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Open Source Services Come of Age
Rob writes "A new breed of solutions and services companies is bringing a more professional
approach to the deployment of open source software. A sure sign of a maturing market is
when vendors stop talking about products and start talking about services and 'solution
stacks'. It can be indicative that the marketing team have taken over from the engineers
in charge of presenting the company to the outside world, but also shows that customers
are demanding a more professional approach towards the deployment of the technology. This
is certainly the case in the open source software market, where a clutch of new solutions
and services companies have
recently sprung up to guide enterprise customers through the difficulties of open source
software deployment."
"This is certainly the case in the open source software market, where a clutch of new solutions and services companies have recently sprung up to guide enterprise customers through the difficulties of open source software"
Difficulties? We don't have any stinkin difficulties.
" A sure sign of a maturing market is when vendors stop talking about products and start talking about services and 'solution stacks'."
That kind of buzz word lingo is also a sure sign of bloat. It makes my skin crawl to hear words like "solution stack", not only because I don't know what the heck it means, but also because it doesn't mean anything. It's a fuzzy complicated way of saying, "a bunch of related software products that you'll find useful in your company".
I guess for OSS to join the mainstream, it will have to use the same insipid lingo that the big guns like IBM and Symantec are using.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I was stunned to find out that my company is bought some commercial on-site training from an open-source author. Even more stunning is that our VP of Development didn't need any extended begging and pleading.
That's strange, earlier today Slashdot was reporting that Linux developers were too old to cater for young people, and now they are celebrating coming of age. I guess it's time to buy Tux a zimmer frame.
MySQL isn't a replacement for Microsoft Access; it's an alternative to Microsoft Access.
I think that solution stacks are good, especially if you wish to envisioneer web-enabled content through branding front-end e-services.
Do, do not, or delegate to someone else: there is no try.
You could try Rekall. Supports multiple database backends, and includes a form designer, a scripting language, and graphical database design tools.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
it means they can use the yahoo chatrooms!
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
... of open source projects? I'd like to the think the majority of OSS work was done out of wanting to create something better (defined many ways) than what was already in existence or at least act as an affordable (as in free) alternative to commercial products. Sure, many OSS products don't quite line up with their commercial counterparts, but obviously many do these days. While it's generally taken much longer for them to get into the spotlight, they got there by being reliable pieces of software and didn't made their mark by filling our heads with buzzwords and marketing material. Now that they are on par with the "big boys", the buzzwords suddenly become less (if at all) meaningful, so the game can really begin. From the article, it seems people still feel OSS is too much of a risk, but as adoption increases, that barrier will slowly start to disappear as well.
the OSS developers who would like to get paid for their superb work. IBM is making it hand over fist deploying OSS and we think it's swell. But as soon as a charitable developer even thinks about a dollar bill the entire OSS community takes him out to the woodshed for being so selfish and violating the spirit of OSS.
It's not anti-OSS to get paid for contributing good code, people!
Read the latest "Joel on Software". His theory is that a focus on service and solution stacks is actually a sign of consulting, a form of software that is more painful and costly to its users and less profitable for the authors. My theory is that as open source software improves, it will become harder and harder to make money from it, since it will require less expensive customization and support.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
that is actually quite a good troll. well done fucktard.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Access has its merits for small-scale apps used in VERY small offices or for homes. Want an alternative? Check out OpenOffice.org Base. Access is not intended to be a multiuser database. It "can" be done but requires fugly code to accomplish it.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I am not sure when open source really was born, but it sure seems like it came of age pretty fast. Not too shabby, eh?
"That kind of buzz word lingo is also a sure sign of bloat. It makes my skin crawl to hear words like "solution stack", not only because I don't know what the heck it means, but also because it doesn't mean anything. It's a fuzzy complicated way of saying, "a bunch of related software products that you'll find useful in your company"."
Hehe. This is funny. Basically the OP is saying "I don't understand that lingo. So it must be something bad". Now you know how users feel every time you geeks throw around all your "buzzwords".* When you all start talking plain, then you can start criticizing others lingo.
[Some "fuzzy" geek buzzwords]
*Floppy=" A rust-coated, plastic disk wrapped in a plastic shell that holds your term paper"
Hard Drive="Like a floppy but can hold much more"
RAM="Your computers version of a scratchpad that goes blank when the power goes off"
CRT="like a TV except the picture is much better, and you can watch survivor on it with a TV tuner card (what's a card?)"
My skin crawls whenever marketeers speak too. Marketing murders language. It's that simple. If customers knew precisely what they were buying, most probably wouldn't bother. We don't buy ground up dead bovine animal. We buy hamburger.
However, that said, Salespeople (like managers) are a necessary evil. If they didn't create the sizzle, open source would still be a hippie programmer's toy.
This is the development I had hoped for. Marketing "solution stacks" of open source software customized for individual clients is where the real money will be made for most open source firms. Migration of older to newer OSS is also where reasonably good individual consultants can make a living.
It may be yet another abuse of the language, but it it isn't nearly as bad as some of the nonsense I see used. I say suck it up and smell the money...
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Great. Just what we need... for our beloved FLOSS community to become buzzword-compliant.
Maybe they could make some use for my buzzphrase generator...
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
i have never seen that attitude (well only from some idiots, but i don't count them).
/.ers!
I see it every day. Especially lately with the Nessus news etc. These guys are working on Linux security for crying out loud and they get blasted by OSSers when they close their source just to stay alive as a company. Their competitors are using their generous/free code against them.
I don't rember reading a single post blasting the what the code-mooching competitors were doing. Get a grip
Either start sending these valuable develoeprs donations, allow them to charge, or watch them all not have time for it anymore.
That's not as shocking as finding out your job has been outsourced to an OSS programmer.
Speaking of Markettalk, has anyone deciphered exactly what Eclipse is yet? :P
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
I can finally leverage my business paradigms with open-source solution stacks!
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Earth to Slashdot editors - learn to tell a press release from a story.
Amusing. It's just part of the Sales Pitch to "the street" and those who have no clue. They're trying to make it sound like this old idea is new so they can generate excitement and multiples of real value for the IPO. And the market's collective amnesia will help them.
Oil... organized crime... american businesses... I think you just described ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco et al. Now what were you saying about respectable? :)
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
GP: "LAMP (Apache+Mysql+PHP)"
Parent: "LAMP == (Linux+Apache+Mysql+PHP)"
LAMP == (Linux+Apache+Mysql+{PHP|Perl|Python})
Next in this thread: Acronym changed to include Ruby: LAMeR
8^)
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software. Eclipse provides extensible tools and frameworks that span the software development lifecycle, including support for modeling, language development environments for Java, C/C++ and others, testing and performance, business intelligence, rich client applications and embedded development. A large, vibrant ecosystem of major technology vendors, innovative start-ups, universities and research institutions and individuals extend, complement and support the Eclipse Platform. Find out what eclipse is all about.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Random that this post came just hours after I saw Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource who: "certifiy and support open source software" Ostensibly she was supposed to speak about: "the open source software movement", however what what she really did was talk about what her new company does, which is certify "open source software stacks" and service models for OSS. It was really insightful to see the way in which she framed the problem, ie. Companies have hoards of IT people running around frantically patching systems so we step in and do automatic patching.
... it seems like this should almost be a solved problem.
It is interesting that companies do not see that the vendors (debian, redhat, microsoft) are at a massive advantage when it comes to automatically patching the systems
Most open-source "companies" are support companies only, not product companies.
btw, a sure sign of maturity would have been products which need less support.
Question: Does a Ruby LAMeR need a xenon flashtube?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
So what is a replacement for Access? A piece of shit?
Learn the words, and what they mean, and you'll find an amazing amount of wisdom you were previously denying yourself.
Wisdom is beyond the reach of most here.
The real OSS service I'm looking for is an industry of companies which specialize in their stable of OSS projects in which they are expert. So I can buy programmer support for an OSS app from any of a number of groups, none of which "own" the SW or the project. I'd like to do a DB query on a CVS repository, to check what code has been contributed by such orgs offering service. Not just as a consumer of the SW, but as a developer, when I want to include an OSS package in my own project, but not enough to gain the expertise.
That kind of service depends on the unique nature of OSS and its projects. It's a tremendous flexibility in available experience, with which proprietary source SW could never compete. And such an ecosystem also represents an extremely productive marketplace for new code shared by everyone. Produced by a "third party" with interest vested more in the quality of the public OSS package than in any tricks keeping it proprietary, despite the rules.
--
make install -not war
... a linguistic solution stack in order to take away added value from your interaction with the marketing engineers. The correct solution stack will enable your business to meet your customers' complete needs for delivery of verbal content designed to maximize their confidence in your area of core expertise - providing software solutions. This is a win-win situation that allows you to focus on excellence while obtaining a higher margin for the same mature products, and maintain a high-quality relationship with your clients. ...Phew!... that's hard...
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
More corporate and venture capitalists interest in open source softwares is a good thing. Use of open source softwares in corporate environments, will lead to OSS getting better, stabler, robust and more user friendly. The developers of OSS, instead of developing and working on projects as a part time hobby thing, can work on it full time and also make some money. We casual/poor users, who cannot or do not want to pay money, are going to benefit immensely from this, because all the money and resources invested by the different corporations and financial institutions will go a long way in making the open source products more viable and more feature rich. Generally most open source softwares rarely have very user friendly interfaces especially for non-expert users, but the different companies and financial institutes in particular will demand and invest in usability improvements, and this will definitely help non geeky users. I hope someday I will be able to teach my grandpa, how to play DVDs on Linux box. In fact I just finished a summer internship in one of these open source companies. And they treat the open source developers as demi-gods, and pay them huge sum of money to visit their premises and interact with their developers. Some, people may not like the idea that OSS developers making money out of their software, but the truth is that the developers have families, and they need to earn money. The philosophy of the open source movement is that people should be free to use, hack, and distribute softwares. Even the venerable Richard M. Stallman is not against making money. I am not very confident about the success of business model adopted by the different open source companies, and it may even end up the way the dot com boom did. But, even out of the dot com boom there emerged some positives like the yahoos, googles, amazons, ebays, etc, and without it I don't think we could have had the web which we now do.
Creativity uninhibited www.kreeti.com
So next time I look for something on SourceForge, every project will be described solely as "proactively enabling multi-tiered, holistic leveraging of vertical markets." Wonderful.
"What's a solution, anyway? I can't think of a more vague description that completely removes any attempt at intelligent evaluation."
A solution is the aggregate (hardware, software, whatever) that solves one or more of your companies particular problem(s) (read customization).
In other words, it's all that "sell services" BS that slashdotters bring up every time F/OSS's negative effect on the computer industry is brought up. Don't complain about your chickens coming home to roost.
"Using this kind of language allows marketing types to change their tune on que. A "solution" is abstract. An accounting application, on the other hand, is something I can start to evaluate."
Maybe if you actually started asking them (+5) insightful questions then you'd get the answers you seek. GIGO or Bad questions in, bad answers out.
A solution stack? What on earth?
Service-based marketing - sure.
Solution-based marketing - by all means.
But a solution stack? How does marketing the architecture running the "service" provide a customer with any idea of its benefit. Sure I may be using LAMP or a Java-based solution but are customers as interested in my architecture choices as they are in having as much uptime / as much ease of maintenance / as low a total cost of ownership as possible?
And before you say "well the big boys care" remember that the vast majority of companies looking for web solutions / services / whatever are going to be of the smaller variety, possibly with better stuff to be doing than worrying about what their website architecture is - as long as it works.
The marketing droids don't seem to understand that babbling on incoherently in pseudo-tech market speak frightens people into the arms of providers who say stuff like "this is what it looks like and here's where it ties in to what you already have and do"
Solution stacks my arse. Mark my words it'll all end in tiers.
A sure sign of a maturing market is when vendors stop talking about products and start talking about services and 'solution stacks
If anyone ever came to me pitching is "solution stack", I would take it as a sure sign that he was out to lunch.
Either that or he is in marketing.
Or is there a difference?
No, a piece of shit is the icon for Access.
And, like most icons, it can serve as an icon for almost all of the Microsoft "solution stack"...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
You still have to go and get training for their configuration manager. So why train your people on actually configuring the components that make up the stack. Your company will be better off and they will certainly learn a lot more than just that one company's configuration manager.
I don't know maybe I am missing something but keep it simple folks quit making things a lot more difficult than they really are.
Just my two cents worth.
grew up with the b.s. that claimed a lot of the IT industry including all the plumbers turning into sys admins -> not that there's anything wrong with that.
You've got 20-somethings that have experience in the industry and are very articulate. Lots of startups around that use OSS cos things are turning to service and support. We don't wanna be greedy egotistical millionbilliontrillionaires like the power industry (a la Enron people - i just watched that movie), we wanna make a living using things we love and also have time to do our other passions in life - usually music and other arts because like i said before, we are articulate (read: learned) people. Always exploring.
Let us just do what we do best and get jobs done. By working together we get to critical mass with less casualties.
I don't know if you've noticed? But this forum has a distintly anti-authority bent to it. Some of it's understandable (abuse of authority). But like all backlashes, it goes to extremes as witnessed by the "paranoia". Anti-authority is even manifested against all things educational. As witnessed by people reveling in the fact that they don't know the subject matter, and see no reason to change that fact. As witnessed time after time, the repeating of material that has been proven false. There's no OSS "a thousand brains, the overall intelligence rises" principle working. With the moderation system only exacerbating the situation because the people moderating are statistically going to be the same people that are anti-authority. Throw in a good dose of apathy, and you have the formula for a dismal future for the present generation.
How the FUCK are you people moderating? How the FUCK was my post off-topic, when it was in direct reference to both the parent post AND the overall topic? It was initially marked +2 insightful and now 0 Offtopic. Get off the crack, guys. This place is as bad as Fark.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Yeah, "solution stack" is a bit abstract as it does not specify a domain that the solution is for. I would think, however, that people around here were able to do some abstract thinking: solution stack implies a *full-stack* framework for some problem domain i.e. a solution. ... the cost of producing intellectual property is going down")
Think of what you like of such a loose way of speaking, but full-stack frameworks are just things of beauty. They are the main reason behind ability to more powerful software with the same amount of programmer hours than before, which was also noted in the article. ("The cost of software
I bookmarked the article. Firms and projects described in it were just the type I want to build on in larger projects, like for example if I get funding for a project to develop a service model and a comprehensive set of tools for an in-house e-learning service provider for small and medium colleges.
--Flam
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
It makes my skin crawl to hear words like "solution stack", not only because I don't know what the heck it means, but also because it doesn't mean anything.
Us propeller-heads live in glass houses too and should be careful when throwing stones, as we are as prone to using acronyms for brevity as marketers are prone to use buzzwords to impress. Most regular folk think of a device to illuminate a dark room when they hear LAMP. "Sequel" (SQL) is a new story that continues a previous one. FLOSS is used to clean teeth, and using the preferred term FOSS to reduce confusion doesn't help at all. Even the mighty marketing dept. at Microsoft can't eradicate the evil acronym, thus we end up dealing with ASP, ODBC, DCOM, CLR etc. To technical people they make conversation less cumbersome but to the uninitiated they are about as meaningful as the term "solution stack".
It is important to note that the folks writing cheques and approving such decisions are PHBs (pointy-haired bosses) that probably more often than not have business and marketing backgrounds instead of engineering or technical backgrounds. If you start spewing out LAMP, SQL, SOAP, XML, RPC etc. their eyes will glaze over. These PHB folk were fed this lingo from the time they entered college...it is the language THEY use to make conversation less cumbersome. Furthermore, you won't convince a PHB to adopt your "solution stack" if you don't relate their concerns. Trust me, I know from experience trying to make a go at self employment that PHBs care not about transactions per second, extensibility, standards support, intrusion-detection and so on...if your proposal made it to his desk those who DO care have (or should have) already done that homework and told the PHB "yep that's OK".
If you are on the short-list and you are now presenting to a table of PHB types you have to spare the technical steak and show a little sizzle---bright shiny objects visible at 30,000 feet are alluring to the PHB. If you can show them a "virtual dashboard" with all the "Key Performance Indicators" of interest to a PHB thay'll lap it up, and don't waste ANY time at all on HOW you do it--that isn't even on their radar of comprehension. You have to brush up on your lingo and get a bit familiar with terms and numbers that are a bit outside YOUR radar. You must do a "cost/benefit analysis"--they wand a good "return on investment"...they want a low "total cost of ownership"...they need to be prepared for the "paradigm shifts" involved in migrating to new platforms.
It is indeed a promising sign for Free software adoption when companies providing that technology start speaking the right language--a big reason personal computers in general and Microsoft in particular really started taking off 25 years ago...because after more than 5 years as a niche, hobbyist industry they finally started forming marketing departments.
I'm just hoping that Red Hat, Novell et al don't mature so much they become over the hill as Microsoft is contending with now. That happens when marketing not only presents the company offerings to outside customers but start to dominate product design and developent as well. Microsoft already gives us enough eternally-moving release-dates, hapahzardly designed software and cavalier attitudes towards security and interoperability and we don't need more of that from the Linux camp.
When I first skimmed past this (a bad habit), I thought it was going to be something interesting, like new Web Services apps being mostly driven by open source software (which I think is the case). Anyway, and don't shoot me, but you guys know that famous marketing book "Crossing the Chasm"? The gist is that there are early adopters (probably the maj. of people who read Slashdot), and then there's the "early majority," "late majority," and "laggards." Anyway, the point is that maybe these stacks are not for us. That they are for "the rest of the folks who are not as technically proficient..."
Yeah, I'd have to agree with you; Slashdot moderators are definitely on crack. Just because of my somewhat turbulent history here with supposed flamebait and trolling, my good posts aren't modded up and my bad ones are modded down.
Get a clue, mods.