On Sat, Mar 09, 2002 at 12:52:34PM -0600, _brian_d_foy wrote:
>
> Today's economic reality is that high-tech decisions made in Arkansas
> play a larger role in boosting America's productivity than decisions made
> in Silicon Valley or Seattle.
>
> His conclusion, therefore, about where we should look, and by extension,
> what open source should target, for future success, seems at odds with the
> usual assumptions of advocacy.
>
> [1] http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/schrage0302.asp
Here's a gem of a quote from that same article:
The reason is simple. Wal-Mart is by far the commercial
world's most influential purchaser and implementer of
software and systems. It is the 800-pound gorilla in a retail
jungle of bonobos and howler monkeys. Microsoft and Cisco may
set technical standards; Wal-Mart sets business process
standards.
It's a very perceptive observation. Amazon.com and AOL[1] are in
the process of switching many of their internal systems to Linux
(or simply making a big noise that they're becoming less reliant
on proprietary systems). Schrage makes the point that these changes
are meaningless in the macroeconomic view of the world. However,
if the tech-savvy companies can't make it happen this year, then
there's not a lot of likelihood that the Wal-Mart, their suppliers
and competition won't make the jump to open source next year.
That leads me to an interesting question: to what extent do particular
open source technologies (e.g. Perl, Apache, MySQL/etc.) *enable*
companies to consider moving their internal systems to open source
platforms like Linux/*BSD?
A few years ago, I was working with a team who developed software
on Linux that had to run on Solaris, AIX and OSF/1 (er, Tru64).
We did a lot of our work with Perl and everything *just worked*.
This allowed us to add Linux development servers into our data
center seemlessly and inexpensively when the crunch came and we
needed more disk+CPU for the project.
Is this the lesson that AOL, Amazon and practically ever other
open source friendly data center is learning? Is this the lesson
that we need to use to reach Wal-Mart?
Z.
[1]: http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/03/08/1957252
