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Recently we podcast with Mark Radcliffe of DLA Piper and Mark suggested we catch up with Andrew Aitken, Managing Partner of the Olliance Group. The connections is that DLA Piper and Olliance co-sponsor what has become an annual gala for movers and shakers in the open source software (OSS) community called the Open Source Think Tank. This year more than 120 CEOs, CIO/CTOs, VCs, attorneys and representatives of Fortune 100 companies met in February to discuss the state-of-the-industry of commercial open source. They also brainstormed individual-company and collective issues affecting the development and deployment of commercial open source.

In our podcast, Andrew discusses some of the most important findings with us. A report is available at the Think Tank's web site and I believe podcasts are planned. Mark Radcliffe (see our podcast with Mark noted above) also has a section in the Think Tank summary report on legal issues.

Andrew has over 18 years senior management experience building and leading national professional services companies. Prior to founding Olliance in 2001, Andrew held positions as VP of Business Development, Corporate Strategy, and Marketing, with technology services providers such as Renaissance Worldwide and eWork.

He has chaired and spoken internationally at multiple industry and government conferences, is a member of the Open Source Software Institute's Board of Directors, SDForum's Board of Directors and Chair of their annual Open Source Conference, and is on the Board of Advisors of SugarCRM, Funambol and Krugle. He has also personally worked with companies such as: IBM, Sun, Intel, Nokia, HP, and others, assisting them with developing their open source strategies.

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

This month we are looking for open-source software and projects specific to master data management (MDM). I think of it as middleware but you might think of it as an application. Let me know what you think either way.

The article is tentatively scheduled for release in July 2008. It will be similar to recent ebizQ reports on open source event processing software and industry-specific OSS (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 June 20, 2008 to dennis@ebizq.net.

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If you do not offer such software but have a partner that uses your OSS product to develop an MDM capability, 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, 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. 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.

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I try to write something at least once a week relative to open source software (OSS). But I’m not finding anything interesting, thought-provoking, comment-causing, or sticky (which has something to do with how many of you read this post) this week.

Maybe this says more than all my “2007 statistics” about the maturity of the OSS movement. Or maybe it’s because Europe is just finishing up a bunch of long weekends and the U.S. is coming up on one.

Whichever, when in doubt, return to first principles, which for me is the concept of open choice being more important than open source. I can philosophize about the difference between the two philosophies again or simply point you to the latest statements of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) founder Nicholas Negroponte. In announcing that governments will now have their choice between Windows and Linux on the low-cost, low power laptops designed for educational purposes in third world countries, he said it is really about the kids, not the development community. This caused a few anti-open-choice developers of the OLPC educational platform called Sugar (not to be confused with the open source CRM product) to leave the project. But that’s a demonstration of choice as well.

Also, when in doubt about what to write about, look around for a subject you’ve written accurately about before so you can say “I told you so.” Avoid the 100-something posts where you were clueless.

If anyone else has a nominee for a more important open source subject during the week of May 12-19, drop me an email or post a comment.

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Bill Gates was widely quoted (and dissed of course) late in April 2008 for saying something about open source vs. free software and the GNU General Public License (GPL). The quote of what he supposedly said makes him look so ignorant of the open source software (OSS) movement that I wondered if he was misquoted or if he purposely mixed up the terms free software and open source to take a parting shot at the Free Software Foundation as he moves on to save the world in his retirement.

Around the same time, the NY Times Freakenomics bloggers posted on what leading thinkers think about innovation. I guess they didn't include Bill Gates in the great thinkers hall of fame. But John Seely Brown (of Palo Alto Research Center fame with other similar laurels) said he feels there are four types of innovation: incremental, architectural, disruptive, and institutional. Of the four he felt instituional is often the most important though least creative and said of open source:

"For example, consider the impact that open source software license B.S.D. used for Linux is having, or the copyleft (institution) used by Wikipedia, or the creative commons licensing regimes, or.."

My first thought about his mixing up Linux and BSD and copyleft was that maybe if Brown doesn't understand OSS terms and conditions, maybe Gates doesn't either. Maybe Gates quote was truly one of ignorance. My second thought was that rather than comment on the article, I'd ask Brown if he meant to get that detailed. The clarity of great thinkers is that they don't get down in minutia the way analysts like me do, not seeing the forest for the trees, etc. etc.

His answer to my email about whether he was misquoted or whether he was trying to draw some piercing copyleft/copyright distinction was insightful and to the point:

"I happen to believe each serious Open source project tends to have its own constitution/institutional form – sometimes even called a constitution – but in any case each is a miniature institutional innovation.. but on top of that, that CC, BSD, GPL are good examples of institutional innovations. Yes as you well know they are all different with subtle and not so subtle differences. I wasn’t arguing for any one form.. I was simply taking my hat off to the folks that crafted each of these and wanted to call them out as innovations in their own right with the belief that these will shape our future as much as any purely technological innovation.. "

We already know what the open source community thinks about Gates' point of view. Let us know what you think of John Seely Brown's?

As for Gates quote, definitely one last zinger!

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Many times in the last year I have written about the Linux Foundation (LF) and last summer we caught up with Jim Zemlin, LF's executive director. In a wide ranging discussion at the time, Jim made the point that the open source software (OSS) movement has almost eliminated a big risk for independent software vendor (ISV) startups in the last few years: losing control of the code underlying whatever the ISV makes. He said he could not think of any Web 2.0 firm that wasn't safely on some OSS stack and therefore working with very low risk of losing the right to use its underlying software. Of course, OSS also lets the ISVs start with a very low cost of entry. Jim also mentioned that he had previously worked at the application service provider, Corio.

Application service provider 10 years ago meant roughly what software as a service (SaaS) means today. Jim's comments about ISVs made me think that he's probably on to one of the major aspects of OSS that we tend to forget. Open source software is also a major enabler of SaaS. As the application world goes SaaS, the eventual users have no strong opinion about the underlying infrastructure as long as service level agreements are met. This is a great boon to OSS suppliers because quality code will rise to the top, unrestrained by massive consumer marketing budgets and other marketing devices that often inhibit product acceptance.

This year we invited Amanda McPherson, the LF’s director of marketing and a popular open source blogger to pick up where Jim left off. Her feelings on the SaaS movement and other aspects of the Linux ecosystem are included in this podcast.

By the way, for the record, the LF is a nonprofit dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux. It is funded by Google, H-P, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Intel and others and was formed in January 2007 by a merger of the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group (not to be confused with the Free Software Foundation).

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I ran across this very thorough and thought-leadership blog post recently by Paul Young, director of Product Management at Netstreams. Like me, he apparently is not directly part of the open source software (OSS) movement but analyzes its dynamics from his career perspective.

His perspective is product management, mine is marketing. His findings are similar to opinions I have posted on the need for open source developers to use marketing and market research techniques IF they want to provide software that will be adopted in the marketplace.

The IF is the key word. IF you just want to "scratch an itch," as Paul describes the issues currently ongoing in the Pidgin OSS community, that's OK too. Just let the rest of us know which it is.

But IF you want to "take it to market," whatever that means to you, you not only need the kind of marketing and market research I describe but the related product management Paul describes. And if you expect venture funding, the VCs will insist on it.

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