A think tank's view of free software [LWN.net]

A think tank's view of free software

Posted May 9, 2007 20:51 UTC (Wed) by hans (subscriber, #148)
In reply to: A think tank's view of free software by nim-nim
Parent article: A think tank's view of free software

I'm not so much concerned with why the entities I listed contribute to FOSS (or FLOSS) as I am with the fact that they do, indeed, contribute. If market forces are driving their moves, that's perfectly fine with me.

Just out of curiosity, what companies' participation, if any, do you think would add legitimacy to a forum such as this? RedHat seems like an obvious one, but who else?

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A think tank's view of free software

Posted May 9, 2007 21:31 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

A company may have a few or even many developers contributing FLOSS code and not push FLOSS in business forums. You have several levels of communication:

1. developer communication: everyone will say they're bullish on FLOSS because that's a good way to attract talented developers, get contributions/partnerships, earn goodwill in customer development teams
2. internal communication: what a company thinks of itself
3. business communication: what its salespeople think will attract customers (buzzword-of-the-day)

In a business think tank you do 3. Very few entities will thing the FLOSS song on this stage. It requires an internal FLOSS commitment (2) even pure Linux players (Caldera, Mandrake) have been known to forget (another example is Novell betting the farm on Linux then doing its recent PR disaster)

Red Hat is certainly one of the few companies that integrated FLOSS from 1. to 3. Mysql is so associated with LAMP it's probably aligned too (but it's a minor player, and I never saw one of their reps). SUN is the big guy closest to Red Hat, though it pre-dates FLOSS explosion, has toyed for years with somewhat-open, and its salesforce would probably need a few great years to be convinced the new SUN FLOSS stance is meaningful (profitable). Also SUN is rather smaller than its main competitors.

The plain truth is FLOSS hasn't succeeded as a business message the way it has succeeded as a developer message (yet). Even a pure tech player like BEA is still at the "mixed source" stage.

Now there is a *large* difference between being skeptical of FLOSS as a business value and writing the kind of hatchet job this report is. It's pure vendor spin and was written by whoever paid most to assemble this "think tank" caution.