One of the blogs I read regularly, but never really comment on is J.P. Rangaswami. In his blog entry on Open Source, he talks about the benefits of Open Source…..

I was in a discussion with a prospect recently where I put forward the idea that open source could be used to deliver a large proportion (or even, all) of the SOA Stack. There was no indication that the customer would not ‘pay’ to receive ’support’. One of the concerns he expressed was who can ’support’ all the software components that could be used.

I emphasised that the overall ‘cost’ of opensource would be substatantially lower, and there was no indication that he took that to be ‘free’. So maybe the message is getting through that:

(1) Open Source is not ‘free’

(2) Open Source can help deliver enterprise scale applications

(3) Using Open Source you can use the ‘best of the best’ to deliver value to a customer

(4) Supporting Open Source is something that really needs to be considered seriously for enterprises using it in anger

So the question is for me - how do you scale the use of Open Source within an organisation and deliver, do knowledge transfer and then support it…..

And then there’s a question of Open Source SOA…. that’s for another day!