Category: Four pillars

Nice to see friend and erstwhile colleague Nigel start blogging externally, gently wondering about the markets that are mushrooming around the Global Warming theme. Welcome, Nigel.

It’s getting more and more fashionable to buy an opensource company. Quite often, the buyer is a closed-source company.

For about a decade I earned a living as a salesman, selling software services. And when I started, I remember being told “a salesman is only as good as his next sale”.

I think that something similar needs to be said about opensource companies. Their value is not in the IP they produced in the past; instead, it vests in the IP they will produce in the future. Which is why the community is important. I am aware that a very small number of people really contribute to an opensource project, any opensource project; but what they contribute becomes valuable because of the community.

No community, no value. Caveat emptor.

I said I would revert to the theme with which Dan Farber ended his opensource post: the inevitability of hybrids.

Why are hybrids inevitable? I think it all boils down to what Stephen Smoliar and Gordon Cook have been talking about recently, both in the shape of comments here as well as in their own blogs. [Blogs overlap and underlap all over the place, like real conversations….].

States and Transitions.

Many of us know where we want to go, but the path is not yet clear. We know what today represents. We know what tomorrow should look like. But we struggle with the in-between.

That in-between, the transition, tends to have three characteristics

1. Everyone’s Entitled to My Opinion

Polarisation: Opinions get polarised. Everything is about Big Ends versus Little Ends. Blefuscu Redux. Proprietary versus open. Petrol versus electric. VHS versus Betamax.

2. You say Tomahto, I say Tomayto

Meme battles: The battle switches to ideas and terms as we strive to make sense of it all. The language gets less civil, more intense, as passions move past simmering point. When words are the only weapons the air tends to get its own tinge of blue.

3. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose

While 1 and 2 are going on, with each side battling in glorious technicolor, the world carries on. And pragmatic people build pragmatic business models and exchange pragmatic value.

We’re all part of this ecosystem. It is said that each plant has its own specific parasite and its own specific pest, that famines were caused by people who carried plants to far-off lands without the apposite pest-parasite pairing. It’s not always clear what our roles are, who the pest is, who the parasite is. Maybe some of us who blog are pests. Maybe the media that feeds on our doings are parasites. Whatever it is, the outcome can and should be a healthy plant.

Hybrids represent transition. And some process of natural selection, as different hybrid strains battle it out for top slot; some atrophy and die, some adapt and survive.

So we have hybrids.

An aside. Hugh Macleod had this to say in a recent post. Over 95% of all Microsoft revenues come from their partners.

Think about it. What keeps the ecosystem going? Who is the pest? Who is the parasite? And is the plant healthy as a result?

Distribution channels are partners. Ecosystem members are partners. Customers are partners.

As we move from proprietary to open worlds, we are seeing another transition. The customer is becoming the partner. And not a day too soon.

Both Chutki (at Cuckoo’s call) as well as Nandini (at Travelling Light) pointed me towards Patrick Ghose’s post about a very special reunion.

Sadly there’s no way I can make it to Cal by Thursday. Much as I’d like to.

So Bertie, Mel, Fuzz, I hope it all goes well. Wish I could be there.

Here comes the plea. Would you guys please let someone in the audience record and upload five minutes of the reunion on to YouTube or similar? That way people like me can be there, out of time, out of space yet vicariously present.

A reader at Blue Meanie commented on my Amartya Sen quote, and it made me think.

I looked again at the quote.

No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.

And I began to wonder. Is there an equivalent for project management? Could I say something like:

No substantial project failure has ever occurred in any “independent” and “democratic” organisation with a relatively free “press”.

I am sure there is something here. I will think more about it. If any of you comes up with better paraphrases please comment away; in the meantime I will seek to replace the three words in quotation marks with more appropriate ones.