NewsForge: When VA was the news

“…Reporters who had managed to get into the
announcement teleconference reported that VA would rely on sales of
proprietary software in the future. So much for Open Source. The
next day Eric S. Raymond added his own spin, as he distributed a
message suggesting that VA’s commitment to proprietary enhancements
amounted to little more than an interim marketing tactic. Raymond
said, “There is less here than meets the eye. This is a change in
tactics, not strategy.”

Raymond suggested that VA’s problems were due in part to
conservative IT managers, and that the only way to get these
managers to buy software instead of simply downloading it and using
it required “hanging some proprietary tinsel off the product.”
Raymond suggested strongly that VA’s strategy and value proposition
continued to be focused on “the service contract.”

Unfortunately, there is little evidence to suggest that
“conservatism” or a corporate reluctance to embrace Linux had much
to do with VA’s problems. On the contrary, Linux is rapidly being
brought into enterprise environments, at least experimentally.
According to Carl Howe of Forrester Research, better than half of
the largest U.S. corporations have adopted Open Source for one or
more projects in the last year, an adoption rate that exceeds the
PC revolution in its earliest days.”

Complete Story