October 28, 2009

On Matt Asay's "R.I.P., open-source evangelism"

Matt Asay recently posted a blog on the notion that there is no longer any need for the open-source community to evangelize open-source, since it is a fete compleat. You can find his blog post here.

I don't believe the evangelism stops, however (when has it ever in the history of humankind?). My sense is that the next phase in evangelism will be on open-source's efficacy in the enterprise. Certainly organizations from Symantec to the New York Times to whitehouse.gov have added to the legitimacy of open-source Web content management systems in the marketplace for specific brand sites. However, open-source has a long way to go in the areas of CRM, DAM, document and records management, financials, ERP, workflow management, or even just end-to-end business application development in the enterprise.

I'm not suggesting that we haven't turned a corner. Its just that we have much further to go before enterprises will adopt open-source across its application stack. Some of that is due to change management, some is the inherent cultural difficulties within the open-source community that can often view mainstream as "the Man".

Also, assignation of value in the OS community is often based on the heroics of the contributor, which may leave other noncoding contributors in the value chain outside of the loop. Once business, project management, developer, and integrator talents begin to work with maximum efficiency in a broader open-source definition of community, things will really take off in the enterprise. Until then, many businesses will still feel that the risks of adoption in areas outside of CMS may be too great.

We'll get there!

Posted at 05:50 pm by Joseph Bachana

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