Roberto Galoppini's
Commercial Open Source Software

The Innovation Festival, that will be held in Rome from the 6th till the 10th of June, will guest people from all around the world to talk about traditional and also unconventional routes to innovation. Richard Stallman and Bruce Perens will attend.

Bruce Perens by GeorgeNemeth

Over the four days meeting, organized by LAit (Lazio Technological Innovation) I would recommend free software and open source enthusiasts to save the following two dates:

8th of June, 8 pm: Free Software between Ethics and Business, open issues and success stories - Auditorium Ara Pacis, moderated by Arturo Di Corinto.

9th of June, 10 am: Commercial Open Source Software (Panel) - Auditorium Ara Pacis, moderated by Roberto Galoppini. Bruce Perens, SourceLabs Vice President and Author of the Open Source Definition, will introduce the debate. Among panel participants Carlo Daffara (CIRS), Gabriele Ruffatti (Engineering), Pier Paolo Boccadamo (Microsoft), and Franco Roman (Sun).

A Q&A session with the audience will follow, everyone is invited.

Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, Perens, Rome, Stallman

A recurring theme of discussion is exactly what defines an “OS company”. Many potential customers are finding more and more difficult to distinguish between “real” open source, viewable code licenses, quasi-open and more; companies are trying to leverage the opportunity of the OS market to push an offering, even if it is not OSS at all.

Recursion by gadl

Of course, a company like Alfresco can proudly claim that - being its main offering a pure GPL software - they are OS, libre, and whatever. But what exactly makes a company an open one?
It is not difficult to find previous traces of the same argument before; starting from Mark Shuttleworth’s comments, Aitken’s ones or by Savio Rodrigues. Within the FLOSSMETRICS project we are facing the same problem, that is how to assess the “openness” of a company, and we observed a few things:

• an OSS project is not only about code; in fact, in many projects the amount of non-code assets (like documentation, translations, ancillary digital material) is substantial. Considering companies as open only by measuring code patches is reductive;
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• a company may sponsor a project in many ways. For example, granting hired programmers time to work on OSS projects (during work hours) is an indirect monetary sponsoring activity; hiring main developers and giving them flexibility to continue develop OSS code is a direct sponsoring.

There are relatively few examples of the first kind; among them, companies that localize and create country-specific versions (like the italian accounting scheme for the Adempiere ERP created by Anthas to allow for a simpler commercialization.

The second model is quite common: IBM sponsors development of the Apache web server, as a basis of its Websphere product, Google employees are asked to work for an OSS projects one day per week on company time (and sponsoring the summer of code, by the way), EnterpriseDB pays many PostgreSQL developers.

Given this, we ended up classifying OS firms as those that:

• sponsor, support, facilitate an open source project, that is a project that has a license compatible with the OSD definition, in a direct or indirect way.
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• the sponsoring/support must be continuous, that is it should not be a single, one time contribution.

This allows to include only those companies that leverage OSS in an organic and structural way, or they would not be able to justify the investment over an extensive period of time.

This excludes one-time donations, for example; and it also excludes those companies that just take OSS and resell it packaged without added value, or “dump” a worthless software code under an OSS license hoping that someone willtake it up from there.

Technorati Tags: adempiere, alfresco, anthas, Commercial Open Source, Open Source Firm

Today is a great day, I eventually got Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun, asking Red Monk - the first analysis firm built on open source - about franchising viability of open source services. Below the full story from the very beginning.

Happiness by Estexx

Thinking back to open source challenges described in 1999 by Michael Tiemann, more than one year ago I tried to figure out how to cope with some of them:

• Scalability - How can a service-based business scale?
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• Sustainability - Will Cygnus be around when customers need it?.
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• Manageability - How can open-source software be managed to deliver quality consistently?.

It has never been easy providing consistent answers to those questions, and the reason could be that no one had an insight that “open source diversity” - the (frequent) absence of a Corporate actor - would really matter.

Writing down customers and vendors’ perspectives, Open Source Franchising came out almost as a natural response, and I started writing the OS franchising concept in March 2006.

Highlighting why appropriating returns from the commons was critical, along with the user-driven demand of broad IT services in commercial open source software, helped me to figure out why Sun is the perfect Franchisor.

Large companies’ and SMBs needs were discussed, showing how the first are more interested in Value-Added-Services and the latter are demanding basic services, addressable by franchisees.
I also investigated the ideal Franchise, pointing out that start-ups are the best choice.

