- Ignoring the source code is akin to an ostrich sticking its head in the sand
- Remember when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?
- My downloads is bigger than yours!
- It's all about working together
- Is that a real poncho or a Sears poncho?
- Open Source Outsourcing
- Outsource!
- Ask The Experts: It's What Project Leads Really Want
- Managing in the Open: The Next Wave of Systems Management
- Emerging management challengers to the Big 4
October 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Ignoring the source code is akin to an ostrich sticking its head in the sand
eWeek's Jim Rapoza recently released a slide show called 10 Things You Should Know About Open Source. I admit, I love lists and I love the perspectives laid out here. You'll need to visit the slide show for more info, but here's the list ...
1. Check the label
2. Not just for coders
3. Forks feed open source
4. You can ignore the source
5. GPL is not a social(ist) disease
6. Open source is no secret society
7. Open Source in Windows-friendly
8. Releasing the code isn't enough
9. Watch out for orphans
10. Dog the bounty hunters
As the notion of open source and its pros and cons permeate the market, I think numbers 2 and 4 are especially poignant.
Sys-admins and coders are not synonymous. Sys-admins may like to tinker and experiment, but they also need things to work, want somewhere to turn when things don't work, and are constrained by costs and time. Decisions are based on what solution solves their pain. We're shifting from a proprietary vs. open source discussion to a quality discussion.
Open source is hardly a "must have" in solving any and all aspects of IT. It's not the golden ticket for everything - take the desktop for example (ouch). In such instances, you can ignore the source. But in integration (like MuleSource)? Systems management? In these arenas, open source is causing a seismic shift that says sure, you can ignore the source code, but that's akin to an ostrich sticking its head in the sand. There's utility in the code. There's power. There's efficiencies for the taking.
Posted by Harper Mann on October 17, 2007 11:33 AM
September 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Remember when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?
If you have the chops, your open source software project should lead and inform your commercial product. Red Hat and Ubuntu have done this brilliantly. Fedora precedes RHEL. Feisty goes before supported Gutsy. Both companies have rabid communities who gobble new code and contribute back fixes and improvements. The developer communities are happy to get cool new stuff. The commercial guys get better fit and finish. The early users are often the production guys as well, so they value early experience and use it to influence the production code. It's a quality loop and better for everybody.
Success with this strategy is twofold. First, you need rank technical competence. The user community wants a deep conversation with you about your project. If you can't meet them as equals you won't get the product right. A working open source community is manna from heaven for a software company, but it has to be a conversation between technical peers.
Second, you need the community involved in the project from inception and they need to influence the project. Unilateral releases create adversarial relationships. Having users on the development team is one of the pillars of open source. When you engage early, you get "how can we get this cool thing to work" instead of a face-off. That's a great place to be.
As an aside, community involvement is one of the things GroundWork does particularly well. Look at GroundWork Connect, the new community support portal, announced just this week. The idea is that users provide feedback, the community pitches in, and there's plenty of discussion. It's in early stages still, but it's a good start.
It's EASY to make money with Open Source. You simply provide great technology, superior service, innovative documentation, good prices, honest sales and insanely great follow-up. The companies that get this are tomorrow's open source success stories. How many can you name?
Posted by Harper Mann on September 19, 2007 12:50 PM
September 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)
My downloads is bigger than yours!
My downloads is bigger than yours!
CNET's Matt Asay posted an interesting blog today titled The Open Source Volume Myth. I believe his post succinctly pulls the covers off the value of the download metric that many feel is the best barometer of success in open source. Maybe in certain instances, sure. But in commercial open source (which I loosely define as a company trying to monetize their particular open source business model), that dog won't hunt. Déja vu back to the late nineties when all the internet-related start-ups thought their future fortunes were linked to oodles and oodles of eyeballs. Remember the end of that story?
So, what beyond downloads? I've never thought Open Source changed the dance of commercial software. A customer needs more than bits. They also need packaging, docs, reporting, processes, services, community and support. The real trick is to get the software integrated into the twisty maze of customer environments, all different. At GroundWork, as with many "Open Source" companies, the open source "product" can be thought of as simply a demo--a fully functional demo, of course, and one that's customizable to meet your needs, but with no obligation to "buy up." You could build on it, and trick it out, but that doesn't make sense. Busy customers truly do not need to develop yet more expertise that's not core to their business. Customers buy the GroundWork "solution" which is in all aspects a enterprise software product. You buy "support" to get the commercial product. Fortunately, customers think GroundWork should be paid for value provided so it all works out.
Want to know if a company is successful? What are their revenues? What is their average deal size? How many paying customers do they have? Not to say there is no value in volume obviously, but to put the download metric on a pedestal is a mistake. Remember how "MIPS" used to measure processor speed? Don't let the marketing folks fool you. :)
Posted by Harper Mann on September 13, 2007 05:03 PM
September 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)
It's all about working together
Systems and network monitoring is often a second or third order concern in IT organizations. The team usually agrees it's a good idea, but never seems to quite get monitoring set up and, more importantly, embedded into the IT process so it's kept up-to-date. When monitoring is up-to-date, it completes an ideal quality circuit that provides not just accurate feedback about how IT and the team are functioning, but also advertises what the team has done for the company lately.
Unfortunately, monitoring is complicated. Most IT shops have purchased "big iron" monitoring tools that turned out to be larger projects than the IT team could bite off. Implementing the tools and integrating them with the systems to be monitored has a steep learning curve. Lots of these projects sit on the shelf waiting for the right kind of help to make large investments pay off.
Here's where open source tools and monitoring experts can make the difference. First, it's possible to get the core bits of the big iron running and stable. This is often the 20% that will give 80% benefit. Once the core is running, an open source solution, such as GroundWork’s, can be added to the mix quickly, easily and cheaply--efficiently integrating the target systems into overall monitoring with the big iron functionality. Quickly because the interfaces are open, easily because open source is easier to deploy through standard interface stacks like LAMP, and cheaper because it's open source.
So, add some open source to kick start that delayed big iron project. The business wins as it gets benefit from a stalled investment. You win with a flexible and expandable solution with more capability than was originally spec'ed.
GroundWork Open Source has several customers where this strategy has worked so well, they've expanded the engagement to cover more of their main data centers and expand to remote ones. They’ve found that open source integrated better with their existing commercial software than other commercial software.
Do you have any stories where integrating open source with commercial software worked for your customers? What tools have worked for you?
Posted by Harper Mann on September 13, 2007 09:54 AM
August 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Is that a real poncho or a Sears poncho?
Companies that respond to Open Source communities have the advantage: the old proprietary ways are over. IBM got this and has done well with projects like XCat and Eclipse. But, companies vary in their ability to participate in open source. Some companies aren't able to go beyond posting a demo on SourceForge. It's a demo for a commercial product because there isn't a community producing patches and product direction behind it. It's just a company calling itself open source for marketing gain without contributing to the community.
