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: Enterprise Policy
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.
October 28th, 2009
What the DoD now says about open source
Open source can be compared directly with commercial software and it offers unique advantages for rapid prototyping and sharing across the military.
Those are the key takeaways in a new memorandum now circulating the Pentagon from deputy CIO David Wennergren (right).
While it’s not a complete endorsement of open source, it does give people a green light to go get some.
The Wennergren Memo says that open source should be included in any market research on department needs, and also debunks some common myths that have been spread by commercial vendors:
- Open source places no restrictions on who can use it.
- Instructions against use of public domain code should not be interpreted to apply to open source, as government employees can fix bugs.
- It is not true that any improvements to open source must be distributed to “the community” (including potential enemies). They can be legally shared throughout the DoD under any open source license and kept there.
- Release of open source code can be controlled, and should be done when in the government’s interest, when the government receives “unlimited rights” on upgrades, and where there is no law, like an export control, that might stand in the way.
The memo says additional information will be posted at the Defense Department Web site and encourages use of the official military software forge at http://software.forge.mil.
Cut through the bureaucratese and you do have a remarkable turnaround in attitudes. Under the previous Administration contracting was the only way to go. Now officers are being allowed to try do it yourself solutions.
That’s a very big deal.
October 26th, 2009
The chief value of open source
One thing I agree with Matt Asay about. The key to open source is not that it’s free.
Open source doesn’t even cut costs, because code licenses represent only a tiny portion of a major product’s cost.
The chief value of open source is visibility. (These highly visible sneakers cost $120 from Xander. Picture from Hypebeast.)
You can see the code, you can test the code, you can improve the code, but mostly you can see the code.
When you see the code vendors, of necessity, change their business models. Their costs move to the back-end. They look for subscription revenue, for services revenue. They look for ways to help a project work.
When you can see the code you have a different relationship with it. You’re no longer asking what it can do. You’re asking how you can adapt it to your needs.
With code visibility, you and your vendors become partners in trying to make something work. The vendor can’t over-promise, but you can’t over-assume either. This may be one of main hidden reasons for IT failure, the two sides of the transaction not being on the same page.
You can also get around a vendor with open source. If the vendor doesn’t have time to fix your issue, you pay someone else to fix it. Maybe you hire someone, maybe you just go to the community or its commercial arm. There are no more excuses, well no more you have to tolerate, with open source.
When code is visible, and you’re a member of the code community, you’re going to be up-to-date on improvements, enhancements, and bug fixes. It’s not just that the code becomes visible, but you become visible as a user of the code.
It’s true that in the enterprise space there is no such thing as free code. There is only visible code and invisible code. When you have open source you have the visible kind, and this makes all the difference.
August 28th, 2009
Aussies give open source golden crumbs from Microsoft table
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has begun fulfilling a promise to give every high school student a laptop, offering Lenovo machines with Windows 7 and some open source applications.
Most reporters covering the story down under are focused on the fact that at least 70,000 kids will get Windows 7 before the rest of us. But I would rather focus on those open source applications, which are not what you would call the usual suspects:
- GeoGebra is a package for teaching high school math. It starts with geometry but also branches into algebra and calculus. Created by Marcus Hohenwarter for a master’s thesis at the University of Salzburg, he now runs the project out of Florida State University.
- Audacity is a sound editor also available under Linux. It was launched at Carnegie-Mellon 10 years ago by by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg (Mazzoni is still on the team) and now makes its home on Sourceforge.
- FreeMind is a mind mapping program written in Java. Mind maps are a great way to outline and brainstorm, especially for those of us with ADD. It is not yet at Version 1.0, and it also lives at Sourceforge.
- MuseScore is a music composition and notation program, which has also yet to reach Version 1.0. It recently delivered its first stable release for the Macintosh, and its developers have just begun working on a branding program.
We are often obsessed in technology by control of the operating system, and in the business press by questions of money. But these fine programs are the tip of a very large iceberg, based in academia, that is slowly transforming education and the education process.
The reason you probably don’t hear more of this is because it is subject to what I call Moore’s Law of Training. There is no Moore’s Law of Training. People learn at the rate they learn, and knowledge is spread at a similar rate.
Any teacher interested in any of these Windows programs has to learn to use them, and has to develop coherent lesson plans for them. Both take time. Given how open source eliminates marketing budgets, it also takes time for news of such programs to spread.
But news does spread. News of these programs has spread all the way to Australia, and apparently to the highest realms of the New South Wales government.
With tens of thousands of Australian kids going to class this week carrying these programs they will spread even more quickly. So will curricula based on them. And, unlike 1990s’ multimedia curricula, these will be fairly stable, so long as the programs retain backwards compatibility, as most do.
These may be crumbs from the Microsoft table, but they are important crumbs. Get enough crumbs and you have the whole loaf. That is why I call these golden crumbs.
Almost makes me wish my kids were babies again. Note that I said almost.
August 27th, 2009
NHIN code-a-thon may change government attitude toward open source
Tomorrow, the Department of Health and Human Services will host its first “code-a-thon” dedicated to the National Health Information Network and its Connect software.
About 80 programmers, led by Apache developer (and Collabnet employee) Brian Behlendorf, will spend about four hours trying to stamp out bugs in the open source software gateway, which is based on National Health Information Network (NHIN) conventions.
Behlendorf’s presence is not ceremonial, as CollabNet runs the military’s forge.mil open source forge site.
The code-a-thon, and the resulting code, could be a great demonstration of the power of open source in dealing with big problems like health care. The participation of Behlendorf offers hope the open source movement will have a great success.
While open source code has won approval from the Obama Administration, the processes by which such code is developed have not fared as well.
While the Veterans Administration is still working with its open source VistA platform, for instance, it has placed a moratorium on accepting code from local VA facilities. Instead of developing VistA through a network of collaborators, open source IT advocate Fred Trotter writes, “it will be centrally developed by a single, controlling entity.”
The decision may improve security and manageability of the code base, but it’s also going to slow down development, and give one contract holder control of the software.
Whether Behlendorf and his code-a-thon can give U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra a little open source religion may be an open question. As Virginia CTO Chopra outsourced development work to India under a master contract signed with Northrup-Grumman which has since become highly controversial.
Are open source projects that are centrally controlled by single vendors really open source projects, or are they proprietary projects using open source as a feature? That’s a question the Obama Administration needs to answer if it’s to get full value from open source.
August 5th, 2009
Is a sandbox the key to open source VOIP
Bandwidth.com sponsors the FreePBX program and Matt Asay asks why.
The correct answer is innovation.
While launching the developer version of FreePBXv3, Bandwidth.com also announced The Developer Sandbox, aimed at creating new applications using IP telephony.
This is the reason to support open source. Telephony software is no big deal. Telephony software that runs on the Internet is no big deal. Telephony software that does more than telephony can be a very big deal. The fastest way to get such software is to share the development load.
But is a sandbox the right way to go? Or would we be better off with a beach?
Where I come from, a sandbox is a highly structured environment. The kids are always supervised. You only let so many kids in at once.
That’s the kind of sandbox Bandwidth.com is running. It will take no more than 20 developers into the first phase of its program. It wants to direct the work toward IP network functionality, convergence between fixed and mobile telephony, and open source telephony based on FreePBX.
My question is whether in doing this Bandwidth.com is being prudent or proprietary. If the sandbox is like a dance club, the application process is like a bouncer at the door. Bandwidth.com seems less focused on luring innovation than on finding business partners.
Telephony is an enterprise-scaled business with relatively few players. But is true innovation going to come from there? Or is it coming from a wide-open international community of individuals? The next great idea could easily be in Russia, in India, or in Brazil. Is this the way to find it?
Will the next great idea come from within FreePBX or from a FreePBX fork?
July 17th, 2009
What open source government data gets you
Early this week I was surprised to wake up and find my wife at the front door.
She likes to leave home early and beat the crowds on Atlanta’s transit system, MARTA.
But on Tuesday, her train was stopped near downtown. It sat on the tracks for an hour before she got out, walked to the other track, and decided to work from home.
I spent the rest of the morning trying to find out what happened. MARTA never released the information, and with local news staffs cut to the bone, no one pressed them on it.
Contrast this closed source attitude with what Portland’s TriMet system has done. By simply releasing their schedules to the public as data files they have encouraged third-party developers to create a host of mobile apps for riders.
The apps, in turn, encourage riders, even regular riders, to keep a link to TriMet on their phones, on their person. Then, if there is trouble, TriMet has a channel through which it can quickly report what has happened, what is being done, and how riders can route around it.
What makes the difference is the transit system’s attitude toward its route data. When you take a proprietary attitude, as MARTA does, riders are left in the dark. An open source attitude, like TriMet’s empowers riders.
This attitude of convenience also leads to more satisfied customers and greater political support. MARTA would love to expand into other counties, and it needs to push through a fare increase. Imagine what an open source attitude toward its data might make in that effort.
And consider what it might do for your local governments as well.
NOTE: A hat tip here to my late friend, Russell Shaw. After leaving Atlanta for Portland in the late 1990s he liked nothing more than regaling me with tales of how much better life was there. I heard his voice in my head as I wrote today, and it made me smile.
June 24th, 2009
Reductive to service Puppet open source configman tools
Key founders of Puppet have incorporated and received $2 million in venture capital funding to advance the open source configuration management software project.
Reductive Labs, which has evolved from the same named consulting firm founded in 2003, will provide training, service and support for Puppet, the next generation open source infrastructure automation framework which is reportedly gaining strength and numbers of users.
Reductive has formed partnerships with Red Hat, Fedora and Canonical and has about 20 paying customers. Puppet currently supports Linux, Unix and Macintosh environments.
Puppet, which was first made available under the GPL in 2005, is a configuration management framework that enables customers to write policies about how web servers should be configured, how database servers should be configured and how mail servers should be configured,” said Andrew Shafer, chief strategy officer for Reductive Labs, which will be headquartered in Portland, Oregon. “Puppet lets you write policies, enforce them and automate them on an ongoing basis and operating system installation through patches and upgrades.”
Shafer said it’s important to have a robust policy-based configuration framework that can significantly speed up deployment of corporate servers. He noted that policy-based tools are valuable because few servers are configured in the exact same way in any corporation.
He pointed out that configuration management becomes even more critical as virtualization and cloud computing take off.
“With virtualization, your hardware headache eases but with thousands of virtual machines you’ve multiplied your configuration management complexities,” said Shafer. “People are bringing up thousands of [virtual] machines with EC2 [cloud] and configuration management complexity is further magnified. Bringing up a test infrastructure or a deployment infrastructure becomes a much easier proposition than trying to manage it in other ways.”
One senior systems engineer at Digg.com was able to rebuild 60 [virtual] machines from scratch in two hours [using Puppet] that would have taken two full days of work if done manually. “And I was largely a spectator,” said that engineer, Paul Lathrop, of Digg. “Now that’s automation.”
“And if he needed to build 600 machines, it wouldn’t have taken much longer,” because of the policy-based configuration management approach, Shafer said.
Its biggest competitor is amorphous: thousands of unique scripts system administrators write for their own environments, Shafer said. There are some model-based configuration management frameworks developed by BMC’s BladeLogic and HP’s Opsware but nothing in the open source space that compares to Puppet, Shafer said.
Reductive has no plans to commercialize the framework into a product per se and will focus exclusively on the services side of the business. Puppet 0.25 is currently in beta testing and represents a huge step forward: three times the speed in one third of the memory footprint of the current 0.24 series.
May 15th, 2009
Activists push city endorsements of open source
The city of Vancouver, in British Columbia, is about to pass a resolution endorsing open source, open standards, and open data networks.
The resolution is supported by Mayor Gregor Robertson. It is being pushed locally by activists like Ifny Lachance of Free Geek Vancouver, who says open source reduces e-waste.
Among those behind the resolution are David Eaves, who writes on his blog,
I can certainly see this motion as the cornerstone to transforming Vancouver into a open city, or as my friend Surman puts it, a city that thinks like the web.
Surman, in this case, is Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. Eaves produced the presentation above for the city of Toronto after Surman gave a talk called “A City That Thinks like the Web” at a conference last year.
As the site puts it (I can’t tell whether the writer is Eaves, Surman or someone else):
This marked a turning point in the history of the city. It was the moment when the Mayor, Council, City Staff and an increasing number of citizens collectively understood the power and potential of architecting a city to be open and participatory.
This is a movement on the march. Want to join or would you prefer to fight it?
May 7th, 2009
Why the London Olympics is closed source
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.
April 23rd, 2009
Should the database market be interesting?
The pending purchase of Sun, and thus mySQL, by Oracle is bringing yet another round of uncertainty to those who manage databases.
“The database market just became even more interesting,” writes our own Matt Asay, and I can’t disagree. But for corporate managers “interesting” is, when it comes to databases, another word for aggravating.
A database is not like any other application. Its structure makes it more like that of an operating system. Ask anyone who has ever had to switch their underlying database system. They will tell you.
This is why so many enterprise buyers are willing to pay the “Oracle Tax.” They are more willing to pay this monopoly rent than the “Microsoft Tax.” Most enterprises use a mix of operating systems, but there is usually only one database structure at the center of operations.
So when someone says the database market is becoming “interesting,” database managers reach for the Tums. (Available online at Drugstore.Com, from which the picture was taken.)
Oracle’s acquisition strategy of this decade is based on that reality. Its customers may have to pay big bucks for their licenses, but they haven’t had the conversion headaches of rivals who chose to save money.
While it is nice that IBM is supporting Enterprise DB, this doesn’t fully mask the pain database managers fear now. A choice between IBM and Oracle is more like one between Coke and Pepsi than one between, say, Adobe and The Gimp. Or Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org.
EnterpriseDB or Ingres may appear to offer an alternative to the “Oracle Tax,” but if Ingres grows who is to say Oracle won’t just buy them? They bought mySQL, didn’t they?
This question is not an academic one. It holds big implications for business generally.
Fact is just about every business of any scale relies upon databases, and database applications, for its existance. Small businesses need low-cost databases in order to get into the game, but in the Internet age they can be forced to scale quite quickly.
Making the “Oracle Tax” the price of corporate ambition is going to do more to limit the number of ambitious players than anything the Obama Administration might do.
April 17th, 2009
Washington state rejects open source
National, state and local governments are all waking up to the opportunity open source offers to save money, to do more, and to collaborate.
Washington state, the home of Microsoft, appears to be an exception. At least to hear Josh Dressel tell it. (Washington entered the Union on the 100th anniversary of President Washington’s inauguration.)
Dressel, an IT specialist in Olympia, the state capitol, writes a blog called the Chrome Toaster, where he has detailed his unsuccesful efforts to wean his employer, the state’s Department of Natural Resources, from Microsoft.
It started when Dressel submitted a proposal to avoid lay-offs in the department through the use of OpenOffice. The response was to ignore him and raise the executive drawbridges.
Dressel did what most people would do. He wrote his state representative. He was motivated by the fact that lay-offs are to begin May 1 and, as a squeaky wheel, he might naturally fear getting greased.
See if his summary of the situation doesn’t match up with what you have found at your place of business:
Our agency is vendor driven. I believe the entire state might be similar in nature. Instead of contacting vendors after consultants and R&D has put time into mapping agency needs, vendors contact those individuals with purchasing authority and pitch the merchandise they claim works best. This might get the job done, but it is an inefficient way of doing business.
Dressel has expanded his proposal to using Zimbra as well as OpenOffice, which he says will save $1.8 million. Zimbra would replace the department’s present Exchange Server, OpenOffice would replace Microsoft Office.
He says the initial cost of doing all this is not monetary, but staff time, and the department has staff. He concludes, “The status of IT at the DNR is we continue to be a Microsoft shop without any sound data to back staying this course.”
It will be interesting to see if Dressel’s name is on the lay-off list, and whether the local press picks up on his crusade.
April 7th, 2009
The open source sea change and the Taylor graph
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 24th, 2009
Momentum building for government open source
After doing my piece about the military and open source I was surprised to get an e-mail from John Weathersby, executive director of the Open Source Software Institute in Mississippi, who was kind enough to walk me through the deal.
(Technology Training Corp. ran a seminar on the military’s use of open source last year. Its logo is shown.)
This is a big deal. Weathersby has been quoted to that effect since 2004 but this is a really big deal. Because it’s not a test case. This has gone through the heart of the bureaucracy and emerged as policy.
“We (the open source community, industry and advocates) are now working WITH the mass of Government and not pushing against the great wall,” he writes. “The momentum is now from ‘within’ the bureaucracy.
In terms of the DISA deal — 50 projects going under open source licenses and a blanket purchase agreement for open source software — the whole thing took nearly a year to put together, Weathersby writes.
The most important point is that the military approached him. Project leader Dick Nelson wanted a full open source strategy, and eventually noted lawyer Larry Rosen was even brought in to work with government legal counsel. This was not slapped together.
It’s cool to have an Administration that openly supports open source, he adds, but it’s far more important that “The continued adoption of open source within government it is now part of the collective decision making process. It now has a place at the table.”
When I asked about open source representing a “make or buy” decision Weathersby grew especially enthusiastic. The key here is that it’s no longer either-or:
The key is when government users realize that open source products work and there are real companies there to install, maintain, repair, update, etc…just like any other piece of software they have ever used. It’s just that simple.
The fact that military planners now understand the open source ethos is important, and should provide momentum behind the discussions which have just begun over using open source in health care.
If the military has figured out the value of open source can health — which ran one of the great pre-open source open source projects in the Veteran Administration’s VistA system – truly resist it?
March 24th, 2009
Is Intel hurt by Cooper exit?
Danese Cooper, dubbed an “open source diva” at Sun, has left Intel to join Revolution Computing. (Opera diva Frederica von Stade is from New Jersey and has enjoyed doing recitals. From Amazon.com.)
Job moves like this happen all the time, but some in the open source community may conclude that Cooper’s move means Intel is less committed to open source.
Certainly such rumblings were heard when Cooper, and others, left Sun. It’s often assumed that open source is rising or falling within Microsoft based on the comings and goings of individuals.
I have played that game, too.
Such fears made sense a few years ago, when open source was highly controversial. I am asking whether it matters now.
Is enterprise open source really dependent on having a few leaders advocating it within the halls of industry leaders? Or is this now no longer a movement but a simple fact of business life.
Cooper leaves a pretty deep bench of open source experts at Intel, judging from the company’s blog. Among its more regular open source bloggers is Dave Stewart, who runs Intel’s Open Solaris program on the Xeon chip and also writes a personal blog.
The point is that the Intel Cooper leaves is not the same as the Intel Cooper came to. My guess is that this was true of her days at Sun as well.
This is also true elsewhere, I’m certain. Open source is now an accepted part of business life. Its place in our largest enterprises is secure.
We are in a post-diva era. (Von Stade retired from the Metropolitan Opera in 2001 but still sometimes appears on the radio.)
March 20th, 2009
If open source is future proof the test has begun
This morning our fearless leader, Larry Dignan (all blessings be unto him) offered some space at Between the Lines to Chad Perrin, a security consultant and Web developer usually found at our TechRepublic site.
Perrin’s conclusion? Open source is future proof.
During most recessions, Perrin writes, you will naturally turn to companies like Microsoft and Adobe, firms you know are stable and will be around when everything settles down. Go with the leader.
Open source changes the equation.
With open source a failed project can be picked up by someone else. When a project uses open standards, switching between a failed vendor and a more viable one is relatively painless.
I think even proprietary companies know this.
I once heard tell of one such company, a firm that would never, ever dream of using open source. Security, you know.
Anyway, they had a big project, and the vendor made big promises, so they signed a contract. Long story short, the vendor could not deliver.
So what was this company’s goal in the subsequent negotiations? To get the code, and some people who knew the code. To open the source to itself, even though it would remain completely proprietary.
I’ve been saying this for 4 years now, and open source leaders have made a career out of saying things like this.
But now comes the market test.
March 19th, 2009
Texas Democrats push ODF standard
Texas Democrats are trying to make open source into a partisan issue.
Their vehicle is HB 481, authored by Marc Veasey of Ft. Worth, who has sought to make a reputation as a thorn in the side of Texas’ ruling Republicans, supporting hate crimes legislation, mass transit, and the Obama stimulus.
That is another way of saying the bill’s chances fall somewhere east of slim and west of none.
What’s amusing are some of the arguments against the bill, as compiled by Aman Betheja of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
The main argument, advanced by a Microsoft lobbyist, is that the bill is anti-competitive, and would be “like choosing Betamax over VHS.”
There is also a fear that users would have to replace their current software, although I believe Microsoft has been pretty scrupulous in supporting the Open Document Format.
It’s the fact that this is being discussed at all that is newsworthy. The rise of open source as a partisan issue, whether pushed by Tories in England, Hindu nationalists in India, or Democrats in Texas, has been remarkable.
March 18th, 2009
Defense Department makes more open source moves
Your Department of Defense made some major moves on open source this week.
- It announced it will work with the Open Source Software Institute to bring over 50 administration applications under open source licenses, starting with its Corporate Management Information System.
- DoD signed a Blanket Purchase Agreement with Carahsoft for the purchase of support contracts to a number of open source products including Red Hat, JBOSS, Alfresco, and mySQL.
Add this to the ongoing work in developing a military forge site and you have an agency that seems as serious as a heart attack, not just about taking advantage of open source, but of being a model citizen in an open source world.
At a technology transfer showcase hosted by Johns Hopkins a defense IS official noted all this will help DoD “leverage” improvements to CMIS made by other agencies, universities or individuals. But that’s the open source deal — you benefit from me and I benefit from you.
An OSSI official noted that, by designating its software open source, the government gains more control over it than if it were public domain. But I can’t see any problem with that, either. Public domain was used before open source licenses existed, so adapting to a legal structure once it’s there seems natural.
It is hard to underestimate the potential importance of this, although I underline the word potential.
For decades the U.S. military has been a buyer of systems, not a maker of anything. This was clear in last year’s dispute between AHLTA and VistA, the former a DoD medical software purchased from a vendor, the latter a public domain system developed by the Veterans Administration.
If the benefits of open source making can be proven it could lead to a sea change in military culture. If.
March 17th, 2009
The big question really facing newspapers
It’s no longer a question of print or online.
It’s what you’re about online.
In answering that question the choice of a Content Management System becomes critical.
The capabilities of your CMS will determine what you can offer people. Its ease-of-use will determine how quickly you can implement new features.
This is an area where open source really shines. The CMS Matrix counts dozens-and-dozens of options including some, like CampSite, that were built from the ground-up for use by online newspapers.
Personally, when it comes to this life-or-death technology decision, I would look closely at Drupal. Or more precisely at its commercial equivalent, Acquia.
The combination of Drupal and Acquia gives newspapers the best of both worlds — a vibrant community to drive the software forward, and serious professional help to make sure you get things right.
Newspapers should feel fortunate, in a way, because some of the shaking out has already happened in this space. Back when I first started poking around here, in 2003, there was far less available. Most of it was almost entirely text-based, if you wanted to scale. Newspapers must scale quickly to survive.
Now you can support all types of files, and the features of most popular social networks. It all goes into a database, to which Acquia has recently added better search capability. Not that there’s anything wrong with Google, and integrating with Google features like maps, as well as Google search, is a great way to look big before you get big.
As to all those who are complaining that we “have” to pay you for doing the same bad job you’ve been doing for years, forget it. Journalists are not doctors, we’re cooks, and no one is going to subsidize a failing restaurant. (If you’re lucky we’ll put Gordon Ramsey on your case — but that’s it.)
The point is that the newspaper business may be dying, but that’s like saying the buggy whip business is dying. The opportunity to organize and advocate a place, industry or lifestyle is not going away.
In fact it’s getting better. Now that you’re magnetic ink the sky is the limit.
March 11th, 2009
Open source is not charity
For today’s post we are going to set the wayback machine to the year 1970. (Picture from Wikimedia.)
Everyone’s wearing bell bottom trousers that get caught in your bike spokes. Everyone has long hair. Hey, I got hair!
Anyway, I was 15. I wanted to be a publisher. Specifically I wanted to publish an alternative high school newspaper.
So I found an advertiser. I quoted the price. It was enough to set me up in business. The client agreed. He wrote out a check, by hand. And then in the margin, where he designated the purpose of the check, he wrote the word “charity.”
I was devastated. (Yes, I took the check. I was devastated, not stupid.)
Let’s move up nearly 40 years to our friend Matt Asay fisking a piece in Slate about Amazon.Com’s lack of charitable giving.
Don’t attack Amazon, he said. Look at open source. Make the giving fit into their business model and Ebenezer Bezos will turn into Scrooge McDuck faster than you can say Charles Dickens.
Nonsense. You’re comparing apples to oranges. Open source is not a charity. It’s a business model. You use open source to make money. If you are only interested in the social benefits of free software, you’re in FOSS, not open source.
I don’t know what Amazon.com head Jeff Bezos is thinking here. It could be he wants to be Bill Gates, building a truly gigantic enterprise then giving it all away so he can change the world. Or not. Maybe he wants to be John Galt.
Maybe he wants to give it all to his kid. Maybe the kid will be the family Rockefeller. Or not.
The point is how you make your money and how you spend it are different subjects. This is true for corporations as well as individuals.
Just don’t write off your open source contributions as charity, OK?
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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