Roberto Galoppini's
Commercial Open Source Software

MySQL on the 22th of December refined its licensing scheme from GPLv2 or later to GPLv2 only.

In 2000 when MySQL AB licensed its software under the GPL, the choice was made because

the GPL was a license followed and respected by everyone. We have kept to it, because the GPL is the most palatable license, and poses the least friction for our user base.

..MySQL has been part of the GPLv3 Committee B advising FSF since the GPLv3 draft was announced in January 2006. For GPLv3, we have seen fantastic improvements and hope for GPLv3 to spread. Even though my activity level as co-chair for Committee B was by far higher in the spring than what it has been in the past few months,

Despite MySQL AB will keep working with the FSF for GPLv3, as they did from January 2006, they decided that

until we get clear and strong indications for the general acceptance of GPLv3 over GPLv2, we feel comfortable with a specific GPLv2 reference in our license.

Has FSF a problem to obtain broad acceptance of GPLv3?

In the last years we have been seeing open source adoption getting popular by telcos.
In my entrepreneurial experience telco operators use open source infrastructures to achieve a competitive advantage through customization; viable OS projects in this respect are freeRADIUS, OpenLDAP and Squid, just to name a few.

Beyond my experiences I noticed MySQL is doing very well in the telco arena, and the SCOPE alliance, founded by Alcatel, Ericsson, Motorola, NEC, Nokia and Siemens to

enable and promote the availability of open carrier grade base platforms based on COTS hw/sw and FLOSS building blocks

has almost one year now.

Also Telecom Italia has recently revealed its strategical approach to open source, showing an interest in developing enabling ecosystems based on OS community.

There are even new generation companies, like Tellme , build almost completely on open source, read the full story.

I meet a lot of people using the term “commercial software” as the opposite of open source or free software, and that’s why I titled my blog Commercial Open Source Software. I was amazed today when I happened to read Wheeler’s essay Commercial is not the opposite of Free-Libre / Open Source Software.
David A. Wheeler, who has written a number of articles as the famous “Why OSS/FS? Look at the Numbers!” paper or the list of the most important software innovations, about himself and his approach to open source said:

I’m not a Linux advocate. I’m an advocate for considering the use of open source software / free software (OSS/FS). As I clearly state in my “Why OSS/FS? Look at the Numbers!” paper, I think it’s a serious problem that many people fail to even consider OSS/FS products.

I always recommended his paper to have a in depth look into the TCO thing, and from now on I will suggest people getting wrong thinking that FLOSS and commercial software are opposites to read his last work.

I found interesting his walk through the U.S. regulation to show that FLOSS programs are commercial items for purposes of the U.S. government, and I hope it applies to other countries.

I liked very much his conclusion, a good advice for CIO busy choosing good consultants:

A speaker who uses the term “commercial” as an antonym for FLOSS is probably someone who doesn’t understand FLOSS yet. And someone doesn’t understand the fundamentals of how software is governed will be constantly confused about what controls every device on the planet. Be wary of people who have such a basic lack of understanding; they are far less likely to give good software advice or to make good software-related decisions.

Thanks David for your job!

I’m glad Matt Asay found time to post about my franchising idea. The ball is rolling.

Matt reporting numbers I cited from IDC and Forrester studies said:

IDC found that 38% of enterprises hire outside consultants to do their migration services and 39% hire outside consultants to do implementation services. For these same services, 59% and 66%, respectively, do the work themselves, internally.

This means that either a) this sort of work is best/cheapest done internally or b) no one has created a viable model to do these basic services better/cheaper/faster.

I believe both a) and b) apply, and it makes perfect sense to me because:

• Medium to Large companies use OS to take back control, and to save money;
  .
• SMEs use OS just to save money, and they keep outsourcing IT services..

Large companies demand OS add-value services, and they don’t want to cope with the myriads of small to nano firms delivering OS-based solutions. Today they have no many options, since medium to large System Integrator are not ready yet to deliver those services, at least in Europe.

SMEs instead need more basic service than anything else, and they’re the perfect target.
No one has created yet a viable model to do these basic services better/cheaper/faster, as Matt said, and setting Service Level Agreement (SLA) could greatly help.

SLA in my vision are a must, and the reason is simple: customers don’t know much about open source, but that “it costs nothing”. And unfortunately the perceived value of a good/service is somehow related to its price. On the other hand perceptual benchmarking is done by customers comparing known reference goods/services, and here I see an opportunity.

What if those basics services would be delivered on time, on budget and respecting pre-established criteria? Entepreneurs and professionists (lawyers, technical studies, etc) are driven by the urgence of their business, they want clear and prompt answers, but local small firms don’t follow any checklist, don’t offer any real SLA, don’t match their needs.

The franchisor may offer a solid experience in organizing, training franchisees making them able to cope with customers expectations, besides all other usual services. I believe training is the key.

