Oracle doesn't get it: open source is not a price tag

ZDNet is reporting that Oracle is due to announce a stripped-down, free database. Why? To try to defend against the rising tide of open source databases:

The database heavyweight on Tuesday is expected to announce the beta release of Oracle 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE), which will be generally available by the end of the year. It is targeted at students, small organizations and software vendors that could embed the Oracle database with an application.

The latest edition is the same as other databases in Oracle's lineup but is limited in usage. It can only run servers with one processor, with 4GB of disk memory and 1GB of memory.

In other words, it mostly stinks, but at least it's free! What Oracle apparently hasn't understood is that free, as in price, is just one part of the open source puzzle. But it's not necessarily the most important one.

My prediction? This move will be completely forgotten. Few to nobody will use it. And, 6-12 months from now, Oracle will have to give a real response to the open source threat it faces. Tossing a lightweight database in front of a fast-moving market that wants free, open, and killer databases just won't fly.

You can do better than this, Oracle.

Book Review: The Keystone Advantage (B+/A-)

I just finished plowing through The Keystone Advantage, a very good book that Arjen recommended to me. (Many thanks, Arjen!)

Here's the premise. We live in an interconnected world, but sometimes in technology we don't fully embrace this concept. Or, if we do, we don't behave in ways that capitalize on the insight and help our firms. The technology landscape is a network of networks, with keystones at the hubs, niche players surrounding the hubs, and dominators consuming the hubs and niche players. Understanding one's role in the technology universe (most of us are niche players), and playing that role well, can help us to thrive as a company.

Simple premise. But the book offers some insights that I found valuable. But first, a bit more detail on the terminology:

Keystone and dominator strategies can be pursued by firms that occupy important hubs in their business networks. Keystone strategies shape and coordinate the ecosystem, largely by the dissemination of platforms that form a foundation for ecosystem innovation and operations. These contrast with dominator strategies, which attack the ecosystem, absorbing and integrating external assets into internal operations. Niche strategies can be pursued by the much larger number of firms that make up the bulk of the ecosystem. These firms emphasize differentiation by focusing on unique capabilities and leveraging key assets provided by others. (10)

With this last point in mind, the authors suggest that "the crucial battle is not between individual firms but between networks of firms. Innovation and operations have become a collective activity" (11).

Exactly. This, by the way, is how we need to think about open source. An ecosystem. A network. "The goal is no longer to lock out entire vertical stacks with proprietary advantage, but to be the best in a chosen area of specialization" (23). Bingo. Let Alfresco be the best in content management, SugarCRM in CRM, JBoss in application servers, etc. Tie them together (maybe with SpikeSource?), each focusing on what it does best, and use that to deliver value to customers. The sum much greater than the individual parts.

Some excerpts with commentary:

Both Wal-Mart and Microsoft deliberately chose to shape the collective performance of the networks of firms that depend on them by offering platforms on which others could build. Both firms were successful because they appreciated the impact these platforms could have on these business networks and took steps to realize this impact by creating real opportunities for other firms. (3)

Iansiti and Levien (the authors) make this important point throughout the book: the best companies create as much opportunity as they consume. Dominators suck value out of a network, whereas keystones enable and foster value. This isn't to say that they don't often compete with their niche players (the constellation of partners/competitors/etc. that live in the ecosystem enabled by their platform), but that the overall effect they have on an industry is positive.

I believe Microsoft was definitely a "keystone" in its youth (and much more open than its mainframe peers (31), but has been forced to consume the value networks around it in order to grow. At its most basic level, this can be seen in the API counts in Windows (no longer the baseline operating system it once was, Microsoft continues to dump everything the US Justice Department will allow it to put into Windows), as the authors discuss (56), but a more detailed view emerges once you look at its acquisitions in the past few years. It's clearly on a "domination" path.

The authors disagree (see especially 85), but I don't think they fully appreciate what Microsoft's acquisitions of Great Plains and other companies mean for the industry. Microsoft's "integrated innovation" translates into one massive software offering - an ecosystem/network in and of itself. I don't see how this can fit the authors' definition of a keystone. It sounds precisely like a dominator.

What we need, however, are more keystones. Or, rather, better keystones. I think Novell or Red Hat make ideal keystones, but Red Hat doesn't seem interested in an open source ecosystem (my subjective, biased view, but one that seems justified by the many open source startups that can't seem to catch Red Hat's attention, despite doing very interesting things) while Novell is still in the early stages of growing one (its MarketStart program is an example).

Hubs can play an enormously important role in the collective performance of a network. They have the potential to increase the ease with which different network nodes connect to each other and thereby decrease the complexity involved in the coordination and integration efforts necessary for improving productivity and achieving growth....

The biological literature suggests that a species that serves as a hub in a food web or other network of ecosystem interactions can improve its overall chances of survival in the face of change by providing benfits to the ecosystem as a whole....Removal of biological keystones can have dramatic cascading effects through the entire ecosystem , whereas removal of other species, even species involved in many interactions, can have little effect beyond the loss of those connections....

Keystones can enhance the productivity of their ecosystems in a variety of ways. Some do so by directly removing or limiting the number of species that would otherwise disproportionately reduce productivity. [A possible counter to my statement about Red Hat above? i.e., Maybe Red Hat plays a filtering role?]....Keystones can also enhance productivity from the bottom up by providing a foundation on which other species rely....

Naturally, the most direct way for a keystone to ensure its continued survival is to directly maintain the stability of its ecosystem. Therefore it is to be expected that keystones act to encourage stability directly in addition to encouraging it indirectly through their effect on diversity. (67-70)

Again, keystones thrive because they help others to thrive. It's not about sucking value out of a network. It's about putting in as much as you get out, and making sure your partners (and, in a way, your competitors) also thrive. There's much more money in a healthy ecosystem than in a monopoly.

On the latter...

A classic dominator acts to integrate vertically or horizontally to directly control and own a large proportion of a network. In so doing, dominators become directly and solely responsible for the majority of both value capture and value creation in their networks, leaving little opportunity for the emergence of a meaningful ecosystem. A value dominator, or hub landlord, in contrast, eschews control of the network and instead pursues control of value extraction alone [like Enron]. In so doing it provides little new value to its network, while at the same time taking what value there is for itself, leaving a starved and unstable ecosystem around it. (74)

In either scenario, the dominator is a net consumer of value in the ecosystem, at least as others are concerned.

It's an interesting read, with direct implications on the budding open source ecosystem. I don't think we have any strong keystones yet, though each member of the LAMP stack (+ JBoss) has the ability to become such. MySQL strikes me as being well on its way. I also think that some players can be both niche players in the wider industry, and keystones within their subsegments. So, SugarCRM is creating an open source CRM "market" (network) around itself, as are Alfresco and others.

Open source is a community of communities of communities. Those that recognize this and actively try to create and share value will be the "keystones" around which this industry revives and thrives.

Latte, flirting, and rejection

Not being a coffee drinker, I'm sure some of the sting in this hilarious (true? not sure, but who cares?) excerpt from an IRC chat session is lost on me. (Many thanks to Marc at O'Reilly for the link.)

Microsoft continues to grow

Say what you will, but Microsoft is not showing signs of going away. Yes, its MSN unit has been weak relative to Yahoo! and Google, but MSN has always been a bit of a dog. (Sorry, Jason.) The Xbox is also apparently not doing as well as expected, though from my perspective (I have a few teenage neighbors who seem to do nothing besides play Xbox all day and night) it's thriving to the detriment of humankind. :-) Windows Mobile, however, is on a 50% boom.

Again, for a company Microsoft's size, a 6% rise in revenues and 16% rise in operating profit is exceptional. Microsoft has its problems, but making money is not yet one of them. Looks like I need to step up my efforts to bury it.... :-)

Write code, get $50,000 and a free trip to OSBC San Francisco (Realm Systems)

This popped up on my OSBC Google alert this morning. (Yes, I criticize them, but I still use them. :-) I had no idea, but am flattered that OSBC has become a destination resort of sorts. Here's the scoop:

Realm Systems is giving away $50,000 and a free trip to the Open Source Business Conference in February (14-15, 2006). What do you have to do to get it? (And which is the bigger prize, the money or the insight you'll glean at OSBC? OK, I agree. It's the money.)

From the press release:

Realm Systems announces the start of Project BlackDog, a skills contest offering prizes in five categories, including a $50,000 grand prize for the best application created or ported to run on BlackDog(TM). The contest started October 15 and ends January 15, 2006. Prizes will also be awarded for the most bugs reported that are determined to be critical to BlackDog functionality. Hundreds of developers have already received their units in anticipation of creating the grand-prize winning application and being recognized at a key industry conference [That would be OSBC].

For those of you unfamiliar with Realm Systems (and BlackDog), Realm is a very cool technology company that has a mobile enterprise platform. What does this mean? I don't know. What it meant the last time I was debriefed by them was that they had created a super-cool mobile personal server that effectively allows you to run your apps (Windows-based, Linux-based, MacOS-based) on any other system. Just plug the little thumb-drive-like device to the USB port and away it goes - no performance degradation, and highly secure. Very cool.

Realm has since expanded its product line, and is looking for help from the open source community, bounty-style. It sounds like Project BlackDog relates to this MPS product:

BlackDog represents a new breed of device that redefines mobile computing. BlackDog is a pocket-sized, fully self-contained Linux server with a built-in biometric reader and Debian-based Linux operating system. Unlike any other mobile computing device, BlackDog contains its own processor, memory and storage, and is completely powered by the USB port of a host computer -- no external power adapter required.

It also sounds like the company has scaled back its ambition (slightly) to only allow Linux-based apps to run on other operating systems. Still, that's pretty cool (no WINE required). Take a look, earn some money, and join us at OSBC San Francisco. (Along with Mitch Kapor, Peter Thiel (Founder, PayPal), Kim Polese, Nick Carr (Does IT Matter?), John Roberts (SugarCRM), John Powell (Alfresco), Marten Mickos, and others.)

The rise of commercial open source (IDG News)

China Martens has a great article on the rise of open source, as well as caution about a possible Open Source 2.0 bubble. She did a long interview with me for the story, but gets great feedback from Jo Tango (Highland Capital Partners), Robin Vasan (Mayfield), and others for the story. Check it out.

(Btw, we're at 400 and counting for OSBC Boston. Great for a first-time event. I'm especially glad to see the high CIO percentage we have. Now if we can just get them to sit through all the sessions.... :-)

The future is here: TagTagging launches!!!!

Matthew Langham has done it again. Not content with his day job, Matthew (aka "Silent Penguin") has launched TagTagger, the newest sensation in Web 2.0. I'm a bit giddy just thinking about the possibilities. Tags upon tags upon...tags.

Head over to TagTagger and join the revolution!


(Awesome, Matthew. 6:27 AM, and I'm going to wake my kids with my laughing.)

Will the "pretenders" please stand up?

UPDATED

Matthew Szulik has a point. Several, actually. I'm just not sure if any of them are valid. Matthew raises a useful issue, but does so in a way that I find counter-productive.

From the Register:

Szulik...[said] it was wrong to think companies like Red Hat could control what the open source community builds and that it's important to stay true to the premise of the Gnu General Public License (GPL).

Agreed. But it does make one wonder why Red Hat employs four of the top 11 Linux kernel developers. Why? Surely there's a reason for this. In part, Red Hat's argument to customers (which I've heard back from them) is that this gives Red Hat superior leverage to support the Linux kernel. Why? Because they have a better sense for where it's going....Ah. Caught. I can think of a few others, but I'd be interested to hear Matthew's rationale (as he once told me that Red Hat didn't buy a certain open source company - though they had actively considered it - because they had access to the source code, anyway, so why bother owning the company when they could access the code? Indeed).

Companies that don't remain true to the GPL or who don't endorse patent-free software violate the concept of open source and are hurting innovation, Szulik said.

Like IBM, the company that has more patents than any other, and yet did more to make Linux a commercial reality (sorry, Matthew) than any other company, by a huge margin?

And I'm still waiting to hear why adherence to the GPL (instead of BSD or other open source licenses) is the true mark of an open source purist. I think the Apache guys might have something to say about this....Besides, my recent post notwithstanding, what innovation isn't happening that Matthew is concerned about?

Companies who violate open source, such as those who claim to provide open source but who add "proprietary" layers to the technology, lack legitimacy.

Well, I think I know who he's aiming this at, but I also think it falls flat. Not the least reason is that Red Hat has been accused of this very same thing: among others were the comments leveled by r0ml at OSCON. See also Ian's recap.)

Matthew might have found it interesting to watch Richard Stallman castigate Michael Tiemann at the Harvard Business School/MIT Open Source Symposium two years ago - Stallman accused Red Hat of being untrue to open source, flouting the GPL, and generally being a poor open source citizen. Michael, normally erudite, flailed to respond.

But he couldn't. Not because he's not razor-sharp smart (with a wicked-sharp tongue to boot). He is. But it's hard to respond to this sort of criticism, as thoughtless and generic as it is.

Matthew seems to label every open source company besides Red Hat "mudblood." Stallman calls Red Hat "mudblood." The mudbloods call Matthew "self-righteous." And we're no better off than when we started, and much worse. Worse because the name-calling does nothing to help customers,

There are all sorts of flavors of open source, Matthew. There are more business models than the Red Hat model. Please don't look for easy political points by misconstruing others' business models, or by mischaracterizing the effects promising new open source companies are having on the industry, because it ends up hurting all open source companies, and not just the one or two you may have been targeting.

In talking with one of your board members it doesn't seem that RedHat believes there is room for more than 1-3 successful open source companies in the industry (of the kind you describe - the purebloods, not like the mudbloods the rest must be).

I think he's wrong. And I disagree with the tone and substance of your comments at Vortex. I think you'll be happier to be wrong in a world with a thriving open source ecosystem than in a world where Red Hat is king of a very small, exclusive (purebloods only!) open source hill. There's more money in a big industry than by dominating a small one. And no one wins when we degenerate to name-calling and touting who is the most open. The real question is, what will solve customers' business problems. You're doing a good job of that. Be content.

How much did Google pay for this headline?

LinuxPlanet must really believe in Google's stated intention to do no evil. Actually, I think it has extrapolated too far from this negative credo to, "Google is manna from heaven." How else to explain this headline?

Google Displays Model OSS Citizenship
Wow! They must have contributed significant code (and a slew of developers to maintain it and grow a community around it), I thought. After all, that's what I consider model open source citizenship.

But no. They gave money. Not an insignificant amount ($350K to a joint open source technology initiative of Oregon State University and Portland State University) but, again, not what I'd call "model OSS citizenship."

Why? Because money isn't everything. As with charity in "the real world," it's much easier to give money than one's time and expertise. I'd much rather give 10% to my church than 10% of my time. (Unfortunately, if you're LDS, you're generally asked to do both. :-) Money is easy. Time and attention are not.

This isn't meant to downplay Google's commitment of cash, but rather to suggest it is a fraction of what Google should be giving (yes, I'm waxing normative now). Google, as much or more than most companies on the market right now, is a huge beneficiary of open source. It runs on Linux (which it didn't pay Red Hat much of anything to use - I think they bought one copy of Professional...sorry, Matthew. That's what "real open source companies" can do. However, as nearly as I could tell, Matthew believes only Red Hat is truly an open source company. :-)), and uses a range of other open source software.

Maybe our generosity should be measured not in what we give, but rather in what we keep for ourselves? Or perhaps this is too tough a metric to be helpful. At any rate, I'd like to see Google contributing people to the open source community, and not just cash or code, though the latter would be a big improvement.

Good work, Chris and team. It's a good start. But with what the open source community has gifted you, I think it's fair to ask that Google give more. Fair is fair, after all. What's next?

Where Skype is going

Russell Shaw of ZDNet attended the Internet Telephony Conference and Expo yesterday, where he heard Skype CEO speak on Skype's future plans. Some interesting, some not so interesting. (Actually, the most interesting thing to me is Groups, which indicates different Skype demographics than I'd supposed. Matt eats a little crow....) But the good news is good enough to finally make the acquisition slightly more intuitive. Here they are. (Thanks, Russell.)

• Skype is aggressively planning to open its payment system for ringtones and third-party software. Yes, fellow eBay company PayPal will be a preferred option, but Skype will take credit cards, too. [This is important, in my opinion. Lots of room for widely dispersed payment systems.]
  
• Skype will be pushing recording systems for Podcasts- which, of course, they would love to enable. [Dear me, are we still talking about podcasts??]
  
• Voice content enablement, based on subscription models that could be handled via PayPal and other Skype-approved payment methods, will be increasingly marketed. [Not sure I understand precisely what they mean by "voice content," but....]
  
• More than 1,000 software and hardware developers are affiliated with Skype, with a stream of others on the way.
  
• Although Skype Groups is intended for business users, Skype is not planning a staffed sales effort to make inroads into enterprise IP telephony. Instead, they will do this via partner products likely to appeal to business users. Zennstrom cited one such example as Skype partner Salesforce.com's integration of Skype links into their CRM system. [This is the biggest news of all, in my book.]

Good stuff. Let's hope that one thing that comes from the eBay acquisition of Skype is that Niklas is actually able to travel to the US. His remote keynotes are getting old. (I've done one before via iChat - it's just a lame way to present.)

Research: Open source not as innovative as expected

Krzysztof Klincewicz (Tokyo Institute of Technology; School of Management, Warsaw University) recently published [PDF download] a great first attempt at measuring the levels of innovation in open source projects. "First attempt" because, as Dr. Klincewicz finds, it's very difficult to measure what is, and what isn't, innovative, especially when so much value is attached to that word (and, hence, it is used far more than it should be).

His findings? Using a base of the 500 most actively developed SourceForge projects as his sample (or 3% of overall projects - 81%, or 89,557 registered projects are not active), Klincewicz finds that open source is not very innovative (Only 64 projects, or 12.8% of the sample, were not "direct imitations of existing solutions" (18), and "only 5 out of 500 SourceForge projects could be classified as technological breakthroughs" (20)), but a significant reason for this is the lack of "marketing" within the open source development community. That is, most open source projects (innovative and otherwise) die on the SourceForge "vine" for lack of recognition and outside contribution.

Also, and almost shockingly, 100% of the "radically innovative" projects were started from 1999 - 2001: not a single one has started since then. I guess I have to take back some of my sniping at the Valley. I'm assuming some of the boom-town euphoria of the bubble is what yielded the innovations that Klincewicz finds....

Additional findings:

"...[M]any of [the open source community's] development efforts are focused on improving and complementing the Linux platform. Even though certain applications may exist for Windows users, they need to be "re-invented" in the other operating system environment. These re-inventions are not radical technological breakthroughs, as similar benefits and functionality are already available for alternative platforms." (7-8)

MNA: It turns out that most open source projects either do the same "new" function, or they're merely re-inventions of old technology on a new platform. Innovative in a way? Sure. But not the kind of innovation most of us associate with the denotation of the word. Here's the specific data:



Why do we see this? Are open source developers simply mindless sheep? I don't think so, and neither does Klincewicz. He laments that the high percentage of "me-too" functionality "creates unnecessary competition for scarce resources within the OSS developer community" (19). But he also finds that the highly formalized decision-making processes within open source communities discourages new concepts, as "[i]t is easier to fork the code...than to convince project decision makers to implement certain ideas" (19).

Strikingly, despite this apparent dearth of innovation (at least, on SourceForge - keep in mind that many of the most popular projects migrate from SourceForge to their own hosted forges), "Innovative projects are significantly more popular among developers than "me-too" solutions" (21). (However, given his own data, I'm not sure how he arrives at this conclusion. His conclusion only holds if you add in the SourceForge project itself, which receives a hugely disproportionate number of feature requests, relative to the other innovative projects he identifies - see page 21).

But if you accept his conclusion, it's clear that developers prefer innovation (why work on the mundane?), but it's simply hard to find it on SourceForge (due to the lack of marketing/discovery resources he identifies and which I mentioned above) (See page 25).

Looking deeper into the identified innovative projects, Klincewicz finds that

"40% of breakthroughs came from company-initiated projects, and 50% of technology modifications grew out of academic research, while community-driven initiatives were in turn more focused on platform modifications and marketing innovations" (22).

