I thought Marc Benioff a.k.a. “there’s no greener model than our model” made a fool of himself when he painted open source as “un-green”.
It not only sends the wrong message especially to cost conscious companies, but worse, Salesforce.com chief comments reflect a complete misunderstanding of what open source really is.
“Open source is the most un-green model there is. Because still every customer has to set up there own data centers, set up there own servers, install all those stuffs, its just open source… that’s not green,” explains Benioff.
Yes, software can make a difference it terms of power consumption. But it’s wrong to think that open source would be less “efficient” than let’s say proprietary software.
And the best proof of that is Salesforce.com itself which uses open source software and virtualization to make its “multi-tennant” model work!
Another perfect example of the contrary is SugarCRM, a Salesforce.com “open source” competitor that also offer an “on-demand” solution. So what’s wrong with that?
Jean-Baptiste Su
Mark Boslet
