Why adopt Open Source?
While reading a discussion on IndicThreads titled Making money with open source, I came across a comment that referred to a site openflows.org and their experience at getting businesses to adopt open source.
On checking the site, I found a section there that I thought I should share. It has some points that can be used by anyone struggling to convince their bosses about the importance of open source and why they should be adopting it. Check out http://why.openflows.org/. The content links are located at the top of the page.
Although I did not see many Java references on the site, it’s good to see such service based businesses that totally rely on open source. What was different about openflows was that unlike the JBoss kind of open source servicing, these guys weren’t saying that they are the creators of the things they are servicing.
Jboss is open source. Red Hat has acquired it for $350 million. Any doubts about money and open source?
I agree that JBoss or MySQL can support their products better than the average open source advocate, but open source is much more powerful when used as more than a point solution. One example would be a testing and quality assurance framework.
JUnit is a great product, but when you combine it with CruiseControl, StrutsTestCase, dbUnit, EasyMock, JAMon, PMD, JDiff and Checkstyle, you have an incredible environment. It this scenario, it is impossible to have an expert on every product. What I have experienced is that you need a person who understands how the products work at a general level, but knows where to go for the answers to the deeper issues that surface.
Scott http://www.openfoundation.com
While the ‘creators’ are specialists in their respective technologies, we at openflows.org are generalists, developing expertise in specific open source applications and platforms.
The clients we tend to work with are new to open source, and do not necessarily have a sense of what software they would like to, or are best suited towards using. Part of our work is making the argument in favour of open source, and helping them evaluate and choose from available technology. We’re doing the ground work to get people turned on and into using free and open source software. We also help them understand the value of the technology, and the benefits of paying people to help them use and customize it.
Individually our members author and contribute to open source projects, and as an organization we help squash bugs and offer back any patches we may come up with in the course of our work.
I generally see the emerging ‘open source industry’ as a constellation of mutually complimentary social and economic actors. We all rely on a common legal and social framework that represents a new intellectual property regime. The motivation for many, if not most of us, is to see free and open source software adopted, used, and supported eveywhere and by everyone. :grin
– jesse at openflows dot org
The creators like Jboss are better placed to service their own products and clients might be more comfortable using such companies to service their open source software.