In other words, much of the new, innovative functionality on SourceForge comes as "feature gifts" from those (companies and academics) outside the open source development community, as traditionally described/conceived. (22)

Time to wring our hands and give up? No. Instead, I think it's time to redefine the open source community, as well as to be a bit more pragmatic about what open source does well, and what it doesn't. For one thing, as Klincewicz notes, all of this bottoms-up commodification has a significant, positive benefit on innovation generally: it forces proprietary firms to race to innovate ahead of the commodification curve (as Larry Augustin detailed [PDF] at the first Open Source Business Conference). Or, as Klincewicz notes, "one could even suggest...that these powerful commoditization mechanisms stimulate more innovation in proprietary than in open software domains" (25; see also Joel West's work).

Assuming this is all true, it means that the most successful open source companies will be those who can create communities to match their projects. In the past, it has been sufficient to find a good project (e.g., Linux), build a support company around it, and fight like mad for branding. This is, in effect, the Red Hat story.

But much of the new functionality, the new open source applications (ECM, ERP, CRM, etc.) will not come from the community, as traditionally defined. It will, almost of necessity, come from companies. Why necessity? Because companies, fueled by VC dollars, can afford the project promotion that Klincewicz finds lacking in the existing open source development community. Again, it's not a question of whether open source can innovate. It's more a question of how to help others hear about it, such that a vibrant community can grow up around it. This is where money is helpful.

Here's to the future community builders, corporate and otherwise.

(And here's a look at some additional interesting data from Klincewicz's research):

Self-Indulgence and Silicon Valley

I downloaded Flock today. I was curious to see why it had managed to generate a fair amount of buzz, given all the other hollow buzz around Web 2.0. Maybe this application was different?

Well, it is different, in the sense that it is actually a full-blown application, whereas much of Web 2.0 consists of simple features that can never stand alone as companies. But the fact that Flock is an application is also one of its downfalls - it's a browser. Who needs another browser?

More pertinently to this discussion, who beyond Silicon Valley could have thought that the world needed this kind of browser? It's a browser that aggregates many of Web 2.0's worst buzzwords (RSS feeds! del.ici.ous tags! Flickr photos!), buzzwords that virtually no one outside of Silicon Valley cares about. (It's a bit like a flocked Christmas tree. You know, that white, superficial, ugly stuff that gets sprayed onto Christmas trees to look like snow? Except that it doesn't look like snow - it looks like flock, whatever that is.)

Living in Silicon Valley, it's easy to forget this simple fact: no one else cares about technology as much as the Valley's denizens do. No one. Other people make money in other ways, and so technology doesn't live front and center in their lives. It's a complement, at times, but not their lifeblood.

Silicon Valley doesn't get this. Silicon Valley lives in a technology cocoon - a bubble that shields it from thinking about the real world, about real customers. Fortunately, the Valley has a few airports which provide the opportunity to take field trips to meet real people, but things like Flock make me think the Valley just doesn't get outside of itself enough.

As an example, drive down 101 and you're bombarded by technology billboards. Drive down any other freeway in America (or other countries that are unfortunate enough to have littered their freeways with advertisements, like we have) and you'll find advertisements that relate to real life: beer, divorce lawyers, and home builders. Sure, you'll find technology billboards here and there, but not the full-time fetish that plagues Silicon Valley.

And it is a plague. I believe the Valley is, contrary to popular belief, vastly inefficient because it wastes so much time and resources building technology that no one but a Silicon Valley developer could love (and even they have a hard time with much of the excess). This may well be why every major open source company today came from outside the Valley: MySQL (Sweden, though they've recently moved headquarters to the Valley, I'm not sure they're helped by it - perhaps not hurt, but not helped), Red Hat (North Carolina), JBoss (Georgia), SUSE (Germany). SugarCRM is on the upswing and may prove the exception to the rule...as will Alfresco.

Yes, we have Google, Yahoo!, and others. But these are a drop in the ocean compared to the man-hours and VC dollars that have been dumped into the Valley. And they still don't compare with IBM, Microsoft, and "yesterday's" software companies that have generated much more money and market value (though I believe they'll get there soon enough, and I'm expressly not saying that no good/great companies emerge from Silicon Valley. Obviously, they do).

Actually, Microsoft is a great example of a company that thrived because it grew up outside the Valley. Whatever one may think about Microsoft, it has done more than any other company on earth to lower the bar to technology adoption. Why? Because Microsoft makes technology (relatively) easy. For consumers, IT administrators, and developers. Microsoft recognizes that the average user isn't a Silicon Valley, highly paid, highly tagged/Flickr'd/blogged developer. The average user is...average.

Strange as it may sound, you learn this much more easily outside the Valley than within - it takes a lot of field trips to the world of the Luddites and Neanderthals to fully appreciate just how average the rest of us are. And how much more disposable income/IT budget we have to spend. You should try it some time.

Arsenal, rising ticket prices, and open source

I'm reading Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, Hornby's portrait of his own addiction to Arsenal Football Club (which was unfortunately mangled by Hollywood that turned it into a lame baseball movie. Who cares about baseball?). It's light reading, but a welcome intermission between Dickens and whatever comes next (probably more Trollope). And, of course, I share Hornby's love for Arsenal....

In the midst of the book, Hornby pulls back to talk about how the game is changing, and particularly the effect of rising ticket prices. As he notes in this quotation below, the big football clubs are effectively pricing away the very people that make the game so much fun to experience:

Arsenal and Manchester United and the rest are under the impression that people pay to watch Paul Merson and Ryan Giggs, and of course they do. But many of them - the people in the twenty pound seats [Note: This was written nearly 15 years ago. The seats are much more expensive now...though Giggs is still awesome.], and the guys in the executive boxes - also pay to watch people watching Paul Merson (or to listen to people shouting at him). Who would buy an executive box if the stadium were filled with executives? The club sold the boxes on the understanding that the atmosphere came free, and so the North Bank [at Arsenal's Highbury Stadium] generated as much income as any of the players ever did. Who'll make the noise now? Will the suburban middle-class kids and their mums and dads still come if they have to generate it themselves? Or will they feel that they have been conned? Because in effect the clubs have sold them tickets to a show in which the principal attraction has been moved to make room for them.

Not dissimilarly, while I applaud the merger of commercial and open source, I sometimes worry that too many executives will spoil the original flavor of open source. By this I don't mean the "community," because I think we've long misunderstood the 'community of communities' that open source truly is (thinking, instead, that it was one big blob of community). Rather, I mean the ethos of open source: giving back, collaboration, etc. We need to be careful.

AirTran needs to lighten up (Lesson for open source)

The WSJ is reporting [Subscription required] that AirTran Airways may stop serving Anheuser-Busch products on its flights because of Bud Light ad that pokes fun at discount airlines. One representative quote from the commercial: "Sure we're concerned for our lives," the discount airline pilot/announcer says, "just not as concerned as saving nine bucks on a roundtrip to Fort Myers."

Pretty funny, actually. But not to AirTran and others (Southwest's spokesman said the ad was "Totally tasteless. To joke about safety is awful. It's out of bounds." I guess Southwest doesn't want to be compared to ValuJet, but isn't it fair game to make that association?

Regardless, unless these discount airlines see some truth in the ad, why do they find it threatening?

The same holds true for open source software companies. To the extent that such companies lead with the "We're cheap!" line, they deserve to be pilloried as 'less-than' competitors to proprietary software. That's why I like the substance (though not the tone) of Matthew Szulik's comment about selling value, not cheapness.

Though lots of companies are raising money on open source, they really should be raising money on the same thing that has always won over customers and generated profit: Value. Product innovation. Etc. If someone is promoting open source junk, it's still junk. We buy things because they're useful/valued, and not because they're cheap. Cheap is a bonus, as I wrote awhile back in IT Manager's Journal.

To the extent that open source companies focus on quality (as I believe Alfresco, MySQL, JBoss, SugarCRM, and others do), there is no need to fixate on price. That's a bonus that comes when the customer realizes that open source delivers equal or better (product) value, and at a lower price, too.

Microsoft gets this. That's why its open source moves (including the recent simplification of Shared Source licenses) are less about being popular and more about keeping the good the company already does, and making it better through a more efficient development model. But only when/where they can demonstrate that open source will benefit its customers.

It's what I like about Apple and Microsoft, both. As well as Google and every other successful software company: open source is treated as a useful means to an end (customer satisfaction), and not as an end in and of itself. That's mature thinking. These companies are customer "bigots," not license bigots. That's a tolerable and, indeed, admirable, form of "bigotry."

Merrill Lynch: CIOs taking a "wait-and-see" approach to Vista

...and are taking an "install-and-see" approach to Linux. As reported by CNET:

According to a Merrill Lynch survey of 100 North American CIOs, two-thirds of businesses are waiting for more information before planning their upgrade schedule to the next version of the operating system, which is due out late next year.

Just 8 percent said they are planning to upgrade in 2007. Twice that many are planning upgrades in 2008, while 5 percent said they plan to wait until 2009.

Meanwhile, just over half of those surveyed said they planned to increase their spending on Linux....

What we learn from Time Magazine

Last week's issue of Time Magazine is instructive, on a number of levels. What I learned:

1. Time claimed to assemble "some of the smartest people [it] know(s)" to talk about "what's next in technology." Time apparently knows very few smart (technology) people. At least, few that live outside of New York City. Next time jump on a plane and head West, where you can find more than technology wonks. People actually make technology out West. :-) Time scored on Tim O'Reilly (always brilliant) and Esther Dyson, did OK (but not great) with David Brooks (New York Times) and Clay Shirky (technology pundit - a regular at Tim's conferences), and completely bombed with the others, who really have nothing to do with technology: Malcolm Gladwell (I won't even start on this one. I'm not sure why people keep buying his books. Please tell me what you're learning from them....), Moby (To his credit, Moby doesn't tout himself as anything more than a musician. About the only thing we learn from Moby in the article is that he knows some weird people, which is almost the definition of "musician"), and some "culture" critic whose name I can't remember because he didn't seem to know much about technology.
   
   
2. Time really is aimed at the person who wants very, very light reading;
   
   
3. Apple is the company to beat in hardware going forward. Time actually does a great job [No subscription required] of capturing the essence of Apple. Yes, Apple has "lost" before because of its vertical integration, but as Time tells it, this isn't Apple's biggest concern:

   But Jobs doesn't care just about winning. He's willing to lose. He has done it often enough. He's just not willing to be lame, and that may, increasingly, be the winning approach.

