November 11, 2003
Lunch with Paul
I went into Norwich today to meet up with Paul Russell for lunch. It's always interesting to chat with him and compare the world of big business with the world domination machinations of Luminas.
Some of the things we covered were Open Source in business, Grid computing buzzword or brilliance, and technolust in the form of the iPod.
Paul's still not convinced that Open Source is necessarily the right way to go about software development. It's not clear to him how to bootstrap large development projects without some form of proprietary funding model. To be fair, this is the problem I have with Open Source too -- funding large R&D or new product developments are difficult the Open Source way.
I think the answer to this is that business these days is more than just products, and Open Source development needs to go beyond the traditional idea of "build a tool and sell it". It's the "product halo" - shifting the commercial value away from the actual products and generating revenue from the ancillary services like systems integration, support, tutorials and documentation - or at least, spreading the burden of revenue generation more evenly across product and service.
We did manage to agree that Grid computing is mostly marketing and hype, with very few really valuable demonstrators. And we also both agreed that I should go and get an iPod as soon as possible ;-)
Posted by savs at November 11, 2003 4:35 PM