Clap clap clap clap. :)

here as well...we'll teach our kids not to be FUD consultants ;-)

Well I meant <applause/> here as well...damn XML escapes ;-)

Amazing! Did he even knew Daisy is open source? If yes, he's clearly stupid :-)

@Sylvain

I was actually (for a millisecond) temped to reply to this guy with the wise words of one of your latest blogpostings:

"OSS is a risk if you ignore it, and an opportunity if you embrace it"

However, I realized he's in neither position. To the happy few blissfully and utterly clueless out there OSS just doesn't exist.

Mmm... As you know, Marc, I know very well who this is about, as Mr. Tridion was my former colleague.

To be honest, I knew hem as a salesperson, and a very good one at that. I did not know that he hit the marketing road at Tridion, which is interesting, to me at least.

As for his comments, I think he must have been in a very dutch smoke-cloud when he asked it, and I am sure he did not know of your commitment to OSS when he asked the FUD questions, which I do not like either, and is quite inappropriate given the context in which it is asked. They must be desperate to win the deal.

In my experience, people start using FUD when they can no longer win the business on their own strength. Everyone does that. Even OSS companies employ those tactics: I have heard the phrase "you better use OSS, or else you will be locked into that proprietary vendor forever" from many OSS vendors in the past years, and I have met a few. I have not seen you do it with Daisy, because probably you have your "own strength" to win busines swith an innovative product, but others (Linux vendors, appserver vendors, devtool vendors, etc) do it as well. It's common business practice in desperate situations... I would not get hung up on it.

Thanks for posting this, Marc. I guess it shows that we're getting noticed among the proprietary CMS systems - and they know their days are numbered.

Playing fair shouldn't be reserved for open source.

– Alexander Limi, Plone Co-Founder

Erm... so what exactly is the big deal here? A commercial company is looking for the ins and outs of a competitor in order to win a contract and make money. Isn't that, like, what commercial companies do?

In my experience, any company runs the risk of going overboard in overstating the negatives of a competitor. I've had quite a few companies that make a living out of supporting OSS tell me paying license fees was like selling my soul to the devil (yes, they actually frased it like that, in an introductory meeting). I've also had a software vendor tell me using OSS would leave me totally unprotected, "anyone can see the source!". I've been told the most ludicrous things. Fortunately, I can think for myself ;)

If you thought thát kind of mud-slinging is rare - think again, I can give you many, many (first hand) examples. All of them a lot worse then this mail, in contrast. I mean, think about it - if I'd be marketing my own CMS - Open Source or otherwise - wouldn't I want to be able to point out why specifically my system is better? Wouldn't I want to find out what others do and how and try and do it better? I don't really see why this mail should merit the attention. Actually, Alexander's comment above about proprietary sytems is in my view worse than the mail (and an example of competitive companies driving open source).

Unless you imagine you live in a world of shiny happy people, ofcourse, where everybody cooperates with one another to make the world a better place. But you already said that ;) And anyway, Open Source content management would be quite different if that were true - instead of hundreds of different projects all trying to accomplish more or less the same thing in a slightly different way, we'd all be working on just a couple of really really good ones. I'd vote for that anytime ;)

So maybe its the other way round. Maybe I'm too much of a cynic to be impressed by this. I just prefer to call it "realistic" instead of cynical ;)

I'd say its pretty silly to corporate tactics with general morality. I'm not sure if this post should win the Red Herring award or the Ad Hominem award.....

Maybe we should talk about American Foreign policy now in order to give this thread a usefull purpose.

Hi John,

thx for leaving a comment (even if critical)
I'm supposing you missed out on the 'compare' (?) verb in your opening sentence...

If so, I must say I'm still struggling to find any sound basis to your claim that corporations (or goverments for that mather) should be perceived as subject to different moral standards then individuals?

As for the awards, thx for concidering me, it's probably lame to claim such: but making a post on a blog is not aiming at that in no way.

regards, and thx for reading so far,
-marc=

Hi Marc,

Thanks for the reply and the correct inference of my spellcheck-lazy grammar. However, are you not being pot calling the kettle black? Judging by the original wording, this email was sent to you in confidence and you've turned it on them in apparently your favor. Were you following morality of an individual or a company then and what is the difference that you say should exist?

