Back in November 2007, I posted on the announcement that XAware had begun an open source project and was leading a trend in terms of making industry-centric open source software (OSS) more available. The post was based on a discussion that I had had with Bill Miller who is XAware's founder.

Bill noted that it took XAware a while to get to open source because of cultural and other reasons. But once it got there, it's having very good success. Miller made some changes to the technical structure of XAware as well. So based on those two things, in 2007 he announced XAware Engine, built it on Spring Framework, he ships it with JBoss and MySQL, although it can run with any compatible application server or data source. It's also been changed into an Eclipse plug-in so kind of open source up and down the stack.

Bill Miller currently serves as the Executive Chairman as well as the Chief Technology Officer of XAware. He also had founded StorageNetworks where he had sort of the same title, Executive Vice President and CTO. And with StorageNetworks, that was a company he grew from two people to more than 600 employees with doing more than $125 million in sales back in 2001. And they grew the company that quickly in just three years.

So almost a year later, it's time for an update. This podcast talks about what's going on in 2008 at XAware and how that "open source thing" is working out.

Back in February, I posted on an interesting phone conversation I had have with Larry Alston, then the vice president and general manager of Open Source at IONA. Now Larry has that same title at Progress following Progress' recent acquisition of IONA. Mentally, I added Larry to a list of open source software (OSS) oriented executives that really have a clear understanding of OSS’s place in building a software business. These executives' message is functionality comes first, open source is a means to an end. I actually heard the same thing around the same time at an IBM analyst meeting from Steve Mills and I am happy to say it cross-tabbed with a lot of my own research among users.

Larry had some interesting opinions and observations about the open source development model and its terms and conditions from a marketing perspective that we couldn't fit it into one blog post back in February. So I invited him back to do this podcast. And with the new version of its Fuse ESB product being announced October 14, the first under the Progress banner, this seemed to be the right time to do it.

Larry brings a different perspective because of a software career that has spanned stints at Bachman, C-bridge, Object Design, and Pantero before joining IONA. If you are into IT software industry history, you'll know that makes three companies he's worked for that have been acquired by Progress.

In this podcast, Larry talks about this new product and how Iona is adopting to what I call the "functionality rules" open-source-as-a-tactic theme now that Iona is part of Progress.

This is one in a series of podcasts that began with meets and greets, and phone meetings that came out of the Red Hat Summit, which was held in Boston in June 2008. Other of these podcasts are available under the Open Source Software tab on ebizQ.net so I urge you to take a look.

One thing that I'm always looking for because I believe it is such an important factor in the information technology market, is software product that help give users open choice not just open source. And one of the products I saw at the Summit fit that bill in my opinion. It was actually new that month it's called Xandros BridgeWays Product for Red Hat and it is part of a product line of mixed-environment, cross-platform Windows/Linux Management Tools.

Just what the doctor ordered if you have to work in the real world that includes a mix of this and that. With this product, Windows administrators can even manage your Red Hat servers directly from their Windows machine. The product is marketed by Xandros, which, separate subject, also recently acquired Linspire. So there's a lot of open source/open choice stuff going on here.

My guest, Marc Bellefleur, is product development manager at Xandros and he explains the open choice characteristic of BridgeWays in more detail. Marc has been with Xandros for four years and before that had a similar role with Corel.

What’s this have to do with information technology investment research? No, this is not another rant about the crazy Diebold voting machine conspirators on the open source software fringe.

This is about the OpenLogic Open Source Census, which includes good news for both Microsoft (MSFT) and Sun (JAVA). I have been a big fan of OpenLogic’s idea since meeting with Kim Weins, Marketing VP, and Steven L. Grandchamp, CEO, in October 2007. Kim gave us a preview of what they were doing a few months later in a podcast. (I would even like to see the idea go further and become a true census of all types of software, which would end the useless “us vs. them, Open source vs. Microsoft� thing altogether.)

But the OpenLogic Open Source Census is in its Dixville Notch stage. As of September 30, slightly more than 2000 “machines� have been scanned, since the census began in April 2008, discovering over 700 “brands� of open source software deployed in 300,000 discrete open source software instances.

For Microsoft (a census sponsor), the good news is that much of this open source software is running on Windows. As of an earlier snapshot in August 2008, more than 50% of the open source software was Windows based but that metric was not released this time (see earlier parenthetical phrase). I suspect that the number has dipped below 50% but the prevalence of Samba as the 19th most frequently found package tells me the Windows number is still high. To me that means that open source is driving business for Microsoft even if its shareholders believe that Unix-Linux migrations should have been Unix-Windows migrations.

For Sun, the good news is the popularity of OpenOffice; it’s on 45% of the machines scanned. But that’s good news of course only if Sun can turn OpenOffice users into StarOffice subscription users or otherwise monetize the popularity of the Office competitor that Sun made open source back in 2001. MySQL is also found on 28% of the machines scanned.

