Recent Updates Page 103 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:32 pm on May 16, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Business models: to be or not to be community-driven 

    While Seth Grimes was in Rome we took a chance to have a nice chat talking of open source business models, and we happened to discuss about differences between proprietary and open source business models.

    How old is your community? by Insane Zamboni

    Characterizing Open as Altruistic and Closed as Profit-driven is, agreed, too black-and-white to explain the many businesses that seek to profit from open source. But on reflection, I like my table as-is. Open-source businesses are universally hybrids, whether they seek to profit from their altruism – those companies such as CentricCRM and Pentaho that sell support for software offerings that are completely free, open source – versus those such as SugarCRM and JasperSoft that are altruistic only to the point where they can attract paying customers for the closed parts of their software stacks. Open-source businesses span the table columns. Whether Open or Closed predominates in a given case depends on the particular business model.

    Reading Seth’s back thoughts on what characterizes open and closed business models, I got back to the idea that classifying Open Source production models is not a mere academic curiosity. On the contrary it makes a lot of sense, since it affects at large the software life-cycle.

    Corporate Open Source

    Hybrid Open Source

    Supplier

    An Open Source firm

    A multi-stakeholder entity

    Product development

    Driven by corporate economics

    Driven by product functionality

    Developers

    Limited numbers, all employed by the supplier, not reachable from outside the organization.

    Varies from a small to very large group of developers. Often permanently employed by the original author or other firms, volunteers or sponsored.

    Users

    Commonly not organised, every user maintains – if any – direct contact with the supplier independently from other users.

    Users participate in virtual communities and discuss among themselves and with the developers about the product, potentially influencing its development.

    The original version (edited) was extracted by the Open Source Maturity Model document

    While I can’t agree with Dion Almaer that if a company open sources its software it is a token gesture, I believe he raised some very important issues, describing what he meant for community driven open source – or hybrid production model, in my words.

    If you don’t have any committers from outside of your company. You probably aren’t community driven.

    If you didn’t spend time cleaning up documentation for the community when you opened it up. You probably aren’t community driven.

    If your users haven’t helped with the documentation if it is lacking. You probably aren’t community driven.

    If you do not have some kind of forums/lists where people help each other out. You probably aren’t community driven.

    If you aren’t willing to put in a lot of effort to build your community to get true benefits. You probably aren’t community driven.

    I don’t think an Open Source firm has to fulfill all of these requirements to proudly call itself community-driven, but if they can’t positively answer any of them I doubt they are taking part of a so-called community.

    I warmly suggested Carlo Daffara to take into consideration also this aspect when describing open source business models within FLOSSMETRICS.

    Is your Open Source Firm different?

    Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, community-driven, flossmetrics, grimes, almaer

     

    • Chris Marino 1:18 pm on May 17, 2007 Permalink

      Tony Wasserman at CMU West has done some research into this and has developed a framework for organizing the different methodologies.

    • Dominic Sartorio 2:16 am on May 18, 2007 Permalink

      Thanks for raising this excellent topic. At the OSA (Open Solutions Alliance), we have a diverse membership and are often asked what we consider to be “open” business models. So, we track this issue with great interest.

      Inevitably, discussion goes down the path of licensing, or how strong each member’s community it. What isn’t discussed enough, IMO, is what best meets customer needs. Ultimately that should determine which business models are best. Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer. Customer requirements can vary greatly, depending on industry, their IT best practices, the type of solution in question, and the skills and know-how required to implement it. Companies that serve different market segments must evolve their business models to best meet the requirements of that segment. Some may be more services-intensive, requiring frequent code customization for example, while others aren’t necessarily best served by purely OSD-compliant management and licensing of source code, but benefit from “open-ness” in other ways. Because open source, especially in the applications space, is still relatively new, we think there is much room for experimentation regarding what business models are best for the most customers. Consequently, we don’t limit our membership based on some preconceived notion of business models we think ought to be the best. Let customers decide that, not us.

      However, there is one notion that we don’t compromise. There’s a difference between “old guard” proprietary organizations and more open, collaborative organizations. The former hoard know-how, act unilaterally, and are always trying to “manage” how customers and partners perceive their products and solutions, as if yielding as little real information as possible is the key to business success. The latter instead share know-how, and act collaboratively with their customers and within their industry, and they compete based on their ability to make customers successful. We fundamentally believe that open and collaborative behavior is consistently superior to closed and unilateral behavior. This difference go beyond how the source code is managed, to how the company fundamentally operates; How it engages with its customers and partners, its corporate marketing, and even corporate culture and internal politics. A company’s DNA is either one or the other; these don’t mix.

