Roberto Galoppini's
Commercial Open Source Software

I spent the last days reading ”Zenoss Core,” a book from Packt, the UK based publisher that just announced the finalists of this year Open Source CMS Award, as reported also by one of the judges.

The book has been written by Michael Badger, who is neither a Zenoss project member nor a Zenoss employee, but one of the many Zenoss community members. The author explains all, starting from installation and finishing with monitoring, and is definitely a good step-by-step for beginners.

Experienced users might find too little details about MIBs, but a whole chapter is aimed at extending Zenoss with Zenpacks and Zenoss plug-ins.

Technorati Tags: open source monitoring, commercial open source, book, packt, michaelbadger, open soure cms award, network monitoring

Updates from the Open Source Census, the survey launched in April by OpenLogic to collect quantitative data on the use of open source software.

Up today 2,181 machines have been scanned with OSS Discovery, discovering over 767 unique open source packages and nearly 300,000 open source package inm    stallations. founding on average 57 unique packages per enterprise.

Stormy Peters, now Executive Director of The GNOME Foundation, in the press release talking about how open source software compares across different operating systems says:

 As expected, Linux (an open source operating system) had the most with an average of 87 instances of open source found per scanned system. FreeBSD (also open source) was a close second at 81, but Mac wasn’t far behind with 75. Judging by the large number of Macs seen at open source conferences like OSCON and LinuxWorld, there are probably a lot of Mac users who are open source fans.

Windows, although not open source, still had a respectable amount of installed open source software, with an average of 39 instances per scanned system.

I suspect that the average Mac user is not an open source enthusiast, likely respondents belong to the OSCON and Linuxworld crowds. I would definitely be more interested in reading surveys run in broader audiences, though.

Register anonymously to the census, if interested.

Technorati Tags: open census, open source usage, StormyPeters

Matt Asay few days ago wrote an inspirational blog post about open source revenues, bringing Larry Augustin to add some salt to the conversation, concluding that customers need to be educated to the real value of open source.

Try harder! by eyelightfilms

Larry meets regularly buyers and CIOs around the world, and he definitely has a pretty unique view on the commercial open source market, so I trust him when he says that customers need to be educated to the value of an explicit and incremental cost structure.

Part of the challenge is educating customers about this different model. The Open Source company needs to explain to the customer that they can pay for consulting services to support their pilot, and then pay for the subscription service as opposed to getting the pilot for free from the proprietary vendor but now having to pay a large licensing fee when they deploy.

Open source vendors trying to convince customers of that, unfortunately are asking potential customers to share not only the opportunities (incremental investments, pay per use, etc) but also the risks. In fact they would end paying for pilots and trials, and I can hardly see many of them willing to do it.

I totally agree with Larry saying that it would be better for customers in the long run, or to better say, it could. As a matter of fact proprietary vendors are providing potential customers with a lot of value beyond the license marketing the organization and its products and services, developing partnerships with hardware or software vendors, investing in pre-sales meeting and so on.

Before experiencing dramatic savings, as Jonathan Schwartz says, potential customers need to get facts and figures about those and potential price savings, and things like the guide to lower database TCO whitepaper or the MySQL savings calculator seem just to start going in the right direction.

Red Hat learned the lesson, spending a lot in advertising, and not only.

Still need upfront money? Ask your VC, and tell them what else and how you are going to sell.

Technorati Tags: open source revenue, open source marketing, Sun, MySQL, Red Hat, JonathanSchwartz, LarryAugustin, MattAsay

OpenLogic just announced yet another webinar on open source scripting Languages for JVM.

Rod Cope, CTO and Founder of OpenLogic, will present this webinar, providing a comparison of key attributes for the most popular scripting languages for the JVM.

Open source scripting languages for the JVM like Groovy, JRuby, and Jython have become popular alternatives to programming languages like Java, C#, and C++ as well as traditional scripting languages like Ruby, Python, Perl, and PHP. Developers are increasingly turning to this new generation of scripting languages because code is faster and easier to write, read, and understand. Scripting languages for the JVM also provide the power of the Java platform without having to write Java code.

• Which languages are easiest (and hardest) to learn?
•  What types of development are best suited to each language?
•  How do the top languages compare in terms of ease of use?
•  What are the strengths and weaknesses of each language?
•  Which open source frameworks and other packages work best with each language?

Register now.

The GNU project yesterday celebrated the 25th anniversary by releasing “Happy Birthday to GNU,” a short film featuring the English humorist, actor, novelist and filmmaker Stephen Fry.

Happy Birthday Richard! by peribanyez

The Free Software Foundation after “Defective by Design“, the brilliant campaign launched to protect our digital freedoms, did a great move managing to bring Fry on the free software board. He generously donated his time to the cause of free software.

Well done, and happy hacking!

Technorati Tags: free software, FSF, Defective by design, happy birthday, StephenFry

The launch of the Open Source Observatory and Repository for European Public Administrations will be held in Màlaga on the 20th of October during the Open Source World Conference, one of the most important FLOSS event in Europe.

The draft agenda, available at the IDABC website, starts at 9.15 with a an hour workshop on FLOSS procurement, a very hot topic at least by Italian public administrations. Marco Battistoni, Unisys OSOR Technical Manager, will later introduce the audience to the new European repository, talking about the platform and its services.

In the afternoon a round table moderated by Karel DeVriendt, IDABC Head of Unit, will give highlights on a selection of European open source projects. Among them Wollmux and the Qualipso project.

Technorati Tags: OSOR, Open Source Repository, IDABC, MarcoBattistoni, KarelDeVriendt

Yesterday I walked through Sourceforge end-users’ needs, trying to figure out how Sourceforge might travel to accommodate their needs. Today we’ll look at what organizations and developers might want, keeping a closer eye on competitors’ offering and how to possibly stay ahead of them.

Portrait of a software developer by zakq100

Organizations.

Let’s start from local and central public administrations. Forges like the European Open Source Observatory and Repository cost a lot of money, helping IDABC and other national or regional organizations to allocate their resources to better help dissemination of practices in using open source software. To enter this market Sourceforge should likely spend some effort to provide users with projects migration tools and also to be compliant with European interoperability standards. Public administrations might well be interested in reaching Sourceforge’s audience, targeting local SMEs and PAs through specific newsletters, taking advantage of Krugle to search code, or more advanced features like a method to rate developers and contributors, etc. I think in this area Sourceforge could really make a difference. Competitors like Collabnet probably simply can’t reach 30 million of users a month, and are probably more focused on the enterprise market. All in all Sourceforge could even provide public administrations with a free service, retaining the possibility to sell advertisements or sponsorship to local IT vendors.

Fixing the “open source mediation conundrum” - namely the fact that any given customer has a component distribution that falls everywhere on the long tail - is more of an opportunity than a challenge to Sourceforge. Stormy Peters rightly says that developers involved with open source projects in the long tail are reachable by forums and email. That is just how OpenLogic maintains relationships with developers on 400 projects. Other organizations, either IT consumers or producers (system integrators included) might need help with that. Sourceforge could commercialize value added mediation services for projects not covered by OpenLogic, whose support probably doesn’t scale beyond a few hundred components, as Domic Sartorio said. Similar speculations stand for stacks not supported by SpikeSource, though. Sourceforge in order to answer the open source mediation conundrum should stretch its ears, going beyond making audience and eventually enabling users/customers collaboration through its community. Moving from group forming networks aimed at distribute software (one-to-many communications) and enabling intra-project transactions among peers to fostering inter-projects communications, creating affiliation, is a strategic decision. Exploiting the power of networks to this extent, forming and fostering inter-projects collaborations, could allow Sourceforge to compete also with organizations like the Collaborative Software Initiative.

Developers.

