December 31st, 2008
Metered computing: Another great argument for open source in 2009
Metered computing, as outlined by Microsoft in a patent application, isn’t the worst idea I’ve heard — but it ranks up there with other spectacular failures like the original DivX, AOL dial-up, and the 2008 Detroit Lions.
The idea, as outlined in this article by David Meyer, is that people would buy “heavily subsidized” (cheap) PCs, but then pay charges based on how much computing time and processing power they used.
Microsoft notes in the application that the end user could end up paying more for the computer, compared with the one-off cost entailed in the existing PC business model, but argues the user would benefit by having a PC with an extended “useful life.”
“A computer with scalable performance level components and selectable software and service options has a user interface that allows individual performance levels to be selected,” reads the patent application’s abstract. The patent application was filed June 21, 2007.
Be sure to read the rest in Meyer’s article. Note that this is speculation based on a patent filed by Microsoft: I’m not aware of any concrete plans from Microsoft to roll this out, but I thought it’d be fun to discuss.
If they do, however, I can’t see it catching on. Who wants to monitor their PC usage for fear of spending too long online or using too much CPU or memory, lest they get a big ding in the form of a hefty bill at the end of the month? Just because people have put up with this sort of thing from their mobile providers, doesn’t mean they’ll get onboard for pay-as-you-go computing. In fact, the experience with cell phone bills is likely to make any smart customer very wary of Microsoft’s metered computing idea. (Note that, on the enterprise side, having the same sort of ability — to pay only for the compute time you use, makes much more sense — but for home users? Not such a hot idea.)
The current proprietary software model for consumer PCs is bad enough. But license fees look like a bargain compared to metered computing — which Microsoft acknowledges will increase the cost of ownership of a PC over the PC’s lifetime. Aside from the cost factor, which is a pretty big downside to start with, there’s the enforcement side. Part of metered computing is the ability to shut off service.
Picture this scenario, if you will: It’s the start of a new billing cycle. You or one of your family members is sitting down at the computer to write that report for work or school that’s due tomorrow. For some reason, a payment wasn’t processed correctly, and suddenly the computer is locked up. Even if you do get the situation ironed out the same days, it’s an hour out of your life getting it smoothed out. Or perhaps the validation server is down, and you’re out of order for the next day while they get it smoothed out. This isn’t far-fetched — people have already been bitten by just this sort of problem with Windows Genuine Advantage.
Contrast this with the open source model: The up-front cost for a Linux distro is either free or very minimal (if you decide to pay for a physical copy rather than download) and the long term cost for updates and use is, well, nothing.
Odds are, this idea is in the nascent stage, and may never be rolled out. With the economy being what it is, I can’t see any vendors making a straight-faced argument to ask customers to pay more for what amounts to less. Maybe I’ve been doing this open source thing too long, though, and gotten used to paying nothing for my desktop usage. Is there demand for pay-as-you-go, or does it get a big thumbs-down?
December 29th, 2008
Perl PR: There’s more than one way to do it
The Perl Foundation tried a little PR experiment over the holiday. Good idea, but there’s more than one way to do it.
Dave Cross blogged about putting out a press release on Perl 5 development moving to a Git repo. Not a bad idea, but probably not the most effective way to spread the news. As one of the mottos of the Perl community is “there’s more than one way to do it,” I’d like to put forward some ideas on how to do PR that don’t fall into the standard corporate mold of “put out a press release and pray.”
I’m glad to see the Perl Foundation looking to be more visible — overall, it seems to me that the Perl community has been kind of quiet the past few years (perhaps they’re tired of questions about Perl 6…) and it wouldn’t hurt at all for the community to be looking for new ways to spread the word about Perl.
But putting things out on PRWeb probably isn’t going to get a lot of traction. Especially when it’s not a major attention-grabber. If there’s a big Perl 6 announcement — that might be a good one to invest the $80 in. But, for the most part, the only people who care that Perl development is going to be moved to a Git repostitory are people who know what Git is in the first place — which is not the vast majority of journalists that read PRWeb. Of course, some sites pick up press releases unaltered from services like PRWeb, so you’ll get a small boost on Google News if one of them picks up the release, but not a huge amount. (I checked, and the release did get picked up by a few publications, so it may have been worth the $80, but they could have gotten the same results or better for free, excepting the time to submit.)
If not PRWeb (or other news wires) what should community projects do to get attention from the press?
- Create a list of sites and reporters/bloggers who typically cover your project or things that look like your project.
- When you have news, send a personal note to each of those people with a short release that’s written conversationally and has highlights about why the news is important and what benefits (not features) it has for users or developers.
- Be mindful of news cycles — anything submitted over the weekend or major holidays is likely to be ignored. So, pretty much anything the week of Christmas is unlikely to be noticed. Even if a reporter happens to be working during the holiday, fewer people are likely to see it.
- Understand what’s news and what isn’t. Minor releases (Acme Editor 4.0.1 - now with undo up to 1,024 operations, up from 1,000!) aren’t likely to be worthy. Major events — major releases, major new functionality, license changes, etc. — merit the time and effort to reach out to the press.
- Learn how to work with and talk to the press.
- Be the media — When I was reporting full-time, I was much more likely to see a blog post by someone in the Perl community than I was to see a news release on PRWeb. By blogging and writing about activities in your community (which will occasionally not only spread the news, but also get you paid) you can be proactive and ensure that the word is spread whether or not a reporter decides to cover the story.
You might be thinking that it’s too time-intensive to contact, say, 30 reporters and bloggers directly. Thing is, getting in touch with the people directly means that you can establish a relationship and realize some long-term benefits you won’t see out of a press release.
December 26th, 2008
Better than a decoder pin: New FSF bootable membership cards
It just isn’t the holidays without “A Christmas Story,” and Ralphie’s quest for his decoder pin and Red Ryder BB Gun. Like Ralphie, the Free Software Foundation understands the benefits of membership and they have a unique hook for prospective new members: A bootable membership card.
Loaded with gNewSense Live!, they are shipping out to members first thing in January 2009 (production problems have caused us a delay). Each card includes a member user name and member number and on the back displays an extract from the free software definition. We’ve also included some exciting advocacy tools, like speeches from Richard Stallman and videos about free software. Since the card fits right in your wallet alongside your credit cards, you can take the message of software freedom with you everywhere you go.
As an added bonus, parents don’t have to worry about junior shooting his eye out with the bootable business card. Membership will only set you back $120 per year, which can be chunked into monthly payments if you don’t want to cough it all up at once. Now you can really be a card-carrying FSF supporter.
My question to the audience — does a membership card (bootable or not) inspire support of the FSF any more than understanding that the money goes to support the FSF? Why or why not? This is a serious question — I’d like to understand whether a bootable business card would inspire a $120 payment if a person wouldn’t already be inclined to support the FSF.
(Whether gNewSense actually qualifies as an entirely free distro is still a matter for debate, but they should at least get credit for intent.)
December 23rd, 2008
Apple continues abuse of App store
If any company desperately needs a clueful community manager, it’s Apple. I’ve written before about the company’s issues with the App store and the way it treats developers (as have many others) but it looks like they’re still having a hard time getting a handle on developer relations.
Ars Infinite Loop blog takes up the case of developers who have been waiting for up to three months for their apps to be approved:
Hart even goes as far as calling Apple’s attempts at support thus far “amateur,” and claims that the problems are widespread. His comments made us a bit curious as to whether this was simply the case of a particular developer making a lot of noise, or the problem truly is as widespread as he suggests. We decided to talk to a few more developers (besides our own Erica Sadun, of course) to see if the accusations were justified.
Ivan Papavich of Brancipater Software has had similar experiences. According to Ivan, the reviewing of applications takes a long time, but worse, that the time frame for review is so sporadic. “It could be two days, it could be two months” Ivan told us. Further, the lack of feedback on what “step” the review process is on further adds to the frustration. Ivan says, “The bottom line is that iTunes Connect is alright, as long as nothing goes wrong. As soon as something does go wrong, it’s bloody annoying and hard to fix.” The folks at Brancipater added that they would be willing to pay for support that met a certain standard.
To give all due credit, Apple has done a lot right with the iPhone. From the user perspective, the App store is a shining example of ease of use. Another tech journalist I respect quite a lot was just commenting today on how he could easily kill an hour browsing the App Store.
But the gatekeeper approach has to be excruciating for the developer community. And even though the user experience is a nice one, I’m not keen on supporting an ecosystem that blocks a number of useful applications from being available in the name of blocking competition with Apple’s own apps.
My next phone will be an Android.
December 22nd, 2008
Does dual-licensing limit community?
Stephen O’Grady has an interesting post about the past, present, and future of MySQL over on Redmonk, including how its dual-license strategy may limit its community:
Generally, this model has served MySQL fairly well. By controlling the intellectual property, they retain the rights to relicense the code, thus protecting a revenue stream. They also were afforded a slightly greater protection from forks versus more collaboratively developed projects like Linux, in that they - theoretically - employed the majority of the people qualified and paid to work on the codebase at the lowest levels. But let’s come back to that.
What’s the catch to the model? In part, it’s that the burden of development is born almost entirely by the MySQL staff, but the more relevant concern here is the inability to consume external contributions - even if they’re excellent - without licensing them.
Stated more simply: as long as MySQL remains committed to the dual licensing model, it will be unable to accept the same patch set that open source only versions of the code can, because they do not share the same licensing concerns. Which is why we’ve seen these spring up, and possibly why the MySQL-derived Drizzle project has taken a different approach from its parent.
Common wisdom in the past held that MySQL’s dual-license strategy was an advantage, as the company could reap the benefits of open source development, testing, and word-of-mouth marketing, while still pursuing some proprietary sales strategies.
Now that there’s more value placed on community contribution and collaboration between projects, the pendulum may be swinging towards pure open source plays instead. I think O’Grady is right on the money — the ability to consume external contributions will outweigh any benefits of the dual-license strategy that inhibits consumption of those contributions.
What do you think? Are companies that sponsor open source development better off with dual-licensing strategies that preserve proprietary opportunities, or should they be ditching the dual-license model and throw wide the gates to community contributions so long as the contributions meet their
December 20th, 2008
Companies drive open source success?
A new report says that large IT vendors are responsible for open source’s accelerated adoption and change.
From the report:
While open source software is omnipresent, and its presence is growing more rapidly than previously estimated, the basic nature of open source software is changing from project-based, developer-driven community initiatives to vendor-driven, and vendor-owned, software. One result of this is to make traditional methods of measuring open source’s presence and roles within user enterprises impractical.
Increasingly, people are finding that much of open source development is actually being directed and supported by companies like IBM, Novell, Red Hat, and others — rather than being the exclusive domain of unpaid volunteers. Though, the effect of the volunteer contributors should not be overlooked, either. It was the volunteers, early adopters, and early commercial supporters that put FOSS on the radar.
As John E. Dunn points out, vendors “have had to integrate some elements of open source into its environment because that was what the market was telling them to do.”
If you look through the history of open source, it’s clear that vendor involvement and open source adoption go hand-in-hand. Commercial involvement has driven the adoption of open source at nearly every turn. Companies like Red Hat and SUSE drove adoption of Linux when it was still rough around the edges by packaging and selling it and continually making it more suitable for use by a wider audience with each release.
December 20th, 2008
No such thing as a free Linux distro
A few Linux distributions emphasize license freedom as a goal, but Tom “Spot” Callaway says that there’s no such thing as a free Linux distro.
Callaway, Fedora’s engineering manager, writes that “you’d need to do an incredibly thorough audit of every file in the system to be sure that every single file is under a known license,” and the evidence says that most distros haven’t actually done it.
When we find something non-free, it almost always exists in the “100% Free GNU/Linux distributions”. I don’t spend time checking these things out, honestly, but for example, all of them were shipping GLX under SGI’s god-awful FreeB (and GLX) licensing at one point, well after Fedora and Debian both were aware of it. The number of things I have found (and continue to find) along with the surprise from upstreams when I inform them of the issues, forces me to draw the conclusion that the “100% Free” distributions are not doing proper audits (or if they are, they’re not talking to the upstreams about it).
I found this post particularly interesting in the light of the openSUSE 11.1 release. We decided we wanted to make sure that openSUSE was freely redistributable, and get rid of the old EULA, but we don’t claim that the release is “100% free” in terms of the software meeting the Free Software Foundation’s definition of free, or even the Open Source Initiative’s terms for being called “open source.”
Not that the goal of being 100% Free isn’t laudable. Just that it’s not quite as easy to accomplish as it might seem at first glance.
December 15th, 2008
More on FSF vs. Cisco
In case you’re interested in more detail on the Free Software Foundation’s suit against Cisco (but don’t want to wade through the entire complaint), the FSF has a post up explaining the situation in plain language. According to the FSF, it’s been a “five-years-running game of Whack-a-Mole” with Cisco.
During this entire time, Cisco has never been in full compliance with our licenses. At first glance, the situation might look good. It’s not difficult to find “source code” on the Linksys site. But you only have to dig a little deeper to find the problems. Those source code downloads are often incomplete or out-of-date. Cisco also provides written offers for source, but we regularly hear about requests going unfulfilled.
Despite our best efforts, Cisco seems unwilling to take the steps that are necessary to come into compliance and stay in compliance. We asked them to notify customers about previous violations and inform them about how they can now obtain complete source code; they have refused to do this, along with the other reasonable demands we have made to consider this case settled. The FSF has put in too many hours helping the company fix the numerous mistakes it’s made over the years. Cisco needs to take responsibility for its own license compliance.
Cisco has also released a short and not very informative statement, which was emailed to me not very long after my original post last week:
Cisco is a strong supporter of open source software. Cisco takes its open source software obligations and responsibilities seriously and is disappointed that a suit has been filed by the Free Software Foundation related to our work with them in our Linksys Division. We are currently reviewing the issues raised in the suit but believe we are substantially in compliance. We have always worked very closely with the FSF and hope to reach a resolution agreeable to the company and the foundation.
I’m not quite sure what substantially in compliance really means, but it sounds a lot like “not really in compliance” to me. (I’m substantially in compliance with the speed limit most of the time, but I don’t protest when I get a speeding ticket after the nice officers happen to clock me being somewhat non-compliant.)
I’ve asked Cisco to make someone available for questions, but Cisco has declined so far since the matter is “currently in litigation.”
For those criticizing the FSF for being “litigious,” it’s taken five years for the company to take the step of filing a suit. Cisco has hardly shown the same level of patience before filing suit against others.
December 12th, 2008
Herding cats for fun and profit: Four tips for working with online communities
If 2008 has a buzzword, it’s probably “community.” I’ve seen a lot more interest lately from many companies (not just mine) in learning how to work with a community. While I don’t claim to have all the answers, I do have some suggestions based on my experience with Novell over the last year, as well as my observations of other companies in and out of the open source space.
- Don’t start a conversation you can’t keep up. When launching a project, blog, or other avenue of communication/collaboration, have a plan for keeping it up long term. It’s easy to start a blog or launch a project — but it takes time and effort to tend to those. So don’t launch something you don’t have a plan to maintain. Don’t have comments enabled if you never read them. That doesn’t mean you need to respond to every comment — but if the community sees you never read or reply, it’s a good sign you’re not really listening.
- Plan to act on feedback. When you open the door to feedback from a community, be prepared to act on it. That doesn’t mean that any and all feedback has to be accepted, of course — but if the conversation is one-way only, it’s useless. When you say “what do you think?” be prepared to listen and act.
- Have an open process. When making decisions, planning features, working on code, and so forth, you need to have a process that’s as transparent as possible. This takes time and effort, and won’t happen overnight. Depending on the nature of your project, some things may always take place behind closed doors — for instance, when dealing with security bugs, many projects choose to make those bugs private until the vulnerability is disclosed. Only a few developers will have access to that information, and the community at large may not have access to those issues. But, the bulk of the process should be open to the larger community if you want to be successful.
- Bad news is better than no news. It may be a good PR practice to stay “on message” all the time by touting all the positives and staying silent on the negatives, but that’s poor community management. Maybe a little less off-message than Monty, but you should never be afraid to admit to making an honest mistake.
Of course, other people might have better ideas than mine. I’d love to hear other ideas on best practices for working with a community. What’s worked, what hasn’t, and any creative tips for companies looking to do right by their communities.
December 11th, 2008
Free Software Foundation sues Cisco
If Cisco really wants to woo Linux developers, it might want to work on license compliance before worrying about code bounties and contests. The Free Software Foundation announced today that it’s suing Cisco for violating the GPL, which is a sure-fire way to put off contributors.
According to the FSF’s press release, the FSF has been trying to work with Cisco for five years without any satisfactory results.
“We began working with Cisco in 2003 to help them establish a process for complying with our software licenses, and the initial changes were very promising,” explained Brett Smith, licensing compliance engineer at the FSF. “Unfortunately, they never put in the effort that was necessary to finish the process, and now five years later we have still not seen a plan for compliance. As a result, we believe that legal action is the best way to restore the rights we grant to all users of our software.”
If Cisco wants to build bridges into the FOSS community, it would do well to start by complying with the licenses that bind the community.
It will be interesting to see where this goes. So far, no one has gotten to a ruling on the GPL in the U.S. My money says Cisco will finally start working with the FSF.
Recent Entries
- Metered computing: Another great argument for open source in 2009
- Perl PR: There’s more than one way to do it
- Better than a decoder pin: New FSF bootable membership cards
- Apple continues abuse of App store
- Does dual-licensing limit community?
Most Popular Posts
- Apple continues abuse of App store
- Metered computing: Another great argument for open source in 2009
- No such thing as a free Linux distro
- Better than a decoder pin: New FSF bootable membership cards
- Perl PR: There's more than one way to do it
- Companies drive open source success?
Top Rated
- Apple continues abuse of App store+13 votes
- No such thing as a free Linux distro+5 votes
- Metered computing: Another great argument for open source in 2009+4 votes
- Insubordinate or honest? What should Sun do about Monty?+4 votes
- Free Software Foundation sues Cisco+4 votes
- Better than a decoder pin: New FSF bootable membership cards+3 votes
- Herding cats for fun and profit: Four tips for working with online communities+2 votes
- Does dual-licensing limit community?+2 votes
Archives
Favorite Links
Blogroll
ZDNet Blogs
- A Developer's View
- All About Microsoft
- The Apple Core
- Between the Lines
- BriefingsDirect
- Collaboration 2.0
- Community, Incorporated
- CRM 2.0: The Conversation
- Dev Connection
- Digital Cameras
- Ed Bott's Microsoft Report
- Emerging Tech
- Enterprise Alley
- Enterprise Web 2.0
- Feeds
- Forrester Research
- Googling Google
- GreenTech Pastures
- Hardware 2.0
- Home Theater
- iGeneration
- Irregular Enterprise
- IT Facts
- The IT Grind
- IT Project Failures
- Laptops & Desktops
- Lawgarithms
- Linux and Open Source
- Managing L'unix
- The Mobile Gadgeteer
- On Sustainability
- Rational Rants
- The Semantic Web
- Service Oriented
- Smartphones and Cell Phones
- Software & Services Safari
- Software as Services
- SOHO Networking
- Storage Bits
- Team Think
- Tech Broiler
- Tom Foremski: IMHO
- The ToyBox
- The Universal Desktop
- Virtually Speaking
- The Web Life
- ZDNet Education
- ZDNet Government
- ZDNet Healthcare
- Zero Day
SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- Small Business Phones: The Basics and Beyond Cisco Systems
- Case Study: Eco-Friendly Materials Importer Uses Technology to Grow Cisco Systems
- What is Network Security? Cisco Systems
Storage Virtualization
- In virtual environments, storage matters. It influences everything from application availability and disaster readiness to power consumption and TCO. Bottom line: Don’t defeat the purpose of your consolidation by skimping on storage.
- From our sponsors
-
EMC Corporation
- ESG applauds new CX4 in analyst report According to ESG, it's hard to find much missing in the new CLARiiON CX4. Read the report to learn more »
-
