Interestingly enough, in our efforts with Open Technology Development
and the Department of Defense (US), the Navy made that determination
that OSS was COTS - and therefore needed to be considered on an equal
footing with proprietary solutions for Navy acquisitions.
Mark
On Apr 27, 2008, at 6:34 PM, Arnulf Christl wrote:
[...]
My original sentiment still stands -- if you have the money, but
don't
have the skills, and don't need it "yesterday," it might be better
in the
long-term to fund an extension of a good OSS project than to take
the
easy way out and buy a COTS package.
Absolutely.
It appears that Open Source is the next level in the evolution of
business
models[1]. It is not a revolution because there is nothing to go
back to.
Slowly a sentiment is growing in the suits that business with software
must be different to business with hardware due to their inherent
difference[2]. We are pushing this process forward with every line
of code
that we produce, with every aspect of the foundation that we create
and we
can nudge it a bit further by using terminology appropriate to this
process. So watch out for the words we use.
COTS translates into "commercial off the shelf" and I wonder why
this term
should be restricted to proprietary packages. The times when one had
to
manually compile a PostGIS, MapServer, GeoServer, gvSIG, Quantum GIS
and
so on, before one could use them are over. You can - and that is an
extra
advantage - but you don't have to.
So my suggestion is to put COTS on the shelf of terminology that is
compatible with Open Source.
Best regards,
Arnulf.
[1]
http://www.opensourcejahrbuch.de/portal/article_show?article=osjb2007-01-02-freyermuth.pdf
[2] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Software
--
Arnulf Christl
http://www.wheregroup.com
_______________________________________________
Discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
_______________________________________________
Discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
