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The virtuous cycle around open source
An interesting quote from a representative of Business Objects about their participation to the Eclipse Foundation:
"We're embracing some of the open source areas ourselves, because we see that as an area of growth for us. It's the way people are going with some of the lower-range technologies, especially with the developers, and so we decided, we won't fight it, we'll embrace it."
I don't know of any other area where changing a threat into an advantage is so easy, and for everybody's benefit. I wrote just the same in a paper I'll present at a local congress in January: open source is a risk if you ignore it, and an opportunity if you embrace it.
Now it also changes the industry landscape, as boxed commercial products (hosted products is a different problem) need to have differentiating factors compared to their open source counterparts. Either by providing higher value features, or by exploring the long tail of features that aren't of general interest enough to see an open source community emerge.
"We're embracing some of the open source areas ourselves, because we see that as an area of growth for us. It's the way people are going with some of the lower-range technologies, especially with the developers, and so we decided, we won't fight it, we'll embrace it."
I don't know of any other area where changing a threat into an advantage is so easy, and for everybody's benefit. I wrote just the same in a paper I'll present at a local congress in January: open source is a risk if you ignore it, and an opportunity if you embrace it.
Now it also changes the industry landscape, as boxed commercial products (hosted products is a different problem) need to have differentiating factors compared to their open source counterparts. Either by providing higher value features, or by exploring the long tail of features that aren't of general interest enough to see an open source community emerge.