Commercial Open Source Software

Is Red Hat doing its part to win the ‘open source’ war? - Ashley Vance says that If Tiemann wants to create a muscular division between the badgeware bastardizers and the open source faithful, we’ll need to see a much more focused effort from the top.

How will open source do in a talent-short age? - Dana thinks open source will more than thrive in a talent-short world. Would SourceKibitzer be the ultimate resource to replace programmers? What about other languages and environments?

MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos: What Open Source Is Really All About - MySQL CEO explains the way they are preventing predatory behaviors: using the GPL, retaining maximum control over product roadmap and taking advantage of the “best code here” position (i.e. technical support is not copyable by others).

Open Source ETL - Philip Howard, who previously wrote “the case for open source ETL“, says that Talend may have entered the open source ETL market late, but it looks that it will soon be a market leader.

Stallman Shoots Free Software Movement in Foot. Again - What is wrong with subversion?

Returns on open source VC investments - Savio Rodrigues quoting Matt Aslett who in turn was reporting Gianugo Rabellino makes a deep analysis to guess why VCs fundings to series ‘B’ and above are increasing while series ‘A’ seems to be drying up for OSS vendors.

The Internet Governance Workshop proposals submitted within the 30 June deadline have now been posted for viewing. Save the following dates:

• Deadline for submitting proposal (abstracts + initial list of organizers ): 30 June.
  .
• Completion of co-organizer and panellist arrangements and merge activities: July.
  .
• Notification of selection - 31 July 2007.

During July proponents of similar workshops will be encouraged to join forces and collaborate where it is feasible. Organizers of workshops are, therefore, expected to work with others who submit proposals on the same theme. A willingness to merge proposals is a requirement.
The Government of Brazil will host in Rio de Janeiro on 12 - 15 November 2007 the second Internet Governance Forum meeting. The IGF website - run by the IGF Secretariat - supports the United Nations Secretary-General in carrying out the mandate from the World Summit on the Information Society with regard to convening a new forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue - namely the Internet Governance Forum.

Technorati Tags: Internet Governance Forum, Open Consultation

SourceForge.net just launched their marketplace, a sort of Open (source) shop for which employment opportunities are not restricted to developers working by a particular company.

From a customer perspective, SourceForge Marketplace could eventually represent a resource to find talented developers, as reported by their newsletter:

Open it’s a shop by psd

Now you can buy services at SourceForge.net

Hire an Open Source Expert

In addition to visiting SourceForge.net for the latest Open Source code, now you can use our site to hire qualified experts. At the SourceForge.net Marketplace, you can quickly and easily buy service from responsive, eager providers—at fair market prices!

Visit the SourceForge.net Marketplace.

Right now, you’ll find listings for technical support, custom development, training and more on applications such as:

• OpenBravo ERP
• Firebird
• JasperReports
• Python SNMP
• And many more!

Check out how the Marketplace works and hire an Open Source expert ASAP.

How many among the just-announced finalists of the second SourceForge Community Choice Awards are already supported by the Marketplace’s providers? Since Voting will continue through July 20, it will be interesting to sort it out on July 26 at OSCON.

Full Disclosure: I am on SourceForge.net Marketplace advisory board, but I would write about it regardless, even if they would have given me money, or a lot of!

Technorati Tags: Open Source Marketplace, Sourceforge

Every Government is supposed to function for the benefit of its citizens, delivering services that help economic growth and enable social activities. Since IT is just a cost center, and considering the possible multiplying effects, many see Open Source as the natural choice.

Good will by mricon

Looking at the North-American experiences, or European ones, I am wondering what did they miss, and how possibly the new ones could eventually be really successful.

Matt calls for leadership, I think that first we need politicians with good-will, willing to put their intellectual potential to work for the overall desires of the general public.

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: Open Source Government

Another reason I love open source software - : A story about the open source transparent development process.

Is Microsoft OOXML the best deal open source can get? - Dana puts it simple, may be even too much: customers and public administrations are not the same, like office-automation suites and file format are different beasts.

The Impact of Open Source Software (OSS) on Education - Topics on OSS on Education, open educational resources (OER), open courseware (OCW) and governance on Terra Incognita blog.
Open Source Economics and why visibility is good for you - Comments about Gupta’s article at Read/Write Web: Open Source Economics Driving Web 2.0 Innovation

Driving the Flex decision - Mc Allister at Adobe expands further the reasons to open Flex given by Phil Cost, the Director of Product Management for Flex and ColdFusion.

The Real Meaning of GNU GPLv3 -  Glyn Moody observes that the drafting of version 3 has been opened out in an exemplary fashion, unfortunately this has a cost: the GPL Loophole it is going to stay.

Survey: Windows loses ground with developers - developers targeting Windows for their applications declined 12 percent from a year ago, from 74 percent to just 64.8 percent. The targeting of Linux by developers increased by 34 percent to 11.8 percent. It had been 8.8 a year ago, according to the survey. Linux targeting is expected to reach 16 percent over the next year.

Open source investment up 33% in Q2 - Matthew Aslett keeps us updated: The biggest deal of the quarter was done by real-time Linux specialist Concurrent ($14m), open source ESB vendor MuleSource raised $12.5m.
Rocard se recupera de una embolia cerebral en India - Michel Rocard has suffered an embolism in the brain during its trip to India, best wishes for fast recovery!

What’s the Matter With Standards in China? - Jeff Kaplan reports that an official from a Chinese standards organization maintained that a standard is not “open” if it has any IPR in its specification. In his opinion China’s influence over the direction and content of the standards debate will surely increase, he might be right.

