Last week I asked for more case studies, and I heard back from a range of companies that recently had significant customer wins. In an effort to spread the good word, here are a few new places that open source is releasing customers from the shackles of proprietary lock-in:
Archive for July, 2008Financial Planning Association Wells Fargo Financial - Debt Consolidation Loan, Auto Refinance … Federal Chief Financial Officers Council Financial Planning Advice and Financial Advisors | Ameriprise … Welcome to The Financial Pipeline - Financial Information for the … Florida CFO Alex Sink/Department of Financial Services FASB: Financial Accounting Standards Board Cory Doctorow writes far superior op-ed pieces than fiction, and this one in The Guardian is a beautiful eulogy for the music industry. The music industry has struck a Faustian pact with ISPs to monitor copyright infringements, violating privacy and probably doing itself no favors with the public or its shareholders. What it needs to do is simply work out an all-you-can-eat license for the ISPs that they could pass on to their customers. I’d happily have $10 or more added to my monthly cable Internet bill so that I have the ability to freely download songs. I currently buy them “by the drink” on iTunes, but a blanket license would be easier. It would also return control to the music labels, control that they’ve ceded to Apple. Cory writes:
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Control, transparency, and customer contributions to open sourcePosted by: admin in Business and PoliticsJoel West, professor at San Jose Say University College of Business, and Siobhán O’Mahony, professor at UC Davis Graduate School of Management, have produced some insightful research over the years. However, I particularly like a new academic study the two recently released: “The Role of Participation Architecture in Growing Sponsored Open Source Communities.” It studies why developers contribute to certain open-source projects and don’t contribute to others. The key? If you want outside participation, you need to deliver more than mere transparency: Developers need to be able to change the direction of the project to make it worthwhile to stick around. (For a swift example of how too much control can stifle a community, take a look at Sun and OpenOffice.) This isn’t surprising, but the research is helpful in detailing why this is so, and how firms cope with it. While most open-source projects attract tiny to no outside developer interest, corporate-sponsored open-source projects start with an implicit handicap by demanding control of the destinies of their projects:
Last week I asked for more case studies, and I heard back from a range of companies that recently had significant customer wins. In an effort to spread the good word, here are a few new places that open source is releasing customers from the shackles of proprietary lock-in:
29
07
2008
Control, transparency, and customer contributions to open sourcePosted by: admin in Business and PoliticsJoel West, professor at San Jose State University College of Business, and Siobhán O’Mahony, professor at UC Davis Graduate School of Management, have produced some insightful research over the years. However, I particularly like a new academic study the two recently released: “The Role of Participation Architecture in Growing Sponsored Open Source Communities.” It studies why developers contribute to certain open-source projects and don’t contribute to others. The key? If you want outside participation, you need to deliver more than mere transparency: Developers need to be able to change the direction of the project to make it worthwhile to stick around. (For a quick example of how too much control can stifle a community, take a look at Sun and OpenOffice.) This is not surprising, but the research is helpful in detailing why this is so, and how firms cope with it. While most open-source projects attract little to no outside developer interest, corporate-sponsored open-source projects begin with an implicit handicap by demanding control of the destinies of their projects:
Filed under: Internet, Internet Tools
Well, fortunately, Google has just quietly introduced CalDAV support to Google Calendar. CalDAV is the protocol that iCal uses to transmit data over the web. Although some other mail and calendar programs support CalDAV, right now Google Calendar is only compatible with iCal. Finally, iCal and Google Calendar can sync without having to use third celebration programs! After following Google’s detailed instructions, you can add your Google calendar account to iCal. Any changes you make in iCal will be transferred over to Google and appear in Google Calendar within about 15 minutes. Likewise, any changes made in gCal will be updated immediately from iCal. If you use a BlackBerry, which also syncs directly with gCal, those changes will be updated on all sides as well. So does this mean that third-party syncing utilities have no place? Well, just based on my initial tests this morning, they are safe for at least a little while. Even though sync support works perfectly, you’ve to create a new calendar account for each individual calendar you want to access. Additionally, if you’ve a calendar called “Home” on your Mac and a different calendar called “Home” in gCal, you can’t just sync those two together. You’ll need to either import all your iCal data into Google first, and then sync with the new calendar, or transfer the information over from one calendar to the other within iCal. Programs like BusySync and Spanning Sync allow syncing of designated calendars with one another. Still, this is a massive step in the right direction and I’m just happy that I have the ability to import my mobile calendar onto my desktop without having to run a background utility. CalDAV support for Google Calendar requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard’s version of iCal. The Google Calendar service is free. [via Google Operating System] OpenOffice.org has a range of problems: Monolithic architecture, declining interest in fat-client software, etc. But it’s primary problem might be its corporate ownership, as Michael Meeks, long-time OpenOffice developer and Novell employee, notes:
This isn’t just a Sun problem. Michael’s comment talks to a much broader problem as more and more open source goes corporate: How do you encourage development as a corporation? AARP Financial Financial Pacific - Home Page OFFICE OF FINANCIAL AID, Wichita Say University Financial Aid Financial Peace University FINANCIAL REHABILITATION INCORPORATED Financial Reserve Companies Technical Career Institutes - Financial Aid, Personal Financial Financial Aid Office - Pennsylvania College of Technology Financial Ombudsman Service CNET is reporting that ex-Googlers are out to beat their alma mater with a new web search engine, Cuil. A quick review of Cuil reveals that it is slow, redundant (meaning, it displays the same pages over and over rather than an array of different pages), and makes weird associations (… |
I’m a pretty huge user of 
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