Had an interesting conversation with a reporter yesterday about an open source project making gains in China (not trying to be coy about details, but I haven’t seen the story yet nor asked for permission to post specifics), and apparently the driver from the Chinese side wasn’t cost or source access, but independence.
Nothing really profound about that; an aversion to relying too heavily on Western vendors like IBM or Microsoft has clearly been a driver behind Red Flag Linux, among others.
But it certainly drives home the reality that there are nearly as many drivers for open source adoption as there are licensing options. It’s this factor that undermines many studies and analyses of open source within the enterprise that focus on a single factor, such as cost. Cost is an important consideration, of course, but we’re finding that other issues such as community and ecosystem, customizability, and security – not to mention less tangible reasons such as independence, ethics, or goodwill – are often as much or more crucial to the decision making process.
Here at RedMonk, we’re big believers that emotion still plays an important role in technology adoption, despite the best efforts of various fact based campaigns designed to remedy this. It would thus seem to behoove ISVs to appreciate the subtle and varied nuances of the open source appeal, and try to map to those subjective desires at least as a supplement to fact-based TCO conversations and the like. Don’t see that happening all that much, but if I was pitching to Chinese enterprises, I know what I’d lead with.
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