OSS, the future of software development?

Came across this interview the other day from Lars Trieloff... "I believe that in ten years OS will be the predominant business model in the software industry". I usually tend to be quite wary and skeptical about these sort of long-term prognostics, especially in such a dynamic and rapid growth industry as the IT industry. However, Open Source to me is really the most effective way to produce complex piece of software. Without re-iterating the most cited advantages of this de-centralized approach, I'd just like to comment on a more personal experience.

At the office we are stuck with proprietary closed source software (no for long though.. more on this in a future post). As expected with software we hit a few limitations (read bugs) that were quite difficult to find a workaround or a graceful solution... all we were left with was a potential resolution in some future release of the framework (Reporting Services from Microsoft for this specific example)!

I can't help but compare this situation with a recent limitation I came across with Spring Framework a few weeks ago.

When trying to use EhCache for a project, I actually want to use the caching not only for what it is ... well i.e. caching, but also as a way to gather usage stats on the access of some of my service object methods. So I've defined a EhCacheFactoryBean while configuring it with the standard ehcache property file and decorated with a SelfPopulatedCache by injecting an implementation of the CacheEntryFactory. However, reviewing the code I realized that there was an issue, so in less than 5 minutes I raised a jira log and about 2 hours later my issue was assigned to one of the author of Spring, and corrected 2 days later!!

Well the fact that it took such as small amount of time to resovle the issue is very impressive and honor the commiters at Spring, although this could have very well happened in any other companies... but do you know a lot software vendors with such a quick reactive turnaround on bugs correction? However to me, the real advantage lies in the possibilities of having all source code at your disposal, it becomes trivial to simply write a corrected version and move on without having to wait for some future release. I can't help but compare this with similar situations we're faced with when issues are found at work with some Microsoft components.... well just too bad!

Martin