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In a March 2008 feature article here on the ebizQ site, a representative of GroundWork Open Source Inc. wrote about “Merging Open Source and Proprietary Systems Management.” Implicit in that subject is the merger of all the software being managed in some way shape or form. So we asked Thomas Stocking, GroundWork Co-Founder and Senior Technical Staff Member to join us to discuss how a commercial open source company like his works with other open source software (OSS) projects and companies, including Red Hat, Nagios and Ganglia.

Thomas has more than 15 years of development and technical experience in many aspects of IT infrastructure management. Prior to GroundWork he served as Director of Information Security at SiteROCK, a managed service provider (MSP) in the Network Operations services space. Previous to SiteROCK he was founder and CEO of InSync Communications, founded with the goal of building a better IT services contracting platform.

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

I guess it should not have surprised me but it was difficult to log onto this seminar, about the Open Source Software (OSS) "security riddle" in the U.S. government, from a Windows PC.

The riddle, on which the title of the seminar is based, refers to the fact that a Federal Open Source Alliance (FOSA) survey, done in the second half of 2007, found that a third of respondents in the U.S. government thought OSS was very secure but another third was very concerned about its security (including some users that had already implemented OSS).

All of this information is great stuff for any user, U.S. government or not. And I believe it is available as a recording (Warning: probably an .ogg file) at the FOSA website.

Opening
Intel representative Nigel Ballard opened the seminar noting that Intel is one of the top five contributors to Linux. FOSA's original study found over 50% of U.S. federal government agencies are already using OSS. More than half of the respondents say it is or will be beneficial. The major benefit "in the beltway" is the ability to access advanced and multi-tiered security, according to 33% of the respondents. But another third said security was a challenge. This is what they call "the riddle." the title of the seminar

Nigel said everyone should use/write open source code to improve interoperability, one of the challenges U.S. Federal government users say they face.

A case study
A real-live OSS user, Casey Coleman, the CIO of the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), said the GSA had been using OSS for about 7 years, "organically and at low risk." She said they implmented Linux, Apache, and a KM product at first but since 2005 have begun to use mission critical applications (but not transaction systems; I asked which type of mission-critical applications, if not transaction systems but received no response).

Ms. Coleman provided a great top 10 list of benefits/issues for enterprise IT users to consider

10. TCO-OSS does not mean free (as we have disussed here on this blog many times)
9. Avoiding product lock-in--this is the open choice benefit we have also discussed here often
8. Multiple support models--all the typical support is available and the good news is that vendors are competing on the quality of the service (rather than functionality I guess; so if you need "functionality foobar" and you get it closed or open, try open and let the suppliers compete on service)
7. Procurement--evaluation can be done much more easily without a typical Federal red tape (this same sort of red tape probably applies in many enterprises)
6. Agiliy-allignment with missione (e.g, the GSA now gets support for Linux but not for its KM tool, saving it money)
5. Transparency--OSS is standards based (I don't believe that is totally true but worth considering your enterprise's position on standards)
4. Collaboration--OSS users are not at mercy of the proprietary-code's vendor for improvements; and the user participates in or has insight into the process
3. Control over investments--
2. Open Source Moving up the stack--thanks for the plug; that's the name of my blog
1. Security

Security is a recurring theme of the seminar; it's "the riddle." As mentioned above, a third of survey respondents find OSS secure but a third of respondents are concerned with security issues (even U.S. govvernment OSS implementers cite security as a concern). The good news is that the Intel community, presumably with a major security concern, is a big user of OSS.

Information on Open Source Security
Red Hatter Chris Runge spoke to the fact that there has been an evolution of security biases, such that "in many places, Linux is the preferred platform of choice." For example, NSA came out to the OSS community with security-enhanced Linux for others to use. This is now built into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 (and presumalby other Lini, both the webinar was sponsored by Red Hat).

Independent of OSS, he poitned out that there were a lot of government mandates on standards that are hard to work with. Red Hat is working on things like the National Vulnerability database.

The Chicken-Egg Problem
Erik Lillestolen of HP wrapped up describing the chicken-egg situation. Should an agency solve the security problem first and then move to OSS or move to OSS first and solve the security problems with it. The answer is, like investing, it all depends on the agency's tolerance of risk. The same applies to any enterprise vis a vis any feature.

Erik also brought up the license differences in OSS. He suggested the agency have some kind of governance policty as well to control the introductuion of OSS into the environemnt. Also good advice for everyone.

Recommendations include identifiying internal or consulting experts. Erik said this is important because many things are different than what users would be accusomted to in proprietary code (I have not found this to be the case in my research so I am not sure what he is referring to; I asked in the Q&A part of the program but my question was not answered). Other recommendations were to manage alerts (keep good track of updates, patches, etc.) and start small (walk before you run).

Q and A session
Some of the questions and answers included:
Q. Who verifies the OSS? The agency using the OSS is responsible for security validation. I am a little rusty on U.S. "federal EDP rules" but I believe the point is that the vendor of proprietary code is responsible for certifying security.
Q. Different types of OSS? The hosts explained the differences between pure open source (e.g., off Sourceforge) vs. OSS from a company such as Red Hat.
Q. The US Census Bureau recntly had to back away from using hand held devices for the upcoming census. Were any open source components involved in the failed effort? The host were not aware of anything with respect to the handheld devices. Our involvement there has been at the datacenter level.

For more information on the FOSA, see my blog post on November 2, 2007.

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

Many people much younger than me know the name of the Lone Ranger’s horse even though the TV show went off the air in 1957 (according to Wikipedia). The concept of the silver bullet (as in “there is no silver bullet”) and the masked man’s accompanying call to action live on everywhere. But few remember the name of the Ranger’s faithful companion Tonto’s faithful companion.

What’s that have to do with open source software (OSS)? Stick with me here.

My recent blogpost on FiveRuns genned up a little interest and illustrated to me the vibrancy and potentially disruptive nature of the Ruby/Rails ecosystem to the relatively stable open source development model. (Note I said “relatively stable.”) An example is information I received subsequent to the FiveRuns post from Derek Haynes of Highgroove Studios, which has been stealth marketing an open source server monitoring and reporting application for the last few months.

On April 15, Highgroove “went public” with its project. If you already know that its name is Scout, you are already a kemo sabe to Ruby and Rails. (I could go on about the fact that Tonto was supposedly an Apache but I would really be going off the rails with that one.)

Per Derek’s announcement,

“The Scout client... is a normal Ruby gem, open for development, and distributed under the MIT and/or Ruby License.”

Members of the community write Scout Plugins which are also completely open.
Derek says:

“In fact, they are surrounded and fostered by a community that encourages branching, fixes, and general openness.”

Highgroove maintains the system and the Scout Server software, where data is aggregated and users collect information about their account, is not open-source. Highgroove maintains the server, and worries about security, uptime and all those good things.

The Scout client is lean and the plugins are whatever you want them to be. There are already over a dozen, such as for permission checking, feedburner statistics, disk usage and so forth.

Hayes and his group, which has been developing in Rails since 2005, plus Scout partners (e.g., Rails Machine) are pushing the community process because it believes:

“No single organization can keep up with innovations in the Rails ecosystem and the entire industry.”

No lone rangers here.

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

An article I saw recently on PC World caused me to change hats and become an interviewee, rather than interviewer. The article says:

“You may be intrigued by the idea of switching to Linux. But how will you get your job done without your favorite Windows programs?”

I am such a person. So I interviewed myself.

I do a lot of research about the open source movement from an investment research point of view (it’s been good for investors!) as well as from the culture/development model point of view here on ebizQ. For that reason I do use open source software (OSS) experimentally. But I do not use it day to day.

Perhaps I should cut the cord from my 20 years with DOS/Windows (of course I never had to "buy" either of them), and my 10-year Microsoft (MSFT) Word dependency. Before that my word processors were LotusWorks and WordPerfect. Ironically an employer that was a Mac shop "hooked me" on Word. And I should stop my short two-year use of Outlook. Before that, as with presentation and spreadsheet software, my email was whatever an employer or client told me to use. Primarily it was Data General CEO followed by IBM Lotus Notes but I have also used everything from CompuServe to Eudora to a great little package called TLC Express that came out of Mass Mutual Insurance (and that a client tried to market to other insurers).

The PC World article presumes you start by dumping Windows for Linux, but points out that many of the OSS applications its author suggests also run under Windows.

The article goes on to list some open source alternatives to Notepad, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, Windows ability to burn CDs, Office, Outlook, Quicken (or Quickbooks), and instant messaging--and six other closed-source application products I don’t use. (So--although I am the interviewee--as a good market researcher, I have to tell you that the opinion that follows does not necessarily apply to a “market set” of users that deploys the applications I mention above plus Microsoft Publisher, BitTorrent, Skype, a digital video recorder, Photoshop, and a Windows disc partitioner. And, more important, the following research has an N=1. )

The PC World article is primarily based on the oft-stated premise that Office is “expensive.” This is one of the most prevalent arguments in favor of desktop open source but has never been backed up that I can find, at least within the research scope that the PC World article frames. The problem I find is that articles like this never define "expensive." I spend about $100/year for full-bore Office including Outlook, Quicken Home and Business edition, and TaxAct (which includes the fee for electronic filing).

The annual cost would be lower if I didn't upgrade every other year, or mailed in my tax forms. I update every other year for tax return preparation purposes but otherwise would not need to. The article does not mention tax return preparation at all but it might be one of the major uses of desktop PCs.

The tax return preparation angle also points out another factor in an individual's use of closed-source software. It is not the software I want, it’s the content. The latest tax laws. The grammar checker. The clip art library. And so forth.

But, OK, for the sake of discussion, I'm thinking of doing what the article suggests. Here's the first thing that hits me, a non-IT person, on the GnuCash web site:

"To install GnuCash on other platforms (other than Windows), users will need Gnome 2, guile, and slib. Neither the currently used swig nor the previously used g-wrap packages are needed anymore when compiling from tarball or when installing a binary."

Huh? I can't imagine what the message says that tells me how to first install Linux.

There are hundreds of millions of desktop Windows users. If the OSS comunity really believes they should become Linux/OSS users, they better start talking to some of them.

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

No, let me rephrase that headline. Alfresco wants to make its software THE enterprise content management (ECM) commodity. Scratch the "open source;" Alfresco's open source development model and terms and conditions are a means to an end by which Alfresco becomes a factor in the entire ECM market. Scratch the "a;" it implies Alfresco would be happy sharing the limelight with another supplier.

I met up with Ian Howells, chief marketing officer at Alfresco, recently. The immediate reason for the meeting was to get his input to my Industry-Oriented Open Source Software (OSS) research, an abstract of which has been posted in the features section on ebizQ (Gold Club membership required but there is no cost).

But I took the opportunity to ask Ian two of my standard “Talking to… questions:” How did you get to the open source movement? Where do you think the movement goes next? (My third standard question concerns the company; for more about Alfresco itself, see my Talking to… interview with John Newton posted here, also in the ebizQ features section with all my monthly articles.)

How did you get here? Ian followed an interesting path to OSS and formed his ideas about OSS marketing from that experience. He worked for Ingres, Documentum, and SeeBeyond (now part of Sun). Particularly at Ingres, he saw the way standards solidified the database market and how the standards ended up pointing to an eventual market winner (at least so far it's Oracle but Sun/MySQL would like to change that). In Ian’s opinion, Ingres had a better database product back in the 1980s but Oracle took advantage of the standards situation by pushing SQL, making it a virtual commodity. Ian sees a similar pattern emerging in ECM, where—he believes—both Alfresco and Microsoft (with Sharepoint) will commoditize ECM.

Where are we going? As you can see in the Industry-Oriented OSS article referenced above, Alfresco leaves it to the Alfresco channel and the community to write the ECM applications. OpenQuote, mentioned in the article, is an example. That makes Microsoft Alfresco’s biggest competitor according to Ian Howell because it has such a channel advantage, and so much experience marketing commodity technology. He points out that traditionally a first mover in a market did not have an advantage (and often had a disadvantage). Software markets usually consisted of dozens of competitors. That group was eventually whittled down to two or three. Often first movers ran out of gas before having a chance to make the cut.

However, Ian thinks the open source movement has led to a change in software market dynamics such that the leading open source project in any given category can become a commodity quickly. With open source, Ian believes, a different pattern is emerging. First movers such as JBoss, Linux (and he hopes Alfresco) tend to dominate going forward.

I agree with him but probably because of a different thought process: most open source players are not forming a market themselves but coming in as competitors in existing markets in almost all cases I can think of (web server software is an exception but even now that functionality has merged back into application server sector or back within the operating system with which it works). So Alfresco is not competing on the basis of its open source terms and conditions against other open source ECM products but against the traditional ECM guys (EMC/Documentum, IBM/Filenet, etc.).

I think Ian and I get to the same conclusion by different roads. That's where he says Alfresco and Microsoft have a great advantage because both products are opening up an entirely new ECM opportunity, increasing the number of ECM seats in an enterprise by making ECM dramatically easier to install and use.

And giving Alfresco (and Microsoft) partners a great base on which to build industry-specific ECM applications. Read the artcle if you get a chance; it's published in two parts.

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

In recent posts on this blog and across the blogosphere, there is much discussion about the increasing penetration of open source into enterprises. The illustration above, from a year-end open source software (OSS) report available here on ebizQ, explains the three different strains of open source, and why, when analysts talk about open source taking over the world, it all depends on what the meaning of open source is. The illustration uses middleware as examples but a similar timeline of open source history can be drawn with most types of infrastructure software as examples.

Open source has sort of been around since the beginning of the information technology (IT) industry. Of course that didn't really matter 50 years ago because most software was also bundled with, leased with and only ran on the hardware it came with. After IBM was forced to unbundle its software by a consent agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice around 1970 (sound familiar all you twenty-something Microbashers), a split in software terms and conditions (Ts&Cs) became pronounced. There were academic developments (on the right of the chart) with one set of Ts&Cs while most software remained effectively bundled (left hand side) even though it was priced and licensed separately. The GNU utilities are an example of the former. In the middle, independent software vendors (ISVs), a new type of company, created software products by writing their own middleware and kernels (e.g., SAP ABAP and Basis) in order to more easily port their software from one closed platform to another. (Many other ISVs, most of whose names are long forgotten, wrote their software exclusively for one platform such as the System/3, AS/400, or NetWare.)

Then the left and right were joined (literally and figuratively) by a third strain of products that are released with some open source characteristics but under Ts&Cs that do not require that any software that uses it also be redistributable or its source opened (the best example being the original Apache). This means the products can be used and forked and otherwise played with by anyone in a way similar to GNU General Public License (GPL) products. But it also means that the new strain of OSS products can be built into closed products (which can't be played with). Both strains can be used to build a maintenance support and professional IT services business exactly the same as the original ISVs have run for 30 years. Sometimes these are closed source products that have the code quite "embedded" (e.g., Apache in vanilla WebSphere AS since the mid 1990s) and sometimes the products are simply an "enterprise edition" of the community project (e.g., WebSphere's version of Apache Gluecode).

From a market analysis perspective, in order to determine how OSS might "change the market," the major question is what strain of open source are we talking about.
1. If Academic/GNU/GPL/community-edition type software can be used effectively by enterprises without accompanying service (for example, as Red Hat discovered with JBoss, some of this software doesn't require a lot of maintenance), enterprise spending on IT will actually contract (at least comparing apples to apples) and it can be truly said that open source has taken over enterprises.
2. If it turns out that the community edition strain of OSS requires as much support as the more traditional strain of commercial software, so that enterprises typically buy the "enterprise edition," the IT market will evolve the same as it has for the last 30 years. The major difference will be that today IT vendors recognize about 33% of your payments to them as licenses, whereas -- if scenario 2 is the case -- they will recognize all your payments as services revenues. You'll still pay the same.

Separately I will look at the penetration of open source into cloud computing.

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

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As regular readers know, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) is our favorite non-profit on these pages. So when we recently got a “trackback” from the very readable “Law and Life: Silicon Valley” blog written by Mark Radcliffe, general counsel of the OSI, we invited Mark to sit in for a podcast.

Mark also ran the "Users" committee reviewing the GNU General Public License (GPL) version3 draft. He earned a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Michigan and a J.D. from Harvard Law. In addition to his OSI work (it is a non-profit) he has been practicing law up and down the 101 for over 25 years and is a senior partner at DLA Piper. DLA Piper has 3600 lawyers in 25 countries and 65 cities.

Of course lawyers can't pass out legal advice in a podcast setting but this 8-1/2 minute interview contains important information CIOs and staffers should think about as open source software begins to find its way into every nook and cranny of the enterprise.

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

I posted recently about the tendency of the open source software (OSS) blogosphere to take newspaper stories and analytical findings out of context... and then to really misinterpret them.

That recent post was about the many opinions on the web about the Australian government banning OSS and the U.S. Navy mandating it, neither of which was true. This week's nominee for most mixed-up open source message concerns a Gartner "finding" that OSS will take over the world on July 22, 2011 (exaggeration for effect!).

My first reaction to all of the breathless comments by others in the blogosphere about the future of the OSS movement was "I think I heard this before." And the reason was because Mark Driver of Gartner said basically the same thing right here on ebizQ on August 9, 2007. You can still listen to Mark's webinar at this link.

For a movement with source in its name, no one in open source seems to ever go back to the source. So, as I did with the claim that the "Navy just announced a bold IT policy," I went back to the source. Not surprising, Mark Driver was one of the authors of the "findings." The "findings" appears to be more a promotional piece. It links off the Gartner home page and links in turn to three or four dozen Gartner subscription reports written by more than 50 Gartner analysts, which I assume contain the meat behind the analysis. I think it is some sort of summary of all Gartner's open source related research in 2007. You can download the piece as a .pdf but I recommend you look at it online; although tedious, each of the three or four dozen links contains a mini-abstract that contains many more interesting opinions about OSS in 2008.

What makes the blogosphere fun, of course, is that half the commentators argued with Gartner over its analysts' "findings." So here are my disagreements with Gartner but I agree with most of what its analysts say:
-- Gartner makes a distinction between open and closed source vendors; as explained in my January lookback report, I don't believe that distinciton applies any longer (Microsoft was the last holdout and it got religion during 2007)
-- Gartner feels TCO on Linux-based systems might pass other systems in the future. The underlying subscription report probably has more detail but I don't believe you can break a TCO analysis down simply by the operating system that underlies the solution set being analyzed.
---------------Linux is UNIX; its TCO is going to track the TCO of all other applications to which you typically apply UNIX
---------------Linux is not Windows, it's UNIX; don't use Linux where Windows will suffice
(I know Microsoft will argue with me that Windows can do anything UNIX can do but that's not true yet and may never be true.)
--Gartner claims that 90% of enterprises will use open source "in direct or embedded form" by 2012. It would depend on how Gartner measures it but I would guess the number is either already north of 90% or that it might approach 50% by about 2020. It all depends where the AS/400 base moves and, if it moves to Wintel, how much open source Microsoft puts in its products. It also depends on whether you mean "free as in air" open source (called free software by the religous) or simply open source that is open source because of a business tactic.

Here's how I read the Gartner report:
1. Open source is not faster, cheaper, of higher quality, of different functionality, and so forth than any other software you might use. Software is software (and SaaS is not software but a delivery model for software).
2. Open source is a development model and a set of terms and conditions, some of which put limitations on your software's use that you might find unfamiliar and too restrictive.

There is no doubt that the OSS development model, which lead to an increased amount of open source code (I don't think Gartner mentioned Apache anywhere?) starting in the mid 1990s, will continue for a decade or more. If you're concerned about license restrictions (they are not in all OSS licenses), read the fine print.

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

Be careful: A lot of blog post headlines just don't get the underlying story straight. Don't blame the blogger necessarily because headlines often get changed as posts are syndicated through the Web. I don't know which is worse for the open source software (OSS) community, the occasional bad headline or the frequent process by which info gets changed as it is passed from blogger to blogger like the whisper game you played as a kid. This is a bigger problem than the rantings of independent bloggers because a higher degree of accuracy is expected of professional organizations.

There's this one with the headline "Open source barred from Australian government" that says open source is out down under. Then there's this one with the headline, "US Navy's new policy: Only open software" that says the U.S. Navy has a new policy where it will use OSS only.

Neither headline is accurate.

I am going to assume the Australian story is correct and that the headline is simply wrong. The story seems pretty straightforward. It says Australian government CIOs have a problem with software that isn't commercially supported; I hear the same thing all the time from non-government CIOs. For example, at this week's Linux/OSS on Wall St. Conference, Aaron Groves of Citigroup--speaking on a Linux Comes of Age panel--said his group doesn't use software that is not commercially supported. Whether it is open source or not is not even a question they ask.

The CNet story is a great example of the tinkers-to-evers-to-chance nature of the blogosphere. The initial Federal Computer Week article was reprinted verbatim by another blog but without the context of the FCW site. The FCW headline writer had already turned the actual words in the speech, "open technology," into "open systems" and that was then picked up by CNet, where the headline was changed from "open systems" to "open software."

Then a claim was made out of whole cloth that the "Navy just announced a bold IT policy." Well in fact there is an almost two-year-old policy all about open architecture, which I interpret to mean standards--not OSS--from reading all the background material. Of course, the Navy is not against open source anymore than any Aussie CIOs are. But in fact the U.S. Navy CIO had to put out a memo in 2007 saying that it was alright to acquire OSS, not that every one in the Navy had to acquire it.

It's time for the OSS-oriented software businesses to stop claiming special privilege and acting as if supported OSS is any different than any other supported software. All software is acquired and paid for the same way it always has been in governments around the world.

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

UPDATED 4/4/2008: I talked to Ian Howells of Alfresco, the U.K-based enterprise content management software maker the other day as I promised to do when I wrote this post back in February.

More important, here's a special apology to anyone who spent time in a computer-acronym dictionary trying to figure out what an IHOP did. It stands for a U.S. restaurant chain, the International House of Pancakes. Now I am hoping everyone around the world knows what a pancake is. You must because the IHOPs fly all your flags as part of their decor.

The second edition of the Alfresco Software Open Source Barometer was released on February 12 and its claims and some misleading possible non-Alfresco interpretations rapidly spread across the open source blogosphere. The most interesting information I found in blog posts about the survey was that IHOP gives away free pancakes on National Pancake day. That was useful data.

But don’t necessarily blame Alfresco for any misinterpretations. I have cautioned before about putting too much stock in web-input, “opt-in” (Alfresco’s term) select-audience, apparently non-weighted statistics such as these. Alfresco itself recognizes this is an issue and describes the methodology in the second slide in the presentation on the survey that it made at the JBoss user conference.

The Alfresco survey results actually come from two different sources and the “n” and methodology of the most interesting finding is different than the more widely publicized findings based on the “Barometer Survey.” Alfresco’s separate research is based on what Alfresco calls the “Group Deployment Survey.” It confirms a long-time statistic in the IT industry, which predates the modern era of open source software (OSS). That finding: Developers like to evaluate on Windows and deploy to Unix/Linux.

Overall in my research experience that statistic is moving in Windows’ favor over time as more and more Windows servers have become available. But the press is reporting that Alfresco found the opposite. That would truly be interesting but I cannot find a time-series comparison for the Alfresco “Group Deployment Survey” data so I cannot analyze the claim. And to be fair, what Alfresco is quoted as saying is that

“In the 2006 survey, for example, 41 percent of respondents reported that they deployed on Linux. A year later, that number jumped to 51 percent.”

If the switch is from UNIX, that would be consistent with my experience over the years.

Most important, the other publicized findings (Ubuntu beating Red Hat, MySQL beating Oracle, Ubuntu and Red Hat beating Suse because of the Microsoft-Novell patent agreement) can only be applied to people that sign up for the Alfresco Community. These are not necessarily even Alfresco “users” as is widely reported. North America is grossly underrepresented in those that sign up for the Alfresco community (presumably because it is a UK company) as are Oracle database users (which years of research confirm equals 75% of the universe).

It would be interesting to see a cross-tab of just the Oracle database users and just the North American users and see if they differ greatly from the net of the rest.

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

Here is an example of the cookie-cutter Microbashing from the open source software (OSS) fringe that I mentioned in a post on March 23. I thought it was a new thing but I have since found out that Microbashing has been going on for years. I am way behind the times, as I am with the move from rock to rap music. (Rock to rap: My parents complained that they could not hear the lyrics in “our music;” now my children as parents are complaining that they can hear the lyrics in their “kids’ music.”)

I received the following comment in response to my commentary on the ISO OOXML vote and the reality of the so-called international Open Standards (always upper case) movement. But this comment is typical of blogoblathering on all kinds of subjects related to Microsoft, be it about EU fines, or Vista, or SCO, or you name it.

"What a load of self-serving nonsense. Do you work for Microsoft by any chance?

"Your paper example is fallacious. The standard used to make the paper I store my information on is irrelevant, yes. But the format in which electronic information is made available is very relevant - especially when that format is owned and controlled by a proprietary vendor who can choose to make changes to it at any time simply to force users to spend money on an upgrade. Thanks but no thanks.

"And then there is the technical case for OOXML, or rather, the lack thereof: http://www.odfalliance.org/resources/The%20Technical%20Case%20Against%20OOXML.pdf

"Catch a wake up; you might learn something.

"brian"

At least Brian’s post is one I can publish because it is not full of expletives. The ones with expletives—or references to Nazism—I call Microhate.

Let's dissect the Microbashing blogpost formula. All Microbashing blog posts are like the form letters that perhaps one of your friends has suggested you send your congressperson (or PM or Delegate or whatever politicians are called outside the U.S.)

1. All Microbashing starts by accusing people of "working for Microsoft." If Brian had read my research, he would realize that I am one of Microsoft’s major critics. I work for myself. The particular post he is commenting criticizes the so-called International Open Standards (always in Upper Case) movement and has nothing to do with Microsoft. But Microbashing never lets logic get in its way. It also does not bother Microbashers that Sutor works for IBM, Schwartz works for Sun, DiBona works for Google, Tiemann works for Red Hat, and so forth. There aren’t many of us virgins out here on the boulevard.

2. The second act of every Microbash play begins with the debating trick of stating something as if it is patently obvious and not in need of proof, a rule of nature. Typically it is the breathless canard that someone is forcing them or someone else to buy Microsoft products. Where is that happening? I do major statistically significant information technology (IT) market research. I would love to dive into this phenomena. Except that I cannot find any instances of it. Please send me an email Brian (or anyone) at dennis@ebizq.net telling me when and how Bill Gates held a gun to your head and made you buy a Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) product. I will investigate it in the impartial manner I use in all my research and publish the results. (Consider this the Bill Gates Held a Gun to My Head challenge.)

3. Next in every Microbash rant comes the reference to IBM (NYSE: IBM) or Sun (NASDAQ:JAVA) or Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) propaganda. In this case it is a reference to a document on the web site of a consortia funded by--guess who?--IBM, Sun, Red Hat (NYSE:RHAT), Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), all the guys that gain more market share if they can restrict government purchasing of document software. What they cannot achieve in the marketplace, they attempt to achieve through government edict. IBM and Sun tried to railroad such a policy through the bureaucracy here in Massachusetts a few years ago but received such an immediate howl of protest from the legislature, state records repository personnel and the disabled that their in-house IT guy was run out of town on a rail (he was run out for alleged T&E improprieties actually but I always wanted to use that old cliché, “run out of town on a rail”). In fairness, I am pretty sure that writers like Brian do not know they are being manipulated by Sun and IBM.

4. Finally (or sometimes for openers) is the ad-hominem attack. I was not sure what "Catch a wake up" means but I assumed it was along the lines of "your mother wears army boots." So I asked Brian and he tells me it simply means “wake up and smell the coffee.” Kudos to Brian for his civility; typically Microbashers accuse me of being on drugs or some such thing (which people of my generation don’t actually think of as an insult to be honest; we think of it as a fond memory of youth).

What causes these people to get so riled up about Microsoft? Since open source software terms and conditions have been so prevalent for more than 10 years, there is no reason that they would ever have to see a piece of Microsoft software.

(By the way, I think the paper analogy is perfect because paper size is also a document format standard on which ISO wastes thousands of man years. But I won't argue with Brian about that. It is the only legitimate non-personal-attack, non-Microsoft-attack, non-IBM-propaganda sentence in his comment. I have “published” his comment on the ebizQ site where he made it but if he would really like to have a discussion about the International Open Standards movement—which is what I am talking about—try it again without the Microbashing. Use PDF as an example if you cannot write about the standards subject in the abstract.)

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

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

This month we are looking for open-source software and projects specific to an event processing--or complex event processing (CEP)--middleware.

The article is tentatively scheduled for release in mid-May 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 or project'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 April 25, 2008 to dennis@ebizq.net.

Download file

If you do not offer such software but have a partner that uses your OSS product to enable event processing or CEP, pass this on (and let me know your partner’s company or project name). The partner can be a systems integrator or other type of services provider. OSS service providers, et 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. Open source software delivered as a service (SaaS) will also be covered.

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 JBoss) even if they are not “sold” as OSS themselves and no matter how they are monetized.

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

Download file

In an August 2007 guest editorial feature article here on the ebizQ site Dominic Sartorio, President of the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), explained the challenge of interoperability in the IT industry. I certainly can’t argue against interoperability because it is the underpinning of my mantra, “open choice.”

ebizQ actually goes further back with the Alliance, having first met with its representatives back in February 2007, at its founding. I think the OSA is critical to the growth of the open source software movement because, presuming open source develops like every other IT market has developed over time, applications will be the key. If the OSA didn’t exist, the open source movement would have to create it.

With the first anniversary of OSA just past, it makes sense to catch up with Dominic and find out how things are going and what is planned for the rest of 2008 and into 2009.

In addition to his Presidency at the Open Solutions Alliance, Dominic is Senior Director, Product Management at SpikeSource. Previously he was in product management at Wily Technology and BEA Systems.

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

I have not posted on the OOXML International Standards Organization (ISO) vote here on my ebizQ open source software (OSS) blog in 2008 because, in my opinion, open source and standards (lower case) are not related.

Open source and standards are different animals

Open source is about three things: a community/culture, a development model, and a set of software license terms and conditions. That’s what I blog about here. Despite conventional wisdom, my research says there are no OSS business model and no separate OSS market.
• There is no OSS business model because most OSS offerings that are monetized are monetized with subscription maintenance in the same way that has been used for years to sell non-open-source software.
• There is no OSS market because I find very few enterprises that procure OSS because it is OSS; they deploy a piece of OSS because it does some function well and, secondarily, they do not object to the accompanying terms and conditions (in a few situations they like those terms and conditions). Because OSS is not a marketplace motivator, there is—by Marketing 101 definition—no OSS market.

Standards (lower case), on the other hand, are retroactive recognition by the marketplace that some widget facet is the best widget facet of that type in the marketplace so everyone else that wants to compete in the market should have that widget facet or something like it if they want to succeed. Typically the widget facet that everyone agrees on is not a competitive factor in the market (actually I cannot think of any example where one is a competitive factor but in good analyst fashion, I say “typically” so as to hedge my bet.)

But no self respecting OSS blogger can go through the last three months—and especially the last month—without at least opining once on the OOXML standardization subject. So here you go:

Standards and so-called international Open Standards are different animails

1. Surprise/surprise—all international Open Standards organizations are effectively run by large commercial companies with skin in the game. They are nominally government entities but nominally and reality are two different things. By the way international Open Standards are always expressed in upper case, like all good propaganda, and are not the same as standards in lower case.

(IBM (NYSE:IBM), which probably has an employee on just about every one of the 87 national standards bodies that could have or did vote on OOXML, didn’t disagree on Thursday March 27 when an anlyst asked it to comment that the proposed standard had already passed. An official announcement is due on Wednesday 4/2. The lastest leaked count I saw before I posted this commentary claims OOXML was approved handily--but other reports said the approval was only by a whisker. My opinions here are the same, PASS or FAIL.)

2. Governments care about lower-case standards for good reason—but it is when they start picking winners and losers in the marketplace by legislating or edictizing international Open Standards (always upper case) that they become dictatorships.

