OSS Gaps

Both Individual Contributors and Decision Makers were asked to identify where they saw gaps in the landscape of available OSS tools. They were asked about the same potential gap areas in terms of:

• Whether they’d like to see OSS address the area
• Whether the gap posed a mission-critical issue for them
• Whether they would contribute (time and/or money) to address the area.

The areas proposed in the ranking were:

• OSS reference implementations of new open standards
• A credible (reliable) OSS networking stack to ensure that new devices (e.g., IoT) have a decent likelihood of doing networking properly
• More network configuration tools available in OSS
• More network management tools available in OSS
• A tool to configure and manage my entire network through a solid OSS package
• Nothing
• Other

Only two concrete suggestions were recorded in “Other”, both on the Individual Contributor questionnaire in the question about what areas they would like to see addressed by OSS:

• “I would like more projects to adopt structured processes for governance, release engineering, standards, documentation, testing, etc.”
• “Secure firmware updates for embedded devices and IoTs”

Perceived Gaps

Although it makes for an eye-strain chart, it’s best to look at all the results together — across both Individual Contributor and Decision Maker responses, for the 3 questions.

Clearly, both groups want a lot more from OSS, ranking all concrete offerings highly. Neither group views many of these choices as solving mission-critical issues for them. Nonetheless, and on a positive note, there seems significant willingness to contribute to the different areas.

Interestingly, “Open Standards reference implementation” ranked highly for both Individual Contributors and Decision Makers, in terms of both interest and willingness to contribute. In fact, that was the highest ranking gap, looking at the composite rating, for Decision Makers. Not so for Individual Contributors, who viewed OSS for Entire Network Configuration and Management as their top choice.

Looking for feedback!

What can we make clearer in this part of the report?  What other questions does this bring to mind that we should answer?

Send comments in mail to: ldaigle@thinkingcat.com