The confluence of two major movements in the software industry—service-oriented architecture and open source software—is promising to cause a fundamental change in how vendors make money on technology, and how customers spend money on technology. The traditional money trail, where customers shell out big upfront costs for software licenses, followed by yearly maintenance and support fees, may have come to a fork in the road.
The very nature of most SOA implementations, which start small and build incrementally, may be incompatible with the traditional licensing model. And the very nature of open source software, which enables an organization to start a project with no money down, removes the financial barrier to entry. It also delivers on SOA's basic promise of agility—the community controls the code, so there is no vendor lock-in.