   Amen to that. We have enough companies that put out lame hardware that is cheap, works mostly, and is ready for the trash heap two years after you buy it. I'm glad we have one who cares about creating beautiful, useful products;
   
   
4. The pundits generally have no clue where we're going. Nor do I. Nor does anyone. In technology, we can see maybe 1-2 years out. Everything else is a complete crapshoot. In the article, only Tim really comes across as really having firsthand knowledge of technology. Perhaps because he helps guides the trends that he's calling;
   
   
5. Time's "Five Things that Will Blow Your Mind" won't. Seriously, they dig up some emerging technologies that were news five years ago, but wouldn't have blown anyone's mind even then. Who is the Time reader that is supposed to be blown away by downloading music to one's phone???

Anyway, the Apple article is good, the rest is not worth reading.

O'Reilly's Open Sources 2.0 ships

I wrote a chapter for O'Reilly's Open Sources 2.0 last year, and it's finally hitting the shelves. Not sure as to the reason behind the delay, but I'm looking forward to getting a copy. No, not because of what I wrote (I've already read that), but because of the other interesting perspectives Danese, Chris, and Mark collected on the present and future of open source business. If this book is anything like the 1.0 rev (Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution), it will be well worth the price of admission. 1.0 centered around the disruptive development model; 2.0 focuses on open source as a disruptive business model.)

My chapter is called "Open Source and the Commodity Urge: Disruptive Models for a Disruptive Development Process." I've included the abstract and introduction below, to give a flavor for what the book offers.

Abstract: Open source hastens software’s natural trend toward standardization/commodification. While technologically innovative companies will always find ample customer interest, the most important innovations for the next decade of software will come from business model innovation, mostly spawned by open source license requirements. Open source builds a new intellectual property regime centered on the source of code, not source code. Protection, in other words, shifts to “owning” the code creator, rather than the product she creates. Those business models that acknowledge this and leverage it will yield better profits than those that attempt a half-way embrace (or rejection) of open source.

And here's the Introduction to the chapter:

Introduction

We are missing the point. Yes, open source imposes dramatic changes on the software industry and, yes, it is roiling the fortunes of many an established vendor. It will continue to do so, and at an increased pace. Yet despite the sometimes anguished, sometimes giddy reception that open source has provoked in the IT world, open source is not novel. It is not odd.

Open source is simply the software world’s mechanism for becoming just like everyone else.

All the world’s a commodity, or services to support and distribute commodities. This book that you are reading. The chair that supports you. The restaurant you will eat at tonight. Everything, including, increasingly, software, thanks to open source. Open source accelerates the natural progress of software toward commodification, or standardization.

It is critical that IT vendors understand this so that they can deploy (or fight, if they so choose) open source effectively, and more intelligently choose how and where to innovate. Open source does not destroy all value in software innovation; instead, it shifts the control point from the code itself to the creator of the code. In so doing, open source software will not pillage all closed source software. As in other industries, there will continue to be plenty of room for upmarket vendors (e.g., Whole Foods in grocery retailing; Starbucks in coffee; and Nordstom in retail clothing).

That said, there is no room for middling and muddling. Open source will commodify from the bottom-up while “upmarket” vendors will dominate “up-the-stack.” Everything else will be a wasteland. Just as Safeway finds itself pummeled by Wal-Mart and Whole Foods so, too, will middle ground IT vendors find themselves grasping at a dwindling market opportunity.

Open source offers hope, but perhaps not for the reasons normally associated with it. Much has been made about the open source revolution, and with good reason. But perhaps the best reason has little to do with development of source code, and instead has much to do with distribution, marketing, and sales. In other words, what we thought was a software development methodology may have far more importance as a business strategy that undercuts competitors while driving down costs and shifting control to buyers. In such a world, those who understand and leverage open source commodification (or escape it) will thrive – everyone else will be marginalized into economic oblivion. Commodification, the highest stage of capitalism; open source, the highest stage of software.

Whitman: We bought Skype to make its cheap service free (??)

It's no secret that I'm baffled by the eBay acquisition of Skype (both by the demographic issues and by the rationale eBay used. It's not that the acquisition wouldn't make sense for someone (like a cable company, perhaps?), but rather that I just can't see my grandmother putting on a headset to chat with a Bulgarian merchant on Skype. But then, I've been wrong before. She talks to all sorts of people....

Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay, is on the record now with a dubious justification of the purchase. eBay will make gobs of money from Skype by...giving it away.

"In the end, the price that anyone can provide for voice transmission on the 'Net will trend toward zero."

OK. I believe that. But what does it say about eBay's acquisition of a company that only makes money by charging users to make calls? (Even the open source advocate in me can't seem to get beyond the non-logic involved.)

Whitman's reply is that money will not be made on voice calls, directly, but rather subsidized through advertising and transaction fees. Maybe.

I'm with David Coursey on this one, however. I don't want free but ad-laden voice service. I'm actually kind of sick of having to wade through ads everywhere. Just charge me for it and leave me alone. For, as Coursey reminds us:

1. Nothing is ever free.
2. Somebody always pays, and whoever pays gets to choose.
3. You get what you pay for.

I don't want ad-supported telephone service. I don't want someone else paying for my time spent on the phone, just as I don't like paying advertisers to spew ads to me on TV. (Hence, I don't watch TV. Unfortunately, I can't quite get out of buying their products....)

Let's call a spade a spade. eBay wanted to look cool again. Skype is cool. So, the thinking goes, eBay + Skype = a cool eBay (to match the "coolness" of Google, Yahoo!, etc.)

Wrong. Revenues are cool. Profits are cool. eBay pulled both in this quarter, neither because of Skype. Time to get back to your core business, eBay. It's not telephony.

Wikipedia: Maybe the masses aren't asses, after all

So, the news this week was that Wikipedia's founder admitted it has "serious quality problems." In part a response to Nick Carr's scathing rebuke of the rise of the amateur class, also picked up by InfoWorld.

Wikipedia being what it is, it actually has an encyclopedia entry called "Criticism of Wikipedia". There's something about that candor that you just have to love.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I wonder how valid all of this criticism is. I'm no deconstructionist (spent all my grad school years fighting against such limp-minded buffoonery), but despite my initial going with the flow ("It stinks! I've smelled it!!") I'm wondering if the criticism is misplaced.

After all, just who, precisely, constitutes an expert in people, places, and things?

What makes a good encyclopedia? If I'm reading it today, I suppose I want a maximum of distilled, comprehensive facts on a given subject. [That said, I think I'd be equally interested in the subjective journal entries from those who were fought in the Battle of the Bulge as I would be about the date, location, etc. Actually, I'd be much more interested in the journal entry. Because that's where my humanity connects with theirs.] But if I'm reading it tomorrow (meaning, if I were an anthropologist stumbling across an encyclopedia from 100-1000 years ago), I think I'd prefer to read a collective bubbling up of a community.

In other words, I'd want to read what a community thought about itself.

This is, really, what "normal" encyclopedias do, but they make pretensions of being something more. They pretend, that is, to be authoritative. I guess I'm not really sure what that means anymore. Does it mean the cathedral or the bazaar? Which information really matters most? What the titled experts think, or what the collective experts think?

I think both - cathedral and bazaar - have their place in encyclopedias. But if I had to choose one, I think it would be the bazaar. Not because it's necessarily better information (though I do believe it will tend to be more comprehensive in scope, if the contribution community is wide enough), but because it's local information. This is a blessing, not a curse, of the rise of the commons.

I suspect that the real problem with Wikipedia is simply that it's still young enough that it lacks a suitably disparate and large community behind it. Assuming it provides even a modicum of value today (it does), then people will build on that modicum until it becomes ever more useful as it collects our communal knowledge. The masses may be asses (thus spake Alexander Hamilton), but it's better than the tyranny of the few over time.

Jonathan Schwartz leads the non-Ajax counterculture

Jonathan sticks a wrench in the Ajax cogs today, declaring (GASP!) that it is not manna from heaven, a sacred language divulged by the angels, and other such heresy. Shame on him for being rational. :-)

In a nutshell, Jonathan suggests that an application's language is immaterial to the value it conveys. The two are separable. Distinct. The value is in the...value.

As a software guy, here's a simple (though often irritating) rule behind user oriented software: The language in which a product is written has nothing to do with the value it conveys. Coming from the company that produced Java technology, that probably sounds a little odd. But it's a simple truth, especially when it comes to users: if the app's no good, it's no good, even if it's implemented in Java. Or PHP. Or Rails.

For whatever reason, the first internet boom led a very broad developer audience somewhat astray with opportunity - no end of new software products were produced that were, in essence, simply old products either rewritten, or built to run through a browser. Granted, many succeeded. But at least as many (actually, way more) failed. Why?

Because rewriting an app simply to use a new toolkit isn't creating value for consumers. Creating an application or service that delivers unique value is what captures users. And the internet gave some developers a tremendous opportunity to deliver unique value - by radically simplifying basic networking, enabling connectivity and community on a truly global scale.

Amen. We can be goofy about technology trends. But at the end of the day, Web 2.0/Ajax applications are only worth the end-user value they actually drive. And that has nothing to do with a pretty interface (though I'm a sucker for the superficial - I freely admit it), and everything to do with what users actually get from the application.

Honey, I love you. I do! (Do you love me?)

Earlier today I watched a married couple interact across a crowded room. The husband was sitting on one side of the room, looking ahead. The wife kept trying to catch his eye, mouthing the words "I love you." She did it so many times that I wanted to mouth back, "He knows."

Or maybe he didn't. Actually, I suspect that she kept broadcasting her affection because she wasn't sure if he reciprocated (She looked considerably younger than he - maybe they're 'Hollywood mogul-style newlyweds'?) her affection. Perhaps she was looking for reassurance....

I sometimes feel that newbie open source companies act the same way. They spend too much time worrying what others might be thinking about them. So they read blogs (like this one) and worry unnecessarily about being popular. While it's important to keep the media and the wider user community straight on one's value, it's equally (more, actually) important to prove that value by making sales. The one feeds the other, but not to the extent that it's worth fetishing over popular opinion.

A little more detail: Intranet Journal on Alfresco

I promise not to keep pumping Alfresco. But I saw this article in Intranet Journal and felt it explained very well the promise I find in the company.

(Incidentally, I think this is only the beginning for open source. The quality of companies being funded continues to improve. Yes, with volume comes some dilution from a fair number of weak companies (just look at all the features in the Web 2.0 world being funded as full-fledged companies), but that shrapnel is a fact of life. With the sweet comes the bitter. I think we should expect to see more robust startups emerging in the next year as pioneers like JBoss, MySQL, SugarCRM, and others prove out the business models.)

