I had an interesting “meeting” recently with Kim Weins, Marketing VP, and Steven L. Grandchamp, CEO, of OpenLogic. The Denver-area-based company is among those driving the inevitable consolidation of the open source software (OSS) market but with a strategy that preserves the OSS culture. I did not hold their preference for the Colorado Rockies over the Boston Red Sox in the World Series against them. Like good salespeople everywhere, they looked for the positive, saying what a great year the New England Patriots were having.

The CEO explained the background. Open Logic was founded as a consultancy back in the late 1990s, with a mission from large enterprise clients to do something to rationalize all the OSS products then starting to permeate the clients’ IT shops. Right from the start OpenLogic avoided one of the biggest stumbling blocks that more purist OSS companies run into, only dealing with OSS. The company (Steve and Kim had not joined at that point) realized that large IT users needed to not only integrate the different pieces of OSS code finding their way onto large-enterprise servers but to also integrate the OSS with other software, no matter how it is developed, licensed or distributed.

Unlike me, the OpenLogic executives are not “open choice” by philosophy. Instead they are “open choice” because that’s what the market is telling them.

Beginning in 2002, OpenLogic began to productize software it had developed to support its consultancy. That software has grown in various versions into a library of over 300 certified OSS distros, a knowledge base, some IT governance functionality, support software and an interesting product that lets users do a census of OSS on their installations.The latter is freeware available for download but not an OSS distribution itself. The company has almost totally exited the consulting business and partners instead with firms such as Unisys and Covalent. OpenLogic secured venture capital in separate funding rounds in 2005 and 2006.

So how does OpenLogic keep the OSS culture alive when they don’t even OSS their own software?

Interesting tactic: Although OpenLogic provides first-level support as part of its maintenance subscriptions, which are also available via a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering called OpenLogic Exchange (OLEX), Steve and Kim “employ” on a per-incident basis what they call the OpenLogic Expert Community. These are the same guys responsible for the distros in the OpenLogic library. If you take a look at the library you’ll find a line up of OSS' greatest hits. Therefore, the OpenLogic Expert Community gives OpenLogic’s enterprise clients easy access to many of the well known writers of OSS’s greatest hits without having to go foundation web site to company home page to consortium bulletin board to South Pacific island looking for the experts.

Aggregating the support as well as the distros is a great idea and I suspect Kim and Steve will have a few more good ideas up their sleeves. We’ll keep an eye on OpenLogic.

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

As discussed often in this blogspace, the real indicator of the long term health of the open source software (OSS) movement will involve the applications space (as in collaborative, content, analytical, ERP-plus and personal-productivity software). As of late 2007, OSS is mostly about operating infrastructure, mid-stack software and to a lesser extent data and database management.

So it is interesting that healthcare delivery applications are tending to lead the way. Back in February, leading healthcare delivery application provider McKesson and Red Hat announced the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform. It consisted of McKesson’s clinical applications prepackaged with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and JBoss middleware, providing a very cost effective package available via the Red Hat Network. But the McKesson software itself was not open sourced.

On October 24, 2007, Misys plc, also a healthcare delivery application software and services provider (but more involved with insurance and banking application development outside the United States), took it a step further. Misys said it was making its Misys Connect healthcare solution available to the OSS development community. It said “Misys Open Source Solutions, a division of Misys plc, was established to create and drive innovation in the marketplace; using open source to move toward open standards is a great step forward.”

I agree with the step forward. The PR release is loaded with celebrity quotes from the likes of Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and founder of the Center for Health Transformation (CHT), and Ronald W. Hovsepian, President and CEO of Novell Inc. (as in the leading Linux competitor to Red Hat). So I think the announcement is more PR than anything else. Misys Connect is a data-sharing application and only one of a dozen Misys applications, none of which were similarly released. But if OSS is going to take off, it needs to do it in the applications space and you have to start somewhere.

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

Update on October 22: Microsoft and EU settled this disagreement, at least for now, as the EU got to scold Microsoft and Microsoft gets to charge others what appears to be reasonable fees for its documentation and some of its interoperability protocols. The linked press release puts Microsoft's spin on the announcement. The EU version is on its web site.

Originally posed on September 28: On Monday September 17, the European Union (EU) Court of First Instance said that the EU Competition Commission (EU CC) was correct when it ruled in April 2004 that Microsoft acted to “abuse” a market it dominated. There is nothing wrong in market domination, just in abusing that domination. There were multiple aspects to the case but as a middleware guy at heart, my interest was in the so-called interoperability/protocols—open source software (OSS) portion of the initial EU CC ruling and the court’s recent concurrence.

