The Agassi Posture–SAP Proudly Passes into the Ages
November 11th, 2005 by Adam Cuothe
Shai Agassi of SAP confirms it! He’ll never get some tail. In a post I wrote at the end of October, I was critical of Mr. Agassi’s open source posturing in an AlwaysOn interview. It didn’t take him long to reappear in the news–in an article by Tom Sanders (VNUNet) and blurt out
“We all talk about how great Linux is”
That’s exactly it, with Agassi it’s just talk. Not an actual investment of effort, know-how, or even belief in any realized strengths. A key thing that always betrays corporate poseurs when they try to make their companies sound like they’re on to something good with open source strategies but don’t actually have any open source strategies (much less participate in its success or the energetic movement it fuels) is that they switch the topic to open standards. Open standards are the curent enterprise IT vendor’s euphemism for “we’re sitting on our thumbs” which is a rather dangerous posture for companies that rely on their employees’ typing ability to produce a little bread-and-butter. The article notes that
SAP is a supporter of open standards and of building innovation on top of a platform, but wants to limit the openness to added services…. The core SAP application will remain closed, but allow outside developers to interact with it through open standards.
Sitting behind this un-initiative is Agassi’s insight
“Intellectual property [IP] socialism is the worst that can happen to any IP-based society…And we are an IP-based society. If there is no way to protect IP, there is no reason to invest in IP.”
I’d like to ask Agassi to define the existance of IP and how he can invest in it. What makes us an IP-based society, Agassi? In a society based on IP, one might think a crucial point to fostering its vitality (as I suppose investment would desire) would be the greater generation and spread of intellectual substance. Yet the typical notion of “protecting IP,” among those that make such statements, is to not just limit access to IP, but rather control access to IP via a company (if the company is lucky, it gets itself a few hastily written laws passed to back it up).
It’s a well known phenomenon among those that labour with intellectual substances (if I may generalize to a quasi-equal level of fuzz, that Agassi does) that a lack of sharing these ideas rarely helps generate new ideas, so what exactly could you be protecting IP from, Agassi? As a final note, is this old-fashioned posture you’re committing SAP to, really the one that is going to magically let it access the long tail you lust after? Enjoy your daydreams, my friend, but make sure you protect ‘em real well. The rest of the world is a bit ill after having to listen to them.
June 28th, 2006 at 20:04
[...] Certainly, Microsoft and SAP have put effort and money into spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), and both have publicly made, sometimes very strange statements about or against FOSS. Yet recently, both are putting some effort into releasing bits in an open source method or else funding some open source development. Rosenberg and Asay seem to think there is an ulterior motive, “Any outreach attempts from vendors who have worked for years to destroy open source should be taken with a grain of salt and a sharp eye cast on motivating factors.” [...]
July 28th, 2007 at 06:06
Nondimensionally preposterous. Unfoundedly guilty, hush your pup. You dang ole goofprick. I think you should head into town with old penelope and get yourself a hangertooth jacket, you umbilical pride miser. Hopefully reading this will make your pitts empty, “disenfranchised unit”. I hope you monger better tomato!