IT basic services today are supplied by artisans, and perceived as a sort of “digital handicraft”. What we need is moving from artisanship to an industrial age of IT services.
But Industrialising IT requires changes on the part of providers of IT services, and of customers.

Another interesting suggestion from Matt:

For this reason I think Novell, with its experience with its YES! certification program, might be in the pole position to deliver a robust franchising program. It, too, has a strong open source desktop offering (better than Sun’s, in my opinion), Linux, etc. And since a big swath of enterprises (44%, according to data cited by Roberto) use Linux for web/email services, as well as file/print, where Novell has good experience, it might be a good product fit, too.

Novell the mixed-source company might well be a candidate. I found two reason to say Sun is the perfect candidate, and I’m curious to know your opinion on that:

• Sun is (mostly) an hardware vendor, being a franchisor might help them to sell hardware;
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• Sun is giving away almost all its software, and it has no clear OS strategy yet..

The first reason is quite simple, and it’s a very good one to spend time and effort in developing a franchising model. The second doesn’t deserve any explanations, I guess.

IBM is my the second best.

Frank Hecker, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, author of the classical Setting up a shop - The business of Open-Source Software, on Matt Asay blog argued that:

I’m also not an expert in ISV channel programs, but these two aspects seem a major departure from traditional arrangements. I have to wonder how successful a vendor like Sun or Novell with an existing channel program would be in moving their channel partners to such a model.

He is right, overlapping between the franchising model and the channel program is an issue.
Open Source Franchising demand an effort to clearly identify differences between those channels, and this it’s definitely much easier for Sun than for Novell (because of different channel programs).

The ideal franchisee is a startup company, young people able and willing to invest time and money, smart and rigorous hacker.

Over the last four years I have been actively involved with the so called war over software patent, and I had a chance to know many entepreneurs, politicians and lobbyists involved with.

No one like Florian Mueller was able to keep a strategic vision all the time, and despite he was criticized by both parties, he was conceded the category award “Campaigner of the Year” by the European Voice, and many other awards.

Evil lobbyist by mimax

Unfortunately I couldn’t manage to help him to get his book translated in Italian, but I can recommend it as the most interesting and entertaining book you can read on the topic. Besides software patentability it’s a book about European legislative processes, about lobbyism and, somehow, about Democracy.

Below some comments about the book from known voices.

Florian’s book vividly conveys the feeling of what we experienced. A must-read for all who are concerned about software patents, and for those who want to know how things work in EU politics.
Benjamin Henrion, FFII Belgium

The fascinating story of how a group of activists made EU history and saved our industry from a potential flood of lawsuits. When reading this you feel like you’re standing in a parliament and talking directly to the politicians who made the decisions.
Kaj Arnö, VP Community Relations, MySQL AB

Technorati Tags: software patent, Florian Mueller, no lobbyist as such

Few months ago I took part in a survey on FLOSS firms conducted by CALIBRE researchers.

CALIBRE researchers have derived a set of expectations for what they call open-sourcing,

whereby companies seek to grow a community of open source developers around what has typically (but not always) been a proprietary product previously

and have asked feedbacks to SMBs belonging to associations, consortia and other organizations bringing firms under a common umbrella.

As participant I received summary results , and I made some considerations based on my personal experience as founder of the first Italian Consortium of FLOSS firms.

Network Membership.
I found interesting opinions expressed about the following statements:

• Candidate companies must have skills/expertise that are beneficial to the existing members
  .
• To become members of the network, candidate companies must be known to, or have a prior relationship with, existing members.

To be in the know and having skills and expertise beneficial to existing members were not considered mandatory to get in the network by a large percentage. In my personal experience be known was a highly desirable characteristic: it took me months gathering firms to start up the consortium just because we all pretend to choose each other.

Member reputation.
About the following statements:

• Our company considers the competence and skills of other member companies before doing business with them
  .
• It is important that our company is seen by other members as being professionally competent
  .
• It is important that our company fulfills our obligations to other members to maintain our reputation in the network.

More than 90% of firms said competence is a critical success factor, either to choose partners or to be seen as competent and trustable. I understand and share these results, and I had only positive cooperation experiences within the network.

Shared Beliefs and Values.
People were asked to comment the following statements about what network members share:

• a common software development philosophy
  .
• accepted ways of doing business
  .
• a sense of common destiny

Firms interviewed didn’t find a common ground on those topics. Despite OS firms base their business on commons-based peer-production, there was no high demand for sharing a common software development philosophy.
The way others do business wasn’t an issue either. It makes perfect sense to me, since we’re speaking about loosely coupled organizations don’t set strict constraints.
For just the same reason members don’t feel they’re sharing a sense of common destiny.

Integrating Members’ activities.
About the following statements:

• Information on the skills and abilities of other network members is readily available;
  .
• The network has transparent routines for coordinating work between member companies;
  .
• The network enables seamless hand-off of tasks between partners.

To my big surprise less than half participants to the survey reported availability of members’ skills, since it was one of our first goal when we set up the consortium.

Almost 40% percent of interviewed firms said the network has transparent routines for coordinating work, and a quarter of them declared that the network enables seamless hand-off.
I’m honestly amazed by these answers, in my experience coordinating activities among members was quite heavy, and troublesome when the goal was internally funded. I’m afraid loosely coupled organizations can’t pretend to set high standards when it comes to inter-firms cooperation, I would be interested to know how others coped with this issue.

Network effectiveness.
People about the business side commented the following statements:

• Our company has benefited from the skills/expertise of other member companies
  .
• Our company has benefited through the sharing of customer contacts with other network members
  .
• The network has enabled our company to compete for contracts that we couldn’t compete for on our own.

Almost 60% of interviewed members said they took advantage of others skills/expertise, a percentage higher than that one about availability of members’ skills, an apparent contradiction.
Only 30% of members declared to have benefit through the sharing of customers, but more than 40% said they could compete for contracts being part of the network.

Nothing really new under the sun, but I believe networks of FLOSS firms will have a greater impact on commercial open source, and I’m looking forward to read and comment CALIBRE findings, as soon as available.

Dear Simon,

much has been said about the importance of the establishment of a well organized Open Source Community to benefit the future of OpenOffice.org, and we do agree upon this goal.

As Italian Native-Lang Project we believe that:

• an open source project is about sequential innovation, it’s about contributing software, documents and tools to something as a community for the benefit of others;
  .
• open source projects are open to the participation of anybody who can contribute value and is willing to work with the community, and volunteering demands big respect.
  .

We have tried for seven months to get an answer about the hypothetic mismatch between OpenOffice.org license and the Italian dictionary and thesaurus released by Italian volunteers.
The former is under LGPL, where textual resources are released under the GNU GPL license.

We’re spending time and efforts from months to include such useful and powerful resources, while we could invest our energies in more important issues, like promoting ODF and OpenOffice.org along institutions, supporting users and developing and including more extensions.

Should the Italian Native-Lang Project mantain a fork to distribute users a full version of OpenOffice.org, along with those textual resource?
We do really hope not, and we’re looking forward to get your help with the legal review of licenses.

The Italian Native-Lang Project team

2006 was a great year for Open Source, no doubt.

For eweek Open Source got big-time, because of:

• Oracle announcement of offering support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to address lack of “true enterprise support for Linux”, as Ellison himself said.
  .
• Microsoft and Novell announcement of collaboration agreements, including patent protection.The two companies agreed to disagree on that point, lacking of good communication.
  .
• Sun Microsystems finally decided to release Java.
  .

CNET put GPLv3 debate on top of its list, but JBoss acquisition by Red Hat, Microsoft sponsorship of an open-source project to develop a converter between Open Office XML and OpenDocument file formats and French parliament dumpling Windows for Linux were on the list too.
Last but not least I’d recommend Matt Asay reflections on 2006, detailed and not too personal.

Open Solaris 10 has received the Common Criteria at Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL 4+).

What does it mean? Bill Vass, President and Chief Operating Officer of Sun Microsystems, wrote:

At Sun, we continue to lead with Certified Open Source Operating Systems that will run on X86/X64 or SPARC hardware from any vendor, at a lower support cost than RedHat.

The idea than seems to be making Open Solaris a viable alternative to the RH flavour of Linux.

Ambitious. Projects like Belenix might help, but there is no easy way to such goal.
Jonathan Schwartz about Open Solaris spread reported an effective picture showing all machines that connect back to Sun’s free update service.

Schwartz said that:

it doesn’t account for all Solaris 10 downloads, but shows the value of leveraging the internet to meet customers (new and old).

But as I already wrote turning users into real customers is not trivial.

My guess? Sun adopting a franchising business model, soon.

Lessig, founding chairman of Creative Commons, after four years retired as chairman of the board, remaining as CEO.

Lessig talking about his successor, Joy Ito, called him the perfect next chairman, said:

The key to our success now, is to fit this project within an overall economy of creativity. We want to support and protect the sharing economy; we also want to build tools that would help support crossovers into the commercial economy. That will take the sensibility and insight that Joi has demonstrated in his whole career.

Creative Commons 4th aniversary was celebrated in Second Life, while Lessig was in Portugal and Ito in in Japan.

Ito made clear he is succeeding Lessing, not replacing him. Than he said:

Many people now use Creative Commons because it makes business sense. The corporate world needs to hear this in a language they understand. I speak their language.

I like it, and I’m sure he will positively contribute to Creative Commons success.