Coal Mining
Posted by Ian Holsman
Marc Fleury’s last posting posits that the IBM’s strategy of rebranding a open source product is bad for the customer.
I’m not so sure.
and I’d like to discuss some of the points he raises.
A perfect example is IBM WebSphere Community Edition. It is based on the Apache Geronimo open source project and is “Bluewashed” whereby Geronimo is strip-mined for whatever is useful, then combined with other ingredients ….
First, I come from the position that there are different consumers out there with different needs. Some are quite happy with the levels of features and support they get from a open source project. Others want the open source project, and a throat to choke, while others need more ‘enterprise’ features and integration with their other systems.
The BSD model (and therefore the Apache Model) can serve the first 2 needs fantastically.
we enable a marketplace where multiple vendors can compete for service contracts, and by doing so you can get a competitive offering. With a single vendors (open source or commercial) product, you are stuck with whatever support they offer, and because all the leading developers work for one company you are S.O.L. going to a competitor.. they wouldn’t have the level of expertise required, or be able to contribute these changes back to the main source base.
Which leaves the 3rd need, the company whoose needs don’t match what the product offers, be it scalability, performance, or integration. IBM (and anyone else who wants to) has offered them a upgrade path to their enterprise product range. Marc calls this ‘Bluewashing’ I call it a upgrade path. It makes both the open source product, and the enterprise product more valueable to a customer. They can start with the free, or support only option of the open source product, and when their company expands, or hits the wall they can upgrade to a commerical offering with minimal disruption and effort.
What Marc also neglected to write is that it also provides funding and patches back to the community. IBM (and other support vendors) have a vested interest in having people choose that product in the first place, whats the point of having a useless open source offering if your entire strategy is to get people to upgrade from it to your commercial version. If it isn’t any good then people won’t bother.
Now does this mean crippleware? well.. yes for the enterprise customers with extreme needs it might, but there is nothing stopping those enterprise customers developing the feature themselves or banding together and contributing the feature back. (they won’t because a IBM offers much more in their value proposition than a feature list).
Because most Apache groups are not comprised of a single vendor they could get the feature in if it is useful enough.
It enables this “stealing” from the community, or in marketing-speak “leveraging”.
By stealing I belive that Marc is talking about firms or people not giving back their resources or money back to the community. but IBM does give back, as does a lot of other vendors who on-sell the Apache products. I belive the correct way to talk about this ‘market speak’ wise is called ROIC. Return on Invested capital. IBM and others have figured out that by having staff contributing back to the product is better for them than doing it by themselves. Personally I think ‘stealing’ in this sense are the people who use the product and don’t contribute their changes back, the people or corporates who just download it and use it, and keep their fixes/patches to themselves.
as for ‘waste dumping’:Another commercial software “strategy” is proprietary software “Waste Dumping”. Think BEA with Beehive. This is the opposite of strip-mining in that it entails the commercial vendors “donating” some technology to open source. Eager to be part of the open source wave, the vendor identifies some technology that is inferior or of limited value to them, and they dump (oops…sorry…they “donate”) it into open source.
one person’s garbage is another persons banquet.