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  • Roberto Galoppini 11:03 am on February 6, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    European Open Source Projects: Qualipso Conference (part II) 

    The second day of The First International QualiPSo conference – “Boosting innovation and growth by fostering Open Source Software trust and quality” – I arrived just in time to attend the “Legal issues in OSS” debate, moderated by Stéphane Dalmas (INRIA).

    A new beginning?The end or a new beginning? by kreativekell

    Stéphane insistently asked the panelists why Europe should accept what he called “US-centric FOSS licenses”, eventually ending to let the audience yawn at the second question on the same topic. I bring some statistics on the table, saying that roughly 75% percent of open source software, at least on SourceForge, is released under GPL/LGPL (of which about 65% under GPL), and I don’t see the point to create a (European) license when EU is definitely not a software house.

    I also asked Till Jaeger, of JBB Law in Germany and one of the driving forces behind the Institut für Rechtsfragen der Freien und Open Source Software, if the AGPL was going to take over in his opinion, at least among small European OS firms. Till represented FSFE in Germany and Harald Welte in GPL enforcement cases, and he said that among the local firms he is advicing AGPL is an emergent phenomenon.

    Last but not least Phil Robb introduced the audience to HP vision to setup methodologies, process and tools to manage licenses’ complexity.

    The following forum – “Business models and strategies” session – was moderated by Franz Kurdofer, Principal Consultant at Siemens, who opened the session saying that QualiPSo future work would be to recommend the best open source strategies depending on selected business models.

    Jean-Noel de Galzain, CEO of Wallix, started apologizing because, he said, he had to set up his presentation in the ten minutes he had before. His speech basically was about Wallix, a promising European OS firm I didn’t know before, but we lost the chance to hear from his voice a definitely much more interesting story.

    Diego Lo Giudice, Principal Consultant at Forrester, being the only analyst among the panelists was supposed to be the keynote speech of the session. His taxonomy of open source business models was basic [slide 19] (SaaS, Product Focused, Service Focused) and filled with inaccuracies, such as listing OpenLogic among SaaS-based firms or citing Funambol’s ten million downloads mark (a number I really wish Fabrizio to reach before doomsday!). He eventually closed his speech with a slide about real truth about the future beyond 5+ years, displaying only a big ‘?’.

    Do we have to think that Forrester analysts have no idea of what will be the possible evolution of the OSS market? This may explain why just a few years ago most of the consulting firms were convinced that OSS was a “flash in the pan” and would have never reached significant market share…

    Björn Lundell, chairman of the Open Source Sweden, a one-year old industrial Swedish Open Source Association, showed a slide [30] relating “commodification” of FOSS, ranging from not differentiating to differentating, to cooperation, from intra company to inter company.

    Cédric Thomas, CEO of the OW2 Consortium, talking about productized services said that the subscription is a healthy market, and that despite there is a lot of traction for SaaS he doesn’t see it replacing the dominant purchase and license mode.

    I asked the panelists about the Sun-MySQL deal, and I noticed that none of them spoke about open source business models, mentioning only specific aspects like licensing. The result was that the company’s strategy, or how a specific firm differentiates itself and deals with the competition, was not effectively described, neither understood.

    Jean-Pierre Laisné, Bull, formerly Chairman of the Board for the ObjectWeb Consortium, moderated the last forum “A network of OSS competence Centres“. He was the only one conducting the session proactively, posing interesting questions to the panelists and doing so eventually catching the audience attention.

    Petri Räsänen, President of COSS, one of the oldest European FOSS competence centers, stated:

    Are you trying to create a compentence center from scratch? It takes years!

    Petri said that the COSS is stimulating FOSS firms to work together with a common “vertical” goal, agreeing with me about the importance of avoiding horizontal aggregation of firms. In this respect I suggested Jean-Pierre to look deeper into the horizontal vs vertical debate, considering the lack of information about consortia and associations in QualiPSo’s deliverables.

    I asked Marco Fioretti, Linux Journal Editor, a comment about the conference:

    In several moments the conference sounded to me like some LinuxWorld show of 6/7 years ago; sure, OSS is a very smart business strategy both for producers and corporate users, but we already knew it and even Qualipso knows it. Personally, however, I have the feeling that Dana Blankenhorn is right when he says that this may be the best way to make EU officially accepts OSS as soon as possible. I’m not necessarily happy about it, of course…

    (Just to recall, Dana wrote “the insights aren’t that deep. They don’t seem to be much more than what you would get from an hour’s worth of Googling.”)

