November 16th, 2009

Montavista embedded Linux eaten by Cavium

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:33 am

Categories: Distributions, General, Hardware, Implementations, Linux, mergers & acquisitions

Tags: Chip, MontaVista, Cavium, LinuxPundit Bill Weinberg, Embedded Linux, Linux, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software, Dana Blankenhorn

Embedded Linux is proprietary by its nature.

Expressing software inside a chip, then selling the chip, gives embedded Linux a business model, but that business model is tied closely to the success of the chip being sold.

So as chip makers have turned to Linux to power their new designs they have bought the software houses that pushed embedded Linux. Intel bought Wind River and now Cavium has bought Montavista.

LinuxPundit Bill Weinberg is troubled by this, but not for the reason you think. Very few of these companies are left now, and those are very small. But Weinberg is concerned more that Montavista failed to bag the really big bucks it was seeking at its founding 10 years ago.

What embedded Linux means for users and software developers is that there are open source on-chip tools you can write to and use for building bigger applications. Who controls the embedded Linux company is less important than that it succeed.

Cavium is considered a “start-up” networking chip company, but it’s doing some cool and interesting stuff.

This month Cavium showed a networked high-definition WiFi design, dubbed netHD, that can move 1080 HD feeds around your home on an 802.11n set-up. It’s working with Hitachi on “security processors” and drives the latest Netgear firewall. Despite continuing losses stock buyers have bid the company up to $850 million.

One can argue that, while Montavista hoped to sell for more, its investors are now getting a taste of a fast-growing proposition. And their success, Cavium’s success, will be open source’s success as well.

NOTE: My apologies to those who like to engage in flame wars here, for delivering a story that contains nothing but good news. How about this….Microsoft! (Stallman?)

November 10th, 2009

Enterprises saving $26 million per project with open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:00 am

Categories: Development, Enterprise Policy, General, Implementations, management

Tags: Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

A Black Duck analysis shows the average enterprise software project is 22% open source, saving an average of $26 million on each project.

The estimate was created using the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO), first released in 1981.

Black Duck, which originally developed its database of code to help companies comply with software licenses, is increasingly turning to it as a research tool, a sort of Framingham Heart Study of software.

In the last few months, for instance, it has documented the rising use of Javascript and PHP, the return of the software M&A market, and the increased use of strong encryption in open source, using its data.

“We’re trying to package up the information around open source projects and serve it in a way that’s productive,” acknowledged Peter Vescuso, (above, right) executive director of business marketing.

Increased interest in and use of open source by enterprises has helped drive excellent growth for the company over the last year, said CEO Tim Yeaton (left). “When the recession started, even conservative organizations have moved to open source.” Studies like this one are a way of giving back.

While three of five developers are still .Net centric, Yeaton added. “What we’re seeing is a wave of pragmatism in terms of building solutions. The religion is out of the equation. Once people figure it out it’s going to be a better way to build” they use it.

“Vendors serving customers at the application development level are figuring out how to respond more effectively. Our message seems to resonate. It’s about the pragmatism of taking advantage of what’s out there, and making good choices at the application level.

“Choose what’s right for the job.” It’s not about values, it’s about value.

UPDATE: Mr. Vescuso made some great points in our talkback thread I think should be in the main story.

it may not be clear this analysis is based on a sample of Black Duck customers and does not represent all enterprise or commercial applications. Our description is at:
http://www.blackducksoftware.com/news/releases/2009-11-10

These were all large code bases. The 22% of the application/product code represents over a half million lines of finished code. If you use COCOMO and BLS wage estimates, you get $26 million. This is the same model and approach the Linux Foundation used to estimate what it would cost to develop Linux. Whatever method you use, a half millions lines of finished code — written, tested — is significant.

November 2nd, 2009

Blackboard embraces and extends into open source movement

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:09 am

Categories: Applications, General, Google, Implementations, Infrastructure, Strategy, business models, content, education, marketing

Tags: Open Source Movement, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

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.

June 23rd, 2009

How friendly is the Movable Type fork?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:02 am

Categories: Applications, Development, Distributions, General, Implementations, Strategy, business models

Tags: Fork, Movable Type, Josh Lowenson, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Quite friendly, but also quite serious.

The right to fork is the second most-controversial aspect of the open source ideal.

Just as some people call the responsibility to share code a rip-off of intellectual property, they are liable to see forks as treason against the parent project.

But not always.

Josh Lowenson’s introduction to Melody, a fork of open source Movable Type, reads like a friendly fork. Indeed Movable Type’s Benjamin Trott has a quite-friendly introduction to the software right now on Movable Type’s home page.

One reason for Trott’s support of the Open Melody Software Group may lie in Movable Type’s own history. It did not start as open source code. It began, a decade ago, as an early competitor to Blogger and Dave Winer’s Weblogger.

Movable Type did not become open source until 2007, after WordPress had passed it by in many ways, proving the value of the open source model. In a way, Melody is Movable Type’s effort to build community following the release of its software, something most projects do the other way around.

So while relations between Movable Type and Bryne Reese, the MT community manager heading Melody, do seem cordial, there is some serious business strategy going on here.

For Movable Type to advance against WordPress, it needs this fork to succeed.

June 1st, 2009

Sun shoots its final Open Solaris arrows

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:00 am

Categories: Distributions, General, Implementations, LANs and WANs, Storage, Strategy, Sun Microsystems, virtualization

Tags: Network, Operating System, Sun Microsystems Inc., Sun Solaris, Operating Systems, UNIX, Servers, Software, Hardware, Dana Blankenhorn

This may be the last CommunityOne event for Sun as an independent company, and if it is the company is going out with an open source bang.

Sun is putting everything it has into the new version of Open Solaris, dubbed 2009.06, and promising once again to unify the open source and paid versions of the operating system.

Director of product management Dan Roberts gave ZDNet a preview. The highlights are:

• Project Crossbow, which puts networking into the operating system stack and reduces the need for networking hardware.
• Project COMSTAR, allowing centralized management of storage, turning commodity servers into storage servers and moving the data used most often onto flash drives.
• Virtualization built into the operating system, so that hypervisors like Xen can be run as containers.

Roberts said Sun is also reducing the cost of its Open Solaris support contracts, and unifying those prices with those of Solaris. There will now be three tiers of support — $324 for basic, $720 for standard and $1,080 for premium.

“That gives existing Solaris customers the option of running a collection of Solaris and Open Solaris under the same contract because there’s no price difference,” Roberts said.

Putting networking, storage management and virtualization inside the operating system kernel of a scaled, enterprise-class operating system is going to be a very big deal, Roberts added.

The moves seem aimed squarely at Sun’s newest rival in the hardware space, Cisco Systems. By putting controls normally associated with Cisco networking inside the Open Solaris kernel Sun hits Cisco where it lives. Or Oracle does.

Where Sun will be living in a few months is another story.

May 12th, 2009

oFono is Intel hail mary play in mobility

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:58 am

Categories: Development, Distributions, General, Hardware, Implementations, Strategy, mobile, telecom, wireless

Tags: Telephony, Nokia Corp., Mobility, Intel Corp., oFono, VOIP, Telecom & Utilities, Telecommunications, Wireless And Mobility, Networking

Those seeking to hit Intel with antitrust charges conveniently ignore there are huge and growing markets where it remains a bit player.

Mobility is one of them.

Now the company is trying one more time with oFono, an attempt by both it and longtime market leader Nokia to remain relevant on a playing field now dominated by Apple and Google’s Android.

More than just another high-tech misspelling, oFono seeks to define a new mobile stack which, while efficient, also limits the technologies that can be layered on top of it. (Get a bigger copy of the illustration above at the oFono Web site.)

From the announcement post of Marcel Holtmann, from the Intel Open Source Technology Center:

oFono is licensed under GPLv2, and it includes a high-level D-Bus API for use by telephony applications of any license. oFono also includes a low-level plug-in API for integrating with Open Source as well as third party telephony stacks, cellular modems and storage back-ends. The plug-in API functionality is modeled on public standards, in particular 3GPP TS 27.007 “AT command set for User Equipment (UE).”

