David Rubinstein: Total Eclipse
December 1, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 3)
Notes from the recent EclipseWorld conference:
Bill Miller, executive chairman of data integration software company XAware, has become a believer in open source. "And that was a long process for me," he said after giving a lunchtime talk at the Reston, Va., event.
According to Miller, the question for XAware was whether or not converting its project to open source was the right move. After all, some companies make the decision to open source their assets for the wrong reasons, he said. "Some think they don't need their own developers, which isn't true.” He also noted that if a company is making a last-ditch, "Hail Mary" play to help get traction for a dying project, it likely won't succeed either.
No, Miller now believes that for an open source business initiative to succeed, it must involve developers. "Where people are developers, they will contribute so much to you, with testing, innovation and viral word of mouth. Your development and marketing costs go down."
XAware's business model closely resembles that of MySQL, Miller explained. "They provide services of the software, and offer it under a commercial license for people who want to build it into a commercial offering without being encumbered by the GPL," he said. Similarly, XAware isn’t putting out its top-shelf enterprise runtime management software as open source. "It's not for developers; it doesn't fit the model."
Data integration and open source "are made for each other," Miller proclaimed. "One of the things about integrating software; there's a lot of additional features, functions and plug-ins—like a framework—that we'd never get to ourselves. Having other people working on it provides a richer offering."
The agile development notions of stories and iterations also work well in an open source environment, Miller opined, as some one or group can take a story and build it out. "We have hives—groups of common interests—and a story can be assigned to a have for an iteration."
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