There's a Vendor in my OSS - Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft

Port 25 - Communications from the open source community at Microsoft
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There's a Vendor in my OSS by MichaelF on October 23, 2006 12:34PM

Taking a brief detour from the thread about OSS and its similarities (or not) to law to take note of a couple recent publications, both of which discuss the interaction between traditional IT vendors and OSS:

In MIS Quarterly (September) (link) Brian Fitzgerald (University of Limerick—one of the must-read researchers on OSS, IMO) provides a comprehensive survey of what he calls “The Transformation of Open Source” with expectations for “Open Source 2.0.”  He expects IT vendors—including Microsoft—to play significant roles in “OSS 2.0.” 

In Communications of the ACM (October) (link) Pamela Samuelson (UC Berkeley) discusses “IBM’s Pragmatic Embrace of Open Source.”  (The title pretty much speaks for itself as a summary.)

I highlight these because they reflect what seems to me (qualitatively) to reflect a trend in the literature.  We’ll work on getting a better sense of what the trend is and researchers’ perspectives on it to bring back to Port25…because (to bring things back to analogy and metaphor), they introduce the question: Is a vendor in my OSS more a fly in the ointment or chocolate in my peanut butter?

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  1. CDarklock said:

    Vendors are good. It is better to have any vendor than no vendor at all. Unfortunately, this means that in the open source world - where the norm is no vendor - vendors do not need to be *very* good. Lacking any incentive for excellence, vendors don't tend to pursue it.

    The exception is vendors who have a real product to sell, like IBM. They know that if they can demonstrate their dedication and excellence to an open source customer, that customer will quite likely become a paying customer of their commercial offerings.

    To explain the metaphor, the chocolate would be great, if it weren't for the ointment making it inedible... so for best effect, you'd be well-advised to switch from the open source ointment to the proprietary peanut butter.

    Not that this is necessarily the best choice for every situation, but it's certainly what IBM seems to be proposing. It's interesting to watch how Google and Microsoft are leveraging the open source ideals in entirely different ways than IBM; IBM seems to be using open source to sell software (I am not sure how well this works), Google doesn't really *need* to sell software, and Microsoft apparently isn't *expecting* the open source arm of the company to sell software.

    I'm fascinated by the idea of what hybrid business models are going to emerge from this. Purely on its merits, I think Google's approach is the smartest, but they didn't come into the field with an existing business to support - and between IBM and Microsoft, I think Microsoft has the better grasp on empirical reality. Historically, open source *doesn't* sell software, and IBM is trying to change that. Efforts to alter the (barely-understood) operation of existing phenomena rarely work.

    posted at 10:44PM 10/23/2006
  2. stats_for_all said:

    Brian Fitzgerald predicts a convergence of OSS and proprietary development.  The combined models representing an amalgam of both.

    He discusses the SCO v. IBM case in several paragraphs.  Fitzgerald mischaracterizes the case as a "patent dispute".  SCO owns no patents, so this cannot be true.

    What SCO v. IBM does represent, as verified by court depositions, is an attempt by Microsoft executives to fund a lawsuit against Linux for sour competitive reasons.

    Consequently,  the lesson of SCO v. IBM is not "cost of IP indemnification", but the yet to be told IBM assault on Microsoft for server anti-trust violations now scheduled for July 2007.  Microsoft settled a previous, and largely periferral,  personal PC anti-trust charge with IBM for >$750 Million.  The core issue of Microsoft interference in the Linux server business may represent a huge loss for Microsoft.

    posted at 11:27AM 10/24/2006
  3. Port 25 said:

    I know I’m running a risk of losing focus on the thread I started on analogy and metaphor, but there’ve been too many things popping up in the last couple weeks. In the interest of focus (and maybe good taste) I decided not to follow up There’s a Vendor

    posted at 07:29PM 11/07/2006
  4. einhverfr said:

    Funny, I should see this after being away due to lots of sudden business.

    I don't think there is any question that vendors are good.  The question is what the proper role of the vendor is in the open source community is, and I for one don't like the current trend towards single-vendor-oss (SugarCRM, SQL-Ledger, Mambo, etc).

    Open source is best when it is a collaborative effort, not where the business needs of one vendor are the sole determining factor of the direction of the project.  This is true even for the vendors, in part because the buisness constraints force them to do better buisness.

    My latest open source project is LedgerSMB, a fork of SQL-Ledger aimed at a real multi-vendor community.  1.2 beta 1 was released today.  We already have collaboration from four primary vendors (meaning those with direct commit privileges to SVN).

    Software lives or dies by its community.  Vendors are a good thing, but a single party has too much control over a project, they become bad.

    posted at 04:27PM 11/13/2006
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