As I’ve been saying all along commercial open source, especially in the network management space, is doomed to fail. I attended Interop last week and while there this little exchange occurred between someone challenging commerical open source and the ‘open source’ panel. The problem with these panels is that they seem to be one sided in the direction of commercial open source companies. That is, what’s the value of a panel of commercial open source CEO’s and advocates without the other side mentioned?
Commercial open source companies are going to start looking like regular commercial companies. They just use the open source crutch as pure marketing hype. Are they really getting true contributions from their community of developers for no pay? Aren’t they really exploiting the free development efforts of these good people to maximize the shareholder value of their investors?
Don’t get me wrong. I am a huge fan of open source projects and open source initiatives generally, but lets call a spade a spade. Almost all of the time (with perhaps the exception of RedHat and MYSQL), companies that exploit the good work of free open source to their own profits just reeks with hypocrisy.
I am no stranger to this topic per a post from Tom Foley and Information Week, but I got a good laugh at Interop and couldn’t resist.
Steve
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