Rebuilding the OSS boat during the voyage

When you evaluate the market, you’re looking to understand where people are today. You empathize. Then you move into storytelling. You tell the story of how you can make their lives better. That’s the “after” state.
All marketing ever does is articulate that shift. You have to have the best product, and you’ve got to be the best at explaining what you do… at articulating your value, so people say, ‘Holy crap, I get it and I want it.’

Ryan Deiss
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How does “the market” currently feel about our OSS?

See the comments in this post for a perspective from Roger, “It takes too long to get changes made. It costs $xxx,xxx for “you guys” to get out of bed to make a change.” Roger makes these comments from the perspective of an OSS customer and I think they probably reflect the thoughts of many OSS customers globally.

The question for us as OSS developers / integrators is how to make lives better for all the Rogers out there. The key is in the word change. Let’s look at this from the context of Theseus’s paradox, which is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object.

Vendor products have definitely become more modular since I first started working on OSS. However, they probably haven’t become atomic enough to be readily replaced and enhanced whilst in-flight like the Ship of Theseus. Taking on the perspective of a vendor, I probably wouldn’t want my products to be easily replaceable either (I’d want the moat that Warren Buffett talks about)… [although I’d like to think that I’d want to create irreplaceable products because of what they deliver to customers, including total lifecycle benefits, not because of technical / contractual lock-in].

Customers are taking Theseus matters into their own hands through agile / CI-CD methodologies and the use of micro-services. They have merit, but they’re not ideal because it means the customer needs more custom development resourcing on their payroll than they’d prefer. I’m sure this pendulum will shift back again towards more off-the-shelf solutions in coming years.

That’s why I believe the next great OSS will come from open source roots, where modules will evolve based on customer needs and anyone can (continually) make evolutionary, even revolutionary, improvements whilst on their OSS voyage (ie the full life-cycle).

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