Equally critical of proprietary and open source myths, advocating software choice beyond marketing and romanticism
About the Editor
Roberto has 30+ years of experience, specializing in open source. He's actively involved in various OS organizations and has helped companies integrate OS into their strategies.
Stephen Walli citingChristensen reminds that once the vendor starts to over deliver on customer needs, customers can’t absorb (and so don’t want to pay for) new innovation. Office 2007 Total Cost of Ownership seems to confirm Christensen’s theory, at least considering the necessary retraining costs from Office 2003 to Office 2007. So far, so good.
Within the context of the “Festival della Creatività ” on October 26 and 27 took place in Florence the first edition of QuiFree.it, a two day event on free knowledge and open source.
After mentioning some public and tv ads sponsored by the Italian Government, I reported some findings from the EC-funded project tOSSad – Towards Open Source Software Adoption and Dissemination. The project, aiming at improving the outcomes of the F/OSS communities, proposed to use mass media and branding of Open Source products to address identified weakness. The weaknesses of the F/OSS solutions perceived by the experts in the IT throughout Europe namely were:
Lack of Awareness
.
Lack of Training
.
Lack of Entrepreneurial Culture
.
Unwillingness to Change
.
Lack of Connectivity
Lack of awareness cluster, composed by answers which have identified problems in public knowledge about F/OSS solutions, included categories of answers like: “public is uninformed about OSS solutionsâ€, “no public interest and no marketingâ€, “low penetration of IST and Open Source in SMEs in the regionâ€.
The solutions proposed by the experts, ranging from “awareness campaigns about social and economical benefits†and “using mass media for advertising (by large F/OSS based companies)â€, to
addressing the younger generation, for example “involve schools and universities to promote F/OSS solutionsâ€.
Getting back to Open Source Enterprise, I mentioned Gartner’s findings. Open-source products accounted for a 13 percent share of the $92.7 billion software market in 2006 and predictions set the percent share to 27 in 2011, when revenue is expected to be $169.2 billion. But look also at Saugatuck Technology, as reported by Matt, telling proprietary vendors how to survive the open-source threat. The Open Source Market is ready for prime time. At least customers are.
As results from another Gartner Dataquest graph, the compound annual growth rate of open source software will more than quintuple that of proprietary software in the next five years. More important, the growth of the emerging phenomenon of Internal Open Source Development.
Customers are getting themselves organized, because small to large Italian firms can’t accomplish their needs. The Italian ICT market is a fragmented archipelago, made by lots of micro-companies where only 0,2% of ICT firms employ more than 250 employees. Small IT firms sometimes employ also gifted hackers, but they can’t manage to keep them busy doing just what they are really good at. Medium to large ICT companies offer a suite or two, often based on third parties open source products, and have no connection with open source communities.
As shown by an OpenLogic study, a quarter of interviewed customers using more than 100 Open Source products can boldly affirm that they saved more than 60% of their IT budget. While 44% of customers using about 1 open source product answered that is “too early to tell”. At the end of the day, open source is not a magic wound, and you need an open source policy and strategy to really take advantage of.
But the Italian open source market, likely not differently from many other European countries, has almost no open source product firms. VAR are having big trouble to sell off-the-shelf Linux distro, and to retain customers is not easy as soon as they get technologically autonomous. System Integrators and ISV, no matter how big they are, have no capacity to define and sell packaged services yet.
The absence of a wide enterprise grade commercial support opened new opportunities, allowing firms like BlackDuck, OpenLogic, Palamida, SpikeSource and SourceLabs to offer “horizontal” services not related to a single package. For example, firms offering intellectual assets protection take deliver assessment services for many if not all packages.
Their business model might be considered “horizontalâ€, as opposite to the classical (vertical) business model, where a firm offers every kind of services for a single package/distribution.These companies will play an important to role in the developing of an efficient and effective open source ecosystem. Nonetheless traditional forms of partner engagement might not work, and things like Open Source Franchising will definitely come to play, soon.
There are still just two ways to make money from OSS: “invent your own recipe†or being proficient at “cooking others’ recipesâ€. If you don’t like cooking, you’re out of the market.The result?
During the Cocoon GetTogether recently held in Rome, I met Luca Passani, an Italian software engineer experienced in Web and Mobile Internet development, known to the open source community for creating WURFL.
Luca, who spent seven years with Openwave Systems, currently works for AdMob, the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace. Yesterday I invited Luca – who lives really close by – to have a tea at my house, and I took the chance to pose him some questions about WURFL.
Luca Passani
How it all started?
In 1999 I was involved in a project for Telenor in Norway. They wanted to launch the first European wap portal. The first two devices to hit the market at that stage were: then nokia 7110 – aka the big banana (“bananoneâ€)- and the siemens C35. They had a very different wap browser: fixing usability with one implied screwing it up the other one. That was the beginning of the so-called “device fragmentation†(known also as device diversity).That’s when I started wondering how I could solve the problem. And that’s when phone.com (now openwave) asked me to join them.
Since then, how did you manage to get such large adoption for WURFL?
In hindsight it wasn’t that difficult, because there was a big gap to be filled, and nobody to fill it. It was like if the big Architect of the Mobile Industry had forgotten the roof! The huge problem of device fragmentation was stopping the industry from taking off, and nobody was providing a solution. This was the contest in which WURFL was born, and around which companies found home. Small companies in the beginning, those which could not afford to pay big bucks for a commercial-grade solutions. I was already running a 3000-developer strong mailing list at the time (called WMLProgramming) when WURFL was born. The list provided the ideas, the encouragement and the support to make WURFL a reality in a matter of months. More than that, the mailing list also represented an excellent marketing channel directly into the IT departments of mobile companies. WURFL’s strength was the grass root interest and support.
It is obvious that we got a bunch of stuff right. After a few years, also average-sized companies were using WURFL, and after them, even big guys such as Google and Yahoo Mobile had made WURFL part of their regular device information diet.
WURFL started almost by scratching a developer’s personal itch. Luca’s activity was sponsored by Openwave to empower developers and eventually leveraging the emerging mobile market.
So, how important was the community to make it happen?
WURFL “is†the community. Developers, the silent constituency of the mobile web, had been totally neglected. They found the strength to come together and fix their own problems: creating WURFL and keep it in good shape. My role was simply being the catalyst for this reaction. I created the WURFL schema, I put my understanding of the problem domain to the service of the project. To add to that, I created the WURFL website, I managed the mailing-list, I created the Java WURFL API and, last but not least, I created WALL (a tool to multi-serve multiple markups to different devices classes). Albeit Andrea Trasatti has now left the project, his contribution for many years deserves acknowledgment.
Luca is a “benevolent dictator” placing community before code. He shared the project’s leadership with the co-mantainer Andrea Trasatti for few years, taking in great account the importance of contributors. Small contributions, or “micro-contributions” as I would call them from now on, are the key to WURFL success.
What about the competition, is WURFL the only platform?
Not, it isn’t it. Albeit there is virtually no competition in the open source space. The situation is different with commercial entities: Volantis, MobileAware and ArgoGroup are the commercial counterparts in this space. Despite those products are backed by commercial entities and come with a lof of nice features, (not to mention commercial support), WURFL has unique advantages which are the direct consequence of the adoption of an Open Source model. Commercial solution are typically expensive, too expensive for small- and medium-sized companies in the mobile space. The reason for the high price lies in the need for commercial vendors to build a repository of device information. One needs trained staff to run device tests (a time consuming activity), and labs in different continents, devices cost 100 to 500 euros to acquire. It should come as no surprise that such costs are reflected in the cost of the product. With WURFL the situation is different. While WURFL can afford no paid staff to run tests, its community provides the open Device Description Repository with a steady flow of device information from its adopters and supporters. One could present WURFL as a piggy bank in which one puts one euro and gets back one million. No wonder people think this is a great deal.
On top of that, comes the fact that WURFL is totally open and WURFL adopters can hack the hell out of the framework and make it do exactly what they need. Hardly a possibility with commercial solutions.
I agree with Luca, a proprietary solution has to run after the sun to get it updated, but they could still try to imitate Funambol approach replicating the Phone Sniper program. So said, I also worked for telco operators for years, and I believe that the openness is needed when you want to include and extend technologies.
Introducing the Funambol iPhone plug-in – Fabrizio Capobianco tells an interesting hacking story showing how Funambol’s architecture of participation welcomes small contributions.
I’m enjoying your blog. I think I’m in the same space as you actually. I’ve been working with companies for over ten years, integrating Oracle with open-source technologies, so it always seemed an obvious mix to me. However sitting in at Oracle User Group events, and open-source ones, it is so dramatic the contrast of perspectives. For instance Oracle Open World (next week) or Collaborate (from IOUG) are so dramatically different from O’Reilly’s MySQL conference. I like you remain fairly agnostic about the whole thing.
May the best solution to the problem at hand always win…
Roberto Galoppini
8:54 am on November 8, 2007 Permalink
Hi Sean,
I really enjoyed your posts. Time by time I wrote posts about what I call “open source recommendations”, so you’re always welcome.
About agnosticism, well, being defined as “an absence of knowledge (or any claim of knowledge)”, I prefer consider myself as atheist, defined as “”a condition of being without theistic beliefs”. To be honest to you I spent some years with the Church of Emacs, but I eventually turned to the dark side of open source! 😉
Microsoft will publish an irrevocable pledge not to assert any patents it may have over the interoperability information against non-commercial open source software development projects.
Of course you can, if you stay in the green area! by Lateefa
We believe it’s important at this stage to focus all of our energies on complying with our legal obligations and strengthening our constructive relationship with the European Commission.
Answering a Dana’s post, I stressed the importance of the real meaning of the expression RAND, Reasonable And Not Discriminatory.
As a matter of fact even if you have to ask a single dime for each copy of a software, that it simply can’t be free software. In this respect perspective any (open) standard and protocol has to be royalty-free, unless you want to keep out open source. I totally agree with John McCreesh, the EU has worked for three years to produce a mouse, and no one is really taking advantage of if it. Did interoperability win? I am afraid not.
Kroes has ensured that EPO software patents – which the EU rejected in 2005 – will now strengthen the monopolist’s grip for years to come.
I totally agree with Benjamin, a patent covenant for non commercial open source developers is a small blanket. At the end of the day “free software” might cost a lot to end customers and open source firms, from now on.
Proforma Global is a division of Proforma, a $300 million company with 650 offices worldwide. It provides some 30,000 clients with fully integrated solutions for both print and electronic communications, designed to serve its clients’ industry-specific graphic communications, commercial printing, promotional and multimedia needs
Proforma Global, a division of Proforma, use Alfresco to help one of its customers to collaborate on and update the look and content of product data sheets among personnel throughout the world.
Matt Asay, Alfresco’s VP Marketing of Business Development, said:
The great thing about Proforma’s adoption of Alfresco is that it was on its terms, not ours. Proforma evaluated the software for months before contacting Alfresco to purchase our support and other services. With Alfresco’s open source and open standards Enterprise Content Management solution, Proforma has complete control of its own content, as it should.
This is the true value of open source: it returns control to the customer, letting them how or if to engage a vendor. For Alfresco, this has meant that we can’t rest on our laurels (i.e., our software). The software may get the customer interested, but it’s the value we provide around the software that closes the deal.
Talking about Nuxeo, the updated platform provides an infrastructure designed to meet the needs of large scale enterprises SOA oriented, with first implementations in the media, energy and defense sectors.
Stefan Fermigier, Nuxeo CEO, asked about the UK market commented:
We’re going to announce next week our biggest deal in the UK and the UK market already represents approximately 20% of our global business.
UK seems to start looking with more interest to commercial open source solutions today.
If you are evaluating Open Source Enterprise Content Management solutions, have a look at Alfresco and NuxeoQSOS sheets before, it might help you. Ohloh comparation is also available.
Simo Sorce is the Samba Team GPL Compliance Officer, hired by Red Hat in 2007 where he is a Senior Software Engineer, maintainer of Samba and expert on Windows Integration and Identity Management.
Simo Sorce in 2001 has co-founded a consulting firm specialized around Free and Open Source Software platforms. He is also an international Free Software advocate.
Simo Sorce
I asked Simo, who about six years ago when he supported my candidature as member of the Italian Free Software Association, to tell us more about his career and interest for free software.
How did you become a Samba team’s member?
While working part-time in the IT department of the University as a Linux/Unix administrator I was tasked with the job of making unix and windows systems talk together for file sharing and most importantly printer sharing purposes. Samba was the obvious tool.
As I am naturally very curious I shortly started wondering how Samba accomplished to bridge the architectural differences between a Unix and a Windows system, especially from an Identity point of view. I knew both architectures and they are very different in some key areas. I started asking questions on the users mailing lists, and I was quickly told that the details were only in the source code.
Being very naive I started reading the code thinking I could grasp everything in a short time. Soon I realized the code was much more complex then I expected but also realized the beauty of some of the challenges in that code, I was hooked.
I started working on the passdb subsystem (the one that manages Identities in samba) and shortly saw the first few patches applied to the development tree. After some time I was contributing regularly and was gifted with the status of Team member.
I think that “community” is an ambiguous term in the FOSS case, I see this world as a set of sets. Real communities exists only at the project level, and they are not necessarily very well defined at that level either. Usually the project community is composed by a more or less stable core set of developers, often employed by some company, and then a wide range of other people that contribute to a minor degree, or just uses the code and provide a lot of good feedback.
The broader “FOSS community” is more or less the superset of all the single project communities. Not everybody recognize himself in this broader super-community, and some people tend to split it into something artificial like the Free Software vs the Open Source communities. What matters at a higher scale is the set of licenses used on one side and the field a project operates in on the other. Where the licenses are compatible we see a lot more interaction, when they are not a bit less and also some tension when two projects in the same filed need or try to interact. These interactions are the links that define the super-community, more or less, with obviously blurred edges.
I think Simo raised very important issues here. Beyond licenses’ compatibility, that has its own role for example when it comes to M&A, but the idea of “super” communities is even more interesting. As a matter of fact many open source projects are using other projects’ outputs, and the way they interact will gain more and more attention. Samba is a “pure” community open source project, but the organization is quite different from larger communities like Debian, ASF or Eclipse. What about the project’s organization?
Samba has indeed its own model, partially dictated by the project history and interactions with the industry and other projects. The Samba Team unlike the mentioned organizations is a very lousy loose group, membership is given by agreement of the existing members after on of the team members proposes a candidate.
Historically the Samba Team has always been just the group of people that was trusted to have commit access to the shared CVS tree, and in fact was born only when Andrew ‘Tridge’ Tridgell and Jeremy Allison decided to start using a version control system. We tend to have a consensus-driven decision system. If most agree we all agree. We don’t take formal votes usually, if someone have a strong opinion against a decision it is his duty to speak in time and argue against it. As most of our decisions are technical in nature we tend to easily agree on a proposal and rarely we get contrasting opinion that we can’t easily settle. Also, usually, the opinion of the developer most intimate with the field being discussed tend to have greater influence than others. For non technical decisions we tend to follow the lead of the Team founders, Tridge and Jeremy. Recently we joined the Software Freedom Conservancy, and this gives us also a legal status. Before that we were legally just a bank account in Australia used to hold donations that we spent mostly to pay travel fares to remote samba developers that could not easily afford a trip to the 2 main yearly events in the Samba community, the CIFS conference in the US and the SambaXP conference in Germany.
Rough consensus and running code, then. It reminds me the IETF’s approach for its working groups, a great one! I believe that this approach works well for a small group, though. Talking about open source firms, you worked for years by your own company, then you moved to the States and eventually joined Red Hat. Could you tell us something about your experience in this respect?
The difference between working for a small firm in Italy and working for big corporations in the United states is huge. At an organizational level you have to change from a do-it-all mindset of the small firm to an environment where you have greater opportunities but also many more constraints. I enjoy being able to concentrate more on technical aspects and leave other aspects to dedicated professionals, but sometimes this means you have to play political games to do what you want.
From the business point of view a small firm is agile, can easily re-focus and try to jump in new fields but is usually blocked by lack of financial agility. Here smallest firms are somewhat at an advantage compared to Italy, access to credit is much easier and you actually have real chances of getting funding if you have a very good business plan. But here things are also more brutal. Risks and rewards are higher. It is as easy to get in business as it is to get thrown out of it. Even in big enterprises you still feel the pressure on quarterly results, long term plans exist but there is a very short term focus that keeps all busy on quick results. In the previous company where I was closer to the sales people, a quarter was the life and death deadline, toward the end of the quarter sales got anxious and pushed you harder to help them sell. In Red Hat I am less exposed to this kind of pressure, but we have anyway very hard development project deadlines, from RHEL updates releases to Fedora releases to your own projects releases. You have to make your long term plans in a way that you can split them in short term milestones or it is very difficult to get away with a project.
All in all I miss some of the features a small firm in Italy can give you, but I also enjoy the experience of working in a big global company. I think you have to try both to understand the benefits and the shortcomings of both, and then decide what you like most. If you are good you will have no problems making a living anyway.
I see also another major difference here. While Simo was working by his own company he had to sell services only partially based on his favorite platform. Unfortunately the Open Source Ecosystem has still to develop a pyramidal approach. Until now System Integrators don’t act as “mediators†towards small specialized firms like his one. While I understand that it is not easy for them to set it up for a large number of OS projects, I really don’t see a reason to not do it with some of. Happy hacking Simo!
Labornet FILAS, a company created by Regione Lazio to sustain development and enterprise innovation processes offering courses for the enterprises development, organized a webinar on SMEs and Open Source.
The webinar was aimed at exploring the issues and concerns around open source from IT firms’ perspectives, providing answers to questions about open source readiness.
I was happy to join the initiative and therefore held my first webinar. I found breeze easy to use, but we experienced few problems with bandwidth and document standards (Open Document Format are not supported apparently).
Attendees were impressed by the honesty of my speech when I went through OpenOffice Migration issues.
Talking about how open source firms inter-relate to their communities, I described the symbiotic, commensalistic and parasitic categories. An attendee asked me if, in my opinion, all Italian IT firms were falling in the last one. Unfortunately, almost all Italian open source firms are not symbiotic to any community. Some are collaborating at some extent in a commensalistic fashion. As a matter of fact, the majority are parasite.
Not surprisingly none of them see her company develop its own product, so the only approach they are considering at the present stage is both the best knowledge here approach, not the best code here (despite there are at least two Italian firms doing it, Funambol and Medialogic).
Dr. Dobb’s Journal invites all vendors to participate in the 18th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards, aimed at recognizing innovative products, books and web sites that have “jolted” the software development industry in 2007. Nominations for the 18th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards are now open. The deadline for nominations is December 3, 2007.
The more participants we have the more fun the award will be by jc_iverson’s
Software development has grown from an elite set of tools that everyone knew about and used, to today’s prolific industry awash with hundreds of products that morph and evolve with such swiftness and complexity that it is virtually impossible for developers to keep up with the changing market. Which products should they continue to use? Which upgrades and new versions are worthwhile? Which new tools’ performance and usability far outstrip their competitors? What is the new killer app? Enter the Jolt Product Excellence Awards: We recognize the most innovative, trend-making, ahead-of-the-curve products. Jolt-award winners are the software products, books and websites that developers should be using today.
I have been introduced by Seth Grimes and now I am a Jolt Awards judge. Seth is doing it for the second year, and may be is not by casualty that Pentaho was the winner in the Enterprise Tools category.
There are many categories, and while the regular cost for each nomination is 300 USD, Open Source and no profit companies can pay 40 USD, but products supported and funded by a non-open source parent company are not eligible for the reduced entry fee.
Roberto, I did suggest to Pentaho that they enter the 2007 Jolt competition. I made the same suggestion to a number of other companies that did not win an award and to one other Productivity Award winner. As I explain in the blog entry you link to (thanks!), I’d like to see even more analytics and enterprise-applications vendors enter.
It’s worth mentioning that the Jolt judges have discussed criteria for assessing potential conflicts of interest and have created a recusal policy for cases where conflicts exist.
Roberto Galoppini
6:58 am on October 23, 2007 Permalink
Ciao Seth,
I am sorry if you felt like me pointing the finger to you, I just thought you took some role, as it happened to be actually.
Unfortunately I am used to Italian corruptions stories, but believe me I never wanted to mention you were pushing them. On the contrary I believe you were right pulling Open Source Firms to join the contest, and I am willing to do just the same.
The Landscape of Migration, by Force Majeure Studios
Luca Passani
Roberto Galoppini and 
Of course you can, if you stay in the green area! by 
Simo Sorce
The more participants we have the more fun the award will be by 
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