I live on Cape Cod and spent so much time with an airline seat strapped to my back for 30 years that I feel no strong reason to leave.

But when I do, one of my favorite places to visit is the San Francisco Bay area. If I don’t have the days it takes to head up to Crescent City, CA, I can get a taste of the redwoods right there in Muir Woods or down in Big Basin. Head out of San Jose to the East Bay the back way for a couple of hours via Mount Hamilton to Livermore and it’s like riding in the Colorado high country. If I’m homesick for Cape Cod I can head out to Point Reyes. (If you’re familiar with Cape Cod but not Northern California, Point Reyes is a National Seashore Park the size of the entire Cape, not just its outer forearm.)

So what does this travelogue have to do with open source?

Well all you bay area open source community members have a way to keep the region "green" for when I visit. Untangle (see previous post) and the Alameda County Computer Resource Center (ACCRC) have partnered to donate hundreds of open-source-software-based computers to Bay Area schools through an “Installfest” to be held Saturday March 1, 2008. They need volunteers to install Ubuntu, Firefox, OpenOffice and more on recycled computers provided by the ACCRC. The volunteers are needed in four locations: San Francisco, San Mateo, Berkeley or Novato.

To signup and volunteer for the Installfest please visit: http://www.untangle.com/installfest

By the way, if you come to Cape Cod, some folks are doing their bit to keep it "green" as well. A proposal is in review with the Federal government, supported by the Sierra Club and others, to build a wind farm in the Sound. It will provide 75% our electricity. NIMBY Kennedy, our summer-visitor U.S. senator, and his otherwise ecology-centric nephew Robert are fighting it but it looks like it will happen. But I digress from a travelogue to politics.

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

Like New England weather, if you don't see what you expect, wait a minute.

When I was surveying for business process management (BPM) software with an open source software (OSS) development model and OSS Ts&Cs back in December 2007, efforts such as ActiveBPEL and Intalio that combined both were few and far between. Of course, Red Hat's jBPM and Sun's BPM efforts are also in the space as part of wider OSS efforts. The article that summarized my search for up and coming BPM players can be downloaded here by joining the ebizQ.net Gold Club.

General research said that BPM/EAI/integration software is among the most complex software developed and offered in the market. Therefore—conventional wisdom said—it is no place for the OSS culture and development model. Our findings disagreed and so apparently does a new entrant in the space, Colosa. Colosa announced February 25 that it was open sourcing its BPM package ProcessMaker.

In an email interview, CEO Brian Reale, CEO of Colosa, said he offers:
1.) an On Demand version which runs on their inhouse server cluster
2.) an OSS Version which can be downloaded for free and installed on Windows or Linux
3.) an Enterprise Version
The difference between the enterprise/On-Demand version and the OSS version is that the Enterprise Version comes with Support and some additional management features for Dashboards and Reporting.

Colosa, with South American roots and a U.S. office in Florida, is open sourcing its product according to Reale because it was built on the LAMP stack and users and partners were telling them that there are few BPM or Workflow tools available in PHP. (I have not had time to research that claim but if that's what partners were telling himI don't have to.)

Colosa is aiming its BPM/Workflow solution for the mid-sized company, and believes that OSS offers good distribution channel to reach the mid-sized company. Actually I have not seen that trend develop yet because OSS products typically require IT staff skills typically not found in the midmarket. But I expect that trend to develop and it does not hurt to be a little out ahead of the curve.

The real objective is to get Colosa's ProcessMaker workflow functionality into other ISVs products and you can't beat OSS for that purpose.

Colosa has been in business since October of 2000. However, initially it only produced specialized workflows for the Reinsurance Industry Vertical, according to Reale

So try it especially if you're an ISV looking for some workflow functionality. That's the advantage of OSS.

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Here's a breath of sensibility in the midst of the open source software (OSS) movement's explosion of Microbashing on the blogosphere beginning February 21.

Nicholas Negroponte is quoted February 24 in the Boston Globe as follows:

"One of the argument here at OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) is, if 100 million kids could have an Asus running Windows, is that better with (sic) two million kids running the XO? And the answer is yes. We want kids connected and the largest possible number is the goal."

XO is the OLPC laptop that bundles a Red-Hat/Fedora-based Linux but could also run Microsoft Windows . It has a price tag goal of $100 but OLPC has moved its price tag down to about $200 at this point as production ramps up. That is still lower than Asustek's series of Eee PCs, some bundled with Xandros Linux and some with Windows XP, beginning at about $245 (subject to exchange rate variations since the Asustek's announcement in 2007) .