I think the real issue here is how OSS differs to commercial software in terms of meeting the expectation of the client, being a small guy or megacorp. Megacorps tend to pay for leveraging to manage their expectations which is not somthing they think they can get from OSS. Maybe the OSS industry can try to appeal more to the silly shiny happy business people who are always smiling as on the Tridion website (makes me a bit ill to my stomach actually). Quite frankly, I like Wierd Al Yankovic's 'whiny crappy people make me mad' song much better which is kind what you did with this post? Lofty morals or not I think {his name} would do well to look more closely at OSS (good for your point) and has done nothing to deserve being slandered in such a way (bad for your point).

OSS so far has made little effort to appeal to these supposed shiny happy business people, it seems only the nerd who likes real content. Hey, I'm one of them but I know how the big boss is making his decions less based on what I say about the product i want him or her to buy and more on the bottom line that shareholders are nagging about in the ear. Hard sales are hard won by sales forces who say what clients want to hear. Even Aerospace firms take contracts on a basis of preference over plausible technical qualification because of agreements about what gets done when things go wrong. You could say it often boild down to product superirority or better mess cleanup? The mess cleanup is potentially more expensive than the product so better go with that.

Hi John,

Thx for your insight on what is, could or should be driving forces in business decissions, I think it brings more nuance and kinda completes the discussion at hand.

Some of your remarks though give me the feeling my motivations are at question, so maybe the following explains my position a bit better:

[pot-kettle morals]
1/ My counter-comment wondered what fundaments one could find to judge actions differently wheater or not they were made by an actor wearing a company-uniform or not.
I still see none. If the mail had come from some individual (plone) developer, or from some peep inside the customer trying to force the internal decission either way I would have been posting it in just the same way. Sorry, not my style.

2/ I do admit though that morality is not an absolute thing: in practice one often needs to find some balance between the better vice versus the worser good. (e.g. discussions on the death penalty, the prisoner dillema, etc etc) Not always an easy task. And surely the priority-scale you handle might very well be historically, culturally or just personally shifted in this or that direction. YMMV.

conclusion: morality/judgement probably varies (a bit) by subject (the judge), it shouldn't be seen changing by object (the actor who's being judged) = Why Miss Justitia caries a blindfold.

[finally, my morals, which are of course questionable]

Some touche at least. I don't generally make emails sent to me public, and that is surely because that too 'is not my style'. So indeed in this case I had been doing some 'lesser evil evaluation', all with the known result.

I think what basically set my scale off towards the go and 'show the example' is the obvious unbalance in _honesty_.

{honesty in the sent email}
This mail is _not_ asking for the ins and outs of plone (as Adriaan's comment was suggesting), this mail is not in search of building a sound content-wise case of listing the better and worse, there is no vision of comparing 'product superiority' versus assistence with 'mess cleanup', or anything 'honest' like that.

It's surprisingly clearly asking for FUD. FUD being (wikipedia) a sales or marketing strategy of disseminating negative but vague or inaccurate information on a competitor's product.

{honesty off my posting}
I didn't make this up. The mail arrived as it did. {his name} actually wrote that. He also called me later to say he was displeased with reading his mail on my blog. Strikingly he wasn't displeased with writing his mail in the first place?

All in all, I valued honesty higher then discretion.

Finally I also tried to account for the 'effects' of my action. And frankly I (was and still) am convinced the 'slandering' is quite mild: Tridion will not loose a sale over this, probably not even that particular one, {his name} will not loose his job, the world will not stop spinning.

I still like Rik's comment and advise best: "I would not get hung up on it"

But yeah, I admit, Global Business Ethics will not drastically go up either. Nor will world famine be resolved, sorry for not spending my time more efficiently.

If nothing else I hope I can keep up to the promise of teaching my kids well, and maybe hope people can just learn 'this is not my style' and thx to this final comment: why.

regards,
-marc=