Sometimes our beloved analysts get things dead-on…and sometimes their predictions as to where IT trends will take us are very, very off.
In an excellent article, ZDNet traces the non-demise of Windows and UNIX that analysts predicted, the continued dominance of Microsoft on the desktop (which was supposed to have been supplanted by open-source alternatives by now), and generally blisters our inability to predict the future with regard to open source. It’s everywhere, yes, but without the expected dominance that was to come with ominpresence.
One thing it has brought us, however, and that’s a significant shift in how all companies engage open source:
…[Apache, Firefox, and Samba] are token victories that mainly offer new options for home users and small businesses. No other open-source application has enjoyed anywhere near the massive commercial success of Linux through its creation of an entire services and support ecosystem.
Instead, they have served as game-changers - motivators to encourage for-profit vendors like IBM and Microsoft to up their game and offer extra value in their respective products.
… Source:The Open Road
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Tenable Network Security, the company behind the Nessus open-source project, has updated its business model [PDF] to offer a for-fee subscription to its vulnerability plugin updates for commercial users.
This sounds a bit like Trolltech’s early efforts to get commercial users to pay while leaving non-commercial users free to use the software without paying, but it’s not. Trolltech’s maligned model wasn’t open source, as it discriminates against a class of user (the commercial user).
In Tenable’s case, the code is free, but the information that flows through it (Up-to-date vulnerability information, for example) is not:
… Source:The Open Road
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Tenable Network Security, the company behind the Nessus open-source project, has updated its business model [PDF] to offer a for-fee subscription to its vulnerability plugin updates for commercial users.
This sounds a bit like Trolltech’s early efforts to get commercial users to pay while leaving non-commercial users free to use the software without paying, but it’s not. Trolltech’s maligned model wasn’t open source, as it discriminates against a class of user (the commercial user).
In Tenable’s case, the code is free, but the information that flows through it (Up-to-date vulnerability information, for example) is not:
… Source:The Open Road
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I met with an executive at a Fortune 50 financial services customer of Alfresco’s yesterday. As we talked about his plans to replace various (proprietary) software products with open source and SaaS products, he made the following interesting comment:
We’re going with open source and Web 2.0-type …
Source:The Open Road
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Microsoft must spend some days gazing around in a stupor. The company continues to print money yet its most current product launch of Vista fell on deaf ears. Microsoft of course wants money, but it also wants to be thought of as a leader in the software world, and with …
Source:The Open Road
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If anyone out there persists in believing that Linux isn’t ready for serious prime time, NYSE Euronext’s dependence on Red Hat should finally lay that silly notion to rest. As announced, the New York Stock Exchange Euronext dumped its proprietary UNIX heritage (AIX, HP UX, Solaris) for the …
Source:The Open Road
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I read a few posts today that made me think that some people have put their brains on idle while their mouths (or, rather, fingers) did the thinking for them. I understand: I do the same thing. Regular readers of this blog will know that I do it…regularly.
One post criticized this blog for having a partial feed. How can a blog devoted to openness have a partial feed??? This conveniently overlooks that CNET relies on page views/advertisements to pay the bills, and so needs people to click through. Were CNET to give everything away for free (as in no advertisements/no money attached to its content), there would be no more CNET. While TechCrunch might like this, millions of others who log billions of pageviews on CNET each year wouldn’t be as happy.
In another turn, Kris Buytaert didn’t like my post suggesting that open-source vendors should anticipate loyalty and a mutually advantageous relationship from their system integration partners, and institute policies to help foster this. I wish I could understand Kris’ argument, but I can’t. The “pay me if you love me but don’t really need me” model doesn’t work (i.e., Support only). Period.
Sometimes we don’t really want the consequences of what we want. We want open source to be all about peace, love, and freedom. It’s not. At least, not to the extent that some of us (myself included) would like.
… Source:The Open Road
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I admit that Microsoft’s software wouldn’t be my first choice for building a web application, but a small consultancy decided to give it a whirl with its Meet with Approval application. As is often the case with Microsoft (to its credit and shame), its tools took care of the heavy lifting of writing code:
Visual Studio provides a number of prebuilt web controls that we were able to drag and drop onto our pages and granted us to get a considerable way before having to write any code. A criticism of this approach is that such controls output bad HTML or restrict design however we didn’t find this. We were impressed by the way in which .NET produced relatively little code and we were able to apply all styling via CSS. Visual Studio 2008 offers a full WYSIWYG editor with CSS support that we found to be superior than Dreamweaver even though we did find rendering problems within the IDE when coding for cross browser CSS.
So, pluses and minuses. But what about the end result?
Pretty good, according to the developers and according to a swift review of the site. That said, plenty of critics have weighed in suggesting that the same results could be had more affordably and in a more sustainable fashion using open-source tools.
… Source:The Open Road
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