What I miss most of all is a license, which allows several people to collaborate on community projects.
And when I talk about openness I am not only referring to the code, but also to NetWeaver as a platform. Unless you work for a partner, a customer or in one of the few countries with a subscription, you cannot access the platform as a developer.

What if NetWeaver was made as accessible as WebLogic?
And what if you would combine that with a code library and SVN?

Secondly, with the advent of Saplink (also created mainly due to the vibrant SDN community) we now have the options of sharing and distributing code. Again, granted, not my (our your) employer’s code, which most employers have a legitimate intellectual right to under our contracts, but at least we have the tools and means for both developing and sharing “own” code, to an extent not seen until very recently within SAP.

As an example, there’s already the widget library; what about extending the SDN downloads section with a public library of (ABAP) contributions from the members? Granted, it would take some extensive house-keeping, since the mere dynamic of SDN and it’s contributors could rapidly drown it in a flood of contributions, but I’m sure it’s at least doable?

Looking at the amount of sample code already available (yet rather unstructured) in thousands of blogs and forum postings, I would imagine that such a library of relatively open-source SAP code, provided, tested and mutually enhanced by community members, could be just what many of us are looking for…?

As far as SAP is concerned, there is a “code library” – the one that is accessible via SE80. Granted, it’s not community-rated and public (only to SAP customers), but there you go.

For customers and partners (the Z* and Y* stuff) the answer looks slightly different. Here the answer to Tom’s question is “competitive advantage”. Why should businesses share custom applications and developments on a large scale with a community? These are applications that improve their business and can potentially give them leadership in their market.

I am all for sharing knowledge to make future apps faster, more secure and speed up development process, but I don’t think a lot of my clients would like it if I shared (their) code with other developers on a public platform. At least not under the current regulations that are in place, like Non-Disclosure Agreements, for example. In my view, openness doesn’t work in ALL areas of enterprise apps. It has to be decided on a case-by-case basis.

But the good thing I took away from Berlin was that there is definitely something happening – and changing !

Kind regards,
M