It's quite possible, but I don't believe that there is the wherewithal in business to develop large scale OSS applications on their own. Most likely such initiatives would be driven by the IT industry. My guess is that we are going to see large open source contributions from IBM and others to compete with Microsoft.
As for costs companies are quite concerned about these enterprise license agreements that MS has tried to force on them. ----- Original Message ---- From: Bob La Quey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Main Discussion List for KPLUG <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, October 29, 2007 12:10:43 AM Subject: Re: Vaunted WiMax's messy side: the spectrum grab - MarketWatch On 10/28/07, Randall Shimizu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I doubt that most companies will go completely open source. That is _not_ what I am suggesting. I am saying that the huge amount of undifferentiated genneral purpose software that they use could be OSS. And that if they were rational they would use an multi-industry consortium to prodcue that software. Thus they would avoid the shackles that companies like Microsoft and Oracle have put upon them. The other 95% of their IT budget could then be focused on company specific software of mission critical and strategic importance. As it is the ratio is the opposite. Maybe 80% is for generic software and 20% for mission critical software. >A software program must be judged by the value and productivity it delivers regardless if it is proprietary or not. About 4 years ago IBM president Sam Palmisano met a lot of Fortune 500 customers. When he met with them is was the CEO's who asked him about OSS. Today we are seeing the fruition of this: "Lafayette, CO (October 19, 2007) – Open Source Software (OSS) adoption > is a common-trend in the software development industry. More and more > Fortune 500 companies are turning to OSS as an alternative to > vendor-driven shrink wrapped products. Most businesses embrace OSS as a > way to cut costs, adopt emerging and potentially more effective > technologies, while leveraging the intellectual property and support of > the development community.(" http://www.prurgent.com/2007-10-19/pressrelease4334.htm ) The point I am makimg is that if they funded OSS collectively at even a trivial level then they could reap far greater benefits. So I go back and say I suspect when you look into the details that such things as "Dinner with the Microsoft Salesperson" turn out to be at least as important as "cut costs ... ." I do not believe that most large businesses are run on a globally ratiional basis. Instead they are arbitration engines that reflect the outcome of a large number of interests internal and external. Middle management, for instance, has often little reason to optimize globally and many reasons to optimize personally. Upper management may well find that the encounter with a Bill Gates is more important than all of the arguments that OSS puts forth. I do not feel this is a cynical view. Rather it is one that views a corporation as a collection of humans with individual interests many of which may well conflict with ideas like, "cuts costs ... ." BobLQ -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
