donmarti

Sep 30 2007

Don Marti on Qumranet and IT Decision Making in General

Don Marti is bloging on Linuxworld how he thinks Qumranet has a future, just not the future they might be looking at now.

Don claims that a software project will fail if someone orders a tool to be used that he himselve is never going to use, as he will never figure out what features are important and which ones are just irrelevant. People who actually use the software should be able to decide.

He gives a good pointer to where MySQL is heading and where they came from. Typically an organisation did't decide on using MySQL after a zillion meetings an a couple of purchacing procedures before to run out to the shop and buy it. No, people just needed a working rockstable database, they took what they had available, started using it and were pretty happy about it.

That's where opensource easily gained acceptance over the past decade, but how will the future go when more and more incompetent mangers will have to decide on keep throwing money out of the window for licenses of products that their people don't use or as an alternative have their people choose , waste less money and go home with a bigger bonus at the end of the year. We'll nobody has ever been fired for buying useless software right ?

I've read people claiming that Qunranet is going to compete with Xensource, I wonder how, Yes they are both in the virtualisation market, but for me they are in two totally different but complementary areas At least Don understands that I wonder, does he know what they are up to or is he just really or has he just a smart guy with some good ideas on the future.