Roberto Galoppini's
Commercial Open Source Software

OpenLogic just announced three webinars on best practices for open source governance.

How to Inventory Your Use of Open Source Software webinar will cover topics like how to use OSS Discovery software to take inventory and how to implement an ongoing audit of open source usage.

How to implement an Open Source Policy and Approval Process for Open Source Compliance webinar will disclose potential risks associated to open source usage, and how open source policies can help enterprises to manage open source licenses.

Understanding Open Source License Obligations in the Enterprise webinar will cover most common licenses’ obligations, and how to comply with them.

Register on line.

OpenLogic, an open source provider offering software and services for open source governance, announced that OpenLogic Certified Library surpassed 400 certified open source packages available. In addition, OpenLogic broadened functionality of OLEX adding a Comparison Matrix service.

An Open road.. by informaplc

Very few open source projects are managed by a specific corporate actor marketing its products, tracking the production process, partnering with other vendors, offering indemnification protection and a fair software warranty. Players like OpenLogic are taking advantage of the absence of a Corporate actor to develop new services, not based on code production (while participating to open source communities).

I asked Kim Weins, Senior VP of Marketing, how did come out the idea of the comparison matrix?

The reason we are coming out with the comparison matrix is that we have heard from customers that it is often difficult to figure out which open source package is best for a given situation. Since there is often limited documentation and marketing materials (except for the relatively few open source projects backed by commercial vendors), companies often pick open source based on reputation or by having developers do in depth research on open source package. The comparison matrix is a starting point that will help companies select the right package or set of packages to evaluate based on their particular need.

The cost of free, namely the cost associated with open source software selection, is the reason behind OpenLogic’s decision to build such resources. OpenLogic started covering Application Servers, Databases and Web Application Frameworks three categories.

Kim, how did you choose the first three categories?

We’ve started with Application Servers, Databases and Web Application Frameworks because they are some of the open source projects used most frequently by enterprises. We will be adding more areas going forward.

I see a sea of opportunities here. Magic Quadrants are just beginning to cover also open source products, but many categories like open source network management probably need similar attention.

Few months ago Matt Asay argued that OpenLogic’s success could have been achieved at the expense of the projects that made it possible, Kim replied on the subject explaining how OpenLogic gives back. As a matter of fact open source software is a proper free market, where appropriating returns from commons is challenging.

Kim, which is OpenLogic strategy about partnerships?

We partner with vertical players whenever possible. For most open source projects in our library, there is no commercial vendor. For the handful where there is a commercial vendor, we prefer to partner with them.

It makes perfect sense, and I am looking forward to report future steps in this direction.

Technorati Tags: OLEX, OpenLogic, KimWeins, MattAsay, commercial open source, open source business, open source comparison, open source library

Hyperic, the provider of open source web infrastructure management software, recently announced a new version of both the open source and enterprise versions of Hyperic HQ.

Hyperic released a new UI plugin framework named Hyperic HQU, enabling administrators to develop new modular UI components via web services, and announced also a partnership with OpenNMS, a popular open source network management solution.

I started asking Stacey Schneider, senior director of marketing at Hyperic, about Hyperic background and history.

The technology and the founders that would eventually form Hyperic originally came together at Covalent. There, they worked together to build an application monitoring solution for web-based infrastructure, centering on Apache. They spent two years developing this technology and recruiting a handful of customers. Early in 2004, Covalent reassessed its place in the market and decided to not invest further in this technology — however the team was passionate about the area and confident their solution had a big place in the market. So, they spun off and formed Hyperic taking the engineers, software IP and customers with them.

The founders bootstrapped the company for 2 years, building out their designs and working closely with the first dozen customers. As the product became mature, JBoss discovered Hyperic during a build vs buy assessment for what would become their JBoss Operations Network offering. They decided to OEM Hyperic. Quickly following that, Accel and Benchmark decided to fund Hyperic. This provided the founders with the means to go through the process of opening up the software to the open source community.

Since then, the company has grown from 5 employees to 40, from 12 customers to over 450, and from one strategic OEM relationship to 6 along with 25 other partners.

Should we talk of “low-end disruption” or a “new-market disruption”?

Hyperic is serving a new market - one that is born of new technology, fast rates of change, and tied together using web technologies. These custom built systems are usually not candidates for the older frameworks offered by the Big 4. Because they are so custom, the teams typically supporting them build custom management tools as well - usually using scripts they write or Nagios to do service checks. These systems may exist alongside old iron legacy systems, systems that are more stable and have a functioning monitoring solution from the Big 4 working for them. However, these systems are different - and this is where Hyperic’s opportunity is made in the market. For operations teams powering custom built technology - using a variety of technologies developed in-house or components available either commercially or open source - they need Hyperic to help them keep up with change, establish rules based monitoring and management protocols, and incorporate their custom logic and bleeding edge technologies into one easy to use, scalable solution.

Why Hyperic is employing three different community managers?

Almost all of our eventual customers meet Hyperic through our Community. They either trial the open source software first, read about users experience, or find their solution to their problem documented through the community. Our community provides broad resources for any deployment, including forum based support and advice, and a community HyperFORGE where users contribute additional management plugins, scripts or UI plugins. To keep pace with the activity, and to organize events, communication and community outreach - Hyperic has 3 community managers and one community moderator. As a company, we believe it is important to invest heavily in community development to ensure our users have the best experience, and we as a company learn and benefit as much as possible from our community at large. As a result, many of our users-turned-customers still rely heavily on community communications and events to improve their deployment. Additionally, they also lend a great testimonial to other users who are considering becoming customers - all in a public forum that is built on credible trust.

Hyperic Enterprise  is a proprietary software solution, just like Groundwork Enterprise, based on the open source version of the product. Hyperic vibrant community is clearly an important part of their marketing strategy.

Definitely yet another interesting open source firm.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, StaceySchneider, Hyperic, open source community, hyperforge, hyperic HQU, systems management,   Web monitoring

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

PLIO, the OpenOffice.org Italian Native-Lang Project association, announces the availability of OOoCrackz, an Extension that allow users to use the free and open source suite in a “crack mode”. The extension aims at answering the needs of 51% of the Italian market, that is in the hands of pirates.

We fund organized Crime by dontaskme

Davide Dozza, PLIO’s President, explains why the Italian association decided to develop OOoCrackz:

Reading “The Economic Benefits of Lowering PC Software Piracy“, an IDC research sponsored by the Business Software Alliance, we understood that OpenOffice.org license represents an obstacle to the adoption of he suite for about half of the Italian population, actually using mostly pirate software.

OOoCrakcz takes away three out of four freedoms, making illegal the access to the source code, the freedom to modify the code and redistribute it, just as every other proprietary software.

OOoCrackz has been developed by a PLIO’s member, Paolo Mantovani, one of the most known expert on OpenOffice.org macros and extensions expert:

The first release of extension allows only the activation of the “illegal mode”, but we are working on an evolution of the extension that will prevent you from releasing documents under Creative Commons licenses. The risk to manage is that the user could inadvertidly respect the copyright law.

To provide you with a real experience of using a pirate software, OOoCrackz prevents the registration and block all possible updates. The idea behind such choice is to make soon your copy obsolete, eventually exposing the user to security problems as happens with illegal copies.

Italo Vignoli, PLIO’s Marketing and Communication Manager stated:

The PLIO annual assembly announced marketing initiative to improve OpenOffice.org penetration in the Italian market. With this announcement we are targeting the illegal software market, a segment not yet addressed by our offer. This will reflect in our coverage of the market, and therefore we foresee an increase of our market share.

Technorati Tags: OpenOffice.org, OpenOffice, DavideDozza, PaoloMantovani, ItaloVignoli, OOoCrackz, Piracy Market, IDC, BSA

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

Groundwork, the provider of the open source based IT management and network monitoring solution, announced at OSBC the availability of GroundWork 5.2, a more scalable and extensible version of the product.

Within the system and network monitoring market the Big 4 (BMC, CA, HP ed IBM) are starting to loose their comparative advantage relative to open source solutions like Groundwork, since open source solutions can provide comparable scalability and distributed deployment options at a smaller cost. On the other hand they are probably retaining a comparative advantage in areas such as multi-OS software deployment systems, asset tracking, demand management, etc.

Considering that IT environments within large organizations run a mix of proprietary and open source software on a variety of platforms, also open source management solutions need to coexist with to support customers’ needs. I asked David Dennis, senior director of product marketing at Groundwork, some more questions about Groundwork’s hybridization strategy and open source projects participation.

How an open source challenger like GroundWork could create a system-wide positive disruption in combination with the entrenched Big 4 players?

GroundWork is able to integrate very well into existing enterprise Big 4 deployments. Customers of GroundWork operate using both GroundWork and closed source applications, allowing operators to continue using processes they are used to, while replacing the costs of licensed agents. When there is little functional difference between open and closed source options, integration frees financial resources to be used on additional initiatives.

The ramifications of this are clear: to gain the greatest benefit from open source disruptive challenges to the Big 4 status quo, savvy IT departments will look for solutions that play nicely with the proprietary systems (that are likely to remain entrenched in the near future), thus creating a positive disruptive benefit to the datacenter as a whole.

Groundwork put together at work many open source projects (among others Ganglia, Nagios, Cacti, NeDi, php-Weathermap, Sendpage, RRDtool Nmap and many more). How are you perceived by those communities and at which extent do you participate to those projects?

Here are examples of components we’ve contributed back to the community:

Nagios scalability improvements that dramatically increase Nagios capacity.

NSCAfe Forwarding Engine: an improvement on (Nagios) NSCA engine to support large installations.

HP OpenView Feeder: Displays output from GroundWork Monitor in OV.

WMI Plug-ins: Enables monitoring of Windows devices and services.

Ganglia plug-in module: alllows Ganglia data to be fed into Nagios for alerting.

