[...] from: 451 CAOS Theory » The five stages of community open source engagement Posted under Uncategorized, hardware by admin on Thursday 4 December 2008 at 10:37 [...]

Matt,

I think this is a very good characterisation of what we see as the open source maturity model. I’d add that we are also seeing this for enterprises, not just ISV’s, in their approach to open source. Most larger enterprises have moved beyond ‘denial’ and are heavy users. The challenge is to educate them on how to move along to ‘contributors’ and ‘champions’.

I’d also like to make a point that we based this graphic on an open source maturity model described in some research done by Carleton University and Nortel.

Ian

I will bite on the MSFT question

Based on their contributions to places like Apache and Eclipse, they are in the “Contribute” stage.

But the thing to understand about this model (having used it for several years) is that in very large companies, the state is not uniform across the whole organization. So within MSFT I would expect to find groups that are still in “Denial” and everything in between.

/mike

Sorry…I should also mention that this model is actually inspired by research work done by Professor Tony Bailetti of Carleton University and was funded by Nortel. For an original reference, please see http://milinkovich.blogspot.com/2006/06/maturity-models-for-open-source.html

Having just returned from 3 days in Redmond discussing PHP on Windows with Microsoft, I agree that Microsoft cannot be pinned to a single stage on this chart. However, realistically, even their forward thinking divisions are no farther along than contribute. I would spread them between denial and contribute with denial being the majority and contribute being the long tail.

IMHO,
=C=

[...] noted that he sees business benefits in being more open, which brings me on to the second point. I wrote recently about the five stages of engagement in open source communities, as described by the Eclipse [...]

[...] Matt Aslett wrote an article about the way that attitudes to free software evolve over time within a company, using a graphic he [...]

[...] Matt Aslett wrote an article about the way that attitudes to free software evolve over time within a company, using a graphic he [...]

I’ve been using a model something like this for a while too. It is resonant witha much older piece of research on the psychology of human belief systems (which works beyond just the religious since capitalism is also a belief system) by James Fowler in his book Stages of Faith from 1981. From reading Fowler, I have come to the conclusion that we need to consider not just “maturity” but its “spread” and “reach” I just posted a load more on this on my blog.

Given Microsoft’s generally-accepted historical approach of “Embrace, Extend, Destroy”, I’d put them on a notional Phase 6 of “Subvert” - after all, on examining the Office XML spec, it strikes me as the only “open standard” so far, which is clearly designed to not be interoperable with…

[...] However, that report just looked at open source specialists, and the use of this strategy is more widespread. Almost every proprietary vendor in the technology industry is somewhere on the five stages of community open source engagement. [...]

[...] the ability to engage in community-led open source development right at the top of the five stages of community open source engagement designed by Ian Skerrett. (Stage 5: design products so that they can be based on FLOSS, obtain [...]

[...] a picture of the way Accenture approaches open source, showing that they are still in the first stages of community open source engagement, somewhere between stage 1 and stage 2, as defined by Ian Skerrett. In fact Accenture asked a [...]

[...] was also great to share a picture slide with Mike. The maturity model for OSS adoption is a great indicator of OSS engagement, not just for ISV’s but also for [...]

[...] plays in the second stage of community open source engagement. They know that open source is a two-way street and are active citizens, even if they are not [...]

[...] previously mentioned, just about every software vendor in the industry in benefiting to some extent from the use of open [...]

[...] symbiotic approach is the most promising. It can bring a vendor straight to the top of the five stages of community open source engagement, as designed by Ian Skerrett. Actors like GroundWork or Google, as recently pointed out by Stephen [...]

[...] Stephen notes I side-stepped the question somewhat, noting that it depended how far along the five step community engagement process a company is, although I thought that ultimately the answer was that a community manager should [...]

[...] ongoing research we are engaged in examining the strategies of traditional proprietary vendors in engaging with and making use of open source, so I shall put some more thought into how our observations can [...]

[...] dans une communauté open source. Ces étapes que je vous présente ici sont issues d’un article du site 451 CAOS Theory. Elles représentent le cheminement que peut parcourir un acteur économique comme une société [...]