While reading MasterNewmedia I happened to know about OpenServing:
Openserving extends the essence of the open source model — free software and content — to all aspects of web-based computing.
Their service will offer soon free hosting, bandwidth and software for communities, promising to turn over 100% of advertisement profits.
Read the full story and learn the key features of OpenServing.
James MCGovern speaking with Raven Zachary , from The 451 Group, got the idea to ask other analyst firms to join him to collaboratively work on the notion of an open source industry analysis guide.
In his post he reported some issues to be addressed, Barbara French from Tekrati also joined the informal community to develop a guide to working with industry analyst firms using open source licensing / analysis as part of their business model. So did James McGovern who said that the open source analysis wiki aims to answer some questions like:
I believe is a very good start, the inter-firms collaboration works fine!
Firms offering open source insurance compliance take advantage of the absence of a corporate actor, delivering services for many if not all packages. Their business model might be considered “horizontal”, as opposite to the classical (vertical) business model, where a firm offers every kind of services for a single package/distribution.
Recently a firm offering Open Source Insurance sent an email to mailing-lists about FLOSS saying:
Has anyone seen any recent (or any at all) analysis of losses due to Open Source violations? I’m looking for something that would put some estimated dollars on cases such as D-Link, Linksys, etc.
As friend of the Italian chapter of the Free Software Foundation Europe I reported some GPL violations in the past, and what I learn from the very beginning is that FSF’s actions to enforce the GPL are conducted by confidential discussions, as far as possible. The reason is simple: private negotiations cost much less, and get to a better cooperation.
On the other side I understand the point of view of the insurance company, you can’t charge an high price for a risk with limited documented history of losses. I warmly suggest them to have a look at the gpl-violations.org website, originally founded by Harald Welte., which last post about GPL violations is a must-read for all.
Since suspected violations requires a bit of work, and very often the FSF conduct many investigations at a time, they might be open to a collaboration.
Why don’t they give it a try?
While many are still arguing about Microsoft’s move to send free PC to bloggers, as I learn from my webmaster these days is running an important discussion about advertising on wikipedia.
As in every democracy there are at least two parties, wikipedians pro advertisment and against it.
I’m with Evan Prodromou, one of the wikitravel founders, saying:
I’m not sympathetic with these folks; in fact, I’m in solid opposition. I think that Wikipedia’s huge amount of Web traffic is a resource that the Foundation is squandering. Traffic like Wikipedia’s is worth tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue per year. That’s money that could go to disseminate free (libre and gratis) paperback pocket encyclopedias to millions of schools and millions of children, in their own language, around the world.
It’s irresponsible to abuse that opportunity.
An advertising-fueled Wikimedia Foundation might do lots of good things and Slashdot readers objections to ads doesn’t sound good to me also.
I support advertising on Wikipedia.
Database provider Solid obtained 4 million euros to accelerate the delivery of its open source database products to the enterprise market, from Apax Partners and CapMan.
The funding comes just after Solid’s announcement that solidDBâ„¢ for MySQL outperformed other MySQL transactional database engines in a public benchmark test.
Have you ever wonder why there are no commercial open source in a magic Gartner quadrant?
I found all my suspects confirmed by a post of James McGovern, read the full story.
Last year Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss was one of the most important event in the OS arena.
Today Red Hat is not just a Linux vendor, it’s really becoming an open source powerhouse, as optimisticly predicted a long time ago by Red Hat itself. Now that Red Hat is starting to offer its customers an application software stack, the game is getting harder.
Whether Ellison’s decision to launch the “Unbreakable Linux” initiative was or not an emotional response to Red Hat’s acquisition, it’s true what Goldman Sachs said about the JBoss deal:
Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss begins Red Hat’s migration up the infrastructure-software stack and leads it into direct competition with Oracle and IBM, two important partners of Red Hat.
Oracle, in particular, seems likely to align with a competing Linux distribution in an effort to deliver a bundled, integrated, open source infrastructure stack of its own.
One goes up, one goes down the stack, but both somehow play the gorilla game.
Delivering open-source stacks to customers might turn them in permanent ones, offering them technical integration, broad support, legal indemnification, in one one-stop shop solution. Just the opposite of the marketing approach I early commented, though.
But Increasing returns theory, central for non-rivarly goods, is far to be predictable.
What is known from Paul Romer, is that economic growth and the technological innovation it requires are impossible under perfect competition: they require some degree of monopoly power.
If Red Hat will keep acquiring other OS firms (applications), delivering valuable subscription services, offering a full intellectual property coverage, it might take the most.
But in order to get there, do Red Hat need a mechanism to enforce excludability or not?
P.S. Here I’m assuming that support seller with constraints not proven to be effective for enforcing excludability, as shown by the Oracle move
Roberto, good article.
