One thing I stress in my day-job research as well as in the theme of my original post here on ebizq is "open choice" as opposed to open source. All kinds of quantitative and qualitative research that I have been involved with indicates that enterprises are really looking for
-- the flexibility and ,development power of open source software (OSS) as well as
-- the ability to keep certain long-term IT assets on their mainframe (be it a real mainframe, AS/400 or other older "server") and
-- keep supporting their user base (be it actual employee, customer or partner) via the pervasive power of Windows applications such as Office, Project and so forth
I came to this very interestinng exhibit and conference in NYC, the Search Engine Strategies meeting (there is one coming to a city near you) to support my day job but took a few minutes to cruise the show floor looking for OSS-based products. As I have indicated in my OSS scorecard, such applications are few and far between. (Google is here at the conference and of course they are a big exception to that gross generalization.)
But I did come across an interesting company that offers open choice. Called Hot Banana, they offer a web marketing application that runs on both Windows and Linux. It is based on what I had long ago dubbed the open choise middleware, Macromedia Coldfusion (now part of Adobe). It's always good to see theory backed up with real life examples.
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