Ruby, a growing software package not associated with any major public company, also scores well as we come out of the hills of New Hampshire.

Surprising against conventional wisdom is the low prevalence of open source software middleware such as Mule, Red Hat (RHAT) JBoss and the IBM (IBM)-led Geronimo project. That’s another indication that we are in the Dixville Notch, non-representative stage of the census. I believe the initial census results reflect development vs. deployment machines in a manner unrepresentative of the real world.

Going forward, one of the problems with the census is its opt-in nature. That provides all the big software suppliers a way to cook the books but at least it’s an equal-opportunity temptation and they all know how to play the game. Over time, if the mix of machines represented in the OpenLogic survey approximates the aggregate IDC quarterly data on PC and server shipments, it should start to truly represent reality. I would guess that by this time in 2009, all the votes will be counted

(*For non-U.S. and even non-New-England and even non-Vermont readers who want to know what a “Yankee� is, see this link, particularly E.B. White’s definition within the Wikipedia entry.)

I must admit that the only roundhouse I've ever been in or near was at a restaurant somewhere up on the Illinois/Wisconsin border. But I couldn't resist talking to a company named Engine Yard. The company is building its business based on the same Ruby/Rails ecosystem phenomenon that we talk about when we met with Todd Barr of FiveRuns back in March of 2008 and Justin Gehtland of Relevance in August 2008.

Beginning in 2006, Engine Yard saw that customers were developing business-critical Rail apps but that those same customers didn't want a worry about deployment issues nor did they want to hire IT staff to manage service. Customers wanted Rails focus 24 x 7 operations support and a smooth path if they would move from 100 users, up to 1000 users, or theoretically 10,000 users. Engine Yard is providing the hosting and data center infrastructure for this sort of scale and; therefore, I think they're getting probably a pretty good handle on this Ruby and Ruby on Rails phenomenon .

In addition to providing needed infrastructure, Engine Yard participates in the Ruby Open Source Projects Rubinius, and Merb. And if you know those projects, you know we're nibbling around the edges of open source cloud computing when we talk in this podcast.

Today my guest is Tom Mornini. He's going to explain all of this in more detail. Tom co-founded Engine Yard and has spent nearly 30 years as a software programmer and software architect. Prior to starting Engine Yard in 2006, he created FaceBridge, which is a billing service for video-over-IM systems, and InfoMania Printing and Prepress, which is an Internet print procurement service. He also served as software architect at Quios; he's responsible for the platform that allowed the company to grow into a global mobile messaging provider. Tom's also the author of Capistrano and the Rails Applications Lifecyle published by O'Reilly.

I hope it is not parochialism on my part but to say the work at OW2 proves some kind of French leadership because it is a spin out of my old employer Bull really disses the Apache Software Foundation, Mozilla, etc. The fact that most open source groups similar to or even more open than OW2 have their roots here in the U.S. doesn't make the U.S. any more or less a mover or shaker in the community. It's not a geographic thing. In reality, all these groups including OW2 hopefully are using contributors from around the world.

The real kicker is the sentence:

"Everyone prospers when working together under a single, shared technology vision."

Well, no, sorry that is not the case in France or anywhere else. In France in particular, before this current iteration of central technology planning by the French government, it was called Plan Calcul, launched by the French government in 1966/1967 in response to the launch of the IBM System/360 or in response to GE's acquisition of Bull or because Kennedy didn't want to sell deGaulle a CDC supercomputer to build a nuclear bomb, depending with whom you parlez.

Whichever, it was a costly failure. It was abandoned around 1975. I saw its effects during my time with Bull in 1973-1974. That is one of many reasons I am against any government's intervention in the IT market through regulation and legislation. But at least the finale for Plan Calcul pretty much convinces me that every time a government does try to intervene it is good news for developers and software publishers--open source or otherwise--that run the other way. Do the timeline and you find that France completely missed the real next big thing in IT while it was trying to beat IBM (or GE or Kennedy) by government edict.

As as aside, I think the statement, "A lot of universities in the U.S., except probably MIT, use traditional tools like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP" would be found laughable by the U.S. labs and universities where open sharing of source code began back when (North) America was still sending France CARE packages. But C-M, Harvard, Berkeley, and the University of Illinois among others can defend themselves.

At the Red Hat Summit, which was held in Boston in June 2008, I came across Zmanda. It’s based on an open source project called Amanda building backup and recovery software.

And at that time, Zmanda had just announced that it was delivering a new level of data protection for MySQL databases. Of course, MySQL was a hot subject at time because of the acquisition by Sun. By the way, I also found out at that conference that MySQL prefers I say MyS-Q-L but that's going to be an effort. Can't teach an old dog new tricks.