Anyway, from the article:

Considering the proven track record of its leaders, the features in the technology previews, and multi-million dollar venture capital backing of the team, it may well prove to change the face of the entire content management niche. It's the combination of these factors that make Alfresco different.

The core team of people working on Alfresco has several decades' worth of combined experience founding, managing, and architecting content management and other enterprise software solutions. It's a pretty diverse and impressive set of bios with the opportunity many IT folks dream of -— re-writing the applications they've known so well from previous jobs and making them better through a collaborative and open approach.

While downloads of Alfresco are only in the preview stage at this time, the goals of the software are lofty. It is an enterprise repository that will provide desktop integration as well as portal access, making it useful beyond the Web content management space. It will give developers the ability to integrate it into existing applications and business processes. Its platform provides the basis for the following types of solutions:

• J2EE-based professional portal projects
  
• Controlled share drives
  
• Content enhanced applications (ERP, CRM, etc.)
  
• Compliance applications
  
• Low-cost, open-source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint

So, this is what Alfresco is doing to Enterprise Content Management. The real question is, what are you planning to do to your area of enterprise software?

Licenses, licenses everywhere, but not a bit of added value

So, the BIG NEWS today is that Microsoft came out with Yet Another License. Three more, to be exact. (Or seven less, if you listen to the sophist. He knows who he is. :-) Supposedly (at least, according to Jason, whom I trust and respect), this is supposed to ensure that

all of Microsoft source code releases will be under consistent terms, and thus more easy to use and to understand. The licenses are each 1 page or shorter. They are written in simple terms that non-lawyers should be able to follow. They are also reflective of the most modern thinking regarding source code licenses within the legal community.

Sure. OK. Who cares?

To the best of my knowledge, open source has not been hampered in any way by its existing license base. We have too many (and now Microsoft says that it has shaved 10 Shared Source licenses down to three - that's progress, but toward what?), but what we don't really have is a communication problem. I'm all for making licenses simpler, but it's a fool's errand to believe that shorter = less legal wrangling. Lawyers are lawyers. They get paid by the hour.

So, I don't see these new licenses adding anything to the open source community. Why? Because they're licenses, not code. Code matters. Actually, let me take that back. Code matters very little. Community matters most.

So, a much bigger announcement would have been that Microsoft had decided to join the open source community in earnest. Stephe Walli has been hammering on this point for some time. Or, at least, Microsoft could have loaned Steve and JD to the community to interweave all the existing licenses.

Of course, if these licenses are meant to facilitate Microsoft's joining in with the community in a more meaningful way, then I'm all for them. I think it's silly to invent new licenses, but if it's what Microsoft requires in order to take baby steps towards deeper involvement, publish as many new licenses as you want. Because at the end of the day, Microsoft has got tens of thousands of developers, which developer capital is crimped and constrained by trying to channel all that energy into Office and Windows. Let them break free. Let them contribute.

News: Bob Young has left the (Red Hat) building

Today Red Hat announced that Bob Young has resigned from Red Hat's board, apparently to focus on his publishing business (Lulu).

"In a funny way, my resignation is perhaps the finest compliment I can pay to everyone associated with Red Hat today, I have complete confidence in the future of the company," said Young.

Surely that sentiment rings true - Bob's the sort of guy that would serve until he felt he was no longer needed.

Still, no Red Hat executive leaves without a strong nudge from Matthew (and there have been plenty of nudges over the past few years, including Kevin Thompson (CFO), Tim Buckley (COO), Hal Covert (CFO before Kevin), John Young (VP, Marketing), etc.). I wonder if Matthew was clearing space on the board, and I'd assume that Bob has actually been somewhat disengaged for awhile. I spoke with him on a panel in Toronto some time ago, and he was pretty focused on Lulu.

At any rate, he's an exceptional person, and I wish Bob well.

Announcement: This time, I'm leaving for real (al fresco style)

Despite my false start the last time around, this time it's real. I'm leaving Novell.

This has nothing to do with Novell - I love the company, and it has been nothing but generous with me. I've spent a little over three years with the company, long enough to co-found our Linux Business Office (and recently disband it once its job was done, i.e., turning the company into a vibrant open source company), help build Novell's ties into the open source business community/ecosystem (MarketStart being but one example), and co-found the Open Source Business Conference. (Note: OSBC was not founded in conjunction with Novell, but Novell generously allowed me to spend part of my work time on the conference in its early days.)

No, I leave Novell in good hands, and on good footing.

Instead, my decision has everything to do with an exceptional opportunity I've been offered with



I'll be Vice President of Business Development, responsible for building out Alfresco's US operations, with an initial emphasis on sales, marketing, and partner development. You know, business development. :-)

It's a chance to work with a great team (John Powell, former COO of Business Objects; John Newton, founder of Documentum; and an amazing development team that built Documentum), great funders (Accel (Kevin Comolli, Managing General Partner of the London office and Peter Fenton of the Palo Alto office are both heavily involved), and, most importantly to its open source success, a superb product, which you can download here.

Alfresco is a company that understands that product must precede community in open source - they're not throwing rubbish over the wall and hoping a community develops around it. They've done everything right in setting the stage for a vibrant, growing community around an outstanding enterprise content management (ECM) product.

As grateful as I've been to Novell, I feel that my next step is to continue to help Novell grow by helping to build a robust open source application ecosystem to run on top of Linux. I can't wait. (But will have to until November 1, when I formally join Alfresco. :-)

Open source war (New York Times)

The New York Times had an interesting op-ed piece on open source over the weekend:

[T]he insurgency isn't a fragile hierarchical organization but rather a resilient network made up of small, autonomous groups. This means that the insurgency is virtually immune to attrition and decapitation. It will combine and recombine to form a viable network despite high rates of attrition. Body counts - and the military should already know this - aren't a good predictor of success.

Software? No. Iraq.

As John Robb points out, Iraq's insurgency against the US military functions a lot like open source software development does, with analogous (though one far deadlier than the other, obviously) results for incumbent software vendors and the US military: loss. For those who continue to think about open source exclusively in terms of code development, please wake up. The much larger issue is that of increasing efficiencies in the business model.

Hitherto decried as open source's biggest weakness, it turns out that the open source business model is only weak until customers decide they'd much rather have the lower-cost, lower risk investment in open source than the over-priced, over-featured proprietary software we've been foisting on them for decades. Once customers vote with their mouse (which they're doing in droves), it becomes clear which model is weak. Not open source.

This isn't a technology war - it's a business war. And open source will win, because it, not traditional software companies, demonstrates a 21st Century approach to delivering and supporting software. It's the grown-up in the room, not the other way around.

As for the real world of body counts and bravery, I won't give away Robb's conclusion (you'll have to read the article for that), but I'll leave you with Robb's lining up of the US military's efforts and those of incumbent software vendors:

Given this landscape, let's look at alternative strategies. First, out-innovating the insurgency will most likely prove unsuccessful. The insurgency uses an open-source community approach (similar to the decentralized development process now prevalent in the software industry) to warfare that is extremely quick and innovative. New technologies and tactics move rapidly from one end of the insurgency to the other, aided by Iraq's relatively advanced communications and transportation grid - demonstrated by the rapid increases in the sophistication of the insurgents' homemade bombs. This implies that the insurgency's innovation cycles are faster than the American military's slower bureaucratic processes (for example: its inability to deliver sufficient body and vehicle armor to our troops in Iraq).

Second, there are few visible fault lines in the insurgency that can be exploited. Like software developers in the open-source community, the insurgents have subordinated their individual goals to the common goal of the movement. This has been borne out by the relatively low levels of infighting we have seen between insurgent groups. As a result, the military is not going to find a way to chop off parts of the insurgency through political means - particularly if former Baathists are systematically excluded from participation in the new Iraqi state by the new Constitution.

Bubble 2.0 (Nick Carr)

I admit it. I love Nick Carr's take on technology. Today he throws a little caution into the Web 2.0 wind, and I think he's spot on:

A lot of people, intoxicated by Web 2.0 hype, are rushing to launch new ventures. Unfortunately, many of them are pursuing similar, and usually flimsy, business models. [Peter] Rip suggests that all would-be entrepreneurs ask themselves two simple questions: "How will you sustainably differentiate yourself? What will you do when 15 other similar sites appear in the next 12 months?" Don't assume, in other words, that low entry barriers make it easier to succeed. It's exactly the opposite. Where there are low entry barriers, there are also low barriers to competition.

This goes back to Joe Kraus' post on how now is a great time to launch a startup (low cost of capital and infrastructure (open source), etc.).

Such rosy analyses, however, miss the point. That they miss the point is not Tim's fault. Tim has always said it's about community, and not merely cheap infrastructure through open source. It may be easier to start a company these days, but it's no easier to make one successful. Easy to say "architecture of participation," in other words, and much harder to actually get people to participate.

Still, there are some things that can be done to facilitate this, as I've blogged. Once you have the right infrastructure in place, you've got to spend serious marketing resources (people and, yes, money) marketing the community, helping people find it and join it, and then ensuring they don't want to leave by making it an interesting, productive community. Again, this is brutally hard work.

Outside the open source development community, it's roughly the same. Amazon didn't become a community overnight, and it certainly didn't without gobs of money. (I can remember countless articles talking about how the company wasn't going to make it, despite tens of millions in VC dollars dumped into the company.) The same holds true of eBay and any other successful "Web 2.0" company you might care to mention. It's hard work, this community-building.

So, don't get infatuated with the cheap cost of startup. The real money is spent in the heavy lifting called community.

Off-topic: Bleak House

I just finished Charles Dickens' Bleak House. It is one of the best books I've ever read (though it took me 200-300 pages to really get into it). In it, Dickens describes a character - Allan Woodcourt - in words that epitomize the best people I've known:

...[A] man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for. (Chapter 60)

Ambitious, but patient and accepting in that ambition when it doesn't quite reach the heights expected. A person pleasant in prosperity or poverty.

