Does Open Source Separate Business From Technology?

hornerj asks: "I've noticed quite a few pundits commenting on how the Open Source movement goes against the standard business model. I've come to believe that it not only goes against it, it rewrites it. Could it be possible that, with the shift from marketing software to marketing services, the business suits are being forced out of the technology pipeline? If IT businesses shift to providing services, will the suits, which historically make software releases buggy, bloated, and premature, be taken out of the decision process? Without a suit forcing an unready software release, it only makes sense that software will get better and better."

The Suits are not the entire problem.

With all due respect, the idea that "the Suits" are the cause of all software/IT problems is, at best, a half-truth. Yes, there are stupid deadlines, bad budgeting, and more - I've been there.

But as a programmer I've also seen coders and developers screw up projects as well. I've seen people assign underskilled programmers to vital projects so they can do "fun" things. I've worked with coders who have no sense of design or deadline or responsibility shaft customers and employers.

Open Source is definitely going to require a rethinking and rearrangement of current business structures, and I think it will be for the better. A service (ie results) approach is definitely needed in IT. Just don't expect an overnight cure, though it's my hope that the service approach will work its way to all levels of IT.

Another Eden demi-paradise...

Do I feel like John O'Gaunt railing against the tide of change.

Nope. OSS doesn't rewrite the business model it mearly changes part of it. OSS has proved itself to be a wonderful tool the way of developing.... well tools. But most business/software decisions are about updating or creating systems. An area in which OSS has little or no experience and impact.

Take the following example

Company A have received $2 million in first round funding, they have to build a website and get it running in 5 months to ensure 2nd round funding.

Now how does OSS get them to their goal ? They need an intelligent searching agent that works on fungii, for this is fungalinfection.com, this has a lot of spiffy features and is the unique feature of the site. So they approach a company who USES OSS tools, like Apache, maybe Enhydra and a big old commercial database like DB2 for there are many transactional and critical pieces that go into breeding your own fungal infection online.

This is old style but using the tools of OSS.

The examples are endless. If someone can show me why OSS changes this model I'd like to know. Taking the example above. Lets say that fungalinfection.com release ALL of their code. And here comes fungalbreeder.com within a week.

Not enough to convince you that there are many different parts to the software industry ? Okay here is another...

Company A has a legacy system that they want to replace in stages, first to be replaced are the screens with spiffy Java clients. Next up is part of the product catalogue, next up is the ordering process, then comes their warehousing system, and on and on.

These will probably use many OSS or other "free" software products but the final piece of software will have been created closed source. There is the argument that then releasing it would open it to the world and thus mean 10,000 people fixing bugs.

Rubbish. The only people who would care would be competitors, why would 10,000 people look at a warehousing system. There are enough 1 or 2 people projects out there to prove that its mostly the "sexy" ones that get done.

I appreciate OSS, I use OSS, I've even submitted patches to OSS and FSF but while it may make me a Luddite I don't see how anyone is going to build bespoke systems using OSS.

Lets put it this way, it takes 10+ years and 000s of developers to build an Air Traffic Control System, do you think this would work well in the bazzare enviroment ?

open source == harder to lie

One of the biggest ways OSS is changing this industry is by making the contents and quality of software known to outsiders. By exposing themselves to external code reviews, and creating what amounts to a highly interactive beta test, a company's marketing must remain honest, because they can be caught in a lie very quickly.

Once a product is feature-complete, all that's left is bug hunting. If the bug list is driving the coding effort, the Whole World (tm) gets to see it, gets to knock things off it, gets to verify for itself whether and how bugs have been eliminated.

The only thing that's to a company's disadvantage is that it's harder to make money supporting a high-quality product than by patching up the bugs and selling the fixes as an "upgrade." Nevertheless, the old model is disappearing. Just as Detroit had to abandon planned vehicle obsolescence in the face of high-quality, reliable imports, closed-source companies are being forced to meet the challenge of open, provable-quality software. Some of them will do this by lobbying for absurd laws (see George Will's May 15 Newsweek column [newsweek.com] for a fascinating mundane example). Some will do this by suing us. The ones that survive, though, are the ones that prove they can adapt. They always are.

--

Bullshit (and I'm not trolling)

There are good "suits" and bad suits, just like there are good programmers and bad programmers.

Good programmers makes really good apps, good suits get those apps sold and are good at seeing what what services (and apps) people are willing to pay for.

Some people are good at both.

You won't make it very far with exellent code without marketing. Neither with exellent marketing of lousy software. (No M$ does not make lousy software. It is not the *best* but for most people it is good *enough*)

Suits follow demand. If they are leaving your area it is a tell tale sign that you will have serious trouble making a living there in a near future.

(That does not mean you should stop coding, just that you'll need a day job)

Sigh.

Why do you make the assumption that:

1. There is a single business modelwhich will be rewritten and that cant accomodate change.
2. suitsdo nothing in an organization except stand around imposing bloatware and quick releases on poor developers?

Should the management and support staff listen to the developers in an IT company? Yes. Are they the only people who should be listened to? No. Successful products are created by an integration of efforts and every other discipline involved in that company (usability expert, marketing guy, account manager, accountant, sales dude) is *necessarily* part of that process regardless of business model.

Besides, in my company the suit who causes the most problems goes under the title customer. And him Id find it hard to get rid of.

Re:Open Source

Surely code monkeys should be writing code, not running the show? I would prefer a great programmer spent his working time improving the code, rather than running a business. I don't really see how Open Source alters the business model that much - companies sell services rather than systems - well, that's not exactly a world shattering event, theres been plenty of service industry work for years now outside the IT world (even within it!).

Open Source

The main thing open source has done is to show how quick a release cycle can be. Compare the number of Linux releases in the last 5 years to the number of Windows, OS/2 or any other commercial OS.

The suits will get left out of the loop because thay slow things down. If they have any sense they will step back and let their code monkeys run the show.