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Google makes Chrome OS open source
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Category: Strategy
November 20th, 2009
Oracle opponent cheers delay in mySQL decision
Florian Mueller, coordinating opposition to Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems and mySQL, sent a note today cheering word that Oracle has asked for, and gotten, a six-day delay to answer European objections to the purchase. (Picture from Roberto Galoppini.)
Mueller, a former mySQL shareholder and strategic advisor, is working with mySQL co-founder Monty Widenius.
“Oracle is now apparently backtracking from previous claims that the European Commission has no credible theory of harm. If the EU’s objections were baseless, Oracle wouldn’t need more time now to develop its arguments. This is another sign of enormous weakness only three weeks after Oracle withdrew its antitrust application in Russia.
One more week won’t change the fact that MySQL competes fiercely with Oracle’s database products including its flagship ‘11g’ across all major market segments. One more week won’t transform a traditional company product like MySQL into a community project that could be developed by volunteers just because it’s open source. The best way Oracle can make use of this extra week is to think really hard about selling MySQL to a suitable third party.”
Mueller said the delay in Oracle’s response means a decision on the merger won’t come from the European Commission until January 27.
Widenius strongly disagrees with mySQL co-founder Marten Mickos on the Oracle-Sun deal. Mickos as written to EC Competition Commissioner Nellie Kroes asking that the deal go through.
My personal view is that Oracle could spin control of the code base into a foundation like Eclipse, with control based on investment, which would also enable money to flow in from mySQL stakeholders like Amazon.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison insists the delay in Europe’s approval is degrading the overall value of Sun, which also controls such important open source projects as Java and Open Office.
I do not disagree.
But due to its open source license Oracle is not gaining control of the mySQL code base, just becoming its commercial sponsor. So why not bring free money to support the code base and have something better to sell support on?
It’s reasonable that Ellison resents the interference of European bureaucrats in Oracle’s affairs. But personal feelings should not get in the way of business. This is business.
Business is just business.
November 18th, 2009
Google-Microsoft rivalry on with ChromeOS launch
The daily competition between Google and Microsoft becomes ever-more direct this week, with Google hosting a demo of its ChromeOS tomorrow, right after Microsoft’s Professional Development conference.
ChromeOS is Google’s version of Linux for netbooks, much as Android is its Linux for handhelds. It is a version of Bill Gates’ nightmares from 15 years ago, as Netscape was rising, visions that led directly to the case of U.S. vs. Microsoft.
Microsoft got through that crisis unscathed in a corporate sense, but its image was transformed from that of a user-friendly upstart to that of “an implacable force for evil,” as one comedy show said recently, exemplified by the famous Boardwatch cover of Bill Gates as a member of the Borg, the Star Trek bad guys.
The fear, old programming hands will tell you, was that Netscape would turn its Mozilla browser into a full-fledged operating system that, because of its dominance of the browser space, could beat Windows in the market.
Chrome is a lot like that. It is centered on the browser, which abstracts the complexity of Linux from the user. And it’s designed to load fast, a real Achilles Heel for Windows on a netbook. An early version could be available for download next week.
When you’re paying $300 for your machine, you don’t want to wait 10 minutes for the thing to start, and you don’t want to be paying a lot for your software, either. ChromeOS is designed to fix both problems, so I am looking forward to it.
The hope is that the industry which supports ChromeOS will make up in services what it loses in up-front fees. And Google will be able to tie all its online services to ChromeOS, increasing its market share in areas like Mail where it is not yet dominant.
So, Mr. Bill, is resistance futile?
November 17th, 2009
What a decade taught Larry Augustin
At 46, Larry Augustin is much too young to be the grand old man of anything.
But he is one of the grand old figures of open source. He was in the group that coined the term back in the late 1990s.
Larry was Sourceforge, he was VA Linux, back during the dot-boom 10 years ago. He rode the stock to $240/share, then watched it plummet to nearly nothing in the dot-bomb.
Once had had a Web site, made it run. Made it race against time. Once he had a Web site, now it’s done, buddy can you spare a dime?
But Larry kept his hand in. He became an angel investor and adviser, a “go-to” guy for any open source start-up looking for some street cred. His current bio has him on 9 different corporate boards, topping the list of the most influential people in open source a few months ago. (Our own Matt Asay was number two.)
The news today is that Larry is the permanent CEO of SugarCRM. Appointed on an interim basis in May to replace co-founder John Roberts, he has pointed the software into the cloud, adding a business model to its large community.
What has he learned in that time?
- Influence is not a contest among bloggers. Augustin’s last blog post is dated July.
- Companies grow through teams. The next negative word about SugarCRM’s people I hear from Larry will be the first.
- The future of open source is in SaaS, in the cloud.
Larry Augustin’s story is proof that second acts in business are possible. Most of those who boomed during the dot-boom were never heard from after the dot-bomb. But not Larry.
His story reminds me of the man who was managing my Atlanta Braves when I first moved here in the early 1980s. He won a pennant, got fired, got kicked around. He got a few gigs, did some broadcasting, advised a few people here and there.
Then he got another shot, in New York, and he took it. His second chance made Joe Torre a sure Hall of Famer.
I can’t guarantee Larry Augustin the same success, but after a decade in the wilderness he has a team again. Hard for me not to root for the “old guy.”
November 12th, 2009
Broadcom goes open source and hell freezes over
When the rock group Eagles broke up in 1980 they said they would get back together “when hell froze over.” They did get back together, in 1994. The album was called Hell Freezes Over.
Point is you can promise you will never do something — never, ever, ever — but business is business.
It’s with this in mind we find Broadcom making its BroadVoice voice codecs open source and royalty free under GPL V. 2.
GigaOM is wondering whether Broadcom isn’t just pushing for higher priced, higher quality voice from service providers using the codecs. I have another theory.
Broadcom saw its greatest success in pioneering relationships with Taiwanese OEMs. When other chip companies were offering these firms software and ecosystems, Broadcom offered them solutions, complete designs from brand names they could bang out for a quick profit.
What I saw at CompuTex this year was an enormous interest from these OEMs, whose ties to Chinese manufacturing are incredibly strong, to go “up the stack” of value, to own their own designs and create their own brand names.
They see this as an impossible dream on the desktop, but very possible in the handset business, a Broadcom niche. Systems like Android, LiMo and Symbian are open source, so the components going into them should also be open source. It’s the most effective way to compete with Apple.
In taking this route, the OEMs are explicitly rejecting Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, and this is a very big deal. This has nothing to do with the sales world they desire. They gave Microsoft all of the Netbook market and stuck Linux in a corner.
This Broadcom announcement is the best proof yet that the future of the handheld market is Linux.
November 9th, 2009
Where should Mozilla go from here?
Five years into Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation’s plans seem mainly geared to an aggressive release schedule, so that the browser can compete with Google Chrome.
There is irony here, because the bulk of Mozilla’s income comes from Google, in the form of royalties on the Google search box which sits on the upper-right corner of the program’s interface.
Thus we have a browser created to stop the Microsoft monopoly pushing what some say is the next dangerous monopoly, that of Google.
Firefox is not Mozilla’s only project. There is the Thunderbird e-mail client, the Bugzilla bug tracking system, and SeaMonkey, which combines Firefox and Thunderbird with Web development tools and chat.
But Firefox is what Mozilla is known for, and most of its work, and that of its add-on makers, is devoted to Firefox and the technologies that emerged from it.
Firefox has transformed the Web, by creating real competition to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The question to ask today, however, is where does Mozilla go from here?
- Can Mozilla expand its funding sources to become truly independent of Google?
- Can Mozilla create real market share outside the browser?
- Should Mozilla be focused on browser share, or leave that to Google Chrome and concentrate instead on HTML-related technologies?
- What is Mozilla, in the end? What does the Foundation want to be?
These are the questions born of success. They are not attacks on Mozilla, but the most successful experiment always raises more questions than it answers. Mozilla is, as they say when a soccer team is attacking, “asking the questions.” Which questions should it be asking?
Where, then, does Mozilla go from here? Now that certainties have disappeared, how does its dreams survive? In an open source world, these are not just questions for the Foundation’s directors. They are also questions for you.
November 9th, 2009
The importance of Sixth Sense going open source
No one can say Sixth Sense is not innovative.
The creation of Pranav Mistry, a PH.D candidate at MIT’s Media Lab, it’s described as a “wearable gesteral interface” whose hardware comprises a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera.
(The illustration is from Mistry’s Web site.)
Mistry’s idea is that these components will be worn like pendant, with the computer they’re wirelessly connected to kept in a pocket.
Using Sixth Sense, data is displayed in the air and manipulated using hand gestures. When Mistry is demonstrating it, he looks like a magician.
It’s cool. And it’s going to launch as open source.
“I don’t want this to comply with some corporate policy,” he told Rediff while in India demonstrating the interface at the TEDIndia Conference. “I want people to make their own system. Why not?”
Mistry’s decision has meaning beyond Sixth Sense. The desire of inventors is always to get their work into the market as quickly as possible. Usually this means waiting for it to be turned into a useful, profitable invention. Mistry is bypassing this by going straight to open source.
There is no report on which license he will use, but whichever one he does choose he has put paid to the canard that open source and innovation are incompatible, for all time.
November 5th, 2009
What would make you trust Microsoft?
In some ways these are the best of times for Microsoft, and open source gets some credit for that.
(I found this charming mashup of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer as Dr. Evil at The Big Deal, a blog by Stefano Buliani.)
Without the competition of open source, I doubt Microsoft’s trend toward bureaucracy could have ever been slowed. Every company goes through its own aging process, and renewal only occurs under pressure.
Open source has strained every muscle Microsoft has — legal, marketing, development, management — but the recession of the last year has brought a turn. Resistance within the open source industry to Microsoft’s entry has gone down. This is easy to see in the writings of our own Matt Asay.
The success of the CodePlex Foundation has given Microsoft another entree into the Fortunate 500. It has allowed Microsoft to be the rabbi of these companies as they approach open source, making strategic code releases and building their own internal communities.
Then there have been Microsoft’s own code releases, which have accelerated since OSI approval of its branded licenses. Plus that sweet, sweet Windows 7 cash.
All in all, a good year. A year of peace and progress. And I can hear you grinding your teeth from here.
Despite all of Microsoft’s actions these last few years, the company remains intensely controversial among open source advocates. For me to write the word Microsoft (Microsoft, Microsoft) here at the open source blog leads to a Pavlovian response.
Actually it leads to two Pavlovian responses. There’s the “Microsoft is evil” response, and a corresponding “Microsoft is not evil” response. And this distrust, this air of controversy, continues to cost Microsoft money.
Microsoft executives still have to walk into open source meetings with shields up, while continuing to protect their bureaucratic flanks within the company. This is easy to see when you hear the smiles on former Microsoft open source executives as they speak from their new gigs. It’s wearing.
Since I began writing this blog, nearly 5 years ago, I have watched Microsoft seek to transform itself from a company that sold code to one that sells the services code provides, and I have watched open source projects see the value in having commercial arms that protect more of their right to make money from copyright.
What I have not seen is any reduction in intensity when I write the word Microsoft, from readers, e-mail correspondents, or the open source people I meet.
Why is that, I wonder. Are all those who hate Microsoft extremists, and will Microsoft ever find happiness in an open source world?
November 4th, 2009
Sam Ramji has his head in the clouds
Sam Ramji, formerly the face of open source at Microsoft (cue the Star Wars music) is settling into a new life as vice president for strategy at Sonoa Systems, a cloud start-up.
He told me it suits him.
“Instead of pushing boulders up the hill I’m going down the hill. Sonoa has 65 employees. I talk to customers directly, daily, instead of monthly. There’s less operational overhead. So I’m getting out more, talking at events more, talking to journalists and analysts more.
“At Microsoft there is no such thing as a staff job. You have to always be driving strategy, be a subject matter expert, and get into detail as much as necessary. I had a 120 person team in a 90,000 person organization.
“As Vice President for Strategy at Sonoa Systems I’m a one man show.” He also gets more family time — he describes himself on his personal blog as an “avid husband and father of two.”
That blog (now part of the blogroll here) is also now a great place to get Ramji’s honest views on cloud computing, CodePlex, and open source in general, as in this piece “free is not the opposite of commercial.”
Ramji describes 
Sonoa as being among the many start-ups working to define what will become the LAMP stack of cloud computing. (That’s a close-up of its home page, describing its offerings, to the left.)
This means competitors are often collaborators. “We’re all trying to figure out how our technologies connect” with the primary competition coming from clients’ in-house development.
He described one Sonoa solution, for MTV, involving RightScale, Amazon, Sonoa and Xen, all working together. “It seems like we do the same thing, but when we get deployed you realize that managing the virtual infrastructure is different from managing cloud service traffic. Stacks are just starting to emerge and each component is important.”
So Ramji has gone from a world where everything is defined and the fight is continuous to one where nothing is defined and contention is nebulous. It’s more wide-open and, he says, more fun.
So there is life after Microsoft, in the clouds.
November 4th, 2009
With Zapatec Funambol has one stack to rule mobile open source
Funambol, now billing itself as the leader in mobile sync, has bought Zapatec, which creates Web 2.0 solutions using AJAX.
The result, the company believes, will be a one-stop shop for building mobile applications that run as well as native apps across multiple platforms.
Funambol has its developers in Italy, Zapatec in the Ukraine, but both have operations in Silicon Valley that will be consolidated in Redwood City. Zapatec CEO Dror Matalon will become vice president of emerging technologies for the combined company, said Funambol vice president of worldwide marketing Hal Steger.
The combined company is focused on a tough problem for mobile developers, namely how do you create apps that integrate with native apps, yet don’t have to be completely rewritten for each platform.
Steger said Funambol’s sync technology solves part of the first problem, Zapatec most of the second, and the combination will enable a total solution.
“A lot of people think the future of mobile apps will be like Web apps, like AJAX apps on desktop browsers,” said Steger. “If you can build a Web app that works on a lot of phones you can just build one version.”
Not exactly. “Mobile is different from desktops because two of the most important things you need to do are integrate with the core apps on the phone, like the address book and calendar, because other apps do.” This makes it harder to build a single app for multiple platforms and carriers.
Funambol solves part of the problem since its mobile sync is designed to be cross-platform and cross-carrier. Zapatec solves the coding problem.
You can call this innovation, but then it’s all based on an open source core. Developers will want to do business with Funambol, not just download its stuff, to get the full effect, Steger said, but the effect should be cool.
November 2nd, 2009
Blackboard embraces and extends into open source movement
Anyone seeking a case study of how a proprietary software company can “embrace and extend” itself into the open source world should stop thinking Microsoft and start thinking Blackboard.
(Picture from the University of Alaska. Bonus points if you find a link to Russia from the site.)
Blackboard has a long-running feud with open source, ably chronicled by our own Christopher Dawson. Open source Learning Management Systems (LMSs) like Moodle, Sakai and OLAT have been seeking its market share for five years now.
Part of the solution was to open source tools for use with its proprietary suite. Blackboard may have been overly-aggressive in pushing this as a true open source solution but it wasn’t finished yet.
Phase Two involves signing alliances with educators and lining up scaled resources from within the open source ecosystem.
Today’s news brings an example.
It’s a deal with Northwestern University (Go Wildcats) to integrate its Blackboard Learn platform within Google Apps as a single sign-on. The Building Block itself is open source, Google Apps is based on open source, but here’s the imprimatur of a major University (and big customer) linking a proprietary LMS into it.
Earlier this year Blackboard signed a deal with Flat World Knowledge, the open source textbook publisher we’ve written of here, to integrate Flat World textbooks with Blackboard Learn.
Given Blackboard’s position as a market leader, and its open source Building Blocks for handling the integration, the move by Flat World is logical and justifiable.
The result, however, is that despite open source a proprietary LMS is more entrenched than ever within its marketplace.
October 19th, 2009
Motorola goes all-in for Google Android
What makes the World Series of Poker compelling is that it ends.
TV poker has specified stakes and players going “all-in.”
Business lacks such climaxes. You seldom see such a grand gesture. There’s always another quarter. It’s a grind.
That’s what makes Motorola’s gamble on the Google Android, and the grand gesture of its “Droid” launch, worth a second look. The company is going “all-in.” There is no backup plan. If the sales parachute does not open the company falls like a rock.
Failure might be embarrassing for Google, but it has other partners and many other opportunities. For Motorola this is do or die.
Even if the company itself doesn’t go under with a Droid failure, this is its last shot at cellphone glory. Its phone sales have been cut in half the last few years, its market share is a shadow of its former glory, and the vultures are circling.
Having followed Motorola off-and-on for over 30 years I find this a fascinating spectacle. The company has been around for over 80 years, producing its first cellphone back in 1973. Motorola’s corporate history claims it invented Six Sigma, and among its acquisitions over the years were General Instrument and Symbol Technologies.
Now Motorola is betting on Google to help make it a player in radios again, its original niche. The first pictures of the platform are out, and were enough to send the stock soaring. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
How do you think it will taste?
October 16th, 2009
Analysts build open source straw men
It is natural that market analysts might not like open source.
Open source lowers costs and passes the savings on to you.
While it is possible to build a $1 billion business on open source the path to that success does not require that you do the Forrester walk or buy Gartner studies on sales channels.
It costs nothing to try open source, so instead of selling you’re converting users into buyers of service.
Open source is also a big enemy of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD), which often defined success in the 1980s. It’s hard to talk about what you might offer when everyone can see what you do offer and add to it if they want.
These same problems, I must add, apply to the media as well. Open source companies do not advertise as widely as those with closed source. They do not hold food frenzies for reporters with big shrimp and an open bar. They know who their customers are — they are the people who have downloaded the code.
This may be why straw men have recently become the subjects of choice among analysts like Gartner’s Brian Prentice.
(If you really want to make your own straw man, the Wiccan section at About.Com has complete directions, from which this illustration was taken.)
That story involves bands of fiercely independent geek-heroes. Armed only with an Eclipse IDE, a weekend’s supply of Jolt Cola for energy and a poster of Jean-Luc Picard for inspiration, they set out to usurp the big software companies in their attempt to control the software universe.
Just because Richard Stallman has a beard like Jerry Garcia doesn’t mean he can play the guitar.
In 2009 most of the long hair and bearded guys I know carry The Fountainhead in their pockets and listen to Glenn Beck. There were more unshaved womens’ legs at the recent Tea Party rallies than in the entire Obama Administration.
I have been covering open source for five years and have yet to meet a single CEO who dreams of wearing Spandex to work. They’re all businessmen (and women), hard-charging dollars-and-cents people. They take advantage of the Internet to drive out costs and are looking to monetize what they have in any way they can.
Now this much is true. In many open source companies, especially early stage open source companies, programmers have enormous power. Getting a project committer onto your team is a real coup for an open source company trying to monetize that project with support contracts.
Some of the best open source companies out there are led by project leaders. And some programmers do drink Jolt Cola.
But just because salesmen wear alligator shoes and some programmers wear Crocs does not mean that open source is being run by hippies. Mario Batali likes Crocs and he’s as serious a businessman as you’ll find.
My guess is this is part of a long mourning process that the research industry has been going through. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
Please get to Stage Five quickly, folks. It’s the only way you can go forward.
October 12th, 2009
Why the big Android bandwagon?
We have had open source mobile platforms for years. Why has Android become a bandwagon, one big enough that people are wondering if it’s not growing too big for its britches.
One word: marketing.
Thanks to its low-cost structure, Google can subsidize the marketing of its products to a degree even experienced rivals can’t match. As I have said before there is a price lower than free, and Google is uniquely positioned to pay that price.
Why? Look at the ad above, for the HTC myTouch, from Vimeo. All those celebrities aren’t just selling T-Mobile, or HTC. They are also selling Google. Android gave Google an excuse to do TV ads, with others’ help. Even if it doesn’t sell phones it sells the Google brand, and Google benefits from that.
It’s all about the sharing. By spreading the development effort through open source, Google also spreads the marketing cost as various players vie for position. But Google’s size and budget are what make this a good deal for everyone else.
Symbian and RIM can’t pay this price to the degree Google can. Symbian was spun-out to become self-sustaining, and its developer outreach efforts may be all it can do. RIM has a proprietary background, and proprietary profits, so for it to grab open source may easily be seen as desperation.
Google has both the money and the reputation to push product through the channel that has its roots in open source. Its multiplicity of developers means all of them have an incentive to drive down the open source incline and the open source development incline.
Google may eventually seek to monetize all this with online services, but it is developing the market before showing its hand in that area. Meanwhile, the ad revenue from having Web pages appear on more mobile kit is all it really needs. (Yes, this means the iPhone is subsidizing Android.)
Google’s cost structure gives it the power to be patient, something no other market player has. The Android bandwagon is built on this patience.
To succeed, however, it will have to deliver products as good or better than the iPhone, at the same or less cost, with just as many apps. That risk to its reputation is all Google is laying on the line here, but since failure will also hurt open source that risk is also shared.
October 8th, 2009
Google plays a hand of Ogre with Apple
Those of a certain age will remember an early Steve Jackson game called Ogre. It was a two-player game where one player had a single piece, a powerful piece called the Ogre. The other player had everything else.
This pretty much sums up Google’s Android strategy against the Apple iPhone. Apple in this case plays the Ogre. (Picture from Steve Jackson Games.)
The combination of Apple’s proprietary iPhone design and its exclusive deal with AT&T has proven financially powerful. Apple created a market no one thought existed for a data-driven mobile Internet client and everyone else is playing catch-up.
With Dell now agreeing to supply AT&T with its version of the Android, Google now has game pieces on all four major U.S. carriers, including the one Apple plays on. T-Mobile was the first carrier to carry Android kit, Verizon is being promised a bunch of it. Sprint and Samsung will be in on the game in a Moment.
Everybody gets to play the way they want. Carriers can get exclusives on designs, and negotiate any deal on the resulting data flow they wish. Both new and old manufacturers get to play in the phone game and try to innovate on the margins.
All this work feeds back into the Android ecosystem, and all content sales feed into the Android marketplace. Google just wants a place to advertise alongside the content.
It’s a fun game, whose knock-on effects are a direct challenge to Microsoft, Symbian, and the Blackberry folks. Google seems destined to be the market’s #2 player by early next year, #2 with a bullet.
But please note this. All Google’s pieces taken together don’t yet add up to the power of Apple’s iPhone. The Ogre still has the power. But Google has the dice.
October 7th, 2009
Will open source biology get anywhere?
While open source moves forward smartly in software, the movement has barely begun in biology, where the need is much greater.
The first such “open source biology” company, Sage Bionetworks, was founded just this year and is only now beginning to solicit its first donations beyond seed money.
Its growth may be slowed in that both co-founders, Stephen Friend and Eric Schadt (who has since left), came from Merck, and the perception may be that this is a Merck stalking horse.
The big news is that this may be broadening. Sage is now trumpeting a “major donation” (amount unspecified) from Quintiles, a contract researcher with 21,000 employees. Friend is now going around the world in search of more.
I will have more to say about Sage’s efforts in biology, and what may be hampering them, over at SmartPlanet Rethinking Healthcare, but for now I want to solicit the wisdom of open source readers.
How would you go about gaining traction for open source biology? What should Stephen Friend be doing?
September 22nd, 2009
Corporate open source is more vulnerable
Yahoo’s move to offload Zimbra, combined with Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, are reminders of a nasty truth supporters of corporate open source would rather not recognize.
Corporate open source is vulnerable open source.
That’s because, with a few exceptions, open source has not been the money-spinner its boosters thought it would be. This should not be a surprise. Open source by its nature values other things beyond a vendor’s bottom line.
Funny, when you eliminate distribution and marketing, and when you can’t make people pay you for your product, your bottom line isn’t going to be as robust as it might otherwise be. Yet this is not a sign of open source failure. It’s a natural by-product of its success.
The money open source vendors aren’t making is money that open source users can make. It’s money saved on code, on systems, on development, money that can be used to do the work of the business. This is true whether the business in question is for-profit, a non-profit, or a government entity. The savings are real, and massive.
What is becoming clear, however, is that because open source values different forms of money, and different peoples’ money, it’s not such a great deal for vendors. That’s one reason entrepreneurial types like Matt Asay are saying good things about Microsoft. Open source, it turns out, is not about them.
But open source code still needs a place to live. It needs a home and homes cost money.
What the history of the last few years tells me is that the best home for an open source project is not a company, but a foundation.
Within a foundation costs are shared, savings are shared, but members are free to deploy those savings as they see fit. Groups like the Linux Foundation, Mozilla, Apache and Eclipse move forward smartly, developers getting plenty of resources to keep working, while corporate-backed efforts sputter and flame out with every season.
But life inside a foundation is not like life inside a corporation. What corporate eyes may see as healthy competition foundation eyes may see as wasteful redundancy.
Take the two code bases maintained by Openoffice.org, for instance. Few outside the business know there are two code bases, one based on Sun’s StarOffice, the other on IBM’s Symphony.
In a competitive world this would keep both sides honest. In a foundation world the benefits are not so obvious. It’s like having two separate offices within the same organization for Mozambiquan orphan relief. The orphans would do better with one.
These truths were not self-evident when the decade began, but they seem pretty obvious now. The question is what are we going to do about them?
September 18th, 2009
Does Oracle matter to open source
Analysts looked at Oracle’s stack of chips for the last quarter and called it a bit light. (Thus this picture of Oracle’s headquarters.)
Should followers of open source care?
Maybe they should. Once it acquires Sun, Oracle will be the largest sponsor of open source projects people use every day. We’re talking Java, we’re talking mySQL, we’re talking OpenOffice.org.
Once Sun’s portfolio is in Oracle’s hands, the projects’ budgets will survive on Oracle’s sufferance, and if Oracle is fading those budgets will decline.
On the other hand maybe they shouldn’t. The big alternative to Oracle in today’s marketplace is IBM’s DB2, which has an alliance with Oracle rival SAP. IBM may be the best friend open source has, with its sponsorship of Eclipse and proof that open source can make a profit.
What is clear is that big open source projects now live in a land of giants. After years of growth under independent leadership, or under the leadership of lagging sponsors, open source managers now find themselves reporting to small divisions of giant corporations.
There is a way out, but it will take work. Building companies that fork projects outside the control of the big boys is legally possible. Linux has all sorts of forks. I reported on one, ClearOS, just the other day.
Another way out is to build open source around foundations independent from any single vendor. Think Eclipse, Apache, and Mozilla.
So long as an open source project lives under a single corporate sponsor, its fate is tied up with that of the sponsor. When the sponsor is bought, the community can either live in the new house or go out into the cold cruel world, alone.
That’s an important lesson from the Oracle-Sun story. It’s a lesson that may be hard for other corporate open source companies to accept, but there it is. If you must rely on others, the best thing to do may be to rely on a collection of them.
If open source is corporate property, how big a difference is there really between it and proprietary software? Something to think about during a long football weekend.
September 16th, 2009
If you liked Microsoft CodePlex you will love MySpace FoxForge
OK, the new MySpace open source project is not called FoxForge.
Just because News Corp. owns something does not mean everything on it gets the Fox logo or the Fox attitude.
(After writing this I decided to check out the Web address FoxForge.com and found this cute little guy next to an “under construction” sign and an address at Lycanthrope.net. At last check Foxforge.org was still available.))
In fact the MySpace open source offering is called Qizmt. It’s a GPLv3 MapReduce project aimed at building distributed applications for large clusters of Windows servers.
The software is already being used in a MySpace feature called “People You Know,” writes our own Dave Rosenberg, and MySpace has plans to expand its use.
While this story started with snark, however, I do have a serious question to ask, which relates to both MySpace and Microsoft’s CodePlex. That is, does the ownership of a project color your view of it?
Would Facebook have overtaken MySpace had Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. not bought its parent company, Intermix, in 2005, with a prediction that MySpace would drive traffic to other Fox sites.
I believe the answer to that is no.
The reason is the nature of this medium. You may not care whether a movie comes from 20th Century Fox, or whether the Fox TV network is broadcasting your favorite NFL team this week. But on the Internet it’s easy to walk out. The exit sign is just a mouse click away.
Thus reputation is a crucial asset online, far more important than in the offline world. If you like someone you are inclined to stay with them despite their faults. If you don’t like them you are inclined to not give them a chance.
This colors attitudes toward all Microsoft projects, including CodePlex and its Bing search engine. I take that for granted on this beat. You’re either pro-Microsoft or anti-Microsoft. Middle ground is scarce.
The same is true for Murdoch. People either like his products or hate them. They rush toward them or avoid them. There is little middle ground. This defines a strong niche market, but also makes other parts of the market off-limits.
I believe this colored attitudes towards the music-oriented social network and, unfortunately, most of the target for that product lived in an “anti-Murdoch” world. The question is how that might color reactions toward Qizmt (which I assume is pronounced Kismet, like the Rogers & Hammerstein musical).
Will you think of this as a FoxForge? Or not?
September 14th, 2009
Open source loves profit
The biggest lie told about open source is that those who practice it hate making money, that they are anti-capitalist.
(Picture from those dirty commies at Wikimedia Commons.)
Some people within the FOSS community do feel that way, of course. They are idealists first, developers second. It is thanks to such people that software is now a hollow mountain, the insides visible and little bits of open innovation pushing through the crust here and there.
It’s just silly to tar the whole movement with that broad brush, as Matt Asay does in tracking the attitudes of some to recent moves by Microsoft and Oracle.
He uses a pushquote to note the words of cartoonist and wine importer Hugh MacLeod, that “It’s easy to spot a purist. They’re the ones without any skin in the game.”
That’s some nice snark, but the reply is it depends on what you mean by skin.
GPL programmers, those who contribute code, have lots of skin in the game, real skin, skin that is more important to them than money. To disparage those in open source who value something other than a bank balance is to call the bulk of it anti-capitalist, when it’s just not.
Lots of people support the GPL because it’s the bottom of the open source incline. They operate transparently because that’s at the bottom of the open source development incline. They have skin in the game, but their lives have fewer zeroes than yours, Matt. They get by with a little help from their friends.
Marc Fleury did a $350 million deal for JBOSS, still one of the largest open source deals on record, and that was for GPL software. Come to think of it, so is mySQL, which came out with $1 billion from Sun.
Marc is now backing another open source project, Open Remote, not because he’s gone Communist but because he knows the best way to clear an impasse of proprietary agendas is to take money out of the equation and move forward.
If you want people to help you develop your software, give them equal rights to yours. If you really want them to help you, play as straight as possible with them. You can still make money. Your community will be thrilled if you do, because they want jobs.
Microsoft doesn’t play that way. In part this is natural, because their code base cost a fortune to develop and so their contribution to open source extensions will always be out-sized compared with those of small developers, as will the benefit they derive.
If you accept those rules. Matt, by all means play by them.
Just don’t throw stones at those who would rather take their software efforts elsewhere.
September 11th, 2009
Will Microsoft always be seen as open source Astroturf?
There’s an old game in politics. If some group is giving you trouble, launch a competing group under your control.
Bar Association won’t approve your judges? Launch your own lawyers’ group. Feminists giving you trouble? Create a group of “real feminists” spouting your talking points.
These are the origins of Astroturf, a popular term in current political debates denoting phony grassroots, people who claim to be angry from the bottom up but are controlled from the top down.
(Are you ready for some football? My local team, the Atlanta Falcons, plays all their home games on the fake grass of the Georgia Dome. This weekend they’ll be tangled up in blue…)
Now before you go all political on me my question is whether we’ll ever see Microsoft as meaning anything but Astroturf in open source.
This week Microsoft is putting a cool $1 million into its new CodePlex Foundation. It’s a valedictory of sorts for director of platform strategy Sam Ramji, who has given his notice. Matt Asay thinks Ramji was da bomb, and suggests his replacement should be a diplomat, not a bomb thrower. (Just pass them your resume.)
The Foundation is organized under the tax law as a 501(c)6 organization. Sounds a lot like charities organized under 501(c)3, but it’s the designation given to business groups like chambers of commerce. The Linux Foundation is also a 501(c)6, while GNOME is a 501(c)3.
Fact is I can almost smell and taste the press releases sure to follow from groups like the Linux Foundation, the FSF, and Software Freedom. It’s phony, it’s an attempt to deceive, Microsoft will always see open source as captive to its interests.
Or to quote the philosopher Joe Wilson, you lie.
But do they?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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