Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Protecting the enterprise against open source M&A

February 21, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Protecting the enterprise against open source M&A

TAGS: Open Source

Network World just published an excellent story on open source M&A, and whether commercialization of open source is harmful or helpful to open source software development. The best quotes in the article come from large enterprises that use open source:

Barry Strasnick, CIO, CitiStreet (and JBoss customer):

"I believe what will really determine the success or failure of commercial firms purchasing open source vendors is the extent to which they can keep the key developers. One of the main reasons that CitiStreet likes to deal with vendors such as JBoss is that our senior technical staff can deal with their technical staff, instead of having to deal with useless layers in between. We don't buy software because of fancy brochures or well-dressed sales staff. We buy software to gain benefit from great programmers.

Could JBoss possibly have paid for a better advertisement? I love that line "useless layers in between." It's true. Who wants to talk with someone that can't immediately solve your problem?

And this one from Bob Hecht, VP of Content Strategies, Informa ($1.5 billion publisher and conference organizer and MySQL + Alfresco customer - truth-in-advertising):

"I'm comfortable in saying that if we build something on an open source platform and it gets bought, it's ours anyway. The implication is for future development, but open source has a way of living. It finds a way."

Hecht goes on to say that he ensures his developers understand the open source code they deploy so that they don't have to passively accept whatever the market throws at them. Good counsel.

Posted by Matt Asay on February 21, 2006 12:54 PM

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