Thoughts of an IT professional

One of the revenue models for open source (OS) companies is the selling of support services and documentation. JBoss is widely known for pioneering the model of making money off support rather than off selling a product. The question that is posed is how do they protect this revenue stream? You can set-up a shop somewhere in Eastern Europe, staff it up with committers to that particular open source project in order to gain credibility, set-up a workforce that masters the product and costs 3 to 4 times less than their Western counterparts and start selling support services. Chances are that you will be able to leap ahead of the original open source company because of the pricing power you yield due to lower costs.
So, how do the OS companies protect themselves from this threat? One great protection is thru the use of trademarks. Take a look at Red Hat, MySQL, and JBoss. Boy, do they protect their brand. MySQL goes as far as to prevent the use of its trademark on documentation. An IT shop selling support services for MySQL (for example) could be taken to court by MySQL because they are using the MySQL trademark (when they are advertising "Buy great MySQL support from us") without consent from the MySQL group. An IT shop planning to compete with them on support should make sure it flies under the radar and doesn’t make a significant dent in the original OS company’s revenues. The moment it gains traction in the market and starts having an effect they should prepare to meet the original OS company’s legal team. Chances are they will not be able to sell their services in a country/region that takes intellectual property (IP) seriously.
Eastern Europe could sell support for OS software to small and medium business in the West mainly because this is a market that is not in the OS companies’ cross-hairs. Western small and medium business could gain from this service (no-cost software and low-cost services) because currently their other alternatives for troubleshooting their Linux desktop are googling their problems or calling tech-savvy cousin Joe.
I really like the way these OS companies manouver. You may have the impression that OS is run by a bunch of pony-tailed hippies fed on utopia, the fact is that these guys grok IP and grok it very well. These guys seem pretty well prepared for an environment in which IP is the main expenditure. A lot better than some closed-cource establishments…

These days I have done something that I have not done for the last year: I searched on Google. Yep, I didn’t do a search on Google for quite a while. The reasons that kept me away from Google was first the Google desktop which behaves more like a trojan than anything else and then its relationship with the Chinese government. Its hunger for information didn’t score many points with me neither: Google is a vacuum cleaner which absorbs every piece of information it can get its hands on. The huge (at the time) mailbox size of GMail reflects, to a certain extent, its hunger for information. Give the users a huge mailbox and load the mail program with features that make the users reluctant to delete email (such as tracking conversations) and they will keep most of their data with you… Its never expiring cookie says the same thing: "We want information and we will whatever is needed to get it".
To go back to Google search, I didn’t use Google search because I didn’t have to. The environment in which I was working before didn’t require me to search the web, most of the information I needed I could access very quickly, either thru information systems or thru people.
Well, that changed. I changed jobs and in the new environment I found myself tackling an application server problem. With little documentation and no tech-support I had to go back to Google. I spent 3 hours on Google trying to find some documentation with no results. It’s not the fact the Google didn’t help me find what I needed that prompted me to write this post. Is the fact that I grew to view web-search as a last choice for information retrieval. For the last year I have put up a library on del.icio.us where I go if I need to find something. I have subscribed to various feeds which provide me with very good information that I index according to my needs. I have come back to it when I needed to get some research about outsourcing from Western Europe, I didn’t have to go to Google and start from scratch and sift thru mountains of garbage in order to find what I need. The effort of putting up a small library, of interacting with human beings interested in the same fields as you is a good long-term investment.
I am slowly coming to the conclusion that dependence on web-search reflects a poor environment (in my case poor documentation and no tech support). What I needed should have been covered way better by my application server provider, I should not have to go Google and struggle to find a significant keyword that would have provided me with the answer. My application server provider should have found a way to channel all the information that their users have to me. They failed and the only thing I could fall back was searching on Google. (I am wondering how many tech departments out there outsource to Google the indexing their information rather than putting up a decent system that their users can rely on.)
Using a search engine may mean, to a certain extent, the assumption of instant gratification: "I don’t really want to put the effort in acquiring this information, I’ll just ask Google for it". Don’t be surprised if Google will not find it for you. It may also mean a poor environment where your source of information is a search engine that is not an authority in the field you are interested in.