(For example governments should not and as far as I know don’t care whether your auto has left or right-hand steering. But they have the right to care whether you drive on the left- or right-hand side of the road.)

3. Large commercial companies employ lobbyists to influence governments—I know it is not the same everywhere in the world but here in the U.S., the right to petition the government is constitutionally guaranteed to all citizens, even to Bill Gates.

(So when the Norwegian standards body or wherever listened politely to and then ended a meeting with 20 noooxml.org members who were petitioning them, it was not a Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) conspiracy. The noooxml.org members had no procedural say in the matter at that point apparently, and the Norwegian or wherever committee that did had been meeting about the subject for two years. Ditto in Germany, Croatia and any other country mentioned in the prevalent conspiracy theories written about by anti-Microsoft blogoblatherers, all repeating the same blather interminably.)

4. In particular, IT document format standards are a solution looking for a problem. There are over 200 international Open Standards (upper case) for the most popular document format you’ll ever use, paper. Do you care and/or do they in any way affect your life?

That’s the reason that most impartial observers like myself have noted from the start that the whole OOXML farce was simply an attempt by Sun (NASDAQ:JAVA) and IBM to take market share away from Microsoft. For example, see Mary Jo Foley, the International Herald Tribune, and so forth. Nothing wrong with that except for the waste of shareholder money (see Note below). It’s just how the game is played.

All the rest is bullcrap from IBM/Sun lawyers, lobbyists and employees. This was not about government records retention, long-ago-approved ISO processes, the length of ECMA (not Microsoft’s) standard document, the superiority of another truly Open Standard (even though it was developed by a proprietary company acquired by Sun in 2000), and especially not about the completely absurd idea (coming from Europeans—where they cannot agree about which side of the street to drive on) that only one standard is needed. Like I said, there are over 200 for paper.

A few recommendations:
• Where governments need standards, let them vote on them in legislatures like anything else that affects our lives rather than hide behind so called Open Standards consortia.
• Where they don’t (which is most places, especially as related to document standards), let the market decide.

(Note: If you are interested, I have posted on the waste of shareholder value caused by so-called international Open Standardization on my IT investment research blog site--see link in right hand column.

(In particular, because I live in Massachusetts I have fully debunked the conventional wisdom—perpetrated by blogobatherers from around the world who couldn’t find Massachusetts on a map—that the Commonwealth of Mass. is some kind of mini-version of Neelieland.)

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Early in March I posted about hearing the founder of Drupal, Dries Buytaert, speak in Boston as part of an adjunct to the AiiM Show called DrupalCon. Part of that Drupal event was the first public explanation of the strategy behind Dries’ new venture called Acquia. Acquia is a commercial company to service and support Drupal as the popular open source social publishing platform tries to move to the next level in the market. For comparison, Acquia is Red Hat to Drupal’s Fedora, except the commercial/non-commerical organizations were set up in the opposite order.

So after the show I caught up with Jeff Whatcott, whom I had last met when he was running Flex and related product marketing at Macromedia (before it was bought by Adobe but after Macromedia bought Allaire). When he became part of Adobe, he picked up responsibility for a lot of LiveCycle products as well. A January 2008 press release says Jeff is Acquia’s VP of Marketing; the Acquia web site says he’s “Communicator in Chief.” Other executive titles at Acquia in addition to Communicator in Chief include code gardener, head Zymurgist—not a clue?—and propellerhead. So we’re still not talking the change of IBM guys from blue suits and wing tips to blue blazers and Gucci loafers here.

And maybe my Red Hat analogy doesn’t quite hold water. Although Acquia is a for-profit company, the founder (Acquia’s Benevolent Dictator naturally) wants it done “in a responsible OSS” way.

Jeff illustrates a lot of what I have been saying about the almost now complete amalgamation of open source movement into mainstream software development and marketing. Or is it vice versa? Although one does not immediately think of Adobe as an open source company, at Adobe Jeff was very involved in open sourcing first the Flex SDK and later Flex itself.

As Jeff sees it, based on his three-month involvement with Acquia at this point, the real strength of Drupal is the number of addons and extensions and the ease of their integration into a Drupal instance. There are over 1800 add-ons already with everything from a shopping cart, a tie-in to Google analytics, and so forth. Each is PhP code that manipulates the core framework and that Drupal developers package into a directory, zip up into a manifest, and post. Other users simply reverse the process and install into their Drupal directory. From an open source software (OSS) community perspective, every add-on is its only little OSS project.

One thing that Acquia will do as a commericial venture is market Carbon, a package of the core and most popular modules as a supported distro. Of course Acquia will also provide the Drupal community much needed infrastructure and similar support as well.

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