Roberto Galoppini's
Commercial Open Source Software

IBM Italia on Thursday hosted a conference on open standards, introducing the audience to standards’ risks and opportunities, in order to accelerate open standards adoption in the public sector. IBM Italia invited Italian stakeholders to meet up with Bob Sutor, IBM Vice President Open Source and Standards, along with representatives of Italian Central and Local public administrations involved with open standards’ policies and dissemination.

Rome in a glass by Geomangio

The event was held on the 8 of May at the IBM office in Rome. Bob Sutor’s keynote speech - Twelve Industry Challenges for Open Source and Standards - introduced the audience to the importance of global standards in relationship to current policies around formal International Standards Organizations. He invited attendees - from Italian public administrations like Consip, CNIPA, ISTAT - to adopt open standards policies that emphasize technical work developed by a community of stakeholders, encouraging them to deprecate de facto standards.

Besides open standards Bob spoke also about open source governance, inviting Italian public administrations to develop common models of FOSS use and governance, making use of FOSS as much as possible easy as proprietary software. In this respect he suggested also to consider developing more open source software, saying so he reported about Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework project as an example.

Last but not least Sutor spent few words about the importance of making new open source leaders and developers, a goal addressed by professor Roberto Di Cosmo working at the university of Paris on the idea of resumes FOSS ready. Evangelizing users on the availability of open source products like OpenOffice.org and Eclipse, eventually teaching children to let them learn the FLOSS value, was highly recommended in his closing remarks.

Flavia Marzano (Province of Rome), Vittorio Pagani (CNIPA Open Source Observatory) and myself (PLIO association) have been talking about open standards’ policies by Italian public administrations from different perspectives, giving the audience a broad view on the subject.

Technorati Tags: open standards, open source conference, IBM Italy, BobSutor, Eclipse, openoffice.org, openoffice

I want to take the opportunity here to clarify my stance and how I managed to form my analysis of Microsoft Open Source Strategy.

A Change of Perception by jpaul

What has ignited this desire of mine to clarify these issues was the publication on my blog of the post entitled “Microsoft and OSS: another battle brewing”, unfortunately published without my editorial approval, and without my ability to review the contents before publication. After reading the article and having personally talked with the contributing editor, Carlo Daffara, I realized he was expressing some concerns about the clarity of my position relative to Microsoft and open source. Let me try to make it clearer.

A little background.

I have been consulting with Microsoft on different subjects over the last two years.

The first time I happened to work with Microsoft was back in June 2006. I took part to the Microsoft’s Linux&Open Source Briefing partner program as open source expert. Techstream, a training firm engaged by Microsoft to deliver worldwide such program, found me over the internet, and eventually hired me after a couple of job interviews.

When I visited Microsoft’s offices in Milan the first time, I barely knew there was an open source group at Microsoft. During the briefing we spoke at large about open source business and production models, and I was surprised by their interest in the subject.

At the same time it was interesting for myself to see how Microsoft was differentiating itself from open source, as was enlightening to meet Microsoft’s VARs and ISVs partners joining the event.

As a matter of fact some of them were already using open source technologies, and were posing precise and accurate questions about Microsoft’s strategy in this respect.

Since then I got used to openly and publicly discuss with Microsoft people about our different views, and I eventually ended to consult with them in 2007.

At that point I was contracted to help them find ways to cooperate with the FOSS world on interoperability, licensing schemas and possibly joint initiatives.

Understanding how delicate it is to be an open source advocate and to consult to Microsoft, I also took a decision to avoid potential conflicts of interest within the OpenOffice.org Italian Association (PLIO). As I had been asked from Microsoft to create open source OpenXML tools for developers, I refrained from taking any position about the OpenXML vote within PLIO, which was directly involved within the JTC1 committee working on DIS29500. Not only. When I concluded my collaboration with Microsoft I thought wiser to keep myself out of the OpenXML vote discussion.

Getting back to Microsoft’s open source strategy, I invited Pierpaolo Boccadamo, head of Microsoft’s Platform Strategy in Italy, at the Commercial Open Source Conference I organized in June last year. I was happy to invite him because for the very first time Microsoft was going to really speak about open source here in Italy, while also announcing the opening of its second open source lab in Italy.

I was also part of Microsoft’s Italy work towards an open source compatible strategy. I have had the chance to talk to Sam Ramji and to many others like Robert Duffner and Bryan Kirschner, with whom I eventually developed my own idea on the Microsoft open-source strategy.

Five (false) factual facts.

1.The FOSS vs proprietary software dichotomy. The historical dichotomy is (slowly) disappearing, just because customers are demanding it. CIOs at Open Source Think Tank, essays from the Open Source Alliances and other sources are telling us about the importance to learn to live in a hybrid world. Microsoft is giving up with the anachronistic idea to keep customers using only proprietary software, at the same extent the idea to fully migrate to open source is of little meaning too. Researches on the transformation of open source are confirming that also the distinction between open source and proprietary vendors is reducing now.

OSS 2.0 blurs the distinction between open source and proprietary software. Key open source players such as Red Hat and Novell’s SUSE Linux business unit position their Linux distributions to be more similar to a proprietary model. Traditional proprietary companies, such as HP, IBM and Microsoft, move more towards open source. Nevertheless, in the OSS 2.0 model, these companies must still satisfy certain criteria in relation to acceptable community values (a significant challenge for OSS 2.0). Large commercial organizations are not always well perceived within the open source community. Companies such as IBM, Sun, and HP support open source initiatives, but their support for patents is clearly at odds with the open source philosophy. Also, the quintessential patron of open source, Red Hat, could struggle in future as its policies increasingly conflict with community spirit and values. Use of subscription agreements and effective customer lock-ins through confidential service bulletins are close to the boundary of acceptable community values.

2. Open Source Governance? We do not need it. Open source analysts describe the goal to define a trusted library of open source software and components a daunting task. Horizontal vendors offering open source support on certified repositories of open source technology are not yet enabling enterprises to manage open source like a portfolio. Besides that, companies acquiring open source software – often without any procurement process involved (downloading it) – are not happy to spend money on open source governance, as reported by Michael Goulde, senior analyst at Forrester:

The paradox is a lot of companies are getting into open source to reduce their costs. They’re not excited to spend money to manage it.

3. For Microsoft (and its partners) everything is a PC. Actually Microsoft was the PC company, and that’s why Microsoft developed effective programs to enable its partners to scale their growth. Microsoft progressively became a platform provider, a crucial hub in the IT ecosystem. Marco Iansiti in his Information Technology Ecosystem Health and Performance explains clearly the role of platform providers.

Platform providers perform a critical role in an ecosystem – they deliver consistent and reliable components that make application providers more productive. The tools and building blocks they provide to ecosystem members make it easier to create powerful applications that in turn benefit end-users. In doing so, platform providers can act as “Keystones” to their ecosystems.

Linux enthusiasts might not like Microsoft’s server market share, but they can hardly ignore it. Both Windows and Linux are complemented by extensive tool sets used by millions of developers, and Microsoft with the Most Valuable Professional program is keeping to foster its communities. Tools, indeed, are just part of the general picture, a picture in which Microsoft creates a lot of value for its ecosystem.

4. Microsoft won’t raise any interest among OSS developers.This argument is not supported by any research. On the contrary both Lakhani and Wolf and Bonaccorsi findings on motivations to contribute returned a different feedback. The former research indicates that only a tiny fractions of respondents would never participate in a closed source project, while the latter shows that firms emphasize economic and technological reasons for contributing to Open Source and do not subscribe to many social motivations.

5. Microsoft IP “broken bridges” will keep Microsoft (and its partners) out of open source business. There are still some obstacles to be addressed before Microsoft can work at with open source in all of its forms, but many open source vendors could already take advantage of the business opportunity. At the end of the day open source firms need, just like any other software firm, to sell preferably products, otherwise subscriptions or services (the very last option). As a matter of fact companies like Zimbra sell proprietary Enterprise editions using Microsoft APIs, and this don’t make them look less open source than others. It is definitely true that Microsoft’s IP policy affects “downstream” developers, as rightly Matt Asay points out. Microsoft, in this respect, has still to work hard to balance communities’ and company’s interests, and I am looking forward to comment Microsoft’s future steps in this direction.

