The Art of Release – Mark Shuttleworth on Ubuntu release management.
A Win for RedMonk is a Win for the Community -Â Stephen on RedMonk.
MySQL Focuses on Community – Learning by doing at MySQL, the case for the community.
Fabio Marzocca of the Baobab fame, is an Italian Ubuntu-developer with an amazing background, ranging from being a technical writer by an historic Italian magazine named Mc Microcomputer to developing a program for music composing, known as the Muzical Wizard.
Few days Fabio posted few comments on my blog, and we happened to know each other, below the interview that followed.
How did you start getting working with GNU/Linux?
It was 6 or 7 years ago when I became very sad looking at my old portable pc that was slowly dying of a broken heart under the constant resource-demanding policy of a proprietary operating system. I didn’t want to throw it away so I gave it a chance with a linux kernel. From that point on, my experimenting and curious approach towards things of life made the rest. Those were the years of the geek, but then I realized that GNU/Linux was a sort of safe and extremely comfortable house to live in. You are surrounded by a crowd of very active fellows who are there to support you, to accept your criticism, to implement your suggestions and to share their and your work.
How did you manage to bring Baobab accepted into GNOME?
Baobab was first introduced in Debian repositories as a deb package. In 2005 I was contacted by Benoit Dejean (a gnome developer – libgtop) and he asked Olaf Vitters to host baobab source tree on gnome cvs. I then started using gnome tools, polishing the code to fit gnome standards, and so on, releasing regular versions. Later that year I met Paolo Borelli, a great gnome-developer who joined Baobab project giving it a strong code enhancement. Paolo was (and actually is) a real milestone for the project. At the beginning of 2006 Emmanuele Bassi, gnome-utils project maintainer, asked me to merge Baobab into gnome-utils as Disk Usage Analyzer, so we started the gnome adventure. Then Alejandro Castro and his Spanish team of Igalia joined the project, adding the beautiful ringschart view to Baobab. I have found Gnome community a great ecosystem for a software project: very professional, skilled and committed people, always available to suggest, integrate and cooperate for the common target.
What about Ubuntu?
In 2005, together with other 2 fellows, I founded ubuntu-it the italian support Community to Ubuntu. We started setting up the basic tools to provide assistance and support: a web portal, a forum, a mailing list and an IRC channel. Since then, the community has grown very rapidly and now the current organization helds up more than 10 separate working groups. I recently gave an interview to Italian national TV explaining the significance of the recent Long Term Support release, Ubuntu 8.04.
Congratulations to have been able to bring Ubuntu on Italian TV! I am hoping that a “pubblicità progresso†open source awaraness campaign could eventually help us to regularly spread the word about open source.
What are the advantages of the community when it comes to product development?
The strong and large barrier between you (the user) and the authors of a software project are knocked down. Whenever you may need, you know that you can send an email or join a chat channel to ask which will be the future plans of a product and its new features. You will never do that without a strong ecosystem such as an open source community. The communication channels with the users are a strategic resource for the community: each comment is deeply evaluated and frequently it becomes a code improvement. We should not either underestimate the “social” effects that collaboration produces on its participants: the more they cooperate, the more they feel themselves motivated to hit a common target.
Another main advantage fo the community on product development is quality control: it often happens that several communities join their efforts together when the release time for an application is getting closer, to check the code and push on debugging. New features release happens only when the community has taken a common decision.
Fabio talking about the (positive) social effect associated with a tight communication channel between users-developers and authors raises an interesting point, adding something to what Simo Sorce reported about his experience with Samba.
Happy hacking Fabio!
Zenoss, the provider of open source network, systems and applications management software, announced the availability of point-and-click installers for Zenoss Core for many Linux platforms.
Thanks to BitRock InstallBuilder Zenoss Core is now installable through RPM, DEB and point-and-click GUI installers.
As seen with Groundwork the “Big 4” are starting to loose their comparative advantage relative to open source IT Management solutions, namely the “Little 4” (Groundwork, Hyperic, Qlusters and Zenoss), as earlier appointed by Michael Coté.
Zenoss, differently from Groundwork that uses a lot of open source network tools and focuses on the presentation layer for monitoring, while Zenoss starts a little lower and builds all the way to the presentation layer using a lot of open source plumbing.
