[PLUG] huh?? commercialized or irrelevant?

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 01:35:27PM -0700, Russell Senior wrote:
> 
> Rogoway had an short article in a recent Oregonian about Compiere
> moving to California, and it made Compiere sound like a well-known
> local open source company.  This surprised me a bit because, well, I'd
> never even heard of it before.
> 
> Later on in the article, he quotes Scott Kveton (recently leaving
> OSUOSL for a startup) as saying: "For this thing to be relevant, we
> have to commercialize it.  Otherwise it's just a novelty."  WTF??

Scott probably said a lot more than that, and the Oregonian reporter
chose the words that fit what he wanted to write.  I've talked with 
Scott a little about this, and my no-doubt-faulty impression is that
he wants to see a lot more commercial activity.  For example, an
individual or small business should be able to use open source and be
supported by a well-organized and efficient support services company.

To date there are a lot of inefficient small supoprt providers,
and large corp-to-corp providers like IBM, but little in between. 
No "H&R Block" or "Jiffy-Lube" or "Geek Squad" for open source. 
Scott's work on OpenID and reliable authentication may contribute
to the infrastructure such businesses will need.

Compiere is working on small business Enterprise Resource Planning
and Customer Relationship Management software (ERP and CRM), which
are also pieces of the puzzle.  The fact that such business needs
are invisible to most of us demonstrates how non-commercial most
of us are.  Most of our neighbors are out there buying and selling
stuff, though, and if we want them to use open source, we have to 
do things that are relevant to them.  Video player and blogging and
browser plugins are indeed just novelties to these business people,
compared to making and distributing the stuff of everyday existence.

Relevance is in the eye of the beholder.  To the vast majority of
eyes, computers in general and open source in particular are just
not that relevant.  We don't get to define relevance for these 
people, but we can identify it and move towards it if we choose.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs