Business Considers Open Source on Par with Commercial Software 121
quad4b writes "At the International Conference on COTS-based Software Systems in Spain last week, representatives from organizations such at the Software Engineering Institute (remember the CMM), National Research Council of Canada and the European Software Institute discussed the inclusion of Open Source Software for the first time on the conference agenda. COTS software includes stuff like commercial operating systems, desktop software, and ERP systems among others. The conference examined best practices for integrating these pre-built components in systems development efforts. They conceded that open source software is essentially no different from commercially built software and that both types have their risks in terms of supportability and security. (what opponents of OSS say is its weakness) Interestingly enough, a senior representative of IBM was present and discussed with some of us, over lunch, how IBM is determined to move to an open desktop based on Linux and OpenOffice within about a year."
Same risks? (Score:2, Interesting)
That's funny... (Score:5, Interesting)
At any rate, it's always been my opinion that OSS programs can only get better when people are forced to USE them. When we see IBM forcing their employees to go down that road, I have no doubt that we will see some positive improvements in the way these programs operate.
Years ago, Atari sold a line of personal computers and tried to promote them for business use by porting programs like Visicalc. Later it leaked out that all of Atari's corporate machines were PC's. No doubt this was true. There is a saying for this, it's called, 'Eating your own dog food'.
Do accounting firms recognize Compierre? (Score:5, Interesting)
What are these institutes? (Score:5, Interesting)
Uh... so, at least for us who are not in the software business but are interested in OSS anyway, it would be nice to know how much influence these institutes actually wield. Are they really "the business" as the subject let's us to believe or something else?
What is this? (Score:4, Interesting)
Two things, though:
1) This is hardly a declaration that "Business Considers..."
2) There is a complete confusion of licensing ("open-source") with development practice ("commercially built").
Ouch (Score:5, Interesting)
Ouch
If there's one thing everyone at SEI is tired of if the CMM thing.
If you've ever met someone from SEI you've probably blurted out "Oh, the CMM people", and got a response "We do more than CMM!". I know I've done it, and got the impression that they're sick and tired of it
Just something to keep in mind if you meet one of them. Of course, I still don't know what else they've done
Haleluja ... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's about time IBM took another whack at you know who
Now let's hope this gets upgraded from the lowly status of a mere rumor to the lofty status of a fact and results in a flood of out-of-the-box fully Linux capable of Laptops.
High Security Computing & China (Score:1, Interesting)
Makes sense with ERP (Score:3, Interesting)
EDMS. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:What are these institutes? (Score:3, Interesting)
Can't tell you anything about the others.
Re:What are these institutes? (Score:3, Interesting)
NRC is composed of over 20 institutes and national programs, spanning a wide variety of disciplines and offering a broad array of services. We are located in every province in Canada and play a major role in stimulating community-based innovation.
NRC institutes and programs are organized into three (3) key areas:
* Physical Sciences and Engineering
* Life Sciences and Information Technology
* Technology and Industry Support
Linux Desktops @ IBM ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Moreover you could guess that taking machines out of service before end of lease, to replace the entire suite of software on them, then send them back, train people and staff a help desk for it is not really a rational goal.
I don't think anyone thinks that migrating everyone or a large chunk of everyone from Win to Linux is going to be any easier than the migration from OS/2 to Win several years ago. And that was quite hard.
Another thing to keep in mind is that your most difficult desktop users, the ones with the most complicated and inflexible requirements are the executives and if they have an app on Windows that absolutely must run the way they want it to run then that is what will happen. Period.
Plus you'd be wasting all the monies you invested in desktop tools for AV and spyware if you suddenly didn't need or couldn't use them anymore.
I think it's bravado to claim that there will be nothing but Linux desktops inside of one year.
Re:Summary (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think there will, as such be a "year of Linux on the desktop". It will slowly crawl its way in. Firstly, to corporate desktops running nothing other than a word processor and spreadsheet, and then it'll make its way to the 'average' home user who uses it at work.
That's how Microsoft took over, anyway. Would be nice if they got screwed in exactly the same way. However, hopefully it doesn't totally take over, so we're all left with a choice of OS.
Re:What is this? (Score:2, Interesting)
Notably, I wrote a lot of code on that project, maybe 25% overall, including much of the hard stuff, and my stuff was pointedly hidden from the reviewers, because I was bypassing paperwork in order to meet our strict deadline. But I eventually backfilled the most important stuff, and I would say that the certification was accurate.
I have to say that any project that wants to work at CMM3 or higher had better have deep pockets. As they say, faster, cheaper, better, pick two (expect one). All of the personnel overhead to do process doubles your headcount, and slows the development time.
CMM's main purpose is to measure the reliablility of the software produced by organizations, so I guess it implicitly selects faster better and chucks cheaper.
Re:and why not consider open source == cots? (Score:3, Interesting)