Succeeding with Open Source

by Bernard Golden

Much like Odysseus - who had to negotiate perils between Scylla and Charybdis - IT managers face daunting challenges. On one side, there is relentless pressure to cut costs. On the other lies an... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0321268539
• ISBN13: 9780321268532
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Great Book! Exactly what we needed!

Any IT Manager with their eye on the radar knows that open source software is rapidly maturing into a viable alternative to expensive commercial software packages. However, there are still some barriers to entry into the OSS world, especially for IT Managers within large, traditional, non-IT companies. The OSMM evaluation method described in this book is a perfect fit for an IT Manager trying to find a way to justify their use of open source software inside the software stack of one of those traditional, non-IT companies. The real-world examples provided by Bernard throughout the book are very interesting and can be used as additional "weight" to your arguments if you are trying to convince your boss that your use of OSS is no longer the pioneering adventure that it once was. This book not only provides OSMM evaluation method, but also a well-written overview of the current status of OSS in the first three chapters. I was not able to find blank worksheet templates on www.navicasoft.com although the book indicates that these are located somewhere on the website. I also could not find a way to upload an assessment to share with the OS community. This is a something that should be considered as it would really be a tactical advantage for IT Manager's efforts if there was a section of Navica's website dedicated to sharing OSMM assessments of the different OS packages. I can imagine that a user community would quickly spring up in response to such an portal. Truly an excellent book!

Great book for anyone who wants to understand Open Source, e

Have you been wondering how to extend the use of open source software in your organization, but would like to know how to find the right software and do pro-quality evaluations of alternatives effectively? This excellent book by Bernard Golden will show you what's different about open source in detail, how you might make those differences work in your organization, and how to use a simple, effective model that summarizes the necessary elements to compare different apps that might fit into your environment. Using Golden's methods will educate your choices, reduce your risks, and help you to succeed with open source. This is a "How-To" book for IT managers, but it's also very suitable for beginners. The concepts don't require technical knowledge, and the explanations are clear and concise. Part I is an overview of everything you wanted to know about open source. It dispells myths, and helps you to understand why open source works at all. Best of all, each chapter has an executive summary, and most paragraphs have a margin note that summarizes the paragraph's concept. This really makes the book easy to read or review. You can skim down the page reading the concept notes until you come to the areas where you want more in-depth knowledge. The overview is excellent. Part II (which also includes the great paragraph notes) introduces Golden's Open Source Maturity Model, the framework for applying what you learned, or knew, from Part I, and more that you will learn later in Part II. The model is a template that grids the elements for software assessment and weighting factors. When you do the math you get the product maturity score, maturity being how full-featured and ready for production use the product is. Of course, your weighting factors will affect the score to make it useful in light of your organization. Formally scoring a number of products will pinpoint the products you should and should not be considering. This part is pretty simple. The devil, of course, is in the details. Golden discusses different types of organizations, how they should set up their reviews, weightings and interpret scores. Then he applies this process to a real-world example using JBOSS, a significant open source product. Each element is fully explored in its own chapter, and this is where the rubber meets the road. Golden compares how commercial products provide the elements, then he discusses how open source provides the elements, many times by using different mechanisms. He gives great guidance on how to find and use these resources when they differ from the single-point solution of commercial software. If differences between open source and commercial software implementation weren't clear to you before, they will be after these chapters, and you'll begin to know how to get the most out of them, too. Open source may not be the right answer for your environment, but now you'll know exactly why, and what has to change before it is. This is a well-written and thorough

Excellent resource for purveyors of open source solutions

I came at this book from a different angle - that of someone looking for resources and strategies to convince potential customers of the benefits of open source solutions. Golden's book is extremely valuable in this regard. It presents a framework (the OSMM) to assess the viability of an open source solution. It has the added benefit of managing customer expectations for me. It informs the intended audience (IT organizations) what they can reasonably expect from enterprise level open source solutions and what their responsibilities entail. In short, the author describes the underpinnings of a paradigm shift in the process of evaluating and deploying software.

Good book, with some especially appealing quailties

I'd heard people talk about "maturity" of Open Source projects, but I was completely unaware that someone had written a formal method of assigning this maturity (OSMM, Open Source Maturity Model) until I picked up this book. The author aims this book at the company or technical administrator who wants to be able to evaluate the Open Source software that's out there, and compare it to the commercial options. The first 60 pages or so pages go through the typical "who, what, when, where, why, how?" questions involving open source. It dispells many myths about open source software. Then it goes through implementing the OSMM on a real project (they used JBoss as their example), and through this evaluation the reader was shown steps taken in each segment of the evaluation process, a very good way of teaching to people like myself who learn by example! There were two things about this book that made it especially appealing to me: 1. Real world examples of open source being used in successful companies. I believe the blurbs about real world successes are hugely important, and it was interesting for me to read, since I never really looked into companies who had made the leap to open source. 2. Notes. Beside many of the paragraphs there would be a short note about what the paragraph is about. So say you don't have time to read the whole chapter, but you want to get the jist of it, you can just quickly read down the page's notes, if something particularly interests you, you can read that whole paragraph. In a book such as this, I think this option for reading the book is a great asset. The book is only a little over 200 pages, but it's quite thorough. I'd definately recommend it to people thinking of taking their company down the open source track.

Introduction to Open Source for Executives and IT Managers

This book is divided into 2 major sections. The first 3 chapters provide an overview of open source software, which are tailored for the CIO/CTO type of people. The rest of the book presents the Open Source Maturity Model, which helps IT managers to evaluate and select the right Open Source software for their needs. For a commercial software product, the vendor, in most cases, is the sole provider of the software, document, training and support. This one-stop-shop approach is a double edged sword. It gives IT managers always one place to go to, but also leaves them no other alternative. On the other hand, the ownership of an open source software is distributed to various parties, including the project committee, various organizations who sponsor the project or provide training, support, or other services for the software, individual contributors and, of course, the users themselves. This decentralized nature of open source environment gives IT manager more flexibility, but also requires new skills to manage them. At the first gaze, I found the Open Source Maturity Model is very similar to any common practice of evaluating a commercial software product. But when I read into the details of each chapter, the approach is obviously different. For example, open source software usually doesn't have the colorful product brochure, datasheet and whitepaper for IT managers to learn about the features of the product. Instead, IT managers can always download and test the software, participate in various on-line forums, or even contact the developers for information. The Open Source Maturity Model is built based on the similar concepts in the commercial world but tailored for the unique open source environment. Last but not the least, don't miss the Preface and Introduction chapters, where the author shares his consulting experience and explains how it led him to the open source world. I found them very interesting.