I disagree with the notion that it will be “individual developer talent” that will help SAP succeed. I don’t think there is much influx of external talent into the problem space to make much of a difference. What I mean by that is there isn’t much incentive for current thought leaders to spend cycles working on SAP problems or products. Most of those people work on projects that they can own and license as they see fit.

I think what the developer license allows is people already in the ecosystem to work more together. I believe that the most likely change coming from this license is enabling companies that don’t compete ( Exxon and P&G ) to work together to build new SAP solutions / fix existing issue. At the very least it could help to further streamline support costs as customer band together to fix issues instead of going directly to the support organization, basically an organic expansion of what we have today.

Hopefully folks are also aware that in terms of dialogue between SAP Mentors and SAP itself on the developer licenses, this was a dialogue that many Mentors put a lot of energy into. Beyond that, countless members of SCN have chimed in over the years on this topic. We should tip our collective hat to that effort, and for those who aren’t aware of this, SAP’s Michael Bechauf (http://twitter.com/mbechauf) has done a truly outstanding job of having honest, detailed, sometimes when necessary, highly technical/legal discussions with SAP Mentors and others in the Twitter/SAP community on this topic. I’ve been inspired by Michael’s willingness to jump in the fray and listen, rethink, push ahead – and be direct when needed about SAP’s options, and in some cases, current limitations.

Having said all that, I am of the opinion, and this is just me talking here, that the future of SAP’s success in the next ten years is more dependent on the ability to harness individual developer talent in the “ecosystem” than ANY other single factor. I know that’s a strong statement, but clearly the platforms companies like Sales force and Apple have built to encourage third party innovation have shown their power.

The SAP Community Developer License is but a small step on this path but it’s an important one and I for one am hopeful that the momentum for this will only build.

- Jon

+1 on a “common sense win”, still wish it was an OSI license but baby steps.