Comments on: Building the BT Open Source Business Case

By: dr1ft3r

dr1ft3r — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:34:57 +0000

James M – Since the acquisition of MySQL by Sun and the large investment into Automattic (WordPress), large-ish valuations of open source projects and companies have arisen. This affects the Osmosoft team only slightly that it increases the ‘book value’ of the acquisiton asset (Osmosoft) to BT, but not necessarily our overall business case. Our goals are still to help shepard BT into the open source community and creating an environment that allows the solutions we (BT) develop/sell/utilize to be whatever is the best for that problem/customer whether it be closed-source or open source. We’ve made a lot of inroads with the technical community within BT in the past year, but there’s still a long ways to go…

By: James Marwood

James Marwood — Wed, 28 May 2008 14:24:30 +0000

How would you explain this now? And I wonder how the case for BT compares with that for other companies with experience of Open Source, such as IBM or perhaps Sun. Has that been something you have come across?

By: My First TiddlyWiki Application « James Shi’s musings about everything and nothing…

Mon, 19 May 2008 19:29:31 +0000

[...] it. I am only a basic TiddlyWiki user. Although, I’ve been engrossed in Osmosoft and the Open Source world since joining the team last year, I’ve only had the most basic understanding of how [...]

By: FND

FND — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 10:30:03 +0000

Thank you very much for this, James!
Now I’ll have a bit of an easier time explaining to family and friends what it is that I’ll be doing at Osmosoft Towers, and why.
The problem, of course, is that there’s no clear “I’m an engineer; I build airplanes” kind of answer in this line of work…

With regards to the “not another research team” part, would it be fair to classify Osmosoft as something of an “applied think tank”?
That might make people understand (and accept) the inherent blurriness of these issues.

By: Phil Whitehouse

Phil Whitehouse — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 10:51:56 +0000

Great post! There’s another area where I think greater experience will come in helpful, and that’s in our external communication.

With our daily exposure to open source it’s easy to forget just how foreign a concept this is for many people. At Le Web, I found one of the biggest challenges was gauging people’s technical competence and understanding (not to mention their English speaking capabilities), and then tailoring my talk to suit. I was definitely better at the end of the two days than at the start, and heaven knows there’s still heaps of room for improvement! And as we get better at describing what we do, it will become more impactful and hopefully help us meet our objectives.