Main | January 24: Open Source Development Labs and Free Standards Group »

By way of introduction, I have been an information-technology (IT) market and product research analyst for a long time. Bull SA, Data General, the Datapro division of McGraw-Hill, IDC, with a few “sidebars” (less than a year each) such as at Kendall Square Research, Raytheon Data Systems, and Noblenet.

You’re correct: short attention span, low marks for commitment, no gold watch for me.

The good news is that I have consistently researched and analyzed the same topic at all of those places—What’s hot in IT now? What’s not and why? Translate that list of companies above into market and product research topics and I’ve covered a good bit of the history of the IT industry: custom-built inventory control in the warehouse and accounting on the desktop 40 years ago; Multics, PARS, virtual memory management, minicomputing, microcomputing, and the Soul of a New Machine (the market for the machine not the book) during the 70s; material requirements planning (MRP), the first integrated office automation software and the industry’s first laptop in the 80s; the open-software movement, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), the debut of R/3 in the U.S., shared-memory high performance computing (not shared processor), and more in the 90s; application service provision, business process management (BPM), the enterprise service bus (ESB), and Web 2.0 so far this decade.

All were the “latest greatest” at the time; there were simply different reasons for me to do the research at different stops (better tech documentation, more effective advertising, cost-effective recommendations to users, vendor product-development planning, actionable investor advice and support in due diligence). I liked doing research for the last reason the best so since the fall of 2006 that’s what I have concentrated on (see www.itinvestmentresearch.com).

And what I found in this latter concentration was that the “latest greatest” in IT today revolves around “open source:”
• Open source as IT culture.
• Open source as IT development model.
• Open source as IT business model.
“Open Source,” I found, was more than just an updated version of the Digital Equipment Corporation User Society (DECUS). I find open source so interesting because it covers the whole array of what was the “latest greatest” IT before it.

So I will try to balance this blog’s entries among
• culture subjects such as the acceptance of the GPL license or the philosophy behind the World Domination 201 treatise
• development subjects such as Eclipse, Apache, Fedora, and the Linux Foundation
• Business subjects such as what IBM, Red Hat, Novell, Sun and so forth—including Microsoft—are doing with the results.
Because this is ebizQ, the emphasis will be on open-source integration software but I will also stray up and down the stack to operating software and applications as the spirit moves me. Because ebizQ readers are mostly users, I will look at things from your point of view.

Finally “open source” means something different to users, vendors, and investors. And it means something different again to me, a market and product researcher. That’s why I am identifying myself as agnostic about the "religious" open source movement; I take no sides in the “movement’s” self-proclaimed almost spiritual battle with Microsoft. I am willing to be convinced of either side's position on a case by case basis. In the end, I don’t think there should be “sides.”

Comment on that or anything else that hits you early and often. I look forward to it.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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