      This is hard to quantify, but you know it when you see it when interacting with the management. There are some typical markers… GPL-licensing is a good sign. So is having public forums for customer feedback. (A closed company would never want the rest of the world to see an unfiltered view of what its customers think about its products.) But there are multiple ways a company can operate and still be “open”.

      Your thoughts are welcome. I’m not sure it’s possible to form a comprehensive taxonomy of open business models, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

    • Roberto Galoppini 8:53 pm on May 18, 2007 Permalink

      Chris,

      I have been a strong advocate for the Open Source Maturity Model, and I thought that the Business Readiness Rating could be considered its evolution.

      None of them became a standard yet, before them even the GRAM/GRAS list had not much success indeed.

      Apparently consultants did not succeed by these means in producing definitive answers on which open source software is best suited to cover a particular need. Why? Once again one size doesn’t fit all.

    • Roberto Galoppini 5:48 pm on May 20, 2007 Permalink

      Dominic,

      I appreciated very much that you came over to comment my post and I am glad you at the Open Solutions Alliance are taking seriously this issue.

      While how strong each member’s community is, it is partially due to members’ choices, licensing on the contrary is totally under their control.

      I wrote about “false positive” talking about OSA’s decision to accept members not using open source licenses.

      You are right saying that there is room for experimentation regarding what business models are best, but pretending to sell open source while selling proprietary software is misleading.

      If you don’t compromise (only) on the degree of openness

      We fundamentally believe that open and collaborative behavior is consistently superior to closed and unilateral behavior. This difference go beyond how the source code is managed, to how the company fundamentally operates; How it engages with its customers and partners, its corporate marketing, and even corporate culture and internal politics.

      you should be clear about it, and tell everyone OSA has decided not to talk about open source (while not it is even under the logo, reporting “open source at work”). Then you might consider to make some changes to your website, that says:

      From time to time, the OSA may use the term “open source solutions” or “open source based solutions.” We do not mean to confuse this with the OSI’s Open Source Definition, which includes requirements not included in our open solution definition.

      This way OSA is contributing to make open source definition uncertain, don’t you agree?

      Your opinion is always welcome.

    • Dominic Sartorio 11:24 pm on May 20, 2007 Permalink

      Hi Roberto, Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Yes, we had our own “false start” through sloppy use of the term “open source” when we originally launched last winter. Open Source (capital ‘O’, capital ‘S’) means something very specific, as defined by the OSI, and the OSA intends to cover broader ground, for the reasons I described in my previous post. Our collective experience has been that customer value can be achieved in a variety of ways, and some of them don’t always fit a strict definition.

      You found other parts of our website that we overlooked. Thanks for finding this, and we will fix this. We don’t intend to cause further ambiguity around what it means to be “open source”, but rather clarify an issue that we believe hasn’t received enough attention: focus on customer needs. In an effort to avoid confusion, we came up with our own term, “Open Solution Definition”.

      Rest assured that our continuing work on this issue will be done in fully open and collaborative ways. Just like open and collaborative development has led to great Open Source products, we believe that open collaboration by the vendor community on various business issues is the best way to achieve customer success.

      Many vendors are incapable of this behavior. Some grew during the pre-WWW time when business success depended on unilateral behavior and “knowledge hoarding” than the collaborative behaviors that modern technologies now enable. Take a look at a more recent blog re: the Microsoft patent issue as an example.

  • Carlo Daffara 6:51 pm on May 15, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Trust networks, consultancies, and why proprietary market leaders are still leaders 

    Expanding the idea of peer conversations as basis for IT decisions, I would like to extend a little bit the reasons for my belief that this trend will probably continue, and lend to some unexpected results.

    Let’s start by thinking as a CIO that has to decide on a new technology, or in integrating a new software system in the company’s infrastructure. The only thing that the CIO knows is the fact that creating software from scratch is costly and requires a significant ongoing maintenance cost, so shifts the decision to a software platform from some vendor, and seeks advice on a company that may provide the necessary integration.

    Using this limited information, what the CIO knows is that:

    • there is a large number of potential platforms to choose from
      .
    • some may be more appropriate than others, and that choosing the wrong one may cause significant delays and added cost
      .
    • just browsing through the advertising material is not sufficient to choose in an appropriate way
      .
    • that the long-term viability of a company can only be guessed.

