Late last week, BMC announced the hiring of William Hurley, the former CTO of Qlusters.On a recent webcast, Hurley said his new role at BMC would be to “architect an open source strategy that makes both BMC and the open source community at large successful; really forge the collaboration between the company and the community.”Regarding the BMC hire, Raven Zachary posted on 451 CAOS Theory his curiosity as to the reactions of other open source systems and network management companies. Well, Raven – below are the thoughts from GroundWork Open Source and Zenoss.GroundWork’s CEO Ranga Rangachari answers…“What an interesting turn of events! Continuing with the trend of legacy proprietary software vendors cozying up with open source (a la Microsoft), BMC is the first of the ‘Big 4’ – which also includes HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli and CA Unicenter – to make the bold admission that open source represents the future of systems and network management.” Zenoss’ VP Mark Hinkle writes…“BMC’s hiring of open source expert, ‘whurley’ just goes to show that even the largest enterprise systems management vendors understand that they need to look to open source to stay competitive going forward. It’s a positive sign to see them acquiring talent versed in the collaborative nature of open source. It should be a strong statement to any enterprise systems management user the direction the industry is headed.”So, what’s the right cliche here… The toothpaste is out of the tube?… The student becomes the teacher?…or…You can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Technology Industry