Sounds pretty open source-y, no? Sounds more open source-y than thou.

But if Intel and Nokia are defining what goes in the center of the stack, it’s a real hardware power play.

I may well be wrong, but I suspect the lower levels of the smartphone stack have already been spoken for. Bringing out a new one, even one built at the lowest level of the open source incline, may no longer be enough to win out over Intel’s and Nokia’s rivals.

It may be, as Barney Frank once observed, “the biggest hail mary play in the history of football. Or marys.”

But as a lover of competition I would be delighted to be proven wrong.

May 11th, 2009

Education lessons for open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:58 am

Categories: General, Government, Implementations, Infrastructure, education, support

Tags: Education, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

One of my favorite ZDNet blog posts from last week was Christopher Dawson’s “How much does open source cost schools.”

The post riffs off a Tech & Learning piece by Randy Orwin, an open source advocate in Washington state, who concluded that “free is not free” and large-scale open soruce implementations are difficult.

I have been working on the question of technology in education for 21 years, since my first child was born. I have concluded that education offers great lessons for all enterprises, especially as it has begun using open source.

I found enterprise technology in education was a dead loss before the game became Internet access. Client technology changes too fast, I learned. The moment teachers were trained on “multimedia” their tools and skills were obsolete. Only by moving to online resources that upgrade themselves could the investment begin to make sense.

Education, in other words, is an enterprise buyer.

What enterprise buyers want are desktops and applications offering workforce productivity and plenty of back-end Internet capacity. Schools and offices aren’t that different.

So the lessons Dawson offers can be applied generally.

1. Open source is a make-or-buy decision. If you go with open source make certain you have the expertise on-staff to make things work.
2. Centralize operations and automate the pushing and updating of applications.
3. Before choosing an open source solution make certain you’re prepared to be part of an open source community.

I would add that the solution you choose may also drive your best-and-brightest. In a conventional enterprise this is your IT shop. In a school setting this is your computer club geeks. If your system is running Linux, that’s what they will learn.

The difference between a school and a conventional enterprise is what happens to that expertise. In most businesses it sticks around. In school it graduates.

So what do you want your smartest kids to become, users or doers? That should offset some of the implied “costs” of open source.

May 7th, 2009

Why the London Olympics is closed source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:26 am

Categories: Cloud Computing, Development, Enterprise Policy, General, Implementations, management

Tags: Olympic Games, Telephone Company, British Telecommunications, Games, Telecom & Utilities, Marketing Research, Personal Technology, Marketing, Dana Blankenhorn

One of the larger surprises this week is the decision by the London Olympics to ignore open source in its planned computer network.

CIO Gerry Pennell (right) gave a lot of blah-blah-blah to the Green IT conference in London, but this really has nothing to do with energy efficiency or application compatibility. (Picture from the GreenIT Web site.)

It’s all about the Adamses. (Adam Smith is on 50 pound notes issued by Clydesdale Bank, the closest thing I could find to the U.S. $100 bill.)

The Olympics are notorious for using every purchase requirement as an excuse to shake down vendors. They get stuff free, or nearly free, and in exchange the vendor gets marketing rights.

IBM was the main computer vendor during the 1996 Olympics in my hometown of Atlanta, and they hyped their participation to the max. They were still talking long after those games were over.

The lessons of those games — don’t trust new software, pay attention to public systems, have a backup plan, and don’t overpromise (as IBM did) — those lessons remain valid today.

But I find it impossible to believe that London won’t have several cloud clusters running in three years with plenty of back-end capacity to handle whatever those games can throw at them, or that virtualization can’t deliver whatever compatibility you’re after.

This is about the fact that BT won the IT contract last year, plus its marketing rights. BT is a phone company. Phone companies are among the last hold-outs against open source.

Before Mr. Pennell, or any other executive, tries to lay a cover story on anyone about anything, they might want to consider the fact that we have this thing called Google now, and reporters can find this stuff out very easily.