    Summarising:

    • Considering that QualiPSo aims at facilitating the reusability of the results of the project to let the QualiPSo competence centers able to deliver consultancy services on FOSS based business models, a better understanding of business models is a must;
    • Getting involved people from FOSS communities is also a must, especially to avoid self-referentiality. Talking about OSS and not presenting what self-sustaining communities (like Debian or KDE) are doing restrict the range of observed phenomenons (consider that half of the linux kernel is community-developed…)
      .
    • While it is encouraging to know that the Commission is investing quite a lot in OSS, it seems that smaller and more focused projects have obtained in the past (and are obtaining now) more “bang for the buck”.
      .
    • Up to now, most competence centers across EU have demonstrated little impact on the creation of a regional/national OSS market. What Qualipso is doing in improving the situation?
    • For your next conference, organize your roundtables so every panelist has the opportunity to show its true competences…

    Technorati Tags: commercial open source, qualipso, EC funded, StephanéDalmas, TillJaeger, PhilRobb, Jean-PierreLaisné, MarcoFioretti, Petri Räsänen, CédricTomas, FranzKurdofer, DiegoLoGiudice, Jean-Noel de Galzain, Björn Lundell, Open Source Sweden, COSS, INRIA

     
    • Davide 2:37 pm on December 4, 2008 Permalink

      Pay attention to the legal session…. Phil Robb did not attend the conference… probably you are speaking about Martin Michlmayr…

    • Roberto Galoppini 9:10 am on December 5, 2008 Permalink

      Hi Davide, nice hear from you.

      Both Phil and Martin attended the conference, and it was a great pleasure to speak with them about FOSSology and FOSSBazaar.

      Phil was indeed invited to join the panel, as clearly results from his own blog at FOSSBazaar.

      I suspect you didn’t attend the legal session yourself.. 😉

    • Martin Michlmayr 2:13 pm on December 9, 2008 Permalink

      Davide, this blog posting is about the QualiPSo conference in Rome earlier this year where Phil gave a presentation. It’s correct that he didn’t attend the recent event in Paris.

    • Roberto Galoppini 6:12 am on December 10, 2008 Permalink

      Hi Martin,

      if you think that the last QualiPSo conference raised interesting issues I’d be happy to write about it. Let me know.

      Ciao,

      Roberto

  • Roberto Galoppini 2:47 pm on February 5, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Microsoft Italy launches Mclips 

    Yesterday Microsoft announced Mclips, an open blog to discuss with Microsoft Italy employees about technology & lifestyle, job opportunities and Microsoft’s initiatives.

    Jan van den BeldJan van den Beld by Digital PR

    About 30-40 Microsoft’s employees will be involved in this communication project, as explained Carlo Rossanigo introducing the new blogging platform.

    Unfortunately we couldn’t play with Mclips during the event, but I happened to speak with Mario Derba, Microsoft Italy CEO, about the future of Microsoft’s distribution channel, as reported by my friend Andrea Genovese (7th floor Director).

    I told Pierpaolo Boccadamo, head of Microsoft’s Platform Strategy by the Italian subsidiary, that we are looking forward to see Microsoft opening the Italian Open Source Software Lab (a sort of Port25 Lab).

    Last but not least I am glad Microsoft invited Jan van den Beld, the Secretary General of Ecma International. I had a chance to speak with about standardization bodies, OpenXML and many other issues. More on this soon.

    Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Italian blogosphere, Italian bloggers, Mclips, CarloRossanigo, PierpaoloBoccadamo, MarioDerba, JanVanDenBeld

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 10:38 pm on February 3, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Microsoft Italy meets the Italian blogosphere 

    Microsoft Italy invited some Italian bloggers to talk about the present and the future of the IT market, (permanent) interoperability and open standards, technological and business trends, web 2.0 and software+services.

    It will be also a chance to talk about Microsoft’s products and strategies with Mario Derba, recently appointed Microsoft Italy CEO. I am looking forward to know if Paula Rooney is right being doubtful about Zimbra’s future.

