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Engaging with the OSS Community
s390 writes "Olliance has the second of its Open Source articles up at the Inquirer. It's called "Engaging with the Open Source Community (Part Two)", and it explains the different levels of involvement that companies can have with Open Source. More education for managers, and an outline of a corporate process for approaching adoption and deployment of Linux and other Open Source software."
Most of us would love to see Open Source widely adopted as a business strategy. The major barrier to this is that business adopts the path-of-least-resistance to profitability, and changing your current strategy for a largely untested and hence managerially mistrusted one is a brave move indeed. No amount of educating managers is going to change the fact that its better to wait and see others succeed (or fail) before you try yourself.
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
Is that a scientific experiment to see how much bullshit the general public will accept?
What were they thinking when they wrote sentences such as "Engagement with an Open Source community is a continuum"? Whom were they trying to impress with this pseudo-scientific marketing fill-word collection?
They go on and on about the various ways in which a company can contribute to the open source community, but completely fail to say why a company would want to do that in the first place! The first installment of this diatribe was even worse, containing some vague assertions like "open source software is more stable" or "open source software is much more secure" and didn't even begin to consider backing this drivel up with facts of any kind.
Argh! Just read this little gem here: "This first decision is not a foregone conclusion, because different enterprises and IT organizations have differing objectives, resources, capabilities, enabling factors, and business constraints." Even pros like Accenture couldn't have packed less content and more hype fillwords into a single paragraph!
But the best part is the "conclusion" where they simply assert "In this paper we've reviewed the definition and advantages of Open Source software". Uh, WTF?!
Waaah, I want to puke when I read this crap! They actually have a headline called "High Level Process" and then proceed to talk about "milestones" and "enabling factors" and "identifying opportunities", it's like an ugly satire on KPMG, Accenture and all the other hype bubble spewers. It could be right out of one of these hollow Gartner Group reports, just blowing in a different hype horn.
This is exactly the kind of lip service the open source community does not need. I say: stay with your SAP friends.
On the other hand, maybe it's a good sign that the open source market is now big enough to attract their share of parasites.