Comments on: Open Source PLM a Real Option

By: Jonathan Scott

Jonathan Scott — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 19:46:05 +0000

@TheWiseOne – I hope we can agree to disagree here. I appreciate you taking the time to comment. Have you had experience with ARAS Innovator, and if so, what do you think of the product (I know how you feel about the marketing)?

By: TheWiseOne

TheWiseOne — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:23:10 +0000

@Jonathan: Keith was referring to your statement that you “just hope enough people will look past the ‘true open source’ debate to see the value in all open source variants.”

The point is: no such debate over “true open source” can be applied here. You may claim that Aras’s *business model* is more open than competitors, but the Aras software system is not open source software, period.

My concern with this is that, as an enterprise-facing product, Aras can cause companies to waste money and effort in R&D by misleading them into initially expecting the product to be open source.

By: Jonathan Scott

Jonathan Scott — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 03:28:10 +0000

@Keith – I appreciate you taking the time to weigh in on the topic. I’m not worried about word games related to ARAS and their model. I like what they are doing and I appreciate their level of openness regardless of what it is called. And independent of ARAS’s business model and licensing model, I think the software’s functionality and architecture are also impressive. Thanks again for very reasonable comments on the subject.

By: Keith Pease

Keith Pease — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:00:17 +0000

@Jonathan – Thanks for your interesting response but I would like to make a final comment. I do support ARAS as a good product with interesting ideas in the way it is made available but we do seem here to have slipped back into the word games. Open Source is whare the source code is open and any thing else is not. No grey areas. ARAS Innovator is not.

By: Jonathan Scott

Jonathan Scott — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:20:41 +0000

@Leftbrainstuff – Thanks for your comments. It is nice to hear from another consulting service provider that successfully makes use of open source platforms. I agree that “open source” can be a charged term and frequently evokes some fervent responses. From my perspective, I am glad for all of the “open” parts of the Aras Innovator stack even if not every component is accessible to me. I just hope enough people will look past the “true open source” debate to see the value in all open source variants.

By: Jonathan Scott

Jonathan Scott — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:16:21 +0000

@Keith – Thanks for clarifying and offering your support of Aras’ Innovator product. We agree that it is a nice product and that their business model offers something new and valuable in the PLM space. I must admit that I had similar misgivings about Aras’ usage of “open source” at first, but I was missing something. Aras does actually call their model “Enterprise Open Source” which qualifies their use of the term “open source” sufficiently (in my mind). By defining which parts of an Innovator stack are closed source (the Microsoft platform elements), which parts are community source (the Innovator element), and which parts are open source (the Innovator Solution elements), I think they are being clear about the meaning, IMO.

By: Keith Pease

Keith Pease — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:59:06 +0000

Just to explain that my previous remarks are not intended to disparage ARAS. I worked with Innovator a few years ago I believe it has a lot to offer. Their Business Model is also innovative but if you create a new model give it an appropriate name. Do not muddy the waters by miss using an existing one.

By: Leftbrainstuff

Leftbrainstuff — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 04:14:21 +0000

While I applaud ARAS’ approach to provide a way to try their PLM solution for ‘free’ I have some philosophical issues with labelling anything that is not totally ‘open’ as open source. This inevitably leads to the fervent responses that we see in the attached comments.

At Consult4you we use opensource apps extensively. By open source I mean software that typically is covered by a GPL licence and that has an active developer community and is free to use and modify any way we wish if we need to. To support the community we donate to those open source apps that provide us with a tangible business benefit. This includes apps like Joomla / Virtuemart, Tikiwiki and Eclipse. Even wikipedia. We use them in production and we make money by using them so we consider it only fair that we contribute something back to support them. We don’t have the time to contribute so we typically contribute cash. We also support them by publicly promoting their benefits and limitations.

When all is said and done we couldn’t realistically operate our consulting business with the freedom to work as we please without access to opensource apps. They make our life easier. This is the real benefit we look for in our use of software.

By: Jonathan Scott

Jonathan Scott — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 02:59:49 +0000

Keith – thanks for your comments. I can appreciate the feelings of several people commenting on this post regarding the “true” definition of open source.

From my perspective, there is real business value in almost all of the forms of open source out there today though. Regardless of who uses which terms to describe their business model or how close a company’s model is to “true” open source, the ideas behind open source seem to be what are important (again, IMO). I like the idea that someone can freely use a piece of software, and in some aspect change it and share it with others for the benefit of the community. This makes Aras very different in the PLM market, and I think it adds value.

By: Keith Pease

Keith Pease — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 17:19:41 +0000

I would just like to make a simple comment re the “Open Source” status of Aras Innovator.

An application is “Open Source” if it makes its source code, (that is all of the source code), freely available to the wider community of developers: If it does’t, It isn’t.

All this dicussion of degress and flavours of Open Source is simply part of the smoke screen that Microsoft biased companys use to try to dilute and confuse the concept.

Like so much in the area of software the propery of “Open Source” is binary. An application is Open Source or it is not.

Aras do not make the Invovator source code available so it is not Open Source, in any way shape form or decree.

Keith.