I had the pleasure of meeting Daniel Lyons today, as he kicked off SugarCon 2008 with an erratic, humor-driven keynote. To say Daniel Lyons is funny is an understatement. His dry, witty, and intelligent brand of humor never ceases to amaze me, and he’s even funnier in person than via the Web.

During his keynote this morning he teed up everything from Marc Benioff and SaaS to Sun’s recent acquisition of MySQL. I took particular note with a story he rehashed that struck a nice chord with the predominant open source crowd. Before accepting a position as senior editor with Forbes, Lyons was best known for his blog, which he started in the same cavalier and trailblazing manor that SugarCRM founders John Roberts, Clint Oram, and Jacob Taylor started. Before long, a community of fans supported the blog, and Forbes was knocking on the door with a job offer. To that end, Lyons thinks open source isn’t that much different from starting a blog, or from South Park’s Underpants Knomes:

“Step one, you steal underpants. Step two, question mark. Step three, make money,” Lyons said.

Jokingly tracing the evolutionary developments in the course of human existence, Lyons said “First you had the pyramids of Giza, next the great wall of China, and now open source. It’s about developing a superior product in a more cost effective manor. Mozilla Firefox is the perfect example. I don’t use it because it’s free, I use it because it’s a better product. If I had to pay for it, I would. With Microsoft Office or Internet Explorer, it’s like looking at the dashboard of the space shuttle. You need a pilot’s license to operate it.”

In closing, Lyons remarked that the open source movement represents pure capitalism…big companies “charging a ton for software and services and smaller companies such as SugarCRM coming in with a new and improved model. And like any capitalistic society, those larger companies heed those lessons. Now even companies like Microsoft are starting to take open source seriously, and there’s a reason for that.”

To Lyons, Silicon Valley can be divided into two groups of people: “Those who actually write code and those like Marc Benioff.”

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