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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."
MySQL isn't a replacement for Microsoft Access; it's an alternative to Microsoft Access.
From the article, it means things like LAMP (Apache+Mysql+PHP).
Yeah it's biznomarketing speak, but it does translate to something real developers need.
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
... 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!
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?
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.
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.
Would appear they're getting flamed for not being open source any, not for demanding that they get paid.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
"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. "
I obviously know what a "soluction stack" is, since I offered a definition in my post. The problem is, that I was pointing out, is that it's just mumbo jumbo talk that gets people to turn their brains off and feel intimidated enough to just accept the speaker as an expert in the field of "solution stacking".
It's an age old marketing practise. Just use fancy words to describe your product or service, and people are more likely to trust you as an expert if you come armed with Vitamin B5, space age polyethylene, and solution stacks.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
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
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. They are ment to obfuscate trivial matters to make clients think it's something new and exciting. And most importantly, something only the marketroids solution can provide (as opposed to just hiring one guy to do it for them.)
And that's god-fucking-damn annoying.
Bot Assisted Blogging
"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.
Stop insulting people and try to learn.
The OSS world is composed of a myriad of different projects with vastly differing maturity, polish, documentation, feature perimeter etc... And all of these are constantly evolving. For a given task, you can find dozens of relevant OSS projects. When you factor in compatibility, support and maintenance, this becomes an inextricable jungle.
Most customers don't have the time or skills or will to see clearly through all of this and need someone to define, package, test and support a coherent collection of OSS components that will get the job done. This not only reduces the percepted complexity but also allows greater reusability and most importantly support costs that don't grow exponentially over time.
Now, you can call these OSS components collections whatever you want. "Bunch of related products...", software piles, solution stacks, application groups... whatever. But the fact that such a term has appeared is a sure sign that the industry has matured and that players on the OSS market now understand what their customers need. By refusing to acknowledge that such a term is needed you just show that you don't understand what's going on.
Customers don't want code, they want a product that meet their specs (a "solution" to their problem?). OSS is working to offer that and I think it's a good thing. OSS is spreading in spite of you, not thanks to you. I think it's pretty sad if you consider yourself an OSS supporter.
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
If someone asked me what the marketing people mean by solution I would describe it as "You know, solution, as in 'solution searching for a problem'"
Linux is not Windows