Open Source and Intellectual Property: DACS Tech News
In the latest software Tech News from DACS an article from Emma McGrattan, SVP Engineering at IngreS, entitled Preparing for Open Source.
Updates from August, 2008 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Roberto Galoppini
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Roberto Galoppini
IDC on Groundwork, Hybrid Open Source Development, OpenMRS and Pentaho Collaboration: links 22-08-2008
Groundwork: Bringing IT Operations Management to Open Source and beyond – Groundwork sponsored an IDC analyst report. I can’t reproduce any content here, and I think IDC should consider a different approach when talking about open source.
Viability of Hybrid Forms in Open Source Software Development – Michel Bauwens reports some quotes of an interesting article along with the definition of Gated Source Communities.
Pentaho Corporation: OpenMRS and Pentaho Collaborate to Enhance Open Source Health Management – Via Mysyndicaat this news about, learn more about how to build ETL functionality into OpenMRS.
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Roberto Galoppini
Open Source Foundations: Jim Zemlin interviews Mitchell Baker
The last Linux Foundation‘s installment in their Open Voices podcast series went live yesterday, featuring Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, interviewed by Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation.
Mitchell raises some interesting points about challenges and opportunities met by Mozilla on its path to success, below an excerpt of the original transcript.
Jim asked Mitchell to describe the major turning points for Mozilla.
Some of the early turning points were in the 1999/2000/2001 time frame, like before Firefox, so before most people knew of us. And these were the turning points in which we actually came of age as an open source project. Meaning we shifted development control and management control from the remains of the Netscape group into a true open source project. And these are things like gaining control of the tree. Who determines who’s got access? Obviously in an open source project you have a set of technical criteria for who can access the source code, but when you come out of a commercial organization there’s this long tradition that all employees of that organization get access. And so these are very nitty-gritty development policies, but it took us a couple of years to figure out how to make that work, given this large commercial organization called Netscape. And those are not as glamorous as the success of Firefox, but they’re absolutely fundamental to having what is a legitimate open source project at the core of what we’re doing. So that was one set.
Commercial organizations willing to shape an open source future – like Nokia with its open source flavor of Symbian, just to make an example – have probably a lot to learn from that.
Success like Firefox stand on strong foundation(s).
And so in July of 2003, we formed the Mozilla Foundation. Up to that point we had had no legal organization at all. We were a virtual organization. And we’d gotten pretty far with that, but there were a lot of difficulties, right. You couldn’t own anything because there was no entity to own it. So you couldn’t own a machine or a trademark, a name like Mozilla, or you couldn’t have any money or a bank account or pay anybody, so it was really a big turning point to create that organization.
And then of course, Firefox. And probably shipping the 0.8 version of Firefox, which happened in the spring of 2004 was an important milestone; not as big as public as the 1.0 release, but it was really the 0.8 release, and I’ll bet any of the people—your listeners—may well have been using Firefox 0.8. It as at that release that we began to be clear we were on to something important.
Jim asked about the role of foundations, and advice for them.
I don’t think that every open source project needs or wants or would benefit from a foundation. But, certainly in our case, we found many things. There are some obvious ones like you’ve got a name. Do you want to own a name? Do you want to be able to protect it? You may or you may want to. Sometimes people would offer to donate money, and being able to have a set of people work full-time and be paid on it can be very helpful to open source projects. Again, it’s not for all open source projects, but for a number of us it’s an important piece. We found that other organizations were much more comfortable talking to us once e had a legal organization. So a government, for example, that’s interested in pen source software; it’s one thing to come to the Mozilla Foundation and talk to us. It’s another thing to come to a group of five or six people who call themselves Mozilla, don’t have an organization, and there’s a policy document maybe on the website, but you’re not really sure who it is. That’s a lot harder. [..]
I’m convinced that the nonprofit status makes people more comfortable in contributing their time and energy and work and effort, and knowing that what we do is legally dedicated to the public benefit. That may not be true of all open source projects, and I’m not trying to be proscriptive and say everyone needs to organize themselves this way, only that we have and I think it’s been important to our success.