The real ideal is billions of kids running whichever they like. Or even both. Unfortunately manipulative politicians around the world, supported by corporations that are anti-competition (in the name of "wanting a level playing field") will get involved and muck up the ideal.

But at least Mr. Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop per Child Foundation, has his head on straight.

Congratulations.

(By the way, I do not mean to imply that the stories about OLPC and the Microsoft open source interoperability principles are related. The Negroponte interview by Hiawath Bray in the February 24 Boston Sunday Globe was most likely conducted prior to Microsoft's announcement.)

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Over at Research 2.0 (see link at right), I’ve analyzed the big-picture on Microsoft’s open-source interoperability “principles” announcement of February 21. Despite the words open source in the press release, the announcement was really about Microsoft’s long-term strategy to move to services. In executing this emerging strategy, Microsoft management could care less about mundane closed or open technology terms and conditions. And it could care even less about standards because all the technology—standard or not, open source or proprietary—will eventually all be behind the curtain. In fact, the press conference was delayed because Microsoft couldn't believe so many reporters and analysts even cared about this subject, and didn't have enough operators to handle the call-in volume.

But Microsoft still has pesky courts and government regulators out there wandering around Oz and it doesn’t need them arriving at the castle like Dorothy and Toto some day. So in the announcement, Microsoft said it was opening the APIs for all of its volume software products (Windows Vista, the .NET Framework, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007), writing some new ones for those that still want to fight about the Open Office XML (OOXML) standard, opening all interfaces used by Microsoft itself in tying its volume products to “other Microsoft products,” and listening even more than ever to its customers.

All good stuff if you like to get down into the engine and get your hands greasy. Most users and enterprises have better things to do.

The open source “news” is that Microsoft basically put its open source software (OSS) agreements with the European Union Competitive Commission into Microspeak. Nothing changes since October from an OSS perspective that I can see.

Attorney Carlo Piana, with whom I spoke in September 2007 when Microsoft lost its appeal at the European Court of First Instance (EU CFI), seems to agree. He said the announcement was “another vague declaration of principles, with no apparent real commitment.” He seems to feel if Microsoft won’t explicitly abandon OOXML then it is not serious about interoperability. I disagree with Carlo only in that OOXML is not an OSS issue. Open standards are not the same as open source and standards are simply whatever most users buy (see Blue-Ray vs. HD DVD, betamax tapes, and so forth).

Red Hat won’t give up its criticism of Microsoft easily even as it works with Microsoft to make JBoss middleware work better on Windows. Red Hat released a statement that said it “regards this most recent (Microsoft OSS) announcement with a healthy dose of skepticism.” It wants Microsoft to drop OOXML (as mentioned above, not an OSS issue and only tangentially an interoperability issue), extend the Microsoft “Open Specification Promise” (i.e., give up all patent protections) and “Commit to competition on a level playing field” (get out of the Office software market I guess). As noted here before, Red Hat increasingly wants protectionism rather than a level playing field. It didn't need government regulations to grow 30%/40% a year in the past. Why is Red Hat whining now?

I am still a little mystified about the free-software-oriented organization called the Protocol Information Freedom Foundation (PFIF) formed in December 2007 to facilitate the EU CFI agreement between Microsoft and Samba. Carlo Piana is a director of PFIF and says the Microsoft announcement does not change any of its obligations under the agreement Samba signed with PFIF and PFIF signed with Microsoft at that time. He says “the PFIF arrangement is there because of a Decision, confirmed by the CFI, which became definitive, and there is an agreement with obligations and a supervising authority.”

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I spoke with Mike Bates, CEO of HotWax Media, this week, following up on research I did recently on his IT-service-provider company and the entire open source ERP market. A summary of the research appears in a recent ebizQ article (off to the left of my head on the main Open Source page, depending on when you read this) titled “Can OSS ERP Projects Meet User Demand?”

The article asks the question: Are there any “market seams” that ERP open source software (OSS) can exploit? The issue is that all of the OSS ERP projects we researched are going to end up competing for IT budgets coveted not just by other OSS product and service providers but by Microsoft Business Division, Oracle, and SAP as well.

That is not as foolhardy an objective as it sounds. Mike Bates explained that he and his partners at HotWax are looking at local government and other industry-specific sectors underserved by the big-name ERP providers. HotWax already provides ERP services for a slew of the Internet-commerce companies on which it originally built its 10-year-old business. HotWax Media might not think of it this way but my research methodology says HotWax is already a leader in a major growing subsegment of the retail automation market, Internet Commerce, a sector underserved by everyone else (but Microsoft).

That’s what I call a “seam.” There are thousands of such seams to be found by slicing the market (as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP do) by industry, size of company targeted, number of employees in the company targeted, geography, and so forth.

Although HotWax started out building and maintaining web sites for users, it has morphed into an ERP services supplier via a major involvement in the Apache OfBIZ ERP project. HotWax counts both OFBiz project creators David Jones and Andrew Zeneski on its executive team, and also leads teams comprised of many of the OFBiz developers. It maintains no forge of its own but works totally through the Apache Software Foundation (see this recent report from Apache for more information).

By the way, showing my age, I had to have Mike explain that HotWax was a popular song when he was forming his company 10 years ago (by the group Beck). I looked at the lyrics and I am going to have take his word for it. They are no more cryptic than the classic line "I took my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry," part of the refrain from the ode that honors "the day the music died."

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

Download file

In a recent blog I introduced Exist Global and its chairman Winston Damarillo. The news was that he was combining Exist Global, a software engineering services firm headquartered in the Philippines, with DevZuz, a developer of delivery platforms that link enterprise businesses to application development projects and processes. There were open source connections all over the merger.

But Winston is really interesting because he is also a founder of Webtide and chairman of Morph Labs and was a founder of Gluecode, which was sold to IBM in 2005, and LogicBlaze, which was acquired by Iona in 2007. These companies have products that are outgrowths of Apache Software Foundation (ASF) or other open-source-related projects—the Jetty Java web container, the Amazon EC2 environment, the Geronimo application server and the Synapse integration broker respectively. The latter became IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, and part of Iona’s FUSE (see recent blog on Iona's Larry Alston) respectively.

In other words, if you are interested in making a business out of open source software (OSS) terms and conditions and its development model, Winston is a guy you need to hear.

Today in this podcast of about 5 minutes in length we hear from Winston Damarillo about the business of open source and the importance of community in building that business.

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Long ago and far away in the infancy of the Internet, research I was doing at the time for McGraw-Hill's Datapro led me to start using the mantra: “Functionality rules!” It probably was a play-on of a saying from some now forgotten TV ad or show. I am assuming that's the case becasue I’m pretty much lost when my boss or the PR department tells me to come with a short sound bite to explain my 100 worksheets of highly cross tabbed and carefully weighted statistics.

I had an interesting phonecon February 14 with Larry Alston, the VP and general manager of Open Source at IONA. I am always happy to find proof points, even non-statistical, that functionality still rules. Add Alston to a list of open-source-software (OSS)-oriented executives we’ve interviewed here (e.g., Roy Russo and Tom Elrod at LoopFuse, Yves de Montcheuil at Talend, John Newton at Alfresco, and more) that really have a clear understanding of OSS’s place in building a software business today. Functionality comes first; open source is a means to an end.

Larry Alston was clear to say that Iona was an “Infrastructure middleware company.” That Iona has products developed and marketed with OSS terms and conditions and other products developed and marketed via more traditional terms and conditions is simply a matter of reacting to user needs and wants.

I tried the question another way: “Is Iona a traditional company transitioning to be an open source company?” The answer: “No, Iona is an Infrastructure middleware company.” Functionality rules.

Larry has many other interesting opinions and observations about the open source development model and its terms and conditions from a marketing perspective. Like Yves of Talend, he brings a different perspective because of a software career that has spanned stints at Bachman Information Systems, C-bridge Internet Solutions, Object Design/eXcelon (acquired by Progress Software) and, before joining Iona in 2004, Pantero Corporation. We hope to have Larry on an upcoming podcast to hear more about OSS from a business perspective.

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

On Feb 13, Red Hat announced it wanted to “own” 50% of middleware deployments by 2015.

On February 14, Red Hat put some meat on that lofty goal by formally announcing the previously pre-announced JBoss SOA platform and three new open source software (OSS) community projects. Two of the new projects are tied to Red Hat’s acquisition of Metamatrix and the company’s long time relationship with Hyperic respectively.

The third project, code-named “Black tie” because it is a direct shot at BEA’s Tuxedo base, is based on the Arjuna technology which Red Hat acquired in late 2005. (Arjuna had been spun out of HP when it exited the middleware market in 2002, dropping the Bluestone middleware line of which Arjuna had been a part.) That idea makes a lot sense given that many Tuxedo users—who have already been moved from AT&T to Novell to BEA over the years—are now going to be moved to Oracle.

These are the Red Hat middleware products/projects—along with their future versions—that it is going to take to displace long-term installed middleware products such as Tuxedo as well as IBM WebSphere, MQ Series and CICS, BEA/Oracle’s WebLogic and Plumtree, Oracle’s many heritage and acquired (non-BEA) middleware products, TIBCO Rendezvous and subsequent products as well as its BPM line up, Iona CORBA-based heritage middleware, SoftwareAG/WebMethods products, Adobe/Macromedia, Sun/SeeBeyond, and so forth.

Of course the Sun/SeeBeyond example highlights the nature of Red Hat’s challenge: all of these companies are adopting open source terms and conditions—and development models—rapidly, thereby eliminating one of the major reasons a user might want to consider kicking out the long litany of past and present middleware legends in favor of JBoss.

One advantage Red Hat has over many of the more established middleware players is that it has practically built its SOA platform from scratch (with the Arjuna exception noted above). Many of the others have a 40-year technology amalgamation that shares very little in common other than a brand name. Without mentioning their name, Red Hat’s Pierre Fricke rightly criticized Oracle for having both an SOA platform and an event-driven architecture platform. “Why are two needed?” he implied. He could have added: And a BPM platform? And a collaboration platform? And a you-name-it platform? Oracle has all that stuff because of its many acquisitions.

The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform also supports mix and match a little better than the established players although I do not expect that advantage to last very long. Red Hat announced that active JBoss SOA middleware partners with which its users could mix and match include Active Endpoints, Amberpoint, Information Builders and iWay Software, SeeWhy, SOA Software and Vitria Technology. In particular, Red Hat talked about an interesting BPM partnership with Vitria. This may breathe some new life into one of the original integration middleware providers.

The Metamatrix technology mentioned above will drive a project called DNA related to SOA governance. Red Hat and Hyperic have released into the OSS community a jointly developed management platform project, named RHQ.

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

Bruce Perens, one of the thought leaders of the open source software (OSS) movement via his actions in founding the Open Source Initiative (OSI), has issued a State of Open Source message celebrating the 10th anniversary of the founding of the organization, which began on February 9, 1998.

Congratulations to the group, which I have written about often on this web site.

Also see our podcast with Michael Tiemann, the current president of the OSI.

Please read Perens' document.

Now here's where I disagree with it

1. I date the idea of community development of software with liberal redistribution rights (which is what OSS is really all about) to a much earlier time period. I look back to COMMON, Share and DECUS--along with Bell Labs' awkward hand off of Unix to Berkeley--as the real beginnings. Even in the modern era, the creation of Apache would make a better beginning point. The original Apache license is copyrighted 1995, three years before the founding of the OSI, and many would argue that Apache-licensed OSS is the most prevalent open source software.

I am not going down that rathole. But my first point is that if you think the open source movement emerged up out of the moors as primal matter just 10 years ago, you will have a poor understanding of the software industry. And that will cloud your software choices as a user, vendor or investor.

2. I can't quickly think of any (never mind "many") "business computing category" in which open source software is a leader as Perens claims. But that all depends on how you measure leader (e.g., installed base, annual revenue, downloads, and so forth) and how discrete your categorization is.

OSS does not lead in the operating system, database, middleware, ERP, BI or standalone applications categories, which is a holistic categorization of the entire market. I could probably slice or dice one of these six in a way that makes his claim true but again the result, although mathematically accurate, would mislead you.

3. I have never understood the vehement Microbashing by the OSS movement.

But it's old news. Even as I write this, Microsoft is the "Platinum Sponsor" of the Open Source Think Tank, a gathering of the open source software elite. It's self defeating for the open source movement to wallow in whatever bothered it about Microsoft in the past.

And here's where I agree with Perens' retrospective:

4. The combination of the Free Software Foundation's GNU utilities with Torvald's Linux kernel did change "the way software works." (Although I would never add "forever" to any observation.) I assume Perens means the software market and not software itself (which works the way it has always worked, one step at a time). Large systems and software suppliers quickly realized that they could both reduce their R&D expenditures and make their customers happy by adopting the open source development model.

This was a two-fer no chief financial officer could ignore. Later many of these same companies (IBM, Oracle, and so forth) also adopted OSS terms and conditions, realizing that most software was becoming a commodity and that their real value proposition was in the accompanying maintenance and other services.

5. Open source has not achieved much penetration on the desktop. I am not sure why that was ever a goal.

The Red Hat strategy vis a vis desktops outlines why it doesn't matter. (Caveat: the linked blog post is based on an interview of Tim Yeaton who subsequently left Red Hat. I have requested an update or reconfirmation from Red Hat multiple times but have not yet received an answer.)

6. Software ought to be copyrighted rather than patented.

As long as copyrighting is as acceptable as copylefting.

Which apparently is why the OSI separated itself from the FSF 10 years ago.

Happy birthday, OSI!

