Brian E Carpenter wrote:
That was way before IBM ever thought of buying the remains of Lotus.
That makes it sound like an urban rumor to me ... I'm pretty sure that
general awareness of open source as a concept let alone competator an IBM
sales man needed to be concerned about post dates IBM's acquisition of
Lotus.
Definitely. It was my boss's boss in IBM, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who
turned IBM on to Linux and open source in general, and that was years
after IBM bought Lotus and made all employees use Notes.
I can believe it took a year or three for this to influence the salespeople
whose bonus depended on selling proprietary software.
Keep in mind, globalization played a major role in the changing of
mindsets. Also only when the IP issues were better framed (and worked
out, or even expired), coupled with newer generation input, and
competition from companies who used OPEN SOURCE as their leverage, but
still charged big time (for support), where things began to change.
Many corporations were not LEGALLY allowed to use FREE SOFTWARE or
SHAREWARE when some why some of the open source licenses are molded
(free for free business, pay for commercial).
We had the #1 product of the year in 1996 and it all began to change
with open source market begin to kill the market place for commercial
vendors. We were little lucky for many reasons to restructure and
survive, but lost millions in the process. For new startups, I don't
think it would of worked for them. If you already established, then
you had a chance.
But honestly, open source is really just a buzz word for "free
software" as most people still don't need the source code.
Users/Operators just want it to run and it works for them, thats all
they need. But once a problem occurs, its generally the same set
issues of support requirements. Sometimes it works out fine, and
usually in the long run, its all cleaned up. But that too requires a
changing of user mindset to ACCEPT this slower mode of development,
fixes, fine tuning, etc. The "Can't complain too much, its free!"
syndrome also plays a role. If you are technical person, sometimes you
can roll up your sleeves and go through what is often a horrendous
development setup (and quite often comes with a complex web of
multi-components licensing issues) to fix a piece of code. That's not
something every user can do nor most wish to do, so there is still the
support factor.
Hence there is still a reason business still exist - there is a still
a market that *wants* to pay you to be on their beck and call.
I recall Ozzie's Notes intro and what got me the most (didn't worry
about it), was that he immediately targeted the high end with a $50
per seat cost. That was definitely not the market we were in and I
recall thinking how long would Notes would be able to keep that up in
the long run. We had customers who were trained with Notes, then
moved on their own and started with Notes, only to begin looking at
other software (like ours). My only recall is the comment that it was
too slow for processing bulk mail.
Today, in my view, is really has not changed much. The more successful
Open Source is the canned package ones, the ones that come with an
installation, the binaries already there, no need to recompile and
they offer a suite of pay support tiers. Just look at this threads,
people still complain and expect the best, easy of install and use.
So in essence, it became like we use to have with ShareWare products -
download a trial version and/or a low end free Community version too.
The only real benefit today is when a problem does arise, the
better open source has many more developers out there that can provide
a patch. So in this way, its more agile than a corporate package. Not
also the case, it could still take losing a tooth, but today the odds
are good that by the time you discover a problem, it probably was
already fixed in version 1.2.3.4.5, snapshot 3.xy3.3.
--
Hector Santos
http://www.santronics.com
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