More on SW Ecosystems (long)

In this article, the author presents ecosystems as consisting of the partners that surround and support a software package. In this blog posting, the author presents several different components of open source ecosystems, including ISVs and other downstream firms. In yet another article, Business Week includes customers, stack aggregators such as SpikeSource, and (to some degree) the VCs. In a typically comprehensive fashion, Gartner defines an open source ecosystem explicitly as

the set of policies, processes, individuals and organizations that can influence, support, staff, finance, train, and educate users and developers of a community for the purpose of making it self-sustainable over a period of time that is compatible with the life cycle of technology investments for the user community.

Finally, Forrester Research says that

"An open source ecosystem is emerging that serves the same functions as a traditional software company — but through multiple organizations. In the past, your software supplier would supply the software, support, maintenance, training, and consulting. The new open source ecosystem provides these services through communities, companies, consortia, and other means. As a result, customers have access to the same services they are used to from traditional suppliers, but they have to understand how to make the open source ecosystem work for them." (note: I do not have access to these Forrester reports as they costs $795 which is not in my budget. However, slides corresponding this first link can be found here.)

Forrester also says that

An open source ecosystem is emerging, however. Though this open source ecosystem is made up of many new types of organizations, such as communities and consortia, the organizations deliver the same four functions as closed source vendors: product development, distribution, services, and marketing. This map of open source players will enable firms to follow a practical approach to build their own open source ecosystem to suit their software needs.

All these quotes leave me with the impression that (a) there is something to the concept of an ecosystem in open source and more generally, in software, (b) the ecosystem concept must include a wide range of participants/units/members/etc., and (c) there is a lot of resource flow in a healthy ecosystem but measuring it will be a hot mess. And I'm just the man for the job.