Sun throws in the towel on its Linux desktop

Er...I mean, it's Java desktop. As announced at JavaOne and reported here, Sun has decided to put JDS, its Linux desktop product, on the backburner. I'm not surprised, though I will admit to being a bit dismayed. I thought they had done some things really well, and was hoping to see them pull through.

Of the major ISVs, this leaves only one - Novell - carrying the Linux desktop torch. I get to see our work from the inside, and can attest to the innovative things the team is working on. But we're one company. Yes, so is Microsoft, but Microsoft won th market when it was still relatively new. It's a mature market now, and mature markets with stubborn incumbents require open source development communities to displace them.

So, more than Novell, we need Novell (or someone) to build a strong community around the desktop. So far, neither Novell nor any other company has managed to build significant momentum behind the Linux desktop. I think this stems, in part, from the requirement that it be a Linux desktop. We really need to get over that. Linux desktops, for now, have a relatively narrow audience. An open source desktop, however, can have a much wider audience, because it would run on Windows, san souci.

Optaros' open source policy

Stephen published Optaros' open source policy today. It's quite good - takes a pro, yet measured, approach to open source. Worth a look and, given its license, you can incorporate it into your own policy if you'd like.

Back at home...

I spent much of the week on the road, with Tuesday seeing me in Los Angeles, Palo Alto, and Seattle on the same day. In the midst of this hectic travel pace, I spent some plane time reading Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose. I normally won't read anything written within the last 50 years, feeling that anything worth reading will endure. (Hence, no DaVinci Code for me, or many other currently trendy books. If it's worth reading, it will still be read 100 years from now.)

Stegner says something (page 265 of the Penguin version) that really hit me:

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. but it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

Stirring, and I suspect more true today than it was when Stegner wrote it 30 years ago.

Just a thought on a Friday afternoon.

The decline and fall of Microsoft's empire

I'm a big fan of Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I first read it while doing my Masters degree (toward my dissertation on "The End of American Hegemony"), and have referred back to it ever since. You should read it.

One paragraph that made it into my Masters dissertation, and which I'll repeat here, hit me forcibly while meeting with Microsoft yesterday. This meeting had nothing to do with open source, btw, and nothing to do with employment, for those of you who may think I toady up to the Great Beast. :-) I wanted to learn more about one of their product groups, and so spent a few hours with the team.

First, the quote (clipped from here, and then its application:

The rise of a city, which swelled into an empire, may deserve, as a singular prodigy, the reflection of a philosophic mind. But the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long. The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy; the vigour of the military government was relaxed and finally dissolved by the partial institutions of Constantine; and the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians.

Gone. One of the greatest empires this world has known, and yet it vanished into what today is a great country, but not a great empire.

Why? Because it got soft. Well, yesterday at Microsoft, I saw the telltale signs of softness all over the campus. Not in the room with the people I met, who each seemed competent and driven (though perhaps not as much as the Microsofties I've known in the past - these were not universally living off raw meat, though a few of them still had that competitive spark), but rather in the fringe of the company. The posters on the wall. The art lectures offered each week from experts. The somewhat trite HR notices.

I may be reading too much into this periphery. Those posters were not, of course, Microsoft. But they were invitations from within and without the company to enjoy life beyond the company. And they were everywhere. (Probably the art lectures threw me the most - undoubtedly planned as a way to raise the intellectual vigor of its employee base, Microsoft's enlightenment struck me as "immoderate greatness." A company going soft on wine and cheese.)

Will Microsoft collapse tomorrow? No. But without something beyond Microsoft Office 2009 to live for, I somewhat doubt that it will be able to sustain its bank account for many more years. The company has become dull and boring in its product offerings (with the exception of the XBox and some of its Internet offerings which, incidentally, run somewhat separate from the rest of the pack) - everything is too much the same. Windows Mobile looks like Windows desktop. Office hasn't appreciably changed in millennia.

Microsoft needs open source as much as it needs Microsoft. Open source may well be Microsoft's only hope for remaining a vibrant, innovative company.

The open source fetish

So, I spent the last few days on the road, talking with various IT companies (both startups and established vendors). As we went through architecture whiteboarding sessions, I kept being surprised by how much open source I saw built into the architectures of these proprietary software companies. We (OK, I)make such a fetish of open source as a business strategy and development methodology, as if these were ends in themselves. I suppose, in some cases, they are. (SugarCRM, for example, would not be Sugar without the open source distribution angle.)

But all the talk about whether open source will trounce Microsoft and the rest of the proprietary vendors? It's mostly nonsense. Open source is already rife within IT vendors, as well as their customers. It's the little open source library here, the open source CMS there. It's being used all over the place because it's free (as in cost), free (as in bother from pesky vendors, EULAs, etc.), free (as in the ether - you can find it easily with a web search).

"Will open source win" is a dumb question. It already has. The better question goes toward what, in fact, it has won. It has not pillaged the proprietary software vendors, but rather enriched them (and broadened their scope of development). It has not ruined naive customers who installed it and then were sued into oblivion. It's just there, in the browser you're using, the website you're hitting, the tools you're developing with. It's a part of the software ecosystem, not a replacement for it.

It is, in short, the new "normal." And it is very, very normal.

Steve Jobs: Commencement speech at Stanford

Steve Jobs delivered Stanford's Commencement address earlier this month. Fantastic read. Inspiring, and not only to Mac freaks like me. I especially like the following quote, because I've found it to be so accurate in my own life:

None of this [calligraphy classes at Reed College] had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

What looks like chance and serendipity looking forward, looks an awful lot like "intelligent design" (vbg) in retrospect. (And no, I'm not an advocate for teaching creationism in schools. See that comment at left? I'm weird, but not very. :-)

Outfoxed: cool use of social networking

At some point, social networking had to grow up and be relevant. Outfoxed, an interesting new quasi-security application, makes good use of social networking to help guide decisions. Slashdot reported on it today.

Outfoxed takes the rankings that Amazon and others do based on sheer volume, and personalizes it. In the Amazon world, I should like Coldplay because 90% of women aged 20-40 bought it. Except that I don't. Outfoxed points to a future where my friends' recommendations, in automated fashion, will weigh more heavily in my purchasing decisions (as they do the real, tangible world) than someone that does not know me, share my interests, etc. This is good.

The next step will be in making such ranking seamless. del.ici.ous, Flickr, and other sites that attempt to wrangle community to their ends only go half-way, because they require conscious, intelligent effort on the parts of users. I have to tag appropriately, which means I must have some knowledge of the site/photo in question, and must (here's the killer) take the time to tag them. I, personally, rarely take the time to do this (and, judging from the Flickr searches I've tried in the past few weeks, most people are like me, as I can never find the tags I want).