To complete the concept I collected and discussed some analysis about the Italian OS market (IDC) and the global market (Forrester), concluding that boundaries of the opportunities space for OS outsourcing are pretty open.

I eventually finished to write the concept two months later, and I gave the concept to Franco Roman, Director of Marketing at Sun Microsystems Italy, in May 2006. Franco shared the concept with Simon over summer, but I had to wait until November to speak with Simon in person, and and I am extremely happy to know that now Simon is taking my idea into very serious consideration. Things are starting to move. Go Simon Go!

P.S.: It would be wonderful if James Governor and Michael Coté would lend themselves to start an open conversation via the comments area or their blogs on this important issue.

[commercial open source, franchising, Sun, Red Monk, Phipps]

Michele Sciabarrà is an Italian Technical Writer and Consultant, he wrote two books and many articles and tutorials. He specialized in Java, Linux and Symbian Technology and he is running his own firm. I asked Michele to answer few questions because sharing his story he might help other programmers might develop their attitude toward open source.

How did you get involved with Free Software?

I really started loving floss very early. My first experience with the concept was at the university, in 1991 or 1992 I believe. At the time I was a Computer Science student, very frustrated with the lack of hackable machines.
There was an Unix machine (an Ultrix Vax to be precise) I was using for an AI exam where I found a lot of GNU software installed on.
I poked around, used the software, read the licenses, and understood the philosophy. In the academic environment it really made sense. Later when I enjoyed the business side of the thing, the collaboration was not the first step, but the last one, when everything else failed.
At the time I had at home a PC IBM (8086) but I did know that there was no way (at the time) to run the GNU software. But eventually I got Minix, installed it, run it, read all the Tanenbaum book (the same book that read Linus Torvalds), including the source code, and dreamed to have at home all that godsend running in the Ultrix machine.
That dream became true a few years later, when finally I got the money to buy a 486 PC where I installed an ancient (now extinct) Linux distro (SLS).
Then I never stopped using free software. After graduating I made almost all the jobs using Linux.

What does it mean to you being an Italian Open Source Entrepreneur?

I would to make clear that I never intended to became an Open Source entrepreneur, my focus was the net as the new medium, with the endless opportunity and problems that poses.
But in the end, I have to say that the business activity I did was the same that many others “open source companies” does: installing and customizing open source systems.
When you offer to your clients a super-powered website, that they call, depending on their mood, CMS, portal, e-commerce, but in the end is always a some form of a web application, you are involved in providing them all the pieces, not only the software but also the machine, the operating system, the database and so on.

Due to my background, I was never able to provide them a “windows-based” solutions and feeling myself comfortable (and also I never liked windows as a server solution, although I appreciate it as a client platform). I always provided open source and free software based systems. But I did it for technical, not philosophical reasons. So I became familiar with all the licensing and legal questions related. But what I always liked, was the benefit of being able to change the software if it was needed.

Two real-world examples: in a project I developed, I had to make a special processing of a file uploaded by ftp. If I was not able to change the code of an open source ftp server, I had to rewrite the FTP server software. In another case, I had to generate a DBF files that was to be compatible with a particular buggy software. The format required was not standard, and I fixed things patching the open source library used to generate those DBFs. These are real advantages, you can only dream of them if you are using proprietary software.

Monitoring the activities of many Italian “open source” companies, I never found they where really open source. Providing services based on open source software is not different from providing services around proprietary software. The main advantage is that clients buy your services because you do not charge licenses. The drawback is that the client does not get this, you are only “the cheaper one”, and being the cheaper one is NOT advantage that you can sustain in the long run.
In fact, a lot of similar companies popped up recently, and the price war made the service model of open source absolutely unsuitable. Nowadays the open source companies in Italy are “the php kids”, that provide at very low fee “absurd” web sites full of functions that really no one needs but the clients wants, just because they think it is cool (and cheap) to have; so they want everything in their site, in order to look better than their competitors. I saw recently a lot of request for web sites with lots of functionalities (forum, cms, shop and many other things) that are sold for rate so low that you can only install the software, and you cannot even afford to have the time to check if everything works, not to mention any sort of customization.

Also the sad part of many “open source” companies is that, when they develop something (often something very simple), they tend to DO NOT release it to the public, even when they should do it to comply to the license of the original work they modified. Nevertheless I know some companies that have a real open source model and they understand what this mean. But they usually do not work for Italian customers. The average italian customer is not even able to understand that the modification you made for it HAVE to be redistribuited, so often you simply do not say nothing.

