Black Duck survey sees open source strategy beating the squeeze
If these guys are ready to defect, saying the costs of proprietary-only development are unsustainable in the face of falling budgets and increased demands, even Baghdad Bob couldn't spin a proprietary victory.
While the numbers surveyed were minuscule, 20 executives from 14 companies, these were all top people from major organizations, the proprietary model's dead enders.
But, Black Duck vice president Jim Berets noted in a press release, barriers remain, and the answer these leaders see may be right in Microsoft's wheelhouse. “Most of these barriers can be traced to the lack of an enterprise-wide open source strategy and clear policies and procedures for managing its use."
That's where Codeplex, the open source repository founded by Microsoft but now run by an independent foundation (that's the foundation logo at the top), comes into the picture.
Codeplex is all about policies and procedures. When Codeplex adds a new project like Web Forms .ASP into its gallery, it's fully vetted, with policies and procedures in place these kinds of developer organizations understand in their guts.
What the developers need to do is also important, and there the answer is conventional. They seek the clouds, they need virtualization, they're being asked to support mobile.
Codeplex will not answer all those concerns, but the efforts of people like Sam Ramji to establish rules for corporate contributions to cloud software projects are not misplaced, according to the results of this survey.