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Our Blogs Open Sauce Stormy by name, not by nature
Our Blogs Open Sauce Stormy by name, not by nature | Stormy by name, not by nature |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 05 February 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 4 I asked her about the logic which de Icaza uses: that he can pull Windows developers over to Linux by developing a clone of a Microsoft product that is about three generations behind the original. Featured Whitepaper
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"I think an example that predates it a little bit that you could look at is OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org, you could argue, is just a clone of Windows (sic)," she responded. "I mean, I don't think it is, but it pretty much - every feature is compatible and you can save in PowerPoint format when you're in Impress. But I think as more people start using OpenOffice.org eventually it won't have to follow Microsoft Office as much. So I think it's one way of catching up and I think allowing people to migrate smoothly " Peters' employer OpenLogic acts as a middleman between open source projects and businesses. "We're in the business of helping companies use open source software and one of the problems that companies often have is they need product support when they use open source software in their business solutions. If something goes wrong at 3am on a Saturday morning, they need somebody they can call. They can't always call the one guy that started the project - he might be busy or something. Also, they use on average about a hundred open source projects. "So they wanted one person to call. They didn't want to figure out from the hundred names they have which one they should call or email. OpenLogic supports 350 open source software projects. So the companies can call us directly. We have support staff that will answer the phones and help figure out what the problem is. And what we do is if we figure out it's a bug in a project we actually work with the committers on that project and say 'hey, our customer has found a bug. Can you fix it and check it into the upstream project?' And then we pay them." The company thus enjoys credibility with both sides. "The other thing that we've used it for is a lot of times companies want to remain anonymous. But they want to add a feature to an open source software project. We had a customer that said, 'hey, we developed this cool thing for this project and we want to check it in, but we don't want anyone knowing that we're using it or working on it'. And so we were able to use our community and say, 'hey, we have this feature. Can you take a look at it? would you be willing to check it in? We're willing to pay you for your trouble because this customer's paying us to do this.' And we kind of help that anonymity out." OpenLogic handles about 350 projects and is adding more at customer request. As the companies are by and large using these open source products in-house, there are no licensing hassles. The GPL specifies that source code must be provided in the event of distributing derived products but there is no distribution involved here. |
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