I spent some time with a large customer of Alfresco's today, and heard an interesting reason for why choosing open source was critical to them. Granted, it's a large media company, and so its needs may not fit those of most other enterprise customers.
But I thought the importance it placed on open source was enlightening:
Open source is critical for us, because on our old [proprietary] content management system, we were completely dependent on the vendor if something went wrong. Alfresco's open-source CMS enables us to get into the code and start working on a fix to any problems immediately, then join up with you to ensure the fix makes its way into your supported product.
Phil Moore, formerly Morgan Stanley's executive director of UNIX Engineering, once made this point at the Open Source Business Conference, arguing that his team could provide better software support than most vendors because of its proximity to the problems. Long term, enterprises don't want to be in the support business. Short term, some of them have to be, given the critical nature of their systems.
Open source makes customers and vendors equal partners, and gives enterprises the ability to resolve immediate needs on their time, not the vendor's, when necessary. It's not for every enterprise, of course, but it just might be for you.
Disclosure: I am an employee of Alfresco.
An old friend from the open-source world, Ira Heffan, called me today about his company, TopCoder. Ira is a smart guy so I figured anything with which he was involved must be good.
And it is. At its most basic, TopCoder stages programming competitions, both for itself (that is, its direct consulting clients) and for third parties like Google. Companies hire TopCoder to stage competitions to build functionality for them (as well as to scout for new talent). TopCoder also provides consulting services and uses competitions to create the requested applications, and heavily reuses its portfolio of applications and components to drive down development costs.
As an example, TopCoder has its premier competition in Las Vegas next week at the 2008 TopCoder Open (May 12 through 15), hosting 120 finalists from 30 countries. $260,000 in prize money is on the line.
Ira told me that one developer made over $500,000 last year in TopCoder prize money. Not too shabby. This, coupled with recruiting interest from top companies means that developers may be winning themselves a new job, as well as a competition.
However, it's actually a lower-profile component of TopCoder's business that I find the most fascinating: Bug Races.
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