I am not used to deliver web applications for SMBs, and I am willing to report others’ experiences. About respecting open source license I believe that we should educate customers and users, as OpenOffice.org volunteer I often reply to questions raised by users and firms about licensing issues. It is a dirty job, but somebody has got to do it! (Read on …)

Years ago I happened to cut my hair by a Jean Louis David salon, and once understood how simple was to choose my hairstyle from a brochure, I never tried another barbershop. Jean Louis David could inspire any wannabe open source Franchisor.

Barbershop by Joel Aron

Jean Louis David in the 60s changed the world of the hairdressing, inventing modern cutting techniques using clippers, eventually starting an international salon brand, now famous all over Europe. It was a revolutionary idea, since barbershops and hairdressers were artisans delivering personal services, at some extent unreplaceable.

Speaking with a managing director of a franchisee, I learned about the training they receive, preparing them to achieve any kind of cut using clippers, but also about opening manual razor’s packaging in front of customers (in order to show them that are new).

When we need a haircut we do know what we want, we also know how long it should take, and we can easily judge if the shop meets our cleaning standards. In a word, we are educated clients.

Nicole France, formerly Gartner’s analyst, wrote:

IT has been and largely still is an artisanal craft, part skill and part black magic. Most organisations of any size have had to create their own IT departments, not so much out of desire, as of necessity.

So while IT Providers must still raise the bar on delivering reliable IT services, ensuring also legal compliance, IT Customers should better understand the benefits and tradeoffs involved in focusing on (predictable) results. In this respect there is a tremendous need for marketing actions.

An Open Source Franchisor could be aimed at delivering to the market IT basic services using OSS, with a fixed-time fixed-price formula, training its franchisees to meet predefined performance criteria.

Open Source franchising for customers could eventually become a shortcut to get reliable solutions, and as seen with Geeksoncall there is plenty of space for growing in computer services franchise arena.

The International Franchise Association, an organization devoted to enhancing and safeguarding the business environment for franchisors and franchisees worldwide, recommends the following when considering franchising:

• Demand: Is there a demand for the franchisor’s product or services in your community? Is it seasonal or does it generate repeat business? Will there be continuing demand for the product or services in the future, is it temporary or a fad?
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• Competition: What is the level of competition, nationally and in your community? How many company-owned outlets does the franchisor have in your area? How many competing companies sell the same or similar products and services?
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• Location: Is it located in the inner city? What are the demographics? Is this particular type of business needed in your community?
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• Name Recognition: Is the company’s name widely recognized? How long has the franchisor been in operation? Does the company have a good reputation?
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• Training & Support: What backgrounds do the current franchise owners have? Do they have prior technical backgrounds or special training that helps them succeed? Do you have a similar background?

The demand for these services is still partially unexepressed, and need to be stimulated, while on the other side we might consider there is no competition in this respect, yet.

A strong Brand is important, and that’s why my perfect franchisor is Sun.

Training will make the difference, moving from artisanship to industrial has never been too easy, though.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, business model, franchising, jean louis david

Ubuntu Dells - Derek Buranen did price comparison of the cheapest Dell desktop compared to a Windows-loaded version of the same specs.

Open Source CMS offers great benefits to scientific collaborative research - The new ZEA partners talks about the potential of collaborative software for research within EU projects.

HP looks to expand open source services - is HP about to sell legal and license compliance services?

Briefing analysts on open source - Alex Fletcher provides some tips on briefing analysts on open source.
Microsoft goes open source for identity - Microsoft has started four open source projects to aid interoperability between identity management systems.

Novell to publish more details of Microsoft agreement - Novell will publish more details on its collaboration agreement with Microsoft before the end of May.

The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) debuted recently with a strong emphasis on promoting interoperability among open source software solutions, and its membership was supposed to be open to organizations providing open source solutions. Dominic Sartorio - OSA’s President - few days ago stepped by and eventually get engaged in a interesting discussion with me about Open Solutions Alliance’s strategy.

Oblique Strategy by gualtiero

At the OSA (Open Solutions Alliance), we have a diverse membership and are often asked what we consider to be “open” business models. So, we track this issue with great interest.

Inevitably, discussion goes down the path of licensing, or how strong each member’s community it. What isn’t discussed enough, IMO, is what best meets customer needs.[..] Because open source, especially in the applications space, is still relatively new, we think there is much room for experimentation regarding what business models are best for the most customers. Consequently, we don’t limit our membership based on some preconceived notion of business models we think ought to be the best.[..]

I have been pretty critical about OSA’s decision to accept members not using open source licenses, calling them “false positive” , but reading Dominic’s comment I learned that there is one notion that they don’t compromise, namely the degree of openness:

We fundamentally believe that open and collaborative behavior is consistently superior to closed and unilateral behavior. This difference go beyond how the source code is managed, to how the company fundamentally operates; How it engages with its customers and partners, its corporate marketing, and even corporate culture and internal politics.

I replied suggesting to be clear about it, and tell everyone that OSA has decided not to talk about open source, while now the logo itself reports “open source at work”. I invited OSA to avoid to make open source definition uncertain, considering make some adjustments to the website, reporting:

From time to time, the OSA may use the term “open source solutions” or “open source based solutions.” We do not mean to confuse this with the OSI’s Open Source Definition, which includes requirements not included in our open solution definition.

Dominic come over again, below his full comment.

Hi Roberto, Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Yes, we had our own “false start” through sloppy use of the term “open source” when we originally launched last winter. Open Source (capital ‘O’, capital ‘S’) means something very specific, as defined by the OSI, and the OSA intends to cover broader ground, for the reasons I described in my previous post. Our collective experience has been that customer value can be achieved in a variety of ways, and some of them don’t always fit a strict definition.

You found other parts of our website that we overlooked. Thanks for finding this, and we will fix this. We don’t intend to cause further ambiguity around what it means to be “open source”, but rather clarify an issue that we believe hasn’t received enough attention: focus on customer needs. In an effort to avoid confusion, we came up with our own term, “Open Solution Definition” (PDF).

Rest assured that our continuing work on this issue will be done in fully open and collaborative ways. Just like open and collaborative development has led to great Open Source products, we believe that open collaboration by the vendor community on various business issues is the best way to achieve customer success.

Many vendors are incapable of this behavior. Some grew during the pre-WWW time when business success depended on unilateral behavior and “knowledge hoarding” than the collaborative behaviors that modern technologies now enable. Take a look at a more recent blog re: the Microsoft patent issue as an example.

Searching for “Open Source” occurrences I noticed that among the actual members only two out of 19 don’t mention open source in their presentations. Apparently OSA is building a stack of open source products - where I see Red Hat RHX more credible offering open source stacks - and a stack of open source services. The latter hypothesis sounds more interesting, OSA would be the first to exploit the potentialities of open source firms taking advantage of the absence of a Corporate actor.

Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, RHX, Open Solutions Alliance, Sartorio

James Dixon, Pentaho Chief Technology Officer, commenting a post introduced me to the “Beekeeper model“, a model used by open source firms writing the majority of the code.

Beekeepers (private) parking by Phil Downsing

The Bee Keeper mode, which applies to companies like Pentaho, Alfresco or Zimbra, is about open source products where the original author, a company, is the main (if not the only) source code contributor (corporate production, in my words).

Going through the whole document (PDF), I found interesting Dixon’s observations about the different kind of professional open source (commercial open source) firms looking at them by the relationship with the code:

• Passive / Committers: Did not write much, if any, of code themselves. They provide services and support for third party open source software. They do not have their own community.
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• Outers: Code started as proprietary software and has been released into open source by the creators.
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• Founders: Originated project to be professional open source from the start. Often need seed capital to achieve this.
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• Converters: Started project as open source project without intent to make money from it. Added ways to make income from it after it became successful. These are sometimes small businesses. Examples: JFreeChart.
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• Baiters: Released an open source project as a method to attract consumers to a different, proprietary piece of software. Examples: Actuate BIRT.

What is missing is a taxonomy describing how Professional Open Source firms cope with their communities, and how (and if) their business models are affected by the relationship.

I suspect that Converters examining later which business model would be right for them have lesser choice, nevertheless they have a community and they can get advantage of it.

About Outers, I believe that a taxonomy of the reasons to give away software would reveal something really interesting. The reason affects how and if the software will eventually be developed in cooperation with a community (hybrid production).
Founders are also intriguing, whether they belong to the “third wave” (applications), or are exploring business models based on the absence of a corporate actor, why VCs are interested in investing in open source software firms would be important too. I guess that VCs play a very important role in the community start-up process.

Technorati Tags: Beekeeper, business model, Commercial Open Source, Dixon, Pentaho

Choosing the best open source products is considered one of the biggest challenges in open source adoption. Software selection costs are so high that specialized consulting companies are doing it as their main job, see Optaros and Spikesource just to name two of. Why is it so difficult?

