Commercial Open Source Software

Business as Usual - Bill Hilf on Port25: It’s not us versus the free world.

Three Minutes with Microsoft’s Open-Source Manager - Bill Hilf explains Microsoft strategy: to license and not litigate. Am I the only one thinking to the Cold war at this stage?

235 more reasons to love open source - Fabrizio Capobianco designed a funny and provoking t-shirt, and I guess he is going to bring along an XXL one for Bill Hilf next Monday!

Steve? Darl? All of the Above? - Billy Marshall asserts that Microsoft won’tl like the nature of the collateral damage caused by the 235 move.

(added on the 20th) Microsoft’s Patent Impasse - A lucid commentary by Cote’, really enlightening.
Organizing an Open Source Workshop!!! - A workshop entitled “Open Source, Open Ideas” will be held on Tuesday May 29th at the Politecnico di Bari campus sponsored jointly by Politecnico di Bari, OrgLab (University of Cassino), Syracuse University and IESEG School of Management.

Dell announces the models for Ubuntu - Jeremy discloses Dell’s Ubuntu models.

I’m Joining Adobe - Ryan Stewart joined Adobe as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist.

Is there a better way for helping companies and public administrations in the OSS adoption process? Most adoptions are based on a few different paths, for example by grassroots adoption, from consultancy intervention, by trying to replicate a known success story. In this sense, the concept of “best practice” can be considered as a way to tell others of something that worked well, but in the past it has not been successful in replicating the experience.

Best Practices by andai

So, considering that most public administrations are pushing for initiatives to help the adoption process (even if it mainly means creating another forge - like the Italian one just launched - I would like to propose the concept of the “implementation blueprint” as an
extension of the best practice model. The idea came out of our experience in the
Open TTT project, that is trying to leverage the technology transfer process used in the IRC network to facilitate the match between technology demand and offer in OSS.

A blueprint is a replicable and complete description of a set of tools and processes that satisfied a specific need. In this sense, a complete blueprint must contain the following items:

• a complete description of the needs; this should include a complete textual
  .
• description of what was requested, including mandatory and secondary requests
  .
• a description of the context of the needs, for example within a public
  .
• administration, with specific legal requirements, an SME, etc
  .
• the set of technologies used
  .
• the process implemented
  .
• criticalities or additional constraints appeared during the implementation process
  .
• an estimate of the human effort invested in the migration process.

Why so much detail? Because replicability requires a significant amount on information not only on the technological means, but also on how those tools were used to create a complete solution.

As these mapping efforts are already under way - for example the Italian Open Source Observatory has a listing section, called “vetrina” that provides short summaries of public administrations’ experience with open source - it may be interesting to propose a collaborative writing process, maybe wikipedia-based, to turn nice-to-know stories into replicable experiences.

[tags] Open Source Observatory, OpenTTT, best practice [tags]

Carlo Piana is an Information Technology lawyer and a Free Software advocate, as Counsel to the Free Software Foundation Europe he advocates the adoption of free/open source software and interoperable systems by European Public Administrations.
I asked Carlo, who I personally met about three years ago when we were both involved with the FSFE Italian chapter, to tell us more about his interest for free software and licensing issues.

How did you get involved with Free Software?

Well, that’s a long story. Here’s the short version. During late 90s I was using OS/2 as operating system of choice, but I did see no future for it, so I decided to switch to GNU/Linux as early as year 2000. It wasn’t easy, and some help was found in the local LUG. There I met Stefano Maffulli, Vice President of Free Software Foundation Europe.

Then the Commission decided that Microsoft was abusing the market, and I was wondering whether the FSFE was somewhat involved. Stefano said something like:

We are already an interested third party, now we need a lawyer with enough expertise to prepare our application with the Court. But time is really, really short.

I thought it was just a couple of hours’ work, just to file the application, then I was supposed to hand over the matter to another lawyer, so I said:

Well, I can help you with this initial step, then you will decide.