At PLIO, the Italian association of volunteers who develop, support and promote OpenOffice.org, we are experiencing similar feedback from the market. Coping with Italian local public administrations or central ones seem easier now that we created a noprofit organization, and we can receive tax-deductible donations now (included the possibility to devolve the 8/1000 of taxes paid).
Talking about open source business models, the Mozilla finances come from the advertising model, but not the way it have been made real.
About the relationship with Google.
[..] the Google AdSense program existed, and Yahoo had similar options. So when you went to look at a website, you could already see that the websites would have ads on them and there was revenue to be shared. And so we though, “Well, we might as well have those discussions.†And we had them for months. Because it was clear pretty early on that there was some revenue relationship that could be had. We didn’t know amounts or numbers, but what spent months—and this is both Google and Yahoo—what took months was to get to know each other well enough to understand this principle that the revenue relationship would not result in technical decision-making about the product. [..]
And we can’t be united with that set if we let the technical decisions about our product move because of a business relationship. And so it’s really the power of the community behind us that makes that possible.
And we spent, as I say, months making sure we all understood this. And when
we were finally clear that that was the case, you know, we ended up with signed contracts, but with a relationship with each of Google and Yahoo.Retaining full control over technical decisions was mandatory, the Firefox community wouldn’t have accepted it. About the business side, I agree that an interesting question would be whether or not search will continue to be lucrative in five or ten years from now. As a matter of fact this is definitely not just a Mozilla’s problem, though.
About the importance of the trademark.
I mean, we have had people tell us, you know, they want to rip out whole subsections of the code and replace them and call it Firefox. Those are the things that are very hard to reach agreement on. And I think that the trademark in general, or the name or the recognition that comes with a name is really a very different concept than free and open source software. [..]
But the name and the trademark, especially in the consumer setting is, how does a consumer who doesn’t understand the technology know what they’ve got? It’s all about understanding what you’ve got, not changing it. And so they’re very different concepts and in the open source world, you know, we haven’t figure out how to live easily within both of them.
Talking about trademark, Zemlin asked what Linux can learn from Firefox.
The first place I would start is that trademark is unsettled in this area. And so if, for example, the Linux desktop had a trademark that was treated like Firefox, there will clearly be parts of the Linux community that are extraordinarily upset and it will be highly divisive. I think you have to start there at one end of it. And so I’d be really cautious.
I am looking forward to ask some questions to Jim about Linux trademark and how and if to empower it in a similar way.
Read the full original transcript.
Roberto Galoppini
Open Source and Software Patents, Joomla trademark, Open Source Idol: links 18-08-2008
Open Source Software and Patents: An Uneasy Journey of Discovery and Understanding – Steve Beller and Jonas Maebe, board member of the FFII, discuss about open source software and patents.
Joomla Trademarks Name and Logo – Discover what has been trademarked, and how it compares to WordPress or Drupal trademark’s policies.
Mozilla’s Firefox Wins the “Who’s the Next Open Source Idol†Crown at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco – Just wondering why OpenOffice.org logo didn’t take part into the “Who’s the Next Open Source Idol?†contest held at LinuxWorld 2008.
Roberto Galoppini and 
Jonas Maebe are discussing. -
Jonas Maebe
Just for the record: I no longer am a board member of the FFII since quite some time (since end 2006, if I’m not mistaken). I am nowadays also not actively involved anymore in most FFII activities.
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Roberto Galoppini
Hi Jonas, I am glad to hear back from you.
I remembered about you when we were fighting against software patents, and I didn’t double check your actual role within FFII. Sorry about that.
Roberto Galoppini
Open Source Licensing: Copyright law protects Open Source, BSA does not
Lawrence Lessig calls for huge and important news reporting that the “Intellectual Property” court in the US has upheld a open source copyright license, while Mark Radcliffe talks about a major victory for open source.
The license discussed by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) was the Artistic License, in the Jacobsen vs Katzer case. The CAFC reversed the previous District Court’s decision, finding that Katzer, not respecting Artistic License’s requirements, was liable for copyright infringement.
Open Source Piracy? No thanks! by mrs.reed
Matt Asay, Richard Koman and Savio Rodrigues are doing an excellent job spreading the word about this breaking news, telling how important is for the open source world.
