One of my recent posts was about a battle for the soul of open source. Perhaps related, there is also a battle in progress at the Open Source Initiative (OSI) web site but this battle is simply about the words, "Open Source."

According to a multiple-month license-discuss spat at the OSI web site, Microsoft is using the words "open source" occassionally to mean making source code available. Sam Ramji, a leading open source software (OSS) supporter at Microsoft and others are defending Microsoft (or at least trying to understand the other side's complaint). Michael Tiemann, the president of the OSI, has weighed in angrily against Microsoft, part of a recent pattern in which he has linked Microsoft to the Jim-Crow-law era in the U.S and WWII-era fascists.

I think in all cases where this open source definition issue has come up vis a vis Microsoft, it has related to some kind of Microsoft-based academic or medical code. The OSI members are not actually in agreement that Microsoft is doing anything wrong but the allegation is that the Microsoft code does not meet the OSI's definition of OSS because the code cannot be used in a commercial project. And Microsoft allegedly obfuscates that point on its web site. This concept of commercial vs. non-commercial is at the heart of the Microsoft vs. free-software movement patent dispute as well.

As I see it, in OSI's definition, there can be no restrictions on redistribution other than the restrictions on any downstream OSS being used. And I guess one of those restrictions cannot be "no commercial use." But this is a word battle only a lawyer can understand. We will be talking to Mark Radcliffe in an upcoming podcast so we will ask him about it. Mark is general counsel at OSI, an intellectual property attorney at DLA Piper in the Bay area, and the writer of a real good blog on all these sorts of thing.

I'll also follow up on the conclusion of this spat on the OSI site after the name calling dies down. But you can follow the discussion yourself as described here.

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This Infoworld report on Red Hat CEO Whitehurst's speech on March 25 is potentially provocative to the say the least. The speech as reflected in InfoWorld illustrates that Whitehurst does not yet show much understanding of Red Hat's own industry, the software industry, which is not unexpected because Whitehurst just joined the industry from the air transportation industry a few months ago.

As I see it (based on a few paragraphs in the Infoworld story):
-- Hopefully Whitehurst was misquoted. But if not, the statement that U.S. unpopularity around the world (presumably referring to political issues related to the Iraq war, I guess) is good for open source just plain does not compute. One thing I have like about the software industry--and the IT industry as a whole--is that it has been multinational since the 1970s. If you deliver the goods, you get the order whether you work in Belarus or Boise. This guy apparently isn't going to settle for a shot from Steve Ballmer or Larry Ellison; he's hoping Rush Limbaugh will come after him.
-- Non-U.S. "people are resentful of sending billions of dollars back to the U.S." Take that, IBM, Oracle and many other leading open source proponents who get a large percentage of their revenue outside the U.S. (although most likely they are not repatriating it too quickly). This is probably good news for Microsoft. I am not sure exactly how Microsoft cash flows (vs. reported revenues) move geographically but I would guess that the big chunk of it that pays for the copies of Office and Windows OEM'd onto PCs made offshore and sold offshore doesn't come "back" from anywhere; it most likely just moves EFT from Red Rock to Redmond.
-- Red Hat's business model, to the extent he means its revenue model of subscription maintenance fees and professional services revenue is basically no different than IBM's or Oracle's (except that the others get a little more revenue upfront). Why should those nasty 'furriners' be more willing to send "dollars back" to RTP than Armonk or Redwood Shores?
-- Chinese and Russians don't want to pay an "intellectual property tax" to U.S. companies. Is Whitehurst condoning piracy?
-- "The dollars in open source relative to what we (Red Hat, I think) do are relatively small," he reportedly said. Well it's about 20% of the total, if conventional wisdom market size numbers are accurate. That's the same percentage that Microsoft represents of the overall software market.

Yahoo Finance reported, also under Infoworld reporter Paul Krill's byline, that others at the same conference feel that pending economic woes are good for open source.

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[NOTE: As a rule, most of my open source blog postings are intentionally pretty light. I strive to give you something between the People column of the daily newspaper and Entertainment Nightly when it comes to open source. If you want something with more depth, look to my Feature articles over on the lefthand side of the ebizQ web site. But the following post is an exception to my rule:]

A few months ago the open source software (OSS) blogosphere got tied up in knots over a Discover article that claims OSS inhibits innovation. The comments on the article were the predictable rantings of the very small OSS fringe when anything negative about open source is released. I have seen the nerdy non-sequitur venom and total falsehoods some techie open source bloggers write in response to my own postings on IT investment research. I have called out anyone (that I was aware of) that lied about me on a blog and I have yet to find one of them that doesn’t backpedal into his or her hole.

The fact that these typically anonymous hatemongers troll the Internet and attack an investment-research posting like mine, words that have nothing to do with technology per se but only comment on the effect one technology position or another might have on shareholder value, illustrates a real problem for the OSS community. Typically, in between the profanity and the hate, their comments go into obtuse arcane technical points that only a nerd could love.

In the end, the OSS fringe wants to take our choices away from us. If we lose open choice, we will all suffer because of the fixations of this small group of OSS proponents against Microsoft (see sites such as BadVista.org, Documentfreedomday.org, and so forth). The good news is that most of the sincere open source community that I meet daily to work on this blog and my feature articles has a live and let live attitude about Microsoft. The vast majority of OSS runs on Windows.

Now there may be a revolt brewing against this non-sequitur venom against normal people in general and against Microsoft users in general. A hint of it can be seen in a back-and-forth battle in progress down-under entitled Ignore the open source hot heads, CIOs told. The jist of the Aussie article is that the vitriolic ad-hominem attacks against anyone that says any thing remotely critical of open source--or in favor of Microsoft--is actually harming the OSS culture. It must be because the Aussies have always had to take a different perspective on everything in the world, but the Aussies are right on this subject.

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If you follow my IT investment research blog (see the IT Investment Research button to the right and look for a March 17 post on Open Standards in Massachusetts), you see why it is important to compare what the blogosphere says to what the official record says. That's the case for any subject... or as your father probably told you: "Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers." Ever since the open source software (OSS) blogosphere erupted about 10 days ago over the "new EU strategy document on open source," I have been trying to get the document itself to match its commentary to the official record.

Turns out I can't. I can't get the strategy document, at least officially, and presumably none of the others blogging on the subject can either. Dale Kidd of the Spokesperson's Service of the European Commission (EC) in Brussels says by email:

"The full strategy document with associated work plan has not been published, since it's for internal use only. However, the synopsis of the Commission's OSS strategy provided on the Europa site is quite clear and comprehensive."

The "synopsis" I was pointed to by Dale is revealing. It's really less about adopting open source in the EC and more about coordinating the adoption of open source between possibly competing EC agencies. The movement to EC adoption of OSS is eight-year-old old news. But it is new news, according to the synopsis, that the Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT) "has taken over the responsibility for the IDABC programme." IDABC stands for Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens.

(As I said last week, I can't figure out the euracracy. Europeans probably cannot figure out the U.S.'s multi-layered, bi-cameral, separation of powers governments either. As explained over on my investment-research website, the misunderstanding of the Massachusetts state government is what lead to so many people who follow OSS thinking of Massachuetts as an early-adopter haven of Microbashers. Actually the opposite is true: when a Microbasher civil servant threatened to take their powerpoints away from them a few years ago, Massachusetts government employees screamed like hell. It helped that the Microbasher bureacrat was also tyring to put into place a policy that cut off the legally blind, hearing impaired and others that depend on Word add-ins for the disabled. The civil servant obviously wasn't a politiican. He was also quickly retunred to the "dreaded private sector," as we like to call it here in Massachusetts.)

Anyways, the key items of this EU new policy are said to be
(1).) use OSS where a clear benefit can be expected;
(2.) consider OSS solutions the same way as proprietary ones in IT procurements (on a "value for money" basis--consider not only licence costs ,but also setup, maintenance, support and training costs);
(3.) promote the use of products that support open, well-documented standards (interoperability is a critical issue for the Commission) and
(4.) and for all new development, where deployment and usage is foreseen by parties outside of the Commission infrastructure, Open Source Software will be the preferred development and deployment platform. (The phrase in bold appears to apply to other government entities in Europe that might use EU developed software. And this ties into the recent EU request to have its own Open Source Initiative OSS license.)

II is unclear to me how that differs from the old policy, also described in the synopsis, which was to "formally allow and encourage" the use of Open Source Software where "a clear benefit can be expected". And I wonder how this correlates with the EC's recent contract with Sun where UNIX was specced in. Can new software be deployed to the new Sun servers?

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I met up with Jonathan Marsh of WSO2 last week; I introduced you to WSO2 in mid 2007 via a Talking to… interview with Paul Freemantle. Jonathan’s role is Director of Architecture for Mashup Technologies but he prefers to call himself a “product designer for people.” He joined the UK-based open source software (OSS) organization in 2007 from that alleged OSS nemesis, Microsoft.

But no Microbashing in this interview. Jonathan simply felt OSS—and WSO2 in particular—provided him personally a better way to “design for people.” This is partially because he didn’t want to move to the company’s headquarters location, something that is highly encouraged in any large non-OSS development organization. He also believes OSS’ community aspect is especially well suited for people-oriented software design.

Although new to OSS, Jonathan is not new to community-based activities. At Microsoft, he had worked on the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) as Microsoft representative, and was co-chair of the WSDL 2.0 group. Microsoft’s involvement in standards activity such as WSDL illustrates its understanding of their importance. Jonathan sees a lot of similarities between standards and OSS in terms of there being community, processes, and a wide variety of contributors. (Truth in advertising: I told Jonathan of my objections to all de jure standards groups but I agree with the similarities analogy.)

One difference he pointed out: the end product of standards communities is a specification and a test suite for 50-100 vendors. The end product for a successful OSS project is thousands or millions of users. Another thing Jonathan’s Microsoft experience brings to WSO2 is an understanding of what it takes to bring to market a product that might be used by millions of users.

If you want to see the beginnings of how that might work out, look at mooshup.com where the community is getting off the ground. The site is based on the WSO2 mashup server also. The server is available under the Apache license and can be downloaded from mooshup.com and the WS02 site. Consistent with the business strategy for its middleware (web server plus ESB plus new registry), WSO2 will provide service and support of course.

Looking at the functionality, Jonathan positions the mashup server as a natural extension of WSO2's middleware to “service composition.” In his product design for people, he wanted to do something more friendly and lightweight than the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). I think of it as a poor man’s business process management BPM (watch for my upcoming blog posts on BPM by the way; my initial feature article for ebizQ on BPM is available here for ebizQ Gold Club members—no cost to join). Given his standards background, the mashup server ties into the WSDL standard; like the way a web server works.

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

I must admit I cannot figure out the European Union bureacracy (euracracy) well enough to nail down all the details but clearly the EU, via its Competition Commission, adminstrative organization, funded projects, parliament and other arms is doing everything it can to legislate open source software (OSS) market success. The EU Competition Commission goes the farthest along this path, attempting to make its anti-competition findings apply worldwide. According to Bloomberg on March 6, adminstrators have come up with a new strategy document outlining how the euracracy will move to OSS (but I have yet to actually find the document anywhere).

The latest example comes from Patrice-E. Schmitz, who is the Director of EU Management Consulting for Unisys based in Belguim and represents a group called the R4eGov (Research for eGovernment) project. The project is funded by the EU and wants to have its European Union Public License (EUPL) approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) license-approval group. OSI is the same group that approved two Microsoft licenses as "open source compliant" last September, letting Microsoft into the club for the first time and thereby taking a lot of grief from the pure OSS community members.

A major issue that the OSI license-approval group has been working on recently is cutting down on the number of OSS licenses. There are dozens including the popular Apache, Berkeley and GPL licenses, many of which differ only in small ways only a lawyer can love. (Speaking of which, don't miss Larry Rosen's article in the features section of eqizQ explaining some of these issues and providing his OSL 3.0 license, which includes all the legal aspects of the GPL without the philosophical baggage.) It will be interesting to see if the OSI applies its growing concerns about too many OSS licenses to such an OSS benefactor as the EU.

As another sidelight, the commission, with about 32,000 employees, mainly in Brussels, recently made a large commitment to Sun but the products it bought were only open source in the weakest sense of the words. On January 31, Sun (JAVA) announced it has been awarded the Framework Contract to supply servers conforming to version 3 of the Single UNIX OS Specification (including their options, extensions, and associated services). Sun’s UNIX product called Solaris was made open source only in the last few years and only after Sun failed to sell it the usual way in the marketplace. And some in the OSS blogosphere question Sun's true commitment to open sourcing Solaris.