It turned out to be slightly underestimated, as now we are turning the third year of litigation, and still do not see the end of the tunnel. So far I have invested thousands of hours in the case, and am still counting.

In order to be effective in the case, I had to learn quick, and I became very interested also all aspects and implications of Free Software. I started helping people around with legal issues, and almost without realizing it, I was an active advocate. The media exposure of the Microsoft case was incredible, and perhaps this is the reason why people, including you, think I am important: because they know my name.

Let’s talk about the Case now.

Being involved in the Case somewhat changed my professional life, because I have never been in a litigation of that magnitude and importance. Even from a side seat, the pressure is enormous and ramifications are endless, the paperwork simply unmanageable. We now have gone through one interim case, and one merit case (we are awaiting the final decision), while one further appeal is on its way and we have applied also to that. The merit case was huge: thirteen judges, the hearing lasted five consecutive days, the “grand salle” was half packed just of lawyers and experts, the floor was barely enough for the two main parties, the rest was journalists, and it was not even enough. I said “side seat”, but don’t be mislead.

Our role has been central in many occasions, thanks to the incredible work that those who back me have done. People of FSFE, but especially the members of the SambaTeam, have been incredible, these guys really rock! Jeremy Allison at the interim and Andrew Tridgell (Trdige) at the main case were outstanding and really, really credible, but also who worked behind the scene, like Volker Lendecke or another Italian, Simo Sorce, were incredibly helpful.

But the case is way more than just that in court. The Commission is trying to firce Microsoft into compliance, after the first decision has not been suspended. But for the first time in history, there have been not just one, but two procedures for non compliance with the first decision: we are right now discussing the second one. The first ended by adding some hundred millions on the top of the at-the-time largest antitrust fine, somewhere short of half a million euro.

Meanwhile, the Commission is cooking another case with a broader scope.
While the first was on interoperability and lack of disclosure, as well as on the tying practice of bundling Windows Media Player with Windows XP, the second is about five different abuses in the server, client and application sector. In fact, interoperability is not just with network protocols, but also with the application layer protocols and formats.

And the market has not been idle either: the ineffectiveness so far of the remedies has allowed the monopolist to double its share in the server operating system market, now well above 70%, the share in the client OS market has not lowered and many more fields have the windows logo on it.

We are silently involved in that second investigation too. It not difficult to discover with whom because it is public on the Internet, but nobody still realized.

What do you think is going to happen in the next future?

The future is threefold. Free Software is gaining momentum by the day, over are the days when some people used to say that it was a toddler’s game. Most of the industry, from IBM to Google, from Sun to Oracle has various levels of engagement, and the mobile is the next frontier.

Software as a service is probably the next step, which could shift the paradigm, but we are still far from maturity. In the middle lies the world of proprietary software and media companies, which will be eventually made irrelevant by the first two, but now they are fighting back with market power, DRM, software patents and the most dangerous weapon: people not realizing how much freedom they are losing any day.

Antitrust is a good weapon to reestablish equanimity, but antitrust is also a political issue: just consider the number of monopolization cases in the USA in the last six years: 0. So we are at a turning point: public opinion must react now, and the first step is to convey more and more balanced information on these topic.

Thank you Carlo, and please keep us updated!

Technorati Tags: Free Software Foundation, Piana, Software Patent

The Minister of Reform and Innovations in Public Administration, Luigi Nicolais, and the President of the Center for the application of Italian Ministry of Innovation and Technology Politics (CNIPA), Livio Zoffoli, today announced the latest initiative of the Italian Open Source Observatory.

The Collaborative Development Environment (ASC, Ambiente di Sviluppo Cooperativo) offers Italian Public Administrations a medium to co-develop open source applications with other public administrations, market players and research institutes.

Public Administrations need software aimed at addressing specific needs, and the collaboration platform has been designed to help them to involve partners in developing software public goods.

Luigi Nicolais commented:

Public Administrations will benefit of the advantages of open source software now, beyond software customizing they will learn how to share it easier, eventually opening a market for software services and reducing time-to-market and costs of acquisition.