Together with Netapp, Zmanda offers a product called ZRM to enable MySQL customers to implement continuous data protection for mission critical databases. Zmanda also announced back in June that it had joined the Netapp Advantage Developer Program and that ZRM for MySQL has been certified for use with Netapp storage systems.

So a lot of interesting things going on there and therefore we’ve asked Chander Kant, who’s chief executive officer of Zmanda, to talk about backup and recovery in general. Chander is also a founder of Zmanda and has been involved on both the technology and business sides of open source software for some years. He was named one of the top 20 Linux Luminaries, in fact, back in 2004 by Linux World.

And prior to Zmanda, Chander founded and ran Linux Certified, which is an open source product and services company, and earlier in his career worked with Veritas. He holds a master’s in computer science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a BS from the Indian Institute of Technology. So let's hear about backup and recovery in this 8 minute podcast.

Back in December 2007, I posted on the Jitterbit Trading Post in the context of the wider movement in open source software (OSS) to make OSS more available and more interoperable. That post back in December was based on a discussion with Sharam Sasson who is Chairman and CEO of Jitterbit. The Jitterbit Trading Post was intended to be the central hub for complete integration solutions built with the Jitterbit open source Integration Suite.

In this podcast, we're going to ask how that process is going. Jitterbit has released Version 2 of its flagship product. And that added some new business process design features as well. Jitterbit has also told me offline that it is seeing some relationship between Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and open source integration and we're going to try to explore that as well.

To do that, we're talking with Ilan Sehayek who is Jitterbit's chief technology officer. Ilan has held various engineering marketing and executive roles in the IT industry in the past 18 years. Prior to leading Jitterbit's engineering team, he served as director of market development at Amazon.com where he created the platform for retailers to run their direct to consumer operations. Before that, he was a founder and VP of product strategy and engineering at CommerceRoute where he pioneered, developed, and marketed integrated app appliances to the enterprise and B-to-B market. So we've got both sides of the experience there in terms of SaaS, and open source--plus exchanges--and that puts us in a pretty good position for some interesting information.

It is unclear how this straw poll is going to limit respondents to U.S. voters. In fact, from the choices to the first of its five questions, it appears that people that don’t vote can also participate so its claim to be measuring “Political-Open Source� feedback seems a little strange. The survey, if the second question is answered honestly, won’t say much either because a person—Democrat, Republican, independent (called unenrolled in some states) and non voter—would have to be pretty disconnected from the world to not use Linux or open source applications. And of course if you use open source applications, the odds are you also use Windows so what does that question prove.

What is pretty clear—and unfortunate—is that the web site and/or its staff person has a hidden agenda. From the three other questions (and other blog postings), the agenda appears to be to legislate or regulate against free-market outcomes in governmental IT procurement in the manner that has long been attempted unsuccessfully in Europe. There is no place for it in IT, and no place for it in open source, especially in the U.S. (IMHO).

"How important are the quantity of solutions in a decision by your company to use open source?"

The poll was the outgrowth of a discussion about the size and importance of the open source community’s ecosystem. Ross Altman of Sun, Dominic Sartorio of the Open Solutions Alliance and Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation were panelists in the discussion. The answer was not surprising to me because I have been asking similar questions about subjects as diverse as client/server software, minicomputer operating systems, ERP, workflow, office automation, business process management, material requirements planning, application servers and open source for 25 years.

And the answer is always basically the same: Functionality rules!

Specifically,
• Over half (57%) of the respondents said the number of other open source solutions available were not important at all as long as the specific open source software they were considering did the job.
• A quarter said the number of solutions were important but not as important as legal/contractual things like license covenants and patent concerns or cultural things such as not wanting to participate in an open source community
• Only 14% said quantity was the most important criteria.

This is somewhat too bad in a way because a pet theory of mine is that open source terms and conditions would begin to become more prevalent as a critical mass of OSS choices became available. But no matter how I ask the question and no matter what information technology I ask it about, the answer always seems to come back as it did on August 20: Functionality Rules!

So guys, give the market more functionality rather than more projects.

By the way, the OSS Roundtable, featuring was recorded and is available here for you to listen to at your leisure. If think you have to join the ebizQ Gold Club to replay it but membership is free.

If you have any questions on what you hear, do not hesitate to email me at dennis@ebizQ.net

Back in March I met with Todd Barr formerly of Red Hat and at that time starting his new position at the Austin-based Ruby/Ruby on Rails-based venture called FiveRuns. That was my introduction to Ruby and its ecosystem and I found the whole area one of the purest of the pure when it comes to open source. Ruby is providing a modern language, a 6GL maybe, and Rails provides a framework designed to run Ruby applications. Think Java vs. JEE.

Just as Java and so forth need all kinds of other software around it 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. Relevance is a consulting/training firm specializing--but not exclusively--on Ruby on Rails software development and hopefully on building that ecosystem. At this year's RailsConf, developers from Relevance led an interesting session on contributing to open source, one of the hottest topics today in the market.

