- Transforming ITIL to Agile
- Visualization Coolness
- Change Detection
- Green IT Machine
- Continuous Training
- Community and Cooperation are the Keys to Success!
- Ignoring the source code is akin to an ostrich sticking its head in the sand
- Remember when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?
- My downloads is bigger than yours!
- It's all about working together
August 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Is that a real poncho or a Sears poncho?
Companies that respond to Open Source communities have the advantage: the old proprietary ways are over. IBM got this and has done well with projects like XCat and Eclipse. But, companies vary in their ability to participate in open source. Some companies aren't able to go beyond posting a demo on SourceForge. It's a demo for a commercial product because there isn't a community producing patches and product direction behind it. It's just a company calling itself open source for marketing gain without contributing to the community.
One sign of this is when the company moves the discussion forum for a project to a company web site instead of using one of the freely available public forums like SourceForge. The company wants control and leads--not a discussion. The user community, on the other hand, wants an open dialog. They spook easily. Witness the difference in downloads in a project where you have to enter you name and other info versus one that just allows you to download. The difference in downloads amounts to tens of thousand per month.
Dialog is critical today for a software company because software and the community it runs are no longer separate. This is the new landscape.
Posted by Harper Mann on August 27, 2007 06:25 PM
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