Open Leads To Consulting

Interesting piece about the relationship between "open" and consulting revenues. I have long been banging the drum that those businesses with primary revenue streams attached to consulting practices have a strong incentive to push open source solutions. Highly modular solutions have many advantages, but their downside is the need to stitch the pieces together. Thus SpikeSource has a business model. 

Short read but raises good questions.

 https://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=19050

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 20, 2006
  "open source software exists in the public domain"?  No, it doesn't.
  
  "It carries no copyright".  This guy's either a troll or completely clueless.  Any time I open a source file of Linux, zsh, FreeBSD, BasiliskII, Syllable, PostgreSQL, OpenOffice.org, busybox, 4OS2, qemu, monotone, subversion, putty, Quasar, alliance, Firefox, ckrootkit, Koha, emacs, Compiere, ntfsresize, festival, eyeOS, Celestia, Cinerrela, OpenAFS, Hercules, FreeDOS, MySQL, Mambo, gcc, geda, bash, gawk, dosbox, gnats, TenDRA, OpenSolaris, ghdl, OpenWatcom, phpNuke, etc ... (I could go on) I find copyright notices.  I find copyright attribution to the programmer/s responsible for writing and maintaining the software.  I find the terms and conditions under which the software is licensed to me.
  
  Can this Steven Titch read?  Or is he afraid of source code?  He should at least have the decency and intelligence to avoid making simple errors of fact like this.  It's this sort of error of fact, avoidable by the simple process of downloading said program and looking at the first few lines thereof, that casts into doubt his integrity.
  
  Which means that his words "IT officials in Massachusetts--along with the thousands of state employees who are being asked to implement and learn new software, not to mention the state’s taxpayers, who may get stuck with a huge IT consulting bill--may end up ruing this policy." must be further analysed.
  
  To what degree do MS Windows Vista and MS Office 2007 have completely new interfaces?  How easy is it for someone skilled and knowledgeable in the styles of MS WinXP and MS Office 2003, to switch to the up-and-coming Windows and Office releases?  Ie, to what degree are they now new software as opposed to mere updates?  To the degree that they change the expected metaphors and behaviours, Massachusetts would be looking at an equally large IT training bill.  How does the Massachusetts tax payer feel about that?  Did Steven Titch even bother to ask?
  
  He gets it right with his statement: "One size rarely fits all."  I did look for proof that he was capable of taking this idea seriously, let alone applying it to this self-same state procurement issue.  I couldn't find any proof thereof.  Certainly not any statement even remotely referring to the stranglehold that Microsoft has had on office software procurement, and the deletrious effects that that has had on government spending with its concurrent security issues aka malware.