One sign of this is when the company moves the discussion forum for a project to a company web site instead of using one of the freely available public forums like SourceForge. The company wants control and leads--not a discussion. The user community, on the other hand, wants an open dialog. They spook easily. Witness the difference in downloads in a project where you have to enter you name and other info versus one that just allows you to download. The difference in downloads amounts to tens of thousand per month.
Dialog is critical today for a software company because software and the community it runs are no longer separate. This is the new landscape.
Posted by Harper Mann on August 27, 2007 06:25 PM
August 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Companies that are strong with the Open Source force gain code contributions and testing from their OS communities. This has become critical since feedback from users needs to be direct to the developers or feature requests get lost in the translation. When a bug has to travel from support -> operations -> marketing -> product management -> QA -> Eng management -> engineering -> coder, you get the telephone game effect. Avoiding this commercial vendor daisy chain is one of the underpinnings of Open Source projects that make them robust.
The smart software companies like Google and Red Hat know this and respond directly to their users. They have already made the mistake of not communicating and have suffered and learned. When you draw from the Open Source community, it’s like outsourcing in that you leverage the knowledge, interest and capability of the project team, rather than relying on yourself or our organization as the sole source of these. This is not the same as dealing with one-off tasks for customers (those that sap the energy of programmers, leaving them tired), because the Community’s stories and specs are more direct and closer to the true needs and capabilities of the users and developers engaged in the discussion. It's more efficient.
Posted by Harper Mann on August 16, 2007 04:16 PM
August 14, 2007 | Comments: (0)
I often see very smart programmers who are working hard but perhaps not so smart. It’s hard in they need to grind out code to get something done; it’s not so smart because they often code stuff a junior "code pig" could and would like to write. Why not hire someone and outsource the coding? This would relieve core smart people to address other problems.
Marketing guru Geoffrey Moore speaks of core vs. context, and recommends outsourcing anything that's not core. In an open source company, it’s important to define what the core activities are. I think there are several. The first is making sure you that you aren’t coding something that someone else in the open source community has already done. Another is making decisions and changes in project direction only after carefully discussing the changes with the core project team. Core is creating the design from the senior experienced engineers and context would be outsourcing as much as possible. Yet, many tech guys either can't engage an outsource team or are discouraged from doing so. What's up with that? And, what's the right mix today?
Posted by Harper Mann on August 14, 2007 01:36 PM
August 01, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Ask The Experts: It's What Project Leads Really Want
Project leads are good at a lot of things, like thoroughly understanding the ins and outs of their projects, keeping things on track, and getting problems solved. The downside of being so good at the job is that they become immersed in the details and demands of running their projects and spend less time face-to-face with the people who are using them (let's face it, email is not the same).
The people at GroundWork know the value of getting people together in person. For the second year in a row, they're sponsoring an Open Source Council, bringing together "lead developers from today's best-of-breed open source IT infrastructure and network monitoring projects" at LinuxWorld in SF, where they'll be able to talk in person, exchange ideas, and meet with users face-to-face.
The developers get a lot out of it. For instance, at last year's council, Matt Massie and Tobi Oetiker met in person for the first time, and discussed a change to the RRDtool database schema that would make Ganglia more efficient. Tobi returned to Switzerland, thought about it, and implemented the changes Matt proposed.
Plus, as a developer, I can tell you that there's a lot of value in meeting with users face-to-face. It's the best way to understand how your software is being used and what issues users are facing. And if you're a user, you can get answers from those questions you've been dying to ask, straight from the lead developer of projects like Dojo, Nagios, Cacti, and Ganglia.
You can "Ask the Experts" at LinuxWorld this year during the following activities: at hour-long "Ask the Expert" sessions throughout Tuesday, August 7 and Wednesday, August 8 at the GroundWork booth in the exhibits area (Booth 501) and at a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session at 6PM on Tuesday, August 7. Complete information about the Open Source Council, including the Ask the Expert schedule is here.
Posted by Harper Mann on August 1, 2007 03:45 PM
July 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Managing in the Open: The Next Wave of Systems Management
The 451 Group today announced a new report titled "Managing in the Open: The Next Wave of Systems Management." The main finding seems to be a recurring theme - "...the 'Big Four' systems management vendors (BMC, HP, IBM, and CA) are ripe for a shake-up from open source systems management players." For more info about the report, go here.
Gartner also touched on this theme back in April.
Open source network and systems monitoring and management vendors have been beating the drum with this message for a number of quarters. Customer traction and 3rd party analyst validation only strengthens their case.
Posted by Harper Mann on July 30, 2007 03:40 PM
July 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Emerging management challengers to the Big 4
Network World's Denise Dubie recently wrote an article on emerging management challengers to the Big 4 (HP, IBM, CA, BMC). In it, Will Cappelli, research vice president at Gartner, said "The biggest story around the big four...is how they will compete against Microsoft, Oracle, EMC, SAP and Symantec, which are moving more aggressively into the management market. This is already happening. Right now the big four still dominate the market, but have lost crucial domains to Microsoft and the Oracle domain is being challenged."
Denise goes on to ask the reader "Which large, established vendors could persuade you to forget about the big four and focus your infrastructure management investment elsewhere? And why? What about these vendors makes you think they can also tackle management better for your environment?"
I thought this would be an interesting question to pose to Michael Coté, RedMonk software industry analyst, and confessed systems management junkie. In addition to asking Coté, "Are companies such as EMC, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Symantec a threat to the Big 4?" I added a follow-up—"Do you think open source management / monitor firms will be gobbled up by larger players or play any part in this discussion?" Here are his thoughts...
"Microsoft is definitely a contender, though 1-3 years out. They're in year 4 of their 10 year plan. That said, their plan seems good. Once they ship a hyper-visor with all their OSes AND get that widely spread, things could get very interesting and in their favor.
"I don't know enough about Oracle to comment. I know they 'do stuff' in this area, but they're rarely at the top of my mind except in the ambitious area. The problem with application companies doing IT management is that they favor their stack instead being truly heterogeneous. Microsoft wrestles with this problem as you can imagine. IBM is an interesting exception, but they're such a mega-company that you have to look at their different software brands (DB2, Lotus, Rational, Tivoli) as being part of a holding company. While Oracle and SAP are huge, they tend to try and stick all their software under one tent/architecture ( i.e., Fusion and NetWeaver) rather than take the more loosely coupled approach that IBM does.
"Obviously, I think the open source folks, such as GroundWork, Zenoss, and Hyperic, have a chance to be one of these 'emerging management challengers' as well. I suspect that if/when one of them becomes successful, there'll be a lot more sniffing around for acquisition by one of the Big 4.
"EMC, by way of VMWare, is another interesting one. Whoever controls the majority of virtualization technology in the future will have a huge chance for doing a lot of IT management tooling. We'll see what happens post-IPO.
"Symantec is interesting, but I think they'd need to partner acquire, or be acquired by someone to fully built up their presence. They have mega-brand value in the mid-market with their Anti-Virus and Norton brands. That brand value could be extended if there was a good mid-market technology and execution.
"The major potential threat to IT management is a mass move to SaaS based applications. While it's sort of pie-in-the-sky, to my mind, the only 'real' thing holding back large enterprises from going SaaS is a culture change. If the collective pool of enterprise thinking suddenly thought that SaaS was OK, I could see lots of people switching over email, ERP, and other things. This is the sort of dream we have every 5 years or so (we called it 'ASP' and 'managed service' last), so we'll see how this go at it goes. The keys this time are (a.) getting companies to accept simple solutions rather than feature-ful ones, and, (b.) a possible generational shift in what 'IT means' once all the MySpace/FaceBook/WhizBang 2.0 people enter middle-management or, at least, start more heavily influencing IT spend."
Posted by Harper Mann on July 26, 2007 09:34 AM
July 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
I've picked up an interesting new book called The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. Aside from addressing the essential—yet rarely asked—question: what do you really want from life?, the book suggests that you can outsource parts of your life so you can be more efficient about delivering work results.
This has relevance to coders in a development group. I know some really good programmers who are tired. Really tired. They work at a start-up and service any and all requests from sales to fix customer problems. These requests arrive fast, furious, at random intervals and are basically one-off tasks that are customer specific.
While these tasks are great for staying "sticky" with the customers, scaling this kind of business is next to impossible. I'm sure this is always a trade-off in a product where the general cases are only so interesting to specific customers, but the custom work is just not scalable. It’s a staple for Open Source companies, because when the software is “free,” support services are often the most valuable product. So, how do you balance servicing customer requests directly but still capture general solutions that can be rolled into a product for general sale? Do you put your best programmers on the customer tasks or do you put them on the main product so you can evolve the foundation? How do you get the most bang?
Posted by Harper Mann on July 25, 2007 09:27 AM
July 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)
As I mentioned a few days ago, if you’re having trouble getting your software to talk to other software, you probably need to take a look at the culture of the company that wrote it.
If the company culture is a top-down hierarchical environment (and I’m not pointing any fingers), this could be the root of the problem in getting the software result you want. The top-down, hierarchical environment tends to stifle cross communication, which is inherently creative, and it can't avoid the "telephone game effect" where information goes through 12 people before whatever is left of the it arrives wherever it ends up.
What's needed is peer-to-peer communication, which reflects the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet and collaboration inherent in Web 2.0. Part of the reason that Open Source exists was the rise of the Internet and the breaking down of barriers between engineers at various companies. When they started talking, the Internet and all other software as well got better. Internet growth is driven by Open Source software that’s able to collaborate with other software. This is true of monitoring software as well--it has to be able to talk to the systems it's monitoring. So, next time your programs aren't playing nice at a customer site, check your organizational comm lines. They may need tuning!
Posted by Harper Mann on July 19, 2007 11:41 AM
July 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Software issues? Consider the source.
Software reflects the organization. The culture of a business vertical, the culture of the company doing the business, and the culture of the software engineering department within the company materially affect how software is designed, written, tested, deployed and maintained. Where software is involved, paying attention to the culture is absolutely critical.
Software is only as good as how it works within its production environment. One of the advantages of Open Source is its broader community with lots of feedback for how it functions in various environments with various users. Open Source engineers code defensively because they know their community, know they will need to provide enabling access to users and other programmers who will fit the project into their own needs. They know there is huge advantage to working together. Open Source projects are not successful if they are myopic. They have to be collaborative. This is in contrast to a "my way or the highway" attitude embedded into the big 4 monitoring tools.
What prompted me about this was kind of surprise. I was talking to a buddy at another small software company who was moaning about how hard it was to get his IT search engine tool to get logs from CA Unicenter. Sounds simple enough, but he spent 3 weeks back and forth with CA support trying to use the CA interface that would provide the logs and never got it fully working. My buddy is strong with the force technically. His product is a Java / Apache stack and promiscuous in its ability to pull data from logs, ports, etc. CA support tried hard to help him, they were great, but he couldn't get what he needed from Unicenter. What's up with that?
Posted by Harper Mann on July 16, 2007 05:11 PM
June 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)
CEOs Weigh in on Latest IDC Open Source Research
Last Thursday, IDC announced estimates that revenue from standalone open source software will reach $5.8 billion by 2011. In other words, according to Matt Lawton, program director of IDC's Open Source Software Business Models research program, the market is still immature ($1.8 billion in 2006) - and will see accelerated growth over the next five years.
I reached out to a number of CEOs who head up open source companies (or at least utilize a lot of open source in their technology) as well as some leading open source associations to get their reactions and insights regarding the IDC research... and what a great response I got! By the way, pardon any advertorials - there is some meat on these bones.
"The IDC report on Open Source software growth is a great indication of the overall strength in open source sales. Obviously, we at Sugar are true believers. What we see, however, is a significantly stronger demand in the enterprise for commercial open source software than indicated in IDC's numbers. Our own sales figures indicate a much more radical pull than this report suggests, and I'm willing to bet we're not the only open source company in this situation. The so-called 'next-gen' open source software products -- applications above the infrastructure stack directly touching the end-user -- are showing significant demand both domestically and internationally. Don't be surprised to see IDC revise its figures upward by this time next year."- John Roberts, CEO, SugarCRM
"In enterprise middleware, we're actually seeing open source entering a next phase in its evolution. The advantages of open source development and distribution methodologies are transcending the initial 'low cost' discussions and actually delivering features and functionality beyond what's available from proprietary vendors."- Dave Rosenberg, CEO, MuleSource
"Top tier analysts seem to agree that the stars are aligning for open source - not only from an adoption and revenue perspective - but as a serious threat to legacy proprietary players. First, in April Gartner released a report titled "Big 4 Management Software Vendors Face Competitive Threats" saying that HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter, BMC Patrol are being threatened by open source systems management vendors mainly because the 'Big 4' do not provide enough additional value to justify the magnitude more cost relative to open source alternatives. And now IDC's research indicates other interesting reasons for growth including 'financial backing from venture capitalists, more comfort with subscription revenue as a business model, and increased interest in OSS within larger enterprise organizations.' Incumbent proprietary players can no longer ignore or give lip service to open source - the writing is on the wall."- Ranga Rangachari, CEO, GroundWork Open Source
“The biggest 'sea change' driving the new market growth that IDC forecasts is the mainstreaming of OSS products in the mind of customers. To them, it's all just software after all, and buying decisions are made simply on product functionality (esp. ease of use), price, and the likelihood of quality support going forward. This mindset change plays right into the wheelhouse of OSS, and represents MAJOR progress and opportunity for open source vendors. Microsoft obviously is aware of the threat, given their recent flailing regarding patents!"- Bob Walters, CEO, Untangle
"The IDC numbers are a nice proof point for what we've been seeing around the globe and support what we're experiencing with our own business - an increase in adoption in both the Alfresco community and with subscription customers that has resulted in a 300% increase in revenues. We're also seeing that enterprise open source adoption is strongest in the United States with community and government partners thriving across Europe. In the UK, where Alfresco is headquartered, it's a bit different. Open source software deployments are fewer in number but with more offerings from companies like our own and these latest IDC predictions, we would expect that to change."- John Powell, CEO, Alfresco
"IDC's latest open source software research is further proof that open source is simply a better way to fulfill customer needs. While Linux has been a touchstone for the success of community-developed software, this research shows the wide and deep reach of open source software of all types. IDC's latest research tells us that Linux and open source software will continue to outpace proprietary alternatives."- Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, The Linux Foundation
"The IDC numbers reaffirm for us something we all know - open source software is growing because it solves real problems for customers. But to achieve the numbers IDC predicts and to push them even further, interoperability among open solutions must be paramount. The OSA has made this central to its mission and we're seeing the need for and benefits of addressing interoperability through increasing involvement in our projects. We're looking forward to being a part of the next level of adoption for open solutions."- Dominic Sartorio, President, Open Solutions Alliance
"The IDC report shows what our customers have been telling us - the horse is out of the barn for open source software. Open source software and licenses have bypassed procurement and spread rapidly throughout enterprises due to freely available downloads. Our enterprise customers are already using an average of 75 open source packages that cover a wide range of product categories. With the rapid spread of open source software, companies are now looking for ways to safely acquire, support and control open source software. Their desire to gain the rewards of open source, while managing risks, will be a key element in driving open source revenue in the next five years."- Steve Grandchamp, CEO, OpenLogic
"IDC's latest data is hardly surprising. No major barriers remain for deploying open source on a mass basis. I expect that the IDC predictions will be widely surpassed, as open source moves beyond early adopters to mainstream users looking for openness and value. Funambol is accelerating the adoption of open source by providing wireless carriers around the world with mobile email for the masses that is better, faster and cheaper than proprietary alternatives."- Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO, Funambol
"JasperSoft agrees that opens source software is in a significant growth stage. We know that successful open source projects, like JasperServer and JasperReports, are seeing enormous traction in the market and are multiplying their revenues each quarter. One reason is that open source can take advantage of emerging global channels and reach markets that proprietary solutions simply cannot."- Paul Doscher, CEO, JasperSoft
"The IDC numbers reflect a realization by the market that open source software is addressing the long-running frustrations customers have with proprietary software. A good part of the explosive (and non-stop) growth is due to the fact that the OSS model wasn't designed to help a single company, but rather an entire ecosystem: IT execs, CFOs, developers and end users. IDC calls this an immature market. Well, we've already seen the disruption this immature market has had not only on the software industry, but also on the industries it serves. Open source has the momentum of a freight train -- one I'm glad I'm on and not standing in front of like my proprietary competitors."- Gerald Labie, CEO, Open-Xchange
"Obviously the IDC numbers are indicative of the overall upwards trajectory of open source software. This is great news and helps to spread understanding about the strengths of open source. I'm concerned, however, that by focusing on 'standalone' software, IDC has missed what I consider to be perhaps the hottest growing segment within open source software: Software as a Service (SaaS). Call it 'on-demand,' call it 'portals,' call 'ASP,' even. This type of open source software usage is harder to measure but is having a dramatic impact on small- to medium-sized businesses, both for management that assesses and buys software and for end-users taking advantage of browser-based app use and development. I hope and expect IDC to cover open source SaaS in future reports."- Tad Gordon, CEO, Lumen Software
Posted by Harper Mann on June 4, 2007 01:35 PM
May 11, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Searching for Intellectual Property
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
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
April 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Gartner Jumps on the Bandwagon...
If one uses the "Shift Key" to spell out "Big 4"- he gets "BIG $."
Gartner recently released a report entitled "'Big 4' Management Software Vendors Face Competitive Threats" that discusses the growing dissatisfaction with the "Big 4" proprietary software vendors.
In this report, Gartner states that the "Big 4" (HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter, BMC Patrol) are being threatened by open source systems management vendors mainly because the "Big 4" do not provide enough additional value to justify the magnitude more cost relative to open source alternatives. In January, former HP Executive Nora Denzel foreshadowed just this:
"...Inflexible, expensive proprietary solutions from the 'Big 4' vendors simply do not provide enough additional value, in comparison to open source alternatives, to justify the magnitude more cost... I predict a 'draining the cost pool' for customers and a paradigm shift in the way they view management solutions. Big fish vendors will be pushed down to the deep end where they can add value while the adoption of best of breed open source solutions will lower the customer cost water line in the shallow end..."
In my opinion, the collection and correlation (or monitoring) of data has essentially become commoditized by open source and this is a good thing for customers.
This is the first time I've seen a Tier 1 analyst firm say (and quantify) that customer loyalty to the "Big 4" is fragile and that the "...OSM [open source management] industry appears to be a more immediate threat to the major IT management software vendors that have no intention (for now) of offering OSM products..."
More than half (55%, 106 responses) of recent survey respondents said they would consider open source alternatives to those offered by the "Big 4" (up from 29% in 2004 survey).
The report notes that while support was still one of the major impediments to OSM adoption, GroundWork Open Source, Zenoss, and Hyperic offer packages of management functionality along with maintenance agreements. The report also discusses the dissatisfaction of "Big 4" customers with the interoperability (or lack thereof) of their proprietary tools, functionality that is inherent to GroundWork's open source solution.
One more reason that the "Big 4" should keep an eye open to open source.
Posted by Harper Mann on April 17, 2007 11:34 AM
April 11, 2007 | Comments: (0)
There is a syndrome that has lately been plaguing the "Big 4" proprietary vendors.
I will call it the "Acquisition/Confusion Syndrome." It can be severely damaging, and anyone exposed to it is susceptible to infection.
The point of exposure occurs when a "Big 4" vendor acquires a smaller, focused start-up in the hopes of expanding their offerings to their customers.
It is shortly after this that the "Big 4" carrier becomes contagious and contaminates their customers, who begin showing symptoms almost immediately.
It starts with a feeling of claustrophobia, of being locked-in to a vendor, and the customer breaks into cold sweat as he is forced to dig deep into his pockets and cough up large sums of money for new, complex product offerings. When IBM acquired Micromuse, Tivoli announced the End Of Life (EOL) of their existing monitoring solution and began transitioning customers into their NetCool offering for an added cost. Customers were required to re-purchase the new NetCool/Micromuse technology rather than acquire it through an upgrade- essentially buying a new product altogether. Word on the street is that after HP acquired Mercury, they strongly "encouraged" their channel partners and end users to deploy the Sitescope product.
Then come the neurological symptoms- dissatisfaction, anger, confusion, and disorientation. IBM's and HP's customer base no doubt felt all of these as they were forced to spend more and learn a complicated, brand new product.
Even though the customers exhibit the brunt of the symptoms, the "Big 4" are not left unscathed, although the disease does have a longer incubation period on the vendor end. As their customers become sicker and begin to die out over time, these large, strong, monolithic vendors weaken and, eventually, risk complete economic paralysis.
But there is treatment.
Daily use of open source software, with its lower costs and higher flexibility, could ease the symptoms of ailing midsized businesses and, as a result, relieve some of the pressure from the "Big 4."
Open source could be the simple, effective, speedy cure for this growing epidemic.
Posted by Harper Mann on April 11, 2007 10:36 AM
March 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Every once in a while, I get wind of a "nutty" blog rant pertaining to open source - and the post I ran across today was top-shelf.
This poor blogger is being driven mad (you can just feel the anguish in the text) by colleagues, co-workers and customers who, out of ignorance, avoid anything non-Microsoft.
"...Here at the offices of FCGenius, we're afraid of the non-M$ world. We can't handle anything that has installation procedures more intense than "Next Next Next Next Finish." Oh, and we don't like anything that's (said with great disdain) 'Open Source'.See, if you buy food and they hand you the recipe and cooking instructions, there's obviously something wrong with the food, right? I mean, what possible benevolent reason could they have for such openness and honesty? The mind does boggle!"
His "devious" plan (to introduce the open source Nagios monitoring tool) may be his only shot at evangelizing the open source gospel...
"I'm thinking about lighting a candle instead of cursing the darkness (when I'd much rather light a flame-thrower), and trying to sneak in a Nagios implementation under the radar so I can go, 'Hey, why don't we use Nagios? We've already got it up and running,' and then show them the nice dashboard."
I'll be interested to see how this drama plays out.
Posted by Harper Mann on March 15, 2007 01:40 PM
March 14, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Peter Mui, the Open Source Community Advocate at GroundWork, was at Red Hat's worldwide launch of RHEL 5 today in San Francisco. He tells me Red Hat rented a theatre in the Metreon (in downtown San Francisco) for the introduction and flew out the "big honchos" from North Carolina for the launch and lunch.
At the launch, Red Hat also announced a new online marketplace called Red Hat Exchange or RHX for short, which goes live later this year. RHX is designed to be a single source for research, purchase, online fulfillment and support of open source and other commercial software business application stacks. The media was certainly interested - read about it here and here. More info at Red Hat's site here.
Many recognizable open source companies, including GroundWork, are part of RHX. Alfresco, MySQL, and Enterprise DB are also involved.
Given Red Hat's leadership with Linux, with RHX Red Hat could be in a position to become the Amazon of open source software.
That being said, will they offer free shipping during the holidays?
Posted by Harper Mann on March 14, 2007 04:33 PM
March 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The toothpaste is out of the tube
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?
Posted by Harper Mann on March 13, 2007 03:53 PM
February 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)
I work for GroundWork Open Source. At a recent company meeting, our CEO Ranga Rangachari gave an analogy regarding open source that was unique, a little humorous, but right on the mark...
"One could argue that hippos are a useful metaphor for large, ungainly, incumbent, legacy, monolithic proprietary software vendors.
There is another metaphor from the animal kington that describes quite a different approach by GroundWork.
Consider the Piranha.
By itself, a Piranha is almost harmless. One Piranha will never take down a hippo, for example.
But what happens if piranha school? They can and do gobble up the hippo. Though rare, it is happening...and happening successfully."
In the market for network and systems monitoring, GroundWork Open Source is pioneering a new business model built on marshaling more than 100 open source projects to attack an $8 billion industry. Some of these projects, such as Nagios and RRDtool are already well known. Others, such as Ganglia, are not. On their own, none of these projects offer a complete solution to systems and network monitoring and so are unable to seize much market share. But together, the sum is truly greater than the parts.
Stitched together so customers can use them easily, these projects solve systems and network management problems for larger and smaller companies alike, whereas HP OpenView and its hippo cousins are product overkill for all but the largest 2,000 enterprises in the world.
The Big 4 systems management vendors BMC, CA, HP, and IBM may want to keep a closer eye on the murky, muddy waters in which they wade.
Posted by Harper Mann on February 28, 2007 10:07 AM
December 19, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Developer's Perspective on Wasted Time With Proprietary "Support"
One of the most agonizing IT troubleshooting pains is when you experience problems with a black box technology, then find yourself held hostage by the proprietary vendor's support system. In an interesting blog entry, one of the core developers in the open source Mule project -- Travis Carlson -- outlines his frustrations with proprietary support in a previous job, and explains the immediate support upside that a customer experiences when they go open source:
"Before I discovered high-quality open source software like Mule, vendor support had always been a sore subject for me. I had been working on a large application integration project for a network backbone provider in Latin America. Our IT department had purchased a "market-leading" very expensive proprietary integration software, with a hefty ongoing "support & maintenance" fee attached to it.Of course, our first big support issue with the vendor surfaced as soon as we went about implementing their solution in our environment. It turned out that their JDBC connector did not fully support Oracle LOBs, which was an absolute necessity for our implementation. We filed a support request, and they eventually acknowledged the issue, but would not be able to provide a serious patch for about 4 months. Our system needed to be in production within 3 months, so we ended up developing an ugly workaround ourselves, which then, by the time the patch finally came out, remained in production for fear of "introducing entropy" into a system which had already gone through the Acceptance Testing phase (sigh).
And then there was the issue of wasting developers' precious time dealing with our vendor's support personnel.
If you've ever dealt with support from a large-scale vendor, you know how it goes. The first-level support guy often actually has less knowledge of the product than you do since you've been working with it day-in and day-out for weeks. Then the second-level support guy might have the same amount of knowledge about the product as you, but of course has no knowledge of your organization, IT environment, or business use cases. And then the third-level support (engineering) is generally inaccessible ("those guys should be insulated from support requests"), so you're left with filing an issue. At some point in time the engineers will eventually work on a patch, but the whole process (like the software itself) is a black box.
Once I discovered the alternative: enterprise-class open source software, which for Application Integration means Mule, the whole story changed.
With Mule, you have all the source code, and not just a periodic "export" of it, but the actual, bleeding-edge development tree. In addition to this, you have the JIRA database of outstanding issues, tasks, and new features. What that means is that if you want to know if any progress is being made on an issue, you can "watch it" in JIRA to see anyone has assigned it to him/herself, whether it's currently "In Progress," you can read comments by developers or other users on the issue, and comment on it yourself, which means a direct line of communication with the developer who is/will be working on the issue. You can check out the source code from Subversion and get updates as often as you want to see if anything has changed. And if you run into a deadline like we did with the Oracle JDBC issue, you can just fix the issue yourself in the actual source code, avoiding bottlenecks in your project timeline, get it into production, and then submit the fix to be incorporated into the next official Mule release, which will help make Mule a better product, make other Mule users happy, and generally make the world a better place.
To people new to open source development, the idea of delving into the source code often sounds daunting, but if you already know what is going wrong, you'll often find that the fix is simply adding an "if (var != null)" check. Now why should you have to speak with 3 levels of support and wait months for that???
And speaking of users, you have a whole community and "ecosystem" of Mule users and integrators to tap into when you get stuck. Chances are, someone in that community has already encountered the same issue as you and can offer some advice. Of course, no one has more knowledge of a piece of software than the team who actually wrote it, which is why the community is not a replacement for the level of professional expertise MuleSource can offer you, but the community does provide orders of magnitude more feedback than any proprietary vendor ever could. And since Mule can be used to integrate just about anything under the sun (not Sun, but yeah, that too :-), if you have a very obscure use case (trying to use Mule to integrate your old DEC mainframe with load-balanced web services using a custom TCP protocol via the serial port, eh?), the user community is going to be your best resource (try getting feedback from a proprietary vendor on that one!)"
Posted by Harper Mann on December 19, 2006 04:04 PM
December 19, 2006 | Comments: (0)
For that special sys-admin on your holiday gift list...
Nagios is a very popular open-source host, service and network monitoring program that helps streamline network monitoring tasks while reducing the cost of operation. According to the Nagios project site, Nagios is currently in use monitoring more than 900,000 services and 195,000 hosts worldwide.
Taylor Dondich, who is the project lead for Guava - which enhances the presentation layer for Nagios -- recently published a book through O'Reilly titled "Network Monitoring with Nagios. The book serves as a shortcut guide / primer covering installation and usage of Nagios as well as how to extend Nagios with other tools to extend functionality. A quick read at 59 pages, it's a handy guide not only for those who have deployed Nagios in their IT environment, but for those considering using open source for their IT infrastructure monitoring needs.
Network World senior editor Denise Dubie recently did a nice QA with Taylor about his background with Nagios, why he wrote the book, and how open source stacks up with its "commercial brethren."
At $9.99, show a little love to your overworked sys-admin and introduce him to the wonderful world of Nagios.
Posted by Harper Mann on December 19, 2006 09:29 AM
December 18, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Open Source Monitoring 101- A Refresher
It's been an exciting year for IT infrastructure monitoring, especially with regards to open source tools. I figured it couldn't hurt to end the year with a quick recap of some of the popular ones that I think deserve recognition. Keep these projects in mind when thinking of IT infrastructure and network monitoring solutions in the coming year.
Data Gathering
The very base level of monitoring. A well-liked data gathering and collection tool is Colletcd, a small daemon that collects system information and writes this information into database files that can be used to generate graphs of the collected data.
Data Storage
RTG is a data storage tool that is designed to allow service providers to rapidly collect large amounts of time-series SNMP data and insert it into a database. syslog-ng provides a secure, platform-independent, centralized log of network devices, and can filter based on message content and customize data mining and analysis.
Data Analysis and Presentation
Some people underestimate the importance of the presentation layer - without the appropriate visibility into network issues, it is easy to miss crucial factors. RRDtool, which I can't say enough about, is a good multi-function tool that is useful for data analysis and provides clear and sophisticated data presentation and reporting options. It has strong graphing capabilities allows users to write custom monitoring shell scripts or even create whole applications.
Data Management
MySQLAdmin is a solid data management and archival tool and can be used to perform a variety of organizational administrative functions, including database creation and server status and configuration checks.
There are also several popular tools that I've mentioned before that span categories - to name a few, Nagios, a popular open source host, service, and network monitoring program and Cacti, a network graphing solution that provides clear and sophisticated graphing capabilities.
The maturity and traction of these tools signify that open source is a viable alternative to proprietary solutions. In 2007, I'd like to see open source monitoring better tackle the issue of scalability, as environments (and the number of devices that need to be monitored) continues to swell in the mid-market.
Posted by Harper Mann on December 18, 2006 05:41 PM
December 08, 2006 | Comments: (0)
MRTG and RRDtool Creator Receives 2006 SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award
I wanted to give kudos to Tobi Oetiker for receiving the 2006 SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award for the creation of the Open Source Software tools MRTG and RRDtool at the LISA event in Washington DC this week.
MRTG and RRDtool are freely (as in freedom and in free beer) available software tools for the collection and graphical display of time series data and are mainly deployed to monitor computer networks and network traffic. Disclosure - RRDtool is integrated into our GroundWork Monitor Professional IT infrastructure monitoring solution and Tobi sits on the Open Source Council we launched in August at LinuxWorld.
SAGE (the USENIX special interest group for sysadmins) had some nice things to say about the project and the developers.
"Before the creation of these tools, the only people that could reap the benefits of long-term, historical statistics gathering were people with multimillion dollar budgets. MRTG and RRDtool democratized, and therefore popularized, historical data collection. As a result, network utilization planning has gone from being guesswork to a fine art. These tools have also been leveraged to track a wide array of resources ranging from disk I/O stats to CPU and memory usage to license server data.
Thanks to Tobias, Dave, and their team, system and network administrators are no longer limited to fire-fighting when our resources are overloaded. We can now easily access network and system data in an intuitive form to predict and plan for upgrades months in advance."
Check out the tools if you get a chance - great functionality, thriving community.
Posted by Harper Mann on December 8, 2006 10:19 AM
November 20, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Open Source and Appliance Software Delivery Open Up New Worlds for Small and Medium Enterprise IT
I just read that 95% of IT folks are happy with their jobs.
But when you start to scratch the surface, a lot (87% in fact) of IT people are still working nights and weekends.
Luckily, I bet the percentage of happy people in Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) IT will be increasing, and the percentage of people working overtime will be decreasing.
Why?
Because enterprise-grade IT management software is finally making its way down to the mid-market.
Basically, I see two major driving factors.
Open Source
First, we see a lot of open source products that are carving out territory that used to be dominated by the big expensive IT management firms like HP, CA, IBM and BMC (sometimes called "The Big 4"). Previously, smaller companies would either have to shell out the big bucks to purchase a solution by one of these firms designed for a larger enterprise (and deal with the accompanying feature bloat and inflexibility) or try to have the IT staff monitor their network manually, an arduous process. Open source allows companies to use less expensive, but still robust, products to do things like network monitoring that used to require a lot of time, money, and energy on the part of the IT staff. GroundWork is good example of this in the IT monitoring space.
Appliance-based Software Delivery
For SME's that do decide they want to go the proprietary route, there is also a growing trend for proprietary software to be delivered via an appliance. Forget Software as a Service (especially for IT Management). Many IT folks in mid-market companies are beginning to realize they now can get some pretty heavy duty IT management software that's installed on an appliance inside their firewall. The advantage of appliance-based delivery is that it's easy to use, and because support is cheaper, the cost is cheaper than traditional software. KACE and Levanta are two companies that come to mind that are tackling this space.
Whether through open source, appliance-based delivery or other distribution methods, I look forward to seeing my IT friends a lot more at weekend BBQ's.
Posted by Harper Mann on November 20, 2006 01:26 PM
November 14, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Working With Open Source Developers and Communities
Over the past few years, the amount of VC money pouring into the open source world has exploded. And I have had, at times, lingering concerns about how this money would be spent by the start-up vendors. I was hoping this wouldn't lead to the excessive spending and burn-rates of the late 90's.
But I have to say, it's been a very pleasant surprise to see open source vendors using their VC capital in creative ways to help developers and projects. As a result, developers have more incentive...and more input! Projects are getting better information from their users. And integration between various projects is getting easier as different project leads are given the chance to work with each other.
This was certainly true last week during the Monitoring SIG, organized by GroundWork Open Source in conjunction with BayLISA, the Bay Area's Large Installation Systems Administrators chapter. As I've mentioned before, network monitoring is complicated - so many of the IT operations directors appreciated this forum where they could work together to brainstorm, storyboard and plot the future path of development.
Another example of a creative open source community program is the OpenLogic Expert Community program. You might recognize OpenLogic as the open source management vendor that also provides support and indemnification on 160+ open source projects. In May, OpenLogic made some headlines because it said it would pay open source developers for 3rd tier support - and pay them with Xboxes upon request (this request was apparently not OpenLogic's idea - the idea came from the lead developers themselves).
Yet another example is from Funambol, the largest wireless open source project, which recently announced an innovative program called the Phone Sniper community program. This program provides incentives and recognition to community members for testing cell phones' ability to receive wireless data. Because of this program, already 150 phone models have been tested - which makes carrier open source adoption much more of a reality down the road.
So kudos to the organizations who are using their VC funding creatively and working closely with open source developers and communities - in the end, it's helping open source software take on some of the biggest IT challenges we face today.
Posted by Harper Mann on November 14, 2006 10:18 AM
July 17, 2006 | Comments: (0)
SmokePing Adds Great Latency Measurement to the Open Source Monitoring Equation
A few months ago, I wrote about Tobias Oetiker's MRTG and RRDTool services -- which are really leading the charge in collecting / visualizing network monitoring data.
Another tool by Oetiker and his colleagues that's seeing a lot of traction these days is SmokePing, a latency measurement tool that uses RRDtool as the database and graphing back-end.
Usually, networking pros use pinging as a diagnostic approach. You experience a problem connecting with a service or machine on the network, so you go into command line, and you try to ping that location. If it answers, then you know that at least the network parts are communicating with each other, and you can use that information as one of the preliminary data points for figuring out the source of the problem.
With SmokePing, you can set up different locations on the network to be pinged at the time intervals you specify. With the great graphing / visualization capabilities of RRDTool, you can see over time what the latency is at different points on the network. And you can easily set up alarms correlated with certain thresholds, and by consolidating your different pings, you get a more cohesive / manageable view of all your different latency measurement points in one place.
There are other types of open source ping tools out there -- such as the popular check-ping in Nagios. But I've been finding the SmokePing service to be extremely easy to set up and maintain, and the great graphing capabilities have made it the current leader in open source approaches to pinging services, in my opinion. It's definitely worth checking out if you're seeking an easier way to track latency trends across your network.
Posted by Harper Mann on July 17, 2006 06:14 AM
July 06, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Keeping Tabs on Open Source Mixing and Matching
The degree of choice and customization that open source affords is one of the key selling points that sets it apart from proprietary solutions (every bit as appealing as the lower cost of acquisition, from many organizations' perspectives).
But when organizations start mixing and matching different open source technologies, they find that "open" doesn't necessarily mean "interoperable" -- and incompatibility between different open source technologies can take down systems just as easily as interoperability issues between different proprietary products can take down systems or applications.
"With open source projects we can sometimes get seduced by their promise and skim over the effort it takes to get it all to work together, the license issues for dozens of applications included in a particular stack, or even the complexities of mixing open source with proprietary and commercial software," according to Steven Grandchamp, CEO of OpenLogic, a company that provides software and support to help enterprises manage open source. "Often different teams, groups or divisions are using very different sets of open source solutions. Large companies often don't know where it is, how it's used, or what license it is under."
In the Windows world, Microsoft has a great deal of control over their operating system, database tools, software. While that doesn't mean that there aren't common failures and problems -- there is a single point of control over the discreet components. Today's news that Microsoft was taking efforts to interoperate with ODF was an interesting example of how a proprietary vendor's customers can pressure that vendor to create better interoperability with open source solutions.
In the open source world, typically there is no single point of control, and no assurance that one technology will work with another. People generally start out with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell SUSE, or another popular Linux distro. Then they go onto the open Internet and start playing with individual open source projects (on SourceForge, there are currently more than 122,000 registered open source projects).
Over time, an organization can accumulate a ton of different open source technologies under its umbrella, and when incompatibility issues start popping up, the user often doesn't know who to call when a system or application goes down. Further, the company likely does not have a very disciplined understanding of all the different license restrictions on the open source technologies they're using, which introduces new liabilities in an audit scenario.
The point isn't to induce a sort of hand-wringing anxiety about open source use in enterprise. Open source is a fact of life today, and ultimately these interoperability issues are much easier to solve between open source solutions than they are between proprietary solutions.
With the news that Sun is open sourcing Java, we're going to see the open source integration and compatibility issues continue to become more complex. As Sun exec Rich Green said in a CNET Q&A that ran today, "Java is more advanced than, I think, any other open-source software in terms of compatibility testing, the availability of (testing suites) and other things like that." So what does that mean for the organizations whose employees start tinkering around with open source Java, and building new applications with complex dependencies on the JVM?