He also added that:

Among e-Government’s strategic lines it is necessary to study and define a model to use open source software assuring economic sustainability, within a market where Public Administrations and software firms play their respective roles.

About ASC

ASC is a collaborative development environment based on GForge, to help public administrations to collaborate, using message forums , mailing lists and tools to create and control access to Source Code Management repositories.

Related post:

Italian Government: funds to sustain open source innovation

Technorati Tags: Open Source Government, Italy, CNIPA

While Seth Grimes was in Rome we took a chance to have a nice chat talking of open source business models, and we happened to discuss about differences between proprietary and open source business models.

How old is your community? by Insane Zamboni

Characterizing Open as Altruistic and Closed as Profit-driven is, agreed, too black-and-white to explain the many businesses that seek to profit from open source. But on reflection, I like my table as-is. Open-source businesses are universally hybrids, whether they seek to profit from their altruism – those companies such as CentricCRM and Pentaho that sell support for software offerings that are completely free, open source – versus those such as SugarCRM and JasperSoft that are altruistic only to the point where they can attract paying customers for the closed parts of their software stacks. Open-source businesses span the table columns. Whether Open or Closed predominates in a given case depends on the particular business model.

Reading Seth’s back thoughts on what characterizes open and closed business models, I got back to the idea that classifying Open Source production models is not a mere academic curiosity. On the contrary it makes a lot of sense, since it affects at large the software life-cycle.

The original version (edited) was extracted by the Open Source Maturity Model document

While I can’t agree with Dion Almaer that if a company open sources its software it is a token gesture, I believe he raised some very important issues, describing what he meant for community driven open source - or hybrid production model, in my words.

If you don’t have any committers from outside of your company. You probably aren’t community driven.

If you didn’t spend time cleaning up documentation for the community when you opened it up. You probably aren’t community driven.

If your users haven’t helped with the documentation if it is lacking. You probably aren’t community driven.

If you do not have some kind of forums/lists where people help each other out. You probably aren’t community driven.

If you aren’t willing to put in a lot of effort to build your community to get true benefits. You probably aren’t community driven.

I don’t think an Open Source firm has to fulfill all of these requirements to proudly call itself community-driven, but if they can’t positively answer any of them I doubt they are taking part of a so-called community.

I warmly suggested Carlo Daffara to take into consideration also this aspect when describing open source business models within FLOSSMETRICS.

Is your Open Source Firm different?

Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, community-driven, flossmetrics, grimes, almaer

Expanding the idea of peer conversations as basis for IT decisions, I would like to extend a little bit the reasons for my belief that this trend will probably continue, and lend to some unexpected results.

Let’s start by thinking as a CIO that has to decide on a new technology, or in integrating a new software system in the company’s infrastructure. The only thing that the CIO knows is the fact that creating software from scratch is costly and requires a significant ongoing maintenance cost, so shifts the decision to a software platform from some vendor, and seeks advice on a company that may provide the necessary integration.

Using this limited information, what the CIO knows is that:

• there is a large number of potential platforms to choose from
  .
• some may be more appropriate than others, and that choosing the wrong one may cause significant delays and added cost
  .
• just browsing through the advertising material is not sufficient to choose in an appropriate way
  .
• that the long-term viability of a company can only be guessed.

So, what is the best strategy? We can try to imagine what a perfectly rational CIO would do, that is it would create a probability tree and try to guess at the potential events, their probability, and their impact. So, for example, if we choose by ourselves, the probabilities may be:

In this scenario, the CIO has to give an initial estimates at the probability of succeeding. How can she do it? By looking at similar tasks, for example. As most people uses Microsoft, or IBM, or SAP, she is fairly confident that she can use those too, and as those companies are still alive, they are probably doing it right. This is of course a false assumption, as there is limited information on failed or delayed project (outside the largest ones, like some government IT nightmares), but it is the only information that the CIO does have. Given this information, she knows that by choosing wisely, the potential cost of vendor A is 1.5, with vendor B is 2.4, with vendor C is 4. But she does not if the selection is appropriate, or if all the vendors have been included in the list.

