As part of the August 20, 2008 Open Source Software (OSS) Roundtable on ebizQ, we asked attendees the following question:
"How important are the quantity of solutions in a decision by your company to use open source?"
The poll was the outgrowth of a discussion about the size and importance of the open source community’s ecosystem. Ross Altman of Sun, Dominic Sartorio of the Open Solutions Alliance and Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation were panelists in the discussion. The answer was not surprising to me because I have been asking similar questions about subjects as diverse as client/server software, minicomputer operating systems, ERP, workflow, office automation, business process management, material requirements planning, application servers and open source for 25 years.
And the answer is always basically the same: Functionality rules!
Specifically,
• Over half (57%) of the respondents said the number of other open source solutions available were not important at all as long as the specific open source software they were considering did the job.
• A quarter said the number of solutions were important but not as important as legal/contractual things like license covenants and patent concerns or cultural things such as not wanting to participate in an open source community
• Only 14% said quantity was the most important criteria.
This is somewhat too bad in a way because a pet theory of mine is that open source terms and conditions would begin to become more prevalent as a critical mass of OSS choices became available. But no matter how I ask the question and no matter what information technology I ask it about, the answer always seems to come back as it did on August 20: Functionality Rules!
So guys, give the market more functionality rather than more projects.
By the way, the OSS Roundtable, featuring was recorded and is available here for you to listen to at your leisure. If think you have to join the ebizQ Gold Club to replay it but membership is free.
If you have any questions on what you hear, do not hesitate to email me at dennis@ebizQ.net
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