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  • 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 10:25 am on December 15, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    GNU Economy: Sun, the perfect franchisor 

    As I mentioned before, appropriating returns is always critical and I think that Franchising OS might be a promising business model. Unfortunately not many software firms might drive excellence in the OS market, here why it makes perfect sense for Sun:

    • Sun forges inside a best-of-breed Operative System, an office automation suite tool, the Java framework, like other development tools;
      .
    • Sun’s brand is on of the strongest in the ICT world, recognized as one of the most innovative and forehead ones;
      .
    • Sun has a symbiotic approach to OS communities, tracking contributes and experiencing different organisations’ models with few important projects;
      .
    • Sun has the power to build an ecosystem where IP protection and indemnification, warranty, benchmarking and dependability analysis and mediation services are delivered by other partners, bundling and unbundling them depending on customers’ needs;
      .
    • Sun would be the first to deploy an OS franchising model, being the first mover has a chance and a challenge. Since franchising might overlap with classical channel partner programs, special due diligence has to be paid in this respect;
      .
    • IDC and Forrester studies on Open Source market show how customers needs are related mostly to basic services, therefore is possible to implement procedures and fares to deliver such services at fixed time, fixed costs;
      .
    • The Italian Portal Java Open Business has worked with Italian SMBs and developers, creating consensus and posing basis to develop further collaborations. In this respect Italy might be the most cost effective area to develop a business case.
      .

    Does it make sense to you?

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 8:27 am on December 15, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Blog! the book 

    I’m a newbie blogger, and few days ago I bought Blog! How the newest media revolution is changing politics business and culture, by David Kline and Dan Burstein.

    It’s a collection of interviews with influential and well-known bloggers, and I found it simple adn effective. I believe that a complex and various phenomen like the blog might be revealed just through different opinions, and I like very much their approach.

    As I’m more interested in business and corporate blog, I start reading “Business and Economics” chapter. I found resources like “The Corporate Manifesto” , the innovative marketing methodology Double Loop Marketing or the rewarding revenue sharing policies set by Weblogs.

    I agree with the author David Kline, who concisely pointed out:

    Ultimately, blogging is all about empowerment.
    And woe be to any politician or businessman who tries to ignore the roar of today’s blog-enabled citizenry.

    By the way I sorted out that part of the Italian translation was done by my dear friend Antonella Beccaria, journalist, entepreneur and last but not list my patient Webmaster.

     

    • zeno 4:36 pm on December 15, 2006 Permalink

      What a serendipity! I’ve just posted onto my blog about ethics and web 2.0. I think you gonna win the mara of the week award! 🙂

      welcome to the blogosphere
      zeno

    • Dawud Miracle 3:22 pm on March 9, 2007 Permalink

      Roberto, when you began as a new blogger, did you feel welcome? I wonder if there are things that we fellow bloggers can do to help newbie bloggers and nonbloggers find their way into the blogosphere? There’s a number of barriers for people, especially the non-techie types. But I wonder if the biggest barrier isn’t us. Is the blogosphere too cliquey? What do you think? You’re certainly welcome to view the post I’ve written and add your two cents to the conversation.

  • Roberto Galoppini 5:59 pm on December 14, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Novell: “Your Linux is ready” road show 

    Today I stepped by the roman chapter of Novel’s “Your Linux is ready” tour. In the past years I went to many Novell’s roadshows, to be honest most of the times no many people were attending usually. But this time I was impressed by the number of attendees, there were no spare seats in the whole room.

    Questions posed were quite technical, people were asking nuts and bolts about virtualization and clustering capabilities, but few were interested in document format compatibility too.

    My guess? People are not struggling to get a Linux Desktop – yes, Novell’s CTO Jeff Jaffe is too optimistic – but it’s clear that the Microsoft-Novell agreement got public interest. People I met today were professionals, not just curious.

    Did they all read the Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates survey?

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 9:25 am on December 14, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    GNU Economy: the franchising model 

    Getting back to customer and vendor perspectives we might better describe the OSS market in term of offer and demand, as shortly described in the table below.

    Customer Perspective
    The Customer demands for ..a possible fine answer
    Buyable business services fixed-time/fixed-price services
    Multiple vendor support Retention by SLA
    Enterprise Level Support “Pyramidal” approach
    Technological certainty Continuous support
    Indemnification IP Coverage
    Hardware/Software compliance Stack Assurance
    Vendor Perspective
    The Vendor wants The impact
    Partiecipating to tech clubs Driving standards
    Savings by efficiency Community building
    Branding OS Alliances
    Tracking production Forging inside
    Appropriating returns Franchising

    Large to Medium customers look for enterprise level vendors, but vendors independently of their dimension can not offer personalization or integration of hundreds of OSS. A pyramidal approach (mediation) is needed to deliver value added services on a large number of platforms/programs.

