“…it’s hard to do big things in a small way, so I suspect incumbents have more of an advantage than they do in most industries.”
Nic Brisbourne.
The quote above came from a piece about the rise of ConstructTech (ie building houses via means such as 3D printing). However, it is equally true of the OSS industry.
Our OSS tend to be behemoths, or at least the ones I work on seem to be. They’ve been developed over many years and have millions of sunk person-hours invested in them. And they’ve been customised to each client’s business like vines wrapped around a pillar. This gives enormous incumbency power and acts as a barrier to smaller innovators having a big impact in the world of OSS.
Want an example of it being hard to do big things in a small way? Ever heard of ONAP? AT&T is a massive telco with revenues to match, committed to a more software-centric future, and has developed millions of lines of code yet it still needs the broader industry to help flesh out its vision for ONAP.
There are occasionally niche products developed but it’s definitely hard to do big things in a small way. The small grid analogy proposed earlier gives more room for the long tail of innovation, allowing smaller innovators to impact the larger ecosystem.
Write a comment below if you’d like to point out an outlier to this trend.