http://www.itskeptic.org/5-questions-john-m-willis Comments for "5 questions for John M. Willis" en http://www.itskeptic.org/5-questions-john-m-willis#comment-3697 <p>I can't fault John's logic on Open Source, except, I think the battle with Big Blue on Open Source assumes that OpenSource is targeting existing workloads. To a certain extent Open Source tries to focus on new workloads. In this area the risk associated with an undefined ROI makes the $zero cost of acquisition pretty damn attractive and defocusses the risk associated with a community built product. Especially in a down economy.</p> <p>Open Source is being adopted by the Fortune 5000 companies in the same way as the Internet and PC's. Its being deployed around the formal acquisition policies (thats the point of $0). You will not "see" OpenSource in Enterprise customers until much later in the deployment cycle. OSS customers mostly monetize (talk to vendors) once the adoption of the success of there deployment is confirmed and they need some insurance in the form of support.</p> <p>Linux and Apache have been "outed".. The next wave is application infrastructure that hold customers hostage with high license fees with non-justifiable value for that money. Monitoring tools are a classic of this (infinitely complex, expensive, hard to deploy and manage), databases are definitely there, application servers are another that fortune 5000's are deploying hand over fist, but as yet not talking to vendors (the download figures and the update figures show this pattern).</p> <p>$0.02</p> <p>Brad Vaughan</p> Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:31:18 +0000 buraddo comment 3697 at http://www.itskeptic.org