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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."
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.
... 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.
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.
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