Red Hat at first put out a press release congratulating the EU CC. Sometimes as an analyst you come across a factoid like that in your research and you say, “I understand that. It’s interesting but it’s irrelevant, a side issue.” I did a blog post on that Monday and moved on because I had actually completely analyzed the original ruling in a December 2006 research deliverable. Later, strangely in my opinion, Red Hat put out a press release that I would say, “scolded” the EU CC. As an analyst, it’s typical that because of some intervening event like the second Red Hat press release, you say “Now I don’t understand that and it may be really relevant.” So you interview a group of people, do extensive secondary research (an academic term for “surfing the web”), and then decide “Now I think it’s irrelevant again. On the other hand, if all of these other people care so passionately, I should at least tell their story.”

The subject of this week’s featured article, Hacker vs. Hacker, falls in the latter category at least for now. As I said I would in my Tuesday September 18 blog post, I scrambled and I put a week of deep dive into trying to understand the scold in particular and Microsoft’s inexplicable actions in this matter. Unlike my blog posts, which have a clear—I hope—point of view, the feature article is a straightforward research deliverable, attempting to summarize fairly both sides of a complex issue in less than 2000 words, and telling you what it means without burdening you with my biases. I do not believe that this is evident in the research deliverable but I admit a strong bias against the innovation-stifling ways of the Eurocracy. It dates to my days at the infamous Avenue Gambetta facility of Honeywell Bull in the early 1970s (see "Riots against CIA Involvement in the Allende Assassination”) and a lot of time spent later at Parc Monceau and La Defense for Data General. I leave my biases to my blogging, however.

Some subsequent intervening event may move my research to a fourth category feared by all analysts: “This did matter and I missed the significance.” But for now, the most interesting finding from my research into the EU handling of the Microsoft anti-trust matter and the OSS community's involvement and reaction is that software developers like to argue about the strangest things. My takeaway is that this is just a huge lose-lose for all parties involved. It is the Open Source Initiative (OSI) "license-discuss list" but with tens of millions of dollars to spend on lawyers. In the article I compare this Microsoft hacker vs. OSS hacker battle to the events portrayed in the movie Braveheart. In reality, I think the war between England and Scotland was settled quicker.

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I often get the question whether open source software (OSS) is “ready for prime time?” I typically use Google as an example and recite the litany of key line-of-business processes that Google has that are dependent on various types of OSS. Last week, an old-fashioned proof point was provided by the venerable Transaction Processing Performance Council, keeper of the holy grail of TPC benchmarks, the successor to the even more venerable credit/debit benchmark. Think of TPC as the people who run the ACID tests (as in are your transactions “atomic, consistent, isolated and durable?”).

Through the TPC, IBM announced that it has received what it claimed to be the highest TPC-C performance result ever achieved by a 4-processor server. The IBM System x3850 M2 was running DB2 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform and 64-bit IBM DB2 9.5. The configuration achieved 516,752 tpmC on the benchmark. IBM System x3850 M2 with the Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor X7350 2.93 Ghz (4 processors/16 core/16 threads) has an availability of March 14, 2008 (although the Red Hat part of the mix is available now).

Of course like MPG stickers on cars, TPC benchmarks come with caveats. As the TPC says “You must understand what the benchmark is intended to measure, before you can understand throughput. Throughput, in TPC terms, is a measure of maximum sustained system performance. In TPC-C, throughput is defined as how many New-Order transactions per minute a system generates while the system is executing four other transactions types (Payment, Order-Status, Delivery, and Stock-Level). All five TPC-C transactions have a certain user response time requirement, with the New-Order transaction response time set at 5 seconds.” Therefore, for the 516,752 tpmC number cited by IBM, a system is generating over a half-million New-Order transactions per minute while fulfilling the rest of the TPC-C transaction mix workload

Now the thing this OSS agnostic and open choice advocate admires is that this high-performance transaction load is monitored not through the equally venerable IBM Customer Information Control System (CICS), not through ATT/Novell/BEA Tuxedo, but through Microsoft Com+ (within Windows Server 2003 Web Edition) sitting out at the configuration’s 16 theoretical desktops. Whatever it takes should be the motto of IT folks.

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

I promised some time back to look more at open source software (OSS) development tools.

So far, I have failed in that objective because of all the interest in
-- Microsoft "going OSS" (in my IT investement research analysis, I have even hypothesized about Microsoft acquiring Red Hat and Steve Ballmer accomodated my hypothesis at the Web 2.0 conference today by saying "anything's possible")
-- so-called "Linux patent battles" (that have nothing to do with OSS)
-- the need for more applications in the OSS space to keep the OSS ball rolling.

So a press release that crossed the wire today from Evans Data broght me back to more important stuff such as what do software developers use and why. Evans' recent survey says the Eclipse OSS development framework is an up and coming means to do service oriented architecture (SOA)-based development.

Actually what the survey found was that the Genuitec's MyEclipse IDE was gaining in popularity, and because MyEclipse supports primarily OSS tools... ispo facto and all the Latin stuff. To be clear, MyEclipse is not OSS; you need to pay a whole $50 a year to subscribe to it. But here are all the OSS distributions included with MyEclipse. Not surprisingly, Evans says, Visual Studio is still the most popular integrated development environment (IDE) and IBM's Rational, Oracle's JDeveloper and BEA's Weblogic Workshop are popular SOA developement tools as well. All have OSS tie-ins but are not OSS themselves. Genuitec, Oracle and of course IBM are on the Eclipse Foundation board.

All this development talk also reminds that I will be presenting a discussion of OSS in SOA on October 30 here on ebizQ.net along with many other great sessions as part of ebizQ's annual SOA In Action virtual tradeshow. To register, click here.

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There is an open-source-software (OSS)-related “corporate/social responsibility” initiative at the November Oracle shareholders’ meeting and the Open Source Initiative (OSI) may weigh in on its merits. A pair of experienced corporate/social responsibility advocates has put a proposal on the Oracle proxy that requires the Oracle board to “issue, at reasonable expense, an Open Source Social Responsibility Report to shareholders by April 2008 that discusses the social and environmental impacts of Oracle’s existing and potential open source policies and practices.” The OSI board of directors may debate whether to take a pro or con or “beyond our remit” vote on the issue at its next board meeting on November 7. The Oracle shareholder meeting is on November 2 so any OSI debate would apparently be only for intellectual purposes, but would likely affect future proxy initiatives.

When I first saw fellow bloggers posting on this a few weeks ago, it went right past me like a Rafael Betancourt fast ball past Kevin Youkilis after 10 foul balls. Then I read it and said, “Why OSS?” And “Why Oracle?” And “Why Now?”

The sponsors kindly answered my questions even knowing my opposition to their idea. They indicated that proxy-question procedure is partially responsible for the wording of the proposal vis a vis OSS saving the world. SEC regulations forbid ballot questions that simply ask shareholders to vote on company operational aspects. For example, they could not ask investors to vote to have Oracle adopt OSS as its driving technology principle, although that is what they would like to see happen at Oracle and in other corporations. So, instead, their proposal asks for a report on how OSS contributes to Oracle’s social responsibility.

As for Oracle and timing, the reason is that the sponsors are experienced activist-investor advocates who are very busy in the winter and spring leading up to most corporation’s annual meetings. Because Oracle proxies in the fall, it was easier for them to approach Oracle on what they acknowledge is a personal pursuit. In the spring, they are too busy with other corporate-responsibility initiatives.

Still the effort makes the OSS community look bad, even though I can find no OSS-related organization involved. The proxy question has factual errors and confuses OSS with the standards movement. It uses IDC numbers that I have discussed in the past to point out how OSS is an infinitesimally small part of the overall software market (and actually an overlapping orthogonal software-market ecosystem anyways). Not surprisingly then, despite the proxy wording, OSS is not an important part of Oracle’s business either (and of course, Red Hat devotees would argue that Oracle is just barely better than Microsoft when it comes to OSS bonafides). In addition to real stretches such as OSS having environmental benefits and being in a position to save the “third world” (is there a third world anymore?), the question says OSS can contribute to transparency in government institutions (of course, as indicated in multiple places, some large IT suppliers tried to use OSS to decrease transparency here in Massachusetts state government).

I hope the OSI does consider the proposal if only for intellectual purposes and I urge the OSI directors to vote “no,” not because proxy questions are not part of its charter but because this particular proxy question does the OSS movement a disservice.

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

I received the following statement this afternoon from the Linux Foundation about the recent patent infringement suit filed by IP Innovation LLC against Red Hat and Novell.

"Novell and Red Hat will respond to this claim with the same energy and effectiveness as we saw Novell and IBM bring in their response to the allegations made by SCO. As in SCO, we have confidence that in the end the court will reach a just and right result. This case will aid those of us who are advocating the cause of patent reform by demonstrating the wasteful drain that the current process imposes on innovative activities. We are committed to continuing our vigorous support for meaningful amendment of the software patent laws."

I wrote Wednesday that I would not write anymore about Microsoft and patents but I felt duty bound to find out what the suit was about.

It has nothing to do with Microsoft it turns out (except according to some conspiracy theorists who have noted that three or four former Microsoft managers work for IP Innovation's parent company).

It also really doesn't seem to have much to do with Linux either (except that Red Hat Linux--but not Red Hat Enterprise Linux??--and Novell's Suse Linux are mentioned in the suit, the same way Apple OS/X was mentioned in exactly the same suit back in April).

It also doesn't seem to have any thing to do with SCO (except that SCO sued Novell years ago).

As you can see, the Linux Foundation seems to be going to some lenghts to make a point. But I am not getting the point. I know it wants patent reform; write your congressman.

The suit does appear to have something to do with windows (but not that Windows, just generic windows as in Xerox Parc, circa 1987) and how the operating system--the two Lini mentioned above in this case, OS/X back in April--open and shut them. The conspiracy theorists seem to be stretching because the Applie lawsuit was filed before the Microsoft guys all joined the company.

Go to the parent company's web site, Acacia Technologies, and you find Red Hat has joined some elite company. Everyone else that is anybody in the IT industry has already been sued by these guys (or have bought some rights from them, which apparently is how you keep from getting sued). Novell's name appears regularly along with IBM, Oracle, SAP, EMC, CA, Sage and McAfee in addition to Apple. And these are just the companies in the IT market that deal with Acacia, some kind of patent clearinghouse.

I know everyone's waiting for THE court test. And poor PJ at Groklaw is afraid she's out of business if it doesn't come fast. But this ain't it folks.

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

As anyone that blogs or writes regularly knows, you always want to keep a little scrapbook of ideas nearby in case there’s a slow news day but your editor still wants you to fill up the spot beside your photo with something new.

Today is such a slow news day. So I went through my scrap paper and the best I can come up with Ms. Book is a list of open source software (OSS) blog post ideas that I refuse to blog about:

• I will not blog about the iPhone, whether or not it uses OSS or interacts with OSS. I am just sick of hearing about iPhone.
• I will not blog about Business Week’s article on Sun’s OSS strategy. But our subscribers should look at the article.
• I will not blog about OpenOffice until it has an email function. Until then, it might better be called OpenDesk.
• I will not blog about Google buying Jaiku. It would very quickly deteriorate into an iPhone story.
• I will not blog about the two guys leaving Thunderbird. Any OSS project that is that dependent on two guys is not real community.
• I will not blog about “cloud computing.” Been there, done that; see Data General and N.T.T. circa 1987.
• I will not blog anymore about Microsoft accusations that OSS violates its patents. That subject is hot again this week but the story is two years old and I said all I can say about it here in June.
• I don’t think I’ll blog any more about the Open Source Initiative (OSI) debating the Microsoft Public and Reciprocal licenses. I updated my September 10 posting below. It looks like a done deal. (I guess I’ll have to go back to that well though in the highly unlikely case that the OSI board turns Microsoft down.)

Instead, I think I will do some research into the Oracle proxy statement asking shareholders to vote in favor of OSS. So look for a post on Friday. And I will write about the new Pentaho Business Intelligence (BI) tools in an upcoming ebizQ deliverable on OSS BI like this ebizQ feature article from a few weeks ago.

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

Download file

A few weeks ago I talked with Mark Osofsky, VP of Marketing at OSS services supplier Optaros. As I do in all my “Talking to…” interviews, we talked about trends in the open source software (OSS) community and their effects on the IT market. I also invited Marc to participate in this week’s OSS podcast. Marc has a lot of good points about future trends in OSS. He intersects with my key mantra, “that OSS applications are the key to continued success for the movement.”

So let’s hear from Marc.

These four to five minutes go into more detail.

Posted by dennisb in Podcast | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Update: Russ Nelson (see below) has forwarded the Microsoft licenses to the OSI board for approval with the recommnedation that the board approve them. Approval is almost certain.

More important Update: The Red Sox (see below) cannot lose to the Yankees because the Yankees were eliminated by the Cleveland Indians and a swarming infestation of Lake Erie "Canadian gnats" released onto Jacobs Field by the Free Software Foundation (see below), which is based in Boston.

