You Can’t Ignore This Any Longer

Cloud and open source have been around for some time - long enough for the term "cloud" to [finally] fade away as a differentiator (it's just assumed!). Still, some continue to dismiss these technologies for their corporate solutions - but it's getting tougher to just ignore this stuff ... Scale? Cloud provider Amazon continues to dominate the market, with five times the market share of all of their competitors combined. The breadth, depth, and scale of some of their customers…

Another Take on Enterprise Open Source

18 February, 2009
Open Source
0 Comments

Today's best conversation was with Christopher Young, of B2BSX, a startup software exchange where corporate IT departments can buy and sell their development efforts, and make a little cash to offset stressed budgets. It's an interesting idea, and spawned some ideas in a couple of different directions. Andy Hardy, IT Director Every company I've worked for has toyed with the idea of selling some of their custom-developed stuff - well, every company except the first one, since it was a…

Open Source Insights on Enterprise Software Business Models

A recent Slashdot posting pointed to a presentation from EclipseCon earlier this month, given by Brent Williams, an equity research analyst who used to be in the software business. A few things really caught my eye … Take some time to flip through the original presentation; there are some interesting insights about the nature of the enterprise software industry (the SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft crowd). Three of the lightbulbs that went off in my mind ... (Slide 10) [By folding…

Open Source as bargaining chip – driving business value of IT

I had a fun time this week proposing an open source alternative for an aging component of our EAI infrastructure. The reaction was so classic - the instant some IT folks saw the words "open source" in large type on the piece of paper, they smiled, crossed their arms, and tut-tutted the idea away. Oh, I heard all the classic shoot-down arguments ... "... critical piece of our day to day business transactions ..." "... I rarely need to call,…

What should “open source” really mean to me? (2/2)

It's difficult for many to understand how open source applies in the business world. Most folks get trapped in the mindset of software as product, yet many folks have built businesses based on Open Source - usually by giving away the software / algorithms, but selling implementation services. The Trolltech story is another (typical) twist - free software for non-commercial use, but licensing the stuff to corporations. Why would the latter work? Because of the other difficulty business has with…

What should “open source” really mean to me? (1/2)

The question of the "erosion" of the term has been posed before (good thread!). Over the past few weeks, I've slogged through web content about ... Open Source Software (aka FOSS): Projects and products are becoming commonplace; as evidence, I submit articles such as this (1 of 2), that take the airline magazine approach of chatting up basic ideas like "ROI is often soft" and applying to the Current Topic. There's nothing really stunningly insightful here, just talking about the…