WHurley spins BMC into open source
When he left Qlusters recently for BMC Software, the Houston-based company which began with accounting software and grew like a snip of oilpatch, I wondered how far he could spin that company toward open source.
The answer is pretty far.
From OSCON, he writes that the company has opened a developer network supporting several open source projects, all under the BSD license.
It's true that all these projects support BMC's proprietary software, and selling software is still BMC's business. But everything the company is doing with open source seems transparent, simple, and straightforward.
Here's the WHurley sales pitch, followed by the open source pitch:
Our BSM strategy is key to aligning business and IT. There are a lot of open source point products out there that do not play well with one another, and no clear, comprehensive enterprise management strategy. By integrating open source with BSM, we’re giving you the solutions you’re looking for and the ability to map open source management tools directly to your business strategy.
We are committed to being completely open with the community. I hope that other corporations will follow our lead and start building their developer networks with their customers and not for their customers. I also hope they’ll adopt a permissive license, and consider converting their existing projects to truly open licenses that put their user’s needs first.
As I have written here many times there is nothing incompatible between open source and profit. There is not even anything incompatible between open source and a proprietary model.
Open source is all about compromise -- if you want purity you're a FOSS person. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)