I'd be willing to let a program snoop on my preferences if I was sure those preferences (where I browse, what I buy) would only be visible to a trusted group of friends and associates. I'd be willing to expand that circle of influence if my activities were anonymized to the point that I, as a trusted entity, were known within the system, but I, as Matt Asay who lives at ----, were not. I don't mind people knowing my musical tastes, furniture preferences, etc. But I'd rather not that they ask me if my wife liked my selection of flowers for Mother's Day.

Dream on, Michael Dell

So, Michael Dell wants to ship Mac OS X machines. Dream on, Michael. You are the antithesis of Steve Jobs. Steve gives us The Incredibles, OS X, iPod, etc. Innovative entertainment, and innovative technology. You? You give us cheap boxes. Keep them. (In my experience they break within a year or so, anyway.)

Btw, we don't need a "Dell" of open source, as Ian Murdock has sometimes said he'd like Progeny to be. Open source already has the commodity aspect down. Instead, we need an Apple of open source. Someone to make open source the coveted software/hardware.

Value disproportionate to the size of the community

Today someone sent me a Plaxo request to update my contact details for them. I did so, and then was invited by Plaxo to partake of this wonderful benefit for myself. (Yippee....) However, I knew from experience that they really didn't mean it. They only cared about me to the extent that I run on Windows and use Outlook. Nope. Nope. I was out of luck.

This happens pretty routinely. Google desktop search? Windows. LinkedIn plug-ins? Outlook. Etc. It's reasonable that they would do so - the largest market lies with Windows, Outlook, and IE.

However, it struck me today that this Windows/Outlook/IE (or IE-O-W, if you prefer) crowd is probably not the vociferous bunch that drives Slashdot, gets religious about products, etc. In short, they're likely the silent majority that makes it tens times harder to spread positive word of mouth.

Imagine that, instead, a company came out with its product first for the Linux crowd. A group of people (small, in comparison) which is active in blog space, lives on mailing lists, and generally talks up cool new technology that makes its way to their platform. Why wouldn't a company start with this vocal community, rather than throwing it a scrap at the tail-end of a product's lifecycle, when the developers get a few spare cycles? Why not market first to the uber-geeks, and let them pitch to the uber-sheep?

Is open source risky?

No, according to Stephe Walli, a good friend and Optaros' VP of Open Source Development Strategy. Actually, Stephe doesn't say that open source isn't risky - he just says that it's no more risky than proprietary/commercially-licensed software. In some ways, it's actually less risky.

Take a look. It's worth a read.

I want to be a greasemonkey

Just heard about Greasemonkey for the first time yesterday. What is it? According to Dive into Greasemonkey, it is:

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to write scripts that alter the web pages you visit. You can use it to make a web site more readable or more usable. You can fix rendering bugs that the site owner can't be bothered to fix themselves. You can alter pages so they work better with assistive technologies that speak a web page out loud or convert it to Braille. You can even automatically retrieve data from other sites to make two sites more interconnected.

Very, very cool. Like much of open source, it puts control back in the hands of the customer/user.

Now I just need someone to make it easy for a non-techie user like me.

Open sourcing your logo

OK, so it's not really open source. But it's all about community, and how a network is better than a single company writing code (or whatever).

The Wall Street Journal yesterday reported [Subscription required] on LogoWorks, a Utah-based company that I've known about for some time, but never got around to blogging. Until now.

LogoWorks employs a network of freelance graphic design artists to competitively bid for and create logos for end users (mostly SME in size). The article gives an example of a job, and why the community approach yields benefits:

The price was low, in part, because the designers were all free-lancers spread across the country working on their own computers, many at home, and didn't require office space or health benefits. They completed their jobs based on [the customer's] written specs, which they received online, never meeting or directly speaking to the client. When the sample logos were done, designers simply uploaded their work for his critique.... [T]he client ... knew only that he got a half-dozen logo options at a fraction of what he'd previously paid.
"It democratizes services for small businesses," says Morgan Lynch, LogoWorks' founder and CEO. "If you can get two people to work on a project and then throw one away, why not do it?"

LogoWorks' operational structure illustrates just how dramatically the Internet has eased the entry and lowered the operational costs for many small businesses. With a Java-based software platform that the company spent $2 million developing, LogoWorks now manages some 200 free-lance designers working anywhere in the world at any hour.

Because nearly all business is conducted online and via the telephone, the corporate headquarters can be based in Lindon, Utah, where real-estate prices and the cost of living are lower than in major design metropolises. Those savings enable the company to offer its services to other businesses at a fraction of the cost they might otherwise have paid. Some 90% of its clients are small firms, although the company has done work for bigger firms such as Pfizer, Sears and Toyota.

This obviously has close corollaries in the open source world. Yet I wonder why more open source companies haven't deployed a similar payment scheme? Ximian (now Novell) was an early innovator of the bounty system, but it strikes me that bounties may not go far enough in blending a company with its community.

The article identifies the "secret sauce" in LogoWorks' rewards system: ego.

While there are many incarnations of the online free-lance business model for services such as copywriting and legal work, LogoWorks' secret sauce is an internal-ranking system that requires designers to be critiqued after every job by their peers.

Here's how it works: customers fill out a creative brief online and pick their price: from $265 (two designers and four to six concepts) to $549 (five designers and 10 to 12 concepts). The job is posted to a private area of the LogoWorks Web site where graphic designers sign up on a first-come, first-served basis.

The pay scale fluctuates. Designers are designated at expert, midlevel, or entry-level rank based on a point scale of 0 to 100. They all start at entry level, and their points and pay go up and down based on how their designs fare both with clients and with their peers. For instance, entry-level designers get paid $25 per project; midlevel, $30; and experts, $40.

Pleasing the customer pays most: The designer whose work gets chosen earns an additional $50 plus 10 points. However, they also get critiqued by their peers after every job in a fashion mimicking the old bell curve -- that is, someone's designs are always deemed best, while someone else's are deemed worst for a particular project.

Points are added or taken away based on these rankings. Fall below 80 points, and you get bumped to the midlevel pay scale. Fall below 30 and you're back at entry level.

Designers acknowledge that in addition to a financial incentive, there's an ego factor when it comes to peer ranking. "It keeps it competitive and forces everyone to do a good job," says Columbus, Ohio, designer Michael Lancaster, a.k.a. "artboy," at LogoWorks. Since 2001, he says, he's taken in $52,000 crafting designs for LogoWorks.

That's significant money for a freelance worker. That kind of money motivates. Open source can learn from this.

Mutually assured...standardization?

I spoke at a Wall Street Journal event (Enterprise Ventures) yesterday with two friends, Irwin Gross (Worldview Technology Partners) and John Roberts (SugarCRM). It's always nice to be on a panel with sharp, relevant people, especially with a good moderator (Charles Forelle, Wall Street Journal). I get good ideas from smart people like them.

A few thoughts occurred to me during the panel discussion:

• Mutually assured standardization. If various companies are each using open source to target profitable businesses within their competitors, isn't the net effect of this mutually assured standardization (playing off the "mutually assured destruction" phrase attached to the nuclear arms race)? That is, won't all areas of the software stack, in time, be pushed into open source (through Adam Smith's 'invisible hand,' as it were? This is a great thing for customers and, I believe, for the competitors themselves. It drives the industry forward as vendors must increasingly create and sell value, rather than selling lock-in. I continue to believe that Microsoft could do with much more competition if it hopes to ever really improve its product line (which has remained roughly stagnant for, oh, a decade).
  
• First mover advantage in open source is critical. Because there is a finite open source community base, with a finite attention span, growing a project big and early seems critical to launching a successful open source startup. SugarCRM has done this with the CRM market. John Roberts gets quoted in every major publication whenever open source is brought up now and, more importantly, his business is thriving. Timing matters. [Note: It would be interesting to see what the take-up is of Red Hat's JOnAS, coming in after JBoss established a stronghold.]
  
• Open source will grow, not shrink, markets. John was quoted in the most recent BusinessWeek saying, "We're turning a $10 billion market space into a $1 billion market space." I know John was going for effect here (and echoing similar comments from Marten Mickos), but what he says is simply not true. Every technology market has grown in proportion to its pricing: the lower the price of the technology, the more widely it has been adopted, and the larger the market has grown. Open source brings enterprise technology to the much larger SME market. That's a good thing.

Anyway, it was a great panel. It left me more energized than ever in the promise of commercial open source.

Open source EAI: The next Big Thing?

I've been impressed by the wide range of open source application startups that are emerging, several of the most promising of which will be highlighted at this fall's Open Source Business Conference (OSBC). There are the SugarCRMs, Compieres, etc. that you've already heard of, but many new ones like ImpactPLM (Product Lifecycle Management), JasperSoft (Business Analytics), etc. that you've likely never seen. Come to OSBC and see what the open source business community has to offer....

However, at some point, this growing array of open source applications will necessitate integration. Outside the open source world, EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) is a massive market and, according to a Baseline Magazine survey/study, EAI is CIOs' top priority for 2005, with surveyed companies spending an average of $12.1 million on EAI this year. (Business Analytics/Intelligence, by the way, is second with an average of $11.1 in IT spend per company.)

There is, or soon will be, a need for open source EAI. It strikes me that integration of open source applications should be easier than in the proprietary world because of the transparency of the code. I don't even need SugarCRM's permission to write connectors between it and, say, Compiere or OpenMFG. Tighter, easier integration, with transparency into the integration "glue," as well. Seems like a winning combination.

And, of course, there will always be the need to tie these new applications into a framework of legacy applications, but I think the initial market is likely an SMB play where you're essentially delivering an integrated, certified suite of open source applications - the SpikeSource of applications, as it were.

I don't know their relative quality, but there are a range of open source EAI projects. Here are a few Java-based products. And you can see how active these projects are on Sourceforge by clicking here.

I'd be interested in learning from a developer/user how useful the existing open source EAI products are. Mature, or do they have a ways to go? Regardless, this seems like a good area for venture investment. As for me, a lay user, I'd love to have the flexibility of an open source application, without having these emerging applications silo'd from the rest. (Even on my desktop, I like EAI. It's why I use Entourage instead of Apple's Mail, iCal, Address Book - I like the "suite" approach. However, I just downloaded one of Paul Berkowitz's scripts to auto-sync Entourage and iCal so that I can publish my calendar from iCal - Paul has made a nice little business for himself in consumer-level EAI for Mac users.

Changing face of open source community

It's basically just a rehash of things I've said here, but it's a bit more systematic than the blog often is. IT Manager's Journal has an article I wrote recently on the evolution of the open source community. Enjoy. Or not.

IE grows up, but still stinks

Couldn't agree with Gizmodo more on this one. Microsoft is innovative, yes, but only when forced to compete. Bradley Tipp, National System Engineer for Microsoft in the UK, said as much when we shared a panel in London a year ago. This time, the competitive response may be too little, too late.

Where 2.0, indeed

I'm heading to O'Reilly's Where 2.0 Conference at the end of the month. Looking forward to it, though at first I was baffled by the conference theme. Leave it to Tim to take us out to the bleeding edge...again and again.

Anyway, as part of the Where 2.0 world, this article struck me as interesting. Says the article:

Russell Buckley is discussing a slightly different, but similar, application that would let people leave location-based reminders for themselves in various places. While Russell isn't sure how people will actually use it, there certainly are a few interesting ideas -- such as reminding yourself which shops had certain products you might want to buy. Another idea would require being able to access the meta-data in another way, so that you could look at a map of reminders and recognize how you could string together a series of errands.

From there, it's not hard to see how some other extensions on this idea could be useful. Combined with a social networking system, it could be possible to leave location-based reminders for your friends, telling them which shops or restaurants to check out. Or, it could be useful in reminding you of the name of the bartender or maitre d' at a certain restaurant.

Given that my brain shrinks with every new improvement in my PIM suite (I can't remember anything anymore - my To Do list fills that function for me), I can see lots of cool things to do with location-based tags. Once my kids become teenagers (perish the thought), I can see requiring them to leave "notes" as to where they are on a date, so that I know where to send the infantry if they're late getting home.

Or, leaving my children alone for a minute, I like the concept of "nag-ivation" that this could create, as this article points out. Because my brain no longer functions, I'd love to have my To Do list synched with location-based services so that, rather than drive by the bank 50 times without depositing the money I had been meaning to deposit, my GSM phone would SMS me once it saw me heading in the right direction. I'd never have to think again....

Clustering Bluetooth

Interesting article on some (still early) research on clustering Bluetooth devices. Kind of like a flock of birds, as it were. From the article:

A typical flock of 2,000 starlings contains as much brain tissue as a single human being. Of course, you can't link together bird brains. Not real birds, anyway. But a small group of roboticists at the University of Essex are designing a system to wirelessly network a swarm of tiny, Bluetooth-enabled unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) into a cluster of flying computers acting as one processor more powerful than the sum of its bots.

Someday, flocks of shoebox-sized UAVs called UltraSwarms could act as a distributed eye in the sky, monitoring highway traffic, aiding in crowd control or even entertainment at massive sports arenas or, of course, embarking on military surveillance missions. Much of the data they gather -- video from onboard cameras, for example -- will be dealt with in the sky, delivering only "news you can use" to a central command. For any of these applications to fly though, the researchers must weave together two threads in computer science research: cluster computing and swarm intelligence.