Dickens ends with this description of Woodcourt's life (as a physician), as told by his wife:

We are not rich in the bank, but we have always prospered, and we have quite enough. I never walk out with my husband but I hear the people bless him. I never go into a house of any degree but I hear his praises or see them in grateful eyes. I never lie down at night but I know that in the course of that day he has alleviated pain and soothed some fellow-creature in the time of need. I know that from the beds of those who were past recovery, thanks have often, often gone up, in the last hour, for his patient ministration. Is not this to be rich? (Chapter 67)

Indeed.

The storage boom: "Nobody wants to throw anything away" (WSJ)

The WSJ features a front page story on the boom in the data storage market. Some great data (not the least of which is Mexico spending $4.5 million with EMC for storage gear, software, and services to capture $200,000 in lost tolls - they're going to spend years recouping that "investment" :-):

• Corporate data-storage capacity is expanding by 60% a year;
  
  
• The data-storage hardware business is worth $23 billion;
  
  
• The combined revenues of the two largest storage-speciality companies (EMC and Network Appliance) grew 26% in their latest four quarters, compared with 6% growth by the two biggest broad line computer companies (IBM and HP);
  
  
• Storage sales were up 9.9% in the second quarter to $5.6 billion, according to IDC, outpacing the 5.6% growth in servers;
  
  
• Hardware costs decline 35% a year;
  
  
• The storage boom is being fueled by "new regulatory requirements, the proliferation of capacity-hogging video records, and [email attachments, i.e., unstructured data]."

All of this raises a compelling question: What are enterprises doing with all of this data? If they're like my oldest daughter and my wife, they're saving simply for the sake of saving. That works fine for old baby clothes and foreign currencies ("It's a collection, Daddy!"), but even these are best in circulation. What are enterprises doing to "circulate" this data, some of which was created solely with that purpose in mind, yet enjoys limited circulation?

Some are turning to ECM (Enterprise Content Management) to more efficiently circulate documents and other data types, as InformationWeek reports. EMC bought Documentum back in 2003 for $1.7 billion on the premise that storage and ECM play off each other and, ultimately, feed each other. I think this premise is correct. Employees will centrally store more data if they can actually do something useful with it when it's there.

And employees will be more productive if they can make use of the knowledge/data stored on their colleagues' hard drives. At Novell, my department tried to solve this with a Wiki. It hasn't been highly successful, because it requires too much effort to get information into the system. Maybe if we were using a commercial wiki product like JotSpot we'd do better....I'm surprised there hasn't been more activity between the big storage vendors and the pureplay ECM companies (FileNet, Interwoven, Alfresco (open source), etc.). (Perhaps because the EMC/Documentum merger hasn't panned out? I suspect that it has, but that's one possible reason. Anyone have any data on that?)

Nor is ECM the only avenue useful for leveraging digital assets. Video search technology (like Virage) is helpful, among other things. The point is that it's not enough to just amass data. We've got to start doing things with it.

[Picture from InformationWeek, courtesy of Getty Images.]

Optimal license for social welfare? Project welfare?

Marshall Van Alstyne (MIT) has published the beginnings of very interesting research that tackles the question of how liberal a license/community needs to be to deliver optimal developer and consumer benefits. You can find it here. Marshall is looking for comments, so please give it a read and let him know what you think.

The net of the research seems to be that in an ideal, free (as in freedom) loving software world, optimal social welfare is achieved by hippie developers exchanging free love (and code) with each other and end users. But in the world we live in, projects (sponsored and not) are best served by providing at least a temporary ability to profit from the code.

The research question is a difficult one:

If proprietary incentives matter for innovation, and if public access to a reusable free/open platform also matters for welfare, then what scope of protection creates the greatest good?

The key findings are intriguing:

1. Highest Social Welfare

   a) The highest social welfare of any configuration is a pool of "freedom motivated" developers matched with completely free/open licenses. This is higher than a pool of "profit motivated" developers matched with proprietary licenses.
   
   b) BUT, if any fraction of the population is profit motivated, then the socially optimal license will ALWAYS contain the offer of a proprietary period t > 0. This stimulates higher innovation.
   
   c) Regardless of whether an institution is freedom or profit motivated, the optimal license is more open than BSD in the sense that the length of proprietary protection on derivative works should not be arbitrarily long. Multi-period innovation is thwarted by overlong protection.

2. Profit Motivated Firms

   a) Profit motivated firms rationally choose EULAs more often than is socially optimal.
   
   b) Decentralized innovation can increase profits over going it alone. For profit motivated firms, this means it becomes privately rational to choose open licenses once reuse and network effects pass a critical threshold. This effect can even dominate subcontracts with targeted developers.
   
   c) Even non-profits can benefit by harnessing the efforts of profit-motivated developers and giving them a brief period to charge for the value of their investments.

3. Platform Owner Tenure

   [Addressing the question of whether large projects need "sponsors," the researchers find that they do.]
   
   More specifically, we find that a platform sponsor needs to exercise a long term interest in a platform as a means to enforcing good behavior on the part of decentralized profit motivated developers. A prisoner's dilemma emerges in which anyone who likes to charge prefers to do so as long as possible but, if they do, then the whole community suffers. If a license can enforce a reasonable, i.e. short term, proprietary period then everyone, including the developer, wins over multiple periods of innovation. For this to work, the tenure of the platform sponsor must survive multiple periods of tenure for downstream developers.

4. Piracy

   Even if no reuse is possible and innovation never occurs, conditions exist where a profit motivated firm prefers to allow limited piracy, interpreted as free user access, to a portion of its products. Roughly interpreted, word-of-mouth effects on sales can dominate lost sales.

CIO: IT investing when you've got the money (CIO Update)

CIO Update has a useful article on how open source can help CIOs save money with open source...temporarily or indefinitely. It comes down to something we discussed at The 451 Group's open source summit earlier this week: open source is succeeding in large part because it lowers the barriers to try out software. I've said it before, but the idea resonates more and more with me over time. The easier software is to find, try, and then buy, the more software will get sold. CIO Update:

Most, if not all, organizations can postpone a large investment in off-the-shelf solutions by using OSS tools that mirror packaged software. By changing how you view OSS, you will be likely to make more informed and less-costly decisions when it comes to packaged software.

One of the major benefits of using OSS in this manner is that organizations gain more time to see if the solution works instead of paying a lot of money up-front for license fees. The argument is simple: by using free, OSS (e.g. databases, application and Web servers, operating systems), organizations can develop rich enterprise applications before actually committing to any vendor or product.

Alfresco: The SharePoint killer?

Alfresco launched last year with a bang (big-name executives from Documentum and Business Objects starting it; funding from tier-one venture capital firm Accel; etc.), and then went silent. It now seems clear that the company wasn't in hibernation, but was instead doing what the good open source companies do: building an innovative, killer product. (Mea culpa: I was dubious that they could learn the nuances of open source community. After a few meetings with them, I'm prepared to eat crow.)

ComputerWorld caught up with founder and CTO, John Newton, earlier this week:

John Newton, CTO and chairman of Alfresco, says that tackling content management with open source technology isn’t new, but most of the open source offerings available today target web content.

Next month, after several months of gathering interest and building a developer community around the project, Alfresco will release its open source platform for ECM.

The company intends to offer a wide range of ECM functions and the capability to re-purpose content for a variety of uses, Newton says.

“ECM is about knowledge bases, document management, image management, records management and email archiving,” he says. “That is the direction we are going [in] ... providing the open source platform [for ECM].”

ECM is one of those things that wouldn't make you perspire in anticipation, and it's not the sort of thing destined to get much play at Web 2.0. But it's precisely the sort of important, day-to-day application (like CRM and ERP) that will drive enterprise adoption of open source.

What makes Alfresco's approach different from the proprietary and open source CM solutions on the market? Among other things...

• Unlike 99% of open source content management, Alfresco isn't fixated with web content (i.e., websites). This is a natural place for the open source development crowd to congregate, but such systems lack the sophistication and robustness of Alfresco's more document-focused approach.
  
• While still lagging FileNet, Documentum, etc. in features, Alfresco delivers the core ECM features at a performance boost over these over-architected, heavily patched (read: old) systems. Feature-wise, it's a close match-up to Microsoft's SharePoint, without the need to buy into a toolshed-full of other Microsoft software (some good, some weak).
  
• Ease of use.

  With his new ECM venture, Newton also took on the challenge of making a content management system that is easier to use.
  
  “A big portion of ECM is not being used by [content] contributors [who] don’t want to fill in a bunch of fields but just want to go into a shared drive. We made our system look exactly like a shared drive and emulated the Microsoft shared drive protocol.”

  Finally! ECM for the rest of us.

Overall, I'm very impressed by the Alfresco open source approach. Like SugarCRM, MySQL, and JBoss, Alfresco focuses on quality of product first, understanding that good community follows good technology (provided it's architected in such a way to encourage and facilitate participation).

SpikeSource: My ah-ha moment

I spent some time on the phone with Nick Halsey (VP of Marketing at SpikeSource), and in the course of our conversation I finally got it. It all clicked into place.

I've been hot and cold on SpikeSource since its inception. But mostly lukewarm. I just didn't understand its value vis-a-vis what Novell or Red Hat could do. To the operating system "hammer" guy, everything looks like a nail.... Dave took "cold" to new levels in his early analysis of the company. (But to be fair to Dave, it wasn't really clear to me, or others I had talked to, what, exactly, SpikeSource intended to deliver.)

Today, Nick told me the answer. Or, rather, he showed me the answer. He described the normal process by which developers download, install, and use SugarCRM. (We focused on that example, but it could be any company's product, including closed or open source applications, that runs on a mess of open source infrastructure/middleware/databases, e.g., MySQL, Apache, etc.)

So, they download SugarCRM, thinking they're getting Sugar. But then they find out they also need to download these other components. Which then need to be integrated and made to play nicely together. Some time later, the developer (if she has done everything properly on the installation) actually gets to try out SugarCRM to see if it will work for her organization.

SpikeSource removes the complexity from this scenario. One click installation and the developer suddenly has a fully operational system without the headache.

According to Nick, Sugar on Spike now accounts for a significant percentage of SugarCRM downloads. (Roughly 30%, if I remember right.) Perhaps more importantly, support calls have dropped to ~2/10,000 downloads (.0002). That means Sugar gets to spend more time in development, and its customers get to spend more time actually using its software. Surely this is a good thing....

I'm a believer.

