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

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

The UK based publisher Packt, known to the open source world for its Open Source CMS Awards and to have donated  $100,000 to open source projects, has sent me a copy of “Blogger: Beyond the basics“, a book about using the Google blog publishing platform.

The book is a pretty good guide to working with Blogger. The author Lee Jordan explains professional uses of the platform, ranging from managing ads to be your own boss to optimizing your blog for search engines.

If you are using blogger and you want save time to learn how to get out the best from it, have a look at this book.

Technorati Tags: blogger, book, packt, LeeJordan, open source donations

The HP’s announcement of the availability of FOSSology, an open source tool to track and monitor the use of FOSS within an organization, and FOSSBazaar, a community platform to discuss best practices related to the governance of FOSS, is getting public attention.

Martin Michlmayr, recently hired by HP to play the FOSSBazaar Community Manager, introduced me to Phil Robb - Engineering Section Manager in the Open Source and Linux Organization at HP - and I asked him more about the idea behind HP’s initiative.

HP see’s a lot of fear uncertainty and doubt about FOSS from too many of the customers we work with - said him during a gorgeous dinner here in Rome - the FUD is not in the developers, it’s in the other folks in these companies who are responsible for the governance of the corporate software assets.

The managers, legal team, procurement folks ,etc in HP have been working with FOSS a long time, and we are confident and comfortable with our use of FOSS and our support and participation in the community. We know there are other organizations like ours out there as well.

It is obvious to us that if we help to build a “general consensus” across the corporate world as to how to manage FOSS, then many more organizations will also be confident and comfortable with their use of FOSS and therefore it’s adoption and usage will grow (along with the FOSS community in general). We think this is a good thing for both FOSS and the corporate community.

If HP is recognized as a driving force behind this improved understanding of FOSS, then both the community and these corporate customers will look more favorably on HP, and our capabilities regarding FOSS than they have in the past. HP’s current reputation isn’t bad or negative, but it’s also not that well known. We want to improve that.

Is HP going to kill Black Duck and or Palamida businesses? Both Black Duck and Palamida are welcoming the initiative, and I believe that HP is in the position to add momentum to the use of open source software without affecting their business.

HP Open Source Health Check is a set of services HP is offering to its customers. Some of them are using the fixed-time fixed price formula, moving from the classical artisanship approach to an industrial way to deliver open source value. Others, like the Open Source Governance Assessment Service and the TCO Analysis Service, require a deep understanding of both closed and open source platforms in a variety of sectors, and sound pretty difficult to sell worldwide as a “productized service“.

Matt Asay stressed the fact that HP is not creating a proprietary product, but going open source is probably the only way to get people’s attention in short time, and partnering with many important firms - like Google, Novell and SourceForge just to name a few -for co-authoring FLOSSBazar’s content it is definitely a smart move.

Talking about FLOSSology, I am looking forward to see if now that Ohloh went open source it will eventually be included at same point. In the meantime I warmly suggest to insert either FLOSSology and FLOSSBazar on Savannah, considering that searching for Open Source Selection on google returns the Savannah’s entry for QSOS project as the very first result.

Last but not least helping medium to large customers to understand if, within commercial Linux distributions in use by their systems, there are components and modules not supported by the vendor could be a plus.

Am I right Phil?

Technorati Tags: HP, FOSSology, FOSSBazar, Ohloh, open source selection, QSOS, Savannah, PhilRobb

About Phil Robb.
Phil Robb is Chairman, and General Manager of FOSSBazaar.org; a website and community dedicated to improving the governance and adoption of free and open source software within enterprises, institutions, and governments. Phil is also a section manager at Hewlett Packard leading their Open Source Programs Office. In that role Phil manages several product development teams focused on open source solutions and governance including the FOSSology project. Phil is also responsible for HP’s Open Source Review Board which is the governing body within HP for all open source software usage and deployment. Prior to joining HP in 2001, Phil held senior management and technical positions at Critical Path, Fisher Scientific, Motorola, and Honeywell-Bull. Phil received a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Management Information Systems from Bowling Green State University, and attended Colorado State University toward a Masters degree in Computer Science.

“The Family Guide to Digital Freedom,” June 2007 edition is now available for purchase at Lulu.com, have a look at the website to know more.

Marco Fioretti, the aythor, is a freelance writer living in Italy, he did write also “File Format: Hidden traps in OpenDocument (or any other open standard) and how to avoid them“, an interesting article about problems and issues related to every open standard.

Below some information about the book and also an excerpt of the book. Continue reading ‘Book: The Family Guide to Digital Freedom’

Keeping in mind the value of non-paying customers I happened to read an Alex Fletcher’s post about the paper “The Value of ‘free’ Customer” mentioned by Nick Carr in another recent post.

An application fo free by malthe

The paper is about so-called two-sided markets, markets in which one or several platforms enable interactions between end-users, and try to get the two (or multiple) sides “on board” by appropriately charging each side.

While Open Source firms do not play in a two-sided market, the mathematical model created , as suggested also by the authors, might be applied in other areas, hopefully in the OS arena too.

Gupta, one of the authors, said:

working on understanding and modeling complex network structures such as those of MySpace. Here the issue that we are grappling with is the tangible and intangible value of customers. In other words, customers provide tangible value to a firm through direct purchases but they also provide intangible value through network effects or word of mouth. It is quite possible that some customers have low tangible but high intangible value. Traditional models would label such customers as low value and would miss a huge opportunity for a firm.

Technorati Tags: open source, network effect

Peter Barnes in Capitalism 3.0 talks about the costs and benefits of the free market.

In his metaphore capitalism is run by an “operating system”, giving too much resources to big corporations, who distribute profits to tiny portion of the population.

In order to fix capitalism 2.0 “bugs” he suggests to protect the commons by giving it property rights and strong institutional managers named commons trust.

The book is freely downloadable, but you can also buy it.

Professor Karim Lakhani, co-founder of the MIT-based Open Source research community and web portal. He has studied extensively the emergence of OSS communities and their innovation and product development strategies, and investigated how knowledge from outside of the organization can be put to use inside for innovation.

Reading an interview with Lakhani,I enjoyed the following quotation,

People often think about open source as a special case, as if such openness can only happen in software.

Martha Lagace asked him how did he start to become interested in scientific problem solving

In open source communities we see a vast degree of openness in which everybody can participate, but also the practice of broadcasting your work to everybody else. People continually broadcast their problems, others broadcast solutions, and the person with the problem is not always the one with the solution. Oftentimes, somebody else can make sense of both what the problem has been and what people are proposing as solutions, and can come up with a better answer.

I also read a book by Dava Sobel about the longitude prize [Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time]. Finding longitude at sea was one of the toughest economic, scientific, and technological problems up until the eighteenth century. Isaac Newton said the only way to solve the problem was through astronomical methods, but he was proven wrong because someone from rural Yorkshire, England, came up with a clock that could keep time at sea. Nobody had anticipated that that kind of invention was practical.

About the difference between problem solving within OS communities and scientific circles

Open source software developers are very pragmatic and focused on solving problems. Scientists are focused on problems too, but their priority is often publication and that can sometimes come in the way of openness and sharing. The ideals of science are, of course, openness, sharing, and no restrictions on the free flow of knowledge, but in practice that doesn’t happen much at all. Some scientists, however, are pushing back and many say they need to rethink how they conduct science.

About risks related to opening problems to people outside the organization

For firms, the first order risk is the loss of intellectual property, especially if you think about the fact that most firms and scientists believe that the problems they work on are actually their most important things. If you provide hints to competitors, it will reveal a lot of your strategy.

I think it’s a legitimate concern, although practice doesn’t prove that out in the sense that even if other people know about the problems you’re working on or have seen your solutions, it’s very hard to implement those solutions in other settings. Knowledge is actually very sticky. Even if you reveal everything about what’s going on, there’s tacit knowledge behind a lot of scientific and technological activities.

And the benefit of opening up your problems to outsiders is that in fact you can get novel solutions—quicker solutions than what the firm or R&D lab might develop. It also opens up new domains for the pursuit of knowledge and activities.

But it’s still a very counterintuitive way of working.

If you want to know more about outsiders, reputation and his research read the full story.

I meet a lot of people using the term “commercial software” as the opposite of open source or free software, and that’s why I titled my blog Commercial Open Source Software. I was amazed today when I happened to read Wheeler’s essay Commercial is not the opposite of Free-Libre / Open Source Software.
David A. Wheeler, who has written a number of articles as the famous “Why OSS/FS? Look at the Numbers!” paper or the list of the most important software innovations, about himself and his approach to open source said:

I’m not a Linux advocate. I’m an advocate for considering the use of open source software / free software (OSS/FS). As I clearly state in my “Why OSS/FS? Look at the Numbers!” paper, I think it’s a serious problem that many people fail to even consider OSS/FS products.

I always recommended his paper to have a in depth look into the TCO thing, and from now on I will suggest people getting wrong thinking that FLOSS and commercial software are opposites to read his last work.

I found interesting his walk through the U.S. regulation to show that FLOSS programs are commercial items for purposes of the U.S. government, and I hope it applies to other countries.

I liked very much his conclusion, a good advice for CIO busy choosing good consultants:

A speaker who uses the term “commercial” as an antonym for FLOSS is probably someone who doesn’t understand FLOSS yet. And someone doesn’t understand the fundamentals of how software is governed will be constantly confused about what controls every device on the planet. Be wary of people who have such a basic lack of understanding; they are far less likely to give good software advice or to make good software-related decisions.

Thanks David for your job!

Over the last four years I have been actively involved with the so called war over software patent, and I had a chance to know many entepreneurs, politicians and lobbyists involved with.

No one like Florian Mueller was able to keep a strategic vision all the time, and despite he was criticized by both parties, he was conceded the category award “Campaigner of the Year” by the European Voice, and many other awards.

Evil lobbyist by mimax

Unfortunately I couldn’t manage to help him to get his book translated in Italian, but I can recommend it as the most interesting and entertaining book you can read on the topic. Besides software patentability it’s a book about European legislative processes, about lobbyism and, somehow, about Democracy.

Below some comments about the book from known voices.

Florian’s book vividly conveys the feeling of what we experienced. A must-read for all who are concerned about software patents, and for those who want to know how things work in EU politics.
Benjamin Henrion, FFII Belgium

The fascinating story of how a group of activists made EU history and saved our industry from a potential flood of lawsuits. When reading this you feel like you’re standing in a parliament and talking directly to the politicians who made the decisions.
Kaj Arnö, VP Community Relations, MySQL AB

Technorati Tags: software patent, Florian Mueller, no lobbyist as such