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February 17, 2005
Infecting the business
I hope we were able to infect a couple of people a few days ago. And I don't mean with the flu virus that's currently going around here. On Tuesday we visited a customer of ours to see what they have been doing (with our help) with Cocoon and in particular the portal. They have really taken to Open Source for building a portal based solution and it's great to see how they have been able to integrate their legacy systems easily using the pipeline concept and additional components. While we were talking I asked whether they had thought about giving the components back to the Cocoon project as they are pretty generic.
Even though they have been using Cocoon for a while and popping in an out of the mailing-lists, the look on their faces showed that this thought had never crossed their mind. But slowly, as I was explaining the advantages of giving back to the community I could see how the various brains in the room started churning. From an initial "oh, we'd need to talk to our legal department" to a "that's a good idea - then everyone will profit" took only a few minutes. Hopefully the legal department doesn't throw any stones down.
This brief encounter shows that even as the spread of Open Source continues in the enterprise, there are still various walls that remain to be torn down. And far from ridiculing people from being inside those walls, it is our job to show how to climb them.
Posted by Matthew at February 17, 2005 02:46 PM