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.
Today I took my time to zoom back over my last year blogging over open source. Commercial Open Source blog has just completed its first year of life.
In November 2006 I scrambled with the generous help of Antonella Beccaria and little advice of my new media mentor Robin Good to create the blog site you are just reading now.
I was happy. I was excited. I could not hold myself in place. I felt that the time to share my ideas, some of my experiences, a bit of my know-how had definitely come.
I see the web as a venue for sharing, exchanging and making valuable conversations, and I thought that I had to make myself fully part of this.
One idea that significantly influenced my decision to take on blogging was the Open Source Franchising business model. As a matter of fact in the summer 2006 I had already written a paper describing such business model, which I had also submitted to Sun Microsystems. My desire, especially since Sun didn’t ever comment back on my proposal, was then to extend my quest for feedback and opinions from other authoritative open source thought leaders.
And that’s how I discovered how blogging could be helpful to get invited in meetings, events and conferences, eventually opening me doors and new opportunities. As I go forward in my blogging experience I am realizing that my use of writing to get greater exposure and visibility may very well be my very best marketing strategy.
Like it or not, I had also my share of ego-boosting. Initially mostly for psychologically reward, later on as an increasingly valuable meter of my own professional credibility, I have had spent my share of time checking up technorati and looking at google ranks, just as everyone else. And I learned a few things:
you can get to know lots of like-minded people who share your interests, passions and sometimes business customers and reach out to them in ways that would be next to impossible in the physical world:
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Robin Good was totally right suggesting me to pay great attention to choose the tag-line. Googling for Commercial Open Source my blog is always one of the very first results. In reason of that PR agencies and CEOs from all around the world touch base with me daily to open more and more conversations.
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I learned a lot from them, and with some I am enjoying regular conversations. After all the ultimate reason to keep writing daily for all of us is that it is really true that no man is an island, not even a blogger!
Roberto, it’s great to read your views on the OSS marketplace. How time flies…I remember thinking that blogging was a waste of time a year ago.
But I’ve learned so much from folks like yourself and the others you mention in your post….Like I’ve always said, better to have smart friends than be smart 😉
BTW, advice #2 you received from Robin Good was great advice. I wish I’d thought about that before going with rand($thoughts) as my blog title…live and learn!
Happy 1 year anniversary
Roberto Galoppini
10:40 am on November 16, 2007 Permalink
Thank you Paolo, see you around!
Savio I believe you’re right, blogging is all about conversations with brilliant people like you and the others. So, here I am tagging you with a blog-game named “my five open source blogger heroes”, it’s your turn.. 😉
By the way, thank you very much for your kindly notes of congratulations.
Yesterday a broad alliance of leading technology and wireless companies announced the collaborative development of Android, the new open platform for mobile phones by Google.
The Open Handset Alliance, that’s the name of the most promising technological club after the GSM MoU club agreement, lists already 34 members. Among them names like Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Nvidia, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, China Mobile, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, NTT DoCoMo, LG Electronics and HTC.
This alliance shares a common goal of fostering innovation on mobile devices and giving consumers a far better user experience than much of what is available on today’s mobile platforms. By providing developers a new level of openness that enables them to work more collaboratively, Android will accelerate the pace at which new and compelling mobile services are made available to consumers.
So Google is not interested in making money on software (like Microsoft), or hardware (like Apple). As usual they want to make their money on services. As reported by Wireless, according to Opus Research, mobile advertising spending in North America and Western Europe will reach a combined US$5.08 billion by 2012, up from an estimated $106.8 million at the end of this year.
The Open Handset Alliance describes itself as “the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices” aiming to develop technologies that will cut the cost of developing and distributing mobile devices and services. But Google knows very well that mobile innovation basically has been hampered by “device fragmentation“, and android is the ultimate answer to this specific issue.
It’s both possible and highly unlikely because the more constraints the manufacturers put on the platform the less beneficial it is.While a license would allow that kind of behavior … it’s unlikely you’ll see [a locked down] scenario.
The Symbian promise was aimed at a similar goal, when it was established in UK as a private independent company in June 1998. The original shareholders were Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia In October 2003 Motorola withdrew from Symbian as a shareholder by selling is stake to Nokia and Psion, becoming a simple licensee.
I had doubts on the Symbian technological club since early 2003, as I wrote in an article. The idea was good, but the implementation was quite poor, since even the most important shareholders were adopting incompatible Symbian’s dialects.
While I agree with Savio Rodrigues saying that is a very pragmatic decision, I believe that platform differentiation is a two fold process of securing individual vendors’ businesses and at the same time prevent lock down scenarios.
FireGPG Version 0.4.4 – Version 0.4.4 has been just released. encrypt, decrypt, sign or verify the signature of text in any web page using GnuPG and your favorite browser.
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
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Lack of Training
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Lack of Entrepreneurial Culture
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Unwillingness to Change
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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.
A year in review by 
Idetrorce, 
Roberto Galoppini, 
Great expectations, by 
The Landscape of Migration, by 
Luca Passani
Of course you can, if you stay in the green area! by
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