Take a look. Lots of cool implications.

Will the real OSI please stand up?

OK, so I can't let this one go. Rereading OSI President Michael Tiemann's comments on Microsoft's reaching out to OSI for 'constructive dialogue,' it baffles me that Michael said what he said. OSI is a neutral (open source promoting) industry body, yet Michael seems to be doing all that he can to limit the size and scope of the open source community. I don't get it.

Michael first says that OSI will take Microsoft's overture "at face value," but then reveals apparent insincerity (and degrades OSI in the process) with the following:

"We are happy if they are willing to take a new position and a new look. Nothing could be better than for Microsoft to embrace fair competition and abandon their so unsuccessful past practices."

Conciliatory? Is this supposed to make the dialogue easier? I'm not sure why Michael, as president of OSI, is trying to make this dialogue harder than it need be, but it certainly seems counterproductive to what he was appointed to do/be. (And, btw, Michael, I'm not sure I'd characterize Microsoft's "past practices" as "unsuccessful." Last time I checked, Red Hat wouldn't sneeze at tens of billions of dollars in the bank. We may not like some of their competitive practices, but it would be a stretch to call them "unsuccessful.")

Which brings us back to OSI. What is it? OSI's website tells us that

Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a non-profit corporation dedicated to managing and promoting the Open Source Definition for the good of the community, specifically through the OSI Certified Open Source Software certification mark and program.

So, it's not neutral in the sense of having to love Microsoft, Red Hat, or any vendor. But it does indicate that the way it promotes the Open Source Definition for the good of the community is by reviewing and approving licenses.

OSI is the open source license guardian. I'm not sure how this positions it to be a good focal point for Microsoft's discussions. Chalk that one up to Microsoft's ignorance. I'm also not sure why this role privileges OSI to take pot shots at a company that, if taken at face value, is trying to work with the open source community. Chalk that up to a silly pride on OSI's part.

If OSI is the open source license guardian, then I think that role is best filled by an organization that is more neutral than not. It should look to the merits of the requests placed before it, and not speculate on politics, competition, and the like. It does not compete with Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, Zend, SugarCRM, etc. etc. It is a non-profit, industry neutral body which is pro-open source community.

Therefore, it (and its representatives) need to take a little more care to best fulfill the organization's role, and not deprecate existing and potential open source community members. This means opening up the kimono to Microsoft until they give probable cause for not taking its overture at face value. The community is wider than the few who show up to OSI board meetings.

And no, I'm not ignorant of "Get the Facts" and other Microsoft attempts to discredit open source. I am, however, fully cognizant of similar comments among many in the current open source "faithful" who once shared those same feelings. Embracing open source is not as easy as some would make it out to be. It takes shifting one's mindset which, it must be said, is hard enough for one person, much less an entire company. It may well be true that of Microsoft's 50,000+ employees, they sometimes disagree on things. (We only have 6 in my family, and we disagree on lots of things more important than open source software.) But there are helpful ways to deal with this, and hurtful ways.

I think Michael, at his core, understands this. The eWeek article quotes him as saying, when asked about those in the community who still perceive Microsoft as an enemy to be avoided at all costs,

"So, what's the price of being wrong? There are some prices that can't be paid and others where you say, 'boy, that was a learning experience.' But if you don't try, you'll never know."

Exactly. So let's put away the shotgun and instead listen, cautiously optimistic.

Next time, I'd ask the OSI to not launch warheads at the first sign of a white flag, signaling a momentary (and perhaps perpetual?) ceasefire. It's too early (and always inappropriate) to taunt someone even as they're asking for help. (At my kids' soccer games, it's called being a 'bad sport.') OSI is a neutral promoter of the open source community and you, Michael, represent OSI when wearing your OSI hat. Please start acting like it. You've had constructive, off-the-record conversations with Microsoft and others before. It's OK to be nice and productive in print, too.

The "Linux" desktop market

I was playing around with GIMP last night. This is the result. Well, one of them. It's a very robust, and very free, Photoshop-like open source program. It's been around for years.

And yet I'm guessing few people reading this have ever heard of it, much less used it.

Why? How is it that such an incredible program is so thinly used? I think there are a few reasons. One is that GIMP has no marketing budget. No company behind it, actively trying to make money. There should be an opportunity here, if nothing else a low-octane retail distribution business for 2-3 people. (Frankly, I think the same is true of FireFox, OpenOffice, and a few other programs, including VLC.)

Another reason may have to do with Linux. That is, people still confuse open source with Linux, and assume that open source applications must, of necessity, be Linux-constrained. The most visible "Linux" programs, however, are anything but: FireFox and OpenOffice run on everything. Same with GIMP, VLC, GAIM (Windows and Linux - no Mac), and a host of others. This goes back to my post on Microsoft - when will it realize that Microsoft, not the Linux world, has an amazing open source story platform story to tell (which it can use to shore up Windows, by adding value)?

Anyway, give GIMP a try. You won't be disappointed. (And, btw, the "filter" I used to create the picture above is Oil Painting. You should try Photocopy, Cubist, and GIMPressionism, too. Very cool.)

Lessig vs. Epstein on (digital) property rights

Larry Lessig starts off the debate, and does so with his trademark (pun intended) flair and flourish. Unfortunately, in this instance, I think his arguments for free culture (and for dampening the intellectual property restraints on that culture) denigrate into sloganeering. He's a brilliant legal thinker - in this article, he just sounds like an earnest entertainer.

As one example, Larry argues that DRM will dramatically, negatively affect the way we "remix" culture. But he's wrong. He spends a paragraph talking about how we've historically remixed culture: orally, around the campfire, over the phone, etc. But then he takes a huge leap, declaring that DRM (which cripples our ability to transfer and read/listen to digital works, not our ability to talk about them) will stimy our ability to remix. How? As noted, our ability to share the ideas has not increased or decreased because of DRM. [Note that I'm not a fan of DRM. I think it's a foolish solution to a non-problem. But I don't like the way Larry circumlocutes the real quibble with his argument.] At any rate, his problem should be less with DRM (technology), and more with the hyper-protective, litigious attorneys driving it. Lawyers stink.]

What he really means is that remix opportunities have expanded with digitization, and he'd like the law to go along with those opportunities. He wants more remix opportunities than we've traditionally had, in other words. That's fine, but he'd do well to call that out, rather than pleading the case with sophist aplomb.

This happens repeatedly in his article. As Epstein chides, Larry oftenn glosses over real, logical argument in favor of personal anecdote and crowd-pandering. As another example, Larry celebrates Brazil's ramrodding of free software down its citizens' throats, but for all the wrong reasons:

The cause is not hard to see: according to the United States, Brazil, for example, is a pirate nation. The International Intellectual Property Alliance (which, its name notwithstanding, represents U.S. copyright interests) estimates that this piracy cost United States copyright industries close to $1 billion last year. Consequently, the U.S. has begun to put pressure on Brazil. That pressure has produced an unsurprising reaction against the stuff that makes it possible for Brazil to be a pirate nation--proprietary code and proprietary culture.

For there's another way to reckon the cost of the proprietary. According to the Brazilian government, for example, Brazil sends close to $1 billion to the north each year just to pay for software licenses. So as the Brazilians see it, tongue firmly in cheek, this proprietary stuff is a bad thing all around--costing the U.S. $1 billion, and Brazil $1 billion as well.

The obvious solution is to dump the proprietary stuff. So the Brazilian government is pushing itself and the nation to substitute free software for proprietary software. As one member of the government said during a speech at the World Social Forum, "We're against software piracy. We believe Microsoft's rights should be respected. And the simplest way to respect their rights is for Brazilians everywhere to switch to free software."

No, the simplest way to respect Microsoft's rights would be for people to pay what they owe. The answer to social problems is not simply to lower the bar such that everyone becomes law abiding.

[By the same token, Microsoft would do well to price its products consistent with a given market's ability to pay. I or my company may be able to afford its $500 license, but this is almost certainly not true for most of the world's population. Just as with the music and movie industries, Microsoft may be creating the very problem it abhors, then trying to sue and scream its way out of the problem, rather than solving the root of the problem.]

Richard Epstein counters all this with a persuasive argument that property rights matter.

These simple observations can be generalized. Property rights are organized to minimize the obstacles to human prosperity and well-being by maximizing the public benefit that emerges from the self-interested actions of many individuals. Common property works when we want, say, to travel freely on a river. Private property works when the development and trade of separable assets creates enormous gains. But the justification for private rights in everything from sponge cake to software has to be social. Private property provides the right incentives for innovation, from which nonowners benefit through voluntary exchange.

In general, private property is a great bargain for society. Let's assume that Bill Gates's net worth is $45 billion. That's a lot, but it's no big deal compared to the gains his customers have received from purchasing Microsoft products. My copy of Microsoft Office may have cost me $500, but that is a tiny fraction of my gains in productivity. The most important gains from all forms of property, whether tangible or intellectual, accrue to the nonowner who buys the products of the owner. The price one actually pays for a thing is almost always less than the amount one would pay if necessary. The difference, called consumer surplus, is a pure gain for the buyer, and it exists because private ownership gave the seller the incentive to create or maintain the thing. In other words, granting a temporary patent or copyright monopoly to get the benefit of a new product now--rather than having to wait for some free product later on--is usually a good deal for both the producer and the consumer. This system of property rights isn't antithetical to free software or "free culture." Indeed, it is their very foundation.

I think Epstein misstates his case somewhat, in that my productivity gains from Microsoft Office are probably not as great as he supposes, but it is absolutely the case that it would take me a huge amount of work to replicate what Microsoft has done. It's far more efficient to reward Microsoft for what they did than to hope that the earth's X billion populants will do so, individually, one by one.

Epstein further points out that intellectual property protection is necessary for the 90% (or more) of the world's creative populace for whom tangible, monetary compensation is important:

As John Locke would have it, a just society recognizes the natural rights of its citizens, including the right to protection of their productive labor. But copyright has an additional justification: it fosters huge positive contributions to culture, in the form of novels, movies, manuals, music, and other works. Some creators are motivated solely by the desire to create and would be happy to distribute their works under simple terms such as a Creative Commons license requiring attribution only. But for most authors, compensation matters, and we increase their production by limiting the rights of others to copy their work. Of course, authors who claim copyright protection today necessarily build on the efforts of prior writers. But Lessig's rhapsodic praise of free culture ignores the necessary trade-offs between producers and users that any mature system of copyright must take into account.

I ultimately side with Epstein on this. As he notes, "The great threat to free culture is not proprietary software. It is the dogmatic insistence that one form of industrial organization is a priori better than its rivals." Amen. When will we learn that open source software is good not because it is Good, but because it can be cheaper, more robust, enable more efficient distribution, etc.

As one of my favorite philosophers, William James, might say, truth is what works. To the extent that open source works (for vendors and buyers), it is "Good." There is no Faustian bargain in using solely proprietary software, or a mixed-source model. There is nothing righteous or holy about open source. It just sometimes works much better than proprietary software. Isn't this good enough?

"Free" software will continue its capitalist climb because it is a very capitalist phenomenon, as I've argued elsewhere and as Epstein argues here. It depends on intellectual property rights for its very existence. This is not a bad thing.

Rackable deserves its success

I first met Tom Barton, CEO of Rackable, in 2000. His father, then a professor of mine at Stanford, made the introduction, because I was (in addition to full-time studies) working full-time for Lineo, an embedded Linux startup, and Tom knew "a little" about Linux/open source. He had recently left Red Hat, where he had managed 2/3 of the company's revenue (SVP of Client Services), and was an EIR at Lightspeed Venture Partners. I was raising money.

Anyway, left Lightspeed to take the helm of Rackable, and has proven his worth many times over. Rackable, which builds Linux-based high-performance computing clusters, pulled in over $100M in 2004, and has been ramping revenues as a torrid pace. It has filed for an IPO, and will hopefully do so soon.

As seems to be the case with every ex-Red Hatter that I've known, Tom is happy (I won't say smug ;-) to be trouncing his alma mater in terms of growth and, soon, revenues. (This despite having to aggressively compete for business, rather than owning a dominant share of an exploding market, largely through historical accident.) I sat down with him in his office 6-9 months ago, and he told me Rackable would surpass Red Hat in profit margin, as well.

If he's right, and I would never bet against Tom, that says something about Red Hat's model. This may sound disingenuous given my affiliation with Novell, but I really want Red Hat to succeed. It's good for open source to have a company to look to as an IPO and ongoing financial success. But the market doesn't seem to believe Red Hat's story, despite its impressive subscription and revenue growth. In part this is because Red Hat's stock price remains grossly inflated: its P/E ratio is 51.91 (Industry average is 28.72 ).

More tellingly, the company's model simply makes it hard for it to ramp revenues/profit/etc. as fast as traditional software models do or, frankly, as alternative open source business models do. I think it will get better as the company has finally caught up with its revenue recognition constraints, and will be able to plow subscription-dollars into growing the company (It is on a hiring binge right now, for example), but Wall Street appears to be taking a wait-and-see approach. (See table below for RHAT ratios and industry comparisons.)