I started asking my twitter buddy Mark Hinkle, VP Business & Community Development at Zenoss, the following question:
How an open source challenger like Zenoss could create a system-wide positive disruption in combination with the entrenched Big 4 players?
As for Zenoss integration with the Big Four we have a few customers who actually share Zenoss event data with Big Four systems. I can think of one user who feeds all Zenoss event data into his legacy monitoring system from HP while he grows using Zenoss Core. Because we expose all our data and code it makes it relatively easy to make REST and XML-RPC calls to Zenoss or event to directly access the data. I expect that others will do things like federate our CMDB with other CMDBs for ITIL compliance.
I think what’s really interesting is that we can quickly develop products that meet the needs of our community users and our enterprise customers because of this, because we are so flexible we see users doing a variety of integrations not just with the big four but other products. Our automatic remediation functionality allows users to kick off other programs based on monitoring data this makes Zenoss a logical partner for other open source and commercial projects and software companies.
Supporting ISVs and developers to enable them to extend an IT management platform’s functionalities is key. Open Source players like Zenoss seem to have understood that very well.
Zenoss uses a lot of open source projects, how do you participate to these projects?
So far we are a gold sponsor for the Twisted, MRTG and RRDTool because they are related to what we do and in the case of Twisted and RRDTool we embed their technologies. We also are working with a few other open source communities to integrate our data and theirs to make it easy for our users.
For our users we invest a lot in our user base. We have developers and a dedicated community manager monitoring the forums. We reach out to those that have problems and mention in our forums and via blogs.
Zenoss seems to prefer funding existent projects instead of joining them. What about your community?
Zenoss thrives on the input from our community, both good and bad. In our last release Zenoss Core 2.2 included over 650 improvements (features, bug fixes, etc.) most of them submitted by our community of users via our publicly available Trac system. The biggest advantage for a software company like ours is getting users who share their experience, it’s hard to duplicate the same environment that an end-user has but giving them our software and making it easy for them to give feedback is a big advantage for Zenoss. In April we announced over 4,000 deployments and over 100 paying customers who help inform how we develop our software.
Also over 32,000 people have opted to receive our monthly newsletter and that newsletter has a survey on varying topics including prioritization of features, new platform support, etc. That information goes straight to our development team.
We also have had great participation on our wiki and in our forums. We have been averaging over 1000 posts a month in our forums/mailing lists which is a great knowledge base for all our users and helps us better support them. We got some great tips like how they are maintaining their events databases and how they are making Zenoss into a high availability monitoring system. Others have given us extensive feedback on our documentation, one user helped provide the guidelines for a rewrite of our user guide from a end-user perspective that was incredibly useful. We also have a steady flow of plugins (we call them Zenpacks) coming in to help improve the ability to monitor devices, operating systems and plugins.
I am also amazed at the popularity of the our IRC channel #zenoss on irc.freenode.com we can hardly cover the channel and all our other venues ourselves but there are usually 30 or more users in the channel helping each other. We archive the logs and they add to our knowledge base as well.
We also have a dedicated developer who is the Zenoss Community Manager, Matt Ray. Matt’s working to help integrate other open source technologies with Zenoss Core and being our technical liaison to the community. However, most of the Zenoss Core developers and support staff lurk there and answer questions regularly.
This week we are planning on announcing our Zenmasters program that will recognize 12 of our most active community members. We also are going to formally acknowledge over 30 others who have contributed to the project in the last year. It’s very exciting to see people getting involved and really has helped us to grow and add improve the software over the last two years.
I like programs like Zenmasters, they can really help to foster Corporate production model like yours. Zenoss Enterprise is a proprietary product, based on open source projects, but Zenoss is not directly involved in any of them. Being open for companies like Zenoss is fostering its own community.
Yet another interesting approach to deliver to the market open source products.
Roberto, thanks for your kind words and commentary. We just announced our Zenoss Masters last night:
http://blog.zenoss.com/2008/06/03/zenoss-masters/
These guys really power our open source community. I am just a figurehead 😉
My decision to start Commercial Open Source blog was significantly influenced by my desire to share ideas on open source business models, extending my quest for feedback and opinions from other authoritative open source thought leaders.
Rereading Matt Asay‘s post about “the convenience of proprietary software“, to which just yesterday followed Stormy Peters’ answer, I thought it was time to throw another business model idea: open source network marketing.
Make a difference by aepoc
Wikipedia’s entry on Network Marketing reports (the italic emphasis and URLs are mine):
Network marketing is a business distribution model that allows a parent multi-level marketing company to market their products directly to consumers by means of relationship referral and direct selling.
Independent unsalaried salespeople of multi-level marketing referred to as distributors (associates, independent business owners, franchise owners, sales consultants, consultants, independent agents, etc.), represent the parent company and are rewarded a commission relative to the volume of product sold through each of their independent businesses (organizations). Independent distributors develop their organization by either building an active customer base, who buy direct from the parent company and/or by recruiting a downline of independent distributors who also build a customer base, expanding the overall organization. Additionally, distributors can also earn a profit by retailing products which they purchased from the parent company at wholesale price.
Skepticism around Multi Level Marketing has its place, and there are many resources explaining what’s wrong with Multi Level Marketing. As a matter of fact the legitimacy of MLM businesses can’t be given for granted, and many pyramid schemes try to present themselves as legitimate MLM businesses. Apparently the Federal Trade Commission advises that MLM companies setting greater incentives for recruitment than product sales are to be viewed skeptically. Others state that the real problem with MLM is the people it attracts, highlighting that network marketers often have little or no experience developing business relationships other than that of employer/employee, and they are in danger of disappointment caused by the failure to quickly satisfy unrealistic economical expectations.
So, why do we need a scheme like an MLM to sell open source?
Information asymmetry make categorizing open source customers a not so easy task, and I believe that is not uncommon to see users – read potential customers – spent a lot of time (therefore money) instead of buying commercial open source products and services. Someone, somewhere in the IT department, knows how much time spends to make things work.
These people can make the difference, they can really help to turn users into customers, from inside.
They use open source software, they know what kind of support do they need, they are the best distribution channel than ever. They do know how to reach customers – rather they live by them – and how to offer your value proposition.
The point is: what you can offer them?
What can you offer them, is your (and mine) question…
One answer is hidden in Open Source’s main weapon: the Community. Qou can try to join all those people into an horizontal, cross community not strictly related to a software project but to a wide knowledge of main attractive themes of Open Source.
It is not easy and I am here just putting my thoughts on a keyboard, but maybe we shoudl brainstorm on it.
Fabio
Hi Fabio,
open source world is becoming more and more valuable, but only a tiny fraction of OS actual value goes back to the original author and to whoever it may concerns. I call this the “appropriating returns from Commons” problem.
Open source network marketing – if applied responsibly and ethically – could be an effective response to such problem. Positive network effects are making few OS products ready for prime time, but half of them lack of enterprise support. CIOs are asking OS companies behave like proprietary vendors, pre-sales support included. Proficient open source personnel are, by no means, the better option.
The frittering is truly in the details: how the compensation scheme pays, allow or not to allow downstream partnering, etc.
Lose weight now, ask me how! 😉
Roberto,
you know very well that your words apply globally, and not on the poor italian OS market. Here we are far away from asking ourselves why the OS value doesn’t get back to original authors: there is NO value here to get back anywhere.
But let’s talk globally. The benefits of the network effect are by no doubt interesting. And it could be a chance, too. I see just one problem: network effects have positive returns when you reach and go over a certain critical mass: how many investments should you draw in order to reach the critical mass?
And now, here it is, my question: how does the compensation scheme pay? 🙂
Hi Fabio,
you are right, open source vendors are not popular in Italy, despite there are quite a few open source developers here.
Talking about positive network effects, you are right saying that (big) investments are necessary. New players need to spend big bucks to reach a critical mass, and to become the next philanthropic arm of free software business is not for all. All in all there are enough well known open source products to which apply OS networking business models, though.
The compensation scheme has to be build in a way that preserve and enhance open source values, and no economic rewards have their own place in the equation alongside economic ones. Moreover potential conflicts of interest has to be kept as low as possible, users have to turn into customers because it makes sense, not because network marketing has cheated them.
