Updates from December, 2006 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:26 pm on December 23, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    OpenSolaris: Sun gets it certified and spread 

    Open Solaris 10 has received the Common Criteria at Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL 4+).

    What does it mean? Bill Vass, President and Chief Operating Officer of Sun Microsystems, wrote:

    At Sun, we continue to lead with Certified Open Source Operating Systems that will run on X86/X64 or SPARC hardware from any vendor, at a lower support cost than RedHat.

    The idea than seems to be making Open Solaris a viable alternative to the RH flavour of Linux.

    Ambitious. Projects like Belenix might help, but there is no easy way to such goal.
    Jonathan Schwartz about Open Solaris spread reported an effective picture showing all machines that connect back to Sun’s free update service.

    Schwartz said that:

    it doesn’t account for all Solaris 10 downloads, but shows the value of leveraging the internet to meet customers (new and old).

    But as I already wrote turning users into real customers is not trivial.

    My guess? Sun adopting a franchising business model, soon.

     

    • osgeek 8:04 pm on December 23, 2006 Permalink

      yeah, it is cool. Solaris 10 keeps getting better each passing day!
      osgeek

    • jamey 9:59 pm on December 23, 2006 Permalink

      More info on the Solaris Registrations Map can be found here.

  • Roberto Galoppini 3:32 pm on December 22, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Italian Government: funds to sustain open source innovation 

    Italy has been one of the most conservative European countries toward open source adoption by the public sector, but the Italian Budget law has some interesting news about free software.
    Before talking about what’s new, it’s worth to mention Italy has a long story about OS evaluation.

    In light of the spread of the Open Source phenomenon, the Italian Minister of Innovation and Technologies Mr Lucio Stanca decided to commission a study. On the 31th of October 2002, was established a Commission for free software in Public Administration. The Commission invited enterprises and associations for auditions and eventually published a Cognitive survey on open source software.

    The proposals in the study are summarized as follows:

    • Government offices should neither prohibit nor penalize the use of OSS packages: the criteria for selecting software solutions is “value for money”.
      .
    • Customized software should belong fully to the public office that developed it, but the proprietorship should not necessarily be exclusive. Outsourcing contracts should include suitable protection clauses.
      .
    • The re-use of customized software owned by public offices should be encouraged and facilitated, and successful results and best practices should be shared among all the public offices of the country.
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    • Public offices must be able to inspect and trace all licensed software, and must be safeguarded against the risk of a supplier no longer being able to provide assistance.
      .
    • Government information systems should interact through standard interfaces that do not depend on a single supplier.
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    • Public documents should be preserved and made available in one or more formats. At least one format must be open. Government offices can decide, however, whether any additional formats should be open or proprietary.
      .
    • The transfer of customized software and licenses between government offices should be unrestricted.
      .
    • Guidelines, planning tools and support services for the procurement of software products by government offices should be prepared, for which the expertise and resources present in the country should be strengthened and exploited.
      .

    The Commission suggested to let OSS would be eligible for e-government projects, as seen with the European Commission within the 5th, and the 6th Framework Programme for Research . The procurement and use of OSS was finally endorsed by Minister Stanca’s Directive of 18 December 2003.

    On February 2004 was established a Working Group by the Center for the application of Italian Ministry of Innovation and Technology politics (CNIPA). The working group by July 2004 released a document containing indications on how to be compliant with the Directive.

    Up to now very few public tenders have been really compliant with the Directive, and OSS is far to be considered widely as a valid alternative by Central Public Administrations.

    But two days ago everything changed: the Italian Budget law is considering open source as a favorable factor in assigning funds to sustain innovation by local public administrations.
    Beatrice Magnolfi, undersecretary State for Public Administration Reform and Innovation, commented the law said:

    We do support Italian software industry growth, an archipelago of SMEs managed by young people, bringing innovation and creativity into the market.