We support the communities of the individual projects that GroundWork Monitor is composed of. We have sponsored and host the project team meetings (”Project in Residence” events): we’ve done this for Cacti
and Ganglia.

We convene a Project Lead Council where the Project Leads get to meet and share ideas. Out of these meetings, we’ve had these successes that benefit the broader community of open source IT monitoring users.

Sometimes we act as a ‘broker’ between projects. For example,Matt Massie of Ganglia talked to Tobi Oetiker of RRDtool about making changes to RRDtool that made Ganglia more efficient. Also, Remo Rickli of NeDi added
php-Weathermap integration, developed by Howard Jones. Kees Cook added SMS messaging capability to SendPage as a result of one our Council meetings.

Groundwork _Enterprise_ is a proprietary software solution based on many open source projects, and while is not leading any of them it is engaged in the coordination of some inter-projects collaborations, an interesting form of lucrative coopetition.

Still an open source firm, in my opinion, an interesting one.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, groundwork, ganglia, RRDtool, nagios, cacti, nedi, lucative coopetition, open source monitoring

Few months ago Volantis announced that was about to release its Mobility Server Community Edition to the open source community under the GNU General Public License version 3, starting making it available immediately as a free download under a proprietary license.

On the 19th of March Volantis released the Mobility Server, opening 1.2 million lines of code, the result of seven years’ of development as reported by the press release.

What is Volantis Mobility Server Community Edition?

The Community edition includes the Volantis Multi-Channel Server (MCS), Volantis Message Preparation Server (MPS) and Volantis Media Access Proxy (MAP), as well as a significant proportion of the Volantis Device Database and Eclipse-based developer tools.

Reading the Volantis Mobility Server Overview I understand that to get full access to the Volantis Device Database you need to buy the Professional Edition. Moreover if you want to use the Device Database directly with other commercial applications that are not using Mobility Server for rendering, the Device Database edition is required.

Volantis making available Device database updates from time to time has little chance to get voluntary contributions among individual developers (as seen with WURFL or Funambol), and it is probably targeting a different audience:

Telefonica has a strong desire to work with open source projects which is why we created the OpenMovilForum project. It’s also why we fully support the idea that Volantis develops its own open source initiative.
(Luis Almansa, Senior Project Manager at Telefonica)

Andrea Trasatti, Director of Device Initiatives at dotMobi and WURFL cofounder, kept me in the loop about the news he appears to be interested in. After reading the table comparing the Community edition and the Professional one I am convinced that dotMobi can’t take advantage of the open source one. I see consultants like Nick Lane being happy with the Community edition, as probably are happy SMEs that couldn’t afford the proprietary version to fulfill their own private needs.

Also Small IT firms can now step into this market, and I suggest Mark to consider to get the Mobility Server listed in the Ohloh open source directory.

Volantis primary aim seems to be setting industry standards, though. The company has results also from the press release has  contributed to a community standards process to create within , driven by the W3C the DIAL specification. As a matter of fact XDIME, a Web development markup language, has been created by Volantis to comply with the DIAL specification and is designed to create content viewable on any mobile device.

Am I looking forward to speak again with Mark Watson, Volantis Systems CEO and sort out more first hand information.

Technorati Tags: open source mobile, funambol, wurfl, andreatrasatti, markwatson, volantis, DIAL, telefonica, openmovilforum

Although there are dozens of open source licenses, the terms in copyleft licenses such as GPLv2 and GPLv3 seem to cause the most angst for enterprises using open source. Companies are concerned that they are putting their own IP at risk when using these licenses. In this webinar, you?ll gain a better understanding of copyleft licenses and how to manage the risks for your organization.

Topics covered in this webinar will include:

• An overview of copyleft — what it is and isn’t
• Managing potential risks to the organization
• Overview of potential lawsuits and recent cases
• Answers to common questions on copyleft licenses

Presenters in this webinar include:

Stormy Peters - Director of Community and Partner Programs for OpenLogic
Attorney Robert J Scott - Managing Partner of Scott & Scott

Register now.

There are quite a few books on Asterisk out there, but if you can manage Italian I wish to recommend you this one: “Asterisk” (Italian).

I happened to meet in person the author, Diego Gosmar, charing the roundtable on Open Source VoIP at the VON Europe Conference held in Rome in November.

Being the second book on Asterisk written by Diego and his coauthors, it goes pretty much beyond installation and protocols for VoIP, covering in depth topics like how to implement SS7 applications carrier grade with Asterisk or billing with astbill and WildiXbill, but also some spots on ENUM and wireless VoIP.

Mark Spencer, original author of Asterisk, wrote a kind preface for the first book edited by Diego, closing as follows:

It’s especially rewarding to see Asterisk growing in Italy, as I’ve always felt it was long past due time for the America to have something to give back to Italy in exchange for one of Italy’s most important contributions to computer science: the
pizza!

I really hope that the “Italian Open Source Pizza connection” will soon be appreciated also for things like this book

Technorati Tags: Apogeo, DiegoGosmar, Asterisk, Open Source VoIP, astbill, wildixbill, ENUM