This is not really a viewpoint this week. It is halfway between a rant and an "Idunno."
I've got my Irish up over in the IT Investment Research space about a European Union (EU)-based front group's proposal to "open the world." From an investment point of view, my objection is to governments determining winners and losers in a free market, be it the business process management (BPM) software market or the broader software market. It is not only a matter of the government choosing winning technologies (the EU and/or some of its members have tried to do that for 50 years and failed) but actually choosing winning companies (by making up rules that only certain software companies can follow).
I don't know how the winning companies are chosen. I assume the ones that are legally domiciled so they can be taxed highest are the "winners," I guess that's how politicians decide such things.
The front group's means for picking winners and losers is ostensibly through the use of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). FLOSS is the EU's way of saying open source. They add the French word libre (meaning free as in 'not a slave') to the mix so as to be clear that they don't mean free as in the English language sense of 'at no cost.' It's also the EU's way of saying not Microsoft.
Anyway, along with a lot of other open source blogoblather, this latest Open World/Standard/Cloud/Interface/you-pick-it proposal also proposes:
"BPM/Management will be the new frontier in FLOSS applications. Beyond infrastructures and even ERP, the management of the mashup IT and business services of tomorrow will be key to the future. Large communities must develop key initiatives, to build open foundations for these tools, around large multi-vendor communities such as Apache and OW2 (a European-based OSS consortium".
Now I have no objection to that idea, because I say basically the same thing all the time on this blog, except I don't care one way or the other whether you use open source software or an abacus. I do object to the word 'must," which along with "should" and "impose" is littered throughout the manifesto (the front group's term, honest) as if the document were handed out by the late Chairman Mao.
Which leads me to ask: "
What about Open Source Business Processes (in manifestos, concepts are always capitalized)?
I have never considered it before despite the fact that I have been specifically studying open source software as a culture and as a set of software-market terms and conditions for two years (and I have been involved in the culture off and on since 1975).
The front group does not ever actually say it but open source business processes are essentially what it wants when it argues against patents. But that only matters to you if you plan to put some great business process flow you've thought up into a piece of packaged application software and try to license it or sell it as a service. What if you just want to use your unique process flow to help you (and maybe your customers and business partners) do something or other better than the guy down the street? In that case, you don't want your competitor, the guy down the street, to be able to use the same process.
- Should the government be able to force you to?
- Isn't an open source mentality for business processes the key to building up repositories?
- Are there really that many unique business processes anyways? What's wrong with sharing them with the guy down the street?
Let me know what you think with a comment or an email at dennis@ebizq.net
-- Dennis Byron
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