Open source projects 'need more customer focus'

• Tags:
• Customer Focus,
• Open Source,
• Support

Ingrid Marson ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 02 Jun 2005 12:40 BST

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Open source projects need to be more customer focussed if they are to succeed in the corporate marketplace, according to several companies attending the Holland Open Software Conference in Amsterdam this week.

Alan Williamson, an open source evangelist at IT services company SpikeSource, said that one reason open source projects fail is that some developers do not think about the features that customers will need. For example, many projects have poor documentation and some even omit relatively basic features such as a tool to uninstall the application, Williamson said.

"One thing we've done at SpikeSource is work on how to uninstall a project. The project leader didn't even think about the need to uninstall it, but the harsh reality is that users do uninstall applications," said Williamson, speaking at a session on how to bring open source to the mainstream on Monday.

Marcel den Hartog, the European director of advanced technology at Computer Associates, agreed that open source project teams are not always aware of what corporate customers want. He told the audience at the conference that support, including support for older versions of the software, is an essential requirement for open source projects that want to succeed in enterprises.

"One of the things I hate about the open source community is that they only talk about two versions — the current version and the future version," said Hartog. "We have clients who will pay us to support really old versions of software — they don't want to change their production environment because it works."

Hartog noted that open source software often gets into companies through the back door — for example, it is used in a testing environment and is then ported to the production environment. But this can cause problems as the developer who initially chose and installed the software is typically not responsible for supporting it — instead operational staff are left supporting a new type of software that they may not know how to support.

"Operational people hate change — if you change something and it breaks then operational people get kicked around. That's how open source software gets a bad name in big companies," said Hartog. "The management, procurement staff and auditors are not happy as they don't know who it's from, who to call when it goes wrong and they don't have a service level agreement."

A project roadmap is another feature that is important for open source projects that want to attract corporate users, according to Matthew Langham, the leader of the open source group at German software company S&N. He said that many open source projects do not have a roadmap, but users are often keen to know when features are due to be added.

Some open source projects have already accepted the need to be customer-focussed. Bart Decrem, a marketing contact for the Mozilla Foundation, said last year that one of the reasons why the Firefox browser has been so successful is because it focused on making the browser more easy to use.

"We have spent 10 years watching how people use stuff, for example, tab browsing came from watching people visit the same Web sites every day. Too often the Linux community lives in a bubble — there is not enough interaction with end users," said Decrem.

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