Blogs at 10 paces as ITIL service catalogue vendors shoot it out on the web

A spat breaks out in the service catalogue vendor community. As Len Beadell said when he ran out of all water in a broken down Jeep deep in the Australian desert hundreds of kilometres from the nearest help, "This should relieve the monotony".

Andrew Cramer of PMG fires a broadside pretty clearly aimed at newScale. He raises some points that may be valid, but they aren't new. newScale have been running an "open source" page for ages. So why now? And why so heated?

I don't normally quote from other posts, but this is America, so before the inevitable legal leeches get involved and it gets taken down, Andrew's post said

IT people are too smart to fall for an "open source community" that is A. owned and run by a proprietary software vendor, and B. provides no "open source" anything, and C. Fakes being an open souce community to create a discussion board that is scraped for software and consulting sales leads. So, when this doesn't work, what other follies might one try to trick you? I know, write a book. In case you have read the ITIL v3 books three times because you were just enthralled with the action-packed drama and powerful business dogma they contain, you just have to have a $59 book written by the, you guessed it, the very same vendors who host the "open source service catalog community." Cards on the table, I'm a vendor too. Perhaps I'm jealous of my very creative colleagues. In truth, they are very experienced in this space and I applaud their efforts to educate folks truly trying to learn about this topic. How about we do this in a more open, honest, and free way? C'mon, we all have blogs and our own websites, we don't need to resort to Service Catalog follies now do we?

Maybe it has to do with a recent post by Rodrigo Flores of newScale, which was not so much a broadside as a casual drive-by pot-shot.

There were a lot great sessions on service catalogs at ITSMF Fusion last week, but a couple bothered me. One, by a vendor who shall remain nameless, was just plain wrong. Self-service is cool, but it's not a complete ITIL v3 catalog or portfolio. The recommendations on running a project are unlikely to work, their approach is more like to result in lack of adoption.

I'll take sides on this one. Rodrigo is a respected blogger (Page Rank 3), who is an active participant in the online community. newScale make no secret of who runs their "open source" site. They make the same mistake I often do of calling it "open source" when it is in fact "open content". It may be mis-named but it isn't fake. If you can see past your technology fixation for a moment you can see that the site is what it says it is, and popular with it. newScale do in fact give away content under the Creative Commons licence and encourage others to do so on a most useful site.

In the other corner we have Andrew's blog, PR zero, which gets posts more than once a year. PMG encourage no community but they do give away Word and Excel templates. You need to register but of course those registrations are never "scraped for software and consulting sales leads". Methinks one kitchen vessel is accusing another kitchen vessel of carboniferous discoloration.

"Perhaps I'm jealous of my very creative colleagues". Yup, I think so Andrew.