Commercial Open Source Software

Seth Grimes, a consultant specialized in large-analytic computing system, who in 2003 was engaged by Pentaho for market-positioning, few days ago stepped by Rome to present a course, entitled Open Source for the Enterprise.

Seth a couple of weeks in advance wrote me an email to get in touch, and last sunday we meet to talk about the open source market, business intelligence and related stuff, as follows.

Seth, how do you spend your day?

Like you and many others I know, I have a fork in several pies. I spend about 40% of my time doing hands-on work relating to management, analysis, and dissemination of government and marketing statistics. Another 40% of my time I spend on IT strategy consulting, focusing on business intelligence and text-analytics technologies. The remaining 20% of my work is writing, presenting, and teaching — same topics, a variety of audiences — my Rome class on Open Source for the Enterprise, the Amsterdam Text Analytics Summit the week before, and so on.

Are you deeply into Open Source?

I’m not an open source specialist. I work at the applications layer, and I’ve found over the years that open source is often the best option measured by a combination of capabilities, ease of introduction and use, and cost. I’ve been using Python since the mid-’90s and Linux, MySQL, PHP almost as long. Over the years, I have become a fan of Apache, Mozilla, OpenOffice, and a slew of other Web and end-users tools.

I suppose that my predisposition to open-source was helped along by my use of the Internet. Nothing unique there: the Net in earlier days was about connecting and sharing, a natural for those who are community minded. I think I first used Network News (Usenet) and sent my first international e-mail over Bitnet in 1984, and starting in the late ’80s, I was an Internet (and then Web) evangelist at a series of organizations where I was employed. But I actually trace my involvement in OSS — in commercial OSS much earlier.

I first learned to program in high school in the mid-’70s. We wrote Basic code that was interpreted, not compiled, so the source code was exposed. Time-sharing users had access to program libraries: utilities, applications, games, etc. I spent many hours playing a Star Trek inspired space wars game — this was dial-in on a 110 baud/10 CPS teletype with an acoustic-coupler modem — and I coded a slew of enhancements and improvements. The commercial part: my friend Mitch and I went to Star Trek conventions in New York in ‘75 and ‘76, and the second year there I brought listings of my modified code and even a couple of copies punched out on paper tape, and I sold a couple to one of the exhibitors there. I think I got $10 each.

Tell us something about Pentaho, and Open Source BI.

Given my BI interest, I first surveyed open-source options back in 2002. I got a chance to use some of the software for real work starting in late 2004. I was hired to introduce BI at a Washington DC membership association, which had very limited in-house IT skills because all their applications — management of membership, bookstore and software sales, meetings, knowledge communities, continuing education — was hosted. In keeping with their modus operandi, the organization budgeted lots of money for consulting and nothing for software. So I set them up with MySQL, Mondrian OLAP, and JPivot for JSP interfaces, and I did my data work with Python. In retrospect, we should have spent more effort building a BI culture, figuring out how to incorporate analytics in everyday operations. The system funtioned well enough technically; acceptance obstacles had nothing to do with open/closed source software origins.

That said, it OSBI of the era — and I think this is still largely true — was technology for Java developers. It took a lot of work to craft end-user applications. I wrote about this situation just a few months ago.
OSBI is evolving. There are suite alternatives from a variety of companies with similar capabilities and but a variety of sponsor business models. I’ll probably write about some of them — Pentaho, JasperSoft, SpagoBI, OpenI, Palo Server — soon.

May be at Gartner are too busy playing the Magic Quadrant game to notice that things are changing?

Thank you Seth, and please keep us updated!

Technorati Tags: Business Intelligence, Commercial Open Source, Seth, Pentaho

IDC Italy, responsible for organizing the local Linux World OpenSolutions Summit, suffering from lack of sponsors decided to cancel the Italian event.

As invited speaker I was supposed to give a speech in the plenary session, entitled “Open Source Business models: entrepreneurial islands and archipelagos“, about how open source firms cope with communities. Now that the conference has been canceled, the question raising up could be how open source firms cope with the market, and why they don’t invest money to sponsor events like this.

Game Over by si3illa

Talking with Seth Grimes, invited speaker at the Reading the New York OpenSolutions Summit program (PDF), I learn that the American conference in February addressed vertical industries (Financial Services, Health Care, etc), and specific tracks (Linux on the Desktop, Virtualization, etc). The Italian event - originally designed as a two day event - was conceived as a “general purpose open source conference”, I guess to reach a broader audience.

While many people registered to join the event, and many companies were interested in giving a speech, there were no enough sponsors to make it happen: the one-size-fit-all approach didn’t pay.

The internet, along with its Group Forming Networks, has changed the way companies reach customers, and the way customers look for advices, for good. I see workshops, unconferences and barcamps - I missed the RedMonk’s one at CommunityOne - taking over the open source world.

Magic (Open Source) quadrant game is pretty over by now, people have the power!

Technorati Tags: OpenSolutions, Open Source Conference, Commercial Open Source, Grimes

Matthew Aslett brought some more light on the most discussed partnership in the open source arena, getting feedbacks once again from Justin Steinman, director of marketing for Linux and open platforms at Novell.

