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Open Source Services Come of Age 92

Posted by samzenpus from the all-grown-up dept.
Rob writes "A new breed of solutions and services companies is bringing a more professional approach to the deployment of open source software. A sure sign of a maturing market is when vendors stop talking about products and start talking about services and 'solution stacks'. It can be indicative that the marketing team have taken over from the engineers in charge of presenting the company to the outside world, but also shows that customers are demanding a more professional approach towards the deployment of the technology. This is certainly the case in the open source software market, where a clutch of new solutions and services companies have recently sprung up to guide enterprise customers through the difficulties of open source software deployment."
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Open Source Services Come of Age More

Open Source Services Come of Age

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  • A sure sign of bloat (Score:5, Interesting)

    by saskboy ( 600063 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2005 @09:44PM (#13778526) Homepage Journal
    " A sure sign of a maturing market is when vendors stop talking about products and start talking about services and 'solution stacks'."

    That kind of buzz word lingo is also a sure sign of bloat. It makes my skin crawl to hear words like "solution stack", not only because I don't know what the heck it means, but also because it doesn't mean anything. It's a fuzzy complicated way of saying, "a bunch of related software products that you'll find useful in your company".

    I guess for OSS to join the mainstream, it will have to use the same insipid lingo that the big guns like IBM and Symantec are using.

    • Re:A sure sign of bloat (Score:4, Insightful)

      by schwaang ( 667808 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2005 @09:48PM (#13778545)
      From the article, it means things like LAMP (Apache+Mysql+PHP).
      Yeah it's biznomarketing speak, but it does translate to something real developers need.

    • A sure sign of language difficulties. (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "That kind of buzz word lingo is also a sure sign of bloat. It makes my skin crawl to hear words like "solution stack", not only because I don't know what the heck it means, but also because it doesn't mean anything. It's a fuzzy complicated way of saying, "a bunch of related software products that you'll find useful in your company"."

      Hehe. This is funny. Basically the OP is saying "I don't understand that lingo. So it must be something bad". Now you know how users feel every time you geeks throw around all

    • A sure sign of marketing (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AB3A ( 192265 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2005 @10:09PM (#13778655) Homepage Journal
      My skin crawls whenever marketeers speak too. Marketing murders language. It's that simple. If customers knew precisely what they were buying, most probably wouldn't bother. We don't buy ground up dead bovine animal. We buy hamburger.

      However, that said, Salespeople (like managers) are a necessary evil. If they didn't create the sizzle, open source would still be a hippie programmer's toy.

      This is the development I had hoped for. Marketing "solution stacks" of open source software customized for individual clients is where the real money will be made for most open source firms. Migration of older to newer OSS is also where reasonably good individual consultants can make a living.

      It may be yet another abuse of the language, but it it isn't nearly as bad as some of the nonsense I see used. I say suck it up and smell the money...
      • Speaking of Markettalk, has anyone deciphered exactly what Eclipse [eclipse.org] is yet? :P
        • Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software. Eclipse provides extensible tools and frameworks that span the software development lifecycle, including support for modeling, language development environments for Java, C/C++ and others, testing and performance, business intelligence, rich client applications and embedded development. A large, vibrant ecosystem of major technology vendors, innovat

    • Re:A sure sign of bloat (Score:5, Informative)

      by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2005 @11:10PM (#13778915) Journal
      It makes my skin crawl to hear words like "solution stack", not only because I don't know what the heck it means, but also because it doesn't mean anything. It's a fuzzy complicated way of saying, "a bunch of related software products that you'll find useful in your company"

      OK, so take a "bunch of related software products" such as, Oh, perhaps Javascript and XML, with a SQL backend. It's commonly called "AJAX" - what would you call that except a "solution stack"?

      Or, perhaps, uh, Linux, Apache, maybe MySQL/Postgresql, and PHP? Commonly called "LAMP", this would qualify as a "solution stack", perhaps?

      Oh, that phrase "solution stack" (or its close cousin, "software stack") doesn't mean anything to you? Just because you don't know the meaning of a word doesn't mean it has no meaning. What I find funny is that engineers are often accused of speaking in "engineer speak" or "tech speak" by the marketroids, because those !@#@$!@ engineers so often say things that have no meaning!

