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Open Source Services Come of Age

Posted by samzenpus on from the all-grown-up dept.

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."

5 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Re:A sure sign of bloat by schwaang · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  2. Now we just need to stop hating on . . . by EraserMouseMan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  3. A sure sign of marketing by AB3A · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

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  4. "Solution stacks"? by Caspian · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Great. Just what we need... for our beloved FLOSS community to become buzzword-compliant.

    Maybe they could make some use for my buzzphrase generator...

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    With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
  5. Re:A sure sign of bloat by Fizzl · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Hello Mr. Retarded Sales Droid.

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

    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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