ZDNet Must Read:
For government open source is a make-or-buy decision
If it sounds like make-or-buy is a political choice, it is.... Continued »
February 9th, 2010
Ksplice Uptrack eliminates Linux server reboots, Sunday hours
Researchers at MIT have turned an innovative open source security technology known as Ksplice into a commercial product.
Ksplice Uptrack, whose general availability was announced today, eliminates the need to reboot Linux servers to perform monthly updates and security patches, the Cambridge, Mass. company said.
ZDnet wrote about the technology in early 2008 based on a tip from Linux Foundation’s Ted Ts’o, who saw great promise with the technology.
The subscription service that is based on the MIT technology allows the Linux kernel to be updated live without restarting or disrupting applications: no downtime. This is key because of the frequent updating of the Linux kernel.
Ksplice Uptrack is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Debian GNU/Linux, CentOS, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, and OpenVZ. The subscription fee is 3.95 per month per system after a 30-day free trial. A free version is available for Ubuntu, the company also announced.
“On the coolness scale, this is like changing out a car’s engine while speeding down the highway,” said Keith Winstein, a business development spokesman for the company.
DreamHost, Media Temple and HostGator are among 40 early adopters of the technology.
Ksplice developer Jeff Arnold, a former MIT graduate student, is Ksplice Inc’s CEO. Here’s what he said upon the product release today: “Now system administrators can keep their systems up to date
without coordinating outages, and they don’t need to come in Sunday at
2 a.m. to take everything down,” Arnold said in a press release. “They can avoid the biggest headache of server maintenance, with better availability and a smaller window of vulnerability than ever before.”
February 9th, 2010
How Microsoft uses open source to fight open source
There is power in authority.
Microsoft’s strategy against open source uses authority. It ties up institutions that are authoritative, that have power over professions, creating a benefit for the institution that ties its members to proprietary Microsoft tools.
I have covered this extensively at ZDNet Healthcare regarding products like Amalga and Healthvault, but here is an example that goes beyond medicine and is specifically about open source.
The British Library is the authority here. It’s a great library, with extensive online resources. It does a lot of outreach, too. The picture is from its business and IP centre, which targets entrepreneurs.
What Microsoft has done with the library is an open source project called the Research Information Centre Framework. It’s a virtual research framework, helping them manage the increasingly complex range of tasks involved in 21st century research.
OK, where’s the catch?
Built on top of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, the RIC extends the core MOSS functionality to meet the needs to academic researchers engaged in collaborative research projects
Gee, doc, you’re not a Microsoft shop? Even if you can connect with these resources, you’re always going to be second-class in a group project that depends on them.
Which is sort of the point. To Microsoft open source is not an end in itself. It is a marketing tool. It is a way to gain lock-in with important customer sets.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s the way of the world. But sometimes it’s nice to look behind the nice worm and see the hook embedded therein, so you don’t get caught.
The lady in the picture, by the way, is Mandy Haberman, an inventor best known for the Anywayup Cup. She is also a campaigner for patent rights.
February 9th, 2010
The language Google knows best is English
Matt Asay compared the latest Windows and Google marketing and quickly found for Google.
Windows 7 ads are Madison Avenue at its best. “Windows 7 was my idea,” users say, and the TV ads feature them at their most heroic, as male models taking showers and being virile while they imagine features Microsoft wound up implementing.
Google ads are all Mountain View. Its Super Bowl ad was a shortened version of one of its search stories, a series of Google searches that told the story of a man who met a woman in Paris, married and had a child. In 30 seconds.
Google gets it. Microsoft does not, Matt writes. But what does Google get exactly? (They got something Scott Adams wrote about, in Dilbert, back in 1995.)
I think what they get is that people get tech. People today are comfortable around computers. Nearly all people are. So talking to us in English about features, about what your tech can do for me, is far more acceptable than it was 20 years ago.
The jargon of strips like Dilbert, in other words, is now understood by everyone. We all get the joke.
This goes well beyond TV. Take the Google comic book. It’s techies talking tech, but in simple English, and not the kind which assumes you don’t know what’s behind the words being said. It doesn’t talk down. It talks at.
It’s that, but it’s also a Manga. It’s as if Google programmers are living in a Tokyo of the mind. The pictures break up the pitch, turn the pitch into a story. I think Madison Avenue believes this kind of thing goes over peoples’ heads, and 20 years ago that might have been true.
But no more.
There is another key Google communication tool, one that relates directly to open source, but also relates to Google’s financial advantages over other open source companies like Ubuntu.
These are its Software Development Kits, its SDKs.
SDKs are often written alongside code. They’re coding documents for coders. Getting through them separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls, the Americans from the Chinese.
