The article describes the five facets of the interoperability ecosystem and offers insight into a constructive role for governments in facilitating each aspect individually, as well as in promoting the interoperability ecosystem as a whole.
Understanding the evolution of a complex, competitive environment is always easier in hindsight, but today's CIOs and government policymakers don't have the luxury of retrospection when it comes to the volatile world of enterprise software. Highcaliber decisions require a clear-sighted, non-dogmatic grasp of the contexts in which government enterprises today deploy both proprietary and open-source software in heterogeneous IT environments. This article addresses the topic, and describes ways in which proprietary and open-source software developers are drawing upon each other's development, licensing and business models. The article illustrates how today's IT world is no longer an "either/or" world in which customers and vendors chose to be either proprietary or open source. Instead, it is an attractive world of "both/and" as the lines between proprietary and open source have, making interoperable deployments almost inevitable in many if not most cases.
SOA, virtualization and cloud computing has changed the paradigm with regard to proprietary and open-source approaches. Public policy and laws should remain technology agnostic to enable the growing heterogeneity in IT.
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