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Fri, 23 Apr 2004
Avalanche
Ben Galbraith posts about the Avalanche Co-op. While Ben is skeptical of the ability of a
loosely organized band of hetergenous companies can effectively produce and support enterprise software
he also wonders
why the companies involved don't just open-source their software
Odd that Ben likes open source but doesn't believe that loosely organized bands of companies (what about individuals) can produce or support enterprise software.

I think that what these companies are trying to do is to smooth out some of what they perceive to be the unreliable aspects of open source software. I don't view this an attempt to extort money out of member companies, but more an attempt to solve the free-rider and other problems that corporations face when attempting to use/develop open source software. My guess is that these companies are going to end up using (and hopefully contributing back to) open source software as part of what they end up doing. In a way, you can look at it as something like a gated, for-profit version of the ASF, which employs staff developers. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

In my mind this is a logical next step in the phenomena that Doc's IT Garage is trying to deal with -- reversing the dynamics of the vendor-customer relationship, using open source style (or more neutrally, commons-based peer production) ideas as one of the ways to do that.

[00:07] | [computers/open_source] | # | TB | F | G | 1 Comments | Other blogs commenting on this post
I wrote about Avalanche on Tuesday here:

http://www.silentblue.net/mtarchives/000574.html

Considering how overpriced and low quality enterprise apps typically are, I'm surprised there hasn't been a bigger revolt against the software industry.

Avalanche does have one leg up over OSS: it focuses on enterprise apps, which is in short supply in the OSS community. For every open source enterprise project, there must be a dozen Linux distros.

Avalanche hopefully will encourage companies to go the open source route in the long term.
Posted by quanta at Fri Apr 23 07:59:02 2004

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