BEYOND OPEN SOURCE

In the last twenty years, the Information Systems industry has seen amazing increases in hardware capability and equally amazing reductions in hardware costs. However, the software side of the industry has failed to deliver similar results. Though programming languages have proliferated and software environments have greatly expanded, the industry has seen only marginal improvements in productivity. In particular, the large application systems market (often referred to as ERP applications) has seen its products remain both unreasonably expensive and rigid... At the heart of the problem is the way software has been built for decades and continues to be built today: Applications are built using programming languages and logical structures far removed from the business problem being solved. That this is a serious problem is clear, based on the costs of software alone. What is not at all clear, however, is whether or not an alternative to the problem exists. Is it really possible for..