Matt Asay’s Top Priorities and Goals
At the beginning of February Matt Asay moved from Alfresco to Canonical, and Matt’s blog activity already reflects his career change and I asked Matt about his top priorities in the new role. (More …)
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Don are discussing. 
Roberto Galoppini
EU Oracle-Sun Investigation: Hobbyists and Hecklers at Work
On the 3rd of September the European Commission has decided to conduct a phase two inquiry, which includes forwarding surveys to Oracle’s competitors and customers as well as organizing “crowded“ private hearings.
While lobbyists of both sides are arguing to convince the EC that the deal may – or may not – limit competition in the database market, Monty Widenius asks hecklers for help to save mySQL, and Oracle makes commitments.
Florian Mueller - known EU campaigner and strategist, involved also in the software patents war – shared with me some of his current ideas, and I took the chance to speculate around the events.
Roberto Galoppini, 
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Stefano Maffulli
Setting up a non profit foundation may be an elegant solution to the problem. I think Sun should have enough experience dealing with communities (Java Community Process, for example). I believe that the non profit foundation would help also OpenOffice.org
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Roberto Galoppini
Oracle or Sun maybe or maybe not interested in takin part in the MySQL foundation, it could be named FreeSQL or something like that to avoid all IP issues in case. I believe a relative high number of vendors could have an interest to support it.
OOo is different, very few players could be really interested and all in all the EU didn’t mention the office suite and without any pressure I can hardly imagine any change at Sun or Oracle.
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A. Rebentisch
So Monty sells MySQL to SUN and then wants it back for free when SUN is overtaken by Oracle. I find that a bit creative use of antitrust law for such objectives. The more critical technology of the merger is probably Java.
I am sure Monty could sell certification/support instead of licenses, regardless of the software “code” license. Florian’s relicensing request put the stakes a bit high.
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Roberto Galoppini
Apparently Monty has been taken pretty seriously from the EU, and he is definitely one of the most important voices taking part into this antitrust investigation. So said, I believe that Monty’s concerns about the viability of his business approach shouldn’t be relevant in this case, though. What matters to me is code production sustainability, and nothing else.
Roberto Galoppini
How to Make CodePlex Sexy for Business
The mission of the CodePlex Foundation - enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities – could be a roaring success. But in order to  create an open, neutral and business friendly environment first some work has to be done.
Roberto Galoppini
The not-so-intuitive Intuition of Intuit
The lines between open source and proprietary vendors’ software strategies continue to blur. Intuit announced the launch of a community site for developers interested in creating connected on line applications for small businesses, providing them with a number of open source tools.
Roberto Galoppini
SourceForge Community Awards and the Business Case for OpenOffice.org
Twelve SourceForge community choice awards have been assigned to nine different open source projects. PortableApps won four awards, included “Best Project”. OpenOffice.org, awarded with 3 prizes last year, won ‘just’ an award, resulting the “best project for Government”, getting an amazing share of votes (48.27%).
Despite PortableApps is today’s most amazing victory, I want to join the OpenOffice.org debate, recently raised by Matt Asay after Kevin Turner’s speech at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.
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Philip Copeman
Roberto – liked you article on Open Office. Tell me if you think we can do business on TurboCASH Accounting.
Roberto Galoppini
Open Source Business Strategy: OpenERP and Long Term Sustainability
Matt Asay says that creating an open-source software able to attract significant outside development contributions is difficult, yet important. Quid pro quo paradigms, as Stephane Croisier calls them, can foster more sustainable open source communities. Both Jahia and OpenERP found their way to foster external participations.
Roberto Galoppini
Open Source ECM: Alfresco Business Strategy
Alfresco meetup for community and customers took place here in Rome two weeks ago, featuring both John Newton and John Powell, respectively Alfresco CTO and CEO.
I asked few questions to John Powell, learning more about Alfresco licensing story, and about differences between Alfresco Enterprise Edition and Alfresco Labs.