    Follow me on twitter tomorrow, from 6 PM (GMT+1)!

    Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Open Source Strategy, Open Standards, MarioDerba, Italian blogosphere, Italian bloggers, PaulaRooney, Zimbra

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 6:52 am on February 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Linux on Desktop? European Organization represents EU OS firms, Open Positions: press, facts and figures 2-02-2008 

    Myself interviewed by Marco Trotta for “Il Manifesto” – Is finally the Linux on desktop year? I doubt, likely Linux in 2008 will take over in the mobile phone market though.

    EU: Organization to represent Open Source SMEs – If I am not wrong Rishab Gosh told me something about it.. meme to myself: send an email to Rishab now!

    FR: Government economic commission recommends Open Source – France should increase the use of Open Source software, says an economic commission headed by the French economist and policy adviser Jacques Attali.

    Attention Yahoos! – Ross suggests Yahoos to join Socialtext!

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 2:38 pm on February 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    European Open Source Projects: Qualipso Conference (part I) 

    The First International QualiPSo conference – “Boosting innovation and growth by fostering Open Source Software trust and quality” – took place in Rome on the 16th and 17th of January, with international speakers from 30 different countries.

    beginningRemember how it all began.. by .bradi.

    IT executives from major players were joining industry round tables, and public officers and agencies presented their views, but there were no free software projects’ representatives, and only one open source vendor (François Bancilhon, take a moment to read his open letter to Steve Ballmer).

    Unfortunately I missed the chance to meet the Minister Luigi Nicolais, who opened the conference emphasizing the role that Open Source can play in the society development. I really would have liked to ask him about the 10 millions euro open source funds.

    Getting back to the conference, the first session I attended was “OSS in the world – implementing open source for innovation and growth: experiences and practices“. Diego Lo Giudice, Principal Consultant at Forrester, talked about future trends, basically telling things in the know: OSS becomes a major ingredient for “commercial software” – apparently he is missing that Commercial and Open Source are still not antonyms – substantially agreeing with Gartner; OSS puts downward pressure on “commercial software” license pricing, etc. The Forrester’s survey on open source usage in Enterprise and SMB in America and Europe was pretty interesting, though (slide 6-8 of his presentation).

    Alfonso Fuggetta gave the same speech he gave at the VON Europe Conference. He concluded that embedded software and pervasive ICT are a huge opportunity, blue oceans are appealing.

    Yuan Cheng, Deputy Director for Information Industry Bureau of Heilongjiang Province of China, talked about China’s long term evolution vision about open source, putting everything in a totally different temporal perspective (100 years!). He also said that he looks at QualiPSo as a good starting point, being a chance to broaden networking opportunity. In this respect I also believe QualiPSo is playing an important role in this respect, but this specific goal could be achieved without EU spending big bucks.

    Roberto Di Cosmo gave a great speech, explaining why the OS industry need engineers and developers able to cope with communities (soon more on his idea of resumes FOSS ready) and briefing the audience about the Groupe Thématique Logiciel Libre, a French pole de competitivite (competence center) funding FOSS projects. He ended his speech saying:

    FOSS is here now, let’s make sure it will scale up.

    Stefano De Panfilis – QualiPSo project coordinator and Research and Development Laboratory Director at Engineering Informatica – closed the first day talking about “Leveraging OSS“. He said that we should move from rebellion to industrialized practices, keeping the freshness and enthusiasm tradition of free software projects. I totally agree with the statement, and I am looking forward to see more contamination at the next meetings, maybe inviting selected speakers from different communities. (to be continued)

    Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, open business, oss, qualiPSo, RobertoDiCosmo, DiegoLoGiudice, AlfonsoFuggetta, YuanCheng, François Bancilhon, StefanoDePanfilis, System@tic, Forrester

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 11:34 pm on January 30, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Italian Conferences: “What’s ahead in Security”, Whitfield Diffie 

    Tomorrow at the University of Rome, located in Via Salaria 113, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman – famous for their invention of public key cryptography in cooperation with Ralph Merkle – will give a speech entitled “What’s ahead in Security”.

    The conference is organized by Sun Microsystems, Diffie is Chief Security Officer at Sun.

    Technorati Tags: Diffie Whitfield, Martin Hellman, public key cryptography, Sun

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 8:54 am on January 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Government: Open Source and the Department of Defense, David Wheeler webinar 

    Open Source Software (OSS) and the DoD, a Webinar sponsored by DACS will be held by David Wheeler on the 2 of November at 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM EST.

    David WheelerDavid Wheeler by swhisher

    Open source software (OSS) has become widespread, but there are many misconceptions about it – resulting in numerous missed opportunities.
    This presentation will clarify what OSS is (and isn’t), rebut common misunderstandings about OSS, discuss the relationship of OSS and security, discuss how to find and evaluate OSS, and explain OSS licensing (including how to combine products and select a license).
    It will show why nearly all extant OSS is COTS software, and thus why it’s illegal (as well as foolish) to ignore OSS options.

    Title:Open Source Software (OSS) and the DoD
    Date: Monday, February 11, 2008
    Time: 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM EST

    System Requirements
    PC-based attendees
    Required: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista

    Macintosh®-based attendees
    Required: Mac OS® X 10.3.9 (Panther®) or newer

    .. and what about Linux-based attendees? 😉

    Space is limited, Reserve your Webinar seat now!

    Technorati Tags: Open Source Government, DavidWheeler, dacs, webinar, open source procurement, open source governance

    (More …)

     
  • Roberto Galoppini 6:59 pm on January 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Tools: more on HP’s FOSSology anf FOSSBazar 

    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.

     
    • Ross Turk 8:31 pm on January 29, 2008 Permalink

      Hey Roberto! Thanks for writing about this story. Over here at SF.net, we’ve been talking with the FOSSology team for a while now, and we’re committed to helping them in any way we can. I’m actually looking forward to meeting them face-to-face during the upcoming season of trade shows to talk about our path forward.

      I think that the location of open source code in a large, heterogeneous codebase is of high importance to everyone involved. From my perspective, this isn’t necessarily proof that companies should fear open source technology, as Dana Blankenhorn suggests (http://tinyurl.com/2xu8q9). This doesn’t have to be seen as an intrusion detection system for wicked alien code.

      Instead, I think this should be seen as a tool that companies can use to be well-educated on the license requirements of any code they utilize, so they can respect them and act accordingly.

      I also think it’s more than a little bit cool that open source code is of such tremendous usefulness that engineers are consistently taking advantage of it to “get the job done”…so much so that it compels business owners to consider the various legal implications. I believe, as Phil does, that providing tools to help business owners better understand just how valuable open source code is to their business will be a good community investment.

      Thx,
      Ross

    • Roberto Galoppini 11:32 pm on January 29, 2008 Permalink

      Hi Ross,

      it is always a pleasure to receive your feedback!

      Dana is right saying that (medium to large) enterprises need their own internal network of engineers and programmers, but this can hardly be the first step. I see HP now offering services previously offered only by small open source firms, and that is good. The FOSS market need more momentum, and HP can greatly help the process, changing open source perception by large customers.

      As I wrote I see also some space to offer value added services, license compliance it is just one of them.

  • Roberto Galoppini 2:08 pm on January 25, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , DougLevin, FLOSSBazaar, FLOSSology, , , , StevenGrandchamp,   

    Open Source Tools: HP launches FOSSology and FOSSBazaar 

    HP just announced the availability of FOSSology, an open source tool that can be used to track and monitor the use of Open Source software within an organization. The main functionality made available at the moment is license detection, more features will be added in the next future.

    At the Linux Meets Business conference held yesterday in Germany Christine Martino – Vice President Open Source and Linux Organization at HP – introduced also FOSSBazaar, a community platform to discuss best practices related to the governance of FOSS.

    I had the chance to learn more about HP open source plans just last week, when Martin Mychlmayr invited me to talk with him, Phil Robb – Engineering Section Manager in the Open Source and Linux Organization at HP - and Bernard Marclay, FOSS Marketing Manager at HP.

    HP wants to demonstrate its experience with FOSS Governance obtained in over 7 years for internal purposes, and it will be offering services related to FOSS Governance at large (e.g. defining open source policies, supporting the adoption process with its consulting division, etc).

