Re: [Idle chatter] IBM & open source (Plagued by PPTX again)

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

> > > That was way before IBM ever thought of buying the remains of Lotus.
> > That makes it sound like an urban rumor to me ... I'm pretty sure that
> > general awareness of open source as a concept let alone competator an IBM
> > sales man needed to be concerned about post dates IBM's acquisition of 
> > Lotus.
> Definitely. It was my boss's boss in IBM, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who
> turned IBM on to Linux and open source in general, and that was years
> after IBM bought Lotus and made all employees use Notes.
>
> I can believe it took a year or three for this to influence the salespeople
> whose bonus depended on selling proprietary software.
Keep in mind, globalization played a major role in the changing of 
mindsets.  Also only when the IP issues were better framed (and worked 
out, or even expired), coupled with newer generation input, and 
competition from companies who used OPEN SOURCE as their leverage, but 
still charged big time (for support), where things began to change. 
Many corporations were not LEGALLY allowed to use FREE SOFTWARE or 
SHAREWARE when some why some of the open source licenses are molded 
(free for free business, pay for commercial).
We had the #1 product of the year in 1996 and it all began to change 
with open source market begin to kill the market place for commercial 
vendors. We were little lucky for many reasons to restructure and 
survive, but lost millions in the process.  For new startups, I don't 
think it would of worked for them.  If you already established, then 
you  had a chance.
But honestly, open source is really just a buzz word for "free 
software" as most people still don't need the source code. 
Users/Operators just want it to run and it works for them, thats all 
they need.  But once a problem occurs, its generally the same set 
issues of support requirements.  Sometimes it works out fine, and 
usually in the long run, its all cleaned up. But that too requires a 
changing of user mindset to ACCEPT this slower mode of development, 
fixes, fine tuning, etc.  The "Can't complain too much, its free!" 
syndrome also plays a role. If you are technical person, sometimes you 
can roll up your sleeves and go through what is often a horrendous 
development setup (and quite often comes with a complex web of 
multi-components licensing issues) to fix a piece of code.  That's not 
something every user can do nor most wish to do, so there is still the 
support factor.
Hence there is still a reason business still exist - there is a still 
a market that *wants* to pay you to be on their beck and call.
I recall Ozzie's Notes intro and what got me the most (didn't worry 
about it), was that he immediately targeted the high end with a $50 
per seat cost.  That was definitely not the market we were in and I 
recall thinking how long would Notes would be able to keep that up  in 
the long run.  We had customers who were trained with Notes, then 
moved on their own and started with Notes, only to begin looking at 
other software (like ours). My only recall is the comment that it was 
too slow for processing bulk mail.
Today, in my view, is really has not changed much. The more successful 
Open Source is the canned package ones, the ones that come with an 
installation, the binaries already there, no need to recompile and 
they offer a suite of pay support tiers.  Just look at this threads, 
people still complain and expect the best, easy of install and use.
So in essence, it became like we use to have with ShareWare products - 
download a trial version and/or a low end free Community version too. 
   The only real benefit today is when a problem does arise, the 
better open source has many more developers out there that can provide 
a patch. So in this way, its more agile than a corporate package.  Not 
also the case, it could still take losing a tooth, but today the odds 
are good that by the time you discover a problem, it probably was 
already fixed in version 1.2.3.4.5, snapshot 3.xy3.3.

--
Hector Santos
http://www.santronics.com
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