- Zmanda throws down with Veritas
- OpenLogic: Not your father's stack provider
- MySQL builds BI into its stack
- UK reaffirms its stance on software patents ("Yankee patent system, go home")
- Uncertifiable Linux
- $1.89 billion in open source funding (CBR)
- HP: $25 million EMEA revenue directly related to Debian
- Great Gmail hack for archiving
- But MySQL is not a real database...
- Open X-change lands super-size deal
February 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Zmanda throws down with Veritas
I spoke with Zmanda CEO Chander Kant last week about the company's growth and some new things they have been working on. I first met Chander at the MySQL conference about a year ago. Since then the company has expanded its support for MySQL and is now starting to target other applications like Oracle and SAP.
Today Zmanda announced a program that I think is an interesting marketing move.
Beginning March 1st and through April 15th of 2007, the leader in open source backup Zmanda will offer existing Veritas NetBackup customers the ability to switch to its brand new Amanda Enterprise Edition 2.6 with Zmanda Management Console for free!Simply show your Zmanda Account Manager the current renewal quote for Veritas NetBackup and Zmanda will set you up with a year long subscription including software and support for Amanda Enterprise 2.6. Yes, its that simple - just like installing and using our products.
There are two aspects of this that I like:
1. By calling out Veritas they make it clear who they compete with, rather than just saying backup
2. Since the support infrastructure is already in place the incremental cost associated with doing this is very low. And once you start using the management console it's unlikely that you would swap it out for an expensive solution from Veritas.
Chander tells me the management console is very different from the other backup vendors--typically these consoles are Java-based and very heavy. The Zmanda console is browser-based and takes advantage of other web properties. They will also soon publish an API for Amanda for 3rd party developers to do direct integration.
Previously:
Zmanda-Open Source Data Protection
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on February 28, 2007 08:16 PM
February 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)
OpenLogic: Not your father's stack provider
I spent some time talking with Steven Grandchamp, CEO of OpenLogic, today, and am very glad I did. I've been operating under a two-years old understanding of OpenLogic's business, and it's time for an upgrade.
OpenLogic is not a "stack provider." Rather, it provides a gateway to a high-quality library of open source projects, certified to work together, with the ability to apply and enforce policies around adoption and deployment of those projects.
Interestingly, OpenLogic's technology isn't solely applicable to open source. It actually allows enterprises to extend the OpenLogic library with open source or proprietary modules (applications/databases/whatever) that they prefer. Enterprises, for example, may be an Oracle shop, and don't want to allow their engineers to deploy MySQL, PostgreSQL, Ingres, or whatever. They could pull out the open source databases and hook in the Oracle database, such that internal users will only be able to apply the corporate policy around Oracle adoption.
I asked Steven how enterprises determine that they need OpenLogic at all. Typically, enterprises don't come to OpenLogic with a particular project in mind. Rather, open source has already found its way into the organization, and it's trying to find a way to effectively manage the open source IT that's already there.
(I've told many the story before about a trip down to Austin to speak to the IT workers of the State of Texas. The general counsel spoke before me, and cautioned everyone to avoid open source until they had a policy in place. When she left, I asked for a raise of hands of people already actively using open source within the State. ~85% of the hands went up.)
So, the enterprise has a choice when confronted with unchanneled open source adoption: they can rip it out (because they don't have SLAs for the open source software, or may have policies that mitigate against its adoption), or they can legitimize and manage it. Most choose the latter. And an increasing number are choosing to do so with OpenLogic. (I'm frankly very impressed by its customer base.)
Once enterprises open the door to sanctioned use of open source through OpenLogic, OpenLogic finds that adoption spreads like wildfire (as "secret" projects come out of the woodwork to be "blessed" by using a managed, trusted source for open source). I really like the fact that OpenLogic serves as an enabler to widespread open source adoption. It's not a gatekeeper so much as a key to the gate that years of FUD have put in the way of open source.
So, who buys from OpenLogic? AT&T, General Motors, Wacker, IBM, Lockheed Martin, and others. And why? Because they're looking for one of the following four things:
- Trusted source for open source (see above);
- Policy - An enterprise might want an overarching policy for auditing and managing its open source use;
- Support - Enterprises are used to having SLAs on the products they buy, and so may have a hard time
- Upgrades - Enterprises may be struggling to manage the upgrade process for so many moving parts.
I'm upgrading my outlook on OpenLogic to "Buy" from "Neutral." I really like what they're doing. This is a company worth watching.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 27, 2007 12:49 PM
February 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)
MySQL builds BI into its stack
MySQL and JasperSoft today announced a new OEM relationship. In fact, I think it's the first OEM deal that MySQL has done (InnoDB excepted). Is this a new trend for MySQL? For JasperSoft?
Here's the deal:
[The two companies announced the] availability of Jasper for MySQL: OEM Edition, a suite of operational reporting products that includes a high-performance interactive report server, a graphical report creation tool, and a pixel-perfect reporting system with dashboards, tables, crosstabs and charts.This is a great addition to the MySQL arsenal, and a great partner for them. (And to think it happened without the OSA. ;-) It's precisely the sort of incremental add-on - for both companies - that enterprises want.The two companies have signed a joint reseller agreement that allows MySQL to offer the new product to its commercial ISV and OEM customers. JasperSoft will also have the right to resell MySQL's database solutions as part of the JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite.
With Jasper for MySQL, OEMs and ISVs building MySQL-based products can now deliver built-in reporting. Developers can create, store, schedule, distribute, share, drill-down and interact with reports. Developers also get the ability to deliver Web-based ad hoc reporting.
Good work for both companies.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 27, 2007 09:52 AM
February 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)
UK reaffirms its stance on software patents ("Yankee patent system, go home")
The UK government yesterday re-affirmed its position on software patents: it doesn't like them, and won't enforce them.
The Government remains committed to its policy that no patents should exist for inventions which make advances lying solely in the field of software. Although certain jurisdictions, such as the US, allow more liberal patenting of software-based inventions, these patents cannot be enforced in the UK....Stiff upper lift wins out in the end. Silliness continues to reign supreme here in the US regarding software patents.The Government will...continue to exclude patents from areas where they may hinder innovation: including patents which are too broad, speculative, or obvious, or where the advance they make lies in an excluded area such as software.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 27, 2007 09:28 AM
February 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)
I tried hard not to blog this, but the flesh is weak (however willing the spirit :-). I'm not sure how newsworthy it is that IBM is refusing to certify Oracle's Linux. After all, IBM doesn't necessarily overflow with love for Oracle.
Still, it is newsworthy that one of the world's biggest application vendors doesn't, for all intents and purposes, run on Oracle.
IBM is not ready to guarantee that its computer programs are compatible with Oracle's recently launched version of the Linux operating system, an IBM spokesman said Friday.The problem, of course, is that Oracle Linux is not, and never can be Red Hat's Linux. The whole go-to-market premise behind Oracle's move was that it could out-support Red Hat on Rd Hat. Foolish. Foolish. Foolish.This means that if IBM software programs turn out to be incompatible with Oracle Enterprise Linux, then it will be up to Oracle — and not IBM — to resolve the issue, said IBM spokesman Matthew McMahon.
Oracle, which started selling Linux in October, has said its product is identical to one from Red Hat, the number-one vendor of the popular open-source operating system, and will seamlessly run software written for the Red Hat system....
IBM may one day support Oracle Linux. "We are going to wait and see if there is traction in the marketplace," McMahon said. "If clients want it [Oracle], then we will support it."
Red Hat dwarfs Oracle and every other company in terms of contributions to the Linux kernel, and so is in a much better position to support Linux. Source of code, not source code.
Oracle made an unwise move. It simply misunderstood how open source works. The best move at this point would be to realign with Red Hat and start serving customers again. Oracle's Linux serves no one.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 27, 2007 08:12 AM
February 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)
$1.89 billion in open source funding (CBR)
While some of us were skiing or eating during the Christmas holidays, Matthew Aslett was crunching the numbers on total open source investments since 2000. The answer? A whopping $1.89 billion. The numbers just keep getting bigger, too, with $475.2 million raised in 2006, up 61.6% from $294. million in 2005.
Importantly, from my perspective, open source investments have a natural multiplier on them. That is, an open source investment tends to stretch much further than an investment in a proprietary software company, which requires a large percentage of its bank account to fund distribution (and development - we need that Lithuanian language support, Tom!).
Given how much value is unleashed by open source, these VCs are veritable Santa's helpers. No need to give Christmas presents this year, my friends - you've given the world tens of billions of reasons to celebrate. ;-)
Posted by Matt Asay on February 27, 2007 06:10 AM
February 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
HP: $25 million EMEA revenue directly related to Debian
Via InternetNews: Big Debian Linux Payday For HP
In fiscal 2006, $25 million in hardware sales in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) were directly related to HP's Debian support.
Pretty amazing that you can make money from free software. Maybe Dell will take a page and start putting Ubuntu on laptops.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on February 26, 2007 04:15 PM
February 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Great Gmail hack for archiving
I came across this hack from Steve Rubel's Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center which basically allows you to extend your existing Gmail account with "sub-domains" (my word, not his) so that you can archive emails etc. without having to send them and file them.
Gmail supports youraddress+(extra)@gmail.com. A clearer example of this is opensources+archive@gmail.com would still deliver to the opensources address, but I created a filter that puts a label on the mail and archives it automatically. Thank you Gmail.
Lifehacker has known about this forever, but it was news to me.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on February 26, 2007 04:07 PM
February 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
But MySQL is not a real database...
Oh, the silly things incumbent vendors like to say about open source. One oft-repeated line from Oracle is that MySQL is "lightweight" or in some way inferior. If "inferior" means "routinely handles mission critical, backbreaking workloads that Oracle cannot muster or that no sane person would apply Oracle to," then, yes, I suppose it is lightweight.
As Zack just posted over on his blog, Pingdom did a survey of "massive" web sites (Meebo, YouSendIt, Alexaholic, TechCrunch, FeedBurner, iStockPhoto and Vimeo) to see what they're running. Six out of seven run LAMP, with MySQL being the "M."
So, again, if you've got a lot of money to spend, want to waste it on licenses, and don't need a best-in-class database, Oracle or DB2 might be for you. But if you want the database that the world's most potent application runs on (It's called "the Internet"), then you should try MySQL on for size. Google, Yahoo!, etc. etc. do. And their computing needs are arguably a lot more intensive than yours.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 26, 2007 03:19 PM
February 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Open X-change lands super-size deal
Businessweek is reporting that 1&1 Internet, the world's largest Web hosting company, said it will roll out 1 million e-mail accounts this year running on Open-Xchange's open-source software.
That's a lot of mailboxes, but I wonder if it's actually the largest deployment of open source software.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on February 26, 2007 08:11 AM
February 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Red Hat goes vertical (healthcare)
Here's an interesting tidbit: McKesson and Red Hat have announced an end-to-end open source healthcare solution:
The Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform packages the Red Hat suite of open source products and services, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux updates via the Red Hat Network. It also includes dedicated customer support and services, as well as other open source technologies such as JBoss Enterprise Middleware. This complete solution provides superior levels of stability and performance as well as predictable maintenance cycles.This is not the first open source healthcare solution (MedSphere's OpenVISTA arguably holds that title), but it's a good start on open source's road into vertical industries. It sounds to me like this is open source (the Red Hat stuff) with a proprietary healthcare application (the McKesson stuff) running on top of it. As such, it's not quite as compelling as it could be, but that's McKesson's fault, not Red Hat's.
In the interim, here's hoping that we'll see more and more open source in the vertical world.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 26, 2007 07:09 AM
February 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Nat: "Is 'open source' now completely meaningless?"
Nat Torkington is trying to come up with the agenda for OSCON, and has discovered that the minute one steps out of the world of community open source to scan the ranks of commercial open source, you find lots of commercials, but little source. Or little unadulterated source. Or little of much at all, as he found (and < href="http://egofood.blogspot.com/2007/02/my-outrage-is-quite-present-i-assure.html">Chris DiBona did, too) with Datamation's list of 10 open source innovators, which included few open source companies, even fewer innovators, and very few companies worth buying from.
People, please. This dilution of open source is not helpful, either to you or to the industry. You can dump your worthless code on the world and call it open source, but it's not. That's why most enterprises aren't buying your software, open or closed. If you're a loser as a proprietary company, you're a loser as an open source company. The only thing that changes is the relative share of your code that you've grudgingly shared. With strings attached.
Nat, for my part, my advice would be: stay open. Your audience uses a robust "sniff test." If you start to capitulate, they simply won't attend OSCON or, at least, the business track of OSCON. You don't need to relax your standards. Within five years, people will realize that going fully open source is not a cross to bear, but rather the key to disruption and liberation (and subsequent/consequent economic value) in open source.
They'll realize they have nothing to lose but their proprietary chains, and open source will begin to dominate in earnest. We're in a transition period. But people will eventually get it.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 26, 2007 06:04 AM
February 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Tim O'Reilly: "Free download isn't a frivolous act"
Tim is mostly writing about online publishing (giving one's books/articles/whatever away for free), but the same concepts apply to open source software. Whether giving your software away is a good or bad idea may depend on the maturity of one's brand/awareness in the market:
A lot has to do with the ratio of possible consumers of the free product who might be converted to paying customers to the total market size. If I have awareness with .01% of the target market, giving copies away to raise awareness to 10% of the market, where 10% of those might convert (1% total) is a good deal. But if I have awareness with 60% of the target market, and give my product away, with a 10% conversion rate, I've lost a great deal.For every company that I can think of, their problem is not monetization of downloads (yet): it's downloads. I'm not aware of any open source company that needs protection of its software more than it needs users of its software. Without users, protection is worthless (and somewhat silly). The first order of business, then, is to generate lots of users, as I wrote back in early 2005.That's why I said piracy was progressive taxation. If you have high awareness, my experience (from a number of experiments that I've reported on over the years) is that making copies available for free can reduce your market, but that if you start out with low awareness, it can enhance them.
Open source software is a great example. Projects start small, and use viral marketing to get sampled. Companies (say Red Hat with Linux) ride that wave of awareness and then introduce new products that monetize more limited access.
In short, utility drives purchases - whether something actually fills a need for customers. Whether the technology is copyrighted or patented really doesn't enter the equation. I would be willing to bet that exactly zero IT buyers sit around after a vendor has left the room, debating whether they should buy a product or not because, "Man, did you see the IP on that thing? Whew! I sure would like to have some of that IP!"This is why Tim writes that it's far too early to turn off our brains when it comes to business models and the 'Net:No, we buy things because they're useful (or because we're mindless sheep that can't say 'no' to a well-marketed brand - I do think some of this goes on in IT, generally, and certainly with open source projects, as well). Open source happens to succeed because it's available (in the sense that it's easier for me to download and try it out than a proprietary product - not because of source code availability, but because of the licensing/distribution model), and because quality undergirds that availability.
That's why "the free download isn't a frivolous act" is such a profound statement. We're still learning the science, if you will, of online promotion via viral distribution. We should be running lots of experiments -- experiments that we measure -- and sharing the results so that we can all learn what works, not just taking either redistribution or restriction as religion. I hope to change my mind and my business practices many times as we continue to learn about what works.I do, too. That's one reason Alfresco recently moved to the GPL. It's a reason you should, too. The value is first and foremost in the user downloading the software, not the protection that happens afterwards. Without the first, there is no need for the second.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 26, 2007 05:48 AM
February 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Blackberry 8800 (Verdict: Great device, but Cingular sucks)
I'm on my second go-around with Cingular and Blackberry. Last time I bailed out on the BB8700 when it stopped sending and receiving emails (about 10 days in) and now it seems that the 8800 has the exact same problem. I was out all day and checking email on the 8800 thinking that it was a slow day, sadly I had lots of email, but Cingular's network chose not to give it to me.
I eventually figured out that the phone doesn't always pick up the EDGE network (even if it has the "edge" network) even if I was in the same location a few minutes before. It just drops the EDGE and never gets it back even if restart or remove the SIM card. This also affects the web browsing which was extremely frustrating as I was fighting with a car salesman about prices I found online.
I had planned on writing a glowing review of the 8800, as it really is quite good--the best phone for a BB by far, and it's the right size, if a tad too long for a smartphone. Unfortunately, Cingular jacked me again and I got nothing for you in terms of usability since the email died on Friday. Oh, and Cingular customer service closes at 6pm PST on Sundays in case you want to call. Lame.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on February 25, 2007 07:20 PM
February 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)
SAP to offer highly uncustomizable apps for mid-market
SAP continues to avoid the learnings of open source...How can customers not flock to a product that is billed as "highly standardized" with "less choice" of options?
Kagermann referred to A1S as an "entirely new product" that will not be a hosted version of the company's All-in-One product. All-in-One is a slimmed down version of mySAP Business Suite, which is designed for large enterprises.The hosted offering will be a highly preconfigured, "off-the-shelf" product that gives companies a range of applications with limited flexibility to tweak their functionality, he said.
"To drive the price down, the product must be highly standardized," Kagermann said. The need to offer a set of standardized functions, he said, also means "less choice" of options to customize the product, he added.
By narrowly limiting product customization and thus complexity, SAP and its partners will be able to deploy the offering much faster, Kagermann said. Fewer consultants will be necessary, resulting in lower costs.
Previously:
SAP: We spend lots of money, therefore we provide value
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on February 23, 2007 11:14 AM
February 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Google apps for the Enterprise
I finally had some time to check out Google Apps Premier Edition and I have to say they could easily win me over were it not for one missing item: Sync.
You have to have sync for Outlook and iCal before you can truly be enterprise (or even small business) functional. Maybe I just couldn't find it?
It's not realistic in this day and age to do calendar share etc. with the abundance of mobile devices and users. Otherwise its a great offering especially when you have a hugely disparate team like I do.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on February 23, 2007 10:15 AM
February 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)
LWN.net has an interesting article [Sub req'd] detailing the contributors to the Linux 2.6.20 kernel. The author attempts to determine just who (as in individuals) and who (as in their employers) writes the Linux kernel. It's not an easy task.
It is not uncommon to see Linux referred to as a volunteer-created system, as opposed to the corporate-sponsored, proprietary alternatives. There has been little research, however, into how much work on Linux is truly "volunteer" - done on a hacker's spare, unpaid time.LWN goes at it in a few different ways (measuring patches, lines changed, lines removed, etc.), one of which is to measure those developers that change the most lines of code.In general, the assumption that Linux is created by volunteers is simply accepted.
Determining the real provenance of free software can be a daunting task. There is a wealth of information available for those who look, however. In an attempt to shine some light in this area, your editor hacked up some scripts to do a lot of digging around in the kernel git repository. The idea was that, by looking at who is putting changes into the kernel, we can get a sense for where our source is coming from.
Perhaps most interesting for readers of this blog, however, is who employs these developers.
Keep in mind that some people don't use their corporate email address when working on the kernel, so LWN filled in this information when they knew it, and reached out to developers when they didn't. So, this list is imperfect, but probably as good as anything else one could put together.
The list gives Red Hat a lot of support in its claims to be innovating in the kernel space. With nearly 15% of the heavy lifting being done by its developers (nearly double that of any other company, and triple its nearest competitor), it also means that Red Hat (as well as Novell, which does a fair amount of kernel work, too) can legitimately offer superior support on Linux. Support that Oracle's PR fluff just can't match. (Oracle contributed less than 1% of the kernel work.)
But this isn't really about any one particular company. It's about how you do business in open source. To be credible in open source, you must write code. Great code. And lots of it. Marketing only takes you so far in the open source world. At some point, you must show substance.
That substance, unfortunately, doesn't automatically translate into sales. For that, a compelling business model is required. You know that I'm a fan of Red Hat's model. (So much so that Alfresco just adopted the same 100% GPL model.) But there are others. The key point is that you must have substance both in code development and in business development.
Not easy, but definitely worth it.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 23, 2007 09:56 AM
February 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Zimbra an answer to Catholic prayers
I couldn't resist the headline, because Tina Gasperson's Linux.com article on Zimbra was classic: "Zimbra and OSS answer college's prayers for cost-effective enterprise apps."
St. Vincent's is a Catholic liberal arts college in Latrobe, Penn. With budget constraints typical of many small private educational institutions, the school is taking deliberate steps to use more open source software. Recently it ditched Microsoft Exchange in favor of Zimbra.Great work to the Zimbra team. Now you just need to work on my church. I want my tithing to pay for value, not licenses."We like the concept of open source as opposed to paying a high license fee and then high maintenance fees," CIO Tom Morrison says. "We like the idea of paying for support, not the product. I think it encourages the provider to continue to maintain a high level of value, because we're not locked into a proprietary license."
The college sought to find a messaging and collaboration application with less restrictive license terms than Microsoft's, but comparable functionality.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 23, 2007 08:30 AM
February 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft loses patent suit, must pay $1.52B
So maybe this is one reason Microsoft has been going on the patent offensive. Microsoft was found to have infringed audio patents held by Alcatel-Lucent and must pay $1.52 billion in damages.
People sometimes chide the open source community for in-fighting, but never has it cost as much as the proprietary world's internal squabbles. I find the whole thing distasteful and sympathize with Microsoft on this one.
"We are concerned that this decision opens the door for Alcatel-Lucent to pursue action against hundreds of other companies who purchased the rights to use MP3 technology from Fraunhofer, the industry-recognized rightful licensor," Tom Burt, Microsoft's deputy general counsel, said in a statement.Indeed.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 23, 2007 06:02 AM
February 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Salesforce.com: Paying the price of competition (Josh Greenbaum)
I find Josh Greenbaum to be generally insightful, and yesterday's post on Salesforce.com's looming problem is no different. The honeymoon is over for Salesforce.com, writes Josh, because all that once set it apart - SaaS model and all the hype that came with that - is largely "commodity" now in the industry.
This will be the year of on-demand for the rest of the market, and it's going to take away the only real competitive advantages that Salesforce.com has had — serious pioneer status and a lot of high-end, and high-priced hype. The other potential competitive advantages — deep integration to the back office, and a sizable and legitimate ecosystem/infrastructure play — are still too nascent to give Marc the cover he needs as the big guns start to fire. To date Salesforce.com has not established that the bulk of its customers want deep integration, too many of them are just implementing an on demand contact management system. And AppExchange just hasn't reached anything near the critical mass — I'm not sure it's even really left the launch pad yet — to give Salesforce the next big revenue play it needs to stay ahead of the forces arraying against it.Interestingly, though Josh doesn't write on this, arguably Salesforce.com's biggest competitor (though it doesn't realize it yet) is open source CRM, and specifically SugarCRM. SugarCRM marries the disruption of SaaS with the ease-of-adoption (and lower costs) that open source yields. Benioff's bluster tends to pay well, but free, unfettered access to a great CRM system is even better, and more disruptive. It's also a great way to help ensure a company is bigger than the developers who write the code and the salespeople that sell it. SugarCRM has community that I believe will give AppExchange a run for its money.
Hence, I disagree (mostly) with Josh's final point:
The problem is that AppExchange expands the core through partners, instead of expanding the core inside Salesforce.com itself. That means that growth will have to come from a third-party network, instead of inside the company. I don't think becoming a software distributor will let Salesforce.com survive the onslaught of full-service, suite-based competitors for long.I'm not sure how Josh meshes this thinking with the obvious counterexample of a phenomenally successful ecosystem play (Microsoft Windows and Office), but I believe it is precisely communities that will make products like Salesforce.com and SugarCRM more successful. A vendor doesn't need to be (or shouldn't need to be) the sole source of innovation for its product. In a closed source world, perhaps they have to be such. But not in open source.
This is SugarCRM's key advantage. Its power is in its community. It therefore needs to feed that community, just as Salesforce.com should be feeding its AppExchange community. The difference, however, should come down to ease of access, and there I think open source trumps all.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 23, 2007 05:46 AM
February 22, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Today Alfresco announced that it has gone 100% GPL. As you might imagine, I'm ecstatic about the move (and have been working toward this since I joined Alfresco in 2005). Actually, I think it would be fair to say that everyone in the company is ecstatic about the move. It makes things easier for marketing, for engineering, and for sales. (Gasp! Did he really say "GPL" and "sales" in the same paragraph? :-)
As CNET has covered, this move is in part designed to help expand our already healthy community. But it's also about driving a stake into the heart of our outdated, expensive, proprietary competitors, as John Powell, Alfresco's CEO states:
Moving Alfresco under the GPL makes a tough battle even tougher for those companies still shackled by proprietary licenses designed to controlIf you're an open source company, think about the power of giving your software away. How can a Cognos or Business Objects respond to a more innovative JasperSoft, which just so happens to be free? Or a Oracle or Salesforce.com respond to a more innovative SugarCRM, which just so happens to be a free download away?
customers instead of empower them. Alfresco is by far the leading brand when people think of open source ECM and the move to GPL will accelerate that adoption across the development, OEM and customer communities.
They can't. That's the power that Alfresco is tapping into, especially since we've made the entire product GPL. You can spend a million dollars with Documentum. Or you can download Alfresco (and get a product that is lightyears faster, dramatically easier to use, has a common repository across Web Content Management, Records Management, Document Management, Imaging, etc.
Oh, and it's free, too.
This is what open source business is all about. Significantly benefiting customers and the development community while cutting your Stone Age proprietary competitors off at the knees.
This doesn't mean, by the way, that interoperability with the proprietary world doesn't matter. Of course it does. We've actually worked closely with Microsoft to enable tight SQL Server/Windows/Office integration. (And Sam and Bill and their team has been fantastic to work with. These guys understand that Microsoft thrives so long as its ecosystem thrives, and they're helping to make that happen.) No, a move to 100% open source means a laser-sharp focus on customers, and integration with the software they already have matters a great deal.
The battle, instead, is for all the software they still need. Open source helps to ensure you win that battle.
Alfresco feels strongly that the future of software is open source. Not a little open source mixed with a lot of proprietary source. Free and open source software. It is open source, not hybrid models that will drive true disruption in the software industry, with greater value created for and by end-users.You can find the FAQ here, which answers a lot of the questions customers, partners, and competitors may have about the move. The white paper describing Alfresco's licensing strategy is here.The GNU General Public License (“GPL”) is the ideal license to drive forward this industry disruption. The GPL ensures that no vendor – including Alfresco – can control a customer’s content. The GPL also provides the maximum assurance that the open source community and not, ultimately, Alfresco, protects investments in our code.
We plan to be in business for a long time, but wanted a license that guarantees our users that Alfresco, the code, will always be bigger and more enduring than Alfresco, the company. This enables our community to invest in the Alfresco code with maximum confidence that the investment will grow over time, and not be wasted.
Like MySQL, Alfresco is licensing its software under the GPL with a FLOSS Exception. We strongly endorse and promote the GPL but also wanted to broaden the tent to allow other open source projects to integrate with Alfresco without necessarily having to go GPL themselves (however much we may want them to do so).
This move is about choice, in other words. Choice for our customers (Freedom of access to the world's best content management system). Choice for our partners. Choice for our competitors (join us or get run over :-). Choice for the community.
And, lest you didn't grok my point above, this is also about making money. The GPL is open source's best business license. It is open source capitalism - the free market at its finest.
Freedom pays great dividends.
I want to extend a HUGE thank you to Heather Meeker of Greenberg Traurig LLP, our IP attorney, who did a fantastic job assisting us in making this change. She may have become tired of seeing my number pop up on her caller ID, but she never showed it. Instead, she offered exceptional legal counsel, and I'd recommend her to anyone looking for an expert in open source and intellectual property, generally.
[Truth in advertising: I work for Alfresco and think that the proprietary software companies we compete with have a limited shelf life. :-) ]
Posted by Matt Asay on February 22, 2007 10:07 AM
February 22, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Well, sort of. I got an email from Moshe Bar (one of the founders of XenSource) the other day saying he had resurfaced. Very interesting to hear where, given his background: Qumranet. What does Qumranet do?
And why did they come up with a name that sounds like Qumran, the ancient city nearest to where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found (and which is supposed to have been the home of the Essenes (an ascetic group that lived during and after the the time of Christ) - sorry, I'm a Bible guy, and find a possible tie to the Scrolls fascinating).
The company is a newbie, but already turning heads, as Datamation notes:
Why it’s innovative:I'm not smart enough to know which is the better approach, but I do think highly of Moshe. Good luck to him and his merry band of Essenes."Everybody has been assuming that open-source virtualization will always mean Xen, but Qumranet has taken a different approach that bears watching," said Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat.
Qumranet has developed KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) technology, which is a full virtualization solution based on a loadable kernel module. In contrast to Xen, which uses an external hypervisor, Qumranet believes that Linux itself serves as a good hypervisor. (A hypervisor manages the virtualization and enables multiple operating systems to share a single hardware processor.) KVM leverages Linux’s scheduler and memory management components, allowing full virtualization features at the kernel level.
What’s their track record? Since Qumranet is still in stealth-mode, this question is premature. However, they’ve been active in the open-source community and have gained the attention of major players like Red Hat. "They’ve already been successful at getting their virtualization technology accepted into the upstream Linux tree," Stevens said."
Posted by Matt Asay on February 22, 2007 07:55 AM
February 22, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Sophists for patent deals, please stand up!
James DeLong is a longstanding sophist affiliated with Microsoft. He's also very smart. (I had him speak at OSBC once.) So, it's no surprise that he would launch this sometimes sophisticated, sometimes absurdly silly bit of chicanery. We all have our biases and gods to serve - James' just happens to make his best arguments fall flat.
He starts off reasonably enough (if he inflates his case just a bit):
the deal between the two [Microsoft and Novell] is dictated by a simple reality. The customers want what the deal provides. They want interoperability of open-source and proprietary programs--the ability to run both types of program in heterogeneous environments--without being required to perform the integrations for themselves. This means that open-source and proprietary software providers must create a structure that allows them to cooperate on finding technical solutions to their customers' demands. It is not possible to solve the customers' problems for open source without also solving them for proprietary companies, and vice versa.True enough, but it begs the question as to a) why open source + proprietary is any different from proprietary + proprietary (Hint: it's not) and/or b) Microsoft didn't enable this interoperability long ago. It's not as if someone were actively preventing them from doing it.
James then pulls an amazingly cheeky comment on the need for intellectual property protection, conveniently forgeting that it is the company that bankrolls his lobbying group (Microsoft) that is the "someone [that] might come out of left field claiming the right to enjoin some mission-critical application." No one in the open source world has ever made this kind of veiled threat against a proprietary company. Rather, it is the proprietary world - and Microsoft in particular - that consistently threatens litigation over intellectual property.
So, whom should customers be worried about? That's right - their proprietary vendors. It's the proprietary world that is litigious, not the open source world.
Here's where the absurd enters the fray. James, obviously a complete stranger to the reality of open source businesses, makes the claim that either you "respect" IP (meaning, horde it and use it as a cudgel to threaten lawsuits against everyone, apparently) or you "flip burgers."
In all of these worldly roles [i.e., commercial attempts to make money with open source], open-source community members must pay attention to the customers. They might not like it; they might prefer the purity of the FSF approach, but that is not the choice on offer. If you don't want to pay attention to customers, then either arrange to have rich parents, or learn to flip burgers. (What! You call this rare?) It won't even work to get a grant from a foundation--there is no customer more imperious.What makes this comment so classic - other than the amazing depth of ignorance that it betrays - is that it's sophistry at its finest. James has somehow turned excluding customers from participating with a vendor - from seeing and viewing and modifying source code to fit their needs, rather than a vendor's paycheck - into a customer value. How, please tell me, James, does keeping something proprietary serve the customer? The exact opposite is true. Property is not designed to serve another - it is designed to serve oneself. You can read the US Constitution as well as I.
As Stephe Walli notes (He used to work for Microsoft, just like you, James), customers don't buy patents or copyrights. They buy solutions to their problems. No one goes into a purchasing decision and lets the tie-breaker be, "Who has the most patents on their code?" It's complete rubbish.
Maybe that's why Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, came to this rousing defense of the IP protection in the Novell deal (be sure you're sitting down when you read this, because the logic is astoundingly brilliant):
I actually think that when the decade is through, we'll look back, and we'll say the agreement between Microsoft and Novell was one of the most important milestones in the decade from an (intellectual property) perspective.There you have it. We don't really know why it's needed, but it's there. So we win! I think Brad is amazingly smart but I think he, like James, is crippled by the stupidity of the position he has to defend.[And why?]
People can debate how much (the patent protection) is needed, but the reality is it's provided.
So, let's get back to reality, James. The reality is that customers are choosing open source in droves. Not because of a needless Microsoft/Novell pact. But because it works. Because it creates tremendous economic value.
And because it aligns customer needs and expectations with vendor business practices. Proprietary software pits a vendor against its customers, and treats them like would-be criminals. Open source does the exact opposite - it treats customers as equals.
Don't believe me? Come to OSBC to hear your friend, Eben Moglen, talk about the GPL as the most American of licenses. Free as in market.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 22, 2007 07:15 AM
February 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Prophesy Red Hat's future, get $20,000 (and maybe a job)
Jack pointed me to something tonight that sounds very interesting: The Red Hat Challenge. I guess it's a bit like Google's Summer of Code, in a way, but with bigger money, an MBA slant, and the chance to present to Red Hat's management team:
Red Hat, the world's leading open source software company, is looking for innovative ideas to shape its future business model. The Red Hat Challenge is an open invitation to create an innovative solution to a Red Hat business problem.This is only open to students, so I can't enter (not that it would matter - I'd lose). But if you qualify, you should. It sounds like a great opportunity. Something for we business folks to chew on.Form a team with the most brilliant people you know. Research. Brainstorm. Then present your concept to a panel of business leaders. The judges will provide detailed feedback on your concept plan that will support you in your future endeavors. And the winning team will receive $20,000
Which is why I like the idea. If Red Hat were to poll people in the industry, it would get all sorts of opinions colored by industry. Mine. Yours. Etc. But this Challenge seems like it's designed to extract insight from students before they become biased/jaded by the software industry. Good call.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 21, 2007 08:25 PM
February 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Where will innovation come from?
I love P.J. O'Rourke. He writes for The Atlantic Monthly and is worth reading, whatever he happens to be talking about. He's that funny/sardonic/scathing.
In last month's Atlantic, however, he writes about something [Subscription req'd] relevant to open source, and to technology, generally. Namely, how can we predict where innovation will happen next?
He starts the exercise in classic O'Rourke fashion:
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative. The history of humankind’s development can be summed up as the story of surprise. Adam Smith failed to forecast the Industrial Revolution despite his friendship with James Watt, inventor of the steam engine that powered it. And who would have prophesied MySpace, Oprah, or a TSA ban on hair-styling gel in quantities greater than three ounces?So how does he propose we do it? Or, rather, what tools might help us figure out where innovation might sprout up next?
O'Rourke turns to Worldmapper, a tool created by geographers at the University of Sheffield (UK). Basically, it shows maps of the world - national boundaries intact - that show nations as fat or skinny based on how they stack up in terms of population, R&D expenditures, or whatever data you plug into them.
Here's an example of how R&D expenditures look globally:
A bit cartoonish, as O'Rourke notes, but technically accurate. As can be discerned from the above, the United States, the wealthier Western European nations, Israel, Japan, and South Korea spend a lot of R&D. But on what? That R&D could be a complete sinkhole, which is why O'Rourke next turns to a map of royalties and license fees exports:
In this category, the US dwarfs everyone else, with the UK, France, and Sweden as runners up.
O'Rourke can be elusive on when he's trying to be funny, and when he's trying to make a serious point, but I think he meshes the two together in the next point: money doesn't make innovation. People do, and perhaps a disproportionate share of innovation comes from those who have enough, but not too much:
Innovation is necessary to progress, and progress is, we tend to think, necessarily linked to prosperity. But if we look at the most innovative nation in history to date—our own—we see that the most distinctive American innovations were the products of poverty. Bluegrass, gospel, jazz, rhythm and blues, country and western, rock and roll, and hip-hop are the music of poor people. American slang, American style, American fashions and fads have their sources among the least affluent. America’s car culture, teen culture, sports culture (and drug culture and gun culture) were shaped by what, in other countries, would be called the lower classes.I suspect there's more truth to this than O'Rourke is willing to concede (he is, after all, an essayist, and not a scientist of any stripe - as such, he's not really trying to prove anything with this data). It seems pretty telling to me that the technologies we use most came - almost without exception - from startups that were poor long before they were rich.One secret to this sort of innovation is rich poor people. To be on the poverty threshold in the United States ($9,973 per year for a single adult) is to be richer than most people in the rest of the world (per capita global average GDP is $8,229). A nation’s poor can’t be innovative if they’re famished. Famine takes too much time and energy.
Still, this rise to the innovative top doesn't come without stress. O'Rourke concludes:
ven all the very rigorous research compiled by Worldmapper, what totally un-rigorous conclusions can we draw? A rough tally of quick impressions of arbitrarily chosen criteria indicates that only about a dozen countries or regions are likely to be innovative in the near future. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the United States and Europe loom largest. But South Korea and South Africa keep popping up strongly as well, and so do Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and a few other places.Try to find O'Rourke's article and read it. Very funny, with a hint of insight.All of which is mirrored, at least tolerably closely, by the Alcohol and Cigarette Imports map. That’s one more thing about innovation: it’s very stressful. And who, among the world’s innovators, are so stressed that they have to bring in stress relief from overseas? That would be the Americans, the Japanese, the Taiwanese, the South Koreans, and the Continentals in Western Europe. You folks look like you need a drink. Innovation is a damn big job. Congratulations. Have a cigar.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 21, 2007 06:38 PM
February 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)
My colleague, John Newton, posted an interesting reply to James McGovern's request as to how his blog could be improved. John writes:
You posted an article on user advisory boards. It seems to me that blogging may be a more potent form of user advisory board. How about trying a user-led versus vendor-led user advisory board organized through the blog.This is an interesting idea. Alfresco has a customer advisory board, and I'm on the advisory boards of several different open source vendors, but I like the idea of a loose-knit grouping of bloggers to serve as a brutally honest sounding board for a company's direction.
I'm not sure how to organize or manage such a group, but maybe that's the point?
Posted by Matt Asay on February 21, 2007 08:37 AM
February 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Szulik: Take my competitors' money, please!
Matthew Aslett has this gem on Matthew Szulik's reaction to Microsoft's SUSE Linux vouchers:
We certainly expect that there will be those cases where customers will consume those coupons. We're certainly encouraging one or two customers to consume all of them, let's get this over with.Szulik isn't worried, because he understands that real open source buyers (you know, the savvy kind that aren't buying into Oracle's pseudo-Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers) pay for value, and aren't looking for a free ride:
When you think about the amount of workload that's being placed on these technologies...free doesn't cut it. We're finding a more informed buyer; we're finding a more strategic buyer.Back when I was at Novell I called 'Foul!' on this rhetoric, but I no longer believe this to be the case. My own company has 6,000 active installations, but only a fraction of those (a healthy fraction, mind you) pay us any money. Those that pay are those that understand that open source is about much more than price.
I'm obviously a Red Hat fan. Not hiding that. But can we get over this constant browbeating of Red Hat that Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc. keep regurgitating? (Sun and Novell have, too, but I put their positioning in a different category.) It seems obvious that however much lip service these companies provide to open source, their hearts (and wallets) clearly are not in it. They want the world's most successful open source company to fail. They want open source to be a toy, a pet, not a tool, and certainly not a weapon.
They aren't burning the boats. Instead they're trying to boil the ocean in the hopes that the leaky boats will still "float." But, to quote Marten Mickos,
As if you could kill a dolphin by drinking the ocean.Indeed.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 21, 2007 07:13 AM
February 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)
VB Compiler for Mono launched today
Via: Linux-Watch.com--Mono brings Visual Basic programs to Linux
The Mono Project announced that it has developed a Visual Basic compiler that will enable software developers who use Microsoft Visual Basic to run their applications on any platform that supports Mono, such as Linux, without any code modifications.
This new and improved compiler, which supports Visual Basic 8.0 code, is bundled in Mono 1.2.3. In addition to Visual Basic support, this version includes many bug fixes and an almost complete ASP.NET 2.0 API (application programming interface) implementation. WebParts, however, still isn't completely supported.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on February 20, 2007 07:10 PM
February 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Is it me or does Outlook make you want to throw your computer out the window(s)?
This morning my backup MacBook started acting a bit funny, crashing all the time with some kind of kernel panic. I am still waiting for a replacement MacBook Pro from Apple so I decided to test-drive a Thinkpad T60 we have here in the office.
My initial reaction is that the design of the machine and the keyboard are still the best. Thinkpads have to be the most functional laptops available. But my reaction to Windows is that it's still clunky and non-intuitive. Add to that the fact that Outlook is so annoying to use that I decided to go back to the broken Mac rather than suffer with Windows for a second longer. The initial thing that blew my mind was that IMAP messages aren't moved to a Trash bin when you delete them…they just have a strike-through line. Completely and utterly moronic. Basically if you use IMAP you have to "Purge deleted messages" in order to clean out your inbox. It's a huge time-waste for absolutely no reason.
As a side note to my dislike for Outlook 2003 I figured maybe I would try to upgrade to 2007. After I made sense of the Office 2007 versions I noticed that Office 2007 Student doesn't come with Outlook. This is utterly foolish move by Microsoft. One of the primary reasons people stick with Windows is because of Outlook-addiction. My guess is that they are concerned that people would only pay for the Student version but it seems like a huge missed opportunity related to getting kids addicted to the dark-side. This just reinforces the usage of apps like Thunderbird and Gmail against Microsoft's desktop stronghold. Microsoft can only blame themselves when they eventually lose the desktop.
I did make another attempt on Linux (on a T60p-please Apple, license MacOS to Lenovo) and found the same results as last time. Both SLED and Ubuntu are fine, but the wi-fi issue bums me out. However, if you are using a desktop, you are golden. Don't bother with Windows. Seriously, I did the suffering to prove it out.
I can't tell if I have just become too impatient and fickle with technology but the idea of using any version of Windows makes me feel ill. I would take a broken Mac over a brand new Windows machine any day. And I would choose Linux on a desktop over Windows for most business users.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on February 20, 2007 04:56 PM
February 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Open source marketing--going from project to business
Over the last few years we've seen the benefits that open source provides to distribution and development. We've also seen the impact that a quality community has on a project or company's growth. One of the things that still isn't clear (or at least not quantifiable) is the impact non-community marketing efforts have on the growth of open source businesses.
As part of my company's growth process we at MuleSource decided to experiment with what might be called more "traditional" marketing (at least in the internet age.) We've put a banner ad up on TheServerSide.com (our analytics say that TSS drives a great deal of traffic for us) that links back to our new GetMule.com mini-site.
The Get Mule program is designed to do several things:
-Drive traffic to a vanity URL (getmule.com) that creates a brand imprint
-Encourage people to register with us for a great whitepaper from RedMonk or take a survey and get a cool t-shirt (the back says Don't be a dumb-ass. Get Mule.)
-Provide market data (via the survey) that we can fold back into the product roadmap
-Ultimately the goal is to get people to try Mule and convert them into subscribers.
My explanation above is a bit academic, but considering the fact that our advertising budget for 2007 was exactly zero it was a big move for us to decide to launch a campaign. Especially when you consider that there are four components once you hit the landing page:
1. Download Mule
2. Get a free analyst report (we paid for reprint rights)
3. Flash screencast (cost us a bit of money for the flash)
4. Survey (we're giving away t-shirts)
In one fell swoop we went from spending zero dollars on advertising to spending a big chunk of dough to get all this stuff together. As such, here are the questions I keep asking:
-Can we get more then branding from this exercise?
-Will developers always be our target?
-Would it make more sense if we did our marketing by vertical segments or by product category?
-What is the click-through rate for any of the pages in the jump site that would make the campaign a success in general?
-Should I have just bought a new car with the money we are spending?
Travis did a further write-up on this as he is terrified of the whole thing.
Previously:
Tough Marketing $$$ Decisions for a Tech Start-Up
The voodoo of marketing an open source project
Where are all the open source marketers?
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on February 19, 2007 09:47 PM
February 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Dell Ideastorm: Give us Linux and OpenOffice
Dell's new Ideastorm site launched last week--it's interesting to see how quickly a few main issues came to light:
1. Pre-installed Linux option
2. Option to not have all that extra software installed
3. OpenOffice pre-installed
Makes me wonder if only geeks know about the site or the rest of the world is annoyed with Microsoft as I am. The person who submitted the first two summarized very nicely.
CHOICE is what consumers want on their new PCs, not annoying surprise circus-ware (the typical smattering of 3rd party popup-infested software found on most new Dell PCs). Quality free and open source software is well behaved, and may be legally pre-installed on PCs, and legally shared with friends and family, sharing is encouraged!
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on February 19, 2007 06:50 PM
February 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Ballmer: I worry more about disruptive business models than competitors
Internetnews has is carrying a story detailing Microsoft's Steve Ballmer on how it feels to be #3 (in online services) and competing with "free":
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted that the software vendor has had difficulties competing for consumers online and developing a business model for online business services.Well, at least this is an honest response to the open source threat. Much better than the patent FUD he has been spraying about. And, I suppose, it's a very telling reason why Ballmer continues to fixate on open source.But he said that he was more worried about being blindsided by a new business model than any one company in particular.
"I think about new business models more than I think of individual companies," he told analysts at a Merrill Lynch conference in New York today.
Ballmer pointed to open source as one potential source of worry. While the company has gained market share against Linux both on desktops and in the server market, he said that "having a competitor that is nominally close to free is always a challenge... There is a set of pricing pressure that nobody should ignore."
Unfortunately, Mr. Ballmer, it won't work. It's much too late for you to be able to kill open source. Better to join the party than to try to kill it.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 17, 2007 01:43 PM
February 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Love from my vendors: Apple and Orbitz
It's a bit early to tell but both Apple and Orbitz are making very concerted efforts to do right by me. Apple actually assigned a very nice woman who was bummed out to hear how disgruntled I was and a service guy from Orbitz corporate read the blog and we talked about my experience and he offered legitimate condolences and a bit of an explanation on the incidents with my bad customer service.
Sometimes we all fall into these black holes of customer service. I can only hope that my suffering makes everyone else's experience better. Meanwhile, I hurt my hand so no more typing for a few days.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on February 16, 2007 02:39 PM
February 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Off-topic funding news: HonestTea has raised $12M
I forgot to post this a few weeks ago, but my favorite beverage maker HonestTea just raised money to expand their operations. The website is way out of date, but one of my friends is a food scientist and she says their stuff is one of the few things out there that doesn't destroy your body from the inside out.
Being that I instituted "Cookie Thursday" at our offices, I like to balance things out a bit with healthy drinks.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on February 16, 2007 02:33 PM
February 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Steve Ballmer: Was this the friend Novell wanted?
Mary Jo has another great post on the Microsoft/Novell pact. I'm sure Novell thought it had a well-meaning partner when it entered the agreement, but Ballmer continues to dash those hopes on the rocks.
Mary Jo writes:
The same week that Microsoft issued a press release providing further details about some of the technological advances that will result from the November 2006 technology agreement between Novell and Microsoft, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told Wall Street what he really thinks the deal means to Microsoft.With friends like these....During a forecast update meeting for financial analysts and shareholders on February 15, Ballmer reiterated that, to him, the deal is more about Microsoft exerting intellectual property (IP) pressure on Novell than anything else.
Ballmer didn't talk up technological cross-collaboration. He didn't mention helping customers with interoperability challenges. He didn't mention new sales opportunities. Instead, he said:
The deal that we announced at the end of last year with Novell I consider to be very important. It demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property even in the Open Source world. I would not anticipate that we make a huge additional revenue stream from our Novell deal, but I do think it clearly establishes that Open Source is not free and Open Source will have to respect intellectual property rights of others just as any other competitor will.
Listen, Brother Ballmer. Please spare us the fear-mongering around Linux. Put up or shut up. (You'll likely never see Microsoft actually pull a trigger on Linux/open source, however, because I'm fairly certain that Microsoft has lifted quite a bit of IP from the open source world. In fact, I'd stake a very large bet on it.)
What's disappointing to me is that Microsoft doesn't need to descend into this silly FUD game. It's a products company. It sells products, not IP. Microsoft competes very well on that basis. It doesn't need to start calling the kettle black, "pot" that it is.
Time to join the 21st Century of software, Steve. Your rhetoric is a decade or so out of date.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 16, 2007 11:15 AM
February 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Giving education away for free, MIT-style
The WSJ is running an interesting story a rising trend in elite universities: free education. MIT's OpenCourseWare Project was the first of the bunch, but others (like Berkeley, Yale, Bryn Mawr, etc.) are following suit:
Following the lead of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other highly competitive schools, more institutions are posting online everything from lecture notes to sample tests, and even making audio and video files of actual lectures publicly available. The sites attract anywhere from thousands to more than one million unique visitors each month.Democratization and altruistic motives aside (though I believe these are legitimate), what can these schools be thinking? That giving away the education is a net positive for them, financially and in many other ways:The moves -- which differ from the "distance learning" courses that many schools offer for credit and charge for -- come as colleges and universities say they want to democratize education, making the best resources available to more people....
MIT's pioneering "OpenCourseWare" program, which was launched in 2003, posts the syllabus and class notes for more than 1,500 courses online for anyone who wants them. By this November, it aims to publish materials from virtually all 1,800 of its courses across all its schools.
An MIT survey of users showed that about a third of freshmen who were aware of the site before attending the university said it made a significant impact on their decision to enroll.Fascinating stuff, and hugely interesting for those of us in the open source world. There is much more to the software business than bits and bytes. Arguably, these are not nearly as important as services that make the software useful, just as the articles a professor has published don't necessarily make a particular class more informative. (News flash: Professors get paid to publish, not to teach, which sometimes results in really brilliant professors that are really abysmal teachers.)Universities say they don't worry about losing applicants by giving away materials online. "From Yale's point of view, there still is nothing more important than direct interaction between students and teachers," says Diana E.E. Kleiner, an art-history professor and director of the Yale project. "Putting a selection of our courses online doesn't change that."
The value of a Stanford education over, say, a X State University education is not predominately in the quality of teaching that goes on, but rather in the pedigree it offers, as well as (possibly) the quality of students one meets with. (As for my own Stanford education, I should have done it online, as I was working full-time for Lineo throughout most of my time there. I'm not sure any of my fellow students would even remember me. :-) The universities realize this, so they're not giving up anything by giving away the education.
Now consider this if you're an ISV: are you really giving away your livelihood by giving away (completely) your software? (Hint: The answer is "No." It just requires a leap of faith.)
Posted by Matt Asay on February 15, 2007 11:57 AM
February 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Correcting Matt Asay on Ubuntu/Mark Shuttleworth
I found out that some of the things I had said in Mark Shuttleworth's regard weren't strictly accurate (a euphemism for "false" :-), and I wanted to set the record straight. Someone called me on it in the comments to an earlier post, and I decided to look into the matter. Net net: Mea culpa.
I respect Mark a great deal and hope to make more money than him so that I can buy Arsenal and take him to a match with me. :-)
There are a few things that I should clarify:
- I derided Mark for deprecating Red Hat (as proprietary, etc.). It is true that Mark has hit out at Red Hat at times, but I failed to mention the praise he has accorded Red Hat at times, as well. Mark's views on Red Hat are more nuanced than I suggested, in other words.
- I also suggested that Mark has embraced, and not merely tolerated, proprietary software. The reality is that no proprietary software goes into the Ubuntu distribution by default. I think I let the analysts' opinion on the matter sway mine, and did so incorrectly. Reading back through articles/blog posts, it's pretty clear that Ubuntu has always defaulted to free/open source drivers/software when it can, but is necessarily pragmatic at first.
(No one, by the way, is required to use CNR, but after reading through the Ubuntu forums, it's clear that lots of Ubuntu users do want it. I suspect Mark doesn't care much for CNR, but is willing to let his users determine whether they want it or not.)
Mark, I apologize for this. Sincerely.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 15, 2007 11:24 AM
February 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Internetnews: Linux ecosystem worth $40B by 2010
IDC believes the Linux ecosystem is worth $18 billion today, and will jump to $40 billion by 2010:
For 2006, Al Gillen, research vice president of system software at IDC, told an early morning audience that the research firm has pegged the Linux ecosystem that includes servers and software to be worth $18 billion. By 2010, Gillen said, the market will be worth $40 billion.No matter which way you parse that message, $40 billion is a big number. I wouldn't mind having it in my bank account. :-)In terms of Linux operating system deployments, a surprising finding that Gillen described is that there are almost an equal number of paid Linux server deployments, which include Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, as there are unpaid "free" Linux deployments such as Debian and Fedora.
A lot of growth in Linux deployments is coming through increasing workloads moving to databases among other enterprise applications. Tim Grieser, IDC's program vice president of enterprise system management software, explained that Oracle's recent move to formally support Linux directly is proof positive of how important Linux is for the database market.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 15, 2007 11:15 AM
February 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Consumer electronics are a joke (Joel Johnson)
After my latest MacBook Pro death, I couldn't agree more with Joel's rant.
Stop buying this crap. Just stop it. You don't need it. Wait a year until the reviews come out and the other suckers too addicted to having the very latest and greatest buy it, put up a review, and have moved on to something else. Stop buying broken products and then shrugging your shoulders when it doesn't do what it is supposed to. Stop buying products that serve any other master than you. Use older stuff that works. Make it yourself. Only buy new stuff from companies that have proven themselves good servants of their customers in the past. Complaining online about this stuff helps, but really, just stop buying it.Posted by Dave Rosenberg on February 15, 2007 07:47 AM
February 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)
VC Investments--The Valley still rules
I just got a report on VC investments in 2006 and one of the key things that stands out is the overwhelming number of investments (and dollars) that are being floated out of Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley 1108 deals, over $9b
New England 413 deals, just over $3b
NY Metro 249 deals, just less than $2bThe study is only for the US but it's clear that the Valley is still pumping out the big dough.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on February 15, 2007 07:33 AM
February 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Index Ventures raises a new fund - more open source investments coming
Today, the industry's most prolific open source investor announced that it has raised another fund. 350 million Euros worth. This can only be a good thing for open source.
Index, perhaps best known for its investment in Skype, but the firm has done a slew of interesting investments (last.fm, FON, Oanda, Mobissimo, etc.). Danny Rimer, one of the partners there, gets my vote as one of the top venture capital investors anywhere, and especially when it comes to open source. MySQL, Pentaho, Trolltech, SourceLabs, and Zend all got early funding from Index.
Not sure what Index does that makes it so successful, but it's got to the be the people, which also got even better today. It added former Skype global marketing vice president and Video Island founder Saul Klein as a venture partner.
It probably helps that Index doesn't have the same fetish with investing within five feet of their offices. As Bernard Dalle, Index's general partner, says:
Everything we do is about helping entrepreneurs move quickly to become global market leaders. Success for European companies has depended on their ability to extend their geographical reach quickly and cost-effectively. We invest in entrepreneurial teams going after global opportunities, whether they are in Tallinn, Toronto, Los Angeles, London or Madrid.Would that this vision were a bit more widespread in the venture community, which tends to fixate on the Valley and Boston, thereby missing all the potential elsewhere.Good luck to Danny, Bernard, and team. You deserve it.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 15, 2007 05:52 AM
February 14, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Doing open source in the 'burbs
I've suggested before that open source companies need not migrate to Silicon Valley. It's not really an open source question, though, so much as it is a persistent belief that to be big/important you must live in a big/important city.
The WSJ took on this topic in yesterday's Journal in an op-ed piece called "The Myth of 'Superstar' Cities." It begins:
These seem the best of times for America's elite cities. Wall Street's 2006 megabonuses created thousands of instant millionaires, and, with their venture-fund soulmates in places like San Francisco, Boston and Greenwich, the best people are prowling for Ferraris, planes, multimillion-dollar condos, the newest $200 lunch place and the latest in high fashion. In some markets, office prices and rents are breaking all-time records....That's OK, you say, because it means the wheat is being separated from the chaff. Only the best remain! The article continues:Yet these triumphs obscure the longer-term developments that continue to reshape metropolitan America. Economic and demographic trends suggest that the future of American urbanism lies not in the elite cities but in younger, more affordable and less self-regarding places.
Over the past 15 years, it has been opportunistic newcomers -- Houston, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas, Riverside -- that have created the most new jobs and gained the most net domestic migration. In contrast there has been virtually negligible long-term net growth in jobs or positive domestic migration to places like New York, Los Angeles, Boston or the San Francisco Bay Area.
Some urban boosters see these shifts to the high end as evidence of superiority. After all, they argue, only the "best" remain, while immigrants, the poor and ordinary middle-income slobs migrate out to the suburbs and other less elite regions.None of which means you need to move to suburbia, of course. Just that if you already live there, you can start a great business there. Last I checked, JBoss started in Marc's non-existent Atlanta garage. Red Hat started in not-so-hip Raleigh, NC. MySQL started somewhere cold and north (aka Sweden :-). Etc.Yet, even here, the demographic trends are not nearly so promising. Over the past decade college-educated workers -- who once disproportionately migrated to the superstar cities -- now appear to be tilting instead to more affordable, family-friendly places. Since 2000, Riverside, Phoenix, Charlotte, Las Vegas and Dallas all have been among the big net gainers with such migrants. In contrast New York, Boston, L.A. and even the Bay Area, a big winner in the 1990s, appear to have become among the highest net losers. The big outlier here, as in many things, is Washington, D.C., where an ever expanding federal government and its satellites continue to draw in ever more educated workers.
Open source is about quality, not geography. Stay where you are.
Posted by Matt Asay on February 14, 2007 09:32 AM
February 14, 2007 | Comments: (