In the last couple of years I have become more and more disillusioned with open source; but not with the fundamentals of it, nor with the support mechanisms, nor with the communities (mostly).
The problem is that there are a handful of bigots (enthusiasts?) who make a lot of noise, and most of it is negative; you know these people: whenever there is any negative news on commercial software, sure enough there will be useless comments from these enthusiasts on how you should expect that from the evil commercial empire X or how the open source is SOOO much better.
Or another type of group of these enthusiasts say how you are not doing real open source because you do not follow the rule #44 in the open source bible. Or how Java and MySQL are not open source as they are provided by one of the evil empires Oracle.
So I have decided to start supporting and developing "community software" instead. Community software is like open source; it has a lot of free code available for you to develop with and great communities to interact with - as a matter of fact most of the current open source communities will find it to be like home and like open source used to be - open.
There are some fundamental differences between Community software and open source though:
1) Community software does not have to use open source development language (open sourceness defined by some weird rules); Java is fine, so is C# and any other commercial development language. Nor does it matter that you use SQL Server or Oracle as the database within your apps.
2) the community within Community software could have been managed and built by the commercial vendor; ESRI development community for example is very strong and has a lot of resources available for you to tap on.
3) with Community software you do not have to publish all your code to the community unless you really want to, and if you do it could become part of the commercial product in some near future - which is great as it means you do not have to support it yourself from that onward!
4) with Community software the commercial vendor developers themselves are in the community too and help you with great insights if you get stuck. And they really want to do this as on top of being helpful on the community, they also get paid to do this.
I see the Community software as the evolution of open source; and you can join them usually in the website of your preferred commercial vendor :)
BTW I did think about instead of community software calling this "open open source", but it just did not sound right.
The problem is that there are a handful of bigots (enthusiasts?) who make a lot of noise, and most of it is negative; you know these people: whenever there is any negative news on commercial software, sure enough there will be useless comments from these enthusiasts on how you should expect that from the evil commercial empire X or how the open source is SOOO much better.
Or another type of group of these enthusiasts say how you are not doing real open source because you do not follow the rule #44 in the open source bible. Or how Java and MySQL are not open source as they are provided by one of the evil empires Oracle.
So I have decided to start supporting and developing "community software" instead. Community software is like open source; it has a lot of free code available for you to develop with and great communities to interact with - as a matter of fact most of the current open source communities will find it to be like home and like open source used to be - open.
There are some fundamental differences between Community software and open source though:
1) Community software does not have to use open source development language (open sourceness defined by some weird rules); Java is fine, so is C# and any other commercial development language. Nor does it matter that you use SQL Server or Oracle as the database within your apps.
2) the community within Community software could have been managed and built by the commercial vendor; ESRI development community for example is very strong and has a lot of resources available for you to tap on.
3) with Community software you do not have to publish all your code to the community unless you really want to, and if you do it could become part of the commercial product in some near future - which is great as it means you do not have to support it yourself from that onward!
4) with Community software the commercial vendor developers themselves are in the community too and help you with great insights if you get stuck. And they really want to do this as on top of being helpful on the community, they also get paid to do this.
I see the Community software as the evolution of open source; and you can join them usually in the website of your preferred commercial vendor :)
BTW I did think about instead of community software calling this "open open source", but it just did not sound right.