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Open Source — Selling Software That Sells Itself
mrcgran writes to mention that LinuxWorld is running an interview with Alfresco's Matt Asay. "Open source is changing not just how companies make software, but how they sell it. Alfresco's Matt Asay explains the new sales cycle and the skills that today's software sales people need to close deals. [...] 'But you know what? We have worked with Microsoft on interop without doing any sort of a patent deal; as has Sugar and MySQL and Zend and these other companies. We work directly with Microsoft for a customer of ours to insure SQL Server integration with Alfresco. Didn't have to sign any patent deal with them to get that done. We both had a mutual customer. It was in our mutual interest. We both wanted to make money, therefore we did it. But the patent thing is a complete smoke and mirrors, I don't want to say trick, but it has nothing to do with interoperability. No matter how much Microsoft may repeat that, it has nothing to do with interoperability.'"
My workplace just signed an agreement with Alfresco. They claim that they don't charge an up-front fee for licensing (they just charge for support) - but their demo software stopped working after 30 days because the demo license expired. (So until we bought a license, the software didn't work.)
As one of our managers put it "this is the least open-source open-source project I've ever seen."
So if you're like me, wondering what is being slashvertised today, Alfresco is an open source content management system like SugarCRM.
A CMS (Content Management System) or CRM or Wiki allows a large number of users to collaborate online, typically meeting business needs like product delivery, scheduling, Human Resource management, and internal business documentation.
Does anyone know of other similar open source projects? In specific, I'm curious if there are other projects like SugarCRM. I know about all the different Wikipedia projects.
That article is worth its weight in raw platinum. The guy from Alfresco sound like one of the most open, decent and honest management types I've ever heard give an interview. The interview raised so many points that get discussed over and over and over here on slashdot, such as the need for sales people to be mediated by engineers so as not to give false expectations, such as the feeling that the propietry software models are not working very well because they are simply too expensive and place too much risk on the customer. He also notes how SuSE went south after the Microsoft-Novell deal, this directly from data on his own product.
The guy sounds like he would be a real pleasure to work for.
More and more I see OSS winning over in key markets. In fact I see the major conflict not in 'which Vendor do you use?' but in 'which technology do you use?'. Which is actually the way it should be. For instance: I've got a medium size web project comming up - a web-based B2B/CRM plattform - and the big figtht wasn't "proprietary" vs. "OSS" but "Symfony" vs. "CakePHP". The customer has some buddy companies who all use Cake, so I'm suposed to build the thing in CakePHP aswell.
What I find interesting is that throughout the entire evaluation and preperation phase the entire 'OSS or not' question wasn't even being discussed and allready had been decided in favour of OSS. Shrinkwrap software business is mostly a thing of the past. It's about how and with what extras and service you can deliver you software.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca