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Category: Events
November 13th, 2009
The stupid network will get a hearing
Advocates of transforming network regulation from Bell services to dumb bits will get a hearing from the FCC, as David Isenberg, author of the classic Rise of the Stupid Network, has joined the agency as an expert advisor.
(Picture taken in 2004 from Isenberg’s Isen.com Web site.)
Isenberg will be part of the team that will deliver the National Broadband Plan to Congress in February. He wrote on his blog that, as a result of his agency assignment his annual conference on broadband reform, Freedom2Connect, will be postponed.
A bit of disclosure. I covered the 2006 Freedom2Connect conference in Washington for ZDNet.
In the Stupid Network essay, which he wrote while at AT&T in 1997, Isenberg argued that the most efficient network is controlled at the edge, with a design based on the idea of plenty rather than scarcity, and transport based on the needs of the data.
The idea, he wrote, was that the network did not need intelligence at the center, that it should just “deliver the bits, stupid.” Hence the stupid network.
The problem is that while the stupid network is fine engineering, great for users and consumer equipment suppliers, it doesn’t leave much for the telephone company to do but move bits. And Isenberg wrote at a time when the bit-moving market was highly competitive, with prices falling every few months.
Thus the phone companies have argued against the stupid network. They have sought to install gear within the parts of the Internet they control to guarantee Quality of Service, to distinguish between bits based on protocol or what the customer is paying to move them, and to stop bad bits before they arrive at a user’s desk.
“Those are nice bits there, a shame if something happened to them.” And the phone company is Santa Claus, deciding which bits are naughty and which are nice.
The problem with this is it slows the network, and creates a barrier to entry for innovation, which must win permission from the network operator in order to reach the market. It is also redundant if customer equipment can handle tasks previously done by the intelligent network.
The Internet, as it exists today, is essentially a stupid network.
Cellular networks, you will note, are completely different from stupid networks. Such networks are all centrally controlled, with the carrier defining different bits as separate services, controlling who can sell what, and taking a cut on every transaction.
Isenberg left AT&T in 1998 as “Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff” but has been better known as mud, Voldemort and Who’s He at Bell offices ever since. (This is especially true for those who work as Bell lobbyists.)
Isenberg will just be one member of the agency’s National Broadband Task Force, one voice out of many. The FCC is also taking public comment online and holding hearings.
But at least his voice will be heard.
November 3rd, 2009
Yahoo does right by Traffic Server
It’s easy to become obsessive over whether a piece of code is open source.
How code becomes open source can be just as important. Is it being given the resources and sponsorship necessary to grow? Or is it being tossed over the side of a sinking ship?
By those standards, Yahoo has done its Traffic Server, acquired early this decade along with Inktomi, a solid service, placing the code with Apache.
The code is available right now from Apache’s incubator. This brings the number of incubator projects to 36.
Traffic Server is designed to optimize Web sites by caching popular content at the network edge, closer to users. It’s not something Google needs — they have their own solution — but it could be very useful for relatively new, fast-growing sites. It can keep them from going down when everyone “rushes to the rail” for access.
The software is being released in time for ApacheCon, which plans a Meetup on the software at 8 PST tonight. If you’re at the Con go to Room 4. There you can get the lowdown on features, performance and history from people who have actually written code.
Shelton Shugar of Yahoo told CNET’s Stephen Shankland that Yahoo hopes Traffic Server grows like Hadoop, the cloud computing technology that has since spawned the start-up Cloudera.
What do you think it can be?
July 27th, 2009
Could open source have built Silicon Valley?
The failure of OSCON to make a splash in San Jose (expect to see it back in Portland next year) is leading to some general soul-searching which results in this question.
Could we have built Silicon Valley in an open source world?
In other words, to what extent is the wealth of technology a result of legally-sanctioned monopoly as opposed to open competition?
That’s what patents and copyright are, legally-sanctioned monopoly.
Let’s quote again from Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, enumerating the powers of the Congress:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Another term for an exclusive right is a monopoly, and it was with the term monopoly that this power was discussed by the Founders. It’s not intellectual property. It’s an exclusive right to an idea, a monopoly over its use.
But technology has always demanded more than what the Founders granted.
The Microsoft EULA is a direct descendant of IBM contracts from the 1950s, in which buyers gave sellers control over what they were buying in perpetuity. Long before the subject of software patents came up, IBM was fighting against leaks of knowledge about how it did things, and against reverse engineering of its inventions.
Without this power over its customers, could IBM have existed? Could Microsoft have existed?
Open source is really just a different type of contract, one that transfers power from the sellers to the buyers of technology. It places a time limit on those monopoly rents innovators depend upon, one that is earlier than what is offered by copyright, by patent, by other software contracts.
In Silicon Valley, innovation is the fertilizer that makes the crops grow. With open source, software is more like topsoil, and those who nurture that soil believe they will prosper longer than those who just throw fertilizer on it.
Invention is the plant corporations harvest for their profit. Software is the environment on which everyone’s survival depends.
OSCON, I think, is better off in Portland.
June 3rd, 2009
To Jim Zemlin this CompuTex represents progress
My impressions about a failure of Linux to break through at CompuTex are based on observations of this year’s show floor. I was not here previously
But this is not Jim Zemlin’s first rodeo. The executive director of the Linux Foundation told me he is seeing great momentum for Linux at this show.
I spoke with Zemlin (right, at right) following his talk before a few hundred people in a conference room at the Taiwan World Trade Center (TWTC), a subsidiary venue for CompuTex. The main exhibits are in the Nangang Exhibition space several miles away.
There are really two shows here, he said, one that you see and one that you don’t.
“If you look at the show floor you’re only seeing half the picture,” he said.
“The argument I just made is real and people in Taiwan understand it and are looking for an alternative to Windows. They live in a world of very tight margins, of hyper competition, they struggle every day to differentiate. That comes from software, and Windows does not provide that diferentiation.”
Zemlin’s talk was scheduled after a talk on the Moblin project, which Intel has since passed on to the Foundation. The talk on Moblin seemed to draw more excitement than Zemlin’s discussion of Linux. Dozens of people left the room after he began speaking.
This did not discourage him one bit, just as the Taiwanese habit of listening quietly and offering little reaction to what is heard did not discourage him. Nothing seems to discourage Jim Zemlin.,
In response to a question about Moblin and Android, he admitted that Android currently has an advantage, because of the HTC phones already on the market. But he predict Moblin will shine in the coming “convergence” world where laptops and phones become one.
“In the next 6-12 months, when you start seeing Moblin devices in the market, when it’s productized, you’ll see developer interest go crazy,” he predicted.
While we sat we also compared netbooks. I showed him the HP Mini 1000 I bought at Fry’s, which only had Windows versions. He showed me an identical device (only with more internal memory) he had bought at the HP web site, for the same price I paid, and with Ubuntu Linux installed.
As in so many things Zemlin’s answer to problems in the channel is to find another channel. Actions to live by.
June 2nd, 2009
Sorry Linux but the chicken came first
In the old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, I got the answer this week, at least as it relates to computing.
The chicken came first.
I started my day on a hunt for Linux, preferably desktop Linux.
It was depressing. It’s not just Asus and MSI who have gone Windows in Taiwan, it’s everyone. The Microsoft booth dominates in a corner of the show floor. Instead of bragging on what they have done, they are pushing embedded systems for games and home servers. They are pushing outward, not defending their turf but attacking.
I visited the SUSE Linux booth, the only obvious Linux presence on the main floor. Where is my penguin, I asked. Where is the gear running Linux?
Intel has some, I was told. So I went to the Intel booth. After some shrugs and shaken heads, I was taken to a bank of three monitors showing network applications, under Linux. All were behind glass. You could look but you better not touch.
I wandered over to AMD. AMD dressed girls in high boots and short skirts. They are still showing what is known here as “fighting spirit.” Certainly they would be fighting for the penguin.
Where is Linux, I asked. I was pointed to a corner of the booth, where an AMD embedded system was shown, naked, running Ubuntu. But not for the office. This is an OEM product, I was told. Next to it stood the application. A slot machine, apparently developed for the Macau market.
November 20th, 2008
An open source fundraiser for the ages
Let me admit up-front that I am a big fan of Bruce Kushnick.
A market analyst by trade, his Teletruth has been giving the phone monopolists truth for nearly a decade — they just think it’s hell.
When an analyst is telling the industry what it wants to hear, or looking where it wants him to look, money comes easy. When he comes to be seen as an enemy — as Kushnick is — the industry’s answer is to starve him out.
Thus Kushnick’s New Networks Institute lives a hand-to-mouth existance. He’s like Richard Stallman without the fame and glory.
But he does have something Mr. Stallman hasn’t got. A piano. And the chops to make some good music on it.
So he’s doing a fundraiser. Specifically he’s planning a concert, next month, at a New York club called The Duplex. Paying customers get a copy of his album, “Late Night with Kush.” (That’s the cover art at the top.)
I have heard of telecoms doing fundraisers for music before, but have you ever heard of it going the other way?
October 27th, 2008
John Galt is dead or Linus shrugs
John Galt is the lead character in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a classic beloved by boys in late adolescence and former Fed chairmen.
Galt represents Rand’s ideal of objectivism, of free market absolutism and rule by those few who dominate the market.
The idea has been taking a beating lately, what with even Alan Greenspan admitting the ideology is flawed.
But those of us in the open source movement knew those ideas were bogus a decade ago. John Galt, meet Linus Torvalds.
Linus is the anti-Galt. He is naturally shy, he likes teams. He is more interested in solving a problem than in anything else.
“We haven’t had a lot of huge pressing technical issues, so what people have been writing about is how we do development,” he said in an interview at the recent Linux Kernel Summit. His gentle way of saying how is the wrong issue.
One of the more remarkable exchanges came when Linus was asked about shortening release cycles. He admitted he had favored such a move, then added that the discussions had convinced him otherwise.
John Galt would not approve of that. He would demand things be done his way, that others bend to his will.
So when Randians like Andrew Keen see the success of open source, they’re flummoxed. They wind up with arguments that make them look like idiots.
Because there is no absolute ideology, no simple -ism that will explain it all to you. The genius of Steve Jobs is to be valued highly. But so is that of the team around Linus Torvalds. The proprietary and open source model both have their points.
What should matter, in the end, is the quality of the finished product, its usefulness, its value. Focus on that and you can’t go far wrong.
The real answer lies in the words of that great capitalist Robert W. Woodruff, the man who built The Coca-Cola Co.
“There is no limit what a man can do or where he can go, if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.” I think Linus would agree with that. It’s wisdom you can dance to.
October 1st, 2008
LinuxCon will not be a trade show
LinuxCon will be like a big user group meeting, an EclipseCon as opposed to a CES.
Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin (right) called last night to reassure me that his group is not taking a risk with LinuxCon, just responding to user demand.
“We have an event in two weeks in New York, the End User Collaboration Summit, that’s at capacity, where people will be interacting with the CEO of Red Hat and key developers.
“We had our Collaboration Summit in Austin, at capacity. We have Legal Summits, the Kernel Summit event. We have the symposium in Japan. We just want to open it up to a broader community.”
The Linux Foundation has learned how to put together all-day and multi-day events for a few hundred people in an auditorium. Zemlin is planning next year’s LinuxCon based on an attendance of near 1,000.
The most likely site is the Portland Theater at the Oregon Convention Center but nothing is decided yet. The recent Linux Plumbers Conference, which this even will play on top of, drew about 300 to a site near Portland State, Zemlin said. (Go Vikings.)
I also asked Zemlin about OSCON, which has outgrown Portland and is moving to the Bay Area next year.
“OSCON is a little different” from what LinuxCon will be, he said. “A lot of it now centers on Web technology, Ruby, higher level programming. There isn’t a lot of overlap.”
Zemlin said that LinuxCon is part of the move toward smaller industry events generally. The Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) is a good model for where he’s going.
“OSBC has a small event that talks about business issues. Ours will be focused on technical developers and the vendor community. They want a forum where they can exchange ideas about the technical platform.”
So if that’s your thing maybe I’ll see you in Portland next September.
September 30th, 2008
Do we need a LinuxCon?
The Linux Foundation has announced it will host its own, user-and-developer conference in Portland next September, dubbed LinuxCon.
Having lost O’Reilly’s OSCON three weeks ago the good people of Portland are thrilled, and my former co-blogger here, Joe Brockmeier, gave the press a statement of support.
It’s designed to take place alongside the Linux Plumber’s Conference, which drew a reported 300 to a building in the city’s Pearl District over the weekend.
While that’s a good start, it’s a long way from the crowds that filled the Portland Ballroom in the Oregon Convention Center last summer.
With gas still around $4 per gallon and air travel a nightmare it seems pretty risky to add a third major event to the 2009 calendar.
The foundation’s Executive Director, Jim Zemlin, said this is being done in response to demand, and that the event will include a trade show along with conference and workshops. He has been briefing the media about it the last two days.
A successful show could eventually prove a major profit center for the Linux Foundation. Many trade groups host their own shows and the biggest events, like CES and CTIA, are big money spinners.
But there is risk here. While community manager Brian Proffitt blogged about the new show today on the foundation’s Web site, and a Web page has been created for it, there was no press release out on it as of 1:28 PM Eastern today.
It’s not too late to turn back, Jim.
Loading ...September 27th, 2008
Grafting American attitudes on European open source
Big Money Matt Asay is fairly dismissive of European open source.
It lacks the killer instinct, he writes. The only way to graft that on is to bring the European to America. He cites Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol, as an example.
He has a point, as my friend Roberto Galoppini demonstrated recently at OSIMWorld in Berlin.
Roberto held a workshop on bringing open source into the business model during the show, which was well attended. And he had all his facts in order, complete with attractive charts.
There’s your problem. His blog post on the talk read like an academic paper. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But…
Entrepreneurs often mine the academy for technical ideas. In practice (as Nick Negroponte has shown) they also chew these guys up and spit them out like sunflower seeds.
Entrepreneurship is easy to over-think. I have known many entrepreneurs in my years as a reporter and it’s really an art, an instinct. One which starts by putting yourself into the mind of the customer, and seeing things from their point of view.
Studying entrepreneurs won’t make you Steve Jobs any more than studying art will make you Picasso. The greats just have “it,” and we’ve never been able to define what it is. We just know it when we see it.
What is the best way to find “it?” Where I live in Georgia, the best model is the Advanced Technology Development Center at Georgia Tech. (In the map above, notice that it’s across a busy freeway from the main campus.)
The ATDC has been around for a quarter century now. Its creation was one of the first tech stories I ever wrote.
Physically it’s just a collection of small office suites. In fact it’s a shark tank, with academics from Tech and elsewhere acting as bait, and a network of venture capitalists as chum. (Maybe that’s where Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus got his big idea.)
The vast majority of entrepreneurs who go into the ATDC fail. But some, like Earthlink, succeed. Once they leave campus the ground is still rocky. Most Atlanta start-ups blow up or get bought. But this is the best model for launching them I’ve seen.
So if I could make a single recommendation to Galoppini and others trying to build open source in Europe, this would be it.
Put one of these hothouses near a great academic institution. Invite entrepreneurs to speak, invite venture capitalists for drinks, and accept that most ideas which germinate there will be bogus, that most entrepreneurs who try their luck there will fail.
But some won’t. And it is these few, these busy few, on which you build a new culture.
September 11th, 2008
OSCON outgrows Portland
OSCON is moving to the Valley.
After six years of bringing 2,000 people each summer to the Oregon Conference Center in Portland, O’Reilly is moving the show to the Bay Area for next year.
Travel costs are the stated reason. But The Oregonian harbors darker thoughts, noting that since the OSBC merged to form the Linux Foundation its operations have also moved south. Might Linus be next?
Seriously, I think there is something deeper at work here. Growth.
Portland just doesn’t have the facilities to house a fast-growing conference covering a global audience. On the other hand LinuxWorld does not yet fill the Moscone Center, and San Jose also has a very attractive convention center.
It’s the nature of industries. Valley girls and boys should note that growth also takes events out of the Valley as well, depositing them in the deserts of Las Vegas, or the lakeside of Chicago, even downtown Atlanta, where I live.
Since the demise of Comdex, in fact, the tech industry has had no “meeting of the clans” save for the January CES show in Vegas, and the fight to restrict it to the trade and keep it from growing much past 100,000 attendees is constant.
So how big should events like OSCON, and Linuxworld for that matter, be getting? What would be unmanageable? How big is too big?
August 27th, 2008
Linux Foundation announces end user summit
The Linux Foundation says it will hold its first End-User Summit on October 13-14.
The event will be held at the Desmond Tutu Center, which despite its name is an Aramark joint, recently opened a mile southeast of the Javits Center on the West Side.
The target is businesses which are heavy users of Linux and open source in their enterprise computing systems.
So no surprise its first keynote will be from Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian, with a Q&A moderated by Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin.
Other features include a panel with key Linux maintainers, a panel of large users, and a presentation of the Linux Weather Forecast, designed to keep users up-to-date on coming changes to the kernel.
So, you going? Autumn in New York…maybe you can catch a Mets play-off game (as if that’s going to happen).
July 31st, 2008
Disasters at Whistler raining on Mozilla's summer parade
A rock slide, power outage and loss of a top engineer of Firefox 3 have some attendees of Mozilla’s 2008 summer summit wondering if the ghosts in Redmond aren’t raining on their parade.
The Firefox summit is behing held at, ahem, Whistler, the code name of Microsoft’s Windows XP.
First, a giant rock slide on Wednesday closed the road from Vancouver to Whistler, trapping many at the summit in and any latercomers out. Since the road will be closed for five days, attendees will have to take an alternative route to the airport — turning a three hour ride into an eight-hour odyssey.
Then the hotel hosting the summit lost power this morning after a truck hit the transformer.
That’s on top of the loss of a significant Firefox exec. Earlier this week, Mozilla v.p. of engineering, Mike Schroeper, a top developer of Firefox 3, announced he is resigning from the open source project to go to Facebook.
Did we mention that the weather at Whistler has been gloomy all week?
Here’s one report from an attendee.
“To add insult to injury here at the Mozilla Summit, we now have no power. I am told that a laundry truck hit the transformer for the hotel around 6:00 AM … We’re on battery power, which is good for ten hours or so. Luckily, they estimate that the power will be fixed in five hours but I’m not sure what that is in metric,” wrote one developer on Planet Mozilla. It was not seen if the driver of the truck was a Microsoft employee or a bear. I’m afraid to get on the gondola to go to the mountaintop for the big dinner tonight though.”
Another attendee pointed the finger at Canada.
Still another said that despite the “fear and loathing” at Whistler, the summit has been a smashing success the content and backup power generator.
Still, we hope organizers aren’t planning to revisit next year to neighboring Blackcomb mountain. “Blackcomb” is the code name of the next iteration of Windows, once code named Vienna and now known as Windows 7.
July 26th, 2008
The Microsoft way with Apache
For its customers.
Microsoft can no longer pretend that even its best customers live in a homogeneous world.
Nearly all must deal with Apache servers — the latest Netcraft survey shows Apache with 49% of the market, and Microsoft’s momentum of 2006 stalled out.
Given that reality Microsoft had to make its move, becoming a major sponsor of the Apache Foundation.
Sam Ramji (above), the Microsoft executive who announced the Apache support, ironically gave Open Office its top Sourceforge Community Award later the same day.
So with Microsoft now contributing money and code to Apache and other open source projects, is there anything bad we can say?
Combine Microsoft’s support of Apache with Google’s preference for making its own open source contributions under the Apache license, and you have significant momentum for the BSD-like Apache license in its continuing competition with the GPL.
In making the Microsoft contribution announcement on his blog Ramji specifically cited “The Apache Way” of collaboration as a model for the future. As opposed to, say, FOSS.
The main difference between the two licenses, of course, is that Apache licensees can use the code they get in their own products, under other license terms, while GPL licensees have to give that code back.
So if Microsoft wants to do some tweaks to what it has offered, it can. Competition is moving from the law courts to the workbench, where it belongs.
July 25th, 2008
Open Office sweeps Sourceforge awards
This must have left a mark on Microsoft.
Microsoft was the diamond sponsor for this year’s Sourceforge Community Choice Awards, culminating last night in a party at the Jupiter Hotel in Portland.
The big winner? Open Office. It swept the awards for top project, top enterprise project, and top project in education.
Big Money Matt found this curious, but not me. Open Office has matured a lot in the last year, and it’s a consumer-oriented project. It’s good stuff. Get yours now.
What Firefox was doing a year ago, Open Office was doing this year — getting a chunk of the mass market off the Microsoft train.
There is a problem with this, of course. While Firefox and Open Office are great projects, their motivation is to take money out of the system, to take down the old Microsoft monopoly. They lack compelling business models of their own.
Unlike, say, enterprise open source packages that can justify their support bills. Or SaaS projects that can roll their costs into an online subscription, along with a handsome profit.
So let me offer a modest proposal. For next year, a new award. Best new open source business model.
Let that winner pay for the party.
July 22nd, 2008
Google shows off its bench
Maybe it has nothing with the continuing rumors over Steve Jobs’ health, but Google seems to be making a special effort this week to show off its deep executive bench.
This week’s OSCON show in Portland features talks from five Googlers, the headliner being open source programs manager Chris DeBona.
Ben Collins-Sussman, Leslie Hawthorn, Steve Souders, and Alex Martelli will also represent the Googleplex, but none are liable to draw a single groupie. (Or appear on the cover of Time, right.)
When I turned on CNBC for news about Google adding real-time ticker support there was an interview with a Googler, but again it was not with any of the top dogs.
This is actually a very good thing. A large, growing company wants to show that it has a deep bench and sending five speakers to OSCON helps show off the company’s open source commitment.
But every great company is a dictatorship. We have found no model for building corporations beyond the entrepreneurial one. Even GE, the only original Dow Jones component to still be on the list, has in fact had a succession of absolute rulers leading it.
Google is no different. The vision of Larry Page and Sergey Brin still holds. In a word, search. In another word, find. Maybe its cloud will bring a third word, host, but so far it is mainly a set of services built around that one word, search, again.
And then there’s that ultimate aspiration, Do No Evil. It doesn’t appear in Google’s corporate mission statement, but it’s what most people think of when they consider the Google brand.
A clear, concise mission statement is no substitute for a firm hand on the tiller, however. Google likes to say it has three — Brin, Larry Page, and CEO Eric Schmidt, which provides redundancy.
But if a truck hit Sergey or Larry tomorrow, a hole would open up in that cloud. A hole that would be very hard to fill.
Despite the trappings of democracy, like elections for public company directors, the best American businesses remain kingdoms. Your bench can be as deep as you want, but you still need a star to win the game.
It’s good to be the King. It’s also necessary to have one. True whether you’re Apple, Google, Microsoft, or the shop around the corner.
July 22nd, 2008
The tribes of open source gather at OSCON
While next month’s LinuxWorld show will be business on parade, this week’s OSCON in Portland is more like a gathering of the tribes.
Anyone who covers open source recognizes the tribes on sight:
Visioneers who really believe that miracles can occur using the open source process. Here’s an example, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington seeking help to build a $200 Linux tablet.
Most visioneers stay on the sidelines. Those who get in the game, like Nicholas Negroponte, often find that it takes a lot more than a Clue to succeed.
OSCON is visioneer HQ. Once a market becomes real visioneers go somewhere else. The lucky ones get jobs, like Linus Torvalds, where they can express themselves in code and let others take the bows.
Because OSCON is a visioneer show this week is going to all be about mobile. Lots of talk, no kit. Just what visioneers love.
Geeks love to take things apart and put them together in new ways so they can stick it to “the man.” Geeks like some jailbreaking, finding ways to grab control of their own iPhones and run true open source on it.
Jay Freeman of Saurik is an example. His Cydia Repository article is fascinating reading. Want your iPhone to run Debian Linux? Want to turn it into a doorstop? Take the challenge.
Suits mainly wait for Linuxworld. Suits have jobs — at IBM, at Sun, even at Alfresco and Mulesource. When suits aren’t in suits you will find them in matching button-down shirts or mock turtlenecks — whatever the boss calls the uniform of the day.
Some suits like to pretend they’re geeks, and some once were. Just like Emeril La Gasse was once a line cook. When you’re in business, no matter what you once did, you’re in business. You hire others to do what you most love.
Wannabes are the aspirational market, the people who would use Linux if they could, who believe in open source but not enough in themselves to even try and become geeks.
I freely admit to being a wannabe. As a reporter for 30 years I brag about “protecting my stupidity.” I can break anything. I represent the mass market. I cover the game but don’t play it. My aspirations are more of the Damon Runyon or Mike Malone variety.
But here’s the thing. If I can make sense of it you’ve hit the mass market. I’m the entry point. The geeks and visioneers are all looking to create something people like me can understand.
Users are part-geek, part-wannabe, part-visioneer and all-important. I’m looking at you now.
You are who all the rest of us are really serving. You determine which vision succeeds, which suits make it to the top.
Users are a big part of every show, attendee badges shining, filling the shuttle buses, the auditoriums, grabbing a bite at the snack stands on the side.
If every show is a trial, users are the jury. You make your decisions signing support contracts, ordering online, in stores, in what you tell your friends. Without you there’s no show.
Have a good show.
May 6th, 2008
Open source as the villain in its own story
Maybe because of JavaOne and Sun’s well-known concerns about open source profit the idea of proprietary hooks which make people pay for open source software is big again.
After all, if the code is free and visible why should an enterprise customer write a check to its sponsor? (Buy this guy now, while he’s on sale, from Buycostume.com. I’ll explain why in a minute.)
When code has a BSD-type license, like Eclipse, the answer is that the project isn’t producing products at all, but the raw material for products. Companies are free to write, and sell, proprietary extensions.
When code has a GPL license, the answer is not so clear. Companies may feel that their own code contributions, or help with bug fixes and beta testing, are compensation enough.
Savio Rodrigues of Infoworld (and IBM) divides customers by time and money, suggesting that holding some code back as an incentive for conversion makes sense.
Matt Asay of C|Net (and Alfresco) suggests the big money is in peripheral services, like systems management or SaaS, so the core need not be hidden.
To complicate matters further we have the fears of Twitter, a proprietary site whose functions could easily be cloned into a more powerful, networked open source project.
In other words this question of opening or closing code to maximize profit is no longer unique to open source. When open source is seen as a potential competitor it hits everyone.
This may be the key point. As a successful business model, open source is putting new competitive pressures on companies which are not all economic.
The goodwill of a powerful community can be a great asset, but like this site’s credibility it’s an asset that can disappear in a heartbeat.
Ask the folks at CoreCodec, trying to contain a PR storm over an action they’ve already taken back.
Reputation, credibility, and goodwill have no place on a public company balance sheet, but these values are just as important to software companies now as they are to politicians.
To Matt, Savio and others in the business the question is how much gold they can spin this straw into. But the wise man knows it’s how much straw you have which really determines your bottom line.
In journalism we have a word for this straw. We call it credibility. It’s hard to win, easy to lose. Every journalist worth their byline knows it’s the only real asset we have.
So welcome to my world, boys. How the straw becomes gold may appear to be magic, but the straw is what you need to focus on. That’s why the fellow at the top of the page is the villain in his own story.
April 8th, 2008
State of the Linux union is sound
Before settling down to business at its Collaboration Summit in Austin today, the Linux Foundation heard a state of the Linux union talk from IDC.
In the enterprise space, it’s sound. (This is a picture from last year’s summit. Don’t they look excited, though?)
The key takeaway was a hockey stick graph, showing the Linux ecosystem growing from $21 billion in sales last year to $49 billion by 2011.
The big growth is coming in applications, and deployment software like databases, IDC said, meaning the current VC interest in enterprise Linux is right on target.