Google developer documents aren’t like that. Here’s a piece of one taken at random:
Content providers are activated when they’re targeted by a request from a ContentResolver. The other three components — activities, services, and broadcast receivers — are activated by asynchronous messages called intents. An intent is an Intent object that holds the content of the message.
Sounds like nonsense, but each term mentioned here is defined before it’s used. It’s easy to follow, it’s organized, it’s structured. The sentences are short. It’s thought out by people who are well paid to translate geek into English, or any other language.
In the early years of open source proprietary companies like Apple and Microsoft had a big advantage in this area. They had the revenues that let them hire the tech writers who could do this kind of thing.
Open source projects did not. Some open source advocates even prided themselves (some still do) on how poorly they communicate what they are doing.
This is changing rapidly, because Google has raised everyone’s game. Take a look at these documents for a simple open source tool called UltraDefrag. It’s got pictures, bullets, and simple language. It’s well done.
Point is that time has changed the tech community. We know more than we once did, or we have been replaced by kids who do. Google speaks to this audience, eye to eye, and has raised the game of every other open source developer in the process.
Google is taking Microsoft down with the tools of journalism.
February 8th, 2010
Torvalds' Nexus One endorsement may be regretted
Linus Torvalds is not Bill Gates.
He’s a programmer, and an honest man. So when he finds something he likes he says so, without artifice, and that’s all it means.
I hope people will understand that following Torvalds’ blog post extolling the Google Nexus One.
Apparently Linus has the same problem my son does (along with millions of other people). Directions are not his strong suit. So for him, Google navigation was a killer app.
Trouble is, in many ways Linus Torvalds is not “just a programmer.” He’s a brand name. He is, however reluctantly, a celebrity. So a simple blog post can read like an endorsement.
Put it this way. If Steve Ballmer picked one of the many Windows Mobile phones and said, “this is the one I like,” other makers of Windows Mobile phones might be upset. So he doesn’t.
Linus just did.
Google is trying to build a competitive ecosystem in Android, and Android is not the only Linux-based system in the mobile space. It’s like saying which one of your children you like best.
If you want to go the full paranoid on this one, you could even call Linus unpatriotic. After all, Motorola has staked its future on Android, and here he is making nice with a device from HTC, a Chinese company! (I know. Motorola has had its stuff made in China for years.)
This is as crazy as Jay Leno appearing in an ad for David Letterman’s TV show. It’s inconceivable! (I don’t think the word means what you think it does.)
February 8th, 2010
Ellison puts Screven over mySQL
Turns out the biggest surprise in the Oracle-Sun drama was not the split within open source over mySQL.
It was the split within Oracle over mySQL. (Picture from Oracle’s Collaborate 2007 event.)
Ken Jacobs, who was one of CEO Larry Ellison’s first 20 hires, says he is leaving the company after seeking to run mySQL and being turned down.
Jacobs gets credit for keeping InnoDB moving forward after its 2005 acquisition. This was a big win for open source.
InnoDB was an integral part of mySQL, and there were fears then Oracle planned to box-in mySQL by controlling its storage engine. But that didn’t happen, Oracle was able to claim open source bonafides.
Now Edward Screven, Oracle’s chief corporate architect, is in charge of mySQL, which could lead to the same fears expressed over InnoDB when Jacobs took it on.
Screven, however, also has some open source mojo. He was interviewed by Linux Foundation head Jim Zemlin in 2008, touting the company’s commitment to Linux. “We didn’t view GPL as something that was going to get in the way of business in the least,” he told Zemlin.
Trouble is that while Linux is an enterprise product, and has long had substantial server market share, mySQL began as something smaller and simpler, not scaled. The code base was moving toward greater scale before Oracle bought it, but during the debate even open source advocates like Matt Asay admitted it wasn’t a direct competitor.
This was always at the heart of the dispute. Would open source be allowed to develop a true competitor to Oracle? Would Web start-ups have to make a costly switch from open source as they scaled, or commit to open source in their business plans, raising costs substantially?
Internet success happens in Internet time. A start-up subsisting on pizza, even a small open source project, can be discovered by the masses and become world famous within a year. Will there be an easy migration path, or will that path be slammed shut?
Ask Edward Screven.
February 8th, 2010
Hunter pushes CodePlex as a business-oriented foundation
Paula Hunter will differentiate CodePlex from sites like Google Code and groups like the Linux Foundation by trying to bring enterprise IT shops into the open source mainstream.
Hunter was named the new executive director of the CodePlex Foundation late last week, and spoke to ZDNet Open Source.
The CodePlex Foundation is based in Seattle, but Hunter lives in New Hampshire and works in the Boston suburbs. That may prove an asset as Hunter works to distance the foundation from its roots as a Microsoft open source site.
