Beware of vendor roadmaps
Beware of vendor roadmaps
The Open Source Industry Australia has announced that vendors, such as Microsoft, cannot be trusted as much as the open source community because they do not always fulfil their roadmap promises.
The industry body for open source in Australia says that the actual path followed by the vendor marketing the "vision" bears little real resemblance to the eventual technology users are asked to run a few years later.
It mentioned examples of abandoned projects, such as OS/2, pitched by Microsoft as the future of personal computing operating systems; Blackbird, a competitor to HTML; the originial MSN, which was incompatible to the Internet and a long list of "object oriented" systems designed to supersede the Windows API (Cairo, MFC, Visual J++, OLE2, COM, DCOM, DNA), which were mutually exclusive, forcing users and developers to migrate and re-code after Microsoft moved from one to the other.
Con Zymaris, co-ordinator for OSIA said. "Big vendors are also setting a roadmap for big platforms and then never see them through to the end, which messes up the work prepared by developers, who design technology to match these projects, as well as businesses and governments.
"We are issuing a warning to these people about not trusting these vendors. This is less likely to happen in the world of open source. True, changes do happen, but only a product by product level, so changes are made at a much lower scale. Also, the advantages of adopting open source software is that it gives users the change to modify the code and design their own roadmap. So this brings more control to the users. This cannot be done with proprietary software, which limits the freedom of organisations for the sake of making more money."
Zymaris says that the big vendors sometimes alter the roadmap path due to technology faults, but a lot of the time, they dump pathways for the sake of new ones so that they can issue new licences to make more money.
Leon Brooks, another spokesperson for OSIA added. "Open source is not about creating some form of roadmap and then ramming it down users' throats. Open source is the most direct, democratically oriented method for quality software production available. In effect, the users are the builders of the software. Sofware evolves to do what users want it to do; no more, no less. Open source offers every Australian organisation a chance to draw their own roadmap; a path which focuses around the immediate, pragmatic, production-level needs of your business, rather than some vendor's business and revenues targets."
Related Article: