Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Applying the open source spirit to analyst reports

August 16, 2004 | Comments: (0)

Applying the open source spirit to analyst reports

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Analyst reports are far more akin to tightly-guarded proprietary products than they are to open source software. After all, analyst firms sell the reports, always for a pretty penny, and many analysts guard statistics, such as market share numbers found in the reports, as if they were golden heirlooms.

But perhaps the analyst community is now learning a lesson from IT's most philosophically revolutionary movement of late: open source.

Analyst firm RedMonk today released a report detailing what it calls 'Compliance Oriented Architecture' and abbreviates, naturally, as COA.

COA's, according to the report's authors, are "what happens when a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is applied to compliance challenges."

In the near future, it is easy to see how, well, almost every SOA will face compliance challenges of one sort or another. But that is hardly my point.

Unlike most other analyst reports -- and the real reason I wanted to blog it -- RedMonk is conducting an experiment here. The report is free. Now, that alone is not groundbreaking, even if more of them should be free.

But the real gem here is that RedMonk is seeking customer feedback which the analyst firm, in turn, plans to make available under the Creative Commons license, "so that anyone who's interested can share and build on it if they see fit," the firm wrote.

RedMonk went on to say that readers can post it to their website, debate it, criticize it, send it to their colleagues, even make derivative works, as long as RedMonk is given credit for its work and any derivatives are licensed equivalent similar terms.

I'll certainly be interested to watch this experiment as it grows.

RedMonk made the report available free, and you can find it here.

Posted by Tom Sullivan on August 16, 2004 03:01 PM

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