    As a matter of fact they are partnering with many actors. Doug Levin – Black Duck software CEO – made some public statements welcoming FOSSology’s introduction. Steven Grandchamp - OpenLogic CEO – asked to comment the announcement told me:

    As a Strategic Sponsor of FOSSBazaar, OpenLogic is working with others to provide information and tools that help enterprises understand the issues around open source governance.  Sharing our open source expertise, along with tools like OpenLogic’s OSS Discovery (which produces an inventory of open source being used) and HP’s FOSSology (which uncovers licenses in open source), will help enterprises leverage the significant financial benefits of open source software.

    Also Stormy Peters is blogging on the matter, and others will come. While having dinner with HP people honestly I couldn’t come out with a firm’s name that they didn’t contact yet. We also spoke about the business side of the initiative, I will soon write on the matter.

    The man behind the FOSSBazar community. 

    Martin, a known Debian developer and fellow researcher, is the man behind the FOSSBazar community. He is the FOSSBazaar Community Manager, and he will be working with partners to define content, help members to conduct valuable and interesting discussions and debates, and he will be joining conferences all over the world to promote the FOSSBazaar community.

    I wish him all the best of luck!

    About Martin Michlmayr. 
    Martin Michlmayr has been involved in various free and open source software projects for well over 10 years. He acted as the leader of the Debian project for two years. In this role, he performed important organizational and coordination tasks within Debian. Martin works for HP as an Open Source Community Expert and acts as the community manager of FOSSBazaar. Martin holds Master degrees in Philosophy, Psychology and Software Engineering, and earned a PhD from the University of Cambridge.

     
    • Egor Grebnev 1:46 pm on January 28, 2008 Permalink

      You are doing a great job telling about the people who stand behind the projects, and not just the project themselves. Such information makes a very valuable supplement to the official websites and news articles as it makes everything much more ‘realistic’ and understandable.

      Having received your kind permission to translate some of your postings into Russian for INFO-FOSS.ru, we will be republishing this one in the international expert opinion section that we’re about to set up.

      I have a more general request, though. As you know, I am currently a member of two teams: ALT Linux, which is the largest Free Software development company in Russia and INFO-FOSS.ru, which is an information project on Free Software and Open Standards targeted primarily at government public.

      Both organisations are in need of cooperation with the international research community. As a member of ALT Linux, I would be happy to collaborate and share our experience on Free Software acquisition management in government contracts that we have gained in a series of research projects for the Ministry of Economy. As a member of INFO-FOSS.ru, I am interested in making the project part of the international research community and consequently move from borrowing information mostly from European publications to being involved in its production. There has been a number of FOSS-related developments in Russia recently, and I believe that such cooperation could become mutually beneficial.

      I will highly appreciate any help from you side as even partial implementation of these wishes will be a major step forward!

    • Roberto Galoppini 11:19 pm on January 28, 2008 Permalink

      Egor,

      I am glad and honored to be published on INFO-FOSS.ru, please link to the original for comments and suggestions.

      You might share your ALT Linux experiences with open source acquisition by public administrations with an international audience. If you wish so my blog is always open to your contributions, and you might get the attention of potential EC partners and eventually get info-foss.ru involved with FP7 and beyond.

    • Carlo Daffara 12:24 pm on January 29, 2008 Permalink

      Dear Egor,
      I share with Roberto the wish to help in strengthening the ties between Russia and Europe on FOSS technologies and approaches. I would be happy to help in bridging the work done in the past (in the COSPA, SPIRIT, OpenTTT and FLOSSMETRICS projects) if it may be helpful, and learning from you and your experiences.
      I am working on the new revision of our EU guide to OSS, and any addition and resource will be welcome.

    • Egor Grebnev 2:16 pm on January 29, 2008 Permalink

      Dear Carlo,

      Thanks for your message! Yes, sharing your experience on these projects will be very helpful. There is not a little information gathered already, and I often feel myself in need of someone to guide me through.

      I believe that it is the appropriate moment to make a summary of our achievements in an English presentation. Meanwhile, I will try to contact you via email.

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:23 am on January 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Björn Lundell, , Cédric Thomas, Diego Lo Giudice, , Jean-Noel de Galzain, , , Open Source Strategies, Open Source Sweden, QualiPSo, , Wallix   

    Open Source Acquisitions: Sun, MySQL Merger. Open Source Sinergy? 

