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."

Comments

A sure sign of language difficulties.

[Anonymous Coward]

"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?)"

Re:A sure sign of bloat

[deander2]

LAMP (Apache+Mysql+PHP)

LAMP == (Linux+Apache+Mysql+PHP)

Re:A sure sign of bloat

[mcrbids]

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"

OK, so take a "bunch of related software products" such as, Oh, perhaps Javascript and XML, with a SQL backend. It's commonly called "AJAX" - what would you call that except a "solution stack"?

Or, perhaps, uh, Linux, Apache, maybe MySQL/Postgresql, and PHP? Commonly called "LAMP", this would qualify as a "solution stack", perhaps?

Oh, that phrase "solution stack" (or its close cousin, "software stack") doesn't mean anything to you? Just because you don't know the meaning of a word doesn't mean it has no meaning. What I find funny is that engineers are often accused of speaking in "engineer speak" or "tech speak" by the marketroids, because those !@#@$!@ engineers so often say things that have no meaning!

Learn the words, and what they mean, and you'll find an amazing amount of wisdom you were previously denying yourself.

Re:A sure sign of bloat

[mcrbids]

It's not that the marketroids are using terms engineers can't understand. It's that they are making up fancy words to describe trivial matters which do not need a term.

And, you're a schmuck or blissfully naive if you don't think that tech people haven't done the same. (Queue up "muffler bearing" jokes here) Oh, and it's the JOB of a marketroid to take whatever you've got to sell, and make it "sexy" so that people buy it. Don't whine at them for that, they are helping you eat. Get used to it.

People==people==people. The only difference is the method. I've caught so many "tech" people spouting so much utter shiat it's not funny. And, they don't like it when you call their crap. Ever try asking a tech weenie what exactly a "firewall blocker" is? How about a "sequence stasis"? I have had to deal with similar many times, and the result can involved raised voices, and fragile egos.

When they aren't making shiat up, marketroids use words like "paradign shift" much like we use "abstraction layer" or "software stack". They have meanings. They aren't exact. They are still very relevant.