    So, what is the best strategy? We can try to imagine what a perfectly rational CIO would do, that is it would create a probability tree and try to guess at the potential events, their probability, and their impact. So, for example, if we choose by ourselves, the probabilities may be:

    graphic

    In this scenario, the CIO has to give an initial estimates at the probability of succeeding. How can she do it? By looking at similar tasks, for example. As most people uses Microsoft, or IBM, or SAP, she is fairly confident that she can use those too, and as those companies are still alive, they are probably doing it right. This is of course a false assumption, as there is limited information on failed or delayed project (outside the largest ones, like some government IT nightmares), but it is the only information that the CIO does have. Given this information, she knows that by choosing wisely, the potential cost of vendor A is 1.5, with vendor B is 2.4, with vendor C is 4. But she does not if the selection is appropriate, or if all the vendors have been included in the list.

    We have also not considered what happens after the end of the project, like what happens if the company leaves the market, or decides to change the platform without giving enough time for a migration strategy, and so on; but we will leave this for a later post.

    Now, let’s say that the CIO has already tried some projects, and discovered that she is unable to estimate probabilities with reasonable accuracy. At this point, she would probably go to a consultancy, that is an independent party with better information on the products, that has demonstrated to be able to select with more accuracy the appropriate probabilities. This is always advantageous, as long as the consultancy has an information advantage on the CIO; the price that she pays goes in a commensurate reduction in the risks associated with the project.

    But what happens when the consultancy seems no more able than the CIO to select the platform, or when it is suspected that the suggestions are not entirely independent? Then, the CIO has no alternative than trying as much as possible to remain on the “tried and tested”, and hope that everything will continue to be fine.

    What happened recently? The change is that the idea of openness and the availability of open forums allowed users to exchange information (sometimes even in an anonymous form), giving the CIO insight on what really works and what does not. This first hand information is for example what allowed many open source server projects to be deployed in a grass-roots fashion; because system administrators were exchanging information about them, and the best ones succeeded. Now this process is starting to be used at higher levels, and this goes back to the death of generalists conferences: as those do not allow for a venue for information exchange in a bilateral way, the users started feeling that it was not useful anymore when compared to web, second life, traditional marketing and so on.

    So we suppose that users (CIOs) are more interested in conversations. But can a CIO base her own opinion on talking with strangers? The reality is that in a way similar to how Google PageRanks adjusts relevance, the user networks created on blogs, digg-like social sites, or unconferences are adjusting themselves for relevance, and allows trust to emerge from seemingly untrusted parties.

    The concept is simple: let’s say that a user talks on a blog about his experience with a product, and other read about it. Around this post, may additional links may be created, some criticizing, some praising the text; and eventually, some users that share information often may become “daily reading material”. The usefulness, and reliability of the source can be inferred easily, by reading at the text itself, if the reasoning or the experience seems reasonable, and how others react to the post.

    While it may be imaginable that one blogger may be paid for talking in a positive way about a product, it is difficult to imagine that *every* user is biased or unreliable, and we can read and verify even the dissenting views with ease. This way, “reliable” writers and experts can emerge for free, and the CIO can verify everything without paying a consultant to get the same information. Of course this does not means that errors do not happen – only that errors are public, and that it is possible for everyone to check any step or any information against public sources.

    This is the real value that is arising from “web2.0” networks, that is the spontaneous creation of networks of peers, that can be trusted thanks to their transparency and willingness to cooperate. I can only guess that this form of value will be probably not be judged in a positive way by sellers, as this negates some lock-in advantage (the push for unified single-company platforms, for example); but this may be the only potential way to exit from a “lemon market” and giving back to the user the power to choose among products in an unbiased way.

    [trust networks, peer discovery, open source]

     

  • Carlo Daffara 7:03 pm on May 14, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Conferences, knowledge dissemination and the discovery of peers 

    As seen the traditional process used by companies to disseminate information and collect potential customers is becoming less and less useful; i is just the beginning of an overall transformation of how companies look at external information sources (like consulting companies).

    In the beginning of the commercial computer era, most users were connected through user clubs, since most software was developed in-house, and the software market was still in its infancy. Groups like SHARE, the first unix communities, VAX users groups and such provided the essential knowledge technicians needed, and were centered on the idea that software and hardware vendors were few, and user experiences were centered on real and concrete evidence.

    Unconference Unconference by MichaelBee

    With the consolidation of the shrinkwrapped software market and the multiplication of deployable technologies, the need for directions and information was not satisfiable with user conferences, and the consultancies were born – fundamentally, people with deep knowledge of a specific sector, reselling this knowledge to reduce the risk of implementation of a new technologies, or the time necessary to implement it. This period marked the beginning of comparison tools (like the infamous Quadrant), necessary in a world where one solution was exluding all the others.

    Open standards, open source and the substantial opening of IT architectures changed everything again; this, and the fact that consultancies were no longer current or reliable on trends that change in a very short time (anyone remembers the “push web” craze? the original Microsoft internet killer, Microsoft network? WAP?) and were found to be not so impartial after all.

    This void is being filled by a new generation of knowledge disseminator, be it small and efficient consultancies like RedMonk (that show that openness can be effective) and vertical conferences, that are less trade shows and more conversations. This resurgence of exchanging information as peers is what is really innovative, or maybe a return to the roots; the fact that customers are being treated less as passive suppliers of money, and more as partners in a long-term strategy, in a way that is strikingly similar to the kind of partnership that OSS companies create with their customers.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source conference, peers discovery, redmonk, knowledge dissemination

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:24 pm on May 14, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Links: 14-05-2007 

    Microsoft takes on the Free World – Is Microsoft wondering to put it this way (patents’ infringements)? Microsoft mind your business: FON Abandons Microsoft, Adopts Ubuntu

    Ooh, ooh, the bogeyman is gonna getcha with his stupid patents. Or maybe not.

    Do Industry Analysts Matter? – It greatly depends on who they are!

    What about open source in the emerging world? – Alex Fletcher is amazed by the lack of demonstrated initiative at the macro-level by the typically western-based organizations, foundations and companies directly involved with open source software.

    The Top Ten Reasons To Work For MySQL -  Wondering to change your job? 29 open positions.

    ConfSL is over – The Italian conference on Free Software is over.

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:10 pm on May 13, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Commercial Open Source is a Juggling act 

    Juggling, or more technically speaking toss juggling, is about throw objects into the air and catch them: easy to say, difficult to do. Gravity is very selective, despite anyone can learn to juggle, few people take time to discover what it really involves.

    Michael Moschen, one of greatest living jugglers, was interviewed by Anna Muoio, a Fast Company‘s journalist who wrote an inspirational article entitled “Life is a Juggling act“. I grabbed some idea from the original article – that I would recommend if interested in the subject – to talk about Commercial Open Source and Juggling.

    Juggling is mostly about breaking down patterns into simpler tasks. There are only two ingredients, tosses and catches. Even the most complex pattern can be broken apart into simpler steps. Once learn how simple are the individual atomic actions, you can recombine them, and eventually show your latest trick.

    Juggler Life is a Juggling act by f.vp

    In juggling there are three basic steps:

    First, make a good throw. Are you rolling the ball off your fingers — as you should — or are you using your palm? Do you throw the ball so it always falls away from you — as it should — or does it fly over your shoulder because you don’t want to let go of it?

    Throw the ball, open source your software. Whether you do it smoothly or not, you have to manage the fear to loose your business opportunities, your brand, or both. Throwing is the very first step, and you need to mind it carefully.

    Second, trust your throw. Look straight forward. Don’t focus on the ball. Realize that once you let go, you have no more control.

    Once you let it go choose if you want to keep coding on your own or not, assess the level of “promiscuity” that you want with your partners, ranging from “totalizing” to none, or “ecosystemic“. Whatever you choose, remember others can take advantage of it, and you might hardly find a way to prevent it. Gravity always wins.

    Third, put your hands under the ball. Let the ball fall into them. If you reach up for it, you cut the amount of time you have to adjust to catching it.

    After a good throw aim for a good catch, if you opted for a medium-long term strategy just wait for the business to come to you, think about Mozilla. You do know if it was a good or a bad throw.

    Juggling is not about Magic: you get just what you do.

    Technorati Tags: commercial open source, juggling, moschen

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:09 pm on May 12, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Links: 12-05-2007 

    Alan Shimel Should Stop Talking About Snort’s Licensing – Thomas Ptacek and Alan Shimel keep discussing about GPL compliance.

    Open source is bad for vendors – Yet another Dana Blankenhorn suggestion.

    Unisys shows acceptance of open source in biz application – It is still the Open Source Economy, System Integrators!

    OpenOffice.org in Education: A Roundup – a roundup into a set of references that could easily and quickly be investigated, by Ross Brunson, Linux Solutions Specialist at Novell.

    The Japanese government looks to go open source – The Japanese government said it wants to decrease its reliance on Microsoft as a server operating system platform.

    FSF still working to achieve Apache license compatibility for GPL 3 – The Free Software Foundation is working hard to establish compatibility between GPLv3 and Apache License.

    Technorati Tags: Apache, Commercial Open Source, FSF, GPLv3, Japan, OpenOffice, Snort

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:44 am on May 11, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Business Intelligence: Seth Grimes 

    Seth Grimes, a consultant specialized in large-analytic computing system, who in 2003 was engaged by Pentaho for market-positioning, few days ago stepped by Rome to present a course, entitled Open Source for the Enterprise.

    Seth a couple of weeks in advance wrote me an email to get in touch, and last sunday we meet to talk about the open source market, business intelligence and related stuff, as follows.

    Seth, how do you spend your day?

    Like you and many others I know, I have a fork in several pies. I spend about 40% of my time doing hands-on work relating to management, analysis, and dissemination of government and marketing statistics. Another 40% of my time I spend on IT strategy consulting, focusing on business intelligence and text-analytics technologies. The remaining 20% of my work is writing, presenting, and teaching — same topics, a variety of audiences — my Rome class on Open Source for the Enterprise, the Amsterdam Text Analytics Summit the week before, and so on.

    Are you deeply into Open Source?

    I’m not an open source specialist. I work at the applications layer, and I’ve found over the years that open source is often the best option measured by a combination of capabilities, ease of introduction and use, and cost. I’ve been using Python since the mid-’90s and Linux, MySQL, PHP almost as long. Over the years, I have become a fan of Apache, Mozilla, OpenOffice, and a slew of other Web and end-users tools.

    I suppose that my predisposition to open-source was helped along by my use of the Internet. Nothing unique there: the Net in earlier days was about connecting and sharing, a natural for those who are community minded. I think I first used Network News (Usenet) and sent my first international e-mail over Bitnet in 1984, and starting in the late ’80s, I was an Internet (and then Web) evangelist at a series of organizations where I was employed. But I actually trace my involvement in OSS — in commercial OSS much earlier.

    I first learned to program in high school in the mid-’70s. We wrote Basic code that was interpreted, not compiled, so the source code was exposed. Time-sharing users had access to program libraries: utilities, applications, games, etc. I spent many hours playing a Star Trek inspired space wars game — this was dial-in on a 110 baud/10 CPS teletype with an acoustic-coupler modem — and I coded a slew of enhancements and improvements. The commercial part: my friend Mitch and I went to Star Trek conventions in New York in ’75 and ’76, and the second year there I brought listings of my modified code and even a couple of copies punched out on paper tape, and I sold a couple to one of the exhibitors there. I think I got $10 each.

    Tell us something about Pentaho, and Open Source BI.

    Given my BI interest, I first surveyed open-source options back in 2002. I got a chance to use some of the software for real work starting in late 2004. I was hired to introduce BI at a Washington DC membership association, which had very limited in-house IT skills because all their applications — management of membership, bookstore and software sales, meetings, knowledge communities, continuing education — was hosted. In keeping with their modus operandi, the organization budgeted lots of money for consulting and nothing for software. So I set them up with MySQL, Mondrian OLAP, and JPivot for JSP interfaces, and I did my data work with Python. In retrospect, we should have spent more effort building a BI culture, figuring out how to incorporate analytics in everyday operations. The system funtioned well enough technically; acceptance obstacles had nothing to do with open/closed source software origins.

    That said, it OSBI of the era — and I think this is still largely true — was technology for Java developers. It took a lot of work to craft end-user applications. I wrote about this situation just a few months ago.
    OSBI is evolving. There are suite alternatives from a variety of companies with similar capabilities and but a variety of sponsor business models. I’ll probably write about some of them — Pentaho, JasperSoft, SpagoBI, OpenI, Palo Server — soon.

    May be at Gartner are too busy playing the Magic Quadrant game to notice that things are changing?

    Thank you Seth, and please keep us updated!

    Technorati Tags: Business Intelligence, Commercial Open Source, Seth, Pentaho

     

    • Truster 9:54 am on September 9, 2008 Permalink

      Thanks for the post and the interesting interview you had with Seth. It might change the way I look at the Internet: I did not know it started up that early. And it reminded me the time when most people did not have access to the internet; my first browsing a few years ago.

