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February 18, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Certified Open Source Stacks
I thought the whole point of Open Source is that you can make it what you want? I just finished reading Neil McAllisters column A slim market for certified open source?. I have to agree with Neil and his assessment that certifying Open Source stacks may seem appropriate only for customers that dont really care about price. Which brings into question whether someone who does not care about price is a consumer of Open Source technologies and applications in the first place.
But I think Neil misses a number of other points about what makes Open Source so appealing to enterprises. It is not just price. I asked Patrick McGovern who ran SourceForge.net for five and a half years about the issue of Open Source appeal to corporate customers.
Cost is certainly one reason why corporation turn to Open Source, but I don't think it's an exlusive one. Often the products work better their commercial competitors and more often then not, the community based support is better as well. But of course the beauty of Open Source for lots of enterprises is you can make it what you want, not what someone else wants.
Here the certification of Open Source stacks may not have much appeal. The likelihood that my stack will be similar enough to your stack could be pretty slim indeed. When I first heard about companies like SpikeSource and SourceLabs I was pretty jazzed. I figured they would build me the stack of my choice, built to my specs. Then they would test it and certify it -- all with a turnkey service -- sort of like Amazon.com for Open Source software. Unfortunately, for me anyway, it seems like their business has taken both companies in a different direction.
Of course troubleshooting your own Open Source stack is a great topic for the IT Troubleshooter and I'll be covering more of this soon.
Is there a market for a standard, certified Open Source stack or is that something I just get for free from the Open Source community?
Feel free to write me with your thoughts at thebaum@splunk.com.
Posted by Michael Baum on February 18, 2006 08:50 AM
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There is always a market for any certification I would think to achieve consistency especially if your partnering, of course. I think they are developing Linux consistency standards right now which were needed to make sure things work when their supposed to. I mean I want someone to tell me something is going to work and then it works a certain way.
http://www.freestandards.org/
I could see a multi-tiered consistency model for different business goals I guess.
It is more like you get exactly what you want instead of just a free download. They sometimes call it a platform. This helps to replace other current software. You can put people into certain standard models so they arent totally tied to one company ecosystem. I guess you have to model that ecosystem.
ever used a typewriter? we should use typewrites cause we are too stupid to use linux properly. RTFM.
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