Originally posted 9/10: Microsoft moved closer to getting two of its “shared-source” licenses declared open source software (OSS) licenses by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) this week. The OSI president seems to have interpreted a Microsoft posting to the “license-discuss” list as asking the OSI board for a vote. And Microsoft also said it would make name changes to satisfy OSI “license-discuss” list concerns.

The OSI is the acknowledged guardian of the OSS license review process. It functions to review and rate licenses from many sources including Apache, Berkeley, other non-profit OSS communities, and individual companies such as Sun and IBM, as well as the much better known Free Software Foundation (FSF). The OSI promotes “10 characteristics of OSS” while FSF claims there are only four characteristics (numbered 0-3). The FSF has a strident, but intellectually honest, all-or-nothing approach to OSS. The FSF is stricter about its OSS interpretation methodology, and supports basically only one OSS license, the GNU General Public License (GPL), with some minor derivations. It uses the GPL for software developed by its companion GNU project community and urges other communities to adopt it.

As an aside, the FSF is also opposed to open choice between OSS and non-OSS products by users, digital rights, various international intellectual property protections, the use of the term “open source,” the use of the term Linux without the word GNU in front of it, and—most likely—global warming. I mention the latter only because, sitting here in New England on what is sure to be the last real day of summer (in the 80s, the leaves about to turn, the Red Sox closing in on a divisional title but still likely to lose to the Yankees in the cold winds of October play-off season), I am becoming partial to global warming.

The OSI process of approving a license is less formal than the lengthy process used during 2006 and 2007 by the FSF in crafting the GPL’s latest version. The OSI does not write licenses but simply affirms that one meets its criteria if the author asks. If approved, the author can use the OSI logo as a sort of Good Housekeeping seal of approval. That is about to happen with the Microsoft Permissive License (MS-PL) and Microsoft Community License (MS-CL) if the OSI does not change the rules during the second half of the game, which some Microbashers are suggesting.

Michael Tiemann, the OSI President, former Red Hat CTO and founder of Cygnus, has written approvingly of the fact that Microsoft asked and of its willingness to cooperate. Russell Nelson, former OSI president and License Approval chairman (at least until March of 2008) has prepared a preliminary report to the license-review committee and the OSI board that indicates that most of the group is supportive of Microsoft’s request. Microsoft has agreed to change the names to the Microsoft Open License (nee MS-PL) and Microsoft Reciprocal License (nee MS-CL). Presumably Nelson will prepare a final summary of the committee’s opinion for the board shortly.

Typically the board votes yeah or nay as soon as practical after the submitter asks for the vote, which Microsoft sort of did this week (it appears from a Tiemann email that Microsoft did not quite understand the process). As I said, the OSI is fairly informal; apparently the OSI even approved the GPL’s latest version although the FSF, not surprisingly, did not ask.

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

Red Hat’s statistics-based announcement on October 4 that it has a “rapidly growing portfolio of certified ISV applications that customers can select to run– 3,000 certified applications” actually highlights a major problem.

Those are not primarily applications by anyone else’s definition of the word, not software that accountants, architects, bank clerks, clinicians and so forth touch on a daily basis. Close to 90% of the applications according to the charts released by Red Hat are infrastructure software used by IT developers or systems administrators. As I pointed out here in another context, the IBM, Microsoft, Sun, and so forth ecosystems include thousands of actual end-user applications and can be measured in the billions of dollars in revenue.

Red Hat is trying to reverse that proportion through the Red Hat Exchange (RHX). Red Hat desperately needs a real applications ecosystem to kick in from RHX before the larger companies catch up to Red Hat in embracing open source software (OSS). They are already well on their way to the point that any market research that tries to bifurcate the software market between OSS and proprietary is already flawed. On the positive side, that ecosystem does not have to include only OSS applications. All applications—whatever the development model and/or terms and conditions of their licenses--which run on an OSS stack, will help Red Hat. The Red Hat stack consisting of RHEL and the assortment of middleware it has built up via the JBoss and Metamatrix acquisitions is its leading advantage.

Another success factor pointed out by Red Hat is the API/ABI (application programming/binary interface) stability that is an important element of every Red Hat Enterprise Linux release. ISVs do not need to keep re-certifying their products and customers do not need to keep installing updates to keep them running.

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

Attention all open source software (OSS) application server/web server middleware software organizations:

I am researching the next in a series of open-source-software (OSS)-related Research Reports for ebizQ. Previous reports have covered ESBs and business intelligence software (scheduled forOctober release). This one will focus on OSS application server/web server software and services, including software as a service (SaaS) offerings. The ebizQ article on OSS application server/web server software is tentatively scheduled for release on ebizQ.net in November.

