So far I am unconvinced that mass collaboration is the wave of the future. Yes, it has changed many elements of the web, and how companies design programs, but those seem like anomalies. One of the creators of Wikipedia left because it became something other than what he envisioned. I am forced to agree with Thomas Friedman’s analysis in "The World is Flat". Speaking of "The World is Flat", Friedman gives a much better description of IBM using open source and the difficulties they initially had. I also find it interesting that Firefox has a rather large following, but when people want an alternative to Windows, they go to Macintosh rather than to Linux.
The authors mention China is adopting open source, which is not a good thing. With China’s history of human rights abuses and control of speech, I wonder how open source can really be successful.
I find it interesting that this chapter covers ERP as open source at the time we are covering it in class. I wonder how successful an ERP can be as open source. As was seen in the Cisco case, if something goes wrong, who do you contact? Since no one owns the IP, who do you sue if necessary?
Right now, I believe that the real reason many companies are shifting to open source is because it lowers labor costs while giving them access to top programmers for free. They only pay if a commercial product comes out of it, saving R&D dollars. Also, companies won’t have to recruit top talent when said talent will work for free in their spare time.
Finally, the writers mention that companies should change their strategy to fit the IT, rather that having IT match strategy as mentioned in class. As we saw what happened last time this was done, I would have to go with the latter.
3 comments:
I'm not going to go on about China, but I agree that open sourcing there is dangerous. It seems that we have competing ideals here. What was "supposed" to happen is a rendition of the Maskus (sp?) curve- where a developing country will "borrow" other country's IP until they reach the point where they have built it up and expanded on it so much that they have incentive to protect it. We've fought China so much on these issues. Are open source and collaboration going to undo everything that we've been fighting for?
I really don't see any logic With regards to China adapting to the open source technology and being a country violating human rgihts. I believe that they are two different things.However I do agree with you on the IBM issue. IBM stepped into opensource because they had nothing to lose, luckily they gained by doing so.
Open source ERPs will be the future first tehy are cheap and now there is an availibility of support.Companies like Marimba step in to trouble shoot the problems and that is those companies make money.
I think that open sourcing is a very important part of the future of business. Google has already forced Apple's hand by releasing their own cell phone platform, which is open source, so that Apple had to open their code up to third party developers just to stay competitive. They had already had problems with hackers and this will at least allow them to point out authorized and safe applications to their customers instead of dealing with repairs related to hacked apps.
Post a Comment