The compensation scheme is just like a dress, and it has to fit you absolutely perfectly. It is definitely not a one-size-fits-all system.
Roberto,
while I’ll keep waiting to find my perfect dress to fit, I can tell you to add also myself into that “few italian open source developers” list! .-)
Fabio,
I am afraid that great tools like your Baobab maybe not the perfect for open source network marketing, but I would be happy to tell people about you, let’s talk about that.
Ciao!
Roberto, I don’t’ think the problem is that users unknowingly spend time. They knowingly spend time to save money.
The problem is that the OSS movement has used “low price…heck, we’re free” as the value driver for years now. Users have bought into this and now we expect users to all of a sudden pay for support or something else around OSS?
This is why I strongly believe that selling support is the wrong decision for the OSS industry. Support is of little value…so why would I pay for it?
Hi Savio, great hear from you again!
I believe you are right about users knowingly spend time to save money, at least in US. But Europe is a different “country”, where CIOs look for solutions instead of products, as John Newton confirmed. TCO and ROI are rarely evaluated, attitude to risk taking is pretty low, and information asymmetry plays a role.
So said, I am afraid you are generally right saying that support is of little value into mature IT markets, while it is growing interest in emerging ones.
Nice. Turn open source into a scam.
No one in their right mind would ever pay for open source software. There will never be sufficient economic value to charge for copies.
There is no money in distribution. How can anyone compete with apt and yum?
Digital copies will always be free as in beer. The value comes from the creation of originals. There are many professional open source developers getting paid to do just that.
If you’d like to see more software, forget distribution, feed and shelter the creators of originals.
My idea of open source network marketing is neither a pyramidal nor a Ponzi scheme – that are both illegal and unethical – and it doesn’t pay on levels.
You are right, an IT department could manage a Linux distribution on its own environment by itself. So said companies like Red Hat are delivering value to the market, even if the determination of this value is the result of subjective judgments.
I definitely agree with you, when you say that to see more free software the market need to feed authors. Note that it doesn’t say anything about how this might actually be done, and I think that an appropriate network marketing could help to create economical resources for funding code development.
Why is it that every time somebody says “Network Marketing” the word SCAM is always attached?
Although MLM or Network marketing attracts some people that are scammers and schemers there are some of us that are professionals that have been highly successful by helping others.
Your compensation plan (it’s not a scheme) is vitally important and if you were to actually consider an Open Source MLM it would be extremely important to consult someone who has been successful in the industry.
Open source is different, also in this respect. First, a large part of the free software crowd has strong ethics. Second, many open source developers and hackers have strong technical expertise on open source software.
So said, I believe open source network marketing needs a team to be properly designed and implemented, and a MLM expert would definitely be one of them.
It is true that network marketing companies do push their people to recruit. I work with a training that coaches network marketers to lead with product and offer the option of an opportunity with the company. We believe that if a person is not passionate about the product they cannot not promote.
Kim,
Your comments are thought-provoking. The industry is flooded with many mlm biiz opp. Success goes to the person who is passionate about the product. Now thats a long term biz.
Regards,
Alexander
Hi Roberto,
I think the biggest problem in the network marketing industry is there are so many people who are selling the sizzle of the business but not the steak.
Just because something has a binary plan or a 5×5 doesn’t make it illegal or immoral. Unfortunately it only takes a few bad apples to ruin it for the bunch.
I think in general the network marketing business model is one of the businesses models around that allows for motivated people to really get in there and earn some money.
Personally I believe that if more people adopted mlm pay structures for their affiliate programs online they would find more people willing to promote their products.
The Open Source Think Tank has been a great opportunity to meet in person many open source CEO, and I just managed to run an email interview with one of them: Chris Keene, CEO of WaveMaker.
WaveMaker, providing a web application development platform consisting of a visual AJAX component and a Java one, started life as a partly open source company building software for grid computing. In 2007 the company with the name ActiveGrid moved on to building a visual development platform in Python, finally under the NewWaveMaker brand.
Chris Keene by twoeggs
Chris, was AcriveGrid open source from the beginning?
ActiveGrid was only partly open source because we had not fully embraced publishing our source code and involving the community in the development process. This meant that we had all the headaches of open source – people wanting everything for free – with none of the benefits of a committed community.
What happened next?
I joined ActiveGrid in early 2007 and made two immediate decisions: first, to move from Python to Java and second, to become a real open source company. We needed to move to Java in order to get corporate adoption and also because we found that the Java community had many robust components like Spring and Hibernate that could accelerate our development efforts.
Why did you need to move to open source?
We needed to move to open source because we lacked the enormous marketing and sales budget to sell our software directly to the enterprise. Instead, we needed to leverage word of mouth in the open source community to help us sneak into corporations through the back door of open source.
I understand going open source basically was part of your marketing strategy.
Did you benefit from the move?
In December 2007, we renamed the company WaveMaker. In February, 2008, we announced our new WaveMaker product and our support for the AGPL license.
Within two days of announcing our open source release, our download volumes skyrocketed by a factor of 20, from 50 downloads a day to over 1,000 downloads a day. At the same time, the number of registered users and daily posting volumes in our community at dev.wavemaker.com jumped by similar amounts.
These results are pretty impressive, I admit. Lurking around your forums it looks like if answers usually come from WaveMaker’s employees, users seem to have a pretty parasitic approach to the “community” space. Developers following the motto “we don’t use software that costs money here“are probably happy with WaveMaker now, but how to turn downloads into profits is a different problem.
Chris, how do you profit from your product?
WaveMaker is available under a dual license: AGPL for open source projects, and a commercial license for projects which need support or enterprise security features.
WaveMaker website reports about some customers and also about alliances, that is both useful for potential customers and partners, but is lacking of information about the differences between the open source and the proprietary version.
If having a business model around the free software is fundamental, to let people know how your business works and how they can benefit is also important.
About WaveMaker.
WaveMaker is an open source, visual development platform for building Web 2.0 applications. WaveMaker applications are based on standard Java and Javascript and leverage other open source components such as Spring, Hibernate and Dojo.
Hi, I’ve been writing a thesis on open source marketing. Though it’s a wide subject yet hardly anyone has written any thesis on it in India. It’s even hardly taught in Indian B-schools. It’s a vast subject & too widely used in India yet hardly anyone in India took any initiative for it. Now, I’ve been searching for evidence which suggest that OSM can bring commercial success & it’s not a fool game at all. The interview here that I read is quite supportive to OSM’s commercial facts yet I’d appreciate if I get some more support time & again in the form of an interview, questionnaire & other articles on OSM. Hope you’d be quite helpful!
Nice to hear from you Abdul,
I believe that all in all open source marketing is a pretty new thing, and the fact that appropriating returns from commons doesn’t make things any easier. So said the importance of an open source brand is definitely not less than for a proprietary one.
Let me know more about your research and keep in touch.
Caroline Arms on digital formats for digital long-term preservation – Jon Udell met Carolina Arms. Caroline works on the American Memory project at the Library of Congress. The Library participates in standardization efforts such as PDF/A and Office Open XML. By the way, I hope that the Italian OpenOffice.org association will join the ISO/IEC JTC1 working group to participate in ODF maintenance.
Alfresco and E2CM – Is Alfresco priced too high as a framework for building custom applications? Probably it depends on where you are coming from…
Firefox Plugins: Hyperwords – All the text on the web becomes richly interactive – Learn how to translate web pages on the fly using Hyperwords plugin.
WordPress Birthday Party – WordPress next Tuesday will be five years old.To celebrate they are throwing a party in San Francisco at 111 Minna, starting at 9PM. Get the full details and RSVP on Upcoming.org or on Facebook.
Microsoft announced that it will update Office 2007 to natively support ODF 1.1, Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5 and PDF/A. Microsoft will also join the OASIS ODF working group and the ISO/IEC JTC1 working group, actually on duty for ODF maintenance.
Promise of a new day by ۩ QTR974 ۩ عـــبـــدالله ۩
Andy Updegrove, Erwin Tenhumberg and NoOOXML seem happy about that, while John MCreesh is of different opinion advice.
OpenOffice.org is a large community, the Italian OpenOffice.org Association has taken part in the process and is expressing its opinion directly from the voice of its President, Davide Dozza.
The Italian OpenOffice.org Association PLIO could not do anything else than welcoming Microsoft’s announcement, considering our openness to dialog and cooperation with Microsoft expressed in our open letter on the 22th of February, expressed also at the OMAT conference on the 2nd of April.
The public dialog strategy is paying off, PLIO and Microsoft Italy today are bringing an important contribution to the software community as a whole.
Today users are winners.
Funambol, a provider of open source push email and PIM sync solutions for the mass market, announced the launch of a new forge.
The new Funambol forge will be a unique access point for Funambol-related open source projects, resulting in a central collaboration site for developers and community willing to share code and technical tips, as well as downloading software and documentation.
A New Forge by carlos.benjamin
I asked my friend Stefano Maffulli, Funambol Community Manager, what is going to change from before.
The new Forge is a tool that Funambol community members deserve. For a complex project as Funambol is, all my efforts are in the direction of giving to contributors a place where it is easy to find things like code, samples, support and documentation. The main obstacle to newcomers is the quantity of data accumulated, the legacy of the project, that looks like a big knot. The new Forge builds on top of this legacy, which is good stuff, to create a better environment for collaboration. This is the reason why I made an effort to migrate in the new system all archives of past years email in Funambol lists.
I understand archives are important, and a little more tweaking is still needed likely. Take the chance to make your product roadmap as easy as possible to access, potential users and customers might be interested into it, despite Debian lives without it.
How those changes will affect your job?
Contributors and community members will have their life at Funambol easier and I wish I will too 🙂 Or better, now that the new Forge is up, I’ll be able to focus on the development of Funambol more closely on one hand, and on the other hand to spend more time talking to the community because there are still many Code Sniper bounties to be collected.
I am a great fan of sniper programs, and considering how micro-contributions are key to Funambol success, I believe you did a very smart move setting up your own forge.
I am glad to announce the start of my collaboration with InitMarketing, a consultancy bringing companies and organizations behind Open Source products into the spotlight, developing strategy and creating market attraction.
InitMarketing Logo by Wirawan Harianto
Sandro Groganz start up InitMarketing after his experience at eZ Systems and Mindquarry, and today welcomed me on board:
The InitMarketing team welcomes Roberto Galoppini who will join us from today. He is located in beautiful Rome, Italy and a highly valuable addition to our team.
Most notably, I value Roberto’s experience as an Open Source entrepreneur which aligns nicely with the pragmatic marketing approach we pursue at InitMarketing.
I will be wearing my new InitMarketing hat at OSIM in Berlin, and I am looking forward to work with Sandro and the InitMarketing team!
Congrats Roberto!
This is the best thing that can happen to InitMarketing.
This is great news Roberto! InitMarketing is lucky to have you.
I look forward to seeing some of your work (via the companies that you’ll advise/do work for).
Where will you be based?
Good luck, Roberto!
Nice team, nice experiences.. nice company 😉
Well done Roberto, congratulations 🙂
Congratulations, Roberto! I think this is wonderful news. I’ve always felt the need for more FOSS related marketing services, so this sounds like a great opportunity.
The mandate of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group of the Internet Governance Forum has been extended, and the Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards would like to submit the following 6 names.
The deadline for the submission of the names is the 21th of May, the renewed group will prepare the next Internet Governance Forum meeting, to be held in Hyderabad, India, on 3 to 6 December.
From the United Nations press release:
The Advisory Group will renew up to one third of its members within each stakeholder group. All relevant stakeholder groups, representing Governments, private sector and civil society, including the academic and technical communities will submit names to the Internet Governance Forum Secretariat.
Proposed nominations do not include any of the DCOS Government members, while the join nomination includes three representatives of DCOS Civil Society members (considering FSFE enlisted among Industry members by mistake).
I would suggest DCOS to consider to include at least one government member.
About DCOS.
The Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards (DCOS) was created at the Athens Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in November 2006. Our mission is to provide government policy makers and other stakeholders with useful tools to make informed decisions to preserve the current open architecture of the Internet and the World Wide Web, which together provide a knowledge ecosystems that has profoundly shaped the multiplier effect of global public goods and improved economic and social welfare.
Roberto Galoppini, and 
Abdul Latif Sultan are discussing. 
Carlo, and 2 others are discussing.
Reply