the open source maturity model
A couple of years ago The Portable Consultant came across Bernard Golden’s timely book Succeeding with Open Source. In it Mr. Golden sets out the criteria by which open source software, together with the communities that create it, might be measured in terms of suitability for enterprise use.
Golden describes the Open Source Maturity Model (OSMM) which enables us to judge how scalable, manageable, and supportable a particular open source product might be. As might be expected, a lot of this depends on the open source community that manages and contributes to the project. By assessing the project and the product itself, among other things, the level of maturity and what I would call sophistication can be determined. This, in turn, can help determine how suitable the product might be for a given organization. Suitability depends to a large extent on the role of the product as well as the capabilities of the organization.
As the back cover states, this book points the way to…
- assessing open source business models
- managing risk, including licensing issues
- evaluating and selecting open source software
- locating and assessing technical support, training, and documentation resources
SeriouslyOpen.org
Around the time that I was reading this book my open source research took me to SeriouslyOpen.org which is jointly sponsored by Capgemini and Intel, according to the site’s footer – Capgemini, it seems, has a limited partnership with Intel. It appears that Capgemini has extended some of the criteria found in Golden’s book and provided the sort of comprehensive methodology of which such consulting firms are fond.
a partnership with roots… or teeth?
All of this goes some way toward explaining why today’s announcement of Novell and Capgemini’s open source partnership may actually have some roots. Capgemini is the only one of the big consulting firms that I am aware of that has gone so far to provide their clients with a formal framework for the consideration and selection of appropriate open source products. Novell is, obviously, doing its level best to raise open source solutions, primarily its own products, to the point where they might be considered on a par with proprietary solutions.
Personally, I’ve thought for some time that Novell has the goods. Whether they have the skills required to market and deliver them is still up in the air. I see some potential for progress here, but whether Capgemini can help drive big business clients to become Novell customers will depend on how well this partnership is executed.
Come to think of it, given Microsoft’s recent patent pronouncements concerning open source, this partnership might do better with teeth rather than roots.
Cheers,
-pmh
- disclosure: the author of this blog has a financial investment in common stock of Novell Inc.