ZDNet Must Read:
Google makes Chrome OS open source
Google made the early code available to the open source community and claims external developers will have the same access to the code as internal Google developers.... Continued »
Category: management
November 10th, 2009
Enterprises saving $26 million per project with open source
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/2009-11-10These 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 10th, 2009
Open source be not proud
Open source is, in part, a release of ego.
When a program is proprietary, it’s yours. You own it. You can feed it or you can kill it.
Not so with open source. When software is made open source it is with the knowledge that its fate is shared among all stakeholders. The contributions that make it valuable may well come from outside, the direction of the software is no longer completely in the hands of its owner or sponsor.
Larry Ellison doesn’t understand this, and I suspect neither does Wall Street. Otherwise, why would the Street be cheering on Ellison’s suggestion that he’ll kill Sun to keep Euro-hands off mySQL?
More than the future of mySQL is now on the line. So are the futures of Java and OpenOffice, and all the other projects Sun Microsystems sponsors. Ellison thinks this fact should make the EC Competition Commissioner, Nellie Kroess, back off. He seems to think the U.S. government can make Kroess relent.
The key to why Ellison is wrong can be found in the paragraph above. It’s one word. I’ll wait…
The word is sponsors.
Open source companies don’t own the code bases that are in their charge. They seek to monetize the code, so the code can be expanded, so it will draw more committers. Acquia doesn’t own Drupal, and Automattic doesn’t own Wordpress. The code bases are, in fact, owned by the community, simply by virtue of being open source.
Ellison seems to think that if he snaps his fingers and brings down the wrath of heaven, then mySQL and Java and OpenOffice will cease to exist. This would be true if they were closed source. In that case they would be orphaned, and if no buyer were found support would disappear.
Open source does not work that way.
Sure it would be tough for these big projects to find new sponsors. But there are plenty of prospects around.
Google would have an interest in Java, as might Microsoft. IBM already has a stake in Open Office. I’m certain we can find another home for mySQL, too. Even Glassfish might well find a new home within the federal government.
Ellison’s threat to kill Sun’s open source projects if he does not get his way is an empty one. Someone would pick up what remaining pieces have value.
Open source, divorced from its sponsor, turns to software water, and would quickly flow through Ellison’s hands.
Go to an open source conference. Listen carefully to the commercial open source businesspeople you see there. They may talk about their kids and their companies, their hobbies and their passions, including a passion for the projects they control.
But they know those projects are more like their kids than their sailboats. They are responsible for the software they control. They do not own it. It’s not “my” software. It’s “our” software.
This is the attitude you must take if you’re to make a success of an open source business. This is why many in the proprietary world, like Larry Ellison, confuse it with communism, or socialism, or some other foreign -ism.
Open source be not proud. Open source code responds to whomever gives it the love of time. The parents aren’t those who gave it the DNA of capital, but those who gave it the love of hard work.
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.
October 23rd, 2009
Give Jim Whitehurst his due and proper
One of the hardest, and underestimated, jobs in business is to take over a going concern and keep it growing.
Examples are few. Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers comes to mind. It’s not broke, don’t fix it, just find a few ways to make it a little bit better and you can win a Super Bowl.
In football building on success gives a coach his “props,” or proper respect. In Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer it’s referred to as one’s “due and proper.”
In the world of open source Jim Whitehurst is a like Tomlin. Critics called Tomlin too young. They called Whitehurst “the airline guy” when he joined Red Hat from Delta Air Lines in 2008.
As with the Steelers Red Hat wasn’t broke when Whitehurst came in, and they’re just keeping on. The had another good quarter, the stock has more than doubled in value this year, and the market cap is now over $5 billion.
Whitehurst has done this with the business equivalent of blocking and tackling. Red Hat has no trick plays, no wildcat offense. For the fifth time (in six years) it topped all software vendors in CIO’s annual survey. That’s a bit like winning the Super Bowl, isn’t it?
I’m sure Whitehurst was asked, at his recent keynote to a business leadership conference named in part for Duke basketball Coach Mike Krzyzewski, “how do you do it? How do you get people to pay you for something they can get for free?”
The answer was probably the same as it is for every other successful open source vendor. You help people make the code work and get value from it. Free code is just code. Supported code is a business result. Red Hat is results oriented.
The bottom line doesn’t lie folks. Use this thread to give the man his due and proper.
October 21st, 2009
mySQL starring as Peter Pan
The debate over mySQL comes down, in part, to a question of whether mySQL should be allowed to grow up.
Certainly this was the promise when Sun acquired mySQL, that it would grow to become a “big boy” database that could go toe-to-toe with Oracle and DB2. (Robin Williams played Peter Pan against Dustin Hoffman in 1991’s Hook, available at Amazon.com.)
Open source fans of the plan to acquire Sun (and mySQL) are either forgetting or ignoring this. I think Matt Asay tells it straight here:
The reality is that MySQL and Oracle compete in two different database markets.
That is today’s reality, and it was yesterday’s reality too. If Oracle succeeds it will be tomorrow’s reality, most certainly.
But that’s not the only possibility. As two UK-based open source advocacy groups (and Richard Stallman) wrote yesterday:
If Oracle is allowed to acquire MySQL, it will predictably limit the development of the functionality and performance of the MySQL software platform, leading to profound harm to those who use MySQL software to power applications.
This seems to be a peculiarly European view. You will note that Stallman personally endorsed this letter, not the Free Software Foundation.
(Correction: One of the groups referenced above, KEI, is based in Geneva, Switzerland, but has a UK office.)
The American view is that there are both closed source and open source alternatives to mySQL, specifically PostgreSQL and Ingres. The European view is that open source must be allowed to grow up, and communities must be allowed to compete directly with the big boys, or competition is not real.
My view remains that, if Europeans feel challenged by this transaction, open source offers them the opportunity to fork mySQL, and to invest as heavily as they need to in order to grow the software into something better. Set a course for the second star to the right and straight on till morning.
Of course, given that this is open source, the chief beneficiary of a European-funded, truly competitive mySQL code base will be Oracle. (Larry Ellison as Tinker Bell?)
October 19th, 2009
SCO story ends with a whimper
Remember SCO?
Back when I started writing about open source and Linux, in 2005, you couldn’t swing a cat without catching someone with an opinion about SCO.
SCO claimed Linux was infringing its patentscopyright. SCO claimed it owned Linux. SCO sued IBM.
CORRECTION: Microsoft claims patent rights on Linux code. The SCO case was about copyright.
Once SCO built a railroad of lawsuits, made it race against time. Now it’s done.
As quietly as possible last week, through a required SEC filing, SCO quietly canned CEO Darl McBride, the architect of its audacious “better luck through lawsuits” business plan.
They didn’t just ease the man out. They eliminated the positions of CEO and president, which McBride held. The top name on the org chart is now COO Jeff Hunsaker (above), whose background includes stints at WordPerfect, Novell and Corel (so he knows from failure).
Anyone have a few words they want to say over the body?
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 15th, 2009
Should Google spin Android into a foundation?
How does it maintain control of Android and at the same time build a community of interests in which developers can seek profit?
The easy answer is to turn the Open Handset Alliance into the Android Foundation. (Fans of the late Isaac Asimov will recognize this fellow even in French.)
Critics love to claim that Eclipse is just an IBM front, but that’s a cheap shot, based on the fact that IBM gains huge benefits from Eclipse without having to pay all the bills there.
Foundations can be a great way to organize vendors who have a common purpose but divergent business plans. The Linux Foundation is a good example of this.
But there are risks in an Android Foundation, as Symbian’s David Wood said when they were going open source a year ago.
Forks are one.
Foundations lead naturally to forks. Every vendor who sells an “enhanced” version of Eclipse tools is pushing a proprietary fork. There are dozens of Linux distros, each of which forks the code in some way to provide added value.
How much Android forking can Google stand before the value starts dribbling through its fingers? Like to see some stuck-up Microsoft search engine sitting on an Android phone? (Make your blood boil? Well I should say.)
There is, of course, another risk in going the Foundation route. It doesn’t always work. Witness LiMo, which Motorola recently abandoned for Android. Witness Moblin, which Intel gave to the Linux Foundation. Witness Symbian itself for that matter.
The difference between the OHA and a conventional software foundation is that for Android to move forward it must first be expressed in phones, in hardware. The chicken-and-egg question here yields an easy answer. It’s the chicken. An egg, the software, is pretty meaningless if it’s just sitting on a server.
This fact reduces the threat of a fork. The value of any Android handset lies in its compatibility. Without that it might as well be a Windows Mobile set.
So long as Google is the biggest investor in Android, then, it’s probably doing the right thing by avoiding the foundation model. But at some point the rest of the ecosystem needs to grow up for Google to get its investment back.
So if Google does set up an Android Foundation some time down the road, know that it’s a sign of success, and that it no longer has to push this rock up the hill all by itself.
October 15th, 2009
Why prefer open source
A preference for open source is based on a simple, easy to understand premise.
An open source code base is your asset. A proprietary code base is someone else’s asset.
Just so long as you understand what “your” and “someone else’s” mean.
(You will recall this picture from Arian Young. I used it in February discussing mandates.)
Now it’s true that an open source asset is shared. But that’s why GPL code may be the best open source asset to have, if you’re not a software company.
Everyone who has GPL code has an obligation to share their improvements. Other people are busy, right now, increasing the value of your GPL assets.
This calculation is true for businesses as well as governments. You don’t need a mandate, assuming you can sell the idea behind a preference to your staff. (Thanks to Matt Asay for his excellent essay on this subject.)
This is something managers in all kinds of enterprises — public, private, and philanthropic — often fail to do. There is a tendency everywhere to mandate. Business managers pass orders down the line without giving much thought to its impact on the people below them. It’s easier than selling.
Vendors take advantage of this to sell a preference for closed source to their customers. Employees are defending their jobs, and futures, by defending the vendor’s interests. Change vendors, even to open source, and your skills with Microsoft or Oracle code can seem worthless, your job may be at risk.
So there is a lot business can learn from the problems governments have in trying to mandate open source. If a Fortunate 500 company dumps Windows for Linux it can face the same resistance.
This can be a hard lesson for top management to learn. You advertise for technical help. You state the specific programs you want people to know. These skills are their assets, and if you make vendor changes — you will always make vendor changes — employees see their assets destroyed.
My dear wife of some decades talks about this all the time, in relation to her work. Her employers get new software and now only want experts in that stuff. The old people are vulnerable.
But people can learn, and people will learn if you give them the chance. The same minds that learned assembler can learn Java. The same minds that learned Oracle can learn mySQL.
Management attitudes are what need to change. Stop thinking of programmers as mere skill sets. They’re trained minds and willing hearts. Most are anxious to take on new skills. Give them a chance. Sell them, don’t just issue them orders.
That’s why preferences are better than mandates. Preferences begin a sales process, they give people a chance to learn new skills. Mandates are always a threat, or at least they are perceived as threatening.
Business and government aren’t really so different. Managing is managing, coding is coding. Treat people as they deserve to be treated and most will come good. Treat them as cogs in your machine and the friction will grind that machine down.
October 9th, 2009
The best protection for software assets
Roberto Galoppini has an interesting piece running today on Codeplex, and how to improve it.
I can’t say much more than “attaboy” about it, but he ends with an interesting comment:
Software patents are not legal here in Europe, and Europe uses a lot of open source software.
As a commenter here wrote earlier today, much of the controversy surrounding open source involves patents, which he calls the “Fight Club” of software. (That’s what Brad Pitt is doing here.)
Without the argument over patents, what would Microsoft be doing that was controversial regarding open source? Some of its licenses are one-sided, but so are its contributions to the code protected by those licenses. The MS-PL license is also OSI-approved.
One point I have made many times — as have people much wiser than I am — is that patent protection isn’t that great a deal. You have to reveal your invention. The rights don’t last that long.
Contrast this with copyright and trademark. This story, and the logo above it, will have legal protection long after Microsoft’s so-called Linux “patents” are forgotten.
When people “pay” for software, what are they really buying? Support. They want to know needed updates will come in, that someone is back there stamping out bugs, protecting us from bad guys, and enhancing the code.
We convey this information through a trademark, not patents.
The difference between open source and proprietary software is visibility, nothing more. Why am I signing a contract for software I can see? To acknowledge your copyright on it, not your patent rights.
All the controversy between Microsoft and open source would be over if the Supreme Court followed Red Hat’s recent brief in the Bilski case, and stripped out rights previous courts had given software companies, rights that have proven to be little but trouble, protecting only monopoly and not innovation.
Perhaps Microsoft might add an “amen” to that brief. Can I hear an amen?
October 9th, 2009
Seeking a Stallman for open source
In one of my earliest blog posts here I called Richard Stallman (right) a father of the open source movement and almost immediately got a personal nastygram. From Richard Stallman.
I appreciated it and have sought to be more careful. Stallman believes in free software, which he calls Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). (It’s also called Free Open Source Software (FOSS).)
Copyleft and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) are inherently political, a direct challenge to software as a business, and Stallman has never, ever thought of himself as a businessman.
Stallman is so idiosyncratic that he takes pains on his personal Web page to note that the views expressed there aren’t even those of the FSF or its GNU Project. They’re just Stallman’s. Stallman is Stallman.
Yet despite Stallman’s Brian-like rejection of leadership, many in open source still revere him and many outside open source still use him to discredit the movement.
Jason Perlow believes this is stupid. I agree. Unfortunately open source, as a business movement, lacks any figure with the messianic qualities Stallman brings to the party.
There’s also this. Much of Perlow’s anger, and that of our own Matt Asay, is directed at Stallman’s continued contempt for Microsoft, his suspicion that Microsoft’s every action is part of some grand conspiracy. Perlow, Asay, and the open source movement (as opposed to FLOSS) want to make peace with Microsoft.
Stallman, if he is considered a leader of the open source movement, is an obstacle to that peace deal.
Microsoft’s MS-PL license is now officially recognized by the OSI. Microsoft’s Codeplex is an active open source site. Microsoft has given serious money to its open source efforts and sought to work more closely with open source companies.
But Microsoft, and those companies like Novell that have come into its orbit, are explicitly rejected by FLOSS advocates, and no one from that orbit has emerged as a spokesman in the way that Stallman has.
There is an implication in Perlow’s piece (mouse over the illustration at its top) that Miguel de Icaza, credited with launching both Mono and GNOME, should be that alternative spokesman. This is partly due to Stallman’s focusing on him as “a traitor” to the FLOSS movement.
Technically he is. But as I’ve noted before, being a traitor to FLOSS does not make you a traitor to open source. The two things are quite different, even if they share a license in the GPL. And open source, as opposed to to FLOSS, does lack a leader. a spokesman, a Stallman if you will.
Will de Icaza take the job? And will the movement follow him?
Loading ...October 5th, 2009
Open Solutions Alliance acquired by Europeans
OW2, a European consortium dedicated to creating open source middleware, has acquired the Open Solutions Alliance, a two-year group dedicated to building reseller channels for open source.
The press release on the deal talked about synergies and about the two organizations being like puzzle pieces meant to fit together.
I don’t buy it.
I was initially intrigued by the OSA. They had a series of meetings that hoped to develop a channel for business-oriented open source projects.
In this way they hoped to recreate the same structure that proprietary companies have. Proprietary channel vendors can be very powerful. Comdex stood for Computer Dealers Expo — it was a channel show.
But that’s not how open source works. Most open source channel companies are highly vertical. They specialize in an application set (like retail) and are using open source solely to improve their bottom lines. Their main interest is in keeping control of the customer.
This may be why the OSA seemed like such a great idea. That pure drive for sales and profit can appear strange at an open source conference, where other motives must also be given lip service.
Unfortunately the OSA never got much further than its little hotel-room conferences. Its funding came from open source companies like BlackDuck that were looking to build sales channels, and not from the channel iteself.
OW2, by contrast, has gotten some traction pushing open source middleware. Middleware is a sweet spot for resellers. The projects are often small, they’re run in a businesslike manner, and it’s a good place for them to put the “secret sauce” that brings in the customers.
OSA gives OW2 a bigger U.S. presence, along with another niche it can exploit. Just as important, I think, is that OW2 gives OSA an exit strategy.
I hope the people behind OSA won’t find this post to be a criticism. I believe the idea of the group was laudable, and that the deal with OW2 is a good one.
October 2nd, 2009
Open source and forced obsolescence
One of the primary reasons for FOSS was to fight forced obsolescence.
When something works well you don’t want to spend good money to replace it. Different is not always better.
(I found this little cutie at a blog site in 2005. She’s probably in first grade by now and looks nothing like this.)
But many proprietary companies force you to upgrade anyway. It’s necessary for their business models. A company that sells the market once can’t keep paying its people, so the old stuff must wear out in some way and you must insist the new stuff is better.
I know many people who chafe at this. For them open source is a godsend. They can ignore the siren call of change, use what works, and save money.
But obsolescence is a double-edged sword.
One of the biggest problems open source projects have is that users resist security updates. Unless you patch your stuff when called upon you are insecure, an easy mark for a hacker who can exploit the old code.
In this way bad guys become the best marketers you have. Security patches maintain the link between buyer and seller, providing a steady stream of service that buyers find worth paying for.
Security patches don’t make software functionally better. They are simply necessary, especially if your open source runs under Windows.
But you are left back where you started. The project has a continuing obligation to patch, and a continuing reason to keep dinging users for support. If the project fails users still have the code, but they are on their own against the bad guys.
So is forced obsolescence really a problem, or is it a challenge?
September 30th, 2009
Missing what open source cannot afford
In order to deliver you free code open source companies must eliminate functions a regular company can only squeeze.
(Picture from The Great Elsewhere in South Carolina’s Upstate.)
What you’re left with are development, support, and leadership. If any money is coming in, it’s coming in for support. Even if you’re not doing all the development yourself, you must still organize and direct it. Then there’s leadership, which can be as simple as a boss and a secretary to keep the lights on.
Trouble is, unless you can find an additional business model (hardware, SaaS) there is never any additional money to pay for things traditional companies take for granted.
Such as:
Advertising — I’ve been doing this blog for nearly five years and chances are good there’s still a Microsoft ad next to it. (I just checked and goody-goody there’s Novell.) Sometimes there’s an IBM ad. (There is today.) But the open source corporate bench is now wide and deep. Where is my Alfresco ad? Matt is dead right on this.
Tschotskes — Yiddish for “little gift.” (Yiddish is the second language of the New York diaspora.) Marc Fleury once gave me a JBOSS t-shirt riffing on the movie “Napoleon Dynamite.” But generally the cupboards are bare. Quite a contrast to the PC beat or the Internet beat, or even the medical beat where inscribed pens, shirts, gimcracks and gewgaws are de rigeur.
Travel — Does Linus Torvalds even have a frequent flyer account? A few luminaries like Stallman, Perens, and Shuttleworth go to exotic locales (or come from them) but the average open source exec-on-the-street knows mainly the Portland coffee shops and perhaps the train schedule to San Jose.
Bonuses — I don’t think these have disappeared entirely. If you can get a hospital or Fortunate 500 outfit to sign their name on the line that is dotted on a support or services contract, you deserve a bonus. But this does not happen often.
Marketing – Most of the marketing I see coming out of open source is public relations, and sorry to say it is little changed from when I started in journalism 30 years ago. Everything is still pitched from the client’s point of view, not the writer’s and not the publication’s. I think this budget can be squeezed further. Maybe send us some tschotskes instead.
Fancy Dinners — No, taking the development team out for eggs after they have pulled another all-nighter does not count. Fancy Feast does not count, either. Open source had traded in their Starbucks cups for McCafe long before that became fashionable. I know they eat well at the Googleplex, but they’re an online outfit, not an open source company.
Strategery — I know, it’s spelled strategy. But if Forrester or the other old-line market research outfits depended on open source the Forrester walk would be to the end of a plank (followed by the sound of a splash). Research? What do you think beta code is for?
These are just a few of the functions I grew accustomed to over 20 years covering technology that I have seen very little of since joining the open source beat almost five years ago.
Perhaps you can think of some others.
September 25th, 2009
Can Linux beat the bloat
Linus Torvalds shocked the crowd (well, the group) at LinuxCon this week with three words.
“Linux is bloated.” He added it’s even gotten “huge and scary.”
(This fat penguin, by Squiggums at DeviantArt, can likely be licensed by the Linux Foundation for a reasonable fee. Just change the fish in the thought bubble to a Microsoft Windows logo.)
Part of the problem here may be just how close Linus himself is to the project. He was there at the beginning, and here he is with something bigger than any conglomerate’s Unix ever got. The whole world depends on Linux — servers, clients, phones. That’s got to weigh on a person.
Or it could be nostalgia. I get this way some days driving around Atlanta. I remember when that mall was an empty lot, I see the store where that skyscraper now stands. I remember when the Peachtree Road Race course had just a half-dozen skyscrapers on it, before Elton John and Jane Fonda and the Olympics, back in the 20th century.
Imagine if Bill Gates managed the original Windows project 25 years ago and were still managing that architecture today, with every fix or improvement coming personally past his desk. I get tired just thinking about it.
On the other hand, maybe Linus is right. He’s the doctor. Maybe it’s impossible to build something that works on any machine, that works clean, that’s scrubbed regularly for bugs, that has enormous amounts of functionality, and doesn’t get bloated. A modular architecture can only get you so far.
Now it’s true that, as our Matt Asay notes, there’s Linux and then there’s Linux. The Linux that loads onto a Moblin phone bears little resemblance to, say, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. What they have in common is compatibility, a common way of looking at the world, so they can work seamlessly together.
As Linus’ personal blog notes, he does take vacations and has a good, happy family life. But has he thought of, like, a sabbatical? Take six months off and chill, do something else, travel, really get away from it for a while? This project is too big to depend on one man at the center — maybe that’s the problem.
So I want to hear from the real Linux geeks out there. Is Linux bloated? Are there things that can be done, from an architectural or development standpoint, to make it less bloated?
Linus sounds tired. Why don’t you be the boss for a while?
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 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?
September 7th, 2009
Why open source remains an ideological divide
Matt Asay has a piece today that is the tech equivalent of a Barack Obama speech.
He tries, once again, to remove ideology from the discussion of open source vs. proprietary software. He urges consensus, the best of both worlds, and asks can’t we all just get along?
As in politics the answer often turns out to be no, because there is a basic ideological divide here.
Proprietary companies succeed by imposing a top-down structure on software development and using sales revenue to keep everyone in line. I mean everyone — marketing, legal, support, development, and customers, too.
With proprietary software you’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus. Leave the firm and you lose access to your code. Leave it as a customer and you lose all your past work, along with much of your knowledge.
You become the business equivalent of David Brock or John Dean. (This is not a political point. Think Dennis Miller or the late Ron Silver, who went the other way.) In religious terms you are apostate, exiled. There seems to be no middle ground.
Open source offers a bottom-up structure of development but money is something of an afterthought. By that I mean you focus first on the job at hand, then build a business model around it, rather than the other way around.
You gain freedom but lose money. The marketing money, the distribution money, all that lovely gelt that bought the lawyers and the trade show booths and the incentive prizes to exotic destinations, is out of your life.
Unless you consider Portland exotic.
This divide between money-is-all and money-is-not-all is baked into the system. You don’t want to turn into Richard Stallman when you take the open source road, you may even reject him personally, but you soon find a daily shave is not necessary, and that broken-in sneakers are really quite comfortable.
Open source, as distinguished from FOSS, is an attempt to marry the best of both worlds, to build a business around a free model.
But no matter how capitalistic you may sound your hippie business heritage remains, and the best way to build a community around your software may still mean the GPL. Development will still require transparency.
Here’s where we turn back to politics.
When conservatives want to attack President Obama the first epithet they usually sling is “socialist.” What they mean is a demand economy, as in Cuba or the old Soviet Union. They don’t usually mean Sweden, or the Netherlands, or England or Canada, where life seems quite comfortable.
If you think of Stallman as Cuba and a company like Red Hat as Sweden, you get the ideological dilemma both Asay and our President face today.
I like shopping at Ikea. The solution for open source? Accept the limits and be proud of what you are. As to the President? Tune in Wednesday, but don’t expect it to be followed by a Republican chorus of Kumbaya.
Point is, Matt, in the end you have to choose a side. I say stand proudly with your friends or you get run over. Be open source, recognize the difference between that and the proprietary model, and go forward. If they want to give you the black hat for that, wear it proudly.
Stand for something.
September 3rd, 2009
Young man yells at cloud
Blogger-novelist-activist Cory Doctorow is out today with a screed condemning the whole idea of cloud computing.
(Here he is in Wikipedia. Doesn’t that live somewhere in the cloud?)
Here is a summary.
The Man is trying to put us down. It’s all a conspiracy to make us pay for what we could do ourselves for free. The corporate shills want to control our machines and through them, our brains.
I agree with Doctorow on many things. On other things I’m sympathetic.
On this he’s dead wrong.
Running a PC is a hassle. There are software updates, there are anti-virals and anti-spyware and registry cleaners to worry about. It can take five minutes for even a Netbook to boot up, and another five minutes to shut it down.
Hardware is not the issue. Client hardware is an incredible bargain. The issue here is software.
All the problems now endemic to Windows machines are slowly infiltrating the worlds of the Mac and Linux, too. This has to do with the size and complexity of modern operating systems, and the large number of very nasty people working overtime to break them.
Maybe, if you have just one laptop, you can deal with this expense and hassle. But even small companies may now have 10-20 or more PCs running at once. The expenses of managing clients are driving companies to the wall.
The idea of the cloud is to abstract this complexity, take it out of the hands of users and put it in the hands of experts. One set of experts can handle the hassles of thousands of users, and hundreds of companies, for less than those users and companies are paying now.
Or as Mark Twain once said, “Put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket.”
As to the broader market, Mr. Doctorow has one kid, a toddler. Congratulations. I have three PCs, my dear wife runs three, my daughter has two and my son has a desktop for gaming with a terabyte of storage.
We use both wired and wireless networking to keep it all together. Several times a year I lose a day of work scrabbling around on my knees, under a desk, trying to check wiring. I have a repair guy on speed dial. I’m not that unusual, and becoming less so all the time.
The complexity and vulnerability of PCs means you can’t just run one. I always have my Netbook on standby for emergencies. If malware infects me, or the cable goes out, I can be at a local coffee shop within minutes.
I no longer even trust my PC for really important stuff. That goes on a USB stick. You can get a 32 Gigabyte stick these days for about $70. Next week it will be less. Wear it around your neck, plug it into the cloud anywhere and, if everything works right, there you are.
Now Doctorow has valid concerns. Networks are not yet built to handle massive use of clouds. The legal environment for cloud users is, well, cloudy.
Fact is these are early days. In PC time it’s 1978. In Internet time it’s still 1994.
What 30 years of experience tells me is that condemning the future when you don’t know what it looks like is never a wise move.
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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