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  • Roberto Galoppini 11:27 pm on March 13, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Recruitment: BMC hires Will Hurley 

    BMC on friday announced that known Open Source “veteran” William Hurley – a.k.a. “Whurley” – joined the company as Chief Architect of Open Source Strategy.

    join the navyRecruitment advertisment by soumit

    Hurley, formerly at Qlusters, has been hired for:

    creating BMC’s open source agenda and overseeing the company’s participation in various free and open source software communities to advance the adoption and integration of BSM solutions.

    I agree with Alex Fletcher, commenting that:

    The challenge for BMC lies in identifying the correct strategy which is most closely aligned with an appropriate participation model, all within the context of their business needs. [..] Though it remains sufficiently difficult to monitor the effectiveness of internal corporate strategies from the outside, BMC’s activity in the open source domain over the remaining three quarters of this year, should show some signs of increase.

    Let’s see how BMC will move toward open source, while waiting listen to Hurley’s podcast.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source Strategy, Business Service Management, Hurley

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 3:09 pm on March 13, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Drugs: the first Collaborative Drug Discovery meeting 

    Collaborative Drug Discovery enables scientists to collaborate to more effectively develop new drug candidates for commercial and humanitarian markets using a customizable, web-based database tool (not Open Source).They held the first annual meeting on the 5th of March.

    collaborationImage excerpt from CDD web site

    An open-source approach to disease and drug research.

    CDD’s goal is to help scientists optimally select and advance novel drug discovery candidates.

    This is accomplished via:

    • A highly-networked virtual drug discovery and development community
      .
    • Scientists can securely collaborate with their drug discovery data, information, knowledge and intellectual property
      .
    • Build deep technical collaborations to help researchers advance the most promising drug discovery assets

    Technorati Tags: Open knowledge, Collaborative drugs

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:08 pm on March 13, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Free Culture: “Free me”, a DVD about Free Culture 

    The Free Me DVD is an attempt to help raise awareness of Free Culture. On the disc I have provided loads of different kinds of media – some of it can be played in your DVD player while other bits can be found when you put it in your computer. All of these works have been created and released under less restrictive licenses than the traditional “All Rights Reserved” copyright notice.

    free me

    Get your own copy or learn more.

    Technorati Tags: Free Culture

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:57 pm on March 12, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source CMS: No need for proof 

    Hivemind Magazine is a website covering the use and development of open source content management systems, which main purpose is to review installations and usage of OS CMS. Today ‘s featured article is titled “Silver Stripe CMS is Proof that Open Source works“.

    review, pleaseProof by Andrew Coulternright

    Open source vs. Commercial

    If you take a look at the more popular CMS software like Joomla, Drupal and Typo3 you will see that they have a common failing. There is a problem with getting things fixed. Open source PHP projects tend to go with the phrases like “eat your own dog food” (using your own application) and “scratch your own itch” ( making changes according to you own personal needs). These phrases bring to mind some of the unpleasantries surrounding open source. When I think of dog food I think of a nasty can of smelly paste that is not really fit for human consumption. Scratching your own itch brings up thoughts of fleas and parasites. You get the idea that some PHP open source projects are a bunch of savvy street mutts. This is not very far from the truth.

    So where does Silver Stripe CMS come into the picture? Silver Stripe is one of the best examples of how a previously commercial only CMS can become open source to the benefit of all. In other words how a pedigreed, trained attack dog is a better alternative to a mean junkyard dog that will do anything for food. First let’s take a look at what Silver Stripe CMS provides that you don’t see in your typical PHP open source CMS project.

    The author here is clearly confusing commercial with proprietary, a quite common mistake. What really amazes me is the assumption that a previously commercial only CMS makes a better product. I recognize that some CMS followed this pathpast, last but not least Zope just to name one of them, eventually turning into a community product supported by many OSS firms. Neverthless it is the very first time that I read a metaphor for community-driven projects like that – a mean junkyard dog that will do anything for food – really suggesting indeed!

    Support

    Because Silver Stripe is backed by a commercial entity that is dedicated to web development there is variety of possibilities when it comes to getting support for the CMS. The typical community support is further complimented with commercial alternatives. The commercial support is not provided by a third party company that is “involved in the community” but a product distributed by the core creators of the CMS. This direct connection is one that makes Silver Stripe a dream come true for both small and large businesses.

    I went throught the Silver Stripe service page, and here I must admit the author is right talking about dream, not so sure about coming true indeed – Premium support for Priority 1 issues offers response time 1 hour maximum 24x7x365 !!!

