Women in Technology

Article:		There Is No Open Source Community
Subject:		Open source is not just a community. It is business strategy
Date:		2006-01-13 11:06:11
From:		MalcolmS
The article is correct. We support open source as matter of a prudent business offering. We can offer our clients the benefits of an open code base (tailoring and self maintenance), low cost deployment, rapid evolution, rapid hardening by widespread test and fix etc. Nobody gets misty eyed in our office about open source. For engineers open-source products are like huge code bases we can assemble quickly for clients in a very cost effective manner. We can also easily instrument and improve the solution performance in an end to end manner. I wrote a similar article to this about a year ago in FreeSoftware Magazine. http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues/issue_03/market_force/ For us open source is good business. We use it with JBoss, CORBA (ACE/TAO/JacORB), Boost, MPC, Ovation, Hibernate and now QuickFIX. We know the products intimately and they fit well in our markets. We are no different than an MS or Oracle VAR or systems integrator. Except we save clients money and time. Both in short supply these days. regards Malcolm Spence Object Computing St Louis

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• Open source is not just a community. It is business strategy
  2006-01-13 16:50:36  john.mark [View]
  
  
  It's funny how the reaction among users tends to break along entrepreneur / non-entrepreneur lines. There's also a libertarian / non-libertarian break as well.
  
• Open source is not just a community. It is business strategy
  2006-01-13 21:08:53  rancor [View]
  
  
  As I've mentioned in one of my other responses the FLOSS "community" is a complex, multi-headed beast. It certainly is not monolithic in any way.
  
  In a similar vein I would say that the groups "entrepreneur" and "non-entrepreneur" are equally diverse.
  
  It appears that you are using "entrepreneur" to be the "exploitative" group that are interested in siphoning off non-free (libre) but OSS into non-free AND non OSS products. As opposed to the "non-entrepreneur" who, I guess, doesn't do what the "entrepreneur" does and therefore doesn't, um, make money?
  
  I think there are "entrepreneurs" that do more than lick their chops at all that good non-free OSS out there. I think that there are "entrepreneurs" that kick out OSS and even free/libre software that can make money.