IT Troubleshooter | Harper Mann » May 2007

May 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)

M/S Patent Redux

TAGS: None

Mark Shuttleworth has the best take on the M/S patent situation. The real issue is patents themselves. They are bad for software innovation. The biggest challenge and the biggest benefit will be in innovating, not in protecting abstract assets. The trick is to occupy the vast headroom created by the explosion of innovation. For each abstract nexus you might want to protect, innovation moves right around it and expands outward. While you spend money and cycles protecting, everyone else is somewhere else so the sue strategy fails. It's time to get over patents, hook into the rocket boom in progress, and ride innovation for all it's worth, which so far is more than we can imagine...

Here's an example of a web site that is free making more money than competitors that are not free, so says Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal.

Posted by Harper Mann on May 24, 2007 08:35 AM

May 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

A Microsoft Pyrrhic victory?

TAGS: None

The deluge of media coverage surrounding Microsoft's "threat" to sue Linux users over patent claims got me to thinking on the matter. It also led me to the blogosphere, where two posts in particular rang especially clear.

I think it is not smart to sue, particularly because adversity seems to make software better. I remember when Unisys patented GIF. PNG was created and it's better. That's what will happen here if this silly suit comes about.

My advice to Microsoft - instead of a law suit, choose innovation. Microsoft should aggressively write software for other operating systems and make something amazing.

Jonathan Schwartz phrased it better in his blog where he advised...

"You would be wise to listen to the customers you're threatening to sue - they can leave you, especially if you give them motivation. Remember, they wouldn't be motivated unless your products were somehow missing the mark."

Untangle's CEO Bob Walters is convinced Microsoft will not sue for the following reasons...

1) Pyrrhic Victory - Most observers would agree that suing your best customers and partners is a risky strategy, especially where alternatives and anti-trust sentiment exists.

2) Armageddon - Some of the folks likely to be named in a suit (e.g., IBM) have formidable patent portfolios of their own. Even the lowly Free Software Foundation and Linux Foundation are not without resources. Would Microsoft want to risk a temporary injunction against Window or Office?

3) Brand - Just as Microsoft is getting some good press for their novel work in securing their products and embracing the web, they again don the cloak of the 'evil empire.' Today's threat is tantamount to pulling that cloak out of the closet; a law suit would rivet it firmly in place.

Bob also provides some conjecture as to what Microsoft is up to...

1) Show their shareholders (and themselves) that they are 'doing something' to monetize their IP portfolio and to combat the 'OS threat.'

2) FUD Linux/OSS users into thinking twice before further deployments.

3) Open a small revenue stream and, more importantly, a market share bump in key risk-averse segments (e.g., financial services).

4) Distract everybody: Take attention off the Vista compatibility debacle (and, to a lesser extent, the Office 2007 fizzle); Increase internal morale by (re-)defining an enemy to engage; Take employee and shareholder minds off the bigger and even-tougher-to-beat enemy - Google.

...And I thought 2007 was the year Microsoft was cozying up to open source.

Posted by Harper Mann on May 16, 2007 10:23 AM

May 11, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Searching for Intellectual Property

TAGS: Open Source

We're on yet another Intellectual Property search mission. This princess bride is pursued through the dread pirate "Open Source," mysterious and fell. How can you make money with Open Source? How can you create IP with Open Source? How to make and keep a hoard for your VC horde?

One avenue to Open Source profitability is symbiosis. For example, Red Hat recognized Linux had not been "socialized." You could get Linux for free, but since there was no support for it, using it required a "kernel hacker" skill set beyond most administrator's capability. Red Hat created installation tools like RPM and documentation so could be used. More recently, Mark Shuttleworth noticed Debian was high quality, but hard to use. He created Ubuntu, a socialized debian, which has been at the top of http://distrowatch.com/ for a very long time.

Groundwork did the same thing with Nagios by adding integration software, documentation, installation and support, and warranties so customers who are not early technology adopters can engage Open Source monitoring. This has been successful to the point of encroaching on the enterprise territory of the Big Iron monitoring tools like OpenView.

Still, there is worry here about whether we have IP, or if other people think we have IP, or where is the IP and so on. In the main, IP resides in the people who create IP. That's why it's called "intellectual." But there is a problem. Technical IP lasts for a very short time. IP no longer makes sense in static books or grand but dead document systems. And, IP is only useful in relationship to customers.

You can certainly use copyright laws to protect stuff you write. The problem is the technical data you write is in a static document with a shelf life of a few months at best. IP is only interesting in a live relationship to the technology and the people working with the technology. This is why Wiki is important. That's why forums are important. Technical people won't use books more than 2 years old, and often less. IP won't sit still. You need people for this. This is a permanent situation. The people have to provide updated to keep up with the changes. It's time to "think differently" about IP. You need blogs and Wikis and forums maintained daily by not only the companies engineers but, as importantly, the customers who are on the front line for IP. Technical IP is a relationship, not some static "thing."

Another problem is customers don't want to contribute code where they have to sign over IP. If they are interested in Open Source, they want their contribution to be Open Source. Soliciting for code that will not be GPL means you pretty much won't get any code. It's the openness of the source that attracts community.

So where can you "hoard?" I think you make money providing solutions. Solutions are not one thing and they are not static. You provide a solution to a customer's user story. Even if the solution is perfect, within months, the customer environment has moved on. Customers come back to you because your solution is dynamic and your smart people taken in the customer stories and moved the solution ahead to keep up with the changes. That's value worth paying for.

Posted by Harper Mann on May 11, 2007 12:52 PM

May 07, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Top Open Source Applications of All Time

TAGS: Open Source

Last week, eWeek ran a story listing the top open source applications of all time. Fun article.

The list is pretty comprehensive, and includes a lot of projects you'd expect to see- Apache, Firefox, MySQL. I'm also pleased to say two of the projects that I talk about frequently, Nagios and Eclipse, were among those chosen.

I think a few other projects not listed deserve a little recognition. Though they're not headline grabbers, they are powerful tools that are found within a lot of software solutions, both open source and proprietary.

RRDtool is a good multi-function tool that is useful for data analysis as well as clear and sophisticated reporting and data presentation. It has strong graphing capabilities and allows the user to write custom monitoring shell scripts or even create whole applications.

Can't forget about Ganglia, either. Leveraging proven technologies (including XML and RRDtool), Ganglia is a scalable monitoring tool designed to function in high-performance computing systems.

Also on my own personal list of the top open source projects is Subversion, an open source version control system, Red 5, the open source flash server, and the widely-known network file transfer tool, BitTorrent.

We're all attracted to "Best Of" lists. Any other open source applications you think should have made the list?

Posted by Harper Mann on May 7, 2007 09:52 AM