In today's increasingly technological world, the need to drive your company forward is always at the top of the agenda, whether it be the advancement of your operational systems, requiring staff training; an informative conference for your customers; …

I couldn't understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting

I couldn't understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting

Today there are plenty of jobs in Open Source or Open Source related positions. Unless you live in the midwest there is no reason why you can't find employment doing what you enjoy. This wasn't the case 15 years ago, but it has been the case for the last 7 to 10 years.

Supporting open source software is an open field. I don't think you will find companies that will be all that successful at it unless they produce it, for the reason that followers will almost always be a day late in understanding a given product. There are certainly cases where some companies have grown larger then the companies who originally produced the software, but I think that in almost all cases you will find that they did added value in the form of installation (since installation is something that not all open source people get the importance of getting it right).

Cheers,
-Brian

I couldn't understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting

Did you really just play the "google me" card? How about instead of throwing your credentials around, you actually address Rod's points?

By the way, I DID Google you, and it looks like every page that mentions you and Open Source together is a page written by you. Not that impressive.

I'm a little late to the game here, but oh well, I'll comment anyway.

For the sake of full disclosure, let me introduce myself. My name is Bryan Noll, and I'm a developer employed by OpenLogic. I'm no big deal, if you google me the first two hits you'll get are a now-defunct website about Bryan Noll the woodworker, and a pretty decent site about Bryan Noll the guitar player, neither of which are me. You can see some of my thoughts on Stormy's original post by reading my response to it. As for my thoughts regarding what you have to say…

First and foremost, I think your assertion that it is not healthy for a project or open source in general when people who have no real investment in a particular project offer support for it is an interesting one… one I've not heard before. I think there's enough validity to it to make a company like ours consider it and genuinely examine our responsibility to the open source projects we support. The result of this examination, in my mind, would be a demonstrable policy OpenLogic would have in order to mitigate the potential concerns you're raising. I'm sure I don't know what exactly that would be, so allow me to be vague at this point. This dovetails nicely though into some of the issues I have with what you're saying.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. You say:

[quote post="167"]My "support" may be coming from non-committers. So OpenLogic can't guarantee to resolve issues strategically. Dependable support involves the ability to commit to the main tree–as well as, in some cases, branches maintained for a particular revision of customer.[/quote]

Interesting to note that in the case of Spring, Interface 21 would be the one and only entity capable of doing what you're proposing. (Please correct me if I'm wrong here.) Seems like a sweet deal for Interface 21 there. If you open source your stuff, and it's a great product that is a big hit like yours is, do you really expect that no one else in the market will attempt to engage in business surrounding it? Surely not… for another example of this, just take the books written about the Spring Framework not written by folks working for Interface 21, or the countless number of developers out there who are highly marketable because they've learned the framework you open-sourced. Are they to feel guilty for the health of the project as well? Interface 21 is allowed to reap such great benefits because the product is A) great, but also because the product is B) being delivered to the marketplace en masse because you've open-source it and made it free. While not being exactly the same, this argument has that “nobody else should be able to make and sell cars because I invented themâ€? feel to it.

Secondly, while I again confess that I think you make good points about potential project health ramifications, another fact driving aggregated support of the market remains. What enterprises have to do today to obtain support for the software they're developing and deploying into production is a painstaking process… the idea of managing support contracts for x number of projects across y number of stove-piped divisions seems like an inefficient nightmare to me. Aggregating these services makes sense from the enterprise's standpoint, however shortsighted you may claim it is. If an opportunity to do business in a market exists, you can't fault someone for swooping in and taking advantage of that opportunity.

Good, thought-provoking, original post on your part.