Forrester's five phases of open-source success
If you walk into the headquarters of open-source leader Red Hat, you'll see this quote from Mahatma Gandhi gracing the wall:
First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win.
It's a poignant reminder to Red Hat employees that Wednesday's ridicule of open source has shifted to a market that seemingly can't embrace open source fast enough.
Forrester Research has crafted its own "Five Stages of Open Source Adoption," as published recently in the May 15, 2009, edition of SD Times, which roughly follows the same pattern of doubt-giving-way-to-adoption that Gandhi suggested:
5 Stages of Open-source Adoption
(Credit: Forrester (via SD Times))I occasionally get requests from IT people as to how they can bring more open source within their organizations. My answer? It depends on what "stage" your company is at.
But one thing is clear: the adoption will happen. As with Gandhi's nonviolent resistance, open source has managed widespread adoption without ugly confrontation, for the most part. Open source doesn't need the CIO's approval. It just has to work.
Indeed, borrowing from the Gandhi idea, open source has won. Open source increasingly finds itself in virtually all software, open source or proprietary.
Now it's just a question of how much--and how, as The 451 Group points out--that victory will pay to its proponents.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
I've also ran Mac OS X for seven years. I've spent less OS X sysadmin time in those seven years than my first month running Linux (Red Hat, if you're curious).
Don't get me wrong, OSS is a great concept on paper. The realworld execution by diehard proponents is sometimes so utterly botched, you wonder why anyone would want to be associated with such a debacle. Even if OSS developers could fix the sysadmin and device driver issues, the documentation quality issue remains an extremely sore spot for OSS pundits.
Documentation is a sore spot? What does that have to do with FOSS? I'm really tempted to think you are blowing much smoke.
Yet perhaps you have identified an area where the growing FOSS businesses have yet to fully embrace. Given how many still waste time on Windows instead of embracing the future, I can't help but to think that it's still not too late to build up a business with FOSS [of course it's not too late].
And by "documentation", I presume you mean fancy brochures. Otherwise, I can say you really haven't looked around or are generalizing beyond what serves your readers. FOSS does grow fast and businesses to serve FOSS are not keeping up at this point in time (too much wasting of time with Windows or with outdated Windows-like ways is my guess). Of course, FOSS provides the ultimate documentation: source code. Those that deal closely with software and grow it can really appreciate that. Also, Wikipedia gives an example of how a lot of future core FOSS documentation development is likely to occur. Wikipedia has been very successful.
I won't comment on the driver support complaint since I haven't bought every device out there or looked at a comprehensive study, but I suspect you are off the mark here as well and decided to generalize out from certain weak areas while ignoring areas where FOSS has very strong device support.
And finally there is "excessive system administration load". What do you mean by that? Again, because some areas are weak, you generalize, I suspect.
The main problem you highlighted is solved several times through once the network effect brings over most nontech users to Linux. When you have mostly techies, they will communicate at the techy level. This is changing, but it's still largely true (at least as concerns direct contributions). This will change. In fact, tomorrow's FOSS documentation will indulge in multimedia "source code". It will take wikipedia to an even higher level.
Adapt to and leverage Linux+FOSS or get run over by the masses. That's my advice to you cvaldes1831.
I get pretty good laughs when I think about the response proprietary vendors might give as to why they don't allow their customers to acquire their source code.
Why treat every customer like they are the enemy?
What is Vista source going for nowadays, $2,000,000,000,000?
Ha
haha
hahahaha!
Microsoft should be paying people to walk into the Vista trap.
Anyway, Red Hat source code is still $0, I believe. And you can probably get the binaries by building them yourself or grabbing a copy of CentOS Linux.
And glossy documentation still has nothing to do with being open source. Neither do administration tools. Neither does anything else you mentioned.
The sanatorium taught you little about open source.
7 years using MacOS
I wonder what system admin one does on a MacOS!! It is pretty much everything fixed there. Not much flexibility.
I haven't seen MacOS used as servers in any environment!!!
I'm remotely managing 60+ Linux servers and I haven't visited the data center for months :)
Something was really wrong the way you were doing stuff there.
According to this http://www.linux-magazine.com/online/news/organizations_find_switch_from_windows_better_than_expected , the biggest thing holding Linux back isn't driver issues or any of the other things cvaldes1831 mentioned. Rather, its the fear that comes from reading comments like cvaldes1831's.
Fear is holding Linux back. Who'd thunk it?
- by You_betcha May 22, 2009 6:53 PM PDT
- Matt, you usually have high quality ideas in your blog. Not in this one. First, the quote is from Mohandas Gandhi. Second, Forrester's five stages are exactly the well known and general bereavement syndrome in psychology. This has not much value.
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- by hozelda May 25, 2009 6:24 PM PDT
- You_betcha, did Matt get the wrong Gandhi? And do you not see the connections between the fives stages and Gandhi's saying as applied to open source?
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