May 6th, 2009

Nagios fork warning to Oracle

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:52 am

Categories: Applications, Development, General, Implementations, Oracle, Strategy, java, support

Tags: Oracle Corp., Network, Fork, Nagios, Matt Asay, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

A fork of the Nagios network monitoring tool called Icinga has officially launched, with the first stable version due October 28.

Matt Asay says this illustrates the health of the open source movement. 

Nagios is a 10 year-old project and those involved with the fork say they include members of its community advisory board and makers of Nagios add-ons.

But there is meaning here for more than Nagios. There is great meaning here for Oracle.

As Oracle prepares to take possession of open source projects like OpenOffice, Java and mySQL, the Nagios fork is a warning that open source code can’t be suppressed.

Whatever Nagios’ managers did to cause the fork, it can’t be nearly as bad as the actions Oracle has been suspected of in its approach to open source competition.

Forks of these larger projects would doubtless move even more quickly, and gain more support from both developers and users, than Icinga, which is used by network managers and not the general user community.

The open source warning to Oracle is clear and was probably put best by Tina Turner, above. You better be good to me.

April 22nd, 2009

Apache releases new version of OFBiz

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:51 am

Categories: Applications, BSD, Database Management, Distributions, General, Implementations

Tags: Apache Software Foundation, OFBiz, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Leading open source project groups like Apache have a reputation for delivering products that are cool for geeks to play with but lack competitiveness as business tools.

This is not true. Apache’s latest proof comes in Version 9.4 of its OFBiz project, which standards for Open For Business. (The POS terminal software is based on XUI, right)

The OFBiz project includes many functions well-known to fans of such open source companies as SugarCRM, Compiere, and Magento. Red Hat is among the industry leaders which also has an ecommerce suite.

OFBiz goes well beyond the Red Hat offering, which is basically a Linux stack with a database and Apache Web server. It includes:

• catalog management
• pricing management
• order management
• customer management
• warehouse management
• fulfillment
• accounting
• work effort management
• content management
• a Point Of Sales (POS) module

That’s a lot of stuff. It’s highly commercial, and there is a very group of company building commercial products based on it,

And this is not just for small stores. Serious companies like 1-800-Flowers and Isotoner are OFBiz users, thus part of its community.

All of which leads to this question.

If businesses are really strapped for cash, and successful businesses are being run on open source tools, why aren’t more companies using OFBiz?

I’m thinking they could really use a SaaS version…

April 21st, 2009

Election industry fights open source like it is 1999

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 9:56 am

Categories: Applications, Distributions, General, Government, Implementations, Legal, mass market, politics

Tags: Industry, Open Source, Strategy, Management, Dana Blankenhorn

I know. References to Prince’s 1982 hit “1999” are now quite dated.

But the electronic voting industry’s attack on open source is so ridiculous that 20th century references are required. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The Election Technology Council, which has given us years of questionable election results with systems that can’t be audited and whose accuracy thus can’t be guaranteed, is out with a white paper saying that, in effect, if code is disclosed only outlaws will have code.

The funniest charge is contained in the group’s press release:

Mandating open source requirements, or full software disclosure, upon current proprietary products would open the possibility of a government taking in violation of the United States Constitution. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits the taking of private property without just compensation. 

Let me get this right. If I make you tell me how your black box decided who won an election, I’m violating your Constitutional rights? ROFLMAO.

Rice computer science professor Dan Wallach, writing at a Princeton-hosted blog, fisked this better than I could.

 Disclosing the source code only results in a complete forfeiture of the software’s security if there was never any security there in the first place.

Oh, snap!

If it seems I am not taking the ETC arguments seriously, it’s because I’m not. Their arguments against open source demonstrate better than anything critics might say why the industry needs to be reformed.

About that, I’m as serious as a heart attack.

April 20th, 2009

What does browser control get you?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:39 am

Categories: Applications, General, Implementations, Internet, Microsoft, mass market

Tags: Web Browser, HTML Standard, Web Browsers, Internet, Dana Blankenhorn

Jason Hiner of TechRepublic writes that the day Microsoft most feared has arrived, in that control of the desktop has moved from the operating system to the browser.

In the fever dreams of 1995, the assumption was that such control would define the Web and give the owner of the winning browser the same power over the Internet that Microsoft had over Windows PCs.

But does it?

Some insight will be gained by the continuing evolution of 3D Web technology, which I reported on last month. Firefox is standing behind OpenGL, Microsoft has its DirectX. Which will win out?

If it’s a game of he who owns the browser controls the Web, Google’s efforts with its Chrome browser make all sorts of sense. But if browser market share is to be believed, Microsoft has few worries. Internet Explorer still dominates.

Which leads me to the heretical thought that maybe we were wrong, and that control of a browser means less than we thought it would.

While browsers are important, and like Hiner I have a Web-based e-mail account, there are other important Web applications. In my case, my RSS reader is very important.

This can result in incompatibilities. I have noticed lately that my reader does not have the latest version of Flash, so some videos won’t display inside it, and neither for some reason will some pictures.

This is not a big deal. If I care I open the item in a browser. Many sites truncate RSS feeds because they want you to do this, it makes for more ad revenue.

I should also add that I have multiple browsers. I use Explorer to write these blog posts. I use Chrome to research them. I use Firefox for shopping.

That’s because, for some time, Wordpress support for Explorer was best, because Chrome’s design lets me close tabs without a memory penalty, and because I have a plug-in for Firefox that carries my identification. My guess is many, many people use multiple browsers, each for their own reason.

So where is the control? To some extent it lies in a number of different Web applications. But to some extent it does not exist at all.

HTML standards are mostly set. Efforts at improving them, at changing them, have bogged down in recent years. So it is difficult to say that even an open process can define new standards going forward.

Web standards, in the end, will be defined by a continuously shifting, and hyper-competitive, marketplace, something no one vendor, nor even open source, can fully control.  Which is fine with me.

April 17th, 2009

How open source got its wings

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:54 am

Categories: Development, General, Government, Implementations, Infrastructure, LANs and WANs, support

Tags: Keene Software, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

How did the U.S. military go from rejecting open source a few years ago to accepting it today?

From successful applications.

Keane Software offers a data point. (The picture is from the South Dakota Schools’ K-12 resource center.)

Keane, a corporate software developer, had a contract to develop a supply and logistics system for the Air Force. Given we are fighting two wars, this needed to be done quickly, it needed to scale, and it needed to work.

“They needed total active visibility across the supply chain” said Keane senior application solutions architect Shamlan Siddiqi, director of the company’s system development practice. “They sought a vision to go to a SOA architecture, a more integrated set of applications, consolidating” a variety of systems.

“The project went through various iterations using proprietary software.” Nothing worked. They went back to prototyping. “The requirements were coming in faster and there was an urgent need.”

So Siddiqi started looking to open source. “One of the first things we did was build a legacy applications layer. We started using Apache applications for linking to it. We felt we could do it faster and in collaboration with them using open source.”

They were right. The team built a Java stack using the Spring Framework, they used tools from IBM and Apache Tomcat.

“Instead of doing it in two-to-three years we did it in less than one. We integrated it into the Air Force portal,” Siddiqi said.

“There were questions initially, about support and documentation. But through proof of concept, out ability to show them the system works, we were able to scale the system in front of them without many issues.”

You can’t use everything on Sourceforge for this kind of progress, he admitted, but there are many open source projects that have matured to enterprise level. Tools like Red Hat and JBOSS, and many of the Apache projects.

Best of all the code could be re-used. ” We were sharing code with various projects. If there were map or calendaring functions or clocks on a project we could use that. There were code bases out there.”

Keane is sold on open source. Its home page still advertises the company’s expertise in Microsoft SilverlightSAP, but Siddiqi now has open source people in-house who can build complete systems, scaled systems, using open source tools.

And the Air Force, now apparently a satisfied customer, seems to have bought into the concept. Just like the rest of the military.

UPDATE: Throughout the process I confused the Keane Software where Mr. Siddiqi works with another Keene Software which does much the same thing. My apologies.

April 16th, 2009

Connecting hobby and business in open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:27 am

Categories: Development, General, Implementations, Strategy, management

Tags: Hobby, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

There remains a severe disconnect in open source between those who focus on its business aspects and those who see it as a hobby.

The best programmers, like our own Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier (right), combine the two. They make money while having fun, in fact their profits come from focusing on the fun in what they do. Google releases its update code and Joe says, in effect, let’s play with it.

Our Matt Asay represents the business side. He focuses on business models, on making money, and most of his work on open source has this in mind.

Both sides need one another. You can see how much they need one another by looking at the fate of OpenX, the open source ad server.

The business model of OpenX is focused on gaining support of people who are engaging online for fun. Most bloggers are not professional writers. They’re just hoping some coin will fall from the sky to fund the time they spend on their passions.

Here, players like Joe can be the glue that gives suits like Matt a shot. A system used by amateurs must be highly idiot-proof, even automatic. This takes technical chops that must be exercised before there is any money around to pay for it.

It is at this point that interest must be engineered, even cajoled out of people who care more about the work than the money.

The best open source entrepreneurs manage somehow to do this. How? I think, from watching folks like Marc Fleury do it for some time now, by focusing in on and enabling the non-economic benefits of development.

Make business feel like a hobby? Show me the fun rather than the money? Focus on pleasure rather than monetization? Heresy, you say.

Maybe. But it’s the only way I’ve ever seen an open source company get over the hump, from start-up to thriving concern.

How do you think it’s done?

April 15th, 2009

The $22 billion open source stimulus package

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:29 am

Categories: Applications, Development, General, Implementations, Satire, mass market, video

Tags: Tea, Stimulus, Open Source, Investment, Finance, Dana Blankenhorn

Black Duck says U.S. businesses can save $22 billion per year simply through re-use of open source software.

While Matt Asay likes the Black Duck release’s bigger number, $387 billion in equity value for all open source code, it’s the potential savings from re-use I want to focus on. After all, we can get it every year and it’s growing.

While $22 billion may not seem like a big number, placed against the $787 billion stimulus package signed in February, it’s still serious coin.

It’s more than six times the amount of money New York City got in the bill. It’s seven times the equity value of Red Hat. It’s over half what Bill Gates is worth following the stock market crash.

Of course it’s not real money. In order for you to get your piece of this stimulus, you have to make maximum use of open source software in your operations. You have to do more than download. You have to put the software to work.

Which means you need to join the open source community in a major way, and be ready to exchange the “precious bodily fluid” of code, and code knowledge, with other folks. Including your competitors.

Given how today’s tea bag protesters are calling the President and his supporters Socialist (or worse) for raising tax rates to Clinton-era levels, and keeping deficits at Bush-era levels for some time to come, how would they react to this?

Once they recognized what must be done to secure the money? (The video is from Ukranian Andrewf403, posted on YouTube last September. I figured it was a family-friendly, non-political illustration of knowledge gained with a tea bag.)

April 15th, 2009

Why open source needs the SYNNEX channel

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:38 am

Categories: General, Implementations, Linux, Red Hat, marketing, resellers, support

Tags: Red Hat Inc., Synnex, Retail, Open Source, Channel Management, Marketing, Dana Blankenhorn

The most important point I tried to make in yesterday’s controversial post was that, for retailers, there is something beyond free, a price lower than zero.

That price is sales support. It comes in many forms. Collateral materials, promotions, co-op ad dollars, customer support.

Since they have no guaranteed money coming in, even after the product is moved, open source vendors can’t make big promises along these lines, and thus sell direct, not through channels.

All of which makes Red Hat’s Open Source Channel Alliance a much bigger story than you imagine.