The explanation given, see below, makes sense out of the Microsoft-Novell patent agreement, but it remains unclear why apparently it was not part of the agreement. Continue reading ‘Novell: the truth unveiled, software patents are part of the deal’

The Olliance Group, an open source consulting firm providing open source market analysis, released an executive summary (PDF) of the “Open Source Think Tank“.
The Olliance Group organized the second annual Think Tank on “The Future of Commercial Open Source” in California (Napa) on March, with participation from more than 100 open source leaders from around the world.

Trends by farfalina

While invited, I couldn’t attend and I was eager to know what open source thought leaders think about the future, below some excerpts of the executive summary.

Tony Perkins, founder and editor of Red Herring magazine and the founder and editor of AlwaysOn, helding his keynote speech mentioned that the cost of starting an Internet company reported that it plummeted by over 80% from 1996 to 2004, trend largely enabled by open source software and powerful, cheap hardware.

The Think Tank guested two different CIO panel discussions, giving open source customers the chance to share their experiences with open source vendors. Continue reading ‘Open Source Think Tank: “The future of Commercial Open Source”’

Steven Yaskin, Queplix Chief Technology Officer, asked me to review his recent creation, an Open Source Customer Care web application named QueWeb Customer Care, made available also for download (requires registration) under an MPL + attribution license (QPL license).

To boldly go by Cadigan

Queplex was announced on the 23th of April, and apparently is the first commercial software built on Google Web Toolkit - an open source Java framework designed to deploy AJAX applications - chosen for the following reasons:

Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile. GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

I went through the live demo available on line - just in case I suggest you to read the brief guide for the demo, it might help - and it looks fancy, but I didn’t go much further than having a look at it.

Queplix adopted the product specialists model, selling value added services for data conversions and it looks like if it is going to start a partnership program based on a new upcoming product:

QueWeb Professional (scheduled for Q3 2007), for IT consulting companies and Value Added Resellers (VARs) serving customers with verticalized or specialized solutions. Features a QueWeb OS download along with a set of proprietary development tools, including: QueDesigner to more easily customize, configure, integrate and build additional functionality; and QueCrawler to “crawl” through company legacy metadata and extract business objects for the replication of existing business processes and GUIs.

Queplix involving VARs might start its own marketplace, and opening to a Split OSS/Commercial products business model, who knows.

About Commercial Open Source, I disagree with this pretty bold statement:

Queplix is the only enterprise-level commercial open-source vendor

As far as I can see they still have to work on creating and leveraging their own community - as others like MySql and at some extent Alfresco are trying to do now - but… is Queplix willing to abandon the corporate production model?

Technorati Tags: Queplix, commercial open source, google web toolkit

Cybernote weekend website article is dedicated to SWiK, a community-driven website created by SourceLabs aimed at allowing people to share all kind of information about open source projects.

SwiK is a kind of Newsvine about software development and open source projects, aimed at helping people to organize the world of open source. SwiK it is an open source wiki and it uses Ajax, JavaScript and Textile, making editing easy and straightforward, try it out by yourself.

In Ashley’s words:

It’s like Wikipedia, Del.icio.us, and Digg all mixed into one, but it’s just for anything related with Open Source projects. The great thing about SWiK is that it showcases all of the hard work that people have put into their Open Source projects. If you’re unfamiliar with Open Source projects and you’d like to find and discover new ones, this is the perfect place to start.

Anyone can contribute, writing anything related to open source, in any language, where English is the default one.

Looking for some hystorical background I found a long post by Alex Bosworth about SWiK first “birthday”, a reading that I recommend to whom interested in social software.

Alex says also that Spikesource SourceLabs is using SWiK internally:

I don’t think there’s any reason it can’t be used for various purposes beyond driving swik.net, and in fact for the past 6 months internally at SourceLabs we’ve repurposed SWiK-Source to run as our internal wiki to help organize our internal projects. People write weekly status reports in the blog pages, describe design policies in wiki pages, and use tags to avoid a disorganized wiki.

I am willing to give it a try, I’ll keep you posted about it.

Technorati Tags: Open Source, SWiK, SourceLabs, social software

In dicember Jeremy Allison of Samba fame resigned from Novell in protest over the Microsoft-Novell patent agreement, about a month ago Jeremy Irons, one of the lead developers of the Samba Team, also left Novell giving advices to young programmers, and now it is Robert Love turn to leave, as reported by Dave Rosenberg.

Managing human resources by Mark & The Zebra

Robert Love in his blog wrote a post eloquently entitled “epilogue“.

An operose decision, I resigned as Chief Architect of our Linux Desktop endeavor, effective today.

In the house that Ximian built, we dreamt and saw to fruition the world’s finest Linux desktop, Linux’s first desktop commercial success. Seated at the table aside some of the industry’s sharpest hackers, we challenged ourselves not with the goal of building another Linux desktop, but with the aim of engineering a more perfect desktop—Linux or otherwise. Unsatisfied with simply cheaper, we went for broke: better and faster, too. SLED’s éclat is ours.

Leaving is never easy. But here and now the timing is right and so, after three and a half years, here’s to what’s next.

It is great time for Novell, and not only Novell, to understand that free software’s gurus and open source hackers need love too. The employer knowing exactly what is annoying people can respond and retain people longer. Is Novell listening hard enough?

Open Source firms selling software made from scratch within their organizations - what I call Corporate Production Model - don’t need to pay too much attention to retain their employees, no more than any other software company.

On the contrary firms basing their business on commons, need to feed patiently and persistently the hackers they hired. Weak intellectual property assets need a lot of care, appropriating returns is already difficult without extra handicaps.
Whether Microsoft is really hiring Open Source Evangelists or not, Commercial Open Source firms have to pay a lot of attention, hackers are precious to them.

Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, hackers, novell, hiring

Rufo Guerreschi is a political activist, an open source a free software evangelist and entrepreneur, who recently established am association - the Telematics Freedom Foundation - for the enforcement and extension of democratic and communication constitutional rights.

I asked Rufo, who I personally met about four years ago when he was looking for advices on free software licenses, to join the conversation to tell us more about his new activities and licensing proposals.

How did everything start?

I discovered free software as I started drafting grant proposals at the World Citizen Foundation in New York in early 2001. It’s goals were to develop democratic organizing software that would enable citizen-controlled global constituent processes, eventually leading to a world democratic order. It became quickly obvious that the use of proprietary software and software patents to support such processes would have in many ways limited the democratic effectiveness of those processes. During several conferences about e-democracy in the following year, I met Richard Stallman. We met many times after that, and I believe we have built a solid discourse on political phylosophy based on shared ethical goals. More recently I have become involved with proposals, through the Telematics Freedom Foundation, on how the free software movement can concretely extend copyleft freedoms in the era of shared remote software applications.

How did you get involved with free software from a business point of view?

The reason that brought me to found Partecs had the objective to create a sustainable community of client political organizations which, within total freedom, would contract us to extend and modify an initial platform for their unique needs. Originally, it wanted to be a non-profit organization, but we thought it would not have appeared as a credible provider of technology to large mainstream political organizations. Also, it would have been undemocratic for such software to be sustained by donations, as donors would have had an indirect control on the features of those tools. Members of democratic political organizations should get used to paying for democratic tools, otherwise others will on their behalf, acquiring in many ways and indirect but powerful influence on those organizations (i.e. GoogleGroups).

The “personal itch” this time was a political one, not a developer’s one like for others.

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

Italy places huge obstacles to any innovative work in IT in general. This dramatic situation extends to so many areas for such long time, that it has generated a large amount of cynicism even in young people. Such decline is so engrained and in the interest of so many people in power positions, that I foresee that Italians will end up mostly “making cappuccinos for the Chinese people”; which is not such a bad destiny on the medium term.
Italian and European governments should decide to actively defend both their economic interests and ethical principles by directly countering software patenting and proprietary software practices. That, I think, would be its best hope to revive a software industry, which consists of mostly of little more than foreign proprietary software reselling and low-skilled integration services. Such revival would bring with it all other market sectors, whose innovation increasingly relies on software.

Rufo you are preparing a political agenda here, don’t you? On a more serious line I agree with you, we need governments better prepared on “technological issues” that can affect dramatically IT business.

Tell us something about your recent initiative about Telematics

We have a feeling we may be on to something very innovative and important. After a preliminary analysis, we may have found a way for the users of any given telematic service, built using FLOSS, to deploy an effective, verifiable and democratic control over their relevant shared hardware and software systems. Concurrently, it may also create a way in which a viable “copyleft” economic model to sustain the joint creation This may as well as creating a sustainable econo-system for the expansion of those tools.

Thank you Rufo, and please keep us updated!

Technorati Tags: Free Software, Telematics, Partecs, Sammondano, Guerreschi

European Community is known to finance many projects regarding Open Source Software, and it would be interesting to know more about such public spending.

Few days ago Alberto Sillitti, from the university of Bozen, one of the Qualipso members, asked me to join a Qualipso’s workshop that will be held in Limerick, within the Third International Conference on Open Source Systems. He kindly asked me to join the meeting to bring over my thinking, and to get myself prepared I went through their website and other projects’ websites.

I enjoyed the FLOSSMetrics approach, fully disclosing their description of work (PDF), stripped only from some confidential information. Reading their document (53 pages long) I found all possible details about the project, including the project management and exploitation/dissemination plan and the detailed Workplan.

Kudos to FLOSSMetrics to choose transparency, but it is worth to notice that many other projects did the same, checkout yourself searching IST Projects “Description of work”.

My first suggestion to Qualipso: made public your description of work, transparency pays.

Technorati Tags: IST, Qualipso, FLOSSMetrics, Open Source

Today in Washington DC from 9:00 - 11.30 am /EST the World Bank’s e-Development Thematic Group invites all interested dgCommunities members to participate by means of live webcast, via videoconference or in person to “Open Systems for e-Government in Developing and Transition Countries: Open Source, Open Standards and Open Format“.

Continue reading ‘World Bank Global Dialogue Event: Open Systems for e-Government’