Fwd: OSS rant (was: Re: XXE editor support for Forrest (Fw: Re: forrest and xml catalogs))

Hi there,

some interesting thoughts about OSS I just found on the forrest list. 
Maybe Gianugo's post is a little addendum to our discussion a couple 
of days ago.

Markus

>From: Gianugo Rabellino <[email protected]>
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: OSS rant  (was: Re: XXE editor support for Forrest (Fw: Re: forrest
>  and xml catalogs))
>
>Steven Noels wrote:
>
>>Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote:
>>
>>>  BTW, Wyona seems to be talking about getting off from the OS
>>>  experience for now, since they found it unproductive :-(
>>
>>
>>Ditto for Xopus.
>
><rant off-topic="true">
>
>I'm not surprised. When will those companies learn? There is 
>absolutely no way and no reason for such companies to prosper with a 
>such blind Open Source strategy. What is the point in making a 
>product Open Source if there is no community around it? You just end 
>up spending lots of money/funds on developers while giving away your 
>results for nothing (possibly to no one or close to).
>
>The whole point in Open Source (forget about the big guys who might 
>leverage marketing visibility and similar crap) is about 
>collaboration and community. We work together to produce good 
>software on which we all make a living by selling it as a product 
>(quite lame but anyway...) or as a set of services/consultancies. 
>But the real point is "together": my company, your company, her 
>company, not just me. Open Source communities are a precious 
>resource when tought as a "shared" R&D department, for companies 
>that otherwise wouldn't be able to afford it: my company provides a 
>couple of developers and gets the benefit of a lab of 50 people or 
>so, we join a common effort with a relatively small amount of 
>resources and we all benefit from that. No small or mid-size company 
>in the world would have been able to put together software like the 
>one hosted by the ASF: think about Cocoon, where S&N, Otego, 
>Outerthought, Anyware and many others, together with individuals, 
>enthousiasts and some big company were able to put together a great 
>product which turns out to be a great asset for their business.
>
>In the OSS world, talking about companies and not about individuals, 
>there is no room (again, big guys aside) for one-man shows: a single 
>company is unable to sustain itself on a single, self promoted and 
>self developed OSS, it just doesn't make sense. So Wyona, Q42 and 
>many others are doomed unless they make it in broadening the number 
>of developers by having an heterogeneous community around them. And 
>they won't have it unless it made clear that their effort will turn 
>into a community effort owned by no one but the community: I, as a 
>developer, perfectly see a reason on working on org.apache.*, much 
>less on com.somecompany.*.
>
>What would happen if Wyona chooses to step right into the Cocoon 
>community donating their code (provided, of course, that we are 
>talking about quality code that meets the interests of the community 
>and that the intention is not purely to dump stuff) and making it a 
>core part of a Cocoon based CMS? I would jump right away on that 
>train, trying to help as much as I can, and so would others (and so 
>actually *did* others with the S&N portal stuff). Most probably we 
>would end up in a short timeframe with a great CMS, done by several 
>developers around the world, tested, interoperable, well documented 
>(oh well... maybe not *that* well after all... :-)), with a great 
>brand on it such as the Apache one, on which many OSS companies, 
>including Wyona would have been able to make good money. We all win.
>
>By joining (or creating, but it much more difficult) an healtful OSS 
>community you get great code, a good number of developers and 
>marketing for free (or almost). With one-man shows you're alone in 
>the dark: good luck, but please don't blame Open Source if you fail.
>
></rant>
>
>Ciao,
>
>--
>Gianugo Rabellino