James: totally agree that we need more case studies to provide open minded folks you more ammunition to take up the chain of command.

on the OS conference front, i’ll just say that we’ve certainly considered, and will continue to do so actively. the main limitation, i’d expect, is that even pooled i doubt such a conference would have the resources that some of the bigger houses so location, event specifics etc would suffer. but we can compete on other metrics, i think.

Consider that many of the larger analyst firms hold conferences in very nice locations and as part of the subscription give away lots of conference passes, you may see what the real problem is. I believe that this could be countered by having all of my favorite analysts in the blogosphere (ZapThink, RedMonk, Nemertes, PSGroup, etc) all construct their own. Maybe they could partner with the likes of Jon Udell?

Maybe these folks could start thinking about how an open source conference model may work?

Duke’s business is not technology yet they made the case to not only fund open source projects via others but to also start doing it themselves. No analyst firm nor magazine has ever covered this aspect and it is getting in my way of being able to propose truly innovative solutions within the enterprise architecture space.

I would really appreciate if the analyst community could start telling the harder story, the one that is not about commercial entities but what enterprises are doing for themselves…

beyond wanting to thank you for sending your readers my way, and concurring on what a great voice and contributor james mcgovern is, i had an open source analysis observation (for lack of a better term) that i wanted to share.

as you know, i tend to provide a good deal of “free content”. my blog, free downloads, syndicated sites etc. readers (as you well know) like this. and i like it because it creates a wider reaach, and more opportunity to interact, which as you say promotes learning all around.

what’s interesting though – and a little mind boggling – is that large buyers (let me second the “we need to get paid”) still have a tendency to measure “influence” in paid subscriptions, not reach/readership. this seems a little outmoded to me – especially with so much really good free content readily available. i was just wondering if this is something you have run into? and if you are seeing shifts in buyer behavior?

of course, all this presumes the free content is good content!

Wikipedia bashers are going to love this. There again, so will many wikipedians… I particularly like the fair and balanced take on The Reg’s Andrew Orlowski. It’s true you know – I never have seen Andrew and Cory in the same…