    Uncertainty, due to scarce integration of OSS stacks, might be overrun by dependability and benchmarking services, in order to assure that the whole software environment works properly and performs.

    Hardware and software compatibility is an issue too.

    Mitigating Intellectual Property risks, in terms of copyright or patent infringements, might be interesting for large enterprise, since they might be sued as happened in the SCO case.

    Vendors having symbiotic approach to OS Communities, know that sharing a standard, in terms of formats, protocols or a code base, requires active participation to body standard or to product roadmap definition: thread off between costs and benefits it’s strongly related to market positioning and other environmental considerations.

    Reducing software production costs is feasible if there are large amounts of volunteers and/or if the Author has a well-defined partnership program to motivate participation.

    Branding OSS is costly and is not clear how to appropriate returns from marketing commons, therefore alliances sounds the most effective way to brand OS products sharing costs and benefits.

    Tracking software production is feasible if and only if the vendor is forging within its organisation, again vendor need to be the software’s author.

    There are just two ways to make money from OSS, named “best code here” and “best knowledge here” approaches, but none of them scale very well, unless you know how:

    • to become the market leader;
      .
    • to save money through cooperative software development.

    But appropriating returns is always critical and Franchising might be a good idea, at least for one of you..

     

  • 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 8:30 am on December 13, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    GNU Economy: Customer and Vendor perspectives 

    The idea of using Open Source software is getting more and more realistic everyday; independent consultants have conducted extensive research and concluded that for quite a few IT solutions Open Source offers a worthwhile alternative.

    Customer and Vendor perspectives toward OSS are different, and the following table represent them in short, below an analysis of them and some thoughts about how to make business out of it.

    Customer Perspective
    Make a wish.. ..granted?
    Savings on licensing Now. And than?
    Avoiding vendors’ lock-in GRAM/GRAS/OSMM/BRR
    Broad support Mostly SMBs
    Indemnification IP Uncertainty
    Warranty “as is”
    Vendor Perspective
    Make a wish.. ..granted?
    Sharing standards/innovation Participation costs
    Savings on sw production Symbiotic costs
    Brand Recognition Partnership costs
    High quality Production tracking costs
    Skill availability Mediation costs

    Customers expect to save money, but they’re wondering about what’s next. Despite cost of exit might be lower with OSS, since rarely data are stored in proprietary formats within open source solution, it’s true that CIOs always wonder about the future.

    Avoiding lock-in is told to be another important issue, but choosing the “right” platform, that means solutions broadly supported and generally recognized as mature (see GRAM, OSMM and BRR), it’s a must.

    Large to medium companies want to cope with large to medium vendors, but quite often OSS is deployed mostly by SMBs.

    Some companies can afford indemnification costs, and are willing to in order to reduce uncertainty.

    Last but not least some companies desire a form of warranties, and can afford to pay for this.

    About vendors perspectives as shown with the linux-embedded case, sharing standards or participating to sequential innovation is a nice to have, and it implies costs of membership, effort and so on.

    Reducing production costs is welcome, but it requires a symbiotic approach and, as commercial Linux distribution companies know, it’s not for free.

    Vendors like to work with strong brands, since makes easier to commercialize their solutions, but very few OSS have a (unique) corporate actor willing to spend money to make it known.

    About tracking software production only community driven by a corporate or a foundation can manage to do it, and making it compulsory, besides low bug density measured in famous OS, project traceability is a difficult task.

    Integration of OSS stack might be tricky, since a vendor has a limited number of workers and therefore of expertise, mediation to other OS project might be desirable.

    Coming to the Italian market, an essay produced by IDC this spring show how the majority of companies interviewed in a mixed champion made of 150 firms, the most wanted services are the basic ones (“assistenza” aka support , “installazione” aka installation and “manutenzione” aka maintenance).The worldwide situation is quite similar, as shown by other studies conducted by Forrester, where CIO of large companies answering the question “Where do you run Linux today” reported 44% within web/e-mail thier.

    The IDC essay investigated also who is on duty for analysis of the migration:

    • consulting firm are chosen by 38% of interviewed;
      .
    • 59% of them did it by themselves.

    Implementation is deployed by vendors for 39% of interviewed, where 66% did it with internal personnel.

    There is clearly space for ICT outsourcing in this area.

     

  • 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.

     

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