.. a situation in which a customer is dependent on a vendor for products and services and cannot move to another vendor without substantial costs. It is often used in the computer industry to denote the lack of compatibility between different systems which, intentionally or unintentionally, forces a customer to continue to use products and services from a particular vendor Wikipedia

In predicatable evolution, software was owned and controlled by a single company. Buying into a given technology often meant buying into a single vendor. Companies were single-focused on building software that filled a need and that need meant customers would buy. Support was an afterthought. And software vendors knew that. They couldn't really ignore customers or be so negligent that customers defected to a competitor. But customers were truly buying point solutions and support from all vendors was about the same, so the process worked. This vendor lock-in approach worked well for decades. Optimized around the fact that it's very hard to find good programmers, big software companies would compete to hire the best programmers and use them to build software and defend their business around that software. With open source in the picture, this changed. As more people began to code, there was more good code available. As a result, being able to write acceptable software became commoditized. Tools and libraries became more available - and there were more of them - making it easier to develop software. Development outsourcing today is a thriving industry, because there are reasonable developers working across the globe often in countries that have weaker currencies. Led by globalized market forces, it began to make sense for some companies to consider software as a loss leader and make money on the services that follow it. IBM’s investments in Linux have far more to do with making money than altruism. By building a strong Linux ecosystem, IBM could displace Sun Microsystems and its Solaris OS, while at the same time taking direct aim at Microsoft’s market share. Linux supporter Red Hat was able to enter the market and make a good business out of the melee. Today, you see many companies that try to build a product, open source it, and make money from support services. With the Internet now full of open source software choices, companies are using them in record numbers. That freedom in the market brings the veracity of software support full circle. A technology decision today is far less certain for customers as well as for software vendors in the future. So who makes money off of the code? What services do people need around it? Will there be a single company that “owns” open source? Or will the business behind it resemble a bazaar? Support is the service most companies are selling around open source software and remains one of the services most customers ask for. And they should. With the great opportunites open source provides comes the inherent risks that something will go wrong. When that happens, companies don’t want to waste time having their own engineers come up to speed on the code. They want an expert to come in and fix it. Companies like Red Hat have been quite successful offering support for open source code and have built a profitable business around it. For decades finding support was a no-brainer. The only people who could support software were the same people who wrote it. After all, they had the source code. Red Hat proved that was no longer true. In 2007 we now have an entire industry devoted to the very task of figuring out how to support open source software best. And the answer is not a knee-jerk selection of Red Hat anymore either. Others are jumping in as well. Support is no longer relegated to second-class status in the corporate infrastructure. Instead, it’s quickly becoming a driver of revenue for software vendors and a bigger part of the software budget for software buyers.

Days after published reports circulated that the city of Paris was mulling an across-the-board migration from Windows and other Microsoft technology to open source, it appears a French government agency has taken the plunge. The French Ministry of Equipment and Transport, which maintains infrastructure such as roads, airports and seaports, announced today it is in the middle of a migration project that will conclude next year in which 1,500 office and infrastructure Windows NT servers will be moved out, replaced by Mandrakelinux Corporate servers. www.linux.com

The capital of Bavaria plans to complete its current migration of more than 80 percent of its desktop systems by 2008 and says that the first users of open software in the city's administration are pleased with the initial results. On Tuesday, Munich's mayor Christine Strobel said at the Systems trade fair that "up to now, we are very happy about the results" of the migration currently underways. "I am not a computer geek, but I must admit that it was easy to switch to the new software," she reported. By the end of the year, some 200 workstations close to Lord Mayor Christian Ude and a number of nearby organizational units will be running on a special LiMux client. If everything runs according to schedule, most of the approximately 14,000 PCs will be migrated to Open Source in the next two years. www.heise.de

Its time to stand up for the web standards we hold dear. Its time to protect our web. Its time to say enough is enough. Its time for Microsoft to take responsibility for failing their clients over and over again. Its time for Microsoft to clean up its own mess. Mike Davies - Yahoo Europe Division