Friday, February 23, 2007
The lack of honesty amongst open source vendors...
Industry analyst Alex Fletcher commented on the lack of honesty amongst open source vendors when it comes to things such as dual licensing, adherence to OSI definition and other sins. There is one thing he said that is troubling:
Here is how the problem starts. Large enterprises spend money with industry analysts to gain insight and guidance. Our decisions will be less informed if industry analysts won't tell us the honest truth on a dimension that could be important to us. While we understand that lots of industry analysts derive their revenues from vendors and not customers, it is at least somewhat important to be more transparent in this regard.
I am of the belief that small industry analyst firms moreso than the large guys have a fidicuary duty to provide this information and name names. Consider this could be a selling point that the big guys don't offer. If you also won't name names then why should I consider purchasing your services?
I wonder what it would take to get James Governor of Redmonk, Raven Zachary of the 451 Group and Alex Fletcher of Entiva to not only name names but to publicly guide this firms towards the light and help them truly understand the benefits of having an open source business model that is compliant with all the definitions...
| | View blog reactions- I'll avoid naming any names not due to any conflict of interests with Entiva, just out of common courtesy)
Here is how the problem starts. Large enterprises spend money with industry analysts to gain insight and guidance. Our decisions will be less informed if industry analysts won't tell us the honest truth on a dimension that could be important to us. While we understand that lots of industry analysts derive their revenues from vendors and not customers, it is at least somewhat important to be more transparent in this regard.
I am of the belief that small industry analyst firms moreso than the large guys have a fidicuary duty to provide this information and name names. Consider this could be a selling point that the big guys don't offer. If you also won't name names then why should I consider purchasing your services?
I wonder what it would take to get James Governor of Redmonk, Raven Zachary of the 451 Group and Alex Fletcher of Entiva to not only name names but to publicly guide this firms towards the light and help them truly understand the benefits of having an open source business model that is compliant with all the definitions...
