There's a Vendor in my OSS

by MichaelF on October 23, 2006 12:34pm

Taking a brief detour from the thread about OSS and its similarities (or not) to law to take note of a couple recent publications, both of which discuss the interaction between traditional IT vendors and OSS:

In MIS Quarterly (September) (link) Brian Fitzgerald (University of Limerick—one of the must-read researchers on OSS, IMO) provides a comprehensive survey of what he calls “The Transformation of Open Source” with expectations for “Open Source 2.0.” He expects IT vendors—including Microsoft—to play significant roles in “OSS 2.0.”

In Communications of the ACM (October) (link) Pamela Samuelson (UC Berkeley) discusses “IBM’s Pragmatic Embrace of Open Source.” (The title pretty much speaks for itself as a summary.)

I highlight these because they reflect what seems to me (qualitatively) to reflect a trend in the literature. We’ll work on getting a better sense of what the trend is and researchers’ perspectives on it to bring back to Port25…because (to bring things back to analogy and metaphor), they introduce the question: Is a vendor in my OSS more a fly in the ointment or chocolate in my peanut butter?