Launching a “Geek for hire” program would be a great thing. Starting by asking developers to opt in to the service, collaborating locally with employment service providers like Manpower, and finally taking advantage of the deep knowledge about Sourceforge users’ skills. Sourceforge today has access to likely the largest global network of talent, and could deliver a pretty unique permanent or temporary recruitment service. Ohloh is already providing information about Sourceforge’s developers, and it is time to offer similar or better services. Now.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, business models, ohloh, sourceforge, manpower, spikesource, openlogic, collabnet, dominicsartorio, idabc, osor, forge

Five years ago, on 24 September 2003, the European Parliament adopted some amendments to limit the scope of software patentability, listening to many European SMEs and associations. Today A global coalition of more than 80 software companies, associations and developers has declared the 24th of September to be the “World Day Against Software Patents“.

On 24 September 2008, the World Day Against Software Patents will provide volunteers with the opportunity to express the growing concerns of users, businesses and developers. The granting of software patents by patent offices around the world affects their freedom to innovate. The organisers expect 24h of activities across the globe. Volunteers will gather in front of patent offices to inform the general public of the problems underlying software patenting.

A global petition demanding to effectively stop software patents worldwide will be launched on the same day. In some regions of the world such as Europe, the United States, or India, dedicated campaigns are being prepared by local supporters. The organisers intend to celebrate the World Day on an annual basis unless substantive clarifications are adopted in national laws that stop software patenting along with their effects on the digital economy.

Sign the petition.

Read FFII press release and go to the  Stop Software Patents website for further information.

Technorati Tags: software patents, FFII, Stop Software Patents

Understanding Sourceforge stakeholders’ expectations might help Sourceforge to better exploit opportunities and manage challenges ahead, considering also actual and future scenarios in terms of competition.

Focusing the camera on end-users by Pete Ashton

Thinking of mechanisms to capture the value of FOSS Group Forming Networks, Sourceforge today is largely taking advantage of the opportunity to sell advertisements and sponsorships, it is experimenting with transactions through its SF marketplace and sells on demand collaborative development resources. Sourceforge don’t sell individual subscriptions, neither sells information or other value added services for collaborative software production.

Advertising has increased in recent years, and advertisers and sponsors - ubiquitous stakeholders in the internet era - might be interested to persuade potential customers to buy some services Sourceforge is not selling today. I could go into deeper detail on that, but I will leave that for another post later. Now let’s focus on some stakeholders’ needs.

End users.

End-users want just software meeting their needs. Easy to say, harder to put in practice. For example, considering users looking for a CMS. They can step by cmsmatrix and get a clue by searching a CMS for the many available criteria. Unfortunately there are few similar resources on the net, and Sourceforge is definitely in the position to know which are the more frequent searches. Specific whitepapers to help people to make decisions could be sold for a fee or funded by a sponsor.

Sourceforge top downloads pages could be enriched with rollovers shortly describing the programs, links to pages containing tips&tricks, and a “users who downloaded this program also downloaded” list, as Amazon does.

Q&A like Yahoo answers or Linkedin questions could really help to effectively build the SF.net community. Despite Google answer failed to accomplish the task to create a knowledge market, the idea to make it only for questions about FOSS could worth some speculations.

Peer to peer network users.

In Europe we feel the urgency to take action against the European lobby trying to criminalize P2P usage, and I totally understand this is not Sourceforge’s battle. But I think Sourceforge could find ways to highlight legitimate, professional uses for that technology. Someone from the Sourceforge crew told me that it could be achieve by offering BitTorrent as an alternate download mechanism for SourceForge.net and reporting on Sourceforge editorial sites that Blizzard uses BitTorrent legitimately for World of Warcraft downloads and patches.

Only World of Warcraft reached 10 million users, so educating communities of gamers to open source software usage seems important to me, considering their average age and social network skills.

Next I will cover the enterprise side, either from developers’ and organizations’ points of view.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, sourceforge, business models, Q&A, market knowledge, yahoo answers, google answer, linkedin questions, world of warcraft, group forming networks, peer to peer

Focusing on iPhone - Raven after 2.5 years as the Open Source Research Director for The 451 Group is now focusing on the iPhone. I knew about his passion for the iPhone (he is the founder of iPhoneDevCamp) and I wish him all the best as iPhone advisor.

Google Code reverses open-source licence ban -  Google changes its mind about MPL and EPL, reversing the decision to not host programs released with those licenses on google site. Chris Di Bona explains why, AGPL remains banded.