Open source meets off-shoring

Hi Steve,

I have read your previous article about OpenSource/OffShoring stroy. I myself is great advocate of OpenSource and trying to find out ways to create value thru Open Source Software and India Delivery Model.

1. The problem I see with open source solution is to do with Innovations. Can open source companies bring in Innovations as quickly as any other enterprise software company? A big software company ( like Oracle, Microsoft) is investing on technology and can sell it for a license and then with the maintenance revenue they can continue to innovate and create value for their customer. Can a Open Source company do that? How can a Open Source company convince a potential customer about their capability to continue to deliver innovation to a customer?

2. Another problem I see being successful in Open Source is the nature of being Open Source. In this example, once Satyam gains enough knowledge and technology know-how about Ingres, they can start supporting the product themselves without Ingres being (subject to ingres being really open source and allows other companies to distribute its software) involved. We saw it happeing recently where Oracle announced support to Linux and other Open Source companies such Red Hat took a beating.

Hi Sankar,

To address your first question, I would like to quote examples of two companies that are building their products on top of FLOSS.

www.collab.net : Bundling solutions on top of Subversion

www.spikesource.com

I do not want to add much text, their websites speak of what they do and how they do it.