Marty Tarle from Bibliocommons came to talk about a vendor’s perspective on the open source environment. From the chatter going on, not everyone agreed with everything he talked about, but that would almost be expected with a crowd that seems to have many very big open source supporters. Here are the major points that I jotted down.
Typical Library Software Ecosystem
- lots of components
- some open source software
- lots of proprietary software
- all needs to work together
Perception of Proprietary Software Vendors
- perceived as closed and inflexible
- lack of APIs, difficult to integrate with
- long development cycles
If this is true for you, then you’re not working with the right vendors. Vendors should be committed to what the users need.
Focus is Often on the Wrong Things
- open sourcing – think that any changes can be made, but inefficient and costly without vendor buy-in
- standards support – but standards out of date and limited
- direct access to data – think can do whatever want with data, but tremendous duplication of algorithms, infrastucture, operations
Focus Should be on Vendor Cooperation
- interoperabililty is a two-way street
- vendors need to
- proactively enable integrations
- proactively integrate other solutions into theirs
Vendor Development & Delivery Models
- development
- agility is critical
- scrum and lean are now the norm
- long development cycles are unacceptable
- delivery
- rapid deployment of new functionality
- a lot of it is underlying architecture and a lot of testings
- being open and flexible
- rapid scaling of hardware
- industry trend is towards “continuous deployment”: narrowing the gap between conception and production plus building the analytics to see whether it’s working
Vendor Culture
- openness = part of company DNA i.e. being invested in client success
- integration = core organizational capability
- openness = proactive, continuous effort
What to Ask Your Vendors
- pace of innovation
- how many releases
- how many notes
- development model
- delivery model
- API
- public
- scalable
- flexible
- ask about attitude towards open source, whether used any, etc.
Best of Both Worlds
Best to use combinations from both worlds e.g. Evergreen + Bibliocommons
Partnership
Vendors and open source communities can work together. What makes a partnership successful?
- communication
- transparency
- accountability on deliverables
- shared success