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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."
" 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!
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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