Anyway, back to Rackable. Tom, and Rackable, deserve their success. It's a great company, super-efficiently run.

How to be a Silicon Valley loser

Gary Rivlin (New York Times) has done it again. In an exceptional Sunday New York Times piece on Silicon Valley's "Brat Pack," Rivlin (unwittingly? I don't think so...) captures just what is wrong with Silicon Valley's ubergeeks. Insatiable pride/oneupmanship bred from unearned wealth.

Living through the Bubble in Silicon Valley, I, too, worried that as I wasn't a billionaire by 30, I must be a loser. But you know what? I moved away from the Valley, "detoxed," and soon realized that the Silicon Valley was almost wholly a myth. Most people that "make it" there would have made as much or more by starting dry cleaning or plumbing businesses anywhere else. The "wealth" of Silicon Valley might be a bit more widely distributed, but not much.

Anyway, the problem with Silicon Valley is that the money there is largely unearned. This leads to silly personal net worth calculations like these which Rivlin highlights:

Double-digit millionaires make up the area's middle class, financially independent but still striving to keep pace. They live comfortably but not ostentatiously, at least by local standards. Keeping up with the Joneses takes on a whole new meaning when your next-door neighbor drives a 660-horsepower Ferrari that starts at $643,000 and the guy down the street owns a $38 million Gulfstream V. Even a used Cessna Citation X private jet costs in the neighborhood of $12 million, plus more than half a million a year for upkeep. And the price for a modest vineyard in Napa County? If you have to ask. . . .

Finally, there are the true have-everythings, the area's centimillionaires. ''To feel truly rich in Silicon Valley,'' Miller says, ''you have to be worth in the three-digit millions.'' By those measurements, Marc Andreessen is rich. Peter Thiel is, too. But most of the serial entrepreneurs in Pincus's tribe of ''comers'' fall into the low to middle range of this so-called middle class.

The navel-gazing hubris of this kind of thinking, especially in light of what people live on outside Silicon Valley, and outside the few richest countries on earth, is staggering.

What's driving this unsated appetite for more? It's really not greed, in my experience. It's immaturity. Rivlin dances around this:

And yet, despite [Mark Pincus', founder of Tribe.net] accomplishments -- and the relatively majestic size of his bank account -- Pincus suffers from something of an inferiority complex. ''There's an A-list here, and then there's everyone else,'' he says. ''And I'm not A-list.''...

''Those of us who haven't yet attained rock-star status, we still need a good script,'' Pincus says. ''Everyone knows that in Hollywood, too many people are doing dysfunctional things for all the wrong reasons,'' he says, ''but somehow it creates something positive and successful. It's the same thing here.'' Or, as Eric Greenberg puts it: ''All of us -- all of us serial entrepreneurs -- go through the same postpartum depression. There's the same soul searching and need for reinvention. It's almost like we have to prove ourselves all over again.''

Perhaps therein lies Silicon Valley's secret weapon as this cohort tries to make its way into the ultraselect ranks of the have-everythings -- the collective insecurities that Sunil Paul, Pincus's former partner, says characterize those who experienced the ''glory years of being the generation's whiz kids and do-no-wrong Midas-touch millionaires, then suffered the depression and financial disaster of the dot-com bust when the phrase 'dot-com' became an epithet.''

"Insecurity," if you'd like, Gary, but it's really immaturity and ego, and more the former.

When life gives you something you don't deserve - and, no, 80-hour work weeks don't magically "deserve" $100M, or even $1M (lots of other professions work just as hard, and do work that is far nobler, like physicians) - you don't know how to properly measure its worth. I think many/most of these dot-com millionaires actually think they did something to deserve the money they have. They didn't. They got lucky, and more power to them for that. But what they need to do now is find something useful to do with their lives. Another startup may augment their bank accounts, but they're going to find that it doesn't fill the gaping holes in their lives, leaving them continually dissatisfied.

Concludes Sunil Paul, founder of Brightmail,

''We are not ready to stop changing the world.'

No, Sunil. You apparently are not ready to start. Your startups will do little to nothing to change the world. Spending a little time with your four-year twins? Now there's a way to have a major impact.

I mean, seriously. Who can honestly say that Netscape has made a major impact on their lives? Marc Andreessen, Jim Clark, and that's about it. Or Google (gasp! Did he really say that about Google? How dare he?!)? I like Google's search technology - it's made it easier for me to find recipes and the like. But I use it a negligible part of my life. Most of my time is spent being a person, not searching for things.

In short, by overestimating the importance of technology, we overestimate the importance of the Larry's and the Sergey's of the world. I'm glad they have their money - really - but at a certain point, it's time to move beyond patting ourselves on the back for the ability to be complete losers with no lives and only one goal: more. Why do we want more? So that we can keep up with the Thiels. But why? I had lunch with Peter a month or so after he sold PayPal to eBay. He spent much of the lunch wondering aloud which state he should move to so as to shield his money from state taxes. Peter's a great person, at his core, and so ultimately decided that it just didn't matter. But for most of the Silicon Valley "elite," most of their lives are spent in such inane wonderings, and then working their 80+ hour work weeks so that they can...say that they did?

Complete losers.

Open source publishing?

I attended a violin recital last night, performed by one of my neighbors. As I enjoyed the music, however, I couldn't help but notice how flustered the piano accompanist sometimes seemed to be, as she flicked to the next page, tried to hold down an unruly sheet, etc. It occurred to me that musicians would make an excellent market for "e-paper"/electronic readers. iPods are too small, screen-wise, but once the technology is available (and the price low enough), I think this would make for a great business.

Fast forward to lunch, today, when I started through the Wall Street Journal. One of the cover stories caught my eye, talking about the plague of returned books that publishers have to manage. I hadn't realized that book publishers (along with movie and music industries) have to take back unsold books, a practice that originated in the Depression.

As the article states:

In most other industries, manufacturers don't have to take back products that don't sell. If a department store can't move a line of clothing, for example, the items are pitched at lower prices. The book industry, by contrast, has been saddled with this system since the Depression, when publishers told struggling bookstores they could return unwanted books as long as they kept ordering new titles. Returns also persist in the DVD and music businesses, and to a lesser extent in videogames.

The reverse tidal flood of books hurts every aspect of the business, one already struggling with weak sales. Authors don't get royalties on unsold books. Publishers sell returned copies at distressed prices after paying to truck them thousands of miles around the country. Books that can't be sold at any price are pulped for a total loss. "The most expensive thing we do in our warehouse is process returns," says John Sargent, chief executive officer of Germany's Holtzbrinck Publishers, which owns such imprints as Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Henry Holt and St. Martin's Press.

Worst of all, the increasing rate of returns has helped ignite a destructive cycle. So many books come back that publishers say they have raised prices to compensate for the anticipated lost revenue. That in turn makes many books harder to sell, creating more returns. Between 1985 and 2003, hardcover book prices rose 118%, far outpacing the 71% gain in the Consumer Price Index during that period, according to Fordham's Mr. Greco.

There are a number of different reasons behind this strange practice, not the least of which is that publishers are afraid to abandon it. But it also strikes me as something that could eventually be solved by electronic publishing - the hardware remains, the "software" (book) goes away. It seems that all that is wanting is display technology that will feel less like staring at a computer screen, and more like paper.

Enter SourceBeat to fill the void. At least, for open source technology books. I think I've blogged the company before, but the recital + WSJ have me thinking more about it. SourceBeat recognizes that technical books, especially when dealing with open source projects (MySQL, JBoss, SugarCRM, etc.) are likely to be out-of-date the day they're published, given the publishing cycle. So, SourceBeat delivers updates constantly to the computer where they can read the "books" at their leisure, and on a medium well-suited for technical books: a computer. It's a great solution for open source technology books. When will we get a SourceBeat for sheet music, Harry Potter, and the rest?

Personal: Lillian Hale Asay Born

So, most of you won't care about this posting, but nothing's keeping you here....

Just thought I'd announce that Lillian Hale Asay ("Lily") joined two sisters, one brother, and two befuddled parents ("Did we really want four?") on Friday, May 27, 2005.

For Fabrizio's and Mark's information, she's an Arsenal supporter. Her first word was "Thiery."

Novell and mixed source

This week Novell (truth in advertising - Novell employs me) introduced a cool 'mixed source' solution stack that includes software from Novell, JBoss and Oracle and servers from HP. This is the first offering under Novell's recently launched Validated Configuration Program - a harbringer of many things to come.

So, I like the "mixed message." I have to smile, though, because I called Mike Evans (VP, Partner Development, Red Hat, and a good friend) the other day and he likened his company to a "purebred" and mine to...well, a non-purebred. Mike meant it to be humorous, and it was. (Mike's Detroit candor often makes me laugh out loud.) But I do think it highlights two opposing camps in open source (though, of course, there are many more than just two): those who think everything should be open, and those who recognize not only that everything won't be open, but that there is no compelling reason that it should be so.

Personally, I think the higher up the stack you go, the less important it is that the code be open. That is, from a lock-in perspective, it's somewhat unimportant to me that my email client be open, whereas I care deeply that my servers run open software. In other words, I don't mind feature lock-in, but I don't like platform lock-in. (But you use a Mac, you say. Well, I'm primarily talking about server and embedded software, and less about desktop, though even on the desktop I don't care as much about a closed platform so long as data formats are open.)

Anyway, those who think there are marginal differences between the commercial Linux variants need to take a closer look. There are significant technology differences, and even more profound philosophical differences.

Microsoft teams up with...Red Hat

Microsoft is apparently extending its olive branch even further into the open source community, inviting Michael Tiemann to a sit-down "dialogue" with senior Microsoft officials (likely Brad Smith, general counsel), as eWeek reports. I'm all for dialogue - I just wonder why they chose Tiemann?

You see, Tiemann doesn't really work for an open source company. He works for Red Hat. I suppose targeting him must have something to do with his presidential status at OSI, but I don't think OSI represents the open source world, either, anymore. (This hearkens back to my argument - it's hard to define who, exactly, represents open source now, given its march toward greater and greater commercialization.) Besides, I think Tiemann has a hard time removing his Red Hat to consider OSI matters.

Were I Microsoft, I probably would have truly chosen a community to talk with, i.e., more than one person (and certainly not a fierce partisan who works for the closest thing to Microsoft in the open source world). I'd have picked Marten Mickos (MySQL), Bob Bickel or Marc Fleury (JBoss), Andrew Morton, someone from Apache (Brian?), and one other (Danese?). In other words, I'd try to find a balance between commercial and development communities, and not adopt the use(less) fiction that any one person can represent the community (and, I have to say it again, certainly not Tiemann - there are people at Red Hat who could fill the role, including Szulik, but he's not one of them).

In short, I applaud Microsoft's efforts to talk with the open source world, though I think it's more posturing than anything else. Microsoft has no (or need not have) problems with open source - its competitor is Linux, and it has just chosen to sit down with the embodiment of that competitor. I can't think of anything productive that could possibly come from Microsoft and Red Hat breaking bread together. They're not going to partner; they're not going to stop competing aggressively against each other (nor should they). So, what's the point? Score a few PR points for Microsoft.

$.99 forever

I'm listening to a fantastic song by the Stereophonics right now (Dakota). I don't know how I went for nearly a decade without hearing the band (perhaps because they've bigger in the UK than in the US, much like Radiohead, which I also only recently discovered), but I'm glad to have remediated the fault.

I just paid $.99 on iTunes for "Dakota" and another $.99 for "Rewind." I'm testing a few other songs through LimeWire, which I'll buy if they're worth hearing more than 2-3 times. (It's my "radio test." If it's not worth hearing more often than I would if I just listened to the radio - almost never - than it's not worth buying, or keeping in my music library.)

To put this in perspective, it costs me close to $.99 for a bottle of Diet Coke. I pay more for Lindt chocolate. Both of these are fine while they last, but they endure for a few seconds in my mouth and near-forever on my expanding waist. I can enjoy Morrissey's songs repeatedly, forever. Isn't that worth paying for?

My only point in all this is that the music industry should be promoting its case in this way, rather than through lawsuits. Remind people of how small an amount $.99 really is, especially relative to the trite, ephemeral junk for which we routinely pay.

(Btw, another great song, which Bryce Roberts clued me into, is Great Lake Swimmers' "Moving Pictures Silent Films." Or Interpol's "Evil." (I don't watch The OC, so I had to discover this latter song through the radio. Radio is still useful for something....))

Stephen Walli on OpenOffice migration

Stephe has a good post on his move to OpenOffice. I'm not quite as sanguine about OpenOffice as he - still feels a little too industrial to me - not enough polish, too much functionality stuffed in, making it feel like something that will get you there, but won't make you look cool on the way. Even so, I agree with him that OpenOffice on Windows XP is likely going to cannibalize a reasonable chunk of Microsoft's Office market. Now we just need to get OpenOffice looking as nice as FireFox does....

Windows as an open source platform

A few weeks back, Stephe Walli posted a shot over Microsoft's bow. Actually, Stephe is still in full detox mode, and I think sometimes gets a little too worked up about his alma mater, but he makes some good points, all the same.

Stephe asks why, if Microsoft suddenly cares so much about the open source community and learning from it, doesn't it simply join the community? While at Microsoft, Stephe helped to launch an open source project or three, so he has street cred on the matter. Microsoft has toe-dipped in open source, in other words, but he'd like to see the company do more.

I have an alternative proposition to make, one that I've encouraged Jason to speak about at OSBC Boston later this year. (November 1-2, 2005) Windows is arguably the world's most pervasive platform (probably equal to or greater than the Internet at this point, frankly, as many who use Windows don't actively use the 'Net, or do so at dial-up speeds, which is basically the same as not using it at all. Why not foster robust open source communities on Windows and IE?

The defaults, of course, are Linux and FireFox. This is already happening. Even with closed-source software, for example, FireFox is increasingly getting equal time to IE: I don't believe I saw a single demo at this year's DEMO conference that wasn't running on FireFox, instead of IE. Open source platforms are gaining mindshare - it's only a matter of time before that mindshare translates into serious market share.

Yes, Windows is still king/queen for now, but I can see this starting to fade...not through the enterprise (which is dull and conservative), but rather through the consumer space. Already, many of the apps I willingly, gladly use on my computers (Windows, Mac, and Linux) are open source. Not because they're open source, but because they're better. From FireFox to VLC (it plays EVERYTHING), my desktop increasingly looks like an open source playground, no matter the office suite I may be using at any given time.

So, again, why not foster Windows as a breeding ground for open source application innovation? Why concede that ground to Linux, or leave it to happenstance that developers will find their way to Windows? This is a pain-free, easy-to-kickstart program for Microsoft that could yield tangible benefits.

And yet Microsoft does nothing.

Is EnterpriseDB wearing clothes?

Meaning, is Dave Rosenberg right, and EnterpriseDB really doesn't employ any of the relevant PostgreSQL developers? When I interviewed Andy (CEO, EnterpriseDB), I never thought to ask about EnterpriseDB's involvement in the PostgreSQL development community - I took it as a given that they'd be heavily involved. Maybe I assumed too much?

Of course, Dave may have been reading too much into this eWeek article. As Andy seems to imply in this article, EnterpriseDB has no intention to be the PostgreSQL community in the way MySQL, the company, is the same as the MySQL development community (more or less - the point is, MySQL, the company, does the vast majority of development work. It's not open source in the sense of a wide-ranging, code-sharing community). As I read it, EnterpriseDB simply wants to be a contributing member of the PostgreSQL community...though many/most of its contributions won't actually make it back into the PostgreSQL code base. Kind of like what Apple has done with BSD and Konqueror.

Is this a bad thing?

No, not necessarily. It's just a different way of looking at open source. Is Google "bad" because it has borrowed Linux, heavily modified it, and given nothing back? I don't think so. It's just a different kind of community member. Moreover, as I've said before, I think much of the value of the open source world going forward will be in creating a massive code foundation for interesting software/services...which will likely not be open source (Amazon, eBay, Google, Friendster...EnterpriseDB?).

Would it be a Good Idea for EnterpriseDB to employ a few relevant PostgreSQL developers (as, frankly, Greenplum has with the Postgres community, in bringing Josh Berkus on board)? Sure, if for no other reason than to help guide the company's decisions relative to the code in the future. Open source developers tend to be candid critics - this is a good thing.

But we also should be careful to avoid the mistaken notion that there should be a landgrab for developers. It's naive and silly to think that hiring Havoc Penington or Nat Friedman suddenly makes you a successful Linux desktop company, for example. It's helpful, but you still have to build a killer product that customers want.

We also need to move past the silly notion that because something is open source, it's automatically a candidate for an excellent company/IPO/riches beyond one's wildest imagination. Slapping an open source label on a weak product doesn't make it sell (or shouldn't - if it currently does, that fad will soon die out). Slapping a company around an open source project just because it's open source doesn't instantly guarantee a good company, either. (In fact, in many ways it may be twice as difficult, as the nuances of successful open source companies are still, IMO, harder to capture, manage, and leverage than with the more widely understood proprietary model.)

Satisfying real customer demands: this is what great companies do, open or closed.

Community vs. commercial

So, a friend IM'd me this morning to tell me he was leaving SUSE...forever. SUSE is an operating system, not his wife, so while I was concerned, it wasn't something that required marital therapy or anything drastic.

Still, I was intrigued by his reasoning. He felt that there wasn't enough community support for SUSE. Or Fedora/Red Hat (though he didn't explicitly say so in this thread, I know he doesn't think much of Fedora/Red Hat from previous conversations, and for similar reasons). His choice?

Ubuntu.

Ubuntu came out of nowhere. I hadn't heard of it or, more likely, paid it little attention, till about six months ago. Then it started entering into every conversation I had (about Linux - I'm not THAT much of a loser. I do talk about things other than open source. Occasionally. Sometimes.).

I should clarify that statement. It entered into my conversations with non-enterprise types who wanted Linux on their desktop/etc. Ubuntu may be something that the CIO of Fidelity might want on his personal desktop, but it's not something he's installing throughout the enterprise. It's still very much a community-focused and based product.

But that is my point. Or, rather, it was the point of my friend. In our rush to commercialize Linux and other open source projects, we tend to cloud the community aspect, which is a danger. By this I don't mean that it's a danger to freedom and peace-loving people everywhere, but rather that it's a danger to the companies employing open source business strategies. That is, the ones who have most to gain from community are often the most egregious abusers of it, intentionally or not.

My friend said that, in his opinion, the best companies are those that foster communities and then supplement them with add-ons, extensions, etc. But community comes first. The worst are those that want to own everything and let the community nibble at the edges.

While I don't think this is always true (or even much of the time - I can think of great companies on both sides), I do think his core point - nurturing community makes for a great company (even, at times, honestly criticizing one's own products/company, as Ubuntu does - is valid. It's much like Tim O'Reilly's architecture of participation idea - users like to buy products that are really moving communities that they join, rather than something a company inflicts upon them. Amazon versus BarnesandNoble.com as the paradigmatic example. (Again, no, enterprises don't care about communities as much but then, enterprises are slow-moving dinosaurs. I like this take on enterprise software from Paul Kedrosky's blog.)

Which brings us to Microsoft. (Doesn't everything? :-) At the least, why haven't they set up a site where users can "develop" document templates? I can download a limited range of such templates from microsoft.com if I'm so inclined (though they have much less for the Mac than for Windows), but I might want the innovative invoice you've created, rather than the one Microsoft imposes on me. This doesn't even involve sharing source code - it's just sharing ideas. Why not? Apple does it with Tiger widgets. Others do it, too. Why can't Microsoft?