Savio included also me in the discussion, referring to a post of mine claiming that the BSA should also help protect open source products.
Certainty by an important US Court is a good start, but we need help to fight against “open source piracy“. In the BSA there are already enough companies already benefiting from open source, let’s see if any of them will eventually spend a word for the open source cause.
Technorati Tags: Open Source Piracy, Commercial Open Source, software piracy, BSA
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Peter Vescuso
While the appeals court decision is certainly an important move for software creators, and one that organizations should review carefully, it should not scare people from using open source within development. More and more companies that are using open source code are doing so in the right way, so that licensing and other obligations are met. Black Duck sees the court decision as more of a wake up call to software development organizations without a proper open source use policy in place, rather than an industry-shifting milestone.
Open source is becoming an increasingly important and strategic component of today’s software development process – enabling faster and more cost effective product evolution. Underscoring its importance, Gartner recently found that 47% of the companies surveyed say they are using code from external sources. A large number of these organizations have well-established policies for open source use and adoption that take into account license obligations. The combination of proprietary and open source software has created a hybrid software development model that definitely requires careful attention to licensing – but can be managed.
Developers and their organizations should have a clear understanding of what’s inside their software components, no matter how seemingly insignificant, in order to avoid legal, financial and business ramifications. Open source code analysis is not about policing developers or prohibiting use, it provides a clear, concise and efficient way to track open source use and license restrictions- a necessity of doing business in a world in which software development is an open field.
-Peter Vescuso, Black Duck Software
Roberto Galoppini
Open Source at Wall Street: Marketcetera enables hedge funds and trading firms to access ACTIV’s data feeds
Marketcetera, an open source firm developing a platform for automated trading, after having secured $4 million in its first round of funding, has now partnered ACTIV Financial, a provider of low-latency market data.
The availability of ACTIV’s real-time equity data on the Marketcetera platform represents increasing momentum in open source adoption by Wall Street’s automated trading institutions.
Making sense by Eccleston George Public Artists
Graham Miller and Toli Kuznets, the two founders of Marketcetera, told me a lot about their interesting business experience few months ago, and I asked Graham to share some background about this joint solution.
The addition of Activ’s real-time equity data to Marketcetera’s open source platform provides a new array of capabilities and features for tactical trading systems, while preserving all the flexibility and breadth of ACTIV’s data feeds. Unlike a proprietary trading application, the Marketcetera platform provides a wealth of uses for the market data out-of-the-box, in addition to a platform for building custom pricing logic and visualizations. This means that trading strategies can be brought to market much more quickly and with less development time than with other solutions.
It will be interesting to see if being open will help Marketcetera to further expand its customer base, allowing proprietary and secret trading algorithms is proving to be key to their success.
Roberto Galoppini
ntop goes commercial, open source interships, open source routers: links 12-08-2008
Open source tools becoming commercial products? This can be a good thing -Â Another popular open source tool just became a commercial offering: ntop tool.Want an IT Job? Check out Open Source – open source internship, some numbers and feedback about google summer of code and Red Hat internship.
The Essential Guide to Open-Source Routers – Basics about open source routers.
Roberto Galoppini
About Making Valuable the Open Source Long Tail
The Sourceforge marketplace advisory board, held in Portland over OSCON 2008 days, was a great chance to meet in person open source VIPs and talk about issues and conundrums in the open source world.
A beautiful Long Tail by I-P-S
Dominic Sartorio, director of product management at SpikeSource and Open Solutions Alliance‘s president, just after the lunch break introduced us to the results of a survey conducted by SpikeSource. Among the survey’s findings is that any given customer has a component distribution that falls everywhere on the long tail, Dominic said.
If, for example, the customer uses 10 components, it is true that 8 or 9 of them may be in the head of the tail, but, most of the time, the remaining 1 or 2 will fall far out on the long tail, well beyond the 100 threshold to which a support vendor may be able to scale.
I agree with Dominic that the open source support business greatly differ from music, books, and other Long Tail markets, and not in a good way.
