Updates from December, 2006 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • 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 5:11 pm on December 13, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Google: giving away software for free? 

    After the famous Google Summer of Codeâ„¢, bringing together hundreds of students and mentors across 90 countries to develop a variety of open source software, today Google released the Google Web Toolkit as free software.

    Google Web Toolkit is likely to be used by competitors, as observed today but I think they had a very good reason to make it open.

    if Google’s ultimate goal is to be more competitive with Microsoft on several fronts, the company has a long way to go. Google had nearly 5,700 employees at the end of last year, up from about 3,000 at the end of 2004. Microsoft has about 61,000 workers worldwide.Google is still small compared to Microsoft in terms of employees and facilities, and expanding is not cheap.
    said Chris Sherman, executive editor of SearchEngineWatch.com.

    So, are they trying to save money for hiring (already) skilled developers?

     

    • Simo 5:28 pm on December 13, 2006 Permalink

      I wonder why they choose the Apache License instead of something that would protect more their assets like the LGPL.

    • Roberto Galoppini 5:43 pm on December 13, 2006 Permalink

      May be Google is willing to get it under the Apache umbrella?

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:14 pm on December 12, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Format: ECMA approved Microsoft’s OpenXML 

    On the 7th of December the industry association Ecma International has approved Microsoft’s Office Open XML format as a standard. Jan van den Beld, Secretary General of Ecma International, said:

    The Open XML standard recognizes the benefit of backward compatibility preservation of the billions of documents that have already been created while enabling new future applications of document technology.

    Bob Suthor from IBM put it on another line:

    We voted “no” because we fundamentally believe that this is doing nothing more than “standardizing” Microsoft’s formats for its own products and that’s not how the industry should be behaving in 2006. In ECMA you do get to vote, and we exercised that right. It’s nice that the Microsoft spec is XML, but that alone will not guarantee widespread correct and complete implementation for the many reasons people have laid out.

    Richard Carriere, Corel‘s general manager of office productivity, looks for interoperability at large, saying:

    The debut of Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft OOXML will immediately experience broad dissemination. [..] Far from clear which of these formats will be adopted by productivity customers, or indeed if we’ll simply need to continue working with multiple file formats.

    On the same line Novell chief technology and strategy officer for Open Source Nat Friedman said:

    Novell supports the OpenDocument format as the default file format in OpenOffice.org because it provides customer choice and flexibility, but interoperability with Microsoft Office has also been critical to the success of OpenOffice.org.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 10:54 am on December 12, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Format: ISO published ISO/IEC 26300:2006 standard 

    Finally ISO published the ISO/IEC 26300:2006 standard, now the Open Document Format can be bought. Even if I doubt is an “open source business model”, as observed by Simon Phipps, I would be happy to see ISO certifying ODF standard compliance (see my comments filed under “Freedom 2” paragraph).

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:23 am on December 11, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Licensing: FSF and OSI approval processes 

    Definitions of free software and open source are both vague, and license approval processes of both organizations are the ultimate resource to know if a license is free software or open source.
    Free Software Foundation criteria to decide if a license qualifies as free software are mutable:

    To decide whether a specific software license qualifies as a free software license, we judge it based on these criteria to determine whether it fits their spirit as well as the precise words. If a license includes unconscionable restrictions, we reject it, even if we did not anticipate the issue in these criteria. Sometimes a license requirement raises an issue that calls for extensive thought, including discussions with a lawyer, before we can decide if the requirement is acceptable. When we reach a conclusion about a new issue, we often update these criteria to make it easier to see why certain licenses do or don’t qualify.

    Where the mechanism used by OSI for license approval/rejection is partially opaque:

    1. Create a legal analysis of the license as it complies with the terms of the Open Source Definition. Each paragraph of the license should be followed by an explanation of how the paragraph interacts with each numbered term of the Open Source Definition. The analysis should come from a licensed practitioner of the law in your country. Email this analysis to license-approval at our domain name, opensource.org. This document will remain confidential to the Open Source Initiative.
    6. If license-discuss mailing list members find that the license does not conform to the Open Source Definition, they will work with you to resolve the problems. Similarly, if we see a problem, we will work with you to resolve any problems uncovered in public comment.

    Beyond definitions, both organizations decide unilaterally if a license qualifies or not.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:48 pm on December 10, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Copyright: the Show Must Go on 

    My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies
    Fairytales of yesterday will grow but never die
    I can fly – my friends
    The show must go on
    The show must go on
    (Freddie Mercury, 1991)

    No doubt, the show must go on. But what about copyright?
    In december 2005 the Chancellor of the Exchequer commissioned an independent study about UK Intellectual Property Framework. The review concludes that copyright term of existing works should never be extended.

    Read the full story by Lawrence Lessig‘s blog, even dead musicians signed a petition for a retrospective term extension!

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 4:29 pm on December 6, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Robin Good: to boldly go to where no other indipendent publisher has gone before.. 

    The first time I met Robin, we were having dinner with Richard Stallman. When I asked him about his job he told me he was an independent online publisher. What I understood was that he was making a business out of brokering information, I had a look at his information portal masternewmedia and than asked him to meet.

    Recently I stepped by his office and I spent a couple of hours watching him collecting news from the net using RSS-aggregators like MySyndacaat, republishing and commenting posts, studying Google analytics and keeping in touch with his co-editors. He is an information broker, running his info-entepreneur business on his own, without charging directly his customers. He is a proof of what Larry Wall said by the First O’Reilly Perl conference

    Information doesn’t want to be free. Information wants to be valuable

    Yes, his business basically is based on online-advertising. It works because he spent years looking for interesting sources of information, cooperating with software vendors to get useful tools to speed up his daily work, keeping users interested, working hard..

    Yes, it’s a web 2.0 business model, and he has been clever enough to build up a team, his business goes beyond the one-man band limit.

    Robin Good worked for years as design director, information designer and multimedia production specialist, spending some time collecting interesting resources from the Internet for his own sake.
    Then he started publishing news on his blog, and as soon as he got ranked by Technorati and other sources he understood he might turn it into a business. After a couple of years he gave up with his previous jobs and dedicated himself to his mission:

    helping both individuals and large organizations leverage the infinite potential for positive co-operation that the intelligent use of new media technologies offer us.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:49 pm on December 2, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Format: what do you mean by that? 

    There are many proposal definitions of Open Format, reported by wikipedia (see previous post) to the IDA migration guidelines one, that says:

    Open Standard protocols are defined as those which are free from patents and with an OSS implementation

    Open Formats, a site managed by volunteers like Dario Taraborelli, has its own too.

    So, what about a “Free Format” definition?

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:00 pm on November 30, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Format: permanent interoperability matters! 

    Few weeks ago I got invited to a dinner by Rufo Guerreschi, along with Richard Stallman and Robin Good. Than Robin filmed an interview to Richard.
    Some days later we all started to discuss by email about the video format to be used to deliver such recordings. Richard asked Robin to publish those video clips using formats supported by free software applications, and Ogg Theora was the format of choice.

    But Ogg Theora is an open format and is supported by an application released under a BSD-style license. So far there is no format’s specification other than the source code of the program. No wonder the format has not been approved by any standardization body yet.

    As we know Open standards may impose “reasonable and non-discriminatory” royalty fees and/or other licensing terms on implementers of the standard and are potentially harmful for OSS implementations (see for example FSF position on W3C policies). Besides licensing issues there are other important issues within standardization bodies policies, like the ten rights reported in Krechmer’s paper “The meaning of Open Standard”. And, last but not least, we might need standardization bodies able to decline to certify subset implementations, or to place requirements upon extensions, as suggested by Perens in his Open Standards and practice, in order to avoid predatory practices.

    Freedom is about knowledge, and data format is much more important than tools’ licenses.

     

    • Roberto Galoppini 11:10 am on December 1, 2006 Permalink

      OGG/Theora might become a standard, I mean a published standard.
      Unfortunately Xiph.org has not even specified such format, but I believe it might get done. But defining new formats outside of standardization bodies is a risky bet, think about the patent issue.
      In my opinion Richard’s position it’s a pure tacticism, a mean toward a goal: promoting free software.
      My concerns are about data accessibility, and I think we need a strategy to guarantee access to our data, for ever.

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