We have also not considered what happens after the end of the project, like what happens if the company leaves the market, or decides to change the platform without giving enough time for a migration strategy, and so on; but we will leave this for a later post.

Now, let’s say that the CIO has already tried some projects, and discovered that she is unable to estimate probabilities with reasonable accuracy. At this point, she would probably go to a consultancy, that is an independent party with better information on the products, that has demonstrated to be able to select with more accuracy the appropriate probabilities. This is always advantageous, as long as the consultancy has an information advantage on the CIO; the price that she pays goes in a commensurate reduction in the risks associated with the project.

But what happens when the consultancy seems no more able than the CIO to select the platform, or when it is suspected that the suggestions are not entirely independent? Then, the CIO has no alternative than trying as much as possible to remain on the “tried and tested”, and hope that everything will continue to be fine.

What happened recently? The change is that the idea of openness and the availability of open forums allowed users to exchange information (sometimes even in an anonymous form), giving the CIO insight on what really works and what does not. This first hand information is for example what allowed many open source server projects to be deployed in a grass-roots fashion; because system administrators were exchanging information about them, and the best ones succeeded. Now this process is starting to be used at higher levels, and this goes back to the death of generalists conferences: as those do not allow for a venue for information exchange in a bilateral way, the users started feeling that it was not useful anymore when compared to web, second life, traditional marketing and so on.

So we suppose that users (CIOs) are more interested in conversations. But can a CIO base her own opinion on talking with strangers? The reality is that in a way similar to how Google PageRanks adjusts relevance, the user networks created on blogs, digg-like social sites, or unconferences are adjusting themselves for relevance, and allows trust to emerge from seemingly untrusted parties.

The concept is simple: let’s say that a user talks on a blog about his experience with a product, and other read about it. Around this post, may additional links may be created, some criticizing, some praising the text; and eventually, some users that share information often may become “daily reading material”. The usefulness, and reliability of the source can be inferred easily, by reading at the text itself, if the reasoning or the experience seems reasonable, and how others react to the post.

While it may be imaginable that one blogger may be paid for talking in a positive way about a product, it is difficult to imagine that *every* user is biased or unreliable, and we can read and verify even the dissenting views with ease. This way, “reliable” writers and experts can emerge for free, and the CIO can verify everything without paying a consultant to get the same information. Of course this does not means that errors do not happen - only that errors are public, and that it is possible for everyone to check any step or any information against public sources.

This is the real value that is arising from “web2.0″ networks, that is the spontaneous creation of networks of peers, that can be trusted thanks to their transparency and willingness to cooperate. I can only guess that this form of value will be probably not be judged in a positive way by sellers, as this negates some lock-in advantage (the push for unified single-company platforms, for example); but this may be the only potential way to exit from a “lemon market” and giving back to the user the power to choose among products in an unbiased way.

[trust networks, peer discovery, open source]

As seen the traditional process used by companies to disseminate information and collect potential customers is becoming less and less useful; i is just the beginning of an overall transformation of how companies look at external information sources (like consulting companies).

In the beginning of the commercial computer era, most users were connected through user clubs, since most software was developed in-house, and the software market was still in its infancy. Groups like SHARE, the first unix communities, VAX users groups and such provided the essential knowledge technicians needed, and were centered on the idea that software and hardware vendors were few, and user experiences were centered on real and concrete evidence.

Unconference by MichaelBee

With the consolidation of the shrinkwrapped software market and the multiplication of deployable technologies, the need for directions and information was not satisfiable with user conferences, and the consultancies were born - fundamentally, people with deep knowledge of a specific sector, reselling this knowledge to reduce the risk of implementation of a new technologies, or the time necessary to implement it. This period marked the beginning of comparison tools (like the infamous Quadrant), necessary in a world where one solution was exluding all the others.