    While Sun Microsystems was buying MySQL for $1 billion, Rome was guesting the international conference “Boosting innovation and growth by fostering Open Source Software trust and quality”, organized by the EC funded project QualiPSo.

    Having the conference among its key themes defining business models to facilitate the use of OSS in the industry, the “Business models and strategies” session – run on the 17th of January, one day after the acquisition – was definitely the right place to ask forum speakers about the deal.

    I asked the panelists an opinion about the largest open source software deal ever, and Björn Lundell, chairman of the Open Source Sweden, an industrial Swedish Open Source Association, congratulated with Mårten Mickos, expressing a positive opinion on the deal for the open source market. Basically the first round of impressions was spent to congratulate with the hero of the day. At that point I posed a specific question about the distribution channel, asking them how the merge operation could affect it.

    Cédric Thomas, CEO of the OW2 Consortium, said that every small firm, open or not, at a certain point has to find its way to the market, and probably it was great time for MySQL to get sales and financial backing to better deploy its value. On the same line of thought was also Jean-Noel de Galzain, CEO of Wallix.

    I was quite disappointed by the fact that none was mentioning how the Sun’s distribution channel is organized by now, and I asked the Forrester’s analyst to tell something about how Sun’s open source business model could change.

    Diego Lo Giudice, Principal Consultant at Forrester, said that he couldn’t anticipate Sun’s press releases on the subject, but talking about business models he stated that it’s all about making money, and a check of 1 billion it’s a lot of money!

    Talking about open source business models many people and also analysts mention only specific aspects, like licensing, paying little attention on how pieces of the business fit (or not) together. The result is that the company’s strategy, or how a specific firm differentiates itself and deals with the competition, is not effectively described, neither understood.

    Last week during the Sun Partner Advantage Executive Summit, organized to share with top partners Sun’s vision for growth, Jonathan Schwartz early morning on the 16th of January sent a physical letter to all partners:

    Good morning! It is my extreme pleasure to start your day with some truly exciting news.

    Earlier this morning, Sun made a strategic mode designed to provide myriad opportunities for partners and the market at large. We announced our intention to acquire MySQL AB, one of the world’s fastest-growing and most popular databases. [..]

    Sun and its partners soon will enjoy unprecedented access to a massive new set of customers. In short, the MySQL database is deployed across every major operating system, hardware platform, geography, industry and application type, and we are committed to working with you to help it gain even greater relevance in the marketplace.

    What’s more, we think our operational, sales and financial backing, along with our global services strength, will enhance MySQL’s value proposition to customers by giving them peace of mind to deploy it at scale enterprise — on whichever platforms they so choose.

    Anil Gadre later discussed the news with partners, and I would have liked to attend to. While it is pretty clear that Sun is consolidating its position as the largest open source contributor, it is still unclear how Sun’s partners will eventually take advantage of a new set of customers in the database arena. Looking at how MySQL is doing business now, and who and how add value to the ‘M’ in LAMP all over the world, I see many unanswered questions on the table.

    Open Source Franchising or not, Sun has to work a lot with its channel to make this move worth well more than the price paid.

     
    • Carlo Daffara 10:11 am on January 25, 2008 Permalink

      There is a strong difference in selling approach between Sun and MySQL. While Sun traditionally leverages its hardware business to provide complete service packages (hw+sw+support), MySQL traditionally leverages its strong developers community to monetize mission critical deployments from the bottom. I suspect that Sun may have bought MySQL mainly to prevent competitors reaching it first (and potentially killing it in the process); this way the advantage of a lower price per database deployed can continue to be converted into preserved hardware margins. The idea that MySQL can be converted into a “grid database” in a way similar to Amazon’s SimpleDB is not convincing, and may make sense only if Sun intend to relaunch its grid initiative (at lower prices) offering the supported MySQL, OpenSolaris and apache in preconfigured means.

    • Roberto Galoppini 12:05 pm on January 25, 2008 Permalink

      I agree with you Carlo, there is a huge difference between the two distribution channels. Sun’s channel today is delivering products plus standardized support services, while MySQL’s ecosystem deploy web applications tailored on specific users’ needs. As a result I see little chance for cross-selling opportunities, consider that MySQL runs on a lot of platform, as also Jonathan Schwartz highlighted.

      About the grid-database it could possibly happen and make sense, but it is not going to help partners anyway.

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