How we say what we mean
July 15th, 2008 by Ross Chevalier
I like to think that all of us at Novell are champions for both open source and open standards. We advocate open source not only in our commercial and community Linux distributions but also in initiatives such as Bandit. Open Standards is not so clear however. We all get the Standards part, or we think we do. In our minds for the most part Standards implies a set of rules, protocols and related interfaces that are agreed to by some communal body and supported by interested parties by consensus. An open standard can be understood to mean that the source that defines the standard and even the code that implements the standard is freely available, although the concept of some reasonable royalty is not excluded.
Last week, I spent some time with some people from publisher IDG. They had recently completed a study of the top things in the mind of the CIO and had offered to share their findings. The conversation was fascinating to me and exposed a number of missed expectations, on my part at least.
I had believed that the word “open” is a good word when speaking with senior IT executives. I was told very clearly that it has turned into a “weasel-word” through misuse and misunderstanding. A large proportion of those surveyed had told the researcher that when they hear “open” the filter gates come slamming down shut. Some of these reactions were attributed to “open source” being a war-phrase to some of these people. It’s interesting to hear and incredibly disappointing that an excellent premise has been turned into a political phrase.
What was more surprising and more disappointing was to learn that the phrase “open standards” is viewed as a buzzword of dubious meaning.
At Novell we’ve looked at and adopted standards very well I think. We have, in my opinion, the greatest LDAP directory on the planet in eDirectory, we use XML aggressively, our access tools actively embrace SSLVPN, we include a PKI certificate engine in OES 2 amongst other places. We support standards such as JSR168 in our T+C application, we support MIME and S/MIME in GroupWise. Overall I think Novell has a great standards based story.
What we learn from the study is that we will again have to change our messaging slightly because those we desire to hear us have had their filters altered by noise from other parties. Parties who perhaps want customers to believe “standard” means “shipped lots of boxes”.
So you may choose to think about these ideas when you want to share your enthusiasm and our commitment to open source. Where open source is seen as political, Linux is seen as alternative. Where open standards based directory sounds like foo foo dust, LDAP sounds like a necessity. As always, it’s up to you.
Until next time, peace.