Updates from June, 2008 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:00 pm on June 4, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Systems Management: Zenoss expands platform support, an interview with Mark Hinkle 

    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.

    Technorati Tags: zenoss, zemasters, markhinkle, it management, open source monitoring, commercial open source, bitrock

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 3:02 pm on May 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Frameworks: WaveMaker, an interview with Chris Keene 

    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

    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.

    Technorati Tags: open source framework, wavemaker, activegrid, chriskeene, open source think tank, open source web 2.0, open source marketing

     

    • Abdul Latif Sultan 11:22 am on August 23, 2008 Permalink

      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!

    • Roberto Galoppini 9:17 am on August 25, 2008 Permalink

      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.

  • Roberto Galoppini 2:48 pm on May 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Mobile: Why Funambol is launching a New Forge 

    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
    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.

    Technorati Tags: community manager, funambol, code sniper, stefanomaffulli, open source forge

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:42 pm on May 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Community Awards: SourceForge Community Choice Awards officially open! 

    Sourceforge 2008 community awards‘ nominations are officially open, you can now nominate your favorite project, even if it is not enlisted within SourceForge.net repository.

    Space Invaders TattooSpace Invaders Tattoo by Pythagore Anonymous

    I asked Ross Turk more feedback on the program:

    Hey! The Community Choice Awards nominations are now open. We’re seeing nominations rolling in from all kinds of projects – lots from SF.net and lots from everywhere else. We’re putting the finishing touches on our party planning, and finding new and interesting ways for various other communities to participate in the festivities, and I think it’s going to be really cool. We’ll even be giving away free FOSS-related tattoos. Yeah, real tattoos.

    To help our projects campaign, we’ve created a series of “badge” images that can be put on blogs, project web sites, and anywhere else they can reach the members of each project’s community. Users can create a badge for their favorite project by going to http://sourceforge.net/community/cca08-badge and providing some basic information. I think this is important because, honestly, nobody knows how to campaign for these projects more effectively than the users who love them.

    Tattoos? I am looking forward to meet hackers at OSCON 2008 going around with tattooed with dolphins or other FOSS-related symbols! 🙂

    Disclaimer: I am on SF.net Marketplace advisory board.

    Technorati Tags: SourceForge, Open Source Community, Community Awards, RossTurk

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:50 pm on May 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Identity Management: OpenID gets momentum 

    SourceForge Community blog announced OpenID support, following Google, IBM, Microsoft, Verisign and Yahoo! decision to join OpenID Foundation board.

    OpenID logoOpenID logo by protimegallery

    OpenID – the open source decentralized framework for user-centric digital identity – is getting tremendous traction and it is estimated that there are over 160-million OpenID enabled URIs with nearly ten-thousand sites supporting OpenID logins (among many also Free Software Magazine).

    I asked Scott Kveton , Chairman of the OpenID Foundation board and VP of Open Platforms for Vidoop, to tell us something about the importance of big companies’ support and how it reflects on the business case for OpenID.

    Having more and more big companies supporting OpenID has been fantastic for the technology. Let’s not forget that OpenID is nearing its 3rd anniversery of its inception. We’ve covered a lot of ground in such a short time. The fact that organizations both large and small are moving to this technology is a testament to the necessity of it.About the business model of OpenID, that’s an interesting question. Just like my mom didn’t get SMTP, she got email the same will be true with OpenID. The magic isn’t in the technology, its in what the technology enables and the real world solutions it will create for users. This is akin to RSS and Feedburner. Users of Feedburner don’t know they are using RSS but its what powered that company and they found a unique way to monetize that. What are the specific ways that people will do this with OpenID? I don’t have a good answer for that.

    Why OpenID is getting included in more and more open source stacks?

    OpenID has been added to more and more open source stacks for the same reasons that technologies like PHP, Linux and others have been adopted. OpenID is built in the same “open” fashion as many other technologies on the Internet and a such I think open source developers trust this technologies over other ones. In addition, OpenID solves a problem set for developers that takes away from their “main thing”. If I have a CMS, managing user accounts isn’t my “main thing”; its secondary. Finally, we were very lucky with OpenID and other open source projects in that we launched the OpenID Bounty program which has helped folks like Drupal and Plone see a reward for integrating sooner rather than later.

    The consistent increase in adoption of OpenID will tell about OpenID business case. To track the take off of OpenID I asked Ross Turk some feedback about the recent decision to use it.

    Our decision to undergo this project was simple. There was a strong community interest, the engineering resources required were modest, and the benefit to our users could be substantial. My dream for SourceForge.net is for it to be a truly open architecture that allows integration with a wide variety of tools and frameworks, and I think my dream is shared by many of us over here. This brings us a step closer.

    This was probably the most straightforward thing we’ve done in a long time. Hats off to the OpenID folks for designing something that’s easy to integrate! If it were hard to do, we might not have done it. Of course, that’s the key to the success of anything like OpenID: if it’s not easy to take advantage of, nobody will.

    Easiness of integration is key to OpenID success, apparently. I am looking forward to tell about how and if someone will eventually take economical advantage of it.

    [tags] OpenID, RossTurk, SourceForge, Identity Management, ScottKveton, OpenID Bounty program[tags]

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:32 am on May 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Webinar: Best Practices for Open Source Governance, by OpenLogic 

    OpenLogic just announced three webinars on best practices for open source governance.

    How to Inventory Your Use of Open Source Software webinar will cover topics like how to use OSS Discovery software to take inventory and how to implement an ongoing audit of open source usage.

    How to implement an Open Source Policy and Approval Process for Open Source Compliance webinar will disclose potential risks associated to open source usage, and how open source policies can help enterprises to manage open source licenses.

    Understanding Open Source License Obligations in the Enterprise webinar will cover most common licenses’ obligations, and how to comply with them.

    Register on line.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:31 pm on April 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Governance: OpenLogic expands its Library and launches its Comparison Matrix 

    OpenLogic, an open source provider offering software and services for open source governance, announced that OpenLogic Certified Library surpassed 400 certified open source packages available. In addition, OpenLogic broadened functionality of OLEX adding a Comparison Matrix service.

    open roadAn Open road.. by informaplc

    Very few open source projects are managed by a specific corporate actor marketing its products, tracking the production process, partnering with other vendors, offering indemnification protection and a fair software warranty. Players like OpenLogic are taking advantage of the absence of a Corporate actor to develop new services, not based on code production (while participating to open source communities).

    I asked Kim Weins, Senior VP of Marketing, how did come out the idea of the comparison matrix?

    The reason we are coming out with the comparison matrix is that we have heard from customers that it is often difficult to figure out which open source package is best for a given situation. Since there is often limited documentation and marketing materials (except for the relatively few open source projects backed by commercial vendors), companies often pick open source based on reputation or by having developers do in depth research on open source package. The comparison matrix is a starting point that will help companies select the right package or set of packages to evaluate based on their particular need.

    The cost of free, namely the cost associated with open source software selection, is the reason behind OpenLogic’s decision to build such resources. OpenLogic started covering Application Servers, Databases and Web Application Frameworks three categories.

    Kim, how did you choose the first three categories?

    We’ve started with Application Servers, Databases and Web Application Frameworks because they are some of the open source projects used most frequently by enterprises. We will be adding more areas going forward.

    I see a sea of opportunities here. Magic Quadrants are just beginning to cover also open source products, but many categories like open source network management probably need similar attention.

    Few months ago Matt Asay argued that OpenLogic’s success could have been achieved at the expense of the projects that made it possible, Kim replied on the subject explaining how OpenLogic gives back. As a matter of fact open source software is a proper free market, where appropriating returns from commons is challenging.

    Kim, which is OpenLogic strategy about partnerships?

    We partner with vertical players whenever possible. For most open source projects in our library, there is no commercial vendor. For the handful where there is a commercial vendor, we prefer to partner with them.

    It makes perfect sense, and I am looking forward to report future steps in this direction.

    Technorati Tags: OLEX, OpenLogic, KimWeins, MattAsay, commercial open source, open source business, open source comparison, open source library

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:41 pm on April 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Systems Management: Hyperic HQU released, an interview with Stacey Schneider 

    Hyperic, the provider of open source web infrastructure management software, recently announced a new version of both the open source and enterprise versions of Hyperic HQ.

    Hyperic released a new UI plugin framework named Hyperic HQU, enabling administrators to develop new modular UI components via web services, and announced also a partnership with OpenNMS, a popular open source network management solution.

    I started asking Stacey Schneider, senior director of marketing at Hyperic, about Hyperic background and history.

    The technology and the founders that would eventually form Hyperic originally came together at Covalent. There, they worked together to build an application monitoring solution for web-based infrastructure, centering on Apache. They spent two years developing this technology and recruiting a handful of customers. Early in 2004, Covalent reassessed its place in the market and decided to not invest further in this technology — however the team was passionate about the area and confident their solution had a big place in the market. So, they spun off and formed Hyperic taking the engineers, software IP and customers with them.

    The founders bootstrapped the company for 2 years, building out their designs and working closely with the first dozen customers. As the product became mature, JBoss discovered Hyperic during a build vs buy assessment for what would become their JBoss Operations Network offering. They decided to OEM Hyperic. Quickly following that, Accel and Benchmark decided to fund Hyperic. This provided the founders with the means to go through the process of opening up the software to the open source community.

    Since then, the company has grown from 5 employees to 40, from 12 customers to over 450, and from one strategic OEM relationship to 6 along with 25 other partners.

    Should we talk of “low-end disruption” or a “new-market disruption”?

    Hyperic is serving a new market – one that is born of new technology, fast rates of change, and tied together using web technologies. These custom built systems are usually not candidates for the older frameworks offered by the Big 4. Because they are so custom, the teams typically supporting them build custom management tools as well – usually using scripts they write or Nagios to do service checks. These systems may exist alongside old iron legacy systems, systems that are more stable and have a functioning monitoring solution from the Big 4 working for them. However, these systems are different – and this is where Hyperic’s opportunity is made in the market. For operations teams powering custom built technology – using a variety of technologies developed in-house or components available either commercially or open source – they need Hyperic to help them keep up with change, establish rules based monitoring and management protocols, and incorporate their custom logic and bleeding edge technologies into one easy to use, scalable solution.

    Why Hyperic is employing three different community managers?

    Almost all of our eventual customers meet Hyperic through our Community. They either trial the open source software first, read about users experience, or find their solution to their problem documented through the community. Our community provides broad resources for any deployment, including forum based support and advice, and a community HyperFORGE where users contribute additional management plugins, scripts or UI plugins. To keep pace with the activity, and to organize events, communication and community outreach – Hyperic has 3 community managers and one community moderator. As a company, we believe it is important to invest heavily in community development to ensure our users have the best experience, and we as a company learn and benefit as much as possible from our community at large. As a result, many of our users-turned-customers still rely heavily on community communications and events to improve their deployment. Additionally, they also lend a great testimonial to other users who are considering becoming customers – all in a public forum that is built on credible trust.

    Hyperic Enterprise  is a proprietary software solution, just like Groundwork Enterprise, based on the open source version of the product. Hyperic vibrant community is clearly an important part of their marketing strategy.

    Definitely yet another interesting open source firm.

    Technorati Tags: commercial open source, StaceySchneider, Hyperic, open source community, hyperforge, hyperic HQU, systems management,   Web monitoring

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 3:20 pm on April 10, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Startups: Marketcetera, making Business sense of Free Software 

    Marketcetera, an open source startup based in San Francisco developing a platform for automated trading, has just secured $4 million in Series A funding to help others make millions.

    Marketcetera is already making its platform available for download, an official 1.0 release is tentatively scheduled for the last quarter of 2008, but the current version is already certified with Reuters RTEX and available also available as a VMWare and Parallels appliance.

    Making senseMaking sense by Eccleston George Public Artists

    I met Graham Miller and Toli Kuznets few weeks ago in San Francisco, and I spent a couple of hours with them talking of their business experience. I am reporting a detailed essay of our conversation, it could be inspirational for tomorrow’s entrepreneurs.

    How all this started.

    Toli and I were both computer science students at Stanford when we met. I participated in a program called the Mayfield Fellows Program, run by entrepreneurship Professor Tom Byers. That together with a couple of classes that Toli took, make up the sum total of our formal business training. The rest was by osmosis and trial and error in working in Silicon Valley. It was through this early work at Reactivity (me) and CenterRun (Toli), that we met our two advisors, John Lilly (currently CEO of Mozilla), and Aaref Hilaly (currently CEO of Clearwell Systems). These two guys have be extremely helpful. Everything from business advice to introductions to investors that they had worked with in the past. The introduction–while helpful–really only gets you the first meeting tho. The rest is up to you, which is why we are grateful that our advisors were able to help us with our pitch as well.

    It is interesting to know how things go over the pond. IT firms, and open source ones are not an exception, start small to become big, or very big. The whole entrepreneurial ecosystem enables start-ups to achieve sustainable growth, it is not just matter of the availability of financial support instruments for SMEs. Advisors are of capital importance, as are important business training courses, and last but not least the role that customers play.

    What role did customers play in the development of the company?

    I think that there were three key customers in the development of the company. First, we were the target customers. When we were building these trading systems on Wall Street, we were looking for something exactly like the Marketcetera platform, and would happily have paid for market data and other services on top of an open-source platform. Secondly, we found some initial seed investors, (friendly Wall Street types) who also wanted to use the software, and specifically were interested in a platform that would let them build out applications quickly. They invested a modest amount of money with the goal of seeing this dream realized. As part of their participation in the company, they got access to the platform, and the ability to guide product development.

    Finally once we got the product into a usable shape, we managed to get some early customers up and running on the platform. These customers required more flexibility in integration and licensing terms than proprietary products could offer them. We structured our early development projects as consulting engagements, that is only charging for our development and configuration time. That way we were able to give our customers a tailored custom solution at the same time maximizing the feedback we get for future product development.

    The first customers have been playing an important role to let it happen. Graham and Toli progressively moved from the approach of consulting engagements into the process to define and sell a product. Customers expectations in terms of licensing and flexibility were definitely of great importance in their path down the open source road.