Microsoft wins Massachusetts file format reprieve - Microsoft’s efforts paid,  Massachusetts included Open XML in a new draft of the state’s technical reference model. I keep thinking that whoever wins the file format war, users are going to loose.

Six questions to national standardisation bodies - Georg Greeve, FSFE President, is working hard on (office) open standards. I suggest him to explain the six questions.
Guide to Open Data Licensing - Rufus Pollock wrote a Guide to Open Data Licensing, a guide to licensing data aimed particularly at those who want to make their data open.

Hey Roberto!

We’re looking for a select group to advise us on the SourceForge.net Marketplace. Because you are a reputable, knowledgeable member of the open source community and we trust and value your opinion, we’d be honored to have your guidance in the first crucial phase of this initiative. Therefore, we would like to invite you to join the SourceForge.net Advisory Board.

The road less traveled by Dolinski

I am really honored to join the SourceForge.net Advisory Board, and I am pretty excited to participate the SF marketplace start-up process. As far as I understand the board will continue to meet regularly on line, in order to be updated and also to give feedbacks.

Simon Crosby, Xen Source CTO, wrote a post entitled “New open source business models based on Xen“, published by SearchServerVirtualization.com, by Jan Stafford, talking about Xen business model.

Xen has pioneered a new model of open source business - one which uses open source as a reference standard implementation of a component of the offering, but which stops short of a whole product. This encourages multiple vendors to contribute, because adopting that model allows them to add value to the final product and be compensated for it.

While the Xen business model is not really new, think about the linux-embedded case, sharing standards or participating to sequential innovation sounds succulent, but is not for everyone.

Sharing the cost of production of a (pure) public good makes sense only if - as seen with the above mentioned linux-embedded vertical market - only a percentage of code is revealed. As a matter of fact part of it is kept private, and represents an opportunity to price the added value.

He put it really clear saying that:

The value-added components that vendors must add to the “engine” in order to deliver a complete “car” to their customers allows them to differentiate their products, and gives customers choice. By contrast, had it been the Xen project’s goal to deliver a complete open source “car” there would be no value proposition for the different vendors seeking to add virtualization to their products, and it would put Xen in conflict with the Linux OSVs — some of the most important contributors to the project.

It is still the split OSS/commercial products business model, a model that has the intrinsic downside that the FLOSS product must be valuable to be attractive for the users, but must also be not complete enough to prevent competition with the commercial one.

Note that the reduction of the attractiveness of commercial versions occur only if thid parties release new packages containing the missing functionality, but it is quite unlikely. It would require a deep knowledge of proprietary products and/or specific Linux distros, and may be some IP disclosure.

Technorati Tags: Open Source, business model, Xen, SimonCrosby

Forrester published a study entitled “Open Source Software’s Expanding Role in the Enterprise“, reporting answers from 486 Open Source decision makers, based in North America and Europe.

Savio Rodrigues commenting a Matt Asay interview that I also mentioned, wrote about the Forrester report, and reading it I found some food for thoughts besides the highlights of Savio and Matt posts.

The #1 attribute of open source that enterprise decision makers care most about: “Supporting open standards”.

Open source doesn’t guarantee open standards. But as the data indicates, the key attribute of OSS in the eyes of enterprise decision makers is open standards. OSS vendor/buyer/user beware.

You got a point Savio - and as you probably know Bob Sutor recently suggested to divorce open source from open standards - but Open Source firms backing open source projects are used to share standards. Choosing to cooperate in technological endeavours - i.e. participating a technological club - happens only if the benefits of cooperation outweigh the costs, and it is not rare to see OS firms doing it.

About the second most important OSS attribute reported by Forrester,  “using without restrictions”, you kept it for a second post, and while waiting I wish to stress that it is a pretty typical open source attributes, indeed.

Matt, who previously wrote a longer post about the report, said:

Surprisingly, the biggest inhibitor to open source adoption seems to continue to be a lack of support/services.

I am not that surprised, and (unfortunately) has little importance that:

[..] any moderately used open source project now has at least one credible source of support for it  [..]

As Matt himself reported later, companies like Unisys or Accenture are bringing open source into the enterprise, and even if small firms sometimes do even a superior work, they don’t have the necessary credibility.

The problem is that Large to Medium customers look for enterprise level vendors, but even those vendors can not offer personalization or integration for hundreds of OSS.
A Pyramidal approach, where large System Integrators would act as “mediators” towards small specialized firms, is missing, and it is not trivial to set up for a large number of OS projects.

Last but not least I wish to report an interesting Forrester’s statement:

Forrester found a few differences between North America and Europe in how firms want service providers involved in the selection, certification, and operation of their open source stacks. Europeans were more likely to want service suppliers to provide assistance in selecting open source software and to offer operations assistance, but the North American group was more interested in vendor certification of an integrated stack of open source software.

Why that?

Technorati Tags: Open Source market, Forrester, SavioRodrigues, MattAsay

The startup guide to investors - Some information about dealing with investors, useful for IT startups.

FSF releases the GNU General Public License, version 3 - The Free Software Foundation released version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL).

Open Source Gaining in SOA, ESB and EAI - Apparently there is solid momentum for open source solutions at the messaging and integration layer now.

MySQL Grows Up - Noel Le says that the more FOSS technologies and the FOSS community mature, the more FOSS firms will adopt formal capital and organizational structures. I agree.

OpenOffice.org API Tutorial - A pointer to a detailed tutorial about the OpenOffice.org API.

The Taxonomy of Conferences - James Mc Govern asks what if conference attendees could also provide ratings on all the conferences they have attended along with reviews, a sort of the Amazon book review mechanism.