Szulik: Only cheapskates buy from Novell

[This time, without personal commentary ;-). ]

Had you been listening in on Red Hat analyst day in NYC on Tuesday, you would have heard this Q&A with Matthew Szulik, CEO of Red Hat (and generally a great guy):

Investor Analyst: Last year we heard very little about SUSE Linux on the street with respect to selling systems, this year, however, we have been hearing about more sales by Novell. To what do you attribute this uptake in sales by Novell?

Szulik: We sell by talking about value and vision and about the customer becoming our partner. We don't mention price. However, there are some customers out there who want a cheap Linux solution and are not interested in added value. Those are customers that we do not do business with.

OK, I have to make a small comment. Novell's entire business model is based on "added value" to Linux, both to the kernel itself and to the services/applications (like collaboration and secure identity management) that run on Linux. I'm not sure what data is informing Matthew's comment.

[Full disclosure: I work for Novell.]

Finally! An open source company that actually understands community (MySQL)

You'd think that with all of its success (financial and reputation), MySQL would be resting on its laurels. Nope. You'd think that the company had already built up a significant community around its database, and could sit back and munch on the fruit of its labors. Nope.

Instead, MySQL has done what Dave and I have been arguing any successful open source company must do: employ someone whose full-time job is to foster and build community. A Chief Community Officer, as it were.

MySQL has done this recently by giving Kaj Arno this position (to complement the excellent work Arjen Lentz has already been doing for the company). Zack explains the rationale:

The strength of the MySQL Community has always been a key reason for the success of MySQL as a product. We've been very fortunate to have a very large and vibrant Community of users, testers, developers, writers and fans of MySQL worldwide. While there are many people within the MySQL organization who interact and communicate with the Community often there were more ideas than we had staff to focus on and sometimes things fell through the cracks. However, as MySQL AB has continued to grow we want to make sure that we increase our investment in the Community and stay true to the overall open source philosophy.

Amen. It's amazing how many companies think "community" is a gift that magically appears whenever you label your product "open source." It's just not the case.

Dan Frye and I were discussing community-building at yesterday's 451 Group Summit on Commercial Adoption of Open Source Software. Most companies are extremely naive when they join the open source world. They think it's about source code availability, when really it's about community. And community is extraordinarily difficult to build. It's a huge competitive differentiator in the changing world of software, and an equally formidable barrier to entry. Tomorrow's R&D is community building.

I applaud MySQL for continuing to demonstrate its keen understanding of the open source market and community.

Data on the Linux market

Zack has pointed me to an worthwhile InformationWeek report [PDF] on the state of the Linux market. He excerpts some of the key findings:

"Red Hat is the most widely adopted Linux variant . Nearly 90% of sites surveyed report its use. SuSE Linux is also popular but it is a distant second at 46% of sites. Debian Linux is the next closest rival -- at a quarter of sites. No other variant earns substantial market share among the sites we surveyed."

"Two-thirds of the 439 business technology professionals we surveyed in January 2005 contend that open source spurs more opportunities for technical innovation. Half (47%) say it encourages business innovation."

"The top 3 areas where organizations currently deploy Linux or plan to deploy it in the next 12 months are: Web / Intranet servers; Application Development; Database."

"The top 4 reasons that have helped accelerate Linux adoption are: Low cost / no licensing fees; Reliability; Performance; Windows security issues."

"Companies expect Linux will reduce their dependence on Windows products. Linux is expected to replace Windows NT or Windows 2000 servers at nearly half of the sites surveyed. Three of five sites expect to use Linux on servers instead of Windows NT or Windows 2000."

"Nearly 90% of companies surveyed anticipate a jump in server licenses for Linux. No other product comes close to these expectations --not Windows, Macintosh or Unix."

Interesting stuff. Here's further corroboration from IDC on the growth of the Linux market:

Zack Urlocker's blog

I hadn't realized that Zack wanted to monopolize blogging, too! (Inside joke: He described "MySQL" as "the open source database" at yesterday's 451 Group seminar on open source adoption in the enterprise. (He meant "one of," but Freud sometimes speaks louder than words. ;-)

Anyway, you should read his blog. The RSS feed is http://zurlocker.typepad.com/theopenforce/index.rdf.

MySQL vs. Oracle: Tie goes to the disrupter

Dave has been wrestling with Oracle's strategic decision to acquire InnoDB. I think he and others may be overestimating Oracle's ability to culturally adapt to this strategic move. As I learned when Novell acquired SuSE and Ximian, it's much easier to cry "Checkmate!" than it is to actually get the king to play dead.

I'll explain.

Open source is culturally vastly different from closed source. It takes Herculean effort to effect the seachange in corporate mindset necessary to get a closed-source company's employees, partners, and customers behind any such change, however much everyone involved wants to be convinced. At Novell, it took huge, expensive transfusions of open source DNA (Ximian and SuSE acquisitions) to move the needle on the company's open source transformation. The acquisitions were the easy, cerebral part.

The brutal difficulty came day-by-day, person-by-person, as we turned the ship around. Matthew Szulik may crow that Novell's acquisition of SuSE was "theatre," but this is naive, disingenuous (and shortsighted - I don't credit Matthew with being so naive, so I can only assume he was playacting. Hmm...sounds a lot like theatre.... :-). It overlooks the leading indicators (partnerships, customer satisfaction, etc.) that strongly point to the growing viability of Novell's Linux business, which should increasingly be visible in the company's quarterly Wall Street reports.

Novell has had a tough slog of transforming itself into an open source company, but that metamorphosis is largely done. The benefits come now.

Oracle has taken the first step in transforming its business. A baby step. The hard work begins now. Novell had ~6,000 employees to influence and change. Oracle has ~50,000. Novell's flagship product, NetWare, had been losing in the market for some time, clearly revealing that changes needed to be made. Oracle may well feel that it is at the top of its game, with a sales force renowned for its tenacity, aggression, and reliance on fat license sales. In short, truly competing with MySQL on its own low-cost turf is going to be a brutally painful road for Oracle.

In a disruptive market, bet on the disrupter, precisely because the incumbent has everything going for it.

Announcement: Splitting my time between here and InfoWorld

Dave Rosenberg has invited me to perma-blog with him over at InfoWorld's Open Resource. I may return to my single life at some point, but for the foreseeable future I'll be crashing at his place.

i had thought to abandon AC/OS entirely for now, but I'll continue to keep this blogspace updated with my InfoWorld posts. However, please be patient, as I may be slow in transferring posts between the two. You can find the InfoWorld feed (with Dave's punchy analysis and winning (?!) personality) over at: http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/rss.xml.

Dave and I have been wanting to do a Laverne and Shirley (Cagney & Lacey? Starsky & Hutch? Boss Hog and Roscoe P. Coltrane?) act. Now we get to.

Again, you should be able to continue to get my posts here at AC/OS.

Analyst: R&D doesn't matter (Booz)

Booz Allen just released a report that suggests that R&D spending has no material effect on a company's revenues.

There is no direct relationship between R&D spending and significant measures of corporate success such as growth, profitability, and shareholder return, according to a new global innovation study by management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. However, the pace of corporate R&D spending continues to accelerate, as many executives continue to believe that enhanced innovation is required to fuel their future growth.

This isn't to say that R&D investment is a complete wash-out. The report's authors suggest a certain threshold minimum is important, but above and beyond that, there's no statistical relation between R&D spending and revenues. This shouldn't be surprising - take a look at Microsoft's (or IBM's...or Oracle's...) R&D budget, and try to calibrate that to actual saleable products that have emerged, and you'll find a very tenuous tie between spend and output. More from the report:

Money doesn't buy results. While the study identified individual success stories, there is no discernible statistical relationship between R&D spending levels and nearly all measures of business success, including sales growth, gross profit, operating profit, enterprise profit, market capitalization, or total shareholder return.

-- R&D spending appears to yield better gross margins, the percentage of revenue left over after subtracting the direct costs incurred in making the products or services sold. This narrow departmental success, however, is not generally translated into overall corporate performance.

"There is no easy way to achieve sustained innovation success -- you can't spend your way to prosperity," said Booz Allen Vice President Barry Jaruzelski. "Successful innovation demands careful coordination and orchestration both internally and externally. How you spend is far more important than how much you spend."

Analyst: EVCA on finding open source opportunities

The European Venture Capital Association recently published its Conference Journal [PDF] in advance of its next conference in Barcelona (October 19-21). One of the articles caught my eye, thanks to Mikko Puhakka. It features Patrick Sheehan of 3i itemizing necessary components of a successful open souce venture:

• Look for a mature market where the established players have a high cost structure.
  
• Look for an easily understandable product.
  
• Look for a kernel that can be built on - open source is all about the spread of communities.
  
• Look for open-source companies that have the aggression and vision needed to conduct full-frontal assaults on major industry incumbents.

A good list, and not too dissimilar from the one Larry Augustin offered at OSBC San Francisco earlier this year.

Commentary: The web as "talk" (Kedrosky)

Paul has an interesting post on how the younger generation (which I think I don't quite belong to anymore) uses the web today: instead of for information, as the older generation does, they use it primarily for communication:

From a new Guardian study on young people’s use of the Internet:

On average, people between 14 and 21 spend almost eight hours a week online, but it is far from a solitary activity. There are signs of a significant generation gap, and rather than using the internet as their parents do - as an information source, to shop or to read newspapers online - most young people are using it to communicate with one another.

About half of that time is spent chatting to friends in online communities or using messaging services, while another hour is spent emailing. The internet may be a window into their personal realm, but it is not a window on the world for young people: only one in 10 say they use it to keep up with news and current affairs. [Emphasis Paul's]

This is precisely what I like about blogs: it's a half-and-half medium. Half information, and half commentary on that information. It's not true two-way communication - leaving a comment on a blog isn't really talking with anyone. But it's a nice first step in that direction.

Commentary: TCO, Migration, and commercialism (NewsForge)

Good article in NewsForge about...well, a number of things. At core, however, I guess it's about how an open source-friendly IT administrator can sell her boss on the value of open source, without being completely emotional about it.

LeCount doesn't discount the ideological side of open source (as I do so often, probably too much). But he balances it out with a plea to developers and IT administrators to wear their (business) thinking caps, as well.

He suggests something, for example, that must be true but has been completely lacking from the discussion about migration costs (given that "migration" normally implies Windows to Linux):

It's no secret that migrating from one operating system to another, whether for a server or a desktop, is not cheap. It does not matter whether it is to or from Windows, Mac OS, Linux, or some flavor of Unix. Microsoft, for one, seizes upon this fact to constantly to claim that Linux is more expensive than it actually is. It's a good scare tactic....