Things like CRM, ERP and other database-intensive jobs are migrating off Unix to Linux, the report said, with service industries and government leading the way, and healthcare lagging.
The big challenge remains Microsoft, which holds over half the enterprise market and could gain share in the next few years, even against Linux, competing fiercely to replace Unix in the enterprise.
The best opportunity to counter this, the report said, is through “software appliances” that combine the operating system with middleware, databases and applications. This would grow Linux, but at the expense of discrete applications, the report said.
The conclusion will put some huzzahs into the late afternoon barbecue and beer fests which are de rigeur after a meeting in Austin. A compound annual growth rate of 35.7% for software, and a total market of $49 billion in 2011, tastes mighty fine.
One more point, a quibble really. IDC has decided to replace the acronym SOA, for Service Oriented Architecture, with SOE, for Service Oriented Enterprise. I’m sure they have their reasons, but this constant replacement of buzzwords with more buzzwords makes everything we do more opaque.
Opacity is not what Linux is all about.
March 27th, 2008
Hot new open source ISVs, projects make the grade at OSBC
Six hot open source startups and projects got notice at the Open Source Business Conference this week.
Not surprisingly, many of them are in software categories deemed most vulnerable to open source disruption, including collaboration and conferencing, social publishing, sales automation, application deployment and developer tools.
Alfresco CMS business development chief and OSBC founder Matt Asay said open source keeps moving higher up the stack, and into niche areas.
“Open source has moved beyond CRM into new territories,” Asay said during his opening remarks at the San Francisco conference. “It’s been an even better year for enterprise open source.”
At the show, executives from SugarCRM, Zenoss and the Olliance group were asked to weigh in on what they thought were the most promising open source commercial offerings and open source projects.
SugarCRM CEO John Roberts’ pick is the open source collaboration project and company DimDim whose web conferencing and meeting service — now in private beta testing and soon to move to public beta — will rival WebEX and Citrix Go-To-Meeting. The Web 2.0 service company employs former Apple executive Steve Chazin and offers free, professional and enterprise editions of Dimdim.
Several observers at OSBC expressed high hopes for Acquia, an Andover, Mass. company founded in 2007 that plans to ship its first commercial product based on the Drupal open source social web publishing platform this fall. The software, code-named Carbon, was highlighted in several sessions at OSBC.
LoopFuse, BitRock and MindTouch, all exhibitors or panel participants at OSBC, got the high sign from Mark Hinkle, a well known opne source advocate and vice president of business and community development at Zenoss.
LoopFuse, of Atlanta, provides an open source sales automation platform that is offered on demand as a hosted web service, on premise and in open source. The company’s platform is based on JBoss and Apache. LoopFuse OneView 3.0 upgrade was recently launched.
BitRock, which was founded in Spain and has offices in San Francisco, has developed a multiplatform installer for open source stacks such as the LAMP stack. Products include BitRock Installer and BitRock Custom, Web, Rubu and Mono Stacks. “It’s a point and click installer for LAMP,” said Hinkle about the solution, which helps reduce the complexity of deploying open source stacks.
At the OSBC, the company launched a new product called the BitRock Network Service that works in conjunction with the BitRock Customer Stack and enables full open source application deployment services for customers.
MindTouch is another OSBC exhibitor whose open source Wiki and application platform got a lot of attention on the show floor. The San Diego, calif company’s recently released its Deki Wiki “Itasca” version offers not only sophisticated wiki services for authoring, aggregating, organizing, and sharing content among development groups but also support for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.
Enomaly, an open source consulting firm based in Toronto, Canada, offers an open source virtual server manager called the Enomalism Virtualized Management Dashboard.
The open source software is a virtual machine manager for the Xen open source hypervisor and caught the attention of Andrew Aiken, founder and managing partner at Olliance Group, of Palo Alto, Calif., (pictured below) who led a panel at the OSBC on open source mergers and acquisitions on Wednesday. Enomaly also offers the ElasticDrive web-based virtual storage system and ElasticLive utility hosting platform.
Paula Rooney is a Boston-based writer who has followed the tech industry for almost two decades. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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