If you would like to formally participate in my data collection, please download and complete the 1-page survey form (see "Download File" below) and return to dennis@ebizq.net by Thursday October 18.

Download file

Note that as the survey indicates, application server/web server products will be covered in the report if they use OSS (e.g., bundle in classic Apache web server software) even if they are not “sold” as OSS and no matter how they are monetized.

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Over at IT gumbo (also syndicated on this tab at ebizQ), Alex Fletcher asks if the broad-brush analyst firms such as IDC, Gartner and so forth are giving open source software (OSS) a fair shake. I answered him philosophically on this subject and I can also answer specifically about how IDC approached its analysis of open source software (OSS) at least until a year ago. That’s because I co-authored the IDC Software Taxonomy for the years 2000 through 2006.

Using Alex’s terms, IDC was (and I think still is) what he called "open source friendly." I think it could more accurately be called "source-source neutral." The IDC software research and analysis methodology did not care who developed the source code or whether it was free of or encumbered by license restrictions. OSS always got its proper due.

In doing demand-side research (asking users what they are doing or thinking about doing), the key question was "Do you use xyz?" “How do you use xyz?” “Why do use…”, and so forth. There was no attempt to bias the question in favor of proprietary software. In fact, since important IDC clients tended to be the so-called "proprietary software" suppliers, there was a huge demand by them to know to what extent OSS was permeating their customers.

In doing supply-side research (asking suppliers what they were thinking or doing), IDC measured all software by the same two basic metrics: revenue and/or units shipped, no matter the source of the source. Counting the "free, unpaid user" was not an issue in the revenue metric because we measured all costs, not just license fees. And it was easy to correlate the units shipped info back to what the users said on the demand side.

More product specific feature/function analysis was equally balanced. Correlating millions of OSS downloads with actual usage is not a new phenomenon. I can't divulge private IDC data but I can say the proportion of OSS downloads to real "free users" this decade is about the same as the proportion of post-office-delivered AOL CDs to real AOL users in the 1990s.

Philosophically, the bigger issue faced by Gartner, IDC etc. in analyzing OSS is that there really is no such thing as an "open source vendor." As Mark Driver of Gartner pointed out at the ebizQ/Gartner seminar on August 9th (still available for replay here at ebizQ.net), "by 2012, 80% of all commercial software solutions will include OSS components." He points out that by that time what he calls "Commercial Open Source" will far outweigh what Mark calls "Patronage Open Source" in user hearts and minds. In eality, they won't even perceive a difference.

Therefore all the assumptions that have always been used by analyst firms will work exactly the same way in analyzing the commercial OSS world. To analyze the patronage OSS world, if you agree with Mark's division of the OSS world that way, size of community, conference participation, and so forth--qualitative metrics us grey-beard marketeers always used for user groups--is one way actionable analysis might be developed.

But it would be an analytical mistake to try to mix the two. It would be like J.D. Power somehow trying to judge classic-car enthusiasts or sports-car rallyists in the same breath as monthly car sales and overall user-based vehicle-satisfaction figures.

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

Per a post I put up back in April, I said that one of the biggest issues in blogging about and researching open source software (OSS) is keeping track of the products, communities, and commercial backers. At the time I said the scorecard was timed to the beginning of the baseball season so now here is a revision timed to the beginning of the baseball playoffs.

There's pretty much a one to one to one relationship among the products, communities and backers but that relationship is not always obvious. Even for the simplest connections. For example, it's probably intuitive that the Mozilla portal is built by the Mozilla Foundation which is backed by the Mozilla Corporation. But it is probably not obvious that whole string really unravels all the way back through AOL to the original Netscape browser. As for something more convoluted but not unusual: the Sleepycat OSS database project is really a derivative of the Berkeley database that forked out of UNIX at System V time but the community is now backed by Oracle, which purchased Sleepycat in 2005.

Some OSS has a community but no commercial backing (such projects don't usually last too long). Others have commerical backing but no community. Sometimes, that is intentional and the product is really freeware rather than actual OSS. But in other cases, it is is because the project is just getting off the ground.

So to keep the players straight I have updated that scorecard. It is available as a free download by clicking where it says "Download file" immediately below. The taxonomy behind the scorecard is explained in more detail in this ebizQ.net feature article released in July. The article includes a short version of the OSS scorecard.

Let me know if there are other OSS projects you would like to see added--yours or something you want me to research.

Download file

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