Just caught this blog from Tom Sullivan over at InfoWorld and was pleased to see that the actual intent of what we’re trying to do was captured perfectly. As he notes, the actual release of the content for free isn’t new.
But with this release we are indeed taking a page from the open source world, realizing that sometimes to get something, you have to give something back. In this case, we’re hoping that the potential collaboration and information interchange (we’ll have more on that shortly, I hope) that is made possible by the open release of the content is more valuable than keeping it under lock and key.
Does that mean we’ll license all of our content under the Creative Commons license? No, not tomorrow anyway. But just as software providers such as BEA, IBM, Novell, Sun and a host of others are embracing open source selectively and judiciously for their businesses, so too do we expect to carefully consider the role that open content will play in ours.
I see no reason to believe that the open source model is any less applicable to our business model than it is to software. It’s not one-to-one, of course, because of the inherent differences between source code and analysis, but at the end of the day they are both just information. Information that can be used and built on. If you allow it.
James says:
November 13, 2004 at 10:38 am
Kinda curious why most analyst firms will produce research reports and pretend that the open source community doesn't exist? I would think that integrity would require analysts to look at the entire industry including both commercial and open source.
http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/leadership/archive…
Stephen O'Grady says:
November 13, 2004 at 10:58 am
You may be curious, but you seem to have a pretty good idea of what's going on in the piece you link to 🙂 I posted a response over there, but suffice to say I fully agree – it's principally financial.
Open source firms are perceived as a potential revenue source, and therefore are not afforded the same attention that their commercial equivalents are. We've tried to change that – spending time with Eclipse, Liberty and shortly, I hope, Mozilla, but you're correct – many analysts are not willing to invest that time in absence of a clear financial return.
We at RedMonk can try to change this by going about our conduct differently, but I think it's just as important that enterprise architects like yourself try to change the thinking from inside organizations. We'll work from outside, you work from inside, and hopefully we can meet in the middle 😉