      But the purpose of this comment is not to talk about myself but to ask a question about OSBI and certain programs I have to choose. As written in the post, I have looked at applications you write about and others. So far I am pretty fond of two programs: Talend and Pentaho.

      It is difficult to make a choice when it comes to the performance, the compatibility and the components of the software. But a difference can be made by comparing the GUI which might be more user-friendly with Talend Open Studio: I especially like the tmap component in Talend Open Studio, a really good way to get a graphical and functional view of integration processes. The tool also has a good debugging system and an active community able to help you. Have some of you tried it out?

    • Roberto Galoppini 5:44 pm on September 9, 2008 Permalink

      I have just asked Seth, but unfortunately he is not a Talend Open Studio user.
      Googling around there are few free resources available comparing the two applications, at the end of the day choosing the “right” application is time consuming (what I call “the cost of free”).

      Keep us updated if you want, and happy hacking!

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:25 pm on May 10, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Conference: IDC OpenSolutions Summit canceled, lateral thoughts 

    IDC Italy, responsible for organizing the local Linux World OpenSolutions Summit, suffering from lack of sponsors decided to cancel the Italian event.

    As invited speaker I was supposed to give a speech in the plenary session, entitled “Open Source Business models: entrepreneurial islands and archipelagos“, about how open source firms cope with communities. Now that the conference has been canceled, the question raising up could be how open source firms cope with the market, and why they don’t invest money to sponsor events like this.

    Shift Game Over by si3illa

    Talking with Seth Grimes, invited speaker at the Reading the New York OpenSolutions Summit program (PDF), I learn that the American conference in February addressed vertical industries (Financial Services, Health Care, etc), and specific tracks (Linux on the Desktop, Virtualization, etc). The Italian event – originally designed as a two day event – was conceived as a “general purpose open source conference”, I guess to reach a broader audience.

    While many people registered to join the event, and many companies were interested in giving a speech, there were no enough sponsors to make it happen: the one-size-fit-all approach didn’t pay.

    The internet, along with its Group Forming Networks, has changed the way companies reach customers, and the way customers look for advices, for good. I see workshops, unconferences and barcamps – I missed the RedMonk’s one at CommunityOne – taking over the open source world.

    Magic (Open Source) quadrant game is pretty over by now, people have the power!

    Technorati Tags: OpenSolutions, Open Source Conference, Commercial Open Source, Grimes

     

    • gabriele 11:11 am on May 17, 2007 Permalink

      It’s a long story in Italian OS conferences … starting form Linux World. General purpose tracks, too much speeches, spreading FUD and, asking more money for sponsoring than abroad. First you must achieve reputation, than you can start to make money.

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:50 am on May 10, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Novell: the truth unveiled, software patents are part of the deal 

    Matthew Aslett brought some more light on the most discussed partnership in the open source arena, getting feedbacks once again from Justin Steinman, director of marketing for Linux and open platforms at Novell.

    The explanation given, see below, makes sense out of the Microsoft-Novell patent agreement, but it remains unclear why apparently it was not part of the agreement. (More …)

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:40 am on May 9, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Think Tank: “The future of Commercial Open Source” 

    The Olliance Group, an open source consulting firm providing open source market analysis, released an executive summary (PDF) of the “Open Source Think Tank“.
    The Olliance Group organized the second annual Think Tank on “The Future of Commercial Open Source” in California (Napa) on March, with participation from more than 100 open source leaders from around the world.

    Trends Trends by farfalina

    While invited, I couldn’t attend and I was eager to know what open source thought leaders think about the future, below some excerpts of the executive summary.

    Tony Perkins, founder and editor of Red Herring magazine and the founder and editor of AlwaysOn, helding his keynote speech mentioned that the cost of starting an Internet company reported that it plummeted by over 80% from 1996 to 2004, trend largely enabled by open source software and powerful, cheap hardware.

    The Think Tank guested two different CIO panel discussions, giving open source customers the chance to share their experiences with open source vendors. (More …)

     

← Older posts

Newer posts →

c
Compose new post
j
Next post/Next comment
k
Previous post/Previous comment
r
Reply
e
Edit
o
Show/Hide comments
t
Go to top
l
Go to login
h
Show/Hide help
shift + esc
Cancel