I recently had an exchange with a coder/developer concerning his hack for displaying a "label cloud" on Blogger sites. You can read our mutual comments here.
Before seeing the replies from phydeaux3, I had already spoken to my business partner about the concerns in the commercial sector about open source in general, and the use of such weighty packages as Joomla in particular. Sure, the code is free, constantly updated, infinitely configurable, and often comparable to commercial applications. Sometimes there really is no commercial equivalent in any affordable sense, as in the case of Content Management Systems such as Mambo and Drupal.
But the issue of support and ongoing development makes business owners crazy. They are used to the model of buying Microsoft software and paying a premium for both the code and all the collateral stuff necessary to support it: books, tutorials, classes and the MS certified geeks to keep it running. All that is standardized and available at your local Best Buy. But when you have a problem with a PHP script written by a kid in Finland, where do you turn?
My suggestion was that one can develop successful relationships with any number of support resources, individual or collective, to accomplish the same goals with better results. It just requires a change of thinking or, much as I hate to employ this term so often, a paradigm shift. Once business people are comfortable with the nature of open source, free code and non-regulated support, the options will seem more clear.
Results speak for themselves in business. Within a day, I had searched for a solution, found it available free and documented on a blog, encountered a problem and got an answer from the developer, and learned a bit about how my application works. I also encountered a resource in phydeaux3, who apparently knows quite a bit about integrating content with weblogs.
When does this sort of stuff happen for Microsoft or Oracle users in the enterprise? Sure, as an IT guy in the past, I would find MS workarounds or tips, but there is an intangible element of community, of working together to accomplish technical feats on the cheap and with innovation that, in my opinion, is not encouraged by the MS environment. If the future of the Internet is the power of the individual as both content generator and consumer, I don't think Microsoft will be able to gain the high ground they did when they provided the hardware platform with an operating system.
Remember that the circumstance of the Microsoft monopoly resulted from essentially a few key business deals with IBM, Zenith, etc., and the next 20 years were a display of the momentum generated by the resulting cash. Open source and collaborative development are organic efforts. And if you really need to spend $10,000+ to develop your own application to work in the public license environment, you can still find the qualified expert vendors who will gladly satisfy.
Before seeing the replies from phydeaux3, I had already spoken to my business partner about the concerns in the commercial sector about open source in general, and the use of such weighty packages as Joomla in particular. Sure, the code is free, constantly updated, infinitely configurable, and often comparable to commercial applications. Sometimes there really is no commercial equivalent in any affordable sense, as in the case of Content Management Systems such as Mambo and Drupal.
But the issue of support and ongoing development makes business owners crazy. They are used to the model of buying Microsoft software and paying a premium for both the code and all the collateral stuff necessary to support it: books, tutorials, classes and the MS certified geeks to keep it running. All that is standardized and available at your local Best Buy. But when you have a problem with a PHP script written by a kid in Finland, where do you turn?
My suggestion was that one can develop successful relationships with any number of support resources, individual or collective, to accomplish the same goals with better results. It just requires a change of thinking or, much as I hate to employ this term so often, a paradigm shift. Once business people are comfortable with the nature of open source, free code and non-regulated support, the options will seem more clear.
Results speak for themselves in business. Within a day, I had searched for a solution, found it available free and documented on a blog, encountered a problem and got an answer from the developer, and learned a bit about how my application works. I also encountered a resource in phydeaux3, who apparently knows quite a bit about integrating content with weblogs.
When does this sort of stuff happen for Microsoft or Oracle users in the enterprise? Sure, as an IT guy in the past, I would find MS workarounds or tips, but there is an intangible element of community, of working together to accomplish technical feats on the cheap and with innovation that, in my opinion, is not encouraged by the MS environment. If the future of the Internet is the power of the individual as both content generator and consumer, I don't think Microsoft will be able to gain the high ground they did when they provided the hardware platform with an operating system.
Remember that the circumstance of the Microsoft monopoly resulted from essentially a few key business deals with IBM, Zenith, etc., and the next 20 years were a display of the momentum generated by the resulting cash. Open source and collaborative development are organic efforts. And if you really need to spend $10,000+ to develop your own application to work in the public license environment, you can still find the qualified expert vendors who will gladly satisfy.
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