    Why did you decide to go open source with your platform?

    The initial motivation for the open source model was the recognition that these systems, traditionally built from scratch in house, required flexibility not possible in proprietary systems. We looked at the strengths of the open source development model, and realized that it often steers development efforts toward a platform, rather than a specific application. This is our end goal, to enable the construction of the next generation of trading tools on top of an open-source infrastructure. One unintended side-effect has been that our customers have complete control over information management. In the intensely competitive world of finance, a hedge fund can more closely guard its secrets through the use of open-source software, because it need not engage third party vendors at all. Should they need help, we are here to provide it, but they’re welcome to “Download. Run. Trade.” all on their own.
    Ultimately we think the open-source software plus services model is a much better fit for an industry that sees much custom software development, and has a voracious appetite for data and connectivity.

    Interestingly enough Marketcetera platform is welcomed by customers because of the “unintended side-effect” Graham talks about. As a matter of fact the freedom to make modifications and use them privately without even mentioning that they exist is a key success factor here. It is probably not by casualty that Marketcetera is distributed under the GPLv2 and I believe they definitely shouldn’t consider to adopt the AGPL.

    Last but not least, who is your customer?

    Organizations of all sizes have deployed the Marketcetera Platform, from multibillion-dollar asset managers to small currency traders. A billion-dollar hedge fund has deployed the platform as a replacement for home-grown trading tools, because of increasing maintenance costs of the custom code. A large asset manager has deployed the platform to manage a suite of connections to 200 broker dealers globally. Because it is available under an open source license, frequently the platform is used as an integration point for several trading systems. For example a small currency trading firm integrates a third party analytics package to a FIX connection with Currenex. We see growing interest from small hedge funds in India up to 10 of the largest financial institutions in the world.

    While Marketcetera have not yet labored enough as open source operations to provide substantiative evidence of the viability of their model, I firmly believe that they are really exploring new potentialities of the free software business. Companies using platforms resulting from commons-based peer production are used to reveal just a fraction of the new code, but hedge funds and currency traders are definitely not industry participants in the field of embedded Linux. Marketcetera’s customers are willing to co-fund the platform’s development, just as Collaborative Software Initiative‘s customers probably do.

    To gain the greatest benefit from open source disruptive challenges to proprietary platforms like FlexTrade, savvy IT departments will pay for open source solutions allowing proprietary and secret trading algorithms.

    Congratulations to the Marketcetera team, and happy hacking!

    Read also Matt Asay‘s post and Dana Blankenhorn‘s post.

    Technorati Tags: marketcetera, trading platform, commercial open source, free software business, flextrade, startup, open business

     

    • fiidgets 10:27 am on July 31, 2008 Permalink

      I like the idea of using consulting assignments to fund development but not sure whether a start up should build a platform and not an application.

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:50 am on April 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    OpenOffice.org: OOoCrackz, an Italian Extension to get in the Piracy Market 

    PLIO, the OpenOffice.org Italian Native-Lang Project association, announces the availability of OOoCrackz, an Extension that allow users to use the free and open source suite in a “crack mode”. The extension aims at answering the needs of 51% of the Italian market, that is in the hands of pirates.

    Funding Software PiracyWe fund organized Crime by dontaskme

    Davide Dozza, PLIO’s President, explains why the Italian association decided to develop OOoCrackz:

    Reading “The Economic Benefits of Lowering PC Software Piracy“, an IDC research sponsored by the Business Software Alliance, we understood that OpenOffice.org license represents an obstacle to the adoption of he suite for about half of the Italian population, actually using mostly pirate software.

    OOoCrakcz takes away three out of four freedoms, making illegal the access to the source code, the freedom to modify the code and redistribute it, just as every other proprietary software.

    OOoCrackz has been developed by a PLIO’s member, Paolo Mantovani, one of the most known expert on OpenOffice.org macros and extensions expert:

    The first release of extension allows only the activation of the “illegal mode”, but we are working on an evolution of the extension that will prevent you from releasing documents under Creative Commons licenses. The risk to manage is that the user could inadvertidly respect the copyright law.

    To provide you with a real experience of using a pirate software, OOoCrackz prevents the registration and block all possible updates. The idea behind such choice is to make soon your copy obsolete, eventually exposing the user to security problems as happens with illegal copies.

    Italo Vignoli, PLIO’s Marketing and Communication Manager stated:

    The PLIO annual assembly announced marketing initiative to improve OpenOffice.org penetration in the Italian market. With this announcement we are targeting the illegal software market, a segment not yet addressed by our offer. This will reflect in our coverage of the market, and therefore we foresee an increase of our market share.

    Technorati Tags: OpenOffice.org, OpenOffice, DavideDozza, PaoloMantovani, ItaloVignoli, OOoCrackz, Piracy Market, IDC, BSA

     

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