What people like Ballmer fail to mention is that the opposite -- migrating from Linux to Windows, if someone would do such a thing -- would cost even more. Not only would you have the aforementioned migration costs, training costs, and the need for support, you would also have the costs of the software....

While major Microsoft customers may be able to coerce Microsoft into lowering its upgrade fees by dropping the word "Linux," most small businesses aren't important enough to warrant a discount.

Obvious, in a way, but it's amazing how often we overlook the obvious. LeCount says something else that I really like, too:

The real financial beauty of Linux lies in its long-term savings. Of course, any planned business model that utilizes investment to achieve long-term profitability is far more desirable than short-term profiteering. The best way to promote OSS is to highlight the long-term financial benefits that open source has to offer. Point out that with software like Windows, you have regular software and hardware upgrades to contend with, and both can be expensive.

He doesn't go quite far enough, however. Open source is cheaper in the long run because it maximizes choice. This is a squishy concept, but when viewed in a "macro" light, it's clear. Goods are cheaper when competition is fiercest. While it may be more comfortable to lounge around with Microsoft's "integrated innovation", it's a receipe for abject lock-in, which has nothing to do with whether Microsoft is a benevolent or malevolent jailer. It has everything to do with choice. Choice saves money. Period.

News: Marc Fleury fights back (ZDNet)

JBoss was recently criticized for going against the ethos of open source in defending its trademark rights. As Marc Fleury correctly argued today at JBoss World, however, this is about "open source, not open brand." Ingrid Marson of ZDNet UK reports:

"We're not talking about open brand here, this is open source. Companies can say they're offer training and consulting for JBoss. What they cannot do is use the JBoss trademark in their brand name. A lot of people offer support for JBoss without being a partner."

Fleury is right. Some in the open source world take "open" to an inappropriate extreme.

Off-Topic: "Extreme" football (soccer) (The Times)

Back in the US, but a parting tribute to The Times and a not-so-beautiful rendition of the beautiful game:

If you think that describing the offside law presents a challenge, you should perhaps thank whichever God you follow that you are not playing in Saudi Arabia. Islamic extremists are inciting Saudi footballers to give up the game of the 'non-believers' and wage jihad in Iraq. Fatwas have been issued saying that playing football is allowed only as part of a fitness regime and with wide-ranging changes to the recognised rules. According to the translation by the Middle Media Research Unit, these include not playing in two 45-minute halves and having anything but 11 players per side ("the number of players used by vile America"). The use of the words 'foul', 'penalty' and 'goal' are also banned, as is demanding a free kick or being punished by a yellow or red card, not that there would be anybody to appeal to as having a referee is also a no-no. Participants are advised to 'play in your normal clothing, or in pyjamas', and finally: 'If one of you inserts the ball between the posts and then starts to run so that his companions will run after him and hug him, like the players in America and France do, you should spit in his face, for what do joy, hugging, and kissing have to do with sports?' Exactly.

Commentary: Open source respect = revenues

I just got back from perhaps my favorite play - Death of a Salesman. I first saw Brian Dennehy play Willy Loman in this play 6-7 years ago in New York, and had to go see it. If you can get anywhere near London before it closes in November, you should do so. It's fantastic.

Salesman reminded me of a true principle, one particularly critical for open source companies. There is no respect in reliving past grandeur. No lasting success in press releases, citations in articles, etc. Downloads? A nice early indicator, but it's not about who can give away the most free software. It's not a popularity contest to see who can give away the most free stuff on SourceForge. It's about who can convert free downloads into paying customers.

In Salesman, Willy Loman, the American idealist, lives a lie throughout his life. It's a lie founded in a scribbling of truth (that he once was actually able to sell some goods for his company, but never as much as he remembers), but one that escalates over time as he continually looks back to an inflated past for self-worth. It culminates in a fierce argument between Willy and his son, Biff (not the McFly kind :-), as Willy desperately wants Biff to be the success that he never was:

WILLY. The door of your life is wide open!

BIFF: Pop! I'm a dime a dozen, and so are you!

WILLY: I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!

BIFF: I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you. You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them! I'm one dollar an hour, Willy! I tried seven states and couldn't raise it. A buck an hour! Do you gather my meaning? I'm not bringing home any prizes any more, and you're going to stop waiting for me to bring them home!

Arthur Miller's (the playwright) message is not very cheery, but the message to open source startups is clear: prolonged respect - the kind that will endure long after the VCs have stopped thinking open source is trendy - comes from making sales. Lots of sales.

I once sat in Matthew Szulik's office, and asked him why his stock price wasn't going anywhere. He told me that his pipeline was filled, sales were rocketing, and eventually Wall Street would not be able to ignore that fact. He was right.

Marten Mickos is another executive that takes this approach. Marten understands that MySQL's status at the top of the open source food chain will immediately disappear the day they stop competing and winning deals. And so he keeps selling, this year to the tune of $40 million.

So should we. In this, open source is no different from any other business model/philosophy. It's only as good as the money it brings in. Depressing, perhaps. But something tangible (as Ben Loman, Willy Loman's brother, tells him). Something you can "lay your hands on."

No RSS newsreaders?

It's odd to me, but I get 10,000+ people regularly coming through this blog, many repeat offenders, but most don't use RSS readers. Are RSS readers really so new that people haven't discovered how to use them yet?

If you haven't yet discovered the joys of RSS, you really must do so. Now. It makes life so much easier. It's like TiVo for the web.

You have a wide range of choices, but my two preferred readers come from (now) the same company: NewsGator. Mac and Windows. (In Linux, I just use the RSS capabilities of Mozilla's Thunderbird email client.)

Once you download and install the reader, try subscribing to my "feed": http://feeds.feedburner.com/acos (or click the orange icon at left). Let the web come to you....

Commentary: Open source sanctimony

"Sanctimony" is probably the wrong word, because I think many of the people to whom I'd apply this term aren't hypocritical - they're just devoutly...deceived. I'm referring to many that I interact with in the open source community, both true zealots and true opportunists. Both sets annoy me, whited sepulchers that they are, in different ways.

What spurred this thought?

Two separate but related things. I'm stuck in London today (I say "stuck" because I'd much rather be home with my family, but am constrained to stay here until Sunday morning so as to get a dramatically cheaper airfare home), and decided to walk around Hyde Park. I love Hyde Park on Saturdays, because of all the football mini-matches being played.

Today, however, the Park was a bit marred by a loud, somewhat in-your-face religious gathering. I just don't like public displays of religiosity, any more than I appreciate public displays of affection. Some things are better kept private. As I passed, I heard a very loud prayer exhorting the crowd to this and that. It was distracting to the peace I had felt watching the footballers. It wasn't appreciated. Nor do I think it was appropriate. (I say this as a very devout, religiously-minded person.)

But it reminded me of something I had been reading a few minutes before, also in Hyde Park. I'm in the middle of Charles Dickens' Bleak House, perhaps Dickens' best novel. In Chapter 15, Dickens castigates the public philanthropists who make much of their giving, calling them

an unsatisfactory company, where benevolence took spasmodic forms; where charity was assumed, as a regular uniform, by loud professors and speculators in cheap notoriety, vehement in profession, restless and vain in action, servile in the last degree of meanness to the great, adulatory of one another, and intolerable to those who were anxious quietly to help the weak from failing, rather than with a great deal of bluster and self-laudation to raise them up a little way when they were down....

So, what, if anything, does this have to do with open source?

Well, the Hyde Park preacher struck me as analogous to the most vocal (and least listening) of the open source proponents I heard at this week's LinuxWorld UK. It was hard to have a rational discussion on my panels because of the menace awarded to any who dared suggest that open source was anything less than deity. This is an unhelpful (and inaccurate) tendency that many in the open source community share.

(As an aside, I recently finished writing an article for a Novell magazine. In it I stated some indisputable facts about open source communities, all of which I've shared publicly on this blog. I was told that some of them didn't accord with public statements by some of our execs. Couldn't I please change them? I responded that I thought it healthier that we promote open source for its true merits, rather than trying to score easy points with half-truths. To his credit, the editor sided with truth.)

The Dickens piece reminds me of many open source companies that have been funded recently. Open source, for them, is a slogan, not a business philosophy. Wrap the words "Web 2.0" and "open source" together and you get a savory, but generally substance-free, delicacy that VCs will fund with minimal hesitation. It's not that either of these terms, or what they represent, is bad (quite the reverse), but rather in the vulgar (meaning: common) way in which they're bandied about for personal gain, rather than customer satisfaction.

But then, I suppose these elements of zealous bigotry and cheap hucksterism are signs of any credible trend. You always get chaff with the wheat. Let's just hope that we get more wheat than chaff.

News: "New and better things than an office suite" (Sergey Brin)

Finally, it's been said! Google has regained some respect in my eyes (no, not through its amazingly weak RSS reader - why can't this company do much right beyond Search?).

How? By showing they have some foresight and (GASP!) restraint. According to Dan Farber (ZDNet), in response to a question about a Google office suite, Sergey Brin said:

"I don't really think that the thing is to take a previous generation of technology and port them directly, and say can we do the minicomuter on the Web on AJAX makes sense. I'm not saying that's what [Microsoft] Office is, I'm just saying that I think the Web and Web 2.0, if that's what you want to call it, gives you the opportunity to do new and better things than the Office package and more. We don't have any plans [to do an office suite]."

Of course Google does (have better things to do than fixate on yesterday's monopoly). As do most of us. So why aren't the rest of us moving on, as well?

Analyst: Where are enterprises spending money? How much? (Forrester)

Some good data on enterprise IT spend.

Commentary: It's no bubble (Marc @ O'Reilly)

Marc Hedlund offers a rebuttal to the chatter about Web 2.0 being a bubble. He says:

The easy story assumes, though, that everyone here [O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Conference] has already forgotten what happened so recently.

It's all they're talking about here, how much it feels like the old days, and all the things that could possibly mean. Bill Gurley had a great line about the 2000-era bubble, that "a mania isn't over until everyone believes in it." Here at Web 2.0, no one believes the mania, at least not yet. No one thinks, as they did in 1999, that we're looking at new technologies that will, say, wipe away bricks and mortar retailers and leave online businesses in their place. No one believes that old