How Open? Open How? It Depends…

It's Like This...Or Maybe Like That...(Part 1.2)

Port 25 — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 20:48:06 GMT

It’s been just over a month since I last blogged on the law-and-open-source –analogy, and, despite a cool, unrelated entry in the middle, I feel my blog karma is running dangerously low… But—proving either that life is a journey of continuous learning

re: How Open? Open How? It Depends…

Bryan Kirschner — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 16:50:15 GMT

Your reference to similarities to COTS is right on, IMHO - one of the things which has always struck me about the SEI report (which was published fairly early on in the 'popularization' of OSS--2001) was the fact the authors explicitly stated at that time they saw a great deal of relevance for COTS body of knowledge to OSS...I think the research in general is coming around to that point of view.

Regards
Bryan

re: How Open? Open How? It Depends…

einhverfr — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 05:58:13 GMT

It seems to me that there are several problems. The first is that there is a huge difference between a community project like PostgreSQL, Apache, or Linux and a commercial open source products like MySQL or SQL-Ledger. The difference between a commerical open source product and a community projects in terms of pace of development and openness. Indeed this difference is often greater than the choice in licenses.

Often it takes experience to navigate the maze of open source software and understand what will work for what environments. But the same is often true of COTS too. How many networked implementations use Access/Jet when it is clearly not designed to be robust in this sort of deployment?

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron Technology Consulting