Comments on: The Open Sourcer's Dilemma, or, The Long Post on The IBM Open Source Analyst Briefing http://redmonk.com/cote/2006/03/02/the-open-sourcers-dilemma-or-the-long-post-on-the-ibm-open-source-analyst-briefing/ One foot in the muck, the other in utopia Tue, 29 May 2012 14:02:26 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1 By: Shaun Connolly http://redmonk.com/cote/2006/03/02/the-open-sourcers-dilemma-or-the-long-post-on-the-ibm-open-source-analyst-briefing/#comment-62 Fri, 03 Mar 2006 16:30:29 +0000 http://www.redmonk.com/cote/wp/?p=25#comment-62 As you point out, OSS Waste Dumping is a subset, of sorts, to open sourcing code. I consider OSS Strip Mining to be a subset of “programming”, as you call it.

Every FOSS community wants their technology to be used as much as possible. Taking a FOSS technology and using it within a larger solution is fine if the tech is kept intact. It becomes Strip Mining when the tech is “Blue Washed” or blatantly forked with the intent of never contributing back changes to the original FOSS community and/or never releasing changes as part of an OSS product. The FOSS community deserves to hear and see the thoughts and ideas for change, otherwise their tech splinters into many different permutations (ala UNIX) causing headaches, supportability issues, and more work in general for all involved.

Regards,

Shaun

]]> By: Jon Collins http://redmonk.com/cote/2006/03/02/the-open-sourcers-dilemma-or-the-long-post-on-the-ibm-open-source-analyst-briefing/#comment-61 Fri, 03 Mar 2006 02:33:08 +0000 http://www.redmonk.com/cote/wp/?p=25#comment-61 Good post. Coupla comments, briefly. First, you say what IBM does for open source, but not what open source does for IBM. As you so rightly say, its not about being altruistic. My understanding is in the open source game for a number of reasons:

– to undermine Microsoft
– to get pull-through into services
– as on-ramps to more "enterprise class" offerings – DB2, Websphere
– to look good in the community
– because of the genuine benefits of the open source model.

I'm not saying they're being bad, just canny!

Second, one of the main drivers towards open source is the continued and increasing commoditisation of software. Linux is Unix, whether people like to agree or not, and that's been around for 35 years. LAMP is a commodity stack so its very hard to get any money out of it, the alternative is to open it up. That's a very short sumary of a very long discussion, but it'll have to do for now :-)

Cheers,

jon

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