"The most important point I can make here is this: if you cannot articulate your business needs and identify IT products that can help you fulfill those needs, you end up thinking in terms of concepts. When you think in terms of concepts, whether feature buzzwords or more general buzzwords like 'mission critical' or 'enterprise interoperability', your thinking is divorced from your needs. And when that happens, the marketing departments have got you. No matter how objective you think you are, you will inevitably find yourself choosing a brand name."
This comment is in the context of Commercial Open Source(COS) organisation that are using branding to make money out of the open source movement. He talks of new monopolies, controlling the innovation. I think there is lots of value in the alternative openstructure approach, where the customer/market determines the best fit for a problem based on the context and prevailing community view.
COS may lead to unnecessary duplication and bias. The duplication comes from competing with other branded open source, we will see this with JBoss and Gluecode now that IBM has taken an interest in Gluecode. The bias will come from following a brand rather than from following a technology or implementation choice. The meritocracy of open source will be lost to the power of marketing.
But maybe the savior is the brand, with IBM using the open source stick to beat off JBoss, it will be a brand war between IBM and JBoss. It will be hard for JBoss to win.
The trump card for open source is the community, while customers may flock to the brand, the community should target the most interesting and appropriate technology. The community should be (and I think are) brand agnostic, the code is the reference.
The only problem is that at the moment the community does not have the buying power, there are no community solutions, so brand still dominates in the procurement process. Open solutions are the way forward.
No comments:
Post a Comment