Walking the open source walk
by Ruth Suehle
Last week journalists converged on Sun Microsystems’ Silicon Valley campus for its first Asia-Pacific summit. Jonathan Schwartz talked about the company’s roadmap and the role of open source:
During the Q&A session at the summit, I asked if that makes open source simply a marketing and branding exercise, rather than a key part of Sun’s technology roadmap–to which Schwartz retorted: “What’s the difference?”
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The problem, however, arises when some companies choose to focus their attention on the marketing component and, in the case of open source, neglect to contribute their share of technology development back to the community.
By the end of that article, I was reminded of a post from Matt Asay yesterday about a much smaller company, Zipidy, which makes an open source mobile solution for finding parking. Zipidy is a big fan of using open source to build their product. They use Leap JADE (an open source Java framework), JBoss, and MySQL. The CEO, Cosimo Sperais, said of the choice:
The major principle that drives our use of open source is speed. Things in open source happen faster and sooner than in proprietary software.
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If you are doing cutting-edge technology, you will often find that no products - open source or proprietary - meet your needs 100%. But the difference is that with open source you can extend the product to fit your needs. In a proprietary world, you’re stuck with the vendor’s product, as well as its priorities and roadmap.
But Zipidy itself is not open source. To that, Sperais answers, “We’d like to gain market share before we further consider open sourcing our own technology.”
The open source community pays attention when you take without giving back. As Bob Walters, CEO of Untangle, put it in interview earlier this summer, if you’re going to talk the open source talk, you’ve also got to walk the open source walk.