      Learn the words, and what they mean, and you'll find an amazing amount of wisdom you were previously denying yourself.
      • "Oh, that phrase "solution stack" (or its close cousin, "software stack") doesn't mean anything to you? Just because you don't know the meaning of a word doesn't mean it has no meaning. "

        I obviously know what a "soluction stack" is, since I offered a definition in my post. The problem is, that I was pointing out, is that it's just mumbo jumbo talk that gets people to turn their brains off and feel intimidated enough to just accept the speaker as an expert in the field of "solution stacking".

        It's an age old

        • The thing is though, that you also come across as an expert if you package the truth in fancy mumbo jumbo. If I tell a client the plain truth, in words they understand, I come across as amateur and as a person whose advice can be ignored compared to when I say the exact same thing using words that sound good, mean exactly the same, and are unknown to them, while dressing up in a suit. Even after working intensively with these people for a year.

          The interesting corollary is that if you are an honest professi

      • Learn the words, and what they mean, and you'll find an amazing amount of wisdom you were previously denying yourself.

        Wisdom is beyond the reach of most here.

      • Re:A sure sign of bloat (Score:5, Interesting)

        by symbolic ( 11752 ) on Thursday October 13, 2005 @01:50AM (#13779608)
        I have to disagree. Once upon a time, software companies sold software. Today, they don't sell software, they sell "solutions". In fact, EVERYONE sells "solutions". What's a solution, anyway? I can't think of a more vague description that completely removes any attempt at intelligent evaluation.

        Using this kind of language allows marketing types to change their tune on que. A "solution" is abstract. An accounting application, on the other hand, is something I can start to evaluate.
        • There is a gardening company that works round where I live. I've noticed its vans now say "Landscaping Solutions" instead of just "Gardeners"...
          • I think it was George Carlin who said it...

            Once upon a time, it was called ShellShock.
            Then Battle Fatigue.
            Then Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

            It's just a symptom of the times...

        • A sure sign of not having a clue. (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          "What's a solution, anyway? I can't think of a more vague description that completely removes any attempt at intelligent evaluation."

          A solution is the aggregate (hardware, software, whatever) that solves one or more of your companies particular problem(s) (read customization).

          In other words, it's all that "sell services" BS that slashdotters bring up every time F/OSS's negative effect on the computer industry is brought up. Don't complain about your chickens coming home to roost.

          "Using this kind of language

          • That's funny - half they time THEY don't even know. What they know is the text included on the slick four-color brochures that say pretty much nothing, but in an aesthetically-controlled manner. They could save themselves a lot of money and just send out flyers that say, "We sell stuff," and they'd be every bit as informative.

            Let me know that you care that my time is valuable to me. Don't make me DIG for answers. If you're selling something, tell me what it is, because I'm not likely to waste my time trying
        • If someone asked me what the marketing people mean by solution I would describe it as "You know, solution, as in 'solution searching for a problem'"
        • What's a solution, anyway?
          It a fluid with a solid dissolved in it. No?
        • I agree with what you're saying, but having programmed since the late 70's I find it ironic that you're comparing the word "software" to "solution".

          I don't remember people calling the stuff we made and used in the 70's to early 80's "software". We called them programs or routines. We didn't "use software", we "ran programs".

          Check Dictionary.com's definition of software:

          http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=software [reference.com]

          It makes me wonder who coined the word "software" in the first place? A google search tu

      • Re:A sure sign of bloat (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Fizzl ( 209397 ) <fizzl@@@fizzl...net> on Thursday October 13, 2005 @02:44AM (#13779788) Homepage Journal
        Hello Mr. Retarded Sales Droid.

        Learn the words, and what they mean, and you'll find an amazing amount of wisdom you were previously denying yourself.

        It's not that the marketroids are using terms engineers can't understand. It's that they are making up fancy words to describe trivial matters which do not need a term. They are ment to obfuscate trivial matters to make clients think it's something new and exciting. And most importantly, something only the marketroids solution can provide (as opposed to just hiring one guy to do it for them.)

        And that's god-fucking-damn annoying.

        • It's not that the marketroids are using terms engineers can't understand. It's that they are making up fancy words to describe trivial matters which do not need a term.

