из блога самого Агасси:

АгассиFirst, let me start by telling you that Tom Sanders, who wrote about my remarks at the Churchill Club on VNUnet.com got the story wrong and took my quotes completely out of context. And his story, with its sensational headline, didn't properly characterize my point of view and has led to hundreds of angry and misplaced comments in the blogosphere about my views. Dan Farber of ZDNet recorded the event and you can listen to it directly at this link http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/z/e/200511/110905_CHC_EVENT.mp3 and you can draw your own conclusions ....

Openness of Source Code

The need for a consumer of software to receive transparency into the source code versus the “black box” approach of delivering systems without transparency is a key issue in the Open Source debate, and an issue that SAP has followed closely for as many years as we are in business. During those 30+ years, SAP shipped its application code, probably one of the largest software products in the world, with the source code available to every customer. The result was that almost every customer modified our code to suit their needs, either on their own, or through one of our many implementation partners.

Some of our customers found that process essential to make the system fit their needs. Some customers found that the ability to modify the code made it possible for programmers to veer too far away from the original application they received, and, in future implementations, they reduced the amount of such modifications. When we get to foundation software, such as operating systems or databases, customers mostly want the code in order to debug systems they build on top of those OSS components. Usually they do not modify the code that much, yet the ability to simply walk through the execution of calls into engines is somewhat the best way to learn how the code should be fixed to perform to a customer's unique needs.

So, as you can see, I am not just a proponent of openness of source, at SAP we actually live by that rule on a daily basis. We are now taking this approach to our next generation of solutions, in which we not only expose the code of applications, we go the distance in exposing models of our composite applications in ways that allow non-programmers (business analysts) to modify the delivered apps to suit their business needs. This "Open Models" approach is not theory, it is executed and delivered with our latest generation of packaged composite apps, and we have more than 100 applications modeled and delivered to customers with in our recent delivery of SAP Analytics.



Andrey