Everyone working on software development should have heard about The Cathedral and the Bazaar and the famous Linus's law: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".
Clearly, this is by far one of the greatest advantages that free and open source software can put when compared to its evil twin, the proprietary golem. But things are really changing lately, and even Apple - talking about evil - had recently to follow the hype.
But when software meets business, things might not be so obvious: being Tirasa a small open source vendor with Identity and Access Management (IAM) at its core business, we had to learn this lesson very quickly:
| (customer) | «How can I trust you? You're so small! What if you disappear / go bankrupt? Can you guarantee that your product(s) will stay active and supported?» |
| (Tirasa) | «We are small, we know. And we cannot provide the kind of assurance you are looking for. But nobody can, look at what happened to Sun Microsystems...» |
| (customer) | «Oh, if only Waveset was open source!» |
So, how to escape from this nonsense?
Together with Evolveum and Symas, Tirasa decided to move forward from the "simple" idea of an open source stack by kicking the Open Source Identity Ecosystem, a common place for open source players, system integrators and service providers where a whole set of IAM open source components are insured to work well together. And enterprise support is available, by different members of the ecosystem, in different countries all around the world.
Purpose? Providing an alternative to proprietary and half-proprietary, often poorly integrated, "suites" which are still preventing many organizations to benefit from the enterprise management of their own identities.
If you find this idea interesting, you are welcome to join our public mailing list.
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