- Vendor contracts are hard
- So we avoid doing them
- So we never get good at them
- So every contract is a painful lesson in trying
Open source wins because I don't have to involve the entire company to use it. I can literally just raise my voice to see if anyone in the group cares and then use it.
And even when it's free for small companies, not approving a license is holding up something that we think is already done, so the wheels grind a bit faster.
Yes. Yes. Absolutely. This can stop adoption right in its tracks, and it depends entirely on one or two personalities. Who's at the wheel in office InfoSec. One guy had a strict "Open Source is Inherently Unstable" red line, sooooooooo . . well, we went two levels above him to get OSS signed off on, because the parent org was all about OSS. Doing that was a bad career decision, but it was the right one. This article gets it right almost exactly; transparency was a huge part of adoption, but the extensibility thing is also a big deal for a niche industry. Also, our vendor was unspeakable, disappearing for years on end, re-appearing as another company, asking fifty times the money for no reason.
This is why a SaaS offering is a must. For open source, a security review might be needed. For a SaaS, checkbox SOC2 and we’re on our way. Leverage to reduce the B2B sales cycle as you scale.
I wonder if there’s a business model around sharing the results of security reviews. Even if Company A can’t fully trust the review of Company B, you could A could provide a lot of context for B to reduce the cost of starting an evaluation from zero.
Not in the projects I am involved, there are clear guidelines, CI/CD pipelines are connected to internal repos only, and there is always a legal and security assement required before anything gets added to those repos.
Open source wins because I don't have to involve the entire company to use it. I can literally just raise my voice to see if anyone in the group cares and then use it.
And even when it's free for small companies, not approving a license is holding up something that we think is already done, so the wheels grind a bit faster.