          And, you're a schmuck or blissfully naive if you don't think that tech people haven't done the same. (Queue up "muffler bearing" jokes here) Oh, and it's the JOB of a marketroid to take whatever you've got to sell, and make it "sexy" so that people buy it. Don't whine at them for that, they are helping you eat. Get used to it.

          People==people==
        • Stop insulting people and try to learn.

          The OSS world is composed of a myriad of different projects with vastly differing maturity, polish, documentation, feature perimeter etc... And all of these are constantly evolving. For a given task, you can find dozens of relevant OSS projects. When you factor in compatibility, support and maintenance, this becomes an inextricable jungle.

          Most customers don't have the time or skills or will to see clearly through all of this and need someone to define, package, test
          • And therein lies the problem. "Most customers don't have the time or skills...", "Constomers don't want code...", etc. If something technical is important to your company, then your company should be employing someone who understands these things, if nothing else so that somebody in your company can make an informed decision that's in the company's best interests. By definition, any external company is not there to help you, they're just there to make money off of you, and to exploit you if at all possib
            • I regret to inform you that you have a terrible misperception of the way business is done and value chains are built and evolved.

              By definition, any external company is not there to help you, they're just there to make money off of you, and to exploit you if at all possible.

              Paranoia and self-delusion, period. Are you telling me that you never buy anything for fear that the vendor would rip you? And if you want to be paranoid, please explain to me why an employee would not be just there to make money off o
            • I take you do all the maintenance on your car. How about your house? Do you do all the repairs? Did you build it? How about your medical care? All self-serve?

              There comes a time when you have to turn to professionals in various fields to meet needs of yours that you aren't sufficiently trained in. And yes, when that time comes it helps to be fairly knowledgeable in that field so you don't get taken for a ride. That isn't always possible. When it isn't, being able to identify what the problem is, and
      • Oh you work for Marketing.
    • It makes my skin crawl to hear words like "solution stack"

      It's called freedom. The point of OSS is to make software free (libre) so that people who use it get to use it their way. If their way includes marketspeak, that's their choice, and people making choices we may personally dislike is always a consequence of freedom.
    • Most open-source "companies" are support companies only, not product companies.

      btw, a sure sign of maturity would have been products which need less support.
    • Also, I wish people would stop using the phrase "comes of age" to mean "is now a good thing" when applied to technology. Does it imply that previously OSS solution stacks were not "of age". The truth is that the OSS stacks have been at least as mature as any other for a long time.

      Many years ago the Amiga mags would run articles in pretty much every issue proclaiming that the Amiga had finally "come of age" with the release of such-and-such software release. They used the headline so often that it became p

    • So ask the consultant or whoever is spreading the buzz words what it means. I guess they'll be pretty silent afterwards if the can't come up with a good explanation.

    • You need... (Score:5, Funny)

      by DavidNWelton ( 142216 ) on Thursday October 13, 2005 @01:54AM (#13779616) Homepage
      ... a linguistic solution stack in order to take away added value from your interaction with the marketing engineers. The correct solution stack will enable your business to meet your customers' complete needs for delivery of verbal content designed to maximize their confidence in your area of core expertise - providing software solutions. This is a win-win situation that allows you to focus on excellence while obtaining a higher margin for the same mature products, and maintain a high-quality relationship with your clients. ...Phew!... that's hard...
    • It makes my skin crawl to hear words like "solution stack", not only because I don't know what the heck it means, but also because it doesn't mean anything.

      Us propeller-heads live in glass houses too and should be careful when throwing stones, as we are as prone to using acronyms for brevity as marketers are prone to use buzzwords to impress. Most regular folk think of a device to illuminate a dark room when they hear LAMP. "Sequel" (SQL) is a new story that continues a previous one. FLOSS is used to cle

  • We might have arrived (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ratbert42 ( 452340 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2005 @09:45PM (#13778531)
    I was stunned to find out that my company is bought some commercial on-site training from an open-source author. Even more stunning is that our VP of Development didn't need any extended begging and pleading.

  • I don't get it... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Psychor ( 603391 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2005 @09:47PM (#13778538) Homepage
    That's strange, earlier today Slashdot was reporting [slashdot.org] that Linux developers were too old to cater for young people, and now they are celebrating coming of age. I guess it's time to buy Tux a zimmer frame.