Choose by Dovaneh

There are many reasons:

• there is no single place to search for OSS (sourceforge hosts a significant percentage of projects, but some merely started there and then moved elsewhere; there are many other forge-like sites and many software listing sites like freshmeat).
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• there is no consistency in the software evaluation; even models like OSMM and BRR have many components that are based on human evaluation, and some more recent approaches even change the evaluation model and forms depending on the software area or market.
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• there are many excellent projects that are not widely known; a great example is the large and sophisticated packages in the scientific software area, virtually unknown outside of a small community).

This means that only a few projects get any visibility, and that many useful tools are not employed even when they could be the perfect match for a company. On this consideration, the EU funded a small project called OpenTTT, that tries to apply a “matching model” to help in the adoption process.

It works like this:

• A group of companies and public administrations are audited, and a set of needs in terms of software and IT functionalities are collected in structured forms (using a modification of the original IRC forms, called TR or technology requests);
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• in parallel, OSS companies and developers are invited to fill a complementary form indicating on what projects they are offering services;
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• requests are grouped, whenever possible, to find a single match for multiple companies;
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• a manual matched process is performed to find potential matches between requests and offers matchmaking is perfected in one-to-one personal meetings at special “matchmaking” events;
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• one has been recently performed at CeBIT and another at the CONFSL conference.

An interesting twist of OpenTTT, that we hope to start soon, is the “club” concept. After all matches are performed, we expect that some needs will go unfulfilled; in this case we will try to find a “near match”, and try to group users with the same need into user clubs, and forward the information that an unfulfilled need has been identified to the groups of developers. After this, users and developers or companies are free to negotiate a commercial agreement, for example for implementing the missing pieces.

See a chart depicting the process.

I hope that this model can be a basis for a more structured and “grassroot” model for interaction between users and developers, not only because it gives an explicit recognition of the fact that OSS is not about price (at least not only about that) but also about flexibility and matching the user needs in a better way.

Technorati Tags: OpenTTT, confsl, best practice, IRC

Commercial Open Source has a lot in common with Juggling, and once you have broken the problem down into simpler steps, it is up to your discretion what to do next.

Absentmindedly juggling by T Bell

In juggling balance is an essential skill, but it doesn’t equal to stillness.

The downside of balance is that you don’t want things to change. The moment you’ve achieved balance, you’d better be ready and willing to get rid of it. Because if you stay with what you think is perfect balance, you’ll be far from in control. Remember, there is no perfect balance; there’s only the approach to it.

Open sourcing your software - throwing the balls - it is just the very first step, then you started playing you need to continuously refine your technique. Look at Funambol, now playing with two “balls” (community and carrier edition) instead of three: they are keeping moving and refining their business model. So does Alfresco, GPLing its software in order to give its new hybrid community a chance - and here I see a need for major adjustments, if they really want it to be a multiple vendors’ project.

Juggling is also about being flexible to the unexpected:

flexible to mistakes of any kind, like the wrong music coming up.When the unexpected flares up, you have to have a sense of humor — to know that your position has been compromised. It’s not the end of the world.

May be at Novell they didn’t expect what’s going to happen because of the so-called nefarious deal, but it took ages for them to “catch” it, and the public get annoyed by not-so-humorous tricks. They were not proficient also in the “show-ending“, eventually.

Open Source firms have to juggle different types of things, and the different characteristics of the objects affects your business game.

Worse than dropping objects is letting them collide in the air and fall in random patterns. To prevent this, you need to create a separate flight path for each object. This comes from training and from knowing how objects move. A ring is a thin planar object that can slide through the air. A club creates a much bigger planar area as it revolves on its axis, and it takes up a lot more space. Then there’s the ball — the easy one that flits in and out of space. But the funny thing is that it’s usually the ball that screws everything up.

Persons are like balls, if your business is based upon a community-based resource you really need to pay a lot of attention to retain them: a weak intellectual property asset need care.

Customers are like clubs, the Internet it is just to small, and customers’ satisfaction gets more and more important when (and if) the exit cost is small. Despite the buzz can greatly help to get new users and eventually customers, but then you need to keep listening them.

Partners are like rings, quite difficult to throw, but once in the air they are consistent with the original trajectory, unless you try to juggle them under wind conditions. Once you get partners, they tend to stay.

And you better know that numbers jugglers do their best just with rings!

Michael Moschen, one of greatest living jugglers, was interviewed by Anna Muoio, a Fast Company’s journalist who wrote an inspirational article entitled “Life is a Juggling act“. I grabbed some idea from the original article - that I would recommend if interested in the subject - to talk about Commercial Open Source and Juggling.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, juggling, moschen