I totally agree that Red Hat’s future is going to be very interesting. The more they grow into Middleware (IBM, Oracle) and Applications (Oracle), the more that they stand to compete with IBM & Oracle, two vendors who helped Red Hat grow. To be sure, IBM and Oracle (amongst other traditional IT vendors) have benefited extensively from the success of Linux, Red Hat and the acceptance of Open Source.
I’ll make the “bold” prediction that Red Hat will be acquired by, or merge with, a traditional software vendor within the next 5 years. I say “bold” with a laugh, because we’ve already seen news about Oracle possibly acquiring Red Hat.
As the acceptance of open source grows, I believe that traditional software vendors will either acquire open source vendors or build open source divisions to meet customer needs. When this happens, we’ll see a hybrid open source & traditional software business model.
Exciting times to come! 🙂
Thanks Savio for your comment.
Let’s see what people say about Oracle buying Red Hat:
Ellison while speculating about a move into the Linux business is worried about the lack of IP ownership:
“We’re missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux; it makes a lot of sense. That’s the one area where Oracle isn’t a player. We looked at buying Novell, for instance: we look at everything, play this thing out. IBM is Novell’s biggest customer. We buy Novell, IBM says thanks very much, takes the source code and boom, there goes all our money down the drain on day one”
Raven Zachary, from the 451 Group, suggested Ellison was trying to drive down Red Hat’s market capitalization:
“Given the amount of drama involving the PeopleSoft acquisition, you can’t rule out the possibility that this is a move by Oracle to make Red Hat a more affordable acquisition targetâ€
My guess? Hybrid business models are not an easy game to play.
Yeah, I think Oracle will re-evaluate their Linux options once they’ve seen how well/poorly their Unbreakable Linux is doing in 6 months or a year.
>”My guess? Hybrid business models are not an easy game to play.”
I definitely agree with you Roberto.
But with the amount of money traditional software vendors have at their disposal, I’d say it’s more likely that they’d buy their open source counterparts before going open source with all their products.
I guess we’ll see 🙂
I just read Jon Peck suggesting some resolutions to assist you in your pursuit of free software, from supporting a Free Software project to simply spread the word about a product, or strategically donate to a no-profit organization like the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure.
Read his full article and remember not to be too pushy when you give advice!
Paul Murphy talking about the predictable stuff wrote:
By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognised as larger and more active than the Linux community.
how did he know that?
You really think that Solaris will be more popular than Linux?
Well I don’t think so… and I don’t think that Unixfans should start an opinion war between them.
I’m fascinated of all Unix systems or Unix hybrids, including Linux.
I use Linux at home and I just wanted to install opensolaris. Well, after this… I think I will try it for a little time, but nothing more. Why should I leave a product intalled on my system, when the manufacturer of it sees himself as an enemy rather than a friend?
Greets,
Andreas Mueller alias Andy Miles
Honestly I doubt that is going to happen any soon.
I think OpenSolaris might really take over in the long run, it strictly depends on how Sun will eventually adopt a symbiotic approach.
We don’t know yet, but we shall soon see..
On the second of November the Free Software Foundation has unveiled a new Linux distribution based on Ubuntu named gNewSense. On the 30th of December an Ubuntu member wrote a public letter to FSF asking them to recommend Ubuntu instead of gNewSense.
The gNewSense project was started by two Developers, Brian Brazil and Paul O’Malley, who aimed to deliver
the stability of Ubuntu with the addition of freedom.
Unfortunately freedom has a big price this time, since many WiFi and graphic drivers don’t work at all, or at a minimal level, without some proprietary software. That’s why Debian (the code base of Ubuntu) developers felt that they had no choice but to do include proprietary device firmware.
Now that the Free Software Foundation is recommending gNewSense for beginners, Ryan Lortie has written an Open Letter to the FSF raising some issues.
Read the full story and comments.
I understand why the FSF do not support Ubuntu, Stallman has always been clear about it:
Are we working for freedom, or have we replaced that goal with the shallow goal of popularity?
So I fully understand omment I read after posting on digg, while I wanted to underline how different is the meaning of freedom by different OS projects. I already cited Shutlleworth saying:
If you have an interest in being part of a vibrant community that cares about keeping free software widely available and protecting the rights of people to get it free of charge, free to modify, free of murky encumbrances and “undisclosed balance sheet liabilitiesâ€, then please do join us.
Yes, Dilbert is right: everyone is someonelse’s weirdo!
Roberto Galoppini are discussing. 
Andreas Mueller are discussing.
Gregory Kohs 7:27 am on November 12, 2008 Permalink
Of course, Openserving (run my Jimbo Wales) quickly failed, and fully and miserably.
However, his nemesis, Gregory Kohs has been running a wiki successfully on the same model — contributors keep 100% of their own ad revenues — at MyWikiBiz.com. Over 37,000 pages and growing.