The fieldbus wars are at their peak
All are agreed 'tis what we seek
The basic cause of all the fuss
The Users want an Open bus
They push and threaten, beg and plead
"Interoperable" is what they need
The widgets made by Vendor A
With Vendor B must plug and play
The Vendors swear they all agree
But just can't bear to make it free
An open door will throw away
Their value-core and make it gray
Proprietary will be gone
To hordes of hungry hangers-on
So the marketing guys they scheme and plot
To make it Open, but really not
To make the User think it works
While hidden deep their secret lurks
I'll tell you what, says Vendor A
Let's all agree on how we play
Lets make it Open at the top
Closed in the middle for secret slop
And Open at the bottom too
For hungry hangers-on to chew
And everyone can now connect
To Open bus, while we collect
Proprietary margins in the mid
A brilliant marketing coup we did!
So Vendor A then did declare
An Open Vendors Club to share
Their deepest secrets together lumped
The horde of hungry hangers on they jumped
But then to add to this strange mess
From the other side comes Vendor S
With their horde of hungry hangers-on in tow
They have their own P-bus to show
Since they owned the bus, they had most to win
They could simply say it was "Open!"
The moral of this ditty is
To understand the fieldbus biz
You've gotta read between the lines
That Open and Closed are just designs
That Users all for Open plead
When Inter-op is what they need
Defacto standards win all debates
Ask Microsoft and Mr. Gates
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Read The Fieldbus Quadrille, the dance of
the "open" networks.
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