Cartier Watches

As a case in point, Red Hat and other open-source companies (including Alfresco, my employer) routinely advertise no lock-in as a key reason to buy open source. There are two problems with this marketing pitch, one, it’s only Replica Watches technically true, and two, customers don’t care, as Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady recently noted. This is why I think Sun open-source guru Simon Phipps’ proposed expansion of the Open Source Initiative’s charter is misguided, though very well-intentioned. (The 451 Group’s Matt Aslett also weighs in on the Fake Watches proposal. Would-be customers don’t care about that. Really. They just want Red Hat’s performance and price, especially compared with Unix. Enterprises and other users deploy open-source software because it works. For those of us in the open-source vendor community, however, too often we waste time Rolex Watch talking about issues that have relatively little resonance for the vast majority of users. Red Hat gets this. That’s why most of the time it sells the value of its subscriptions, and not the hocus-pocus no lock-in story. Red Hat doesn’t have 75 percent of the paid Linux market (or, probably more accurately, 62 percent, according to IDC) because of its lock-in story.We miss the mark on open-source marketing. In fact, it’s often the case that the very standards we seek to set for the software world–interoperability, transparency, etc.–are better observed and delivered by open standards than by open source.

Real customers simply don’t care.And so the problem is? In fact, to the extent that customers really do want interoperability and reduced vendor lock-in, it’s open standards that they should be asking for, not open source.IBM’s Savio Rodrigues points Rado Watches this out in his analysis of the different permutations on the open-source WebKit project. Serdar Yegulalp adds to the analysis: Once a customer invests in a particular vendor (be it Red Hat or Canonical or Novell or MySQL o, there will always be a cost associated with leaving that vendor, a cost that arguably isn’t much different whether that vendor’s code is open source or proprietary.

This isn’t the only area where open-source vendors misread customer tea leaves. For years open-source insiders have debated definitions for open-source vendor, even as customers shrugged their shoulders and continued using open source–from different vendors with very different business strategies–without worrying about the various shades of ideology and pragmatism that fuel open-source development. I’m as guilty of leading this foolish march as Cartier Watches anyone. Cost aside (which is easier said than done, as cost is the primary consideration for the buyer), the support options for Vendor X’s code from Vendor Y or Z are unlikely to be on par with what Vendor X can deliver. Just ask Red Hat about CentoS or Oracle Enterprise Linux support. Compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux can only be verified by Red Hat’s internal test suite. Source code is a building block, not a standard. It’s something you turn into other things. A standard is something that stands above and apart from all of Franck Muller Watches those things, a guideline for what that finished product ought to be like.