    Conclusion

    After a telephone interview with Sigurd Magnusson I felt very comfortable about recommending Silver Stripe to anyone building a commercial website. I immediately adjusted my personal favorites list of content management systems to include Silver Stripe. Sigurd and company have a very positive attitude to sharing their source code with the world. When I asked Sigurd the unavoidable question about profitability and the effects of open source releasing the software the answer was that business has never been better. Their approach to open source is one that many non-commercial projects would do well to emulate. The attractive packaging, powerful code base and the fact that it is licensed under the BSD make Silver Stripe CMS a perfect partner in any web endeavour.

    While I wish the whole Silver Stripe team the best of luck for their recently opensourced product, I really hope to not get used to read articles like this. Phone call may even let the author feel very comfortable recommending it, no question, but the whole article makes a little sense. Even talking about profitability, how could they possibly evaluate returns, considered that it has been opensourced just on the 10th of October? As a matter of fact searching “Silver Stripe”+CMS you get 128 results, I can’t believe that they already took advantage of word of mouth.

    Last but not least, I would like to know why choosing the BSD make it a perfect partner in any web endeavour..

    Technorati Tags: Open Source, CMS, Silver Stripe

     

    • Sam Minnee 3:23 am on March 13, 2007 Permalink

      Hi there, I’m the lead developer of SilverStripe.

      Your google query probably didn’t return very many results because the author of the article misspelled our product name – It’s actually SilverStripe (one word).

      Googling “SilverStripe CMS” returns 82,400 results 🙂

      We chose the BSD license, rather than GPL, because it makes SilverStripe a good choice for commercial projects where you want to use SilverStripe as the framework for your own product. Our goal with open-sourcing SilverStripe was to push its usage as widely as possible.

      With regards revenue from open-sourcing, it’s obviously early days yet, but we are starting to get revenue from sources directly tied to our open-sourcing, and it’s looking like this will grow.

      I can’t comment on the author’s junkyard dog metaphors, but I can say that we started building SilverStripe because we were disappointed with the CMSes out there – not just open-source ones, but proprietary ones too. I think that a project of this nature does need a clear vision that the developers stick to (in our case, keeping the authoring system simple to use without forcing all sites to come from a cookie cutter). While this could happen in projects that are open-source from the start, it did help to have the development team in the same room during the formative period of the project.

      Anyway, glad to hear that you gave our project a look in, I hope this answers some of the questions you had.

    • Roberto Galoppini 10:35 am on March 13, 2007 Permalink

      Thank you Sam, I really appreciate you to exhaustively comment my post.

      I didn’t notice that the author mispelled your product name, forgive me for my mistake. Indeed you answered my question, saying that it is still to early to measure economic results due to opensourcing, considering that you did it less than five months ago.

      I commented the article because innacurate, pretending to drive conclusions from a series false assumptions (Other Open Source CMS have problem with getting things fixed, no commercial support available, etc).

      I’m really enjoying the conversation with you and I would be happy to write more about it, if interested let me know.

  • Roberto Galoppini 12:37 pm on March 12, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Italian Open Source Researchers: Carlo Daffara 

    Carlo Daffara is the Italian representative of the European Woking Group on Libre software, he worked in 7 EU research projects related to FLOSS, including one of the largest migration experiment for European Public Administration (COSPA).
    I asked Carlo to join the conversation to tell us more about Open Source and Research.

    How did you start your activities as ICT researcher within EU funded projects?

    My first Commission activity was with the EU WG on Libre Software, where we [Barahona and I] prepared an article on the economic potential of FLOSS. It had quite an impact, and was also used as basis for many legislative actions and other research activities. I then started working in EU research projects related to OSS; the first one was SPIRIT, for open source in health care, where we prepared one of the first European sourceforge clones. Another influential one was COSPA, where we studied the real TCO/ROI of a migration to open source software on the desktop of European Public Administrations.

    Few weeks ago I asked Alessandro Rubini his opinion about “the” community, and as you might know he is quite skeptical about.
    What is your opinion about “the” community?

    Alessandro is right in expressing disbelief in a generic “community”; there are organized communities that can be recognized as such (Debian or Gentoo supporters are among them) but tend to be an exception and not the rule. Most software do not have a real community outside of the developers (and eventually some users) of a single company; it takes a significant effort to create an external support pyramid (core contributors, marginal contributors, lead users) that adds value. If that happens, like in Linux, or the ObjectWeb consortium the external contributions can be of significant value; we observed even in very specialized projects a minimum of 20% of project value from external contributors.

    It is worth to notice that both Carlo and I use the “pyramid” expression. While he is more focused on the contribution side, I used the expression to layer the market talking about Funambol business model with its CEO Fabrizio Capobianco. Funambol addresses users’ needs depending on their level up the value chain, where “free” customers are at the bottom of the pyramid and Carriers at the top – ISV, Wireless Manufacturer and Application/Internet Service Providers somewhere in the middle. Please note that now Funambol is available in two editions (used to be three), a sign that they are keeping moving and refining their business model.

    You stated that at least 20% of project value come from external contributions, I guess this information come from early FLOSSMetrics results. What about the project?

    FLOSSMETRICS is aiming at the creation of a set of tools and a comprehensive database of metrics related to open source projects, in a verified and stable way. It is planned that this will help future research on the software engineering aspects of OSS, and on the interaction of coding, non-code related activities, and social interactions.
    Our area of work is related on the sustainability of open source-based business models, extending the work we have done in the past 5 years in SPIRIT, COSPA and other projects. We will leverage the database of code to find how communities can find sustainable development models, how business can cooperate or start an OSS project in a sustainable way.

    Talking about business models, you are working from years on taxonomies and categorizations, would you tell us what is an Open Source firm in your opinion?

    My opinion is that code licensing cannot be the only important parameter; for example, a company that pays developers, during work hours, to work on open source projects does indeed benefit OSS in general, and should probably be considered as such. In this view, Google can be considered an OSS company even if it does not release much code under OSS licenses.
    It is important to consider that while it is understandable that claiming to be OSS when it is not true is negative for the market as a whole, the strong tension that is actually developing while debating OSSness is due to business reasons, as new entrants are trying to find a niche market (in some cases “faking” OSS capabilities) and OSS incumbents that are trying to magnify their “truer” OSSness for signaling reasons.

    Here you are bringing some salts to the discussion, I will soon come back on this, may be asking you more on the subject.

    Talking about public funded projects, me and not just me have been quite critical of some European funded initiatives. Do you see any problem in this respect?

    The problem with some EU projects is that they are not really “open”, in terms of external suggestions, interactions, criticisms and such. Some projects “blended” very well with development communities, like EDOS, by having a dedicated person that interacts with groups, companies and communities in a structured way; I would expect that any “open source” project should have at least this kind of openness.

    I totally agree. I think such approach should be used just everytime a significant IT public budget is allocated, it could be a very effective audit. I would also like to see EC evaluators be proficient with Open Source, and I know from my experience that applying is pointless if you are not in their know.

    I am not convinced that there is a need for public funded OS projects, nevertheless I am in favour of public funding in presence of a clear market failure. Do you?

    The problem is twofold: first of all, it is important to recognize the market failure, and this is not an easy thing to do; the second point is how to organize a project so that it is self-sustaining in the long term despite the market failure. This is in a sense an open research problem (that we hope to address during FLOSSMETRICS).

    Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts Carlo, you are always welcome!

    Carlo Daffara is head of research at a small italian OSS consulting company, he has participated in many other working group of IEEE, Internet Society and the EU ICT task force. He worked in 7 EU research projects related to open source and free software. Carlo has also been the Technical Director of the Italian Open Source Consortium for about three years, and he eventually succeeded to the Presidency when I left last year.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source, FLOSSMETRICS, EU

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:23 pm on March 11, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source IPO: Sourcefire public offering 

    Sourcefire, a Maryland-based firm specialized in intrusion detection and prevention system technologies based on the famous Snort – originally written by Martin Roesch, founder and current Sourcefire CTO – on the 9th of March launched its Initial Public Offering.

    NasdaqNasdaq by samy73

    The pricing of its initial public offering of 5,770,000 shares of its common stock at $15.00 per share (before underwriting discounts and commissions). Of those shares, Sourcefire is selling 5,320,000 shares and selling stockholders are selling 450,000 shares. The estimated net proceeds to Sourcefire are $71.8 million.

    Sourcefire, making business selling proprietary versions of Snort with integrated hardware and support services, has recently been a market leader by Gartner, and despite the failed acquisition by Checkpoint in 2005 Sourcefire has continued to grow.

    As reported by the Magic Quadrant for Network Intrusion Prevention System Appliances:

    Sourcefire has addressed criticism of relying on SNORT signatures by increasing the team doing culnerability research to the point that most signatures now are Sourcefire generated rather than SNORT generated.

    Keeping it in mind I understand why the prospectus doesn’t spend many words on Sourcefire’s commitment to its community, as pointed out by Matt Asay:

    While I’m happy for Sourcefire, if it doesn’t have a plan for actively seeding and feeding the Snort community, I can’t help but view it as a parasite that will limit the amount of value it can get from “its” community.

    Sourcefire has proven to be committed and supportive of its community much more than others Open Source firms – whatever it means – and we should judge (and respect) them by their actions, not by a report made for potential investors.

    Technorati Tags: Commercial Open Source, IPO, Sourcefire

     

    • Ron German 12:13 am on March 12, 2007 Permalink

      Looks like Sourcefire’s CTO is on record as being committed to maintaining and expanding the open source community around Snort by advancing the technology. Looks like a pretty strong statement to me.

    • Roberto Galoppini 5:09 pm on March 12, 2007 Permalink

      Thank you Ron to join the conversation, the post you referred is pretty interesting. Some excerpts from it:

      Some have theorized that doing things like adding a new detection engine to Snort that could do gigabit speeds and then giving it away was a Bad Idea because it allowed our Snort-based competitors to have a more level playing field with which to compete against us. My opinion is that it keeps the ball moving forward and keeps people’s eyes on what we’re doing instead of letting them get bored and going off to check out some other more rapidly developing OSS technology or a commercial solution. Letting your technology get stagnant is almost as bad as closing the technology, once the community is bored they’ll be looking elsewhere for something exciting. One important point to note in this regard (in a product company) is that just because you’re releasing advances to the open source community at large doesn’t mean that you are required to drive your differentiation from that technology to zero. If you want to be able to get people to want to pay for what you do, then having some sort of key differentiation is a must! At Sourcefire we did things like developing a complementary technology that allowed us to address one of the toughest problems in the intrusion detection world, false positives. If you can’t maintain differentiation against your open source product or your competitors that use your open source technology, then you’ve got a problem that you need to get creative around, closing the technology isn’t an acceptable answer in my opinion.Once you’ve open sourced your technology then you have to approach its continued development as a community building exercise that works best by advancing the technology and trying to maintain community-friendly policies and programs. If you do this and try to be clueful about interacting with the open source users as the company grows (a whole different topic) then you have the foundation necessary to build a business of substance. That’s the principle that I originally built Sourcefire on and so far it has worked pretty well.

  • Roberto Galoppini 7:08 pm on March 10, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Users: the Value of a “Free” Customer 

    Keeping in mind the value of non-paying customers I happened to read an Alex Fletcher’s post about the paper “The Value of ‘free’ Customer” mentioned by Nick Carr in another recent post.

    For free - skypeAn application fo free by malthe

    The paper is about so-called two-sided markets, markets in which one or several platforms enable interactions between end-users, and try to get the two (or multiple) sides “on board” by appropriately charging each side.

    While Open Source firms do not play in a two-sided market, the mathematical model created , as suggested also by the authors, might be applied in other areas, hopefully in the OS arena too.

    Gupta, one of the authors, said:

    working on understanding and modeling complex network structures such as those of MySpace. Here the issue that we are grappling with is the tangible and intangible value of customers. In other words, customers provide tangible value to a firm through direct purchases but they also provide intangible value through network effects or word of mouth. It is quite possible that some customers have low tangible but high intangible value. Traditional models would label such customers as low value and would miss a huge opportunity for a firm.

    Technorati Tags: open source, network effect

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:53 pm on March 10, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Business Intelligence: IDC survey predicts little impact 

    Dan Vesset, research director for Analytics and Data Warehousing at IDC, wrote an interesting commentary about a recent survey conducted by IDC and DM Review on Business Intelligence.

    Toothpaste for dinner strip Toothpaste for dinner

    IDC’s research states that the Business Intelligence market moves in 15-year cycles:

    • from 1975 to 1990 characterized by production reporting on mainframes;
      .
    • from 1990 to 2005 characterized by friendy client/server solutions;
      .
    • the current market cycle, focused on expanding the reach of Business Intelligence.

    Talking about software upgrades, IDC noticed that:

    BA software vendors want and need rapid adoption of newer versions of their software to increase satisfaction levels and reduce support costs. It also ensures a steady stream of maintenance revenue. When adoption of upgrades slows greatly, customers are sending a signal that they do not see additional benefits in new products relative to the costs of implementing and supporting the new products. According to the survey, 45 percent of organizations upgrade BI software within the first year or as soon as it becomes available. Close to 80 percent of organizations upgrade their BI software within two years of release.

    IDC survey in other words says that at this stage in the BI market there is no much space for disruptive innovation – described as a technology having characteristics that traditional customer segments may not want, but interesting for marginal or new segment looking for a cheaper and simpler solution.

    Interesting open source BI software. It makes sense that a tool perceived to have just enough functionality at a low cost would be appealing to many companies with simpler reporting requirements. Several community projects and commercial companies have emerged to address the potential market for open source BI software. Interest among respondents for these offerings was modest, with 18 percent evaluating the products. However, the majority of respondents indicated no interest in the coming year. These tools will need to mature and prove themselves in the market before wider adoption can occur. Companies will continue to feel comfortable in allocating budgets toward commercial products, especially as system integrators largely choose to recommend these products and offer resources skilled in their implementation. The functionality available in open source products may be suitable as a replacement for commercial products, but skepticism still abounds. In markets where software is directly facing end users rather than just IT employees, open source alternatives have been slowly adopted. IDC does not believe open source BA products will have significant impact on the market in the coming year.

    The Open Source BI market need customers demanding for products not as good as the proprietary products currently in the market. Moreover System Integrators have to get proficient with Open Source BI products, otherwise uncertainty and skepticism will prevail.

    I know people from the Corporate Open Source project called SpagoBI, and I’m going to meet them next week in Sardinia. I’ll be back with more news about the OS BI market.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source, Business Intelligence, disruptive innovation

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:03 pm on March 9, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    DRM: FSF writes an Open Letter to Steve Jobs 

    Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs recently jumped into the DRM debate and now in return is going to receive an open letter from the Free Software Foundation signed by thousands of users.

    Steve Jobs mosaic-style

    The letter is quite long, here a meaningful excerpt:

    It has been three weeks now since you published your pledge to drop DRM, and there have been many responses from commentators who have outlined actions you could take to back up your words. The fact that you have not taken any action leads us to ask the question: How genuine is your pledge?

    What will Steve answer, eventually?

    Read the letter.

    Technorati Tags: DRM, FSF, Steve Jobs

     

    • Krissy 9:47 pm on March 9, 2007 Permalink

      I doubt this will get any response from Apple. As many have said, his essay probably had some Steve-like intentions behind it. I mean, I can’t see him just going DRM-less so easily. (Plus, he can’t really.)

      DRM, I imagine, is here to stay.

      – Krissy

    • Roberto Galoppini 12:31 pm on March 10, 2007 Permalink

      Hi Krissy,

      I went through the article, and I can’t share those conclusions: from wrong hypothesis (Apple making money out of hw selling, and not from music) you obtain wrong results.

      Anyway I agree, DRM is likely to stay, let’s see how and at which extent..

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:14 pm on March 9, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Community development: O’Reilly joins MySQL Board 

    MySQL is really working hard to foster its community, and now the MySQL Winter of Code initiative sounds just like the first notable step. Today Tim O’Reilly explained why he just joined the MySQL Board.

    O'ReillyO’Reilly by Duncan Davidson

    Second, Märten, Monty, and David asked me nicely :-), and after some substantial discussions with them, I came to the conclusion that I could add some value to the company. They were looking for someone who had a sense of the competing pressures of business and open source idealism, and could help them steer a careful course through the obstacles. As open source grows up, there can be tension between its community roots and its business aspirations. But that tension can also be a creative force, and MySQL AB wants to be sure to continue to harness the creativity of the open source developer community, as it becomes an ever-more viable alternative to existing closed source commercial databases.

    Well done MySQL, well done.. and they are already getting the very first result:

    While I’m on the subject of MySQL, I should mention that O’Reilly produces the MySQL User Conference in conjunction with MySQL AB. The conference will be held April 23-26 in Santa Clara. The early registration discount ends March 14, so if you’re interested in MySQL, you should sign up now.

    Whatever you call it – Word of Mouth, Liquid, or Viral Marketing – it works, and any commercial open source firm just need it indeed.

    Technorati Tags: open source, MySQL, O’Reilly

     

    • Savio Rodrigues 11:32 pm on March 9, 2007 Permalink

      Cool – thanks for pointing this out Roberto!

      I think the thing I really like about MySQL as a business is that they are up front about their commercial aspirations.

      They do x,y and z and it just so happens that z=”make $$ using a dual license approach”. And since x=”build & maintain an active community”, it just feels like a good balance.

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