“My responsibility will be to embrace the business community,” she said, adding she plans on hiring a technical director soon. She also plans to develop something like the old Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) user advisory board, covering a range of industries beyond software.
“One primary area we’re trying to focus is the commercial software development area, and certainly the east coast is not only a center for software companies but large enterprise IT shops,” she said.
Hunter is the foundation’s first employee. Even the permanent board of directors has yet to be named. This gives her enormous influence on the group’s direction. But she emphasized to ZDNet that the direction has already been set, and that her plan is to execute on it.
“It’s not necessary for one company to shoulder the burden of this effort. There are plenty of companies that can benefit. Over the next few weeks I’m going to create a program and set of benefits for those people we want to sign on board.”
The direction was described by Sam Ramji, a former Microsoft executive now with Sonoa Systems, when the new foundation was set up last year. That is, provide a way for Fortune 500 companies outside the software industry to make contributions, gain the benefits of open source, while maintaining some code control.
Andy Updegrove is pleased with the appointment, noting her work with United Linux and the OSDL, which was merged with the Free Standards Group to create the present Linux Foundation.
“Paula knows her way around the block,” he wrote, and most stories about the appointment emphasize she’s an open source “veteran.” This makes me feel old. Hunter got her degree from Bentley College in 1983, when I was five years into my own journalism career.
February 5th, 2010
Matt Asay's big break is a big one for open source
I have a confession to make.
I’m a huge Matt Asay fan (right). Always have been.
Matt is the Anthony Bourdain (below) of open source. By that I mean he cooks better than most cooks, writes better than most writers, and he has made himself a big time brand. He’s also hungry for more.
One might compare his move to Canonical, the parent of Ubuntu, with Bourdain’s move to The Travel Channel. It means he now has a palette big enough for his talents.
This should not be taken as a knock against Alfresco. A content management system is an important thing.
But it’s a bit like Food Network. It’s about software, like Food Network is about food. And while Matt Asay can program, while he knows software, he has always shown — especially through his writing at C|Net — that he is about something more than that.
I believe what Matt is about is selling transformation. He’s also about putting things together, and then executing on that understanding.
This is what Canonical, and Ubuntu need. They have a great story to tell. Ubuntu is a big success. But it is a limited one.
Ubuntu sells itself as a desktop, but its money comes from servers. Ubuntu sells itself as universal, but its success comes from localization. Ubuntu is a wonderful dream, but a prosaic reality. It sells itself as the shining city on the hill, when it’s really just a small attractive village.
Matt Asay can change that. His new title is chief operating officer.
“As COO, I am tasked with aligning the company’s strategic goals and operational activities, the optimization of day-to-day operations, and leadership of Canonical marketing and back-office functions.”
Matt is going to try and make the trains in London run on time from his base in Utah. A neat trick.
But I think he’ll pull it off. He can give Ubuntu strategic, practical directions, and he has the operational experience to know when goals are being met and when they aren’t.
In other words he now has his own show, which he can take anywhere in the world he wants to go. No reservations.
February 5th, 2010
Is the Tea Party open source?
Please note. This is not a political post. It is about politics co-opting the term open source as a frame.
At his Global Guerillas site, John Robb (right) calls the conservative Tea Party open source.
He compares it, in this context, to open source warfare. I don’t think that’s a compliment, because by that definition Al Qaeda is open source. But let’s continue.
Robb says that Tea Party activists swarm, that their movement has no barriers to entry, and that it consists of a lot of small groups, even individuals, with a variety of different motives for their actions.
This is the point where I, personally, have to say we’ve extended the open source metaphor a little far.
There are a host of American political movements from the past that emerged similarly. The Netroots early in the last decade. The Far Left of the late 1960s. The Populists of the 1890s. Even the Know Nothings in the 1850s.
I don’t think Millard Fillmore was open source. Do you?
New political movements are seldom tied directly to political parties. Absorption takes place slowly. And it tends to be a mutual thing.
Tea Party activists are running primaries against regular Republicans all around the country — they’re trying to take the party over.
The Netroots are still not happy Democrats. They stand on certain political principles, like the Tea Party people. They organize online, like the Tea Party people. They were, when they began, all about grievances and the stupidity of government, just like the Tea Party people.
What has happened, in our time, is that the Internet has given people the opportunity to self-organize, and to act on that self-organization. The Internet lets political movements of all types rise quickly from the bottom-up. This is in contrast to the way government must act, which is from the top-down.
This President came to power through a great bottom-up movement, some of which he organized, some of which he co-opted, some of which was drawn to him by the times, and all of which moved as one thanks to the expert use of Internet tools.
But once this President achieved power, his attempt to turn the movement into a tool for governing quickly fell apart. Government is a sausage factory, and one tour was enough for most activists to go screaming back to where they came from.
John Robb has a way of making everything the Internet is capable of seem like a threat. Violence is a threat to order, and to the extent that the Internet allows those with violent intent to self-organize there is danger there.
But the Internet can also organize anger into something useful. That’s what open source is. It’s something useful.
As open source has evolved, bottom-up tools like Sourceforge have mostly given way to top-down tools like custom forges, and to company-specific sites like Google Code and CodePlex.
Successful political movements marry bottom-up activism with some top-town structure. They have this in common with big open source projects like Linux itself.
This tends to be organic, a market process. Which I think is my real objection to Robb’s analogy.
Because at its heart, open source is a market process. It’s about building, about saying yes to something, even if that something is merely an alternative to something that already exists, like Windows or Microsoft Office.
Open source is about saying yes we can, not no you can’t. And about proving it.
February 4th, 2010
Is mobile Firefox going to be too late?
I read Dana’s piece about Symbian possibly going open source too late with great interest.
I’ve wondered the same thing about Firefox Mobile, which debuted on Jan 29. Like Symbian on the proprietary mobile OS front, Mozilla’s Firefox has been the leading open source browser for more than six years. Yet it only released its mobile offering, code named Fennec, less than a week ago, and for only one platform: the Nokia Maemo 5 OS.
In the last 15 months, Google’s open source Android mobile operating system and included browser — based on the open source WebKit application framework — has gained some market share and skyrocketed in popularity. Motorola’s Android-based Droid is oft compared to Apple’s iPhone and Gartner predicts that Google’s mobile OS will be the second leading mobile OS platform by 2012.
So does that mean that the mobile version of Firefox is too late? It’s hard to call this early in the game. There are numerous complaints about the current Android 2.1 browser. But certainly it would have been much better if Mozilla jumped into the mobile browser market earlier and grabbed the spotlight away from specialty offerings like Opera Mini.
Mozilla has a version of Fennec under development for Android and an Alpha 3 release for Microsoft Windows Mobile available now. There are some who look forward to running Fennec on Android but based on reports it will be some time before it sees the light of day.
It will be interesting to see how Google’s reputation in the open source world evolves. Android is open source, and released under the Apache license, but not all of Google’s code is open source. It will also be interesting to gauge customer reaction to Fennec’s performance on Nokia devices.
Of course, there’s tons of market share to be divided.
Mobile Firefox screenshot
February 4th, 2010
Crossing the line to the Internet Generation
If you look at the Internet’s development and compare it to that of TV a generation ago, it’s finally the 1960s.
(Two members of the Internet Generation are pictured at right, in 1991. The one on the left is now a video game expert. The one on the right likes Facebook.)
My baby boom generation defined TV, starting in that epochal decade. We defined it as an audience, and in time we took control of it.
Our parents invented TV. They created its vocabulary. The half-hour sitcom, the hour-long adventure show, the interview show for Today or Tonight. But Tomorrow was ours.
The same thing has happened with the Internet. My generation created it. We built it. We understand its pipes and how it works. We defined things like http://, Web sites and e-mail and chat. We created its vocabulary.
But the Internet belongs to the Internet Generation. People like my kids who grew up around the medium, who take it for granted. They don’t care about its plumbing, or how it works. They’re not techies. They’re users.
Two new Pew surveys show that this line has been crossed. A torch has been passed to a new generation. Users now dominate, people who grew up in a world of Web sites and video games and any question answered as fast as you can ask it.
This also means leadership has been passed to a new medium. TV today is what radio was in my day. It’s background noise. The Internet is the new medium. Use is nearly universal among those under 30. And it’s constant.
One other point is that the big screen no longer defines the medium. The average teen owns three or more online devices. Screen sizes vary, resolution varies, the size of the pipe can vary from moment to moment.
The balance between doing-and-being has also shifted. There is less writing and more reading.
I say being as opposed to watching. You don’t just watch the Internet as you did TV. A new medium has a new vocabulary, new folkways, new habits of thought.
I consider this great news, not just for the Internet but for open source. Open source is a product of the Internet. The friction-free economics of open source, of contributions coming from anywhere, distribution costs of zero, all these came from the Internet.
Open source is attuned to Internet values, the values of the new generation. Its future is secure.
The kids are all right.
February 4th, 2010
Did Symbian go open source too late?
With as much excitement as Scandinavians can muster, Symbian has gone completely open source.
(I found this on the Symbian home page. Any idea what it is? Or what it means? Anyone? Bueller? )
Symbian dominated the mobile world for years. Its real time operating systems powered nearly every phone out there. The Symbian Foundation includes five of the finest old-line mobile makers — Nokia, Samsung, Sharp, Fujitsu, Sony Ericsson — along with China’s Huawei.
But the world has moved on. Symbian is no longer the leader. Apple is. Symbian is no longer even the momentum play. Google is. Despite all the talk of tablets and connected devices, there is still no there there.
Fact is, Symbian needed a lot more than Nokia was willing or able to give it in order to be competitive. The group says its goal is for Nokia to control just half the code base next year. The rest of it better be something special.
While backward compatibility matters with desktops and servers, it doesn’t seem to matter much in mobile devices, which are often priced to be thrown away. My son accidentally washed his Symbian phone in the laundry this week. I didn’t panic. We just got him another one.
Symbian is the product of a carrier-focused world where voice minutes mattered and data came only from walled gardens. Carriers like Verizon Wireless openly bragged about their control over customers, how every program running on their gear was pre-approved, and how they were getting a cut on every bit. The networks were strong, the devices weak.
It’s not that way anymore. We are evolving toward a world where the devices are strong but the networks weak. A lot of iPhone data traffic runs over WiFi. It’s the Internet, stupid.
The result is there is a lot more demand for bits, but carriers don’t get as much per-bit as they did before. The result is that consumers look at their devices as being more akin to computers than to phones.
This is not the world Symbian made. This is the world it is trying to enter. This is the world Symbian’s partners, on the whole, ignored as it was coming on. Why should they be trusted to lead now?
You know what would be great fun, though? If somehow, Symbian made me eat my words three years from now. That would make my day. So go ahead and try.
February 3rd, 2010
Will China grab open source now?
One of the great mysteries of our time may be how slowly China has taken to open source.
ZDNet Asia blogger Frederic Muller, who has been promoting Linux in China for some time, says it’s about ownership and getting credit.
I believe there is something to that. (The picture is part of a screen capture from the U.S. home page of HTC.)
Chinese businessmen today don’t really bow to Mao or even Adam Smith. They take after Charles Darwin. Despite their intense competition, they are always looking for a way to differentiate themselves, to stand out, to get above the commodity rat race and have an easier time of it.
Open source does not offer that. You make a Linux box, you make the big effort to succeed with it, and your competitors can have the same box on the street the next day. On the Internet no one knows you’re a dog, but in open source it’s hard to tell your breed.
Ties to western companies with proprietary advantages that could assure a steady stream of orders were better business. Whether the advantage was that of a carrier, a technology or a brand mattered little. What counted was an assurance of regular checks with which to pay the bills.
Google is rapidly changing this. We talk about Google in terms of its relations with the government and its search engine, but its Android and Chromium projects have tapped into something different.
That is, Android offers the hope of proprietary advantage. Tweak Android in the right way, offer the right mix of features, and you too can become a brand name. Anyone even know who HTC was before their Android phone came out?
Chromium holds the same promise. Tweak Chromium in the right way, with the right mix of features, and you can become the next HTC. That means climbing up the value chain, becoming a brand, grabbing a bigger piece of your product’s value add.
Ubuntu lacked the muscle needed to push Chinese manufacturers toward this realization. Google has it, thanks to its dominance in search. Google is a brand. Google has now proven it can build Chinese brands.
But the Chinese success with Google is only half the story. Replacing the carriers and Apple with Google won’t bring Chinese manufacturers the heaven they seek.
That comes when you start digging into open source repositories, looking at software from the user’s point of view, becoming their advocate, and delivering what they want, with your name on the front of the device.
Once Chinese manufacturers realize that open source can give them independence, not only from Apple but from Google and every other foreign entity, China will embrace open source.
February 3rd, 2010
Google narrowing Apple proprietary gap
If I were Steve Jobs I would hate Google too.
It took years for the industry to come up with anything even close to the iPhone, and Apple raked in the profits from that. One-on-one, its designers and marketing people can beat anyone.
But Google and open source have changed the game. Combine an open source process with Chinese manufacturing, and Apple’s best features can be copied, distributed, made and sold almost before Apple itself can get them out the door.
It doesn’t matter if Apple patents the iPad software. Programmers can always find other ways to simulate functionality. There is more than one way to pinch a screen.
So Chrome, which last year was seen as a Netbook replacement, the long-awaited desktop Linux that works, is suddenly seen as an iPad replacement, at least a valid competitor.
Chinese manufacturers are showing screens ripped from laptops called iPad competitors. Within a week speculation has moved from how Apple will extend its lead to how Google will match it.
Throughout the last decade Apple had a secret sauce. It knew the customer. It did the design work, the marketing work, the channel prep, the hype. It made the deals with the guaranteed profits. Then it shipped the designs off to China and they came back profitable. It was good.
Well, game over. Google doesn’t market as well as Apple. It doesn’t design as well. It doesn’t even take the risks of manufacturing and putting its brand name out there — the Nexus One is an HTC product.
Yet still Google is eating Apple’s cheese, first with the media and soon with the channel.
Jobs is boxed in. He can’t wave an American flag over the iChrome because he’s using Chinese manufacturers, too. He can’t make a patent case, because the market will be gone before a case can come to trial. And he can’t guarantee his partners fat profits, because mass cloning of features means there are no fat profits to be had.
The beneficiaries of all this are the same people who were being squeezed by Apple’s dominance of the iPhone. Chinese manufacturers on the one side, American consumers on the other. Both now have alternatives.
And this is what open source does. It squeezes out monopoly profits of all kinds, including those resulting from innovation. It’s evolution in action. And even Apple’s business process is no longer enough to hold it off.
Yeah, if I were Steve Jobs, I would certainly call that evil.
February 2nd, 2010
For government open source is a make-or-buy decision
Over at ZDNet Government, Doug Hanchard turned his Webcam on himself yesterday (right) to discuss the question of whether the U.S. government should be doing more with open source.
Having followed this issue for several years now, I have something important to say about it.
It’s a make-or-buy decision.
The choice is not always a simple one.
Making stuff means taking responsibility for it. It means hiring people both to make it and maintain it. It means committing to spending money both today and tomorrow. It’s a policy that’s difficult to turn back from.
For many decades the U.S. government was a maker. Even when contracts were handed out for big projects, the government remained the general contractor. Over time it became responsible for hundreds of thousands of mid-level employees, paid on a GSA schedule, who were loyal to the idea of government doing things.
If it sounds like make-or-buy is a political choice, it is.
The Bush Administration was a buyer. I’m not just talking here about Halliburton and Blackwater. But throughout the government, and throughout the Administration, the attitude was it was better to buy what was needed than to take the responsibility of making it.
There were, the Bush Administration felt, sound reasons for this. Private contractors owed loyalty to their employer, not the government. Contractors could control employees in ways the government could not. The hope was that profit motive and flexibility would both save money and deliver good service.
This was carried into the IT sphere. I did several stories at ZDNet Healthcare about efforts by private contractors to destroy the VA’s open source VistA system — starving it of funds, driving away the best employees, centralizing contributions, and eventually replacing it through contracts.
My sources were former government employees. The ex-VA employees stayed in touch with former colleagues and got the story out. This was not a big story, but it held a lesson, namely the risk inherent in having government employees building vital infrastructure.
The Obama Administration has reversed this policy. Its appointees believe strongly in the value of open source, not only at the VA but elsewhere. The National Health Information Network, built by Harris Corp. under contract, is now lauded mainly for its use of open source software components. It’s called the Health Internet.
As Brian Klepper and David Kibbe wrote when this re-branding was announced, this becomes an issue of control. In this case, who will control health data interchange. In the larger context, who will control the systems which result from using open source.
Making things creates constituencies, within government, both on behalf of a project and on behalf of continued government funding. Some may argue this risk exceeds the value of using open source.
I disagree. I say we have run the experiment. We have tried making, and we have tried buying. I say making makes more sense in the long run, and that a government which only sees things in terms of the short time horizons of its political term is short-sighted indeed.
Oh, one more thing, Doug. Leave the facial hair to the experts. I think you’re handsome enough.
February 2nd, 2010
Facebook PHP shows value in open source equity
The reported Facebook release of a PHP compiler optimized for high-volume transaction services (like Facebook) is yet more evidence the company takes its open source responsibilities seriously.
It follows by just a few weeks its becoming a top-level sponsor of Apache. (What is Oprah Winfrey doing on a tech blog? Patience, grasshopper.)
Both moves represent good open source citizenship. Cynics will say it’s the least the company can do. But while PHP is open source, it’s not subject to a copyleft license. And in tough economic times it’s easy to justify keeping your hand in your pocket, far away from your wallet.
I argue that both moves serve an important business purpose. Facebook is targeting the Internet Generation, people who grew up with the resource (like my own kids, now 21 and 18). These consumers understand, as their parents did not, the obligations that come with benefiting from open source.
I’m not saying my daughter has a Richard Stallman poster over her bed. She doesn’t. (Although if you made one with black light it could probably make some money.) Something more subtle is at work. Everyone likes to believe the companies they support are good citizens. These are visible ways of proving that.
While copyleft licenses bring a sharing requirement to those who benefit from open source, there is seldom much compulsion involved. If your company adds a tweak to a GPL program and keeps it secret, the FSF police aren’t going to be banging on your door. (Give up the code. We have your server surrounded.)
But the brand equity of any service business is based in part on the public image it projects. I would argue that Facebook overcame MySpace in large part because of a perception that MySpace was trying to control consumers while Facebook had a more open attitude. With switching costs near zero reputation matters.
The fact that all this makes good business sense for Facebook should not, however, lead to the cynical assumption of “they’re just doing it for the money.” Contributions of code and cash for projects is a voluntary activity. The phrase “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” applies.
The point is that in an open source world, how you treat open source communities can make a difference on the bottom line. When switching costs are zero, anything an Internet company can do to prove it’s a good Netizen is both useful and good.
It seems Facebook groks that. It’s a good thing. You get free code and you get free code, everybody gets free code.
(If you don’t think Oprah Winfrey made up in reputation more than those cars cost her, you don’t know business. And if you think she only did it for that reason, you are too cynical to succeed at it, business grasshopper)
February 1st, 2010
SpamAssassin upgraded
It’s worth noting that the Apache Software Foundation last week released a major upgrade of its SpamAssassin e-mail filtering software.
ASF announced that SpamAssassin 3.30, the first major update since May of 2007, changes the way that rules are implemented. “Rules are now separate from the core product and are instead downloaded using sa-update, SpamAssassin’s automatic update software,” ASF announced, also noting that this download method was available starting with version 3.2 as an option.
SpamAssassin 3.30 also offers “support for methods and standards such as text based patterns, bayesian scoring, DNS based black and white lists, DKIM and SPF sender authentication, and email signature clearing houses.”
“The software utilizes a principle of identifying multiple reasons for classifying an email as spam to improve accuracy and decrease the chance of legitimate emails being incorrectly identified as spam,” ASF stated in a press release.
SpamAssassin is used in several commercial security solutions.
February 1st, 2010
What China wants in Internet battle is wholly proprietary
Doug Hanchard, over at ZDNet Government, offers a thoughtful and fair defense of the fear now gripping Internet security professionals following the allegedly Chinese attack on Google and others.
He concludes with a poll, asking readers whether they would accept having their CPUs registered as a condition for going online. This would make it possible to trace computer crime to its source, he suggests.
At last count sentiment was running 4-1 against. No surprise there. But surprising he thought to ask the question that way, because IPv6 has plenty of address space to give every phone, PC and Internet-connected toaster its own IP address.
In other words, his solution is at hand.
So why the pushback?
(Picture from Regentsprep.org.)
Possibly because a solution like this may indeed be China’s aim. China sees freedom as chaos, dissent as treason. It demands the right to police its people as its proprietary property.
In this I believe it has the support of its people. The history of the last century (above) argues that, without unity at its center, China collapses like a house of cards, and that foreigners use this collapse to hold its people down.
Words like freedom and democracy are middle class conceits, China argues. Without power, without rules, and without enforcement of those rules by the wisest and wiliest, the argument goes, society collapses.
Of course, we know better. Open source knows better. Open source, at its heart, is an argument for freedom. People freely choose to support open source projects, or not. The code is visible to all, and there is an assumption that it’s through transparency evil can best be contained.
Open source is derived from Internet values, and those are descended from American history. First the cooperation among professionals and groups that won the Cold War, and second the self-interested cooperation among equals upon which our republic was founded.
China’s values have made it an industrial powerhouse, but its ability to navigate the increasingly-rapid changes of 21st century technology must be questioned. Innovation requires open minds, open hearts, and free inquiry. Limiting the resource, limiting the people, also means limiting thought, limiting imagination, limiting innovation.
As change accelerates the cost of limiting innovation increases, unless a structure is in place that can strictly limit that innovation, channeling thought only in approved directions.
This is the choice the world faces. We know where China stands. We know where America stands. But the Internet can’t long survive half-slave and half-free. It will either become all one thing or all the other.
And in that larger battle, even well-meaning security professionals may, in their honest attempts to secure order, give the future of the Internet, and the world, to our adversary.
February 1st, 2010
How open source tears down proprietary advantage
Slowly.
Open source doesn’t overwhelm a proprietary system. It whittles away at its lead, slowly and sometimes unsteadily. It’s the old Aesop story of the tortoise and the hare, and open source is the tortoise.
(Warner Brothers re-made the Tortoise and the Hare stories in three classic Bugs Bunny cartoons during the 1940s, co-starring Cecil Turtle (right) Here, watch,).
What got me thinking about this was Matt Asay’s latest about Twitter. Twitter is the iPhone of crowdsourcing. Actually if iPhone had Twitter’s market share people would be screaming for antitrust charges against Steve Jobs.
It’s tough to claw back against a Web site with Twitter’s advantages. You’re either on it or you’re invisible. It’s very easy to be on it. I spend maybe five minutes a day with it and have 830 people following my every word.
Twitter’s monetization of its advantage has so far been very limited. I wrote some time ago that Twitter brings mass SMS to the Web, so there should be lots of money there. But so far there is only a trickle.
That is one reason why sites like Identi.ca have gained so little traction. Money attracts a crowd like blood attracts sharks. Financially Twitter is just an oozing sore.
But the general case is more important than the specific. We have seen open source advancing against proprietary advantage throughout the last decade. We saw Google overtake Yahoo. Linux overcame Microsoft in the server space. We watch Firefox creep up on Internet Explorer. We’re watching Android and the iPhone.
Even where open source alternatives haven’t overtaken proprietary systems, they have forced adjustments, and lowered profit margins. PostgreSQL implementations will continue doing that to Oracle. Facebook used openness against MySpace.
No lead is completely safe, and no monopoly rents can accrue, when there are viable open source alternatives available. Open source may be a nuisance to Microsoft, but it’s not getting into its face the way the Justice Department did back in the 20th century.
Open source springs from dissatisfaction. Open source starts small. Open source moves slowly — it’s not about Internet time but real time. But open source is inexorable. Open source does not stop moving forward. Proprietary companies face limited profits, and snappy customers, because open source is an option.
That’s how Twitter will be reeled-in. Slowly, as dissatisfaction rises, as it tries to monetize its monopoly, the groups around projects like StatusNet will start to grow. And we’ll wake up one day and say, hey, Twitter does have competition. We just never saw it before.
But now you can be on the lookout for it.
January 29th, 2010
Google and open source, who needs who more?
Matt Asay has a great piece over at C|Net today, describing attempts by open source to become more independent of Google, and essentially asking Google whether they are going to let open source leadership slip away from them.
But the question can also be looked upon another way. Who needs who more, Google or open source? (Picture from Wikipedia.)
Many important open source projects, like Firefox, are dependent on Google. The Mozilla Foundation draws most of its budget from the Google box on its software, even after Google has gone into competition with its Chrome browser.
Google is proof that the open source way is the profitable way. It has aggressively pushed code out the door, mainly under the Apache license, and has regularly hosted (even hired) important open source developers.
But Google is not dependent on open source. Google’s contributions can easily dominate a project simply because of Google’s size. The Chrome browser could have come out closed-source — it still lags in the area of add-ons, which are a key benefit to being open source.
Google has grown beyond the open source movement in other ways. Its Android project has evolved into a corporate club of carriers and manufacturers, as it needed to in order to gain market traction. HTC doesn’t support Google because Android is open source, they do so because it’s profitable.
The same could be said of Google’s Chromium project, a full operating system based on Chrome. Here again what Google is looking for is not the help of individual programmers, but of corporations, makers of hardware and complete applications.
There have always been two strategies in to open source, a business strategy and a development strategy. A development strategy, the kind Mozilla is based upon, depends on having a collection of allies, large and small, none of them dominant. A business strategy, the kind Google engages in, depends on leadership and control of a corporate ecosystem.
You can see the conflict. What is good for Google and good for an open source project may not always be the same thing. Google is big enough to deliver its own complete projects, licensed as open source, in order to fulfill its business goals. Open source project developers need more balance to their force.
It may just be that Google has grown up beyond open source. It’s like the tiger raised by a dog. It needs to be on its own, both for its own sake and the dog’s sake.
January 28th, 2010
Credativ providing third level of support to OpenLogic customers
OpenLogic has signed a deal with Germany’s Credativ to provide third-level support to its open source support customers.
When you call a company for support, that’s first-level support. When they escalate it to a supervisor that’s second-level support. If you really need an expert, that’s third-level support.
OpenLogic is selling this as a push into Europe for its third-party support services, but the view from Monchengladbach (current home of USA Soccer star Michael Bradley) is quite different. (Go Junter.) I got a taste of how different this morning, chatting with Credativ CEO Michael Meskes and his U.S. unit president, Joe Conway.
Credativ’s business model is built around project committers. Both Meskes and Conway are committers to PostgreSQL, for instance. It reminded me of the model Marc Fleury had for JBOSS “back in the day,” which is to say 2004.
It’s all about giving back, said Meskes. “When we find a bug in a distribution and fix it, we will report the bug and patch or in most cases we will simply commit it because we already have someone who’s a committer on that.”
Last week, for instance, Credativ held a coding event for Debian Linux in its German offices. Half the people there were from inside the company, the other half were outsiders.
Credativ only entered the U.S. market last fall, so right now the U.S. office in El Cajon, outside San Diego, is mostly Joe and some people he’s transitioning to full-time support work. It’s the infrastructure of offices in Germany, England and Canada that lets Credativ seem bigger, and enables deals like the one with OpenLogic.
But Meskes has big dreams. He envisions a global enterprise that can deliver top-notch open source support anywhere in the world. Conway took a call from New Zealand last week, and another from the Caribbean.
He returned both. That’s good, because OpenLogic remains a competitor. It’s who can best sell and manage support that will decide the winner between these frenemies.
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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