This is not aimed at retail, in the sense of a Fry’s or a Best Buy. It’s aimed at what used to be called the VAR market, the Value Added Reseller, being a joint-venture between Red Hat and SYNNEX, a business distributor which calls itself a “business process services” company.

The best news may be that this deal is as important for SYNNEX as for Red Hat, given that the former was dropped by IBM last year, for reasons that make SYNNEX sound like a pretty good outfit.

Unlike earlier efforts, which aimed to organize small VARs and encourage them toward open source, this new group is top-down. It’s SYNNEX putting together an ecosystem of tool vendors that can replace IBM in its line-up.

This makes the deal important for Red Hat, too. It expands its footprint among the mid-market enterprises it has long targeted. But there are risks. The non-performance of OSCA members will rub off on Red Hat just as their positive performances will.

This means bigger deals are the target, and SYNNEX will have a heart-attack serious emphasis on vendor performance, not just in vague “support” efforts but in getting customers’ kit working and paying for itself.

This will, in turn, cause all the members of the alliance, like Jaspersoft, Zenoss and Alfresco, to raise their games. If SYNNEX is going to bring you in on engagements where the other choice was IBM, your efforts will be compared directly to theirs and you had better measure up.

So in some ways this is like getting a call-up to “the show,” and those who don’t perform go down to the minors. Perhaps to stay. The manager as well as the players.

April 7th, 2009

The open source sea change and the Taylor graph

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 9:33 am

Categories: Development, Enterprise Policy, General, Implementations, Infrastructure, business models, management, support

Tags: Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

To the right is an interesting, if controversial, graph offered today by Charles Taylor of Sirius Corp. and ZDNet UK.

It is meant to illustrate the costs of “upgrading” from a proprietary to a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) solution in your IT shop.

It seeks to blunt what you might call the tip of the Microsoft spear, its chief argument against open source in the enterprise.

That argument, Taylor writes, is that that the switching costs will kill you.

Looking less like science than a child’s scrawl, Taylor’s graph actually shows costs peaking with each upgrade cycle, including a switch to open source. But note that immediately after that peak costs drop a lot, and stay down over time.

While I’m as big an open source advocate as anyone I don’t buy this — at least not for enterprise customers.

An enterprise must maintain paid staff, and I think that staffing must be increased after a switch to open source, if you want to keep your installation current.

This increase is modest, I believe, and more than offset by the higher licensing costs of proprietary solutions against the support costs of open source. But it’s real, and we should not ignore it.

In fact we should embrace it.

When an enterprise goes with open source they become part of a larger community, consisting of everyone else using that solution. This community may indeed include competitors. But it’s not just competitors.

Gaining an advantage in this open source competition requires that you be the best community member you can be.

The more you let your people participate in forums, the more code they contribute, the more valuable they become to you and the more up-to-date your system becomes.

Signing a support subscription contract is not the same thing as buying software. It’s less a buyer-seller relationship than a student-teacher relationship.

Once you accept this and build it into your budget you will get the maximum bang for every open source buck you spend. Just not before. This is the open source sea change, the biggest impact of a company successfully adopting open source.

What does your open source experience tell you?

March 31st, 2009

Ingres puts one foot in front of the other

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:13 am

Categories: Applications, Database Management, General, Implementations, Strategy, marketing

Tags: Ingres, Deals, Databases, Enterprise Software, Software, Data Management, Dana Blankenhorn

News, on this as on any beat, comes from controversy. Light, not heat. Man bites dog, not dog bites man.

But in the real world of business, success comes from just putting one foot in front of the other, moving steadily forward, no matter how hard the wind blows. (Like this leatherback turtle, tagged recently in Costa Rica and offered by Jeff DiNunzio.)

It’s finance and legal conflict, not sales and alliances, that wins headlines, even on beats like this where we should know better.

So let’s take a moment to consider the case of Ingres.

Ingres offers an implementation of database software which shares an early history with PostgreSQL. The sales pitch is it’s an enterprise-class, open source database system. Oracle for the price of mySQL. (Stop yawning.)

The folks at Ingres work hard to make this exciting, to “get in the papers” (or the blogs) because that presence demonstrates momentum. It’s considered valuable. There’s no such thing as bad publicity. Call me what you want, just spell my name right.

It may be journalistic heresy to say this, but it ain’t necessarily so. We can’t all be rabbits. Let’s hear it for the turtle.

Over the last few weeks I’ve received a succession of small releases from Ingres, and calls for coverage:

1. A partnership with the Wilken Group of Germany in the telecomm market.
2. A partnership with Biveroni Batschelet Partners of Switzerland in the financial market.
3. Being listed as an “up and comer,” along with outfits that get a lot more ink, by a venture capital firm.
4. An alliance with Open Tech Works in the government market.

By themselves none of these are worth a mention. Even collectively they are easy to lose in the agate. But consider the headwinds Ingres, and all of us, are facing right now. Deals are tough to do. Ingres does deals.

So take a moment, today, and give a turtle its props. Slow and steady can win the race too. As Ingres is proving.

March 26th, 2009

An open source grab for 3D web power

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:53 am

Categories: Development, General, Implementations, Internet, Standards, mass market

Tags: OpenGL, 3D, Web, Open Source, Mozilla Corp., Khronos, Vladimir Vucicevic, Dana Blankenhorn

Khronos‘ move to accelerate development of Web 3D based on Javascript, supported by Mozilla’s Firefox browser as early as this summer, looks like a laudable attempt to get ahead of a rapidly developing trend.

But is it also an attempt by OpenGL to take the equivalent of proprietary advantage under the flag of open source? (Hope so.)

The annual Web3D Symposium is still soliciting papers, and is scheduled for June in Germany. This is the traditional venue for advancing the cause.

But Khronos and Mozilla have their own timetable. Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard writes on his blog of making the new 3D software  ”base functionality in the release after Firefox 3.5,” based on the OpenGL standard.

OpenGL competes directly with Microsoft’s Direct3D software, so the struggle can be expected to be ongoing. Wikipedia maintains an ongoing comparison.

Vladimir Vucicevic is Mozilla’s point man on the project. He writes, “From looking at the available 3D APIs, I settled on exposing the OpenGL ES APIs through an HTML5 Canvas context, enabling access to OpenGL from within Javascript.”

In a post datelined Tuesday he writes, “I think now is the time to bring this out into a wider audience, and to figure out what an initial take of 3D on the web should look like. ”

The key word there is initial. The struggle to define and control a standard for 3D on the Web has just begun with this announcement.

As Sherlock Holmes might say, “the game’s afoot.”

March 6th, 2009

An open source textbook is more than a book

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:45 am

Categories: Applications, General, Government, Implementations, content, education

Tags: Open Source Textbook, CK-12 Flexbook, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

The release of an “open source” physics textbook by the state of Virginia is a serious milestone.

I put the words “open source” in quotes because, while the work has a Creative Commons attribution license and was built using open source tools, its chapters are all bylined and it was done with strict peer review.

The technology platform comes from CK-12, Palo Alto, Calif., built using open source projects like Apache, Django, mySQL, PHP and Google Tools. Progress was tracked on a Wiki.

What may be most remarkable here is the timeframe.

Coordinator Jim Batterson announced the project in October, and his 13 authors had their work done by February 27. They included active researchers, high school teachers, and college professors, as well as some retirees.

Naturally, the new text is based on current technology. No talk of cathode ray tubes. And the resulting book can be updated, rewritten, on a regular schedule so it’s new with each school year. The FlexBook can be viewed online with a CK-12 Flexbook reader or printed.

The contrast with current K-12 textbook acquisition methods is night-and-day. No multi-year lead times. No publisher control. And the approval process is also flexible.

CK-12 is a non-profit organization run by serial entrepreneur Murugan Pal and educator Neeru Khosla.  The group has several dozen active authors, and a board of advisors heavy on the Sun exes.

Think about how texts are developed now, think of how much faster this process is, consider the costs of each, and I think you’ll admit that what we have coming is a revolution. The fact CK-12 is far from alone here may be the best news of all.