SAP Exec Disparages Open Source As IP Socialism

FlorianMueller writes "According to a VNUnet report, Shai Agassi, the president of the product and technology group at SAP, disparaged open source as 'more likely to break applications' than to deliver innovation. He also equated the open-source development model with 'Intellectual property [IP] socialism,' which he says 'is the worst that can happen to any IP-based society.' In Europe, it isn't a secret that SAP's management primarily views open source as a threat to its business, and that SAP is politically on Microsoft's side. SAP and Microsoft co-financed certain pro-patent lobbying activities in Europe, and recently co-founded the European Software Association, an entity that is expected to lobby for software patents and against open-source adoption by European governments."

Comments

Re:Why against open?

[Arend]

Worse:

"Open source is great for debugging, but it's crucial not to touch [the code]," said Agassi.

If it's "crucial" not to touch the code, what kind of a hous-of-cards are we dealing with here?

He got it all wrong

[MadMoses]

is the worst that can happen to any IP-based society

No, one of the worst things that can happen to our society is that it's turned into an IP-based society.

Re:Never works?

[vacuum_tuber]

Arkansas set to pull the plug on ERP-driven budgeting approach...lawsuit continues against SAP

An irony in this is that the Ark. Dept. of Health serves something like 2,200 users with a Wang VS mainframe cluster that runs like a clock -- it keeps on ticking. The VS cluster has a repository of about 50,000 programs, some 38,000 of which are actually utilized by users of the system. A very small group of five or six programmers maintains the code and accommodates all legislative and regulatory changes, often in a tiny fraction of the time it takes for adaptations of newer software technologies, especially those provided by outside firms. Of course the State of Ark. wants to "get rid of the Wang" ASAP (or should that be "A sap?").

It's unclear how it would even be possible to spend money like $60 million creating VS clusters because the stuff just doesn't cost that much. A single VS to serve 500-1000 users can't cost more than low six figures, and new VS technology puts the largest, fastest VS into 3.5" of rack space using industry standard hardware in a Linux host.