    But why is she speaking about an archipelago? The Italian ICT market, as shown by a recent analysis conducted by NetConsulting, is made by micro enterprise (under 9 employees) in 93,7 percent of cases; only 0,2% of ICT firms employ more than 250 employees. Now it’s where it comes from the deep interest toward small firms.

    Magnolfi talking about the availability of a public forge where Public Administrations and firms might buid an IT ecosystem said:

    It’s totally new! We’re making possible a marketplace where IT goods and services are exchanged more effectively, where public administrations’ needs and firms’ competencies and skills on open source platforms might meet.

    Is Italy going to have its own Adullact?

    Quaerendo invenietis – By seeking you shall discover..

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 11:22 am on December 22, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Community development: MySQL approach 

    MySQL recently threw MySQL Winter of Code, an initiative for encouraging contributions to MySql. Kaj Arnö, Vice President of Open Source Community Relations, said that more coding happens during wintertime than in summer, referring indirectly to Google’s initiative Summer of Codeâ„¢.

    As in other Open Source projects held by a Corporate actor, all contributors have to sign the Contributor License Agreement, now available in a click-through version to make things easier.

    At the first MySQL Camp yhere were 223 registered attendees, definitely a success.Partecipants asked if MySQL AB was planning going to ask the community members for:

    • what new features they would want others to contribute
    • what contributions they are proposing to implement themselves

    MySQL told them they have been contemplating mostly the second item, but after feebacks they were considering both of them.
    MySQL is trying to develop its hybrid approach from the commensalistic form to a more symbiotic one, evaluating if and how get community members in the whole production process, moving beyond bug reporting and fixing.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 1:30 am on December 20, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Business model: more on Red Hat 

    Few days ago I wrote a commented a Billy Marshall’s suggestion telling I was convinced was taking advantage of commons-based peer-production, and the difference between Red Hat and Oracle expenditures on R&D had a simple explanation.

    Today I read Savio Rodrigues post, comparing Red Hat’s SG&A spending to similar data from IBM, Oracle or Microsoft and I got a clear picture of the (often) unseen side of the moon.
    I think he did a very good job searching around SEC files.

    And I’m happy he is also half convinced that proprietary enterprise vendors spend 5-10x more on sales and marketing. As I wrote it’s true that COTS open source software is found by users, but it’s not trivial to turn them into customers.

     

    • Savio Rodrigues 7:03 am on December 20, 2006 Permalink

      Hello Roberto,

      Well, I’m less than half convinced about SG&A spending by traditional vendors being higher than open source vendors 🙂

      There are clearly some traditional vendors who spend “too much” on SG&A, but I don’t believe that being an open source vendor means you don’t have to spend on SG&A. You don’t spend as much on SG&A when you’re in the early stages, but as you grow rapidly, you have to compete against the large software companies, and so you’re spending is going to track their spending.

      I totally agree with your comment that COTS is found by users, but it’s not trivial to turn them into customers.

      BTW, what do you think about my opinion of traditional vendors end up acquiring open source vendors?

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:39 pm on December 21, 2006 Permalink

      Sorry to be late Savio, but we moved our beloved server and we got some troubles with DNS updates.

      You pose an interesting question, here a brief answer to a point, but I’ll be writing soon a whole post about it.

      Red Hat.
      RH might play the gorilla game, making bigger and bigger its stack. But the large vertical integrated corporation is starving, above all in markets where the reduction of technological and legal barriers to trade make cooperation more efficient. And more, I believe VC are not fond of investing money in weak IP business, unless you can proof them you’re going to be the one (see also my post on Alfresco business model).

    • Roberto Galoppini 11:28 am on January 4, 2007 Permalink

      As promised I eventually wrote a post about RH and the gorilla game.

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:56 pm on December 19, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Linux war is over? 

    Dana Blankenhor reported the most read story on his open source blog this year was The War is Over and Linux Won. The article was about an IBM-sponsored study indicating that most CIO plan to increase Linux investments instead of Windows’ ones. He remarked:

    I expected this to be controversial, but I was, frankly, amazed at just how controversial it was.

    Besides was true or not that small companies are moving off Windows and larger ones are moving off Solaris, the article was a success.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:03 pm on December 19, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    CRM: SugarCRM in Indian sauce, VtigerCRM 

    While reading SugarCRM press release, announcing they reached more than 1,000 paying customers since the first edition released in September 2004, I rembered about vitger CRM.

    Vtiger CRM, derived by SugarCRM, is an Open Source CRM software mainly for small and medium businesses, where SugarCRM began serving SMEs but than has established large enterprise customers.

    Vtiger CRM is based on LAMP, it’s completely open source and it comes along with extensions for Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook Plug-in for Outlook users and, Microsoft Office Plug-in for Word users.

    I didn’t find any real benchmarking or comparison, but someone saying is good and someonelse saying is bad. Whatever is the future of Vtiger CRM, it’s interesting notice that has happened with the Red Hat-Oracle case, a weak intellectual property asset is risky, from many different angles

    Vtiger CRM is built over a LAMP stack, along with SugarCRM, gdwin32 graphic library, PHPMailer, ADOdb,phpSysinfo and, last but not least, modifications to the SugarCRM code under a different license, named vtiger Public License 1.1, based on Mozilla Public License (MPL); others applications developed by Vitger external to SugarCRM code are under MPL. Apparently its license has been verified, since it’s listed by the FSF Directory.

     

    • richie 12:57 pm on March 14, 2007 Permalink

      Hello! I am Richie from vtiger. vtiger is honest open source. vtiger is profitable and has a lot many customers too. I am not willing to reveal the customer count but as I have mentioned, we are profitable.

      We have our own growth path. The database model is completely different from that of Sugar CRM.

      We welcome you all to join us, have a look at vtiger. We are currently working on 5.0.3 and hope to have it out by early April.

      You can have a look at the latest version at :- http://en.vtiger.com/wip

      Thanks,
      Richie

    • Roberto Galoppini 7:17 pm on March 14, 2007 Permalink

      Hi Richie, I am willing to know more about Vtiger. Even if you can’t share your numbers, what about an interview?

    • curryCRM 8:02 pm on April 11, 2007 Permalink

      yeah, profitable from riding on Sugar’s back. Will NEVER buy your curried SugarCRM! Rather give my $ to the real innovators!

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:34 pm on December 18, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Dr Open Source – how I learned to stop worrying and love the GPL – 

    A couple of weeks ago professor Maria Lillà Montagnani invited me to give a speech along with Pierpaolo Boccadamo, head of Microsoft’s Platform Strategy by the Italian subsidiary, by Bocconi private University.

    I have already met Boccadamo when I took part to the Microsoft’s “Linux&Open Source Briefing” partner program as open source expert, and I was already used to openly discuss with him about technical ed economical differences of the proprietary and open source models.

    I spent part of the weekend to prepare my slides, and I was looking forward to listen to sudents’ questions to my statements and suggestions. The slideshow was starting with a picture of the famous movie Dr StrangeLove, a little parody I did to get their attention. After a brief introduction I got into the heart of the argument, talking about organizational economics aspects and other issues about innovation.
    To my suprise no questions were raised up when I was speaking firms and communities relationships, neither when I talked about disruptive innovation, and how it affects incumbents’ market leadership, nor when I mentioned sequential innovation and technology club partecipation.

    Than Boccadamo spoke about Google, Microsoft strategy, and many other things.
    Again, no question from the public.

    If Picasso was definitely right saying that:

    Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

    What about a class without questions?

     

    • zeno 6:07 pm on December 18, 2006 Permalink

      I’d say “what a sadness” but I studied in Bocconi and I know what you mean. There, people who ask (and think for themselves) is a niche. I don’t mind if this fact is common among the other univerties but, unfortunately, Bocconi is the cradle of the future italian management, of the economic structure so that I’m worried about our country.

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:30 pm on December 18, 2006 Permalink

      You told that: Bocconi is the cradle of the future management, but what kind of? If they have no questions to ask today, they better to learn how to answer yes or no by tomorrow.
      I love Shunryo Suzuki-Roshi quotation
      “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few” and I hope it still makes sense.

  • Roberto Galoppini 2:07 pm on December 16, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Business model: coopetition doesn’t save any money? 

    After my nightly post I noticed I didn’t comment another Billy Marshall’s suggestion:

    Who spends more money on engineering their product as a percent of revenue? Oracle or Red Hat? It has to be Oracle, right? Red Hat gets so much R&D leverage from the community. Wrong. Red Hat spends 15% of revenue on R&D while Oracle spends only 13%. I guess customers want more than just a download re-direct from redhat.com to kernel.org.

    Few days ago I had a chance to speak with a member of an European Commission funded project aimed at analyze a large number of projects using publicly available data sources. The project, named FLOSSMetrics, has the goal to better understand the landscape of libre software development. Preliminary results from well known projects show how a significant percentage of contributed code – sometimes more than 20% – come from developers outside the firm.

    I believe RH take advantage of commons-based peer-production, and the little difference between Red Hat and Oracle expenditures on R&D has a simple explanation in the type of product, its dimension, complexity and age.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:06 am on December 16, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Community: Open Source a Development model? 

    Yesterday professor Alfonso Fuggetta, CEO and Scientific Director of CEFRIEL, posted a comment to an article describing OS as development model. Reading the article I understood Dana Blankenhorn got inspired by someonelse thoughts, and I got by Billy Marshall blog.

    I shudder every time I read a blog post or article by some “expert” that proclaims that open source is a “business model” predicated on providing customers “good support” and that open source is fundamentally different from proprietary software. Hogwash.

    I totally agree, of course. Open Source is not a business model, there are quite a few indeed.
    Some firms taking advantage of intrinsic free software characteristics developed new services and business models, not based on code production.
    But I strongly disagree with the following:

    Open source is not a business model, it is a development model.

    I see many development models, based on very different approaches, but some of them are just like the proprietary ones, like others are dramatically different (see my work on the case of Debian GNU/Linux).

    Getting back to the business, read here:

    Red Hat spends 47% of revenue on SG&A while Oracle spends 25%.

    That’s really interesting, and bring me back to something I’ve already mentioned in a previous post: commercial off-the-shelf open source software is found by users, but it’s not trivial to turn them into customers.
    And it’s even more complicated if you’re not the only one to deliver such services. A “weak” intellectual property asset is risky from different angles.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:25 am on December 15, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    GNU Economy: Sun, the perfect franchisor 

    As I mentioned before, appropriating returns is always critical and I think that Franchising OS might be a promising business model. Unfortunately not many software firms might drive excellence in the OS market, here why it makes perfect sense for Sun:

    • Sun forges inside a best-of-breed Operative System, an office automation suite tool, the Java framework, like other development tools;
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    • Sun’s brand is on of the strongest in the ICT world, recognized as one of the most innovative and forehead ones;
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    • Sun has a symbiotic approach to OS communities, tracking contributes and experiencing different organisations’ models with few important projects;
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    • Sun has the power to build an ecosystem where IP protection and indemnification, warranty, benchmarking and dependability analysis and mediation services are delivered by other partners, bundling and unbundling them depending on customers’ needs;
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    • Sun would be the first to deploy an OS franchising model, being the first mover has a chance and a challenge. Since franchising might overlap with classical channel partner programs, special due diligence has to be paid in this respect;
      .
    • IDC and Forrester studies on Open Source market show how customers needs are related mostly to basic services, therefore is possible to implement procedures and fares to deliver such services at fixed time, fixed costs;
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    • The Italian Portal Java Open Business has worked with Italian SMBs and developers, creating consensus and posing basis to develop further collaborations. In this respect Italy might be the most cost effective area to develop a business case.
      .

    Does it make sense to you?

     

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