latest Forrester report

 To the editor,
  
 The latest report from Forrester Research summarized at
   http://news.com.com/2009-1122-982090.html
 was disappointingly unprofessional in several respects.
 
 Its dig about "the open-source socialist fringe" demonstrates a
 characteristic confusion: the term "open source" was invented
 specifically for participants to distance themselves from the Free
 Software movement's political opinions. By definition, there can
 be no such thing as an "open-source socialist fringe". Nonetheless,
 the report would better have observed that even the putatively
 fringiest socialists' code works demonstrably better than the
 convicted monopolists' output, and let readers draw their own
 conclusions.
 
 Its dismissive treatment of desktop use of Free operating systems as
 a "gaffe" that wouldn't "make sense", is similarly unprofessional.
 If the writers think no Free Software is ready for desktop use, they
 neither support the claim, nor offer any estimate of how long it will
 be before any will be ready. The many successful desktop deployments
 to date, and the unexplainable paucity of failures, would surely
 mystify the authors if they considered the matter.
 
 The authors pretend that only open-source software produces additional
 costs "like documentation, support and commercial add-ons", which
 "swell a company's IT budget". What do they imagine swells the IT
 budgets of companies dependent on proprietary software? Similarly,
 they recommend staffing a technology center with "skeptics--not gurus".
 Since a guru is, by definition, the most competent available individual,
 "skeptics" must be those less competent. They beg the question,
 skeptical of what? Might skepticism about the wisdom of depending
 on the goodwill of a criminal monopolist qualify?
 
 The blanket advice, "companies ... should treat open source like
 commercial software: Hands off the code," betrays a deep failure to
 understand the success of Free Software to date. Decisions about
 participation in Free Software projects belong at the lowest levels
 of the company, where the costs and benefits to each project may be
 evaluated directly, without reference to ideology. If a particular
 group has the needed skills on hand, and would benefit from engaging
 with others to improve their tools, what does it matter how
 sophisticated the rest of the company is about building software?
 Better advice for a CIO would be, "Hands off: encourage line managers
 to make reasoned choices." Such good advice is too generally
 applicable, somehow, to put into a report.
 
 The tacit advice to ignore the second most widely-deployed Linux
 distribution, Debian, is simply irresponsible. Support for Debian
 installations is as readily obtained as for most distributions they do
 recommend, and Debian has unquestionably better future prospects than
 most. The Debian project's continued success must so mystify the
 authors that they dare not mention it at all.
 
 The report's final predictions -- Microsoft freeing its "language
 runtime" (thus making its OS, somehow, magically scalable from embedded
 systems to mainframes), and a million-dollar "Ellison Prize" for
 people who no longer write code, somehow generating an outpouring of
 innovation -- smack of fevered fantasy. Where did we get the Free
 Software we have? That's where to look for it in the future.
 
 Many of Free Software's key components (including the BSD TCP/IP stack
 used in Microsoft's operating systems) came out of (socialistic?)
 direct government grants to solve specific problems. Some arose from
 the "socialist fringe" the report disparages. Most were developed to
 meet specific needs by people hired to satisfy those needs, and then
 found uses (and development support) worldwide. Many of those people
 were hired by, or on behalf of, governments. Is that socialistic?
 The code works.
 
 The report's flaws come from the same place as in most research firms'
 reports: sponsorship. Who paid Forrester to have this report written?
 It looks stitched together from scraps of position papers from IBM and
 an embedded-system vendor. The authors clearly do not understand the
 field they pretend to analyze. Instead, they have constructed a fantasy
 world in which they can echo the wishes of their sponsors.
  
 We should not allow the report's apparently-positive remarks to mislead
 us about the merits of the report or its publisher.
 
 Nathan Myers
 ncm-nospam@cantrip.org