[ Thanks to Timothy Dyck / eWEEK Labs
for this link. ]
“Contrary to the May 1 column by my eWeek colleague John
Taschek (“Open source is (so far) an open road to nowhere”), open
source is far from a road to nowhere. Instead, it’s leading us
somewhere very important-somewhere we want to be.“
“Let’s distinguish between two fundamentally different parts of
the IT market. One is infrastructure-standards-based technologies
such as operating system APIs, network services, compilers,
storage, databases, transaction monitors, authentication systems,
Web protocols and encryption. The other is value-added services,
which provide business-specific logic, make infrastructure products
easier to use, or provide specialized or infrequently used
products.”
“Open source is absolutely the right infrastructure development
methodology for our age. Value-added services don’t benefit as much
from open source, and it may be necessary to use closed-source
approaches to get them developed. I’ll address only infrastructure
services here.”