  • You know... (Score:4, Funny)

    by showardkid ( 823639 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2005 @09:48PM (#13778547) Journal
    I think that solution stacks are good, especially if you wish to envisioneer web-enabled content through branding front-end e-services [dack.com].

  • Good (Score:3, Funny)

    by zegebbers ( 751020 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2005 @09:50PM (#13778558) Homepage
    it means they can use the yahoo chatrooms!

  • Isn't this one of the main goals... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SwedeGeek ( 545209 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2005 @09:56PM (#13778582) Homepage Journal
    ... of open source projects? I'd like to the think the majority of OSS work was done out of wanting to create something better (defined many ways) than what was already in existence or at least act as an affordable (as in free) alternative to commercial products. Sure, many OSS products don't quite line up with their commercial counterparts, but obviously many do these days. While it's generally taken much longer for them to get into the spotlight, they got there by being reliable pieces of software and didn't made their mark by filling our heads with buzzwords and marketing material. Now that they are on par with the "big boys", the buzzwords suddenly become less (if at all) meaningful, so the game can really begin. From the article, it seems people still feel OSS is too much of a risk, but as adoption increases, that barrier will slowly start to disappear as well.

  • Now we just need to stop hating on . . . (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EraserMouseMan ( 847479 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2005 @09:59PM (#13778594)
    the OSS developers who would like to get paid for their superb work. IBM is making it hand over fist deploying OSS and we think it's swell. But as soon as a charitable developer even thinks about a dollar bill the entire OSS community takes him out to the woodshed for being so selfish and violating the spirit of OSS.

    It's not anti-OSS to get paid for contributing good code, people!
    • i have never seen that attitude (well only from some idiots, but i don't count them). Some times OSS goes down because developers dont' have time for it anymore, and people understand that. it's not like someone else can't take over and create a fork.

      • Well . . . (Score:3, Interesting)

        by EraserMouseMan ( 847479 )
        i have never seen that attitude (well only from some idiots, but i don't count them).

        I see it every day. Especially lately with the Nessus news etc. These guys are working on Linux security for crying out loud and they get blasted by OSSers when they close their source just to stay alive as a company. Their competitors are using their generous/free code against them.

        I don't rember reading a single post blasting the what the code-mooching competitors were doing. Get a grip /.ers!

        Either start sendin

  • or consulting (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Dink Paisy ( 823325 )
    Read the latest "Joel on Software". His theory is that a focus on service and solution stacks is actually a sign of consulting, a form of software that is more painful and costly to its users and less profitable for the authors. My theory is that as open source software improves, it will become harder and harder to make money from it, since it will require less expensive customization and support.
    • Nah. As long as businesses see fit to use spreadsheets as databases, email as a filesystem, and can't master basic concepts of efficient workflow, there will always be a need for consultants. The need is especially large in the small business realm (less than a couple hundred employees), and the perfect fit for this realm is the small consulting firm, who can charge realistic prices to the aforementioned cash-strapped, overtaxed small business.

      In the case of the OSS developer-turned-consultant, who better t
  • I am not sure when open source really was born, but it sure seems like it came of age pretty fast. Not too shabby, eh?

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2005 @10:19PM (#13778690)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Fantastic! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Digital Vomit ( 891734 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2005 @10:58PM (#13778847) Homepage Journal
    A sure sign of a maturing market is when vendors stop talking about products and start talking about services and 'solution stacks'.

    I can finally leverage my business paradigms with open-source solution stacks!

  • Is this an ad for some consulting company? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2005 @10:59PM (#13778859) Homepage
    Somehow I suspect this story is a plant from one of the companies mentioned in the article.

    Earth to Slashdot editors - learn to tell a press release from a story.

  • Well, can we read the underlying article as a Paid Commercial Announcement for firms funded by prominent Venture Capital Firms needing PR to go public quickly? This is a business model that Red Hat and now Novell have been riding for years. So have smaller companies like Symas [symas.com] and PADL [padl.com] except that the smaller companies can actually support the code. These new VC-funded companies with househod name Executives rely on the principals of the smaller companies to actually do the work. The smart money finds the s

  • synchronicity (Score:2, Insightful)

    by lexluther ( 529642 )
    Random that this post came just hours after I saw Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource who: "certifiy and support open source software" Ostensibly she was supposed to speak about: "the open source software movement", however what what she really did was talk about what her new company does, which is certify "open source software stacks" and service models for OSS. It was really insightful to see the way in which she framed the problem, ie. Companies have hoards of IT people running around frantically patching sys

  • Open Source / Open Market (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Thursday October 13, 2005 @01:31AM (#13779540) Homepage Journal
    The real OSS service I'm looking for is an industry of companies which specialize in their stable of OSS projects in which they are expert. So I can buy programmer support for an OSS app from any of a number of groups, none of which "own" the SW or the project. I'd like to do a DB query on a CVS repository, to check what code has been contributed by such orgs offering service. Not just as a consumer of the SW, but as a developer, when I want to include an OSS package in my own project, but not enough to gain the expertise.

    That kind of service depends on the unique nature of OSS and its projects. It's a tremendous flexibility in available experience, with which proprietary source SW could never compete. And such an ecosystem also represents an extremely productive marketplace for new code shared by everyone. Produced by a "third party" with interest vested more in the quality of the public OSS package than in any tricks keeping it proprietary, despite the rules.
  • More corporate and venture capitalists interest in open source softwares is a good thing. Use of open source softwares in corporate environments, will lead to OSS getting better, stabler, robust and more user friendly. The developers of OSS, instead of developing and working on projects as a part time hobby thing, can work on it full time and also make some money. We casual/poor users, who cannot or do not want to pay money, are going to benefit immensely from this, because all the money and resources inve
  • A solution stack? What on earth?

    Service-based marketing - sure.
    Solution-based marketing - by all means.

    But a solution stack? How does marketing the architecture running the "service" provide a customer with any idea of its benefit. Sure I may be using LAMP or a Java-based solution but are customers as interested in my architecture choices as they are in having as much uptime / as much ease of maintenance / as low a total cost of ownership as possible?

    And before you say "well the big boys care" remember that

  • A sure sign of a maturing market is when vendors stop talking about products and start talking about services and 'solution stacks

    If anyone ever came to me pitching is "solution stack", I would take it as a sure sign that he was out to lunch.

    Either that or he is in marketing.

    Or is there a difference?

  • You still have to go and get training for their configuration manager. So why train your people on actually configuring the components that make up the stack. Your company will be better off and they will certainly learn a lot more than just that one company's configuration manager.

    I don't know maybe I am missing something but keep it simple folks quit making things a lot more difficult than they really are.

    Just my two cents worth.
    • I have used and in fact even tested these configuration managers, initially they might be pain, but definitely its better to use them, then going to several different websites downloading the softwares reading the manual, installing them and configuring it.
      With the solution stack I can start the installation procedure, and then go out for lunch and when I come back everything is installed and ready to be used. I can start the development work without worrying about whether the different softwares are con
  • grew up with the b.s. that claimed a lot of the IT industry including all the plumbers turning into sys admins -> not that there's anything wrong with that.

    You've got 20-somethings that have experience in the industry and are very articulate. Lots of startups around that use OSS cos things are turning to service and support. We don't wanna be greedy egotistical millionbilliontrillionaires like the power industry (a la Enron people - i just watched that movie), we wanna make a living using things we lov
  • Yeah, "solution stack" is a bit abstract as it does not specify a domain that the solution is for. I would think, however, that people around here were able to do some abstract thinking: solution stack implies a *full-stack* framework for some problem domain i.e. a solution.
    Think of what you like of such a loose way of speaking, but full-stack frameworks are just things of beauty. They are the main reason behind ability to more powerful software with the same amount of programmer hours than before, which wa
  • When I first skimmed past this (a bad habit), I thought it was going to be something interesting, like new Web Services apps being mostly driven by open source software (which I think is the case). Anyway, and don't shoot me, but you guys know that famous marketing book "Crossing the Chasm"? The gist is that there are early adopters (probably the maj. of people who read Slashdot), and then there's the "early majority," "late majority," and "laggards." Anyway, the point is that maybe these stacks are not

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