As curious as everyone else is, I was thinking why Open source or Open standards (in particular) is not rooted in the enterprise community. I always had problems when my fellow colleague creates a file in Word 2007 format, I cannot open in Word 2003 – and guess what, I have to cope with that. While the same is not true between Open office and MS Office as Open Office is not recognized software in my enterprise.
In search of the answer, I came across this article, a little old but still holds true. I think the problem with the enterprise community is they got it all wrong and upside down.
Here is an extract from the article,
and extensions created should align with the direction the open source
community is taking. You may need to step up your involvement to see
that it continues down that path. Having clearly defined interface
points will improve the flexibility of keeping the maintenance costs
low over the long term.”
According to this they are okay to follow the proprietary changes with the release, but “should be willing” to follow the open source community. One thing, that I want to stress is, you are part of the open source community whereas you have no control over the proprietary community.
I conclude that the open source/standards community needs enterprise support in order to evolve in the enterprise world. This will relax the enterprise IT department from constraining themselves to a proprietary standards or systems.
