If you’re in the business of selling or using software, “you need to architect your systems to allow for continued, evolving choice,” says Matt Asay in a recent InfoWorld article. Fortunately, as he explains, open source inherently allows for such choice and also increases innovation, by putting the collaborative efforts of smart people to use in your own organization.
“You can’t possibly afford to hire all those “smartest” open source contributors, and you don’t need to,” Asay says. “It’s a feature, not a bug, of open source that different people and different organizations contribute to and benefit from open source in different ways.”
“Whether or not you’ll get to use the latest and greatest open source software or some other best-of-breed tool depends in large part on how you architect your systems,” says Asay. He quotes ThoughtWorks’ Mike Mason, who suggests that some organizations may opt for convenience at the expense of superior functionality, for example, through the use of consolidated tool stacks. “These choices may lag behind an industry-leading independent alternative. That threatens overall innovation,” Mason says.
A better approach, according to Asay, “is to build on a tightly integrated platform that also affords APIs and other ways to connect alternative services that are ideal for your needs.” In other words, architecting for choice means “building in ways that always allow you to benefit from those smart people somewhere else.”
Read the complete article at InfoWorld.
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