Here my thoughts.

Microsoft, just like any other major IT vendors, understands that open source is a very important part of the IT environment today, but differently from any other, it has a huge partner channel, lots of developers skilled on its platforms, and a strong economic incentive in being a platform player.

Notwithstanding Microsoft choice not to give away its core platforms, Microsoft could play a very important role bringing under its umbrella open source firms. Co-marketing partnerships appear to be appealing from both sides. Microsoft can greatly help to reduce uncertainty, delivering WAMP stacks and similar supported off-the-shelf open source solutions based on Microsoft’s platforms. Microsoft’s customers could eventually reduce the cost of open source software selection, a price many are not happy to pay.

Fostering its own communities, even with specific programs, today Microsoft is providing causes for effects, answering another frequent question about the availability of open source developers and architects.

Where other see just a monopoly, I see our (open source) potential. The other day talking with Stacey Schneider I asked her a feedback on Hyperic experience with Microsoft, below the full transcript.

From Hyperic’s perspective, Microsoft has been great at recognizing what a great partner Hyperic can be. Their Open Source Labs have performed tests and run Hyperic - delivering writeups and podcasts on their opinions of the software (positive!) to their communities. Their partner organization has recently awarded Hyperic a free consulting engagement (they paid for it) designed to review Hyperic’s overall business plan and help us navigate the Microsoft organization in the best way to maximize our participation in go to market activities. They have even gone so far as to become a customer - using Hyperic for management for some technology they acquired that is not yet moved over to .NET. They recognize our cross-platform abilities, and our overall scalability and usability.
As a company, Microsoft is still figuring out many of its approaches and participation in the open source world. Some we may not all agree with in their first stages, however as a partner and a vendor to Microsoft, we have seen constant attention to our space, and have seen recognition that they need to work with mixed environments and mixed vendors nicely. That said, if you are an all windows shop - they are quick to point out you probably want to use their solution which is built just for windows and designed to optimize that experience. We’re fine with that - we think the mixed market is much bigger.

My open source world is pretty hybrid, what about yours?

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, open business, Microsoft Open Source, open source strategy, SamRamji, MichaelGould, Open Source Think Tank, Open Solutions Alliance, Techstream

Bob Sutor, IBM Vice President Open Source and Standards, invited the IBM Italian subsidiary to organize an event aimed at public officers or those who have an interest in the public sector.

IBM Italia recognizing the importance of open standards, and knowing that open standards in IT are critical to allow new entrants to participate, invites stakeholders to meet up with IBM open source and open standards pioneers.

The event will be held on the 8 of May at the IBM office in Rome. Giovanni Aliverti, IBM Italy Institutional relationships, will open the session. Then Bob Sutor will give his keynote speech talking of open source trends for the next 12 months. Vittorio Pagani, CNIPA Open Source Observatory, and Flavia Marzano will cover respectively open standards’ issues by central and local public administrations. I will eventually give my presentation on standards conformance, hilighting the importance to prove that software products are meeting open standards‘ specifications.

Last but not least Gianfranco Cesareo will introduce the audience to IBM software products compliant to open standards.

If you wish to join the event send me an email, the event is invitation-only.

Technorati Tags: open standards, open source conference, IBM Italy, GiovanniAliverti, FlaviaMarzano, VittorioPagani, GianfrancoCesareo, file format

Marketcetera, an open source startup based in San Francisco developing a platform for automated trading, has just secured $4 million in Series A funding to help others make millions.

Marketcetera is already making its platform available for download, an official 1.0 release is tentatively scheduled for the last quarter of 2008, but the current version is already certified with Reuters RTEX and available also available as a VMWare and Parallels appliance.

Making sense by Eccleston George Public Artists

I met Graham Miller and Toli Kuznets few weeks ago in San Francisco, and I spent a couple of hours with them talking of their business experience. I am reporting a detailed essay of our conversation, it could be inspirational for tomorrow’s entrepreneurs.

How all this started.

Toli and I were both computer science students at Stanford when we met. I participated in a program called the Mayfield Fellows Program, run by entrepreneurship Professor Tom Byers. That together with a couple of classes that Toli took, make up the sum total of our formal business training. The rest was by osmosis and trial and error in working in Silicon Valley. It was through this early work at Reactivity (me) and CenterRun (Toli), that we met our two advisors, John Lilly (currently CEO of Mozilla), and Aaref Hilaly (currently CEO of Clearwell Systems). These two guys have be extremely helpful. Everything from business advice to introductions to investors that they had worked with in the past. The introduction–while helpful–really only gets you the first meeting tho. The rest is up to you, which is why we are grateful that our advisors were able to help us with our pitch as well.

It is interesting to know how things go over the pond. IT firms, and open source ones are not an exception, start small to become big, or very big. The whole entrepreneurial ecosystem enables start-ups to achieve sustainable growth, it is not just matter of the availability of financial support instruments for SMEs. Advisors are of capital importance, as are important business training courses, and last but not least the role that customers play.

What role did customers play in the development of the company?

I think that there were three key customers in the development of the company. First, we were the target customers. When we were building these trading systems on Wall Street, we were looking for something exactly like the Marketcetera platform, and would happily have paid for market data and other services on top of an open-source platform. Secondly, we found some initial seed investors, (friendly Wall Street types) who also wanted to use the software, and specifically were interested in a platform that would let them build out applications quickly. They invested a modest amount of money with the goal of seeing this dream realized. As part of their participation in the company, they got access to the platform, and the ability to guide product development.

Finally once we got the product into a usable shape, we managed to get some early customers up and running on the platform. These customers required more flexibility in integration and licensing terms than proprietary products could offer them. We structured our early development projects as consulting engagements, that is only charging for our development and configuration time. That way we were able to give our customers a tailored custom solution at the same time maximizing the feedback we get for future product development.

The first customers have been playing an important role to let it happen. Graham and Toli progressively moved from the approach of consulting engagements into the process to define and sell a product. Customers expectations in terms of licensing and flexibility were definitely of great importance in their path down the open source road.

Why did you decide to go open source with your platform?

The initial motivation for the open source model was the recognition that these systems, traditionally built from scratch in house, required flexibility not possible in proprietary systems. We looked at the strengths of the open source development model, and realized that it often steers development efforts toward a platform, rather than a specific application. This is our end goal, to enable the construction of the next generation of trading tools on top of an open-source infrastructure. One unintended side-effect has been that our customers have complete control over information management. In the intensely competitive world of finance, a hedge fund can more closely guard its secrets through the use of open-source software, because it need not engage third party vendors at all. Should they need help, we are here to provide it, but they’re welcome to “Download. Run. Trade.” all on their own.
Ultimately we think the open-source software plus services model is a much better fit for an industry that sees much custom software development, and has a voracious appetite for data and connectivity.

Interestingly enough Marketcetera platform is welcomed by customers because of the “unintended side-effect” Graham talks about. As a matter of fact the freedom to make modifications and use them privately without even mentioning that they exist is a key success factor here. It is probably not by casualty that Marketcetera is distributed under the GPLv2 and I believe they definitely shouldn’t consider to adopt the AGPL.

Last but not least, who is your customer?

Organizations of all sizes have deployed the Marketcetera Platform, from multibillion-dollar asset managers to small currency traders. A billion-dollar hedge fund has deployed the platform as a replacement for home-grown trading tools, because of increasing maintenance costs of the custom code. A large asset manager has deployed the platform to manage a suite of connections to 200 broker dealers globally. Because it is available under an open source license, frequently the platform is used as an integration point for several trading systems. For example a small currency trading firm integrates a third party analytics package to a FIX connection with Currenex. We see growing interest from small hedge funds in India up to 10 of the largest financial institutions in the world.

While Marketcetera have not yet labored enough as open source operations to provide substantiative evidence of the viability of their model, I firmly believe that they are really exploring new potentialities of the free software business. Companies using platforms resulting from commons-based peer production are used to reveal just a fraction of the new code, but hedge funds and currency traders are definitely not industry participants in the field of embedded Linux. Marketcetera’s customers are willing to co-fund the platform’s development, just as Collaborative Software Initiative’s customers probably do.

To gain the greatest benefit from open source disruptive challenges to proprietary platforms like FlexTrade, savvy IT departments will pay for open source solutions allowing proprietary and secret trading algorithms.

Congratulations to the Marketcetera team, and happy hacking!

Read also Matt Asay‘s post and Dana Blankenhorn’s post.

Technorati Tags: marketcetera, trading platform, commercial open source, free software business, flextrade, startup, open business

IT vendors are not asked to prove that their software products are meeting open standards‘ specifications. Declarations of conformity to a file format standard is a self-certification process.

My speech on the session entitled “Tomorrow’s data availability depends upon today’s data format“ at the OMAT conference was on standards conformance, an issue too often not considered.

In the European Economic Area the CE mark is a mandatory conformity mark for certain product groups to indicate conformity with the essential health and safety requirements set out in European Directives. In short you need a CE mark to sell a plug or a toy, but you can sell software without any external test house which evaluates the product and its documentation. At the end of the day there is no organization that assess standards compliance, we can just rely on implementors’ statements of compliance.

Ken Krechmer over the last ten years spent time and efforts to define the meaning of Open Standards, and he was the first to clearly explain the different views of all standards’ stakeholders.

It is common to think of standardization as the process of standards creation, but this view excludes those who implement the standard (implementers) and those who use the implementations of the standard (users).

Krechmer identifying each constituency’s view gives us a complete description of Open Standards emerge, and a key to understand what is in our interests. I introduced the OMAT’s audience to the ten rights that enable open standards using the following visual presentation.

I went through all criteria, stressing the importance of some of them, like the “Open Meeting” one, establishing that all stakeholders can participate. A right not addressed by many Standard Specification Organizations like ISO, OASIS and W3C, all having in place a pay-to-become-a-member policy.

“Open Documents”, the right to see any documents from a Standard Specification Organization included individual technical proposals and meeting reports, is a standardization right connected to Open Meeting. It come no surprise that the transparency of a meeting is related to the availability of all the documents from the meeting. Again, ISO and other organizations do not fulfill this right.

I stressed also the importance of “Open Change”, the right that gives the ability to prevent predatory practices through license terms that protect against subversion of the standard by embrace and extend tactics.

Last but not least “Open Use” identifies the value of conformance for implementers and users. While multiple implementers can gather together to check if their implementations work with each other (plug-fest), users do need a formal entity taking care of the conformance process. Apparently ETSI is a candidate, it is up to you to judge whether it is a good or a bad thing.

Note that only when all ten rights are supported will standards be really open to all.

Technorati Tags: KenKrechmer, Open Standards, predatory practices, SSO, standardization body, file format

Microsoft and Sourcesense recently announced that are partnering to jointly contribute to the development t of a new version of Apache POI, an Apache top level project.

Apache POI support for Open XML is now in development, to get here took about one year and the first release is expected to be available during the second quarter of 2008.Being personally involved in the process from the very beginning, I want to tell you about how building bridges and find ways to make Microsoft and Open Source firms work together is coming true.

A useful bridge by petetaylor

Last year I have been consulting to Microsoft Italy to help them to better understand the free software principles and the business model and to validate their thoughts on how to find ways to cooperate with the FOSS world on interoperability, licensing schemas and possibly joint initiatives.

Andrea Valboni, Microsoft Italy CTO, at that stage was involved in the OOXML process, and one of the point of discussion about that format was: how people can use IT, how developers can take advantage from it. The issue of a reference implementation was coming out in the debate of that time. Here the full story, in Andrea’s words:

I was discussing this over the phone with Roberto Galoppini (we have been not always on the same page,but our interaction have been always very respectful and intellectually honest), he was not very much convinced that a reference implementation could help developers, although a good idea. His point of view was more in favor of a set of libraries that can avoid developers to enter into the format’s details and concentrate on the application functionalities. I then asked whether he knew someone that can be interested in doing this.

Having been the founder of the Italian open source consortium (CIRS) I do know many Italian open source companies, and I knew I had the perfect match with Sourcesense, an italian-rooted Open Source systems integrator with a strong international outreach and a great track record in participation to Open Source communities: I knew Gianugo Rabellino, Sourcesense’s CEO and a well know member of the Apache Software Foundation, was and is the right man for the job, and I was in touch with Marco Bruni, founder of Pro-netics group, an Italian IT group with solid Open Source roots and the company behind Sourcesense. I added two and two, and I made introductions.

Getting back to Andrea’s tale, here how it goes on:

So a beautiful sunny morning some days after that talk, I was sitting in a bar in Rome, having a coffee with Roberto and Marco Bruni, discussing about formats and listening to opinions of an open source company’s manager. Also the dialog I had with Marco was very open and frank, we both explained our reciprocal points of view and ideas, then he talked about Java libraries they are using to access Office binary formats. As I asked for more info, he talked me about the Jakarta/POI project [Java API To Access Microsoft Format Files] of the Apache Foundation.

Sometime after that meeting, Gianugo was sitting in our office at Segrate, explaining to me and few legals the Apache License and more in general the open source licensing and how the Apache Foundation is working and the communities rules working under this umbrella: he was pretty clear, that’s are the rules, if we would like to create a cooperation.

And it happened, the agreement took form day after day.

I am glad I have been helping to make it happen playing the open source hub role, I really wish this partnership to be the first of many other involving open source firms, possibly European and Italian ones!

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, microsoft, sourcesense, marcobruni, pro-netics, sourcesense, apache, POI, OpenXML

I have been invited to the Open Source in Mobile Conference to give a speech about “Microsoft Open Source Strategy”, and the implications of the strategy for developers and ISVs.

Recently Microsoft made clear its open source intent to go beyond finding ways to thwart Linux and other non-proprietary applications, maybe leaving behind over 10 years of bittersweet memories. As a matter of fact speaking of a “Microsoft Open Source Strategy” could sound an oxymoron, maybe even more of Commercial Open Source. Microsoft attitude towards open source ranged from scaring open source customers talking of (unveiled) software patents to developing and distributing the Microsoft installer on SourceForge, stepping on Samba ’s shoes and eventually establishing an agreement with them, going even beyond obligations imposed by the EC.

A Change of Perception by jpaul

A shift of perception.

Microsoft’s new open strategy, expressively aimed at expanding interoperability, include a specific component, namely the Open Source Interoperability Initiative, designed to foster more engagement between Microsoft and open source communities.

Also things like the Open Specification promise – covering, among others, 38 Web Services standards and on a practical ground enabling interoperability between Microsoft technology and Apache’s Axis web services stack - are not not geared just toward open source, as proven by the existence of implementations distributed under proprietary licenses.

All in all Microsoft’s decision to define and implement an open source strategy did not happen overnight, as all initiatives above mentioned seems to be part of a much bigger picture, bringing Redmond’s giant to increase third parties’ potential. The central management of vertically integrated production stages is increasingly succumbing to the forces of specialization - a recommended reading for all people interested in the subject at large is “The Vanishing Hand: the Changing Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism” - that is especially true for the IT market. The extent of the improvements in the technology of coordination is an extraordinary enabler in this respect, and I believe Microsoft is strongly refocusing on its platform value, making the open source strategy part of such process.

Microsoft spend few years to elaborate its open source strategy, considering that Microsoft opened its Linux Lab about four years ago and started the Open Source Lab two years ago, but it sounds pretty clear now:

The Microsoft open source strategy is focused on helping customers and partners be successful in today’s heterogeneous technology world.

Let’s see now what customers and partners need to successfully adopt open source software today, and how Microsoft could fit into the picture. First let’s dip into few Open Source Market dimensions and open issues.
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Open Source Market dimensions.

Open Source it is told to be a huge market now:

Open-source products accounted for a 13 percent share of the $92.7 billion software market in 2006. Predictions set the percent share to 27 in 2011, when revenue is expected to be $169.2 billion.

Along with such success, Open Source is also seeing a dramatic growth of Internal Development, mostly among medium to big enterprises, as I also heard from CIOs at the Open Source Think Tank. Why that?
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Open Source Software Selection: the cost of free.

The number of viable Open Source Projects is pretty big (18000), but few dozens of them (maybe less) are consuming about all publicly disclosed vendor investments, and only half of the top packages lack of enterprise support. As result, the leading IT Solutions providers are still missing to deliver the Open Source Promise, but for a tiny fraction of open source platforms and applications.

Therefore Software Selection is costly with OSS, up to 40% of migrations’ support costs, as emerged within COSPA EC-funded project. All in all metrics and methods like the Open Source Maturity Model, the Business Readiness Rating and now QSOS are useful, but they do not provide any open source good directories. Again, marketplaces like RHN and SourceForge, plus directories like EOS or sources like Oholoh or FOSSBazaar are also effective tools, but you still need time and effort to sort out the selection issue by yourself.

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Customers’ and Vendors’ Perspectives.

Besides cost savings and flexibility - that allow companies to customize their IT solutions to fit their specific needs - customers want to avoid lock-in by adopting open source software broadly supported, in order to retain the possibility of changing the provider. Again, open source software selection is key to retain such possibility.

Moreover Medium to large enterprises look for medium to large IT companies, often want to buy indemnification and some form of warranty. How all this match with vendors’ perspectives?

IT vendors want to share R&D costs, but sequential innovation come with a cost related to sharing standards and it requires a symbiotic approach. Super-communities made of many open source applications are the next step, but they involve even more complex dynamics. As a matter of fact few open source products are part of a large number of different stacks, and the reason might well be that partnering and integrating with third-parties products is costly. Doing it with little hope to exclusively appropriate returns from the Commons is a risky bet. Last but not the least a strong brand is really important to open source firms, alliances and M&A are likely the most affordable and yet effective way to brand OS products sharing costs and benefits. It is probably not by casualty that we are seeing open source acquisitions happening, few consortia are forming and some technological clubs targeting vertical markets.
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Could Microsoft Open Source Strategy help the open source market?

Microsoft business model is a “platform ecosystem” business model: the more developers writing applications for Microsoft platforms, the better. In my understanding by expanding choice for consumers, also on open source applications, Microsoft is giving to more developers and partners a chance to make business together.

This business cycle is somehow reflected by the IDC’s impact model, reporting a ratio of revenue—between 6 and 18 to 1— for local software, hardware, and services firms for every dollar of Microsoft revenue in many countries. While I have no clue how such estimations are accurate, I understand that 5 millions of developers and 750,000 partners around the world are a unique ecosystem. No other IT multinational actor has a similar ecosystem, plus Microsoft differently from IBM or Sun do forego potential direct revenues for hardware sales and consulting services, leaving other space for others’ business.

In the IT ecosystem Microsoft is in the position to enable also open source application and solution providers to deliver value through their tools and components, and it is proactively working on it.

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Open Souce Heroes: Microsoft’s Open Source Developers.

Microsoft’s Hero Hack Pack, is the way Microsoft is addressing developers to provide them with a range of choices for developing and deploying Open Source software on Windows Server 2008 using Visual Studio 2008. CodePlex is where Microsoft hosts open source projects based on Microsoft’s platforms, containing about 1900 applications (150 of them have been developed by Microsoft), counting more than 30,000 users. SourceForge itself counts more than 70,000 open source projects running on Windows. The open source lab at Microsoft Port25, the Shared Source Initiative or the Ajax Control Toolkit worth all a mention as viable resources for tomorrow “open source heroes”.

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NXT, what’s next for Open Source ISVs.

