SAP's bid to woo open source community meets muted response SAP's bid to cast itself as an open source friendly company is being met with some scepticism from the community, who suggest the projects are largely based on the German software giant's interests. Earlier this month, SAP published its SAP Open Source Manifesto (OSM), which said that the company — which accrues revenue of …
“However, he said he only saw SAP "being involved in the projects which are building blocks for the products that SAP sells, or what SAP uses to operate their infrastructure…”
While I understand with the sentiment, this is inevitable. Anyone (not just big nasty companies) almost always only works on free stuff that is of interest to them. How many people do you know that work on free software that they have no interest in and no use for?
I am extremely sceptical☆ about the motives of any corporation involving itself in any activity, for anything other than the narrowest self interest. Goes ten fold for North Americans.
If you want to catalyse innovation you really have to cast your bread upon the waters.*
So much now mainstream open source started as a tiny, apparently boutique project in some backwater of the internet. Linux itself could fit that description.
While supporting projects that directly benefit your enterprise is clearly comprehensible, less so the idea that a proportion of that support might be directed to more diffuse goals like funding foundations that support smaller, less recognisable projects that might beneficially affect a whole range of projects including those of the first instance.
Scratch any Linux (and BSD?) distribution and you will find any number of components that lack a current maintainer - the XZ fiasco might be the clue stick that crystallises the inherent hazards of unmaintained software.
☆ I strongly recommend burning all wooden horses outside the city's walls. :)
* Eccl. 11:1 qv
Having attended a couple of SAP presentations that got a little more technical, albeit a few years ago, I think they and many other companies would be reluctant about releasing any of their own code as open source, no matter how menial, because their coding standards are often way below those of many open source projects. In open source testing has become an essential part of development because it often saves time debugging issues and you usually have most of what you need to write a test case; and, if you're good, you'll accept you can make mistakes. Less so in large companies where the marketing department often gets the last word. Then, of course, there are the potential legal issues if you can't be 100% sure that all your code is clean from copyright problems. Sure, the same problem exists with the code they're already shipping, but it's much harder to identify problems from outside and you won't need to ask permission to open source those few lines from thirty years ago.
It’d be a security bun fight for a few years. And many companies would be forced to move away from Windows due to the ‘revelations’ surrounding the various security weaknesses that are ‘suddenly’ apparent.
There were then be a big ol’ forkfest and people on El Reg would complain about the number of Windows distros…
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