OSZone Blog

Four Big Ideas About Open Source

ugo — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 15:57:57 +0000

Tim O’Reilly: “In short, you can see that I believe that there are serious challenges to the open source model. For all its success (and that success has been world-changing), it’s important not to get complacent. The world is changing under our feet! The pendulum always swings between open and proprietary, and despite the apparent progress of open source and open standards, right now the pendulum is swinging the other way.”

Open-Sourcing Apple Apps

ugo — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 10:03:42 +0000

Tim Bray: «The real lesson: Open Source isn’t anti-business and it shouldn’t even impact your software revenue. As Eric Raymond wrote in The Magic Cauldron (this was before he cracked up): software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry.»”

Open Source leadership

ugo — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 16:05:41 +0000

Ted Leung: “I like to think of the two viewpoints this way: If you want to look at leadership as giving someone authority, then there are two kinds of authority. There’s positional authority. That’s where you give someone a title and then people follow the instructions of the person with the title. But there’s another kind of authority, which is much more powerful (at least I think so). Call this relational authority, the authority that stems from the relationship that you have with another person. We all have (I hope) people that we trust enough that we let them ‘tell us what to do’. We’ve given those people a place of ‘authority’ in some sphere of our lives. In the ‘despotic’ projects that I’ve observed up close, in every single one of them, the despot had gained significant relational authority, in addition to whatever their supposed title conferred.”

RFQs in relationship with Open Source

ugo — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 21:14:53 +0000

Steven Noels: “Since open source is climbing up the food chain, any company, be it open source or proprietary, should be prepared to work the weights of the RF* bench. It’s only when Real Architects and Consultants will re-emerge again that buyers will be able to acquire independent and buyer-oriented advise, which will make their choice of the right system a lot easier and safer.”

Italians do IT better

ugo — Sun, 07 May 2006 08:50:34 +0000

Fabrizio Capobianco: “Open source also contributes to dispel myths and legends (a.k.a. common sense). I heard once a person say about his public company in the Valley: ‘we have an Italian CTO, it is like having a German chef’ (two countries insulted in one sentence I better do not talk about German food, but the great thing about open source is that the code is out there. Everybody can see it. If it is good, people use it. If it sucks, nobody uses it.”

Under the Economist’s microscope

ugo — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 09:08:23 +0000

Chris Messina: “Not just like that. And not just by opening us up on an examination table, by poking at our vital organs, by studying our work, quantifying our behavior. To benefit from open, you’ve got to be open, believe open, see open, live open, want open.”

Marc Fleury: Inspired or Crazy?

ugo — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 21:35:30 +0000

Richard Monson-Haefel: “If you respect Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steven Jobs for their hard-nosed take-no-prisoners approach to competition than you should add Marc Fleury to your list of inspirers. He is made of the same materia. The difference? The other guys (i.e. Gates, Ellison, and Jobs) are stuck in a 20th Century business model while Marc Fleury is the quintessential example of a new business leader that will help shape the IT industry in the 21st Century.”

Open for business

ugo — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 13:21:40 +0000

TECTONIC: Open for business: “Understandably however, says Koff, many businesses are still nervous about staff participating in open source projects that might result in portions of their proprietary code being worked into open source projects and open source code finding its way into their proprietary applications. The best way to deal with this, says Koff, is to ensure employees are well aware of what they can and can’t do in open forums ahead of time. “

Open Source kills innovation

ugo — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 07:20:11 +0000

Michael at SQLFusion: “In conclusion, I would argue that Open Source contributes tremendously to innovation. If only in one way, that is by pushing software vendors to move away from offering ‘plain vanilla’ type of software and bring in new features, new technologies faster and better. The on-going catching-up game between what Open Source can develop and what a professional vendor develops is key to innovation for the overall software industry, including the growing software as a service industry.”

SaaS vs. Open Source for SMB’s? A No-Brainer.

ugo — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 21:29:02 +0000

Zoli Erdos: “The dilemma with Open Source: a lot of good applications are available, but they are written by geeks for geeks… you really have to be quite knowledgeable to download and implement them. Example: at one of the startups I am advising I use SugarCRM over the internet. Starting to use it was a no-brainer, but when I looked at the prerequisites and the process of installing it myself, my head started spinning. No way, this is not for me! ”