Microsoft’s in 2007 launched the NXT initiative, focused on open source. The goal is to help ISVs to explore how to deliver their open source solutions to customers in the Microsoft world. The Microsoft program provide ISVs with marketing, technical and financial aid to exploit how to get the best results from an heterogeneous world. There are a lot of commercial open source software deployed on Windows as one of its platforms:

· JBoss: Claimed 50% deployment on Windows when they signed a partnership deal with Microsoft that included technical collaboration in September 2005.
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· SugarCRM: Claimed 35% deployment on Windows when they signed their technical collaboration deal with Microsoft in February 2006.
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· Eclipse: Several studies have been done over the past few years show Windows adoption for development and deployment (Dev/Dep):
(80%/60%) [Evans Data Corp., September 2006]
(62%/37%) [Evans Data Corp., September 2007]
(74%/47%) [IDC, Summer 2007]

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ISVs could consider joining the NXT ISV partner program in order to provide their customers with applications that might need to use Active Directory or other Microsoft platforms, getting access to technical information and marketing support. Macadamian, a firm with a deep knowledge on how open source change the way teams work, joined the program, If you want to know more about NXT Program read all Stephen Walli’s posts on the subject.

Microsoft’s Open Source Strategy brought already companies like Zend, MySQL and SugarCRM to effectively deliver open source value on top of Microsoft platforms. Few days ago speaking with Dominic Sartorio, Director of Product Management at SpikeSource, I learned that SpikeSource just announced the availability of five additional PHP-based applications on the Windows Server 2008 platform as turnkey “SpikeIgnited” applications, and more are to come. Sam Ramji at the Open Source Think Tank told me that Microsoft is going to connect to many other open source firms in the next future, as to cooperate with open source communities.

Microsoft seems to be willing to play a very important role in the open source ecosystem, bringing on the table a strong brand, an impressive number of developers and partners, a specific program for coders and an initiative aimed at ISVs.

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Does Open Source at Microsoft make any sense to you now?

Technorati Tags: Open Source Microsoft, SamRamji, Open Source ISV, Open Source Developers, Zend, SugarCRM, MySQL, SpikeSource, DominicSartorio, StephenWalli, Eclipse, Port25

Tomorrow in Rome will take place the OpenCamp, a barcamp on free software, open source and open minds.

The second edition of the openCamp will cover also digital freedoms, trusted computing, net neutrality and creative commons, thanks to the participation of several associations, like Wikimedia Italia, International Webmaster Association, Free Software Foundation Europe, Linux Club and Free Hardware Foundation Italia.

My best wishes to organizers of the event, to participants and to all guests of the OpenCamp, see you there!

Technorati Tags: OpenCamp, barcamp

Today Richard Stallman was giving the last in the series of his three public lectures in Moscow. It was about Free Software and Copyright.

I had a small conversation with him before the talk and asked him why he hadn’t come to Russia since his last visit in 1991. The answer was simple: he didn’t get any invitation. This can be a hint for the people in the countries where Richard has not been yet — if you organize the visit properly and send Richard an invitation, chances are very high that he will come.

Invitation by sarahkim

He liked today’s Russia more than the one he had seen 15 years ago. Even though his time was very limited, it was sufficient to find out that Russian food (including pancakes and solyanka soup) is good and that people are now paying more interest to Free Software than before.

Richard has a theory for that. In his view, the post-communist countries get warmer to Free Software as they move away from the ideology where freedom is restricted. The younger of us, whose personalities were mostly formed after 1991, are more receptive to the idea of contributing to the benefit of the public. Therefore there are more Free Software users and developers among us than could have been among our parents. There is a similar situation in China.

Richard may be right. We were poorly globalized back in the early 1990’s, and that hindered our acceptance of Free Software (along with thousands of other good and bad things that globalization brings with it). To some extent it may remain a problem even now as we often prefer to do things on our own rather than ask for help, which might be readily provided upon request.

It is not strictly about communism. It is about the science of living in a larger world.

Technorati Tags: free software, communism, moscow, RichardStallman