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Breakthrough Analysis, by Seth Grimes
Seth Grimes is an analytics strategist with Washington DC based Alta Plana Corporation. He consults on data management and analysis systems. See More by Seth Grimes
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Cognitive Dissonance: Gartner and Open Source 
Gartner has announced an Open Source Summit for this coming fall. The summit will bring together, on the one hand, an analyst firm known for authoritative pronouncements on all things IT, and on the other, a disruptive model for software development that is, at its core, anti-authoritarian. The term that comes to mind is cognitive dissonance. How will the Gartner summit bridge two conflicting world views? Open source typically ignores the established hierarchies that Gartner caters to. Those traditional corporate structures are deemed irrelevant to collaborative, community focused development. As for Gartner, their summit is designed to educate enterprise clients about a set of technologies and a model that have notoriously been introduced without executive sanction or even awareness. The common ground is dually open source business's well understood need to win over the corporate crowd that pays the Gartner's bills and also Gartner's need to stay on top of an extremely important industry trend. True to form, all summit presenters are Gartner analysts. Outside participation is limited to a couple of keynotes. Gartner is sticking with their usual all-knowing, ex cathedra approach. Absent is the community spirit that lends open source its power and vibrancy. Does Gartner get open source? While I'm sure that individual Gartner analysts do, I wonder that an open-source event without meaningful practitioner and community participation can adequately suggest real-world implementation strategies. Just about every enterprise now uses open-source somewhere and just about every significant enterprise hardware or software vendor, even Microsoft, now works with open source developer and user communities. It seems to me that in the case of open source, judging by Gartner's summit plans, it's the would-be educators who most need educating in what open source is really about.
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