I cannot figure out if I should put this post under Open Source Software (OSS) Culture, OSS Business Issue or OSS Development Trend. I decided on culture because I think the two competing "non news stories" fall into the "it's all for show category."

On one hand, Microsoft has opened a Microsoft OSS site. Microsoft's PR says it's about "participating, partnering, growing and learning." It's really about Microsoft finally getting ahead of the curve against the Microhate that comes subtly from Red Hat and with venom from others. Microsoft says: "This site is intended to provide information about Microsoft and open source in one place, serving as a gateway for information about open source engagements and activities across Microsoft. This includes announcements concerning releases of Microsoft code for community development through the Shared Source program; however, the Shared Source Initiative (SSI) will continue to encompass the spectrum of programs and licenses offered by Microsoft to various communities of customers, partners, developers, and other interested individuals. This includes not only the processes for Microsoft product groups releasing source code for community development, but also, for example, the Government Security Program (GSP) for national governments and international organizations; the Windows Academic Program, supplying universities with concepts, code, and projects useful for integrating core Windows kernel technologies into teaching and research."

The Microsoft OSS site makes my research job easier but I don't see any great benefit for those of us in the open choice camp.

As for the Red Hat Microbashing, it's been turned up a notch by Red Hat's inhouse blogger at Truth Happens. Red Hat has posted four or five times in the last few days about some deal Microsoft has made with the government of Chile. First of all, I have no idea if the facts vis a vis Chile and Microsoft are correct. But if they are, the Red Hat activity is Microbashing in its most crafty form. Most Microbashing is hateful, so obscene and crude (usually filled with misspellings and often with other hate aspects such as racism or bullying) that it is dismissed as the grafitti that it is. Red Hat Microbashing is different; it is usually a redirection from a third party so that Red Hat itself appears to be simply performing an alerting service.

On the Chile issue, Red Hat's inhouse blogger is all in a dither about Microsoft apparently donating software to schools and other child-related programs in the South American country. How is that in any way different than Red Hat donating software to schools and other child-related program in the One Laptop per Child program?

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I wrote last Thursday that I was following the blogging and reporting out of the OSCON open source software (OSS) conference waiting for some red meat in terms of Microhate or intra-movement warfare between the OSS left and right wings or something to get over my summer doldrums. It came in the form of the OSS left wing, represented by GPL V3 author Eben Moglen, attacking the right wing, represented according to Moglen by OSCON founder, Tim O'Reilly. It did not disappoint. You can read about it here and even here right from the source (or at least from a blogger on one of the participants' web sites).

The blogosphere is filling up with comments on the session's implications to OSS. I am more interested in its implications for open choice.

Not that it needs my help but I usually stick up for Microsoft when I see political hacks out of the EU piling on or just plain good propagandists out of IBM or Red Hat or Oracle subtly twisting the facts. No question Microsoft needs a needle here and there but they have never forced me to buy or use their products. In fact, I first started using their products thanks to Apple, whose 1990ish PC came with Word (or my employer put it there, not sure which).

But it works the other way too. If you believe in open choice, you need to stick up for OSS as well. The Free Software Foundation (FSF), seeing its influence waning apparently because of lack of acceptance of the GPL V3, has decided to attack its allies in OSS. With 60 million copies of Vista sold (I sent mine back because my grandkids wanted Pinball) clearly the FSF attack on Microsoft was a failure. This FSF attack on O'Reilly and OSS should be beaten back as well.

If it is not, enterprises will desert all types of OSS because no one running a business wants the hassle of dealing with such pettiness. Most small and midsize businesses already get all of their software as a service or will soon migrate to that delivery method. They could care less about this debate. But the big companies wanted to see the debate end (they wanted open choice) and they forced Microsoft to the table. Microsoft, with new leaders gradually assuming control, did the right thing and ended the feuding (which was really just a game to Ballmer and the earlier generation of Microsoft leaders anyways, a diversion to the pressure of putting out lots of complex software on an accelerated schedule). OSS companies such as Novell, Linspire and others did their part.

Now the rest of the OSS movement, the part that wants to be taken seriously (and deserves to be taken seriously) in the real world where the IT budgets are created needs to sign up as well. And believe me, I can tell you based on my work at Research 2.0 (see button to right), investors will back away from the OSS movement faster than you can say dot.com. if they don't.

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I have been watching OSCON blogging this week for some red meat, some Microhate, some internecine rivalry between the left and the right of the open source software (OSS) movement, anything to overcome the summer slowdown and get a little "new news" rush. Instead I found this excellent thought piece by Illuminata's Gordon Haff, blogging from OSCON in Portland.

Truth in advertising, Gordon--like me--is a "Grey Eagle" (Data General alum), which in addition to meaning that he went through the minicomputer wars, also means that--like me--he has probably seen it all before. It is not surprising then that his and my sense of OSS history agree even though we have never spoken about it. There is one place we differ. He says, "We’re now moving to a world increasingly distant in time and place from the Unix wars." I think the interminable debates about GPL vs other licenses, the Novell/Microsoft agreement, free vs. open, and so forth are just a continuation of the UNIX wars. The AT&T legal issues he talks about have never really been settled.

But I think we do agree when it comes to his main points: it don't matter any more! Data is more important than code (always has been of course). Software as a Service (SaaS) will dominate (Gordon talks about centralized computing) as I posted on here. The desktop increasingly doesn't matter (and I contend Microsoft has already recognized that and moved on).

Maybe Gordon and I just long for the order and normalcy ( :) ) of the old days. Or maybe we just forget Wang and DEC and the ill-fated 88Open Consortium.

Oh, and by the way, the OSCON conference really peaks today and tomororw so I may get my wish for a little steak tartare.

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If you’re into numbers, take a look at a couple of interesting and not necessarily conflicting statistics about open source software (OSS) put into circulation in July: Linux up, Apache down. Among other very detailed findings, 10,000 Alfresco community members said during calendar quarter two that they evaluated OSS using Windows and then deployed on Linux if they liked what they saw. Based on another survey, Glyn Moody of opendotdotdot is opining in Linux Journal about why Apache is losing a lot of web server software share to Microsoft Internet Information Server.

According to a press release, the Alfresco Open Source Barometer Survey showed that Windows is increasingly “a popular evaluation platform” for OSS but that “most enterprises use Linux when they go into production.” That’s pretty consistent with decades-long Windows-UNIX market activity. I haven’t looked at the survey details (they are available at Alfresco’s site) but some bloggers are reporting that evaluation equals development. If so, that’s a different trend; typically more developers deploy to the stack they developed on than not. If that’s not happening with Windows-based OSS, the trend bears watching.

The Alfresco survey also asks users about their preferences in operating systems, application servers, databases, browsers, and portals but remember that the results are not a good barometer of the IT industry, just of Alfresco community members. It doesn’t matter what the “n” is in surveys. You could Alf Landon why that is but I think this is the first U.S. presidential cycle since 1932 in which he is not running for president.

As for the other survey about web server software, Glyn’s source is Netcraft. I use the very imprecise terminology “a lot of” in describing the numbers (supposedly 15 points of web server software share lost by Apache to Microsoft Internet Information Server in the last year; 2 million servers added by Microsoft in the last month) because I can’t gauge statistical significance despite over 125 million “n’s.” I quickly looked at Netcraft’s site for their methodology but couldn’t find it. I believe it is based on some kind of webcrawling/pinging thing but why it picks up some servers and not others could skew the results.

So take the “Jerry McGuire” advice we give clients at Research 2.0 (see link to right): If you are interested in what your peers are doing, follow the money (revenue), and/or count the paying customers coming through the turnstyles.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Business Issue | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As Savio Rodgrigues points out over at Infoworld, traditional software--or at least traditional middleware--is not being replaced by open source software (OSS). Turning his points around, if you are basing IT infrastructure or any other type of business decisions on the demise of closed software, do not bet the farm on it. Where the IT world--both end users and the channel--is really going is to open choice. (Simulataneously and the subject of other posts, the users are increasigly saying we don't care what's under the covers as long as no one comes along and sues us for using it.)

What's going on is a melding of business/development models where whether software was developed inhouse in the traditional product-marketing-driven fashion used by some IT suppliers, the engineering-driven fashion used by others, or by a community in the OSS fashion does not matter. Savio uses IBM as an example and admits his bias as an IBM employee who worked marketing the IBM Websphere Application Server Community Edition offering, formerly Gluecode. and formerly and still a key driver of Apache Geronimo. But he's on the right point even where his proof points require inside baseball knowledge of IBM's, Oracle's, BEA's, etc.'s business practices and detailed results.

A series of financial-market announcements this week by SAP, IBM, and others (with Microsoft likely to follow suit Thursday afternoon 7/19) show that a rising tide is raising all boats. Some of these suppliers are very dedicated to OSS; some pay it lip service, others find the model a yoke around their plans. But everyone is in the game; there is no "we vs. they."

Most important that tide will turn in 3-12 months so enjoy it while you can from an investor point of view. From an IT point of view:

-- If you are an ISV. OEM or service provider, build the product functionality and services structure you believe your potential customers need, not functionality only OSS can deliver. Do not base your business plan on OSS metaphysics. But use OSS to reduce development expense and time to market (two really great characteristics of cutting out the product marketing folks and engineering management). For example, use Websphere AS Community Edition during development and then make your product interoperable with the tens of thousands of classic WebSphere AS sites out there (maybe it's just one ten of thousands but it's still a lot of sites).
-- If you're an IT user that will continue to develop traditionally (as opposed to moving to SaaS and component development), use OSS tools and apps that improve your enterprise's competitiveness (and give back to the community from which you take).
-- If you are part of the increasing percentage of end users going SaaS, enjoy the summer and pay your monthly fee on time to avoid the late charge. None of this matters to you.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Business Issue | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I had no sooner finished blogging about the need for better definitions of open source sotware (OSS), Web 2.0, SaaS, and other buzzwords when a link put me on to a couple of posts that talk about OSS as a business model. The jist of my thought process here is that the OSS community has to agree on some terminology and definitions underlying the historical and current-day dynamics of information technology (IT) markets in order to avoid talking past each other the way that happens in religious arguments. Walk in the other guys' shoes; all that sort of good stuff.

In making my point on business models, I am using this post quoting Marten Mickos of MySQL. But I saw multiple academic and press versions along the same lines. The idea of all the articles was to give advice to entrepeneurs using OSS.

According to the blog post, Marten identifed a list of business models (see below). I do not know for sure if he is the source of course but wherever they came from they grossly overlap and mix up OSS community/culture with selling software. The result is some potentially misleading advice. The most important thing to remember if you are thinking of using OSS to start a business is just that: you are using OSS, you are not becoming OSS and there is no separate market for OSS. There is no business techniques on the lists I saw that are new to the IT industry or even dependent on OSS (Note I am using the other post's wording and avoiding the argument about what free and open really mean, should mean, or that people believe they mean metaphysically.)

- "Software is free but we need donations and subsidies to survive." Apache Software Foundation, Eclipse, and ObjectWeb are given as examples but I suggest IBM Common and Share circa 1955, or Digital Equipment's DECUS circa 1965, are equally good examples. Of course it is also misleading to consider this a business model since none of these organizations are in business.
- "Software is free but we sell ads and placements." Mozilla is given as an example. I am not sure how the Mozilla ad-based monetization program works (can't find it mentioned on the Mozilla web site) but the concept dates back almost 100 years to U.S. radio broadcasting. To me Mozilla is a better example of the OSS trend of open sourcing a product after a period of charging money for a license. I have no objection to anyone giving away their property (I am doing it right now) but it's not a new business model, it's sales tactic (see comment about cheese lady below).
-- "Software is free but if you embed it in closed source, you better pay a fee." Marten uses MySQL and others as examples. I guess he'll give MySQL to me to play around with but anyone that makes money with it gives him a cut; that's a business tactic called "Here's an SDK." I'm guessing the tactic is as old as SD.
-- "Software is free but services are not." Covalent is given as an example but this example is making my point: Covalent isn't selling software.
-- "Software is free but on-going maintenance, monitoring and provision of binaries is not." Red Hat is called out but I think this is misleading since the software is free from Fedora (but see the discussion about Apache, Eclipse at the beginning of the list). Covalent and Red Hat are basically the same types of business and those businesses do not sell software.

This is the second most important business-model item in the list. If you are going into the service business, make sure you are prepared to give service.

-- "Software is free but some enterprise features are not." SugarCRM, Zimbra, JasperSoft are given as examples. Just like the lady in the supermarket handing out free cheese.
-- "Software is free but we built a closed-source product around it" EnterpriseDB and GreenPlum are used but if they are examples of this behavior (I am not sure), that makes them just plain old software developers/independent software vendors, no new or different business model here.
-- "Software is free but hardware is not" Sun is singled out along with a PBX manufacturer but of course this is how the computer market began.
-- "Software is free but we sell everything else on the planet, including closed source software." This is a critical example; the list uses IBM but in fact any leading IT supplier can be plugged in.

The leading suppliers have used OSS magnificently to reduce their R&D expense and improve profits. Although buried here in the middle of the list, this is the business story behind OSS.

-- "Software is free but that's not our real business" Again, as with the first example, a hobby cannot be called out as a business model and provide the basis of a sensible discussion of options to ISVs.
-- "Software is free but we regret it." The list picks on Borland but see Mozilla above (and an increasingly long list of freeware products that are masquerading as OSS for marketing advantage).
-- "Software is free because we dumped it and don't want to see it any more." Actually no example was given, so as to diplomatically not offend anyone I think. I'll stick with that motive myself.
-- "Software is free because we want to drive web traffic." This is software as a service and a whole other post.

Bottom line: lists are fun but don't base any business decision on them especially if you have a mortgage or plan on paying for your kids' college educations in the U.S.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There was a good debate last week at O'Reilly Radar about the implications of open source software (OSS) in the movement to Software as a Service (SaaS). Of course it included all the "we vs. them." "we invented Web 2.0," "OSS adoption is massive," "we invented SaaS," and "we don't get no respect" that these inward-looking OSS blogs love.

But it showed why the IT industry needs to nail down some definitions and concepts before discussions like these begin in earnest. Political blogs are easy to follow because their followers have standard definitions for right/left, republican/democrat, blue/red, and so forth (if a third party were to ever take off in the U.S. it would put the political blogs out of business). Auto buffs have good online and cruise meetings because they all agree on the auto industry model. But IT industry conversations, especially OSS conversations, are more like religous wars with everyone talking past each other.

The O'Reilly blog post and subsequent comments were centered around the meaning of conveyance in the OSS licenses (thankfully it means about the same as it means in any contract). But the string wandered around to--among other things--predict the demise of Google. The reason Google might self-destruct in this scenario is that--of course--it is not open, despite its major use of OSS. But Google does not deliver SaaS in a way that can be compared so some really imaginative thinking about the future of IT falls apart, and splinters further.

So when reading any of these blogs, move up a level and ask what the buzzwords mean.

First, for example, OSS, SaaS, Web 2.0 and utility computing platform are in fact buzzwords, here today and gone tomorrow. The concepts underlying the words have been around for years and someone just gave them new names (with the exception that utilitiy computing was the name MIT originally gave it even before Richard Stallman started hanging out in its labs). OSS is user-group software taken to the next level. SaaS is ADP payroll processing taken to the next level. Web 2.0 is--of course--Web 1.0 taken to the next level.

Second, the concepts are neither competitive nor causative. One does not have to choose between OSS and SaaS nor did OSS enable SaaS (although I believe OSS will be a big enabler of SaaS predominance before the end of the next decade). Web 2.0 was happening without OSS; I forget exactly what Microsoft called it in 1995 (remote scripting something--see this feature article on our website). SaaS was happening without OSS; we called it application service provision (and timesharing service bureaus before that).

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If this is Tuesday, it must be time to write a Microsoft-GPL blog post. This debate is always a sure thing subject during the dog days of summer when nothing else of interest is happening.

Last week, Microsoft put out a statement in response to the Friday June 29 release of the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL v3). In what must be the understatement of the still young 21st century, it began: "Microsoft is not a party to the GPLv3 license …" Why would anyone think it was? The open source software (OSS) community itself—including many users of GPL v2 (not to mention users of Apache, Mozilla, Berkeley, etc. OSS licenses)—still seems pretty divided over the new GPL license wording so until the OSS world gets its act together, why care what Microsoft thinks?

Maybe Microsoft is just feeding the fire among the left and right wings of the OSS community, a little summertime sport? Apparently the Free Software Foundation (FSF) or allied organizations are now claiming that the GPL v3 wording applies retroactively to the Novell-Microsoft November 2006 agreement. This was the arrangement that included Microsoft giving out Novell SUSE Linux "coupons" thereby in some opinions becoming "distributors" of GPL v2-licensed Linux. Earlier the FSF founder was quoted (or interpreted) as saying that GPL v3 did not apply to the coupon caper. He said that the FSF would make changes to GPL v3 to make sure others could not do what Novell and Microsoft had done with GPL-licensed code but that the horse was out of the barn for last year's agreement.

Mary Jo Foley asks the question this way at her blog: "Is Microsoft legal holding a trump card that no one knows about? The answer is probably yes. Microsoft is really saying "we are not distributing no-stinking Linux, we're distributing coupons." Read the Microsoft statement again and you see that it is all about the certificates. After the opening understatement, the subject of the second, third and fifth sentences are the coupons. (The fourth and final sentences remind everyone that Microsoft has some patents in this area just in case anyone would like to contest them.)

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Matt Asay, business development VP at content-management software/service provider Alfresco and prolific blogger about open source software (OSS), attacks the International Herald Tribune (IHT) in this recent post. Matt’s reading something into this IHT article that I don’t see and then spinning it to make points unsupported by the facts. I humbly submit that I don't see what he sees because philosophically I’m agnostic about OSS and Matt’s fiercely all-knowing about it.

Asay's cherry picking like a good progagandist. For example, he hints at facts from a recent BusinessWeek article by Aaron Ricadela that says MySQL might go public as a proof point of OSS momentum. What he does not tell you is that that same BusinessWeek article (also on LinuxInsider) reports that MySQL is only getting one in a thousand downloads to turn into paying business, which is one of the points of the IHT article. (The BusinessWeek article does not provide its source for its data but it appears in a sentence preceded by a quote from MySQL's chairman and followed by a quote from MySQL's founder. I saw a similarly low ratio of conversions with JBoss when I was doing middleware research for IDC, a statistic borne out in JBoss revenue numbers revealed in subsequent Red Hat SEC filings after Red Hat acquired JBoss.)

I have had that word “agnostic” sitting up there beside my face all year and it’s probably time to explain what I mean. My difference with Matt and other fervent all-knowing OSS partisans is not religious or theological; it is strictly philosophical. Religious or theological analogies often associated with using the word agnostic are really not good analogs. Not to mention the fact that it does make sense to follow the old rule of keeping religion (or politics) out of a conversation (or a blog).

My philosophy is that “I don’t know everything.” Just as agnostics believe that we mere mortals can't know first truths and utlitmate causality, I don’t know the first truths and ultimate causes, etc. about OSS. I know only what I can see/hear when I talk to users about it. Or what I can clearly deduce from studying the numbers from statistically significant surveys. There’s a “senior” in front of my title on my business card and somewhere on this web site because I get a discount at the movies, not because I know more than than anyone else through some revelations. (And there's no inside baseball here either; leaks from the inside are another major source of spin. With someone like Matt Asay who is both an insider and someone with a revealed philosophy that the rest of us can't see, spin turns into a corkscrew.)

Having gone down the all-knowing road 25 years ago in the minicomputer wars, I do know agnosticism is the right way to go philosophically. It makes common sense as well because as the minicomputer marketers were shooting at each other, workstations and PCs marched right in and took over the industry. To some extent that has already happened to the OSS movement in the way it has been co-opted by the leading IT providers (although I could also argue that the IT providers have been taken over by the OSS community).

Unlike Matt apparently, when I look at IDC numbers I see users spending more and more on IT services and IT-based business services than ever and not really caring at all about what technology’s under the covers of those services. That's what makes the OSS movement so interesting and worthy of this new Open Source microsite on ebizQ. OSS is going to stand or fall on its technical merits and functionality--like mufflers and transmissions in the auto industry--and not on PR spin from anyone.

Unlike Matt, I see the ISVs and IT-based services providers that I talk to—from Google to my local savings bank—react to these users, their customers, and demand open choice, including OSS but also legacy systems and Windows along with OSS and choice in their associated middleware and packaged applications. The channel, including OEMs as well as ISVs and SaaS providers, will be making the decisions but the OSS community will be building out the infrastructure in an almost pure environment in which the cream will rise to the top.

Unlike Matt, I see the LAMP stack no more or less prevalent than the WAMP stack in the long run (Linux eventually replacing all Unix) with the Oracle database, maybe an open sourced Oracle database, much more pervasive than any other offering.

Where there are attempts at conversion to a philosophy in the OSS movement, users are drawing the blinds and locking their doors. And when I look at this IHT article, I see "just the facts ma’am" with no philosophy masquerading as fact (there are a few factual errors however). I hope to provide the same as ebizQ increases coverage of OSS. If I fail, call me on it.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Construction- and architectural-industry analysts don’t spend a lot of time on hammers and saws; IT-industry analysts don’t spend a lot of time on integrated development environments and frameworks. Yet if you like to design and build physical things with wood and metal as I do, you quickly realize why you have to have both claw and ball-peen hammers and a wide selection of teeth-per-inch in your saw blades. That is a weird way of saying that I have not paid enough attention to open source software (OSS) development tools in this blog space. This is primarily because shortly after I trained as a COBOL programmer in 1969/1970, I became an IT marketeer and never did anything really productive.

That is going to change in a couple of ways this month. Maybe you have noticed that Open Source now gets its own tab right above these words and on the ebizQ.net home page. Along with SOA, BPM, Security and so forth, Open Source coverage will be expanded and part of that expansion will be a good hard look at the tools available to build OSS applications and deployment software, such as operating systems and middleware. In fact, I plan to give OSS tools the same “weight” of my attention as I have given packaged applications and middleware/Linux as I continue to blog under this new format and also add feature articles that go into more depth than a blog post can.

So the timing of this Red Hat story last week and my change in emphasis was interesting. When I talked to Tim Yeaton of Red Hat back in May, he suggested I get up to speed on Red Hat’s relationship with Exadel in order to better understand where they were going to help developers. There was speculation in the press at the time that Red Hat would be acquiring some of its solutions partners but he said look at Exadel to see Red Hat's direction.

I had that meeting last week just as Red Hat was expanding its developer-centric efforts. JBoss.org, which is to middleware at Red Hat what Fedora is to operating software, created the JBoss Tools project, a step toward delivering Red Hat Developer Studio, an entirely OSS integrated development environment (IDE), later this summer. Exadel, an OSS professional services firm, had contributed Eclipse plug-ins, Ajax4jsf and RichFaces in March 2007 to get the ball rolling on the OSS IDE. (If you can’t wait, starting last week, developers can download plug-ins from JBoss Tools to compile their own IDE with tooling for Java EE and Ajax development.)

Not being a developer guy, I would have thought Eclipse already delivered on that need but Red Hat believes that pieces of Eclipse above "core Eclipse" are not OSS and that effectively that makes Eclipse just a framework rather than an IDE. (In addition to a definition debate between framework and IDE, note from this reference in a recent post that we will also be following a growing debate about what is truly OSS, what is hybrid OSS—and whether that matters—and what is out and out freeware masquerading as OSS.)

One thing I will be looking for and that my marketing development/investment research background says should be a natural is a connection between the Red Hat Developer Studio and the Red Hat Exchange, Red Hat’s growing list of solutions provider partners. If Exchange members use the Studio, it is going to be easier for other community members to add on to and expand the Exchange catalog. If the OSS movement is going to continue its momentum, it needs to keep pace with activity at Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and elsewhere to make thousands of OSS minisolutions available to the community (also called objects, applets, enterprise application components, services, and so forth over the years).

Red Hat says stay tuned. We ask you to stay tuned as well as ebizQ.net turns up the volume on OSS. Click that XML or RSS button to the right right now.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Development | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Bob Walters, with more than 15 years of experience in security-software company executive management, joined two-year-old Metavize shortly before New Year’s 2007. Since then he has revamped its business model. He has put more emphasis on software than hardware in providing gateway security. He is increasing coverage outside the U.S. And because the Metavize framework already made extensive use of open source software (OSS), on June 26 he made the framework itself OSS.

Walters’ version of OSS falls into the hybrid category under debate within the Open Solutions Initiative (OSI) community. The OSI contention is that you can't tangle up OSS and proprietary software and still call it OSS, even if it's free. True OSS has to be distributable and of course open source. But Walters software doesn’t look to me like the freeware that many companies are beginning to pass off as OSS. About 85% of the software is free and distributable under the GNU General Public License v2 (GPL v2). [As with many industry participants, Walters is taking a wait-and-see attitude on GPL Version 3.]

Under both GPLs, community members are free to use most of the technology to use, modify and even distribute. Specifically all the software in the Gateway Platform, including applications like Web Filtering, Spam Blocking, Spyware and Virus Blocking, and VPN is included. Active directory integration, advanced policy management and configuration backup are still “closed.” And the company appears to be giving back to the community, or at least trying to. It added full blown quarantine to Spamassassin but the Spamassassin community declined to take it into its distro. That enhancement will become OSS via Untangle.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the company name also changed to Untangle (I’m not sure if that decision was made before Walters joined; the two items were announced on the same day). But not everything changed. Walters has kept the emphasis (1) on small and medium businesses (SMB) and (2) on delivering the Metavize/Untangle threat management software functionality as a service (SaaS). If you’re not familiar with the space (as I wasn’t), Untangle does for servers and gateways what MacAfee, Symantec, etc. do for desktops, giving SMB firms the advantage of not having to rely on blocking threats at the last threat point, the desktop.

Untangle says that IDC calculates that revenue for “threat management devices” total over $3B annual today and are growing at 16% per year. The market has been dominated by the appliance vendors, according to Untangle, with OSS security products relegated to point solution status.

The Untangle Gateway Platform is available on SourceForge. Remember the product can be used to manage threats against any software, not just OSS. And you may be using it already under another name because much of Untangle’s distribution is through third party service providers that change the name.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Business Issue | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)