When I originally discovered open source software, most of the projects were usually works of love, developed by passionate amateurs in their free time and that were interesting but were often not production ready, poorly documented and sometimes less innovative than closed source software. In other words, open source software was, at the time, mostly a cheaper, less powerful alternative to mainstream established software mostly considered because of budget constraints
Open source software development at its finest is a communal effort. It has proven itself a viable model in several areas of software development. However, there is one area where the community effort has broken down. That is in manufacturing enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Open source simply hasn't taken off for manufacturing ERP software the way it has for say, infrastructure software. Part of the reason for this is the introduction of capitalists into the open source ERP model
In this blog post, I talk about the reality of building open source enterprise software, at least talking from personal experience. Open source software is, at least from an engineering point of view, possibly the best way to develop software
While some goals and aspirations of Social Business seem new to many organizations, they are not new in the software world. The fundamentals of a successful open source development project are often identical to the goals identified by “Enterprise 2.0” or “Social Enterprise” champions
If your systems can already communicate, your information won't be held hostage. Support open source. With common products like Android, Apache,Wikipedia, and Word Press, chances are you already use open source on a daily basis. In the ECM world, open source software typically means lower costs, more flexibility, and faster implementations. When we built LincDoc for example, we took advantage of technology like PostgreSQL to keep our users from having to purchase additional software to implement ours. With Open Source solutions and open file formats, content lock in is practically impossible
However, coming from an open source background as the co-founder and CTO of Alfresco, open source has had a profound impact on Web 2.0 and is having a profound impact on Enterprise 2.0
In order to answer that question, I believe we need to look in the direction of open source software and standard definitions
With serious support from enterprise software vendors such as Jive, SAP, SocialText, IBM, Nuxeo, Atlassian and others, OpenSocial is being adopted by organizations who need to bridge social content and corporate content management systems. Just as CMIS has accelerated its adoption across ECM applications due to developer contributions to the open source Apache Chemistry project, so is OpenSocial finding critical mass with the open source Apache Shindig project
I was engaged to implement some accounting / order processing software for them (ended up selecting ACCPAC vWhateverWasCurrentIn1991)
It is also getting much easier to maintenance and deploy new versions of enterprise software, which makes it possible for in-house solutions to stay up to date with the latest technologies and features (such as mobile access). The real solution, I believe, lies in enterprise open source software. If companies can fully grasp the benefits of this type of solution, they will understand that they share infrastructure development with other companies, so that helps them reduce cost, while still being able to maintain full control over their data as it can stay in-house, and therefore not create new content silos, as the data is being manipulated using code that will always be available to anyone (a little interesting anecdote : did you know that OpenOffice is better at opening really old Microsoft Word files than Microsoft’s own product ? This happened because the closed format it was based on was so poorly documented that even Microsoft did not properly maintain it. Open source developers actually did all the documentation work and QA testing when they reverse engineered the format)
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