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

As discussed here last month, one of the recent knocks against open source software (OSS) has been that it simply reverse engineers proprietary technologies at some time period after the proprietary technology becomes popular, in effect inhibiting further innovation and “mopping up” what’s left of a market demand. There are examples of such OSS projects. But it’s not a universal truth.

As I indicated in a recent article, the original Apache HTTP server came on the scene just about coincident with the proprietary Netscape equivalent. “Apache” did not play a mopping-up-old-technology role (although it did clean clock Netscape pretty much) and for a time it did create a separate new middleware market.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Tuscany project also seems equally well timed to current market need. On February 5, 2008, the ASF Tuscany team rolled out the 1.1 release of its Java Service Component Architecture (SCA) project. It’s a runtime environment based on the SCA set of specifications being standardized by OASIS as part of the Open Composite Services Architecture (Open CSA).

The overall effort—both the projects and the standards—are aimed at simplifying SOA application development.

SCA first came out in November 2005 when IBM, BEA and others announced that they were working on it together. It goes hand in hand with the Service Data Objects (SDO) standard focused on uniform access to data residing in multiple locations and formats. In total some 17 suppliers also including SAP, Oracle/BEA, Progress and TIBCO that preach SOA as a design approach for their own product development took it where they wanted to go: developing standards to cut their development costs to increase their profits and/or allow them to reduce cost of ownership and build up the IT market (see more research at my investment research outlet, Research 2.0—button at right).

What it means is that these companies—as they have been trying to since the 1980s via Atlas, OMG, OSF, Xopen and so forth—agreed to put gas pedals under the right foot, agreed that red means stop in brake lights, agreed to simplify translation between metric and imperial measures, and so forth (while at the same time agreeing that they will always disagree on which side of the road to drive on, which side to put the steering wheel on, and so forth).

Then in March 2007, the suppliers, having reached their goals, turned their standards efforts over to OASIS. Enter Apache. The Tuscany project team (admittedly many of whom work for the same companies that originally collaborated on the standard) began working on an OSS instance that met the standard. The Tuscany SCA Java 1.1 release this week adds a number of features to the November 2007 release including a JMS binding, improved policy support and an implementation extension for representing client-side Javascript applications as SCA components.

Tuscany is still an incubation effort at ASF, sponsored by the Apache Web services PMC.

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

Attention all open source collaboration/groupware/office-suite software projects and organizations: I am researching the next in a series of OSS-related application research articles for ebizQ.

Previous OSS application research has covered enterprise content management and business intelligence software.

My next application article, scheduled for March 2008 release, will focus on open source software (OSS) designed to promote group collaboration or productivity. Collaboration is one of the key themes for March on ebizQ as outlined in Elizabeth's editorial calendar. We think key issues to look at are document formats such as ODF and OOXML, and support for non-standard form factors such as mobile devices and appliances. If we're wrong, this is the time to tell us so. Another factor we're researching is the extent to which entire suites of collaboration software are available. Will the process by which spell checkers integrated into word processors and word processors integrated into other personal productivity tools like spreadsheets and personal productivity tools morphed into office/collaboration/groupware software repeat itself in the OSS world.

Open source collaboration software and services, including collaboration/groupware/office software as a service (SaaS) offerings based on OSS, will be covered. If your company or OSS community develops open source collaboration/groupware/office software and 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 Wednesday February 20, 2008

Download file

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

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

The Microsoft (MSFT) acquisition of Yahoo (YHOO) doesn’t really have much of an open source software (OSS) angle.

But if you’re an information-technology (IT) analyst, you gotta say something besides “Wow,” right?

OK, how about this: Microsoft will now own Zimbra.

As our research here on ebizQ and at IT Investment Research (see link to right) has shown, Microsoft is moving to become a business and IT services provider rather than a technology provider. Therefore in the long term, the Office (and a lot of other things) giant from Redmond really doesn’t care if it’s using OSS or its own proprietary technology to deliver those services.

Zimbra might have died a slow death along with Yahoo if Yahoo had been left to wither by itself. Zimbra might become the next generation of Office with this acquisition.

Really thinking three unlikely steps ahead, this deal also illustrates one of the benefits of the OSS terms and conditions. Any Zimbra user worried about the effects of Zimbra being owned by Microsoft can fork the source on day one and go its own way.

And if he’s still with Zimbra, I also like the idea of Scott Dietzen linking up with Ray Ozzie. Transaction management meets peer to peer. That’s Dietzen of Camelot/Transarc/IBM (as owner of Transarc)/BEA heritage meeting up with Ozzie of Plato/Data General/VisiCalc/Symphony/Iris (as in Lotus Notes) heritage.

That would be a bigger merger than this little $44 billion thing.

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