Open Source : Outstanding Issues Galore

Several months back,while writing a brief note, on opensource, I concluded that that from a technology, economic and sociological perspective, there is no compelling reason for the open source model to succeed and become dominant. We can assume at best - a niche role for open source in the IT industry. A few months later, I wrote opensource is not yet ready for the enterprise and pointed out that I tend to take a dim view of open source relevance - see Open source -where is the business model, Opensource : Costly & Litigatious and also covered Kim Polese view business models of the open source support companies – where the contours of what need to be done to support open source components become quite clear and a not seeing several players in the opensource world thinking along these lines – it would be a major impediment to consider adoption of opensource in enterprises if the support model is not made widely available and the economics and technology upgrade rate demonstrated as beneficial. I also recently wrote about FOSS movement winning the hearts & minds of the Indian programmer & highlighted the need to have a robust instituitional and infrastructural support for the movement to gain support from offshore developers. James McGovern is urging opensource analysts to provide details of talent search mechanisms, non-technology corporates interest in opensource, vertical solutions using opensource solutions, details of opensource competing and winning against commercial software, best practices in opensource contributions and the like. Look carefully at the set of issues that he has raised – very essential to build up any movement – daring to challenge well established notions of software – Like James , I shall await for pointed responses to these.( Disclosure – Have tried in the past – with limited/no success to get such specific, credible details).