Because Relevance is a consultancy and does not have a dog--that is, a product--in the hunt, it can be thought of as among the purest of the pure as well. It selects open source code that gets the job done for its clients rather than the philosophy du jour. I am beginning to call that "Let's let the cream rise to the top." Our guest on this podcast, Justin Gehtland, co-founded Relevance in 2003 with Stuart Halloway. He's been a programmer, author, and speaker since 1994. His 2005 book, titled "Better, Faster, Lighter Java," won the Jolt Award for Technical Writing, and he has authored eight technical books in all. He is currently focused on expanding Relevance's Ruby practice and, he says, "building the best team of agile developers in the known universe."

Mark Radcliffe, whom we interviewed here a few months ago, thinks it's good news so I'll take his word for it. I won't even pretend to know anything more than what I read by experts such as Mark. For my primary research, the IT investment research perspective, it doesn't mean much because the major companies that distribute open source software (OSS) use different OSS terms and conditions (Ts&Cs) than the model railroader.

But I suggest everyone that is getting so excited consider the source in what they read about the recent court case I think I am reading Mark correctly to say it's good news but it only applies to that particular license (and not the dozens of OSS Ts&Cs in use) and, I think, only in that particular jurisdiction.

In addition, surprise/surprise, other lawyers don't agree with Mark.

Like all things related to the U.S. legal system, we need a few more years and a few more cases before this can be delcared much of anything. And in the end what will it say if it all comes out the way the open source community wants: If you wrote it, you own it (whether or not you charge money for it).

That's what the OSS community wants, right? Who was going to disagree with that?

"What we wanted to preserve was just not a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form."

Here are my suggestions for 10 basics for OSS software developers to keep in mind:
1. Like oil, the world needs software to run. In fact, like oil, the world needs software more than ever.
2. Most of the world’s markets are capitalistic in their economic organization. You probably cannot change that (but no one will bother you if you try).
3. In certain situations, capitalistic ventures tie software licenses to some other capitalistic activity. The legalities around such tie-ins are very complicated and differ in different parts of the world. But such tying in (e.g., a browser or a media player to an operating system) is not immoral.
4. Since 1970, when IBM decided to stop using such a tie-in arrangement (that is, IBM decided to unbundle its software from its systems) rather than face a United States government legal case over the systems/software tie-in, a lot of software has been sold and licensed “independently.� Software has thus become a large market, in capitalistic terms, separate from the sale of information-technology (IT) systems and services and other non-IT activities that also use software.
5. The market for software as measured by revenue now tops a quarter of a trillion dollars a year, of which Microsoft gets more than 20% of the total. The top 5 software suppliers account for more than 50% and the top 25 software suppliers account for about 80% of annual software revenue. No one forces anyone to use software from Microsoft or any of the other leading software suppliers.
6. Despite the statistics in Basic Number Five, most of the world’s software is developed one-off and not produced in and for a market (that is, specifically for sale). In a small amount of situations, some of this one-off-developed code is given away at no charge, typically to support industry-centric cooperation among suppliers and consumers or for similar reasons. This trend is 50-60 years old and in some form probably predates the invention of software. A very small portion of this no-charge software is licensed under so-called open source terms and conditions (Ts&Cs).
7. There are dozens of types of open source Ts&Cs, which are primarily distinguished by the fact that the code must be distributed in a certain way technically—in source form—and under various re-distribution rules, none of which are more or less moral than other types of tie-in arrangements as discussed in Basic Number Three above. In addition to the non-market-related distribution of OSS, all major software suppliers and thousands of other for-profit software suppliers distribute at least some software using open source Ts&Cs. There are a few opportunities in the marketplace to deal with suppliers that use only open source Ts&Cs if that is your wish.
8. Most of the world’s software as measured by a census of installed code including the software supplied in the market and the software developed one-off—if such a census existed—works with or runs on (or both) software from Microsoft. That includes most of the software provided by the other 24 leading software suppliers mentioned above and most software licensed with open source Ts&Cs. If you believe in the wisdom of markets (some might call them bazaars), there is a reason for this.
9. Software development is labor intensive and like the need for oil (vs. alternative energy sources) the labor intensity will be the status quo for a few more decades. However, this labor intensity and its effects on software development costs is antithetical to capitalism; therefore it is likely in a few generations that some form of robotic software development will emerge and/or general-purpose software as we know it will disappear as a market and most software will be embedded as described in Basic Number Three above.
10. Only a few tenths of a percent of the world’s population is involved in software development. Very few other people in the world care about all of the above. So until you or your grandsons--there are still very few women involved--are replaced by a robot or the market has gone full circle back to software bundled in hardware or otherwise tied-in in some way, enjoy the fellowship Ritchie talked about in the late 1960s .