In the euracracy, does the hand droite know what the hand gauche is doing?

(For anyone who noticed that this originally said "hand rive vs hand gauche," I never had any French training. The sum total of my knowledge of French is from driving around comparing street signs to what I knew the thing to be. In 1968 I drove around Montreal for a day asking my wife why every St. Lawrence River crossing was called the "Pont Bridge." The rive mistake comes from driving around Paris trying to decide if I was on the Rive Gauche or the Rive Droite. So now I know, its droite that means right, not rive.)

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

The blogosphere is buzzing about the high salaries OSS developers can demand. The buzz is based on stories that were kicked off by a recent press release from BlueWolf. BlueWolf is a New York City consulting company that "specializes in the deployment of enterprise software applications and in business process consulting."

Don't rush out and buy a new Mercedes just yet (or assuming open source developers also like to build cars from scratch, don't rush out and buy all the parts for a new Mercedes just yet). First notice that the press release does not mention open source at all. Michael Kirven, BlueWolf's Co-founder, mentioned an important trend he was seeing in open source development hiring in one of the subsequent interviews and all the facts got skewed as one story lead to another across the Internet.

I went back and asked BlueWolf to clarify so that I didn't join the line of bloggers playing the whisper game. There is some good news.

"There's been a huge wave of people embracing open source technologies," said Kirven in a prepared statment. "The availability of those techs has far outstripped the people trained for them."

But no hard numbers can be pinned to the trend yet.

And be careful of the overall numbers in the press release. None of the press people or bloggers writing the follow-up stories and blog posts went back to check the fine print. These are New York City prices folks, where a glass of OJ in the morning costs you $12 in midtown.

And possibly on the down side, follow the logic behind this article in Canada's IT World (you might have to sign up for their free subscription). SAP Labs Inc. researcher Dirk Riehle is right about the statistic in the first sentence in the article (see our recent research here) so I conclude that the rest of the thinking deserves some consideration.

But that does not mean that Kirven is wrong about open source developers being more in demand. In fact, I think BlueWolf's and SAP's findings might synch up.

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Download file

In a recent guest editorial posted on ebizQ, the Apache Software Foundation gave its annual report. As you probably know, the Foundation is the formal organization put together in the late 1990s following the success of its initial open source software effort, the Apache HTTP server.

But looking ahead is probably just as important so we asked to talk to the ASF leader and this year it’s Jim Jagielski, an A-S-F founder and committer to “the” Apache server, as well as Apache Portable Runtime and Apache Tomcat. Jagielski has also contributed to Sendmail, xntpd, BIND, PHP, Perl and FreeBSD, among other projects.

We have met Jim before in his Covalent/Springsource role. For more about Covalent's open source middleware offerings see our ESB and integration server articles on the features page of ebizQ.net

For this podcast of about five minutes we’ve asked him to put on his A-S-F hat.

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Attention all open source software (OSS) projects and organizations: I am researching the next in a series of OSS-related application research articles for ebizQ.

This month we are looking for open-source software and projects specific to an industry such as manufacturing/distribution, financial services (banking, insurance, and securities) or other services industries, government or education.

Information on both infrastructure software (e.g., messaging middleware, connectors, data integration, and so forth) and applications (e.g., a bill of materials processor) will be included.

The article is tentatively scheduled for release in mid-April 2008. It will be similar to recent ebizQ reports on open source business process management software and ERP open source software (OSS) applications (ebizQ Gold Club membership required but there is no charge to join). Your company’s product(s) may be mentioned based on my secondary research but if you would like to formally participate, please download and return the attached 1-page survey form by Friday March 21, 2008 to dennis@ebizq.net.

Download file

If you do not offer industry-specific software but have a partner that uses your OSS product to support specific industries, pass this on (and let me know your partner’s company name). The partner can be a systems integrator or other type of services provider. Industry-specific open source software delivered as a service (SaaS) will also be covered.

OSS service providers--let me know what you are doing as well although the survey form might not be approrpiate. Just describe your activity in an email to dennis@ebizQ.net.

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.

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I met with Todd Barr March 5 to congratulate him on his new position at the Austin-based Ruby/Ruby on Rails-based venture called FiveRuns and to see if he’s nailed down any plans yet. Personally, being based in Austin is a coming home to Texas for Todd who worked for Dell Ventures Group before his six years at Red Hat.

Since he just joined FiveRuns in February I didn’t ask if the company name has something to do with a company softball game or… But whatever the linguistic background of its name, FiveRuns is a great example of a company making money (or more likely still planning to) on open source software (OSS). Unlike many OSS projects we cover, Ruby and Ruby on Rails are pure open source plays: Ruby providing a modern language (I dunno—a 6GL, I guess; remember I’m a deployment software guy not a development guy) and Rails providing a framework designed to run Ruby applications. The project came first (10 years ago for Ruby) and the need for service and product extensions followed.

Think Java vs. JEE (formerly J2EE). Just as Java and so forth need all kinds of other software around them to really get mission-critical attention in enterprise IT departments, Ruby and Rails needs applications beside and on top of it or else it’s just a useful academic exercise (think back to VA and Cygnus vis a vis Linux). Enter FiveRuns with a series of products and distributions to support the language and framework. Originally the company was a generic open source systems management offering (competing directly with HP, Tivoli, BMC, CA, Zenoss, Hyperic, and so forth) but realized that there was plenty of opportunity just with Ruby and friends.

Because its systems management software was originally generic, it was easy for FireRuns to tune the offering to Ruby and still have a good understanding of what was going on in the whole stack, from the networking to the database to the app server and up through the actual user applications.

If you are a Ruby developer or hoster, you probably already know these guys but if not, take a look. You have to look at the total ecosystem however and that’s where Todd comes in. He worked building the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) ecosystem at Red Hat and plans to do the same at FiveRuns. I have seen some blogosphere heat that FiveRuns is not itself open source but it meets my definition. It's new version is written in Ruby, uses Rails, distributes with BitRock and follows all their OSS-related license terms and conditions. Todd will work to eliminate any doubt that FiveRuns is a good citizen of the OSS community.

In the long run, FiveRuns doesn’t see itself so much competing with the generic systems management guys as being an extension that will better manage one specific set of (hopefully large in quantity) applications written in Ruby and running on the Rails framework. The Ruby ecosystem could very well become an OSS version of Progress (before all the acquisitions) or—pardon me guys—Visual Basic.

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UPDATED 3/6/2008 to better explain why open source helps users if it turns out they don't like what Buytaert/Acquia does with it.

Dries Buytaert is the creator and project lead of the popular Drupal open source content management software that lets an individual or an entire community of users publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. 800 friends and associates heard his state-of-the-project keynote March 3 at Drupalcon, which is co-located from March 3-6 with the AiiM show in Boston.

I give him high marks for clarity and courage in his presentation.

The over 800 attendees at the Drupalcon conference are mostly designers, developers and webmasters that both use and contribute to the Drupal open source software (OSS) project. Dries said he envisioned a future where designers, developers and webmasters are no longer needed.

He was preceded on the dais by an executive of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which “invests in journalism excellence worldwide” (along with other charitable efforts). The executive had just announced the next stage in the ongoing Knight News Challenge, a program of grants likely to help the Drupal community. The foundation descends from (but is no longer related to) the Knight-Ridder publishing empire. Buytaert said in his speech that he foresaw a future without publishers too.

He provided strong technical and market proof points in delivering the information that the audience presumably would not want to hear. But it was well received. He made it clear that he was talking ‘future,” some point after the Release 7 currently in process and scheduled for a November 2008 code freeze is completed.

Of course, one of the major benefits of OSS is that anyone that does not buy into the Buytaert vision if Drupal can take a fork and move forward in another direction. Related to that possibility, in a press release issued at the conference, Dries also put some substance around Acquia, a company he co-founded in December 2007 with funding from North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The company plans to commercialize Drupal along the lines of other for-profit ventures tied to community projects (e.g., Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Fedora, IBM WebSphere Community Edition to Geronimo, Iona Fusion to Apache Software Foundation ServiceMix and ActiveMQ). Dries’ co-founder is Jay Batson, previously founding CEO of open source VOIP software company Pingtel. They have been joined by Jeff Whatcott (formerly of Adobe/Macromedia/Allaire) who will run marketing.

(As an aside, AiiM is now known as the Enterprise Content Management association but we greybeards will always know it as the Association for Information and Image Management.)

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