Raising the Bar
May 8th, 2008 by sharps
There was a time when when the main selling point of (Free) Open Source was cost and consumers of the technology we’re willing to make compromises in other areas. I think that’s changed and Enterprise adoption is one of the causes. If your are responsible for maintaining your organization’s business crtitcal infrastructure – you’re not going to cut anyone any slack – not Free; not Open Source.
Some news from Gartner and Forrester today pushed the bar for OSS a little higher. First the report from Forrester ($$) – based on a pretty exhaustive survey of application server users – it’s the first report I’ve ever seen that is essentially based on Quality – not the usual speeds and feeds and feature comparison. It very clearly busts any remaining myths that OSS is a riskier proposition than conventional, proprietary software – in fact it the report’s findings are pretty clear – JBoss App Server 4.x is likely of superior quality, is able to handle demanding workloads and our ability to resolve issues is better than our competitors. Note – I also think this demonstrates the difference between the old and new models of Software – ie. where the value is about the services you provide beyond the bits; not the bits themselves.
That said – the bits have to be good as well – again nobody is giving OSS an easy passage in the enterprise and according to the latest Gartner MQ on Enterprise App Servers ($$) – our bits are damned good (or I guess technically – our vision and execution of that vision is damned good).
Hopefuly we’ll get reprint rights for the Forrester report – not only is it good for JBoss and Red Hat but I think it’s good for the whole OSS ecosystem.
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