When Red Hat announced earlier this year that it was kicking off its own open source certification efforts, a lot of media outlets suggested it would be the death of the crop of start-ups that are addressing compatibility and certification for open source stacks. But I think with the degree of customization that takes place with open source adopters -- and the sheer volume of open source point solutions being adopted -- the complexity of keeping a handle on these systems will support a pretty large ecosystem of vendors like OpenLogic, SpikeSource, SourceLabs and the like.
Posted by Harper Mann on July 6, 2006 01:35 PM
June 15, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Open Source As Much About The People As The Code
One of the most interesting (and relatively subjective) business discussions in IT today is around what exactly constitutes "Intellectual Property" in open source start-ups.
From the VC perspective ... before delivering a term sheet to a potential open source start-up, it's about crossing off potential risk areas at every step of the way. Can the company build a product around the technology? Is there a market for the product? How do you market it, scale it, execute on the plan? Are the multipliers on the original investment attractive enough to justify the investment risk? These are all the sorts of well-known questions that the VC's examine, pre-investment.
But the muddier waters are around the personalities and commitment of the engineers who created the code. How long do they intend to stay? What is their level of commitment? These are fuzzy types of questions - but we know from history that when the core team of engineers that best understands the code up and walks out ... it tends to send a company into a death spiral.
At that point the company must find new developers / engineers that understand the technology, and it can take months and months for them to decipher from a code perspective how the product works -- meanwhile, no one's at the wheel with respect to evolving the product to keep ahead of the competition. You basically have complete technological stasis when key engineers leave, and often there's no recovering.
"The code without the people is worth nothing," according to Phillipe Cases, partner at VC firm Partech International. "A million lines of code is like a million problems that you have to solve. So the risk on any open source investment project is that the 2-3 guys that created it and maintain it could leave. The commitment of the developers is often the IP -- not the code itself."
And this doesn't just apply to tech start-ups and their VC's ... it applies to big companies that acquire open source start-ups. If you acquire the company, only to have the core engineers split after a short period of time, what's your return going to be on that acquisition? Just ask Computer Associates, who shortly after acquiring Ingres, experienced a 'mass exodus' of developers immediately thereafter, and from there certainly struggled to pick up the pieces and profit from the acquisition.
Posted by Harper Mann on June 15, 2006 07:38 AM
March 29, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Continuing Open Source Stack Troubleshooting
Next week LinuxWorld Boston will be hosted at the Boston Convention and Exhibits Center. It's a great chance to pick up on the thread of troubleshooting Open Source stacks. There are several tutorials and talks at LinuxWorld that you probably will want to check out if you're working with Open Source technologies in your data center. Here are some of the sessions I'll be attending.
- 1. Patrick McGovern will be conducting a Hands on Lab on Working with Log Files.
- 2. Alan Boda will be presenting a detective's delight, finding the root cause of a Linux system crash.
- 3. Anil Vasudevan and Kevin Cassidy of Intel are covering a cool new way to optimizes the data movement across all elements of the server including the CPU, chipset, network controller, and operating system software.
- 4. James Schweitzer of IBM's Global Services will be discussing Linux Enterprise Provisioning, Management, and Monitoring.
- 5. I will be hosting a talk about Troubleshooting Linux and the Open Source Software Stack.
If you've found an interesting session you're attending email me at thebaum@splunk.com.
Posted by Michael Baum on March 29, 2006 11:12 AM
March 08, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Where to Start Troublshooting Your Open Source Stack
I've received a number of emails on the chatter about certified Open Source stacks versus specific Open Source deployments. Which ever direction you decide to go you will need the ability to figure out what is going on with all those Open Source stack components. As a primer you'll need to understand what's happening at the base of the stack starting with the operating system.
Today I ran across a handy resource for beginners and experts alike to help you understand where to begin troubleshooting problems with Linux. This is a guide to basic, and not so basic troubleshooting and debugging on linux systems. The guide includes suggestions on where to start diagnosing problems, description and usage of common tools, how to find information, and what to do with that information.
Check it out, its a great resource on the facilities and tips and tricks to troubleshooting Linux.
If you have other favorite resources for Linux troubleshooting write me at thebaum@splunk.com.
Posted by Michael Baum on March 8, 2006 03:20 AM
February 18, 2006 | Comments: (0)
I thought the whole point of Open Source is that you can make it what you want? I just finished reading Neil McAllisters column A slim market for certified open source?. I have to agree with Neil and his assessment that certifying Open Source stacks may seem appropriate only for customers that dont really care about price. Which brings into question whether someone who does not care about price is a consumer of Open Source technologies and applications in the first place.
But I think Neil misses a number of other points about what makes Open Source so appealing to enterprises. It is not just price. I asked Patrick McGovern who ran SourceForge.net for five and a half years about the issue of Open Source appeal to corporate customers.
Cost is certainly one reason why corporation turn to Open Source, but I don't think it's an exlusive one. Often the products work better their commercial competitors and more often then not, the community based support is better as well. But of course the beauty of Open Source for lots of enterprises is you can make it what you want, not what someone else wants.
Here the certification of Open Source stacks may not have much appeal. The likelihood that my stack will be similar enough to your stack could be pretty slim indeed. When I first heard about companies like SpikeSource and SourceLabs I was pretty jazzed. I figured they would build me the stack of my choice, built to my specs. Then they would test it and certify it -- all with a turnkey service -- sort of like Amazon.com for Open Source software. Unfortunately, for me anyway, it seems like their business has taken both companies in a different direction.
Of course troubleshooting your own Open Source stack is a great topic for the IT Troubleshooter and I'll be covering more of this soon.
Is there a market for a standard, certified Open Source stack or is that something I just get for free from the Open Source community?
Feel free to write me with your thoughts at thebaum@splunk.com.
Posted by Michael Baum on February 18, 2006 08:50 AM
January 10, 2006 | Comments: (0)
When Problems Don't Really Get Fixed, Do They Just Go Away?
Have you ever wondered after rebooting a device, server or software creating nasty errors whether the problems go away just because the errors disappear?
It seems with all the complexity of modern systems we often focus on only removing the violation rather than finding and fixing the root cause. I'm sure like me, you wonder, will the problem come back? Will the problem manifest itself in another way, when I least expect it. Is the problem a symptom of a larger issue? It is so hard just to get rid of the error that we often give up or run out of time solving the real root of the problem. Too many times, we just push the problem off to someone else.
This post about Wordpress and MySQL errors reminded me this can happen even in fairly simple systems as well.
If you have a great story about never getting to the root cause, write me at thebaum@splunk.com.
Posted by Michael Baum on January 10, 2006 09:05 PM