Matt Asay
Roberto, I never advocated a move to the Apache license. I simply raised a question. I’m surprised by the amount of misunderstanding that arises from it. Are people so stuck in their own way of thinking that they can’t allow others to ask questions and probe new ways of doing business?
You call our licensing history “hectic.” I call it progressive. We’ve consistently matched the right license for the right phase of the company’s development. I won’t pretend that we always knew exactly why we did X or Z, but then, who does?
You suggest our strategy makes it hard for us to work with governments, and yet government remains one of our top-three verticals. We’re making millions upon millions of dollars with government customers. I am bewildered by your suggestion there.
And as for Funambol, we have the same model (or very similar) as it does. The only difference is that Funambol has given up on trying to sell to enterprise customers, and this is our main type of customer. Other than that, there really is no difference.
So…I’m confused by your post a bit.
Roberto Galoppini
Hi Matt,
glad to hear back from you.
I said you start advocating a different license – Apache, not the BSD as I mistakenly wrote initially – because you wrote that Apache licensing could well be even better than GPL. I added I don’t think you will change the license, though. So said, changing three times in a row the license in a couple of years sounds a bit hectic to me. I totally agree we can name it also progressive. I made my personal guess (just a guess) towards GPLv3 in force of the fact that a company can change (for the better) its decisions.
Europe is now looking into open source procurement, did you read it the OSS procurement guideline draft? I would recommend at least the “Acquiring open source software without tenders” and “Tenders specifying open source software or open standards” paragraphs.
How do think proprietary vendors will face this issue?
The difference between Funambol’s and Alfresco’s approach is not merely the customer target, but in the way they distinguish customers from users.
The [Funambol] core value proposition it is about making carriers life easy to provision users’ phones, manage devices (creation, modification, etc) as well as send OTA commands. As a matter of fact enterprises do not need all these features and richness of configurations, and Funambol doesn’t need to upsell its community.
Similar differentiations happen elsewhere, think of how Sangoma funds open source projects delivering appliances that need to be certified (i.e. conformance testing). This is not a critic, but a fact: the client segment is an important building block of any so called (open source) business model.
I like Alfresco, and I linked three different Alfresco PRs giving a picture of how Alfresco’s business strategy is effective. Still I think it is interesting to express opinions on Alfresco’s strategy, maybe giving feedback in a constructive manner (like for the European public procurement thing).
Roberto Galoppini
Open Source Jobs: Are They Hot or Not?
Savio Rodrigues cleaned up an old blog post retitling it after a tweet from Bob Sutor, to tell people interested in open source to not consider just Red Hat and alike, but think also go work at IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Tibco, etc.
Many IT jobs call for open source skills, and also Matt Asay called for the shortage of open source talent. What about average salary of open source jobs?
Savio Rodrigues
Hi Roberto, yes, my point has always been in the battle of oss vs. commercial, the winners will be ones who replace the “vs.” with “and”.
Roberto Galoppini
OpenOffice.org tricks, OpenOffice.org Pervasiveness, OOo Compare, OpenOffice.org License Extension: OpenOffice.org links, 13-03-2009
Openoffice.org: 7 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do – An essay of OpenOffice.org tricks, with pointers to other good post on the subject.
Does OpenOffice have 11 million active U.S. users? – Matt Asay on OpenOffice.org US pervasiveness, look at the numbers!
Don 8:47 pm on March 1, 2010 Permalink
Matt, many thanks for your post.
There is no mention here of the messages that were once dear to Canonical’s heart, freedom, free software. Is this vision now to be sacrificed to the alter of enterprise computing?
A really interesting question to answer would be, how does Canonical propose to bring freedom to the cloud?
Some clarity around these topics would be great.
Joel West 10:54 pm on March 2, 2010 Permalink
Don,
Matt answers your question: it’s a business, that has lots of potential for growth and profit for its employees and owners. If Canonical increases its market share and installed base, that will increase the viability of Linux as a platform — including the supply of applications and the willingness of firms to consider it as a desktop alternative. But in the end, Jane and Matt’s job is to make a buck.
Joel