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 »
Archive for: June, 2006
June 30th, 2006
Phipps explains what he really meant
Simon Phipps of Sun wrote today not only to complain about what we called a "scarecrow" argument but to explain what he really meant.
"It was a version of Benkler’s argument, that as we align our individual motivations we are able to collectively achieve what only ‘the firm form’ was able to achieve before," he writes. A better summation of the talk is to be found here, he says. (Update: Phipps writes he has blogged his talk as well.)
The real money quote, according to Phipps: "It’s all just there, and you build your solution for your business with what’s just there. You pay for the software at the point of deployment." Support can be that payment method.
Benkler, who teaches at Yale Law School, made this argument most cogently in his new book The Wealth of Networks. His book describes the Internet as creating "commons-based production," arguing for more open spectrum, a larger commons, and more decentralization as the keys to economic growth in the Internet Age.
Benkler draws an attractive analogy in one chapter, explained here by Jack Balkin:
Reds are hereditary storytellers who have the duty and the privilege to tell stories to the rest of the population. Blues elect a new storyteller every night by majority vote, and this person tells stories before the whole community. Finally, in the Green community, people tell stories to each other all the time whenever they feel like it.
The Green world is the one Benkler favors, and which Phipps endorses. This world sounds like a cacophony, but it’s mediated by everyone’s choices on whom they will listen to.
This is the nature of the new economy, as Gary Sauer-Thompson writes at Philosophy.Com, "The removal of the physical constraints on effective information production has made human creativity and the economics of information itself the core structuring facts in the new networked information economy."
This is a major conceptual shift, Sauer-Thompson adds, and I agree. The key to growth is how you enable networked information flows, buildng the future rather than harping on the past.
Sounds like my argument. If it’s Phipps’ as well, then I owe him more than an apology. Would he accept an "atta-boy?"
June 29th, 2006
The broader implications of open source
Often, when interviewing an executive with an open source software firm, I will end by asking if the concept has broader implications.
You can actually feel their eyes light up over the phone. Of course it does, they say, as though finally coming upon someone who doesn’t think their visions are crazy.
Regardless of how legal cases involving open source turn out, it’s obvious that it works as an economic model. Small teams can build complex services. Hierarchies can be broken down. Management books can be re-written. New markets are being opened.
Even Bill Gates now knows the value of open source collaboration. His Foundation brings experts from many intellectual silos together and achieves breakthroughs. The Foundation cooperates broadly with others, none worrying about taking credit, just solving the problem.
But if open source grows the total value of software faster than a silo model, what does this mean in other areas of intellectual endeavor? Long-standing concepts such as peer review are being challenged. Every day sites like YouTube collect thousands of new videos backed by copyrighted music.
There are even political implications. Sites like DailyKos, on the left, and RedState, on the right, are building true communities. The ideas that come from them are not just those of their founders. And when Internet issues like net neutrality are on the table, these sites band together, they stand on the same side.
In any open source endeavor consensus is necessary to achieve progress. Modeling this behavior on economics and politics gives us a different world.
Doesn’t it?
June 28th, 2006
Sun's Phipps makes a scarecrow argument
Those who recall my recent piece on Richard Stallman will nod when they read this. UPDATE: Phipps says he was misunderstood by the reporter who wrote this.
Simon Phipps, a Sun executive, told a conference in London that people need to stop thinking of open source as "free" and start thinking of it as "connected capitalism."
His theme was that altruism is not the motivation for open source, greed is.
But why can’t it be both?
Phipps is making a straw man argument, but of a particular type. That’s why I have the picture of Ray Bolger at right, in his role from The Wizard of Oz. It’s a scarecrow argument.
In the movie (and the book), the Scarecrow insists he hasn’t got a brain, but in fact he’s the brains of Dorothy’s outfit. In the end he’s given mere proof of what he had already, a diploma.
In fact, both Phipps and Stallman are right. You can look upon Free and Open Source Software as mainly free. It drives costs down to the floor, along with Moore’s Law, and allows the World to get onto the right side of the digital divide. This increases the number of potential customers for whatever comes next. It also increases the number of creators to make whatever comes next.
But as a common store, Free and Open Source Software enables everyone to build better, more valuable programs. With the basics taken care of, and shared in common, everyone can build something better on top of it, and compete there. Compete, that is, until this function too becomes basic, and you move even further up the stack.
It’s Bill Gates’ vision of "embrace and extend," only the beneficiaries are both the shareholders in companies doing the sharing and those at the bottom doing the using. There’s no either-or about it. Only those who fight strawmen believe that. Phipps needs some cold water thrown on him.
June 28th, 2006
Sourcelabs updates the open source support process
SourceLabs’ Continuous Support System announcement is leveraging the entire open source community to help big outfits deal with support issues. (Image from the OpenGroup, advertising a competition for Voice Profile for Internet Mail software.)
CEO Byron Sebastian and co-founder Cornelius Willis told me it’s an Early Warning Radar that will bring all open source users the kind of diagnostics, security alerts, and vulnerability notifications they need to be truly comfortable with open source on an enterprise level.
"We generate, every day, an RSS feed or e-mail of over 1,000 new data points" Sebastian explained. "This goes to our enterprise customers, summarizing all the secuirty issues identified that day with open source projects.
"Most of the time there are none, but if you’re a large corporation just knowing someone is looking gives you peace of mind.
"If there are issues we tell you what API not to use, or what configuration to use to avoid it, or we say we’re sending a patch in how many hours. This leverages all data that’s out there in the community, then provides valuable servies to large companies so they have more confidence in open source."
The system has been two years in the making, added Willis.
"We’ve been using this with customers for a year and a half. Our open source customers have started ‘bake-offs,’ where they have us compete with other firms on support cases. We win those bake-offs because we have the technology needed to solve the problem. It’s not just our engineers, but our technology, that wins.
"Think of an air traffic controller in the 1930s, using a binocular and telephone. That’s what it’s been in support. Now you have radar and telemetry so they can do a dramatically better job."
Anything which makes enterprises more comfortable with open source is something even small companies benefit from. The contributions of the big improve the systems of the small, and give everyone a bigger, wider platform tobuild on.
June 27th, 2006
How open source transforms business
CollabNet CEO Bill Portelli started our interview today bragging about CollabNet Subversion, his open source Web-based versioning system.
But we ended up talking about something much bigger, how open source is changing the way businesses of all types operate.
For CollabNet, open source was "a practical business strategy that worked." Five years ago he needed some versioning tool beyond CVS in order to make headway in the managed services business, and found only proprietary offerings from big outfits like Microsoft and IBM. To compete, he said, the only option was "to build a community and leverage it."
So yes, it was selfish. "We used open source to create a standard in the market, so we could provide other products and services on top of it, all based on open source."
But what CollabNet found in developing Subversion, other companies have learned in using it. "We can help you develop products for 20-50% less by building a community, and by using the right web-based tools. A client came back and said the model created unplanned innovation, with half-billion dollar product lines created," from the bottom-up, rather than through departmental silos.
This is a profound change. And Portillo is remarkably eloquent in describing it:
In any change there are going to be people affected. The important thing is to understand what’s going on and get ahead of the curve. That’s true in any technology transition. We need to get ahead of it.
I can see individuals losing jobs. But if you look at the rate of innovation in open source, and the jobs they’re creating, all these things are dynamics that are healthy for the business and create innovation higher up the stack. Look where open source is happening and look how to leverage it.
Open source doesn’t solve everything. Open source is disruptive in many ways. We argue internally about how much to share, what to share. But the Internet has shown it’s no longer good enough to be stuck in your own silo. You have to become part of a community and be ready to leverage it.
Don’t think of open source as just a software business model, in other words. Think of it as a new way to do business, a new way to leverage all your relationships. Think of it as business evolution in action.
June 27th, 2006
Bill Gates embraces open source process
Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the Gates-Buffett foundation merger yesterday was hearing Gigadollar Bill praise the open source process.
Gates and his wife Melinda talked about bringing scientists together around a table and generating ideas about solving problems, without worries about money or who owns the ideas.
There in a nutshell is the open source process. Concentrate on the problem, on the solution. Network freely.
This is a process the Gates Foundation has used for some time now. With the Buffett bequest, the budget of that foundation will double. (Buffett wants his money spent as it comes in, not used as an endowment.) The foundation will now be in a position to press its way of doing things on the rest of the philanthropic world.
Open source, in the end, is a process of collaboration aimed at a result. In software, it’s collaboration between companies and people aimed at building a common store of code all can benefit from.
But the impact of the process is not limited to business. And now it has a champion, from an unexpected quarter.
The world will change profoundly as a result.
June 26th, 2006
What's missing in open source companies?
Marketing.
Successful open source companies don’t have big marketing budgets.
This is both natural and inevitable. Marketing has limited utility when the "product" costs nothing. Those open source companies that have put money in marketing, like Novell, are often looked-upon suspiciously as a result.
That’s not to say open source is all developers, support, and Webmastering.
One position that is not dumped in the open source companies I cover is what might be called corporate sales. Relationship managers who meet with and schmooze enterprises are unsung heroes. And heroines.
The big money in open source comes from support revenue paid by corporations for bug fixes, updates, and the like. One of the big stories of this year, as in the Eclipse story below, is the effort by projects to automate this whole process.
Because we’re talking about open source, moreover, any solution to this problem will be shared generally. Again, the result may well be programmers and Web people cutting out sales and marketing.
Is that really a bad thing?
June 26th, 2006
The importance of Callisto, a sum greater than its components
Some open source projects are important in-and-of themselves. Firefox is an example.
Others are important because of what they enable. Eclipse is in that category.
With Eclipse 3.2, known as Callisto, the Eclipse Foundation is trying to do something much like Microsoft is attempting with Vista, unify a development environment.
The heart of the release is the update manager. It offers options for developers, but its simplicity pushes them to get with the latest. This could not only bring the whole community on to the same virtual "page," as it were, but make sure they stay on it, since this functionality will be part of the project going forward.
I talked about these issues last week with Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation since 2004. "Don’t think of it as a single bag of software. It is the name of an event, not a package," he said.
The news here is how Callisto applies the idea of using components, he said. "If you don’t architect your software to take advantage of component architecture you get in trouble, with too many dependencies."
"Another element is we have a very flexible and open governance model. Each Eclipse project that decided to join did so voluntarily. This was a bottom-up exercise. Each project remains independent within the Eclipse community. Then they come together to work on a common schedule."
A common release schedule, an automated update schedule, components that work together, all built from the bottom-up. And one thing that Microsoft has yet to match.
Transparency. "Doing your software development transparently has massive advantages. The project teams dealt with over 72,000 Bugzilla entries, and a great number came in from the community. We use agile methods within Eclipse." This is the "heartbeat for the community, a functioning pioece of code that is used to generate feedback."
Can all this bring Eclipse a development community rivaling that of Microsoft in size? That’s the hope. Time, of course, will tell.
June 23rd, 2006
XML grows up as XBRL
XML has always been perfect for open source development.
As an evolving standard, the tags which can represent anything need cooperation in order to be useful. Early efforts like adXML applied the technology to specific types of business transactions, in the ad space.
But business processes are more complex than any set of pure XML tags can represent. And so we have XBRL, which is an effort to apply the ideas behind XML to the more complex needs of business reporting.
Up in Kirkland, Washington, just north of Redmond, UBMatrix smells a business opportunity here. Director of marketing Darren Peterson explained it.
"XBRL is a modeling language," Peterson said. Regulators see the value of it and the SEC is defining common methods for comunication using it. "They’ve built a framework people can use to analyze financial statements."
UBMatrix, meanwhile, has developers working on a taxonomy with lawyers and accountants. "Our technology does version tracking to manage the code, as well as code for building the taxonomy. These are key to enabling taxonomies to be built. We’re making the development environment and tool available for no charge."
So where does the money come from? "The collaboration environnment is online and free. There’s also a development tool we’ve been selling for $3,000, and we sell consulting services."
If everyone were happy, the UBMatrix effort might not be so exciting. But everyone is not happy.
"Open source is controversial in the financial reporting world. The idea that people other than the standards bodies be able to contribute to a taxonomy is under real debate. Groups like the Finanaicl Accounting Standards Board (FASB) feel they own the standard, and they are threatened by this open source effort."
This is actually good news. It makes UBMatrix a standard-bearer for lowering the cost of doing business, fighting the good fight against the special interests, with the government (in the form of the SEC) at its side. This will mean press coverage, stories that spread the work of the good work Peterson and his cohorts are doing.
Stories like this one.
June 22nd, 2006
Where Messman failed at Novell
The Desktop Linux movement is not about the operating system.
It’s not just about the applications either. Its advance depends on compatibility, not replacing Windows but building around it, on top of it. On dealing with it.
Every few months, while Jack Messman ran Novell, I’d get a call from a nice PR person inviting me to an interview, where I would be told, once again, "this is the year of desktop Linux." See how easy it is, how simple to install, see the applications.
And then, nothing. Or not very much anyway. So now Messman is out, and Ron Hovsepian (left) is in. Meet the new boss. Is he the same as the old boss?.
Messman bet a substantial part of Novell’s credibility and marketing budget selling something that could not happen. Not the way he was pursuing it.
What might work? Something like the Eclipse Rich Client Platform is a start. It lets software vendors and enterprises build native Java applications that run seamlessly on any operating system — on Linux, on Mac OS X, on Windows. As David Berlind reports, Ubuntu is another way, a localized Linux that speaks the user’s language.
Dealing with a user’s reality is the only way forward. Novell can’t afford any more choruses of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
No big enterprise is going to dump their investment in Windows desktops wholesale and replace them with Linux. It must be done slowly, seamlessly, compatibly.
Once again, under Jack Messman, Novell has lost time, lost money, lost credibility, lost mindshare. There is not much left for Hovsepian to work with. Hopefully he will use what he has left to look at Linux from the customer’s point of view, and the user’s point of view.
That’s the only point of view that counts. Novell’s point of view does not count at all.
June 22nd, 2006
ZDNet comes under political attack in net neutrality fight
ZDNet has come under political attack from proponents of network neutrality.
Matt Stoller (right), writing at MyDD, today accused George Ou and David Berling (it’s Berlind, Matt) of deliberately misrepresenting a recent violation of neutrality by Cox Cable, which lost access to Craigslist for a time.
What’s fun, from the point of view of a neutral (who is only hoping to generate traffic and debate) is the aggreived tone of Stoller, starting with his headline, "Lies and the Lying Liars at ZDNet," a take-off on the title of an Al Franken book.
The idea of George and David as part of some great right-wing conspiracy is really pretty funny. I should add that on the merits of the debate I agree with Matt, that the Bells can’t be trusted not to use their monopoly in broadband access to shake-down big Web sites, to the detriment of all small sites (including ZDNet). The heads of the companies have so much as promised to do this.
What the exchange actually reveals, in my view, is just how partisan, angry, and political this issue has become. This should not be. If broadband access were a more competitive market — if users had more than two choices (and some don’t even have two) for what amounts to paltry speeds of 1.5 Mbps downstream (the FCC defines "broadband" as anything over 200 Kbps) — this would not be a partisan issue.
That’s what we need to look into and fix, no matter what happens in the present debate. The Internet, its commons and its values, are at the heart of open source, and of 21st century economic development.
Who will have the courage to fix the broadband gap? Who will campaign on a demand that we free the bits?
June 21st, 2006
Is open source a threat to copyright?
No. But in terms of our present copyright regime perhaps it should be.
Copyrights, like patents, were put into the U.S. Constitution as incentives to create more. They were seen as limited rights granted for limited times for a limited purpose.
Today’s corporate copyright regime, under which Disney’s Steamboat Willie is still protected, is something quite different. Its time limit is theoretical. Its protections are absolute, extending even to the design of devices that display it. Its purpose is no longer to encourage more production, but to act as a continuing supply of cash to the corporate copyright owner.
This works, for Disney. In the area of software this works for Microsoft. But does it still work for the U.S. economy? Jeffrey Chester of Freepress.org says it does not.
Open source challenges this presumption of copyright absolutism protecting economic growth. In open source, a commons is fostered, and those who use the common store, who also contribute to it, can pile complexity-upon-complexity and build things that would be cost-prohibitive for any single actor to build.
Let me give you a practical example. I’m presently working at a company which is built on Drupal , an open source project licensed under the GPL. If I were using proprietary tools I could not have as complex a system as I have. Since I’m using open source tools I start with a higher level of complexity. So too does everyone else using Drupal. If I create new capabilities, I must share them. In this way the tower of innovation rises higher.
You can only do this with software. Under current law "mashups" like the famous (or infamous" Grey Album , in which a rap album and the Beatles’ White Album were mashed together, are illegal. So not only is technical innovation illegal under our copyright laws, so too is artistic innovation. The purpose of copyright protection is being thwarted.
I’m not saying we should do away with copyright. Copyright protects open source projects just as it does Microsoft. But for the benefits of open source to grow, perhaps some adjustments are in order.
And not in the direction the Congress is looking at.
June 20th, 2006
Hyperic seeks to build an enterprise community
The major challenge for Hyperic over the next months will be turning the enterprise users of its management software into an open source community.
That is the view of Bob Bickel, who recently joined the company as a "key strategic advisor" after having spent several years at JBOSS, most recently as Executive Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development.
Actually, Bickel told me, the Hyperic gig is part of his plan to eventually become a high school math teacher. Bickel, who will see my side of 50 next year (I like to call it the fun side), said he told JBOSS CEO Marc Fleury of his intention last August, long before JBOSS thought of being acquired by RedHat.
Bickel hopes to apply lessons learned at JBOSS to Hyperic, which recently went open source under the GPL. "Hyperic needs to bring their great technology out and build an open source community. JBOSS already had a community. We need to build one here."
Given the need to build that community among enterprises, Hyperic is tweaking the GPL slightly, adding a codicil to its own contracts "so no one needs to fear that an agent makes their own software open source."
Bickel said that Hyperic is great for the "middle market" of companies that are too small to afford an enterprise management system like Tivoli and too big for simple scripting system. "We’re trying to make sure we bring a lot of functionality – full monitoring capabilities, a full agent architecture and 40 agent plugins, as well as the server functionality," to the open source world, he said.
But this will be a different type of community, a community of companies. "An ISV could use all this, incorporate it and reference it in their product set, and Hyperic supports all kinds of network devices, middleware, databases and applications." It will be interesting to see how both Hyperic and enterprises meet the challenge of the GPL. It’s fun. And at our age, Bickel and I believe in fun.
June 19th, 2006
The lesson taught by Wikipedia
In a weekend feature at The New York Times Katie Hafner tries very hard to speak ill of Wikipedia.
They say "anyone can edit" but some entries are closed. Sometimes people stick in lies, which take time to find and fix. The authors are not experts.
But she can’t argue with the math. Wikipedia is now the third most-popular information site online, ahead of CNN, ahead of Yahoo. Ahead (although she won’t t say so) of The New York Times.
One other point Hafner hesitates to make, but Wikipedia is also trusted. When "revert wars" break out, administrators step in. Mistakes (like the notorious one on John Siegenthaler) are fixed when found, or when reported.
But the important math is this, and it’s profound. No silo, no matter how big, can deliver more information bang-for-buck than a community working together. No single company, no single university, could have created Wikipedia, which has only been around since 2000.
The story comes down to one paragraph in Hafner’s piece, concerning founder Jimmy Wales:
Six years ago, Mr. Wales, who built up a comfortable nest egg in a brief career as an options trader, started an online encyclopedia called Nupedia.com, with content to be written by experts. But after attracting only a few dozen articles, Mr. Wales started Wikipedia on the side. It grew exponentially.
I think this relates directly to the ecology of open source licensing schemes. Many businesses, and businesses new to open source, express a preference for BSD-type licensing. But the projects embraced by communities, under the GPL, seem to move forward faster.
If you want to control your code, under open source, BSD licensing probably is the way to go. But you may end up like Nupedia. If you want to grow exponentially, you need to give the community the same rights and obligations you claim for yourself.
June 16th, 2006
The most hated man in cyberspace
Having covered this space for nearly two years, I have seen more resentment toward Stallman than anyone in the world, even though (on the issues) he’s right.
Stallman, if you don’t know, is the father of GNU, and the "Free Software" movement. He’s not the father of open source, he’s its grandfather. He created what I call the Four Freedoms – free to get, free to use, free to change, free in obligation.
It’s that last freedom, the obligation to give back new code in exchange for the other freedoms, that sticks in the craw of so many. It was in reaction to this that the "open source" movement itself was created. In order to make a business out of this, it was felt, this fourth freedom would have to be sacrificed.
It is sacrificed, in BSD-type licenses. You don’t have to share your enhancements to BSD code with the community. But what has happened, in fact, is that projects based on BSD licenses don’t get as much community support as those under Stallman’s GPL. Businesses will associate with one another under BSD, and claim that their clients prefer the BSD license. But you don’t see many hackers in their basements volunteering time to BSD projects. You do see it, still, under the GPL.
To those who believe in a proprietary model, moreover, Stallman is Satan himself. They consider him the enemy of profit, the job-destroyer. They contrast him with contemporaries Steve Jobs and Bill Gates asking, what have you done for your economy, your country? You’re destroying it.
It’s true that free software kills some jobs. It kills marketing jobs. It also cuts profits. Most open source companies I cover consist of programmers, support people, executives and Web folks. Marketing is often an afterthought. In two years on the beat I have been bought two meals, both by the same company (JBOSS). No t-shirts have come in my mail, I have gotten no tschotckes, no free air trips. Not even a beer. (Both meals were lunches. I drank tea.)
Is Stallman responsible? Maybe. JBOSS was founded as a GPL company. But at the same time I have covered countless niches where solutions have become affordable for the first time, thanks to open source. This business movement, which Stallman grandfathered, has done to software what Moore’s Law did to hardware. It has pushed prices to the floor. It has brought thousands of new programmers, and millions of new users, to the Internet.
This has always been Stallman’s goal. His only goal. And he has taken it, all the criticism, all the jibes, because he believes in what he’s doing.
So hate him if you want. I can’t help but admire him. And I think I always will. To those who live for profit, the prophet may be scorned. But theirs, I’m convinced, is the kingdom of software heaven.
Our IT Shapers:
- Richard Stallman: The most hated man in cyberspace
- Barrett Lyon: Internet Influencer
- Dan’l Lewin: Leading Microsoft Emerging Business Development
- Kevin Lynch: Making the Rich Internet Application a reality
- George Boole: On the shoulders of genius
- Howard Rheingold about our mobile world
- Tom Anderson: The man behind MySpace
- Users always have the final say
June 15th, 2006
When is stupid not so stupid?
When it’s open source.
Moves that would look foolish for a proprietary vendor make a different kind of sense when made by an open source project.
The reason, in a word, is altruism. Commercial projects are looking at the bottom line, as they should. Open source projects don’t have to. They are collections of individuals, or groups, engaged in mutual assistance. Whatever benefits the members is worthwhile.
Exhibit A today is Ubuntu. This month they delivered a server Linux with available support. Dapper Drake is Ubuntu’s first "enterprise" Linux, with support available for up to 5 years. There are also improvements to the desktop distribution.
Red Hat says they are not worried. Nor should they be. If Ubuntu were a commercial operation I might say they were making a mistake, spending time on an area where they are not strong, rather than concentrating on their niche.
But Ubuntu is not a commercial operation. It has an advantage over other distros in that it supports many, many languages. Now Linux users in those languages can get an "enterprise-class" Linux which speaks their language, with full support. Together these people do not create material market share. But in the Ubuntu world their desires are what count.
Commercial vendors — whether proprietary or open source — don’t follow small niches. Ubuntu, as an open source project, follows its users’ needs, and since many of those users speak local languages, it tries to provide a wider service to them.
Thus does news that doesn’t matter, matter very much.
June 14th, 2006
Open source creates U.S. manufacturing jobs
Open Source Storage has just opened a 32,000 square foot manufacturing plant. In Sunnyvale. California. On the old Atari campus.
CEO Eren Niazi said the fully-automated facility can turn out 1,000 systems a day. They can do reference designs, and turn around a customer in days instead of weeks. Open source software is used for the systems’ internals, and most wind up being loaded with LAMP stacks, used as enterprise Web servers.
The speedy delivery, which enterprise customers need, is why this plant is in Sunnyvale. "We’re doing rapid deployment," he said. "Our customers can’t wait for this stuff to come from overseas."
While former VA Linux head Larry Augustin blamed the dot-bomb for VA Linux’ failed move to open source hardware Niazi, who has hired some of Augustin’s old team, said outsourcing may have also had a role to play. "They lost some control when they outsourced. We don’t outsource our service."
There’s another difference between the old VA and OSS. "We’re not VC backed. We’re growing without venture capital. We’ve been profitable for five years without it." And there’s no reason to go public, either.
Let’s see. Open source. Jobs in the USA. No need for capital. Did you just read that right?
You did.
June 13th, 2006
Microsoft objects
My post yesterday on Microsoft stirred up quite a hornet’s nest.
Not just here, either.
Michael Francisco of Microsoft’s Port 25 project was kind enough to send a personal e-mail. "Be assured, we are not abandoning the Open Source conversation. Quite the contrary; through Port 25, we are working to create a community wherein constructive communication can take place," he wrote. (Want to go there? OK.)
This is one step down the open source road, but for all proprietary vendors it’s a journey of 1,000 miles. Throwing out some code under a restrictive license and looking for "constructive communication" are fine, but they are baby steps.
Engaging fully with the community, rather than just through your own site where you will get "constructive" communication, is another step. These are steps I noted Microsoft has retreated from lately.
Alex Barnett (above), Big Green’s Community Project Manager, made his differences more public, posting them on his blog and linking to my original post. He also links here to many open source projects Microsoft has going (his post is filled with such bloggy goodness) and adds what I consider an appropriate level of snark. (My j-school degree is 28 years old this month, by the way.)
All these projects are under Microsoft’s "shared source" license, one of the most restrictive in the open source world. Barnett also notes that contributions to its CodePlex are being accepted under many licenses, including the GPL.
Fine enough. But how far is Microsoft going, really? How much is it giving, not just in terms of code but in terms of license terms, against what it’s expecting to get from the community?
I’ll leave that for the ZDNet community to answer. My own view remains that if you want to get, first give. And that for those to whom much is given, much is expected.
June 13th, 2006
Open source searching it all
One of my favorite stories from the Iran-Contra scandal 20 years ago was how Oliver North thought he was deleting documents by hitting "delete."
He wasn’t, of course. He was just getting rid of pointers.
Flash forward 20 years, and open source can now find needles in much larger haystacks. Kazeon and Google are teaming up to offer an $80,000 solution that will let enterprises search 20 terabyte stores of unstructured files at once, including archives and backups. The complete press release came out today on the Kazeon Web site.
Vice president Troy Toman touts this as an essential tool for enterprises in our litigious society. He sees thousands of potential customers. "With the increasing nunmber of regulations on compliance, and the increasing litigious nature of business, people have a need to know where their data is."
This does not mean the NSA’s attempt to grab everyone’s data makes sense. The Kazeon solution only works if you know what needle you’re looking for in a haystack.
"Those technologies are still only really effective in well-defined domains and small databases. It will be a while yet before the true analytics you need is available for these larger databases," Toman explained.
From a business sense there are several interesting aspects to this:
-
It’s a "mixed source" solution, one that still results in a definite price tag.
-
Google should now be seen as being very serious about the enterprise space.
-
Google’s willingness to partner with a virtual start-up in Kazeon is also significant.
Toman also broke down for me how the costs stack up. Google’s search appliance starts at $30,000. Kazeon’s IS1200 then costs $40,000, and there’s about $10,000 to tie everything together. That $80,000 is a starting point.
Kazeon CEO Sudhakar Muddu also explained how all this will go to market. "Google has a good enterprise sales force. We’re doing a lot of sales calls with Google.
"Google is not looking at this as an open source," he added. "It’s a question of solving the problems of legal compliiance. How do you extend a search to billions of files. Google’s interface means you don’t have to learn our product, you can go deep into archives and backups."
Got that, Ollie?
June 12th, 2006
Solving the computing problem in education
Ever since my daughter Robin was born, I’ve been covering education technology.
It has been a history of failure.
Back when Windows was rendering everything obsolete every three years, technology coordinators in education were dead men (or women) walking. As soon as they got systems ready for training teachers, the systems were obsolete.
This is no longer the case. Computers are cheap. Since their primary use is to access the Internet, they remain useful for years. But only if these assets are managed. And solutions like Tivoli, are not cost-effective in the K-12 market.
So schools’ technology coordinators are still dead men (and women) walking. Especially when they tell the bosses that the hardware and software they’re buying is just 15% of the money they need to spend.
Solutions are finally coming from the world of open source. From Open Country, CEO Michael Grove told me. "We do system discovery and systems management. We can do remote monitoring, asset discovery, diagnostics, repository management, provisioning, deployment, security updates and scheduling."
With Open Country in the hands of a vertical market vendor, school networks can be managed remotely for the first time, for a reasonable fee. School computer budgeting becomes predictable.
Grove has been working with Intel to deliver these kinds of cost-effective solutions to India under Linux. "We can sign channel partners to roll trucks. Now you can just press a button on our graphical user interface and reprovision without having to know anything. In the background our management system is doing the lifting."
Great. When will it be available here? "We’ve found a group who is working with lots of school districts and is putting together solutions. We’ll have Windows by year-end."
Robin graduated high school last month.
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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