Open standards, open source and the substantial opening of IT architectures changed everything again; this, and the fact that consultancies were no longer current or reliable on trends that change in a very short time (anyone remembers the “push web” craze? the original Microsoft internet killer, Microsoft network? WAP?) and were found to be not so impartial after all.

This void is being filled by a new generation of knowledge disseminator, be it small and efficient consultancies like RedMonk (that show that openness can be effective) and vertical conferences, that are less trade shows and more conversations. This resurgence of exchanging information as peers is what is really innovative, or maybe a return to the roots; the fact that customers are being treated less as passive suppliers of money, and more as partners in a long-term strategy, in a way that is strikingly similar to the kind of partnership that OSS companies create with their customers.

Technorati Tags: Open Source conference, peers discovery, redmonk, knowledge dissemination

Microsoft takes on the Free World - Is Microsoft wondering to put it this way (patents’ infringements)? Microsoft mind your business: FON Abandons Microsoft, Adopts Ubuntu

Ooh, ooh, the bogeyman is gonna getcha with his stupid patents. Or maybe not.

Do Industry Analysts Matter? - It greatly depends on who they are!

What about open source in the emerging world? - Alex Fletcher is amazed by the lack of demonstrated initiative at the macro-level by the typically western-based organizations, foundations and companies directly involved with open source software.

The Top Ten Reasons To Work For MySQL -  Wondering to change your job? 29 open positions.

ConfSL is over - The Italian conference on Free Software is over.

Juggling, or more technically speaking toss juggling, is about throw objects into the air and catch them: easy to say, difficult to do. Gravity is very selective, despite anyone can learn to juggle, few people take time to discover what it really involves.

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.

Juggling is mostly about breaking down patterns into simpler tasks. There are only two ingredients, tosses and catches. Even the most complex pattern can be broken apart into simpler steps. Once learn how simple are the individual atomic actions, you can recombine them, and eventually show your latest trick.

Life is a Juggling act by f.vp

In juggling there are three basic steps:

First, make a good throw. Are you rolling the ball off your fingers — as you should — or are you using your palm? Do you throw the ball so it always falls away from you — as it should — or does it fly over your shoulder because you don’t want to let go of it?

Throw the ball, open source your software. Whether you do it smoothly or not, you have to manage the fear to loose your business opportunities, your brand, or both. Throwing is the very first step, and you need to mind it carefully.

Second, trust your throw. Look straight forward. Don’t focus on the ball. Realize that once you let go, you have no more control.

Once you let it go choose if you want to keep coding on your own or not, assess the level of “promiscuity” that you want with your partners, ranging from “totalizing” to none, or “ecosystemic“. Whatever you choose, remember others can take advantage of it, and you might hardly find a way to prevent it. Gravity always wins.

Third, put your hands under the ball. Let the ball fall into them. If you reach up for it, you cut the amount of time you have to adjust to catching it.

After a good throw aim for a good catch, if you opted for a medium-long term strategy just wait for the business to come to you, think about Mozilla. You do know if it was a good or a bad throw.

Juggling is not about Magic: you get just what you do.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, juggling, moschen

Alan Shimel Should Stop Talking About Snort’s Licensing - Thomas Ptacek and Alan Shimel keep discussing about GPL compliance.

Open source is bad for vendors - Yet another Dana Blankenhorn suggestion.

Unisys shows acceptance of open source in biz application - It is still the Open Source Economy, System Integrators!

OpenOffice.org in Education: A Roundup - a roundup into a set of references that could easily and quickly be investigated, by Ross Brunson, Linux Solutions Specialist at Novell.

The Japanese government looks to go open source - The Japanese government said it wants to decrease its reliance on Microsoft as a server operating system platform.

FSF still working to achieve Apache license compatibility for GPL 3 - The Free Software Foundation is working hard to establish compatibility between GPLv3 and Apache License.

Technorati Tags: Apache, Commercial Open Source, FSF, GPLv3, Japan, OpenOffice, Snort