Whatever happened to the ‘personal’ in PC?

Isn’t the problem here one of how people aren’t empowered to use the right tools for their job (something which they usually understand better than those who don’t do it)? I wholeheartedly support organisations enforcing information exchange formats (preferably open ones), but find it frustrating that they also try to choose my software, which rarely fits my needs. I see this everywhere – ‘we will use MS Office’ instead of ‘we will exchange documents in ODF’.

There are of course counter arguments relating to the support costs of heterogeneous environments, however I firmly believe that local ecosystems can provide immediate and cost effective support more efficiently than centralised, outsourced helpdesks backed by too few overworked experts, especially if those local ecosystems are allowed and encouraged to communicate ideas and solutions, something which a commercial, locked-down world cannot always provide.

If the problem is generic, go to the opensource community, they’re likely to have solved it better than anyone else.

If the problem is specific to a market segment, go commercial. Someone is likely to have seen the market opportunity and invested.

If the problem is unique to your organisation, you’d better solve it yourself. Because no one else will.

It’s a matter of incentives and market opportunities.

Problems shift over time from unique to segment-specific to general. While all this is happening, the market also shifts. Opensource is moving up the stack.

There’s always room for commercial. There are always people willing to pay a price for the end to end control.

It’s about economics, about what makes sense. To say that opensource is evil is as stupid as saying that Microsoft or Apple is evil. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

And anyway I am a believer in Free as in Freedom, not Free as in Gratis. It used to be OSS; I am always bemused by how it became FL/OSS. That’s like New Orleans citizens becoming “refugees” during Katrina.

Great post. Would have to say though that there are many people, mostly driven by reason #1, who will likely never be convinced. These are, largely, the antibodies-in-residence of the incumbent vendor’s immune system. A class of blinkered technology advocate, whose chemical dependence-like relationship with a vendor drives them to attempt to derail any usage of open source.

This becomes a particular problem if such people are able to effect strategy at a senior level. As their autoimmune behaviour combined with vendor FUD and pricing tactics is a force to be reckoned with. A migration to an open source widget suddenly becomes much harder to sell to the business, when the pricing for your current proprietary widget is slashed as a result of the vendor becoming aware of the proposed migration…

A few thoughts as to the challenge:

Just as with the need to rush children past the dessert trolley in a restaurant, management need to be safely escorted past “zero acquisition costs” in order that they can consume some detail on the longer term and sustainable benefits of open source. The real value, and not the Mermaid of the Open Source Software Seas.

In a large organisation a holistic approach is going to be required. With architects, engineers, procurement and legal all doing their part to make adoption easy, natural and business as usual. With clear strategy being set at a senior level, such that those whose loyalty lies with a vendor are left in no doubt, and will find it harder to mask any autoimmune behaviour.