In short, open source components need to work together. They need to install, run, and be managed together, in the context of whatever application is depending on them. They need to be a coherent stack. Other markets don’t have this problem – Books, music, shares of stock, and so forth, don’t need to “integrate†with each other. Why is this a problem? Because the need for integration itself adds complexity to the support challenge – It is not enough to amass technical competence in a large number of components; one also needs the competence to do root-cause analysis, and determine which component in a given stack is causing the problem the customer is experiencing.
Making valuable the open source long tail is not easy. The SF marketplace maybe an important piece of the puzzle, but what is needed is an enabling ecosystem, or possibly more than one. Given the importance of High-tech SMEs in Europe , the Observatory of European SMEs analyzing success factors for the networking among high-tech SMEs found that the lack of a coordinator, either a larger leading firm or an agency, is key.
To understand how big the problem is, I asked Dominic how many components should be supported to satisfy customers’ needs.
If we extrapolate the survey data (basically assuming that, had we 10 times as many respondents, the shape of the distribution wouldn’t change significantly) we find that supporting 100 components would satisfy only about 30% of the market. Supporting 300 would satisfy 50%. One needs to go beyond 1000 to support 80%, and close to 5000 to support over 90%.
Turns out that it is possible for vendors to choose which 30%, or 40%, or even 50% (depending on their ability to scale their technical competencies) they want to serve.
How open source vendors are coping with the problem?
SourceLabs, for example, chose to focus on the SASH stack, which ended up serving a broad class of the financials industry (among others). OpenLogic scaled federated support to hundreds of components and, by focusing on enterprise customers, found established development and governance best practices that themselves didn’t scale beyond a few hundred components. SpikeSource chose to focus on specific stacks of solutions that had a mass market, thereby limiting its component support needs to those components appearing in those stacks. SpringSource/Covalent packages a distinct set of components as a platform which credibly competes with application servers in the application development market. Systems integrators like Unisys have the ability to charge time-and-materials for open source support, thereby, in effect, passing along the costs of scaling technical competencies to those customers willing to pay for it. And so forth.
The “open source mediation conundrum” – as Dominic named it – has not been solved yet, it will be interesting to see how and if open source actors will cope with it.
Stormy
There are two other factors to consider here:
1 – The code for all those projects is open, so given the right expertise and enough time, anyone could figure out what is going on.
2 – Most of the people that work on those long tail projects are available via mailing lists and email. It’s much easier to maintain relationships with developers on 400 projects, like OpenLogic does, than it is to support them in house.
Roberto Galoppini
Tips for Leading Open Source Projects, Green Free Software, US Constitution and Mobile Location Information : links 08-08-2008
Seven tips for leading free and open source software programmers – have a look at Bruce Byfield‘s list of tips, and also Aaron Fulkerson , MindTouch CEO, talking about the need for a strong personality at the head of an open source project and other pieces of advice for open source project leaders.
Free Software Cuts PC Energy Use – A free software program developed by Verdiem that to cut PC energy use by allowing users to schedule when their computer goes into sleep mode.
Constitution Protects Location Information, CDT Argues – The brief argues that a court should require the government to obtain a warrant based on probable cause in order to gain access to cell site location information stored by a cell phone company.
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Roy Schestowitz
Roberto, there’s a problematic typo in the first link (spam site).
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Roberto Galoppini
Thank you Roy, I corrected it now. Ciao!
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Phil Heaton
My site isn’t a “spam site” – the link was incorrectly pointing to an incoming live feed on my website.
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Roberto Galoppini
Yes Phil, it was just a typo (actually more than one).
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Roy Schestowitz
Yes, too of them.
Phil, the typo had it pointing/redir’ing to spammy sites.
Roberto Galoppini
Jolt Awards Nominations 2008: Nominations are about to open
Dr. Dobb’s Journal in September will throw its 19th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards, aimed at recognizing innovative products, books and web sites that have “jolted†the software development industry in 2008.
Nominations for the 19th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards are going to be open before the end of September. The deadline for nominations will be November 12, 2008.
The more participants we have the more fun the award will be by jc_iverson’s
There are 16 categories, and last year it has been a tough job fully participate and judge the products in all my chosen categories, maybe I should concentrate only on a few of them this year.
Technorati Tags: Jolt Awards, Dr Dobb
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