Raising the Bar

Posted on 2008-05-08 11:55:56.0 by sharps [ View original post ]

There was a time when when the main selling point of (Free) Open Source was cost and consumers of the technology we’re willing to make compromises in other areas. I think that’s changed and Enterprise adoption is one of the causes. If your are responsible for maintaining your organization’s business crtitcal infrastructure - you’re not going to cut anyone any slack - not Free; not Open Source.

Some news from Gartner and Forrester today pushed the bar for OSS a little higher. First the report from Forrester ($$) - based on a pretty exhaustive survey of application server users - it’s the first report I’ve ever seen that is essentially based on Quality - not the usual speeds and feeds and feature comparison. It very clearly busts any remaining myths that OSS is a riskier proposition than conventional, proprietary software - in fact it the report’s findings are pretty clear - JBoss App Server 4.x is likely of superior quality, is able to handle demanding workloads and our ability to resolve issues is better than our competitors. Note - I also think this demonstrates the difference between the old and new models of Software - ie. where the value is about the services you provide beyond the bits; not the bits themselves.

That said - the bits have to be good as well - again nobody is giving OSS an easy passage in the enterprise and according to the latest Gartner MQ on Enterprise App Servers ($$) - our bits are damned good (or I guess technically - our vision and execution of that vision is damned good).

Hopefuly we’ll get reprint rights for the Forrester report - not only is it good for JBoss and Red Hat but I think it’s good for the whole OSS ecosystem.

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