The whole business of "open source = not ready for prime time“ is intriguing and a little depressing.

In my day job I work for Laszlo Systems, who developed a very nifty platform for so-called Rich Internet Applications.

Last year the company decided to make the platform free and open source — reinventing the business model of the company to one that sells applications and services instead of the underlying platform.

http://www.openlaszlo.org

A few weeks ago I wrote a ”white paper“ describing OpenLaszlo. In the first few drafts I had a longish section explaining all about open source, and how ”open source“ did not mean ”not ready for prime time."

But I was able to remove most of that copy, because my reviewers in the marketing side of the company said that that battle had already been won; open source products like Linux and Apache had demonstrated to corporate America (and corporate world) that open source stuff could be as good as or better than closed source.

That does not mean that a teeny-tiny open source project should be deemed a priori a worthy competitor to Microsoft or Intel. But neither should it be dismissed out of hand.

It will be very interesting to see how this pans out in the FCC/communications space. . .

Well, in some places Open Source has its foot in the door. Alas, all it takes is one person to put the kibosh on it.

For example, we have an internal Wiki at my employer (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... if you don't know what that is). It was wasn't ever officially sanctioned. One of our technical leads put it up, started using it, and the whole thing snowballed before any upper manager caught wind of it.

The current system was hacked together in Microsoft's old Active Server Pages technology, and is no longer being actively developed, is somewhat limited in function, and still has some unresolved bugs in it. Last year, we decided “hey, why not move to another Wiki system... one that is actively being developed and supported?” After a longish period of looking around, trying out systems, we settled on a PHP-based system called TikiWiki, which would provide us with a Wiki and a bunch of additional groupware features. I spent two weeks testing and writing scripts to reformat our existing Wiki database to port it over to the new system.

Then the V.P. the Open Source allergy caught wind of it. “Wait!” he said, “how do we know these open source licenses will not virally infect our intellectual property!?” (which is, precisely, one of the lies that Microsoft has been spreading about open source for the past few years). I replied by simply pointing out that none of the licenses of any of the software said anything about the intellectual property rights of any content placed into the system, just the software that ran it itself.

Then the V.P. insisted that we investigate a Microsoft system that could possibly be used to create Wiki-like software. He started pushing for this solution, even though it would mean paying Microsoft $50k in licensing fees, hiring $75/hr consultants to develop software to suit our needs on our own, rather than going with the pre-packaged open source solution.

So, we evaluated it. And it sucked. Totally inappropriate for our needs.

More than a year later, we're still stuck with the same old creeking system, still trying to find information management solutions that are not only technically viable, but also politically palatable to our paranoid VP.

And the punchline? This same VP sends out emails periodically about Google's latest offerings with comments like “Hm. Maybe someday we should look into developing an interface like that.”