Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff

Take All, Give Nothing?

From IBM’s About Project Zero page:

This community is an experiment in a new way to build commercial software, an approach we are currently calling Community-Driven Commercial Development. Community-Driven means that we want feedback, insight, suggestions, criticism, and dialogs with you, the users of Project Zero. This interaction will yield a better solution that targets the problems you have and a technology that truly delivers on its objectives. Commercial means that this is not an open source project. We are still building commercial software here, as the licensing makes clear, but we are doing it in a more transparent fashion.

“Community-Driven Commercial Development”, nice. Sounds more like “Let’s Make Those Poor Open Source Fools Work for Us for Free” to me. Or am I missing something?

Comments

On October 9, 2007 10:55 PM, Patrick Mueller said:

Another way of looking at it, is to say “well, at least IBM’s opening up some of it’s development processes for customers to see how the sausage is made”. I point that out here: http://tinyurl.com/2jy7em

As a developer, who has basically no control over if, how, or when a particular thing I’m working on will be open sourced, I just can’t provide any feedback to your question in general. It’s out of my hands. But, as a developer, if I’m given a chance to at least open the kimono so customers (or potential customers) will have more direct access to developers … bring it on.

On October 10, 2007 1:39 AM, Mark said:

As a developer, who has basically no control over if, how, or when a particular thing I’m working on will be open sourced

So true… at least at IBM. That’s the problem in a nutshell, but I don’t think you realize it.