Don Marti at LinuxWorld has done a nice thing — transcribing podcasts into text articles. I’m old-fashioned and read faster than I can listen. So had he not turned audio into text I might not have found this recent interview with enterprise open source investor Gary Little of Morgenthaler Ventures.

Marti asked Little about his approach to investing in enterprise open source organizations like JapserSoft and MuleSource. Little’s responses don’t sound like your typical venture capitalist. For example, he thinks the community-based approach used by open source has “lessons … for the traditional enterprise software company.” Little goes on to say:

“One of the things that customers really like from an open source company is this free flow of ideas between them, between other community users and, frankly, with the actual developers of the software at the open source company. There is a dialogue and a discussion where customers are actually talking to the developers that develop it and often developers will say, “Oh gee, people really want this feature I can just cut that in.

At a typical enterprise software company, the product marketing person goes out and talks to different customers, finds out what they need, then they build a product requirement document that then gets pared down and vetted and then gets handed over to engineering, and maybe two years later that feature may or may not end up in a product. And it is a very opaque process, and even large customers don’t really know whether their needs are going to be met.”

Here at the EOS Directory, we are building a community around the interests and needs of individuals and organizations seeking enterprise open source software solutions. Feel free to share your questions, suggestions, comments or musing in the comments area here or in our forums.

Also … in a followup to Wednesday’s “just try it” posts about using open source — both here and in Lee Gomes’ Portals column in the Wall Street Journal — you can find more info about Linus Torvalds, free choice, Microsoft and Google in this WSJ Q&A. Be sure to read the original column, which highlights the Linux creator’s problems getting his own family members to run Linux at home.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

This entry was posted by Ryck on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Community, Enterprise open source, Open Source projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.