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…

Funny, how techies talk to each other

I'm writing an email to my favorite SQL guru, about a pretty sticky little problem I'm working on, and I found myself making up words ... In the LotesDB, comments / notes are kept in a single field. Each comment is time and date stamped, with a uname, so that's pretty predictable. The data in the field looks like this: 02/15/2002 03:46 PM (Steve Manager): Capital was approved on 2/11. Project Number has been assigned in SAP and server hardware…

Custom Code Bad, Custom Code Good – Notes for your Software License Agreement

At a vendor presentation recently, I saw something funny on a slide of "best practices" for implementing supply chain planning in SAP: Avoid ZAPO and ZATP ... which means Avoid customizing ATP and APO functions in SAP <aside> A bit of tech humor there; the convention for naming customized code in SAP is to prefix with a Z. Most platforms have unique styles for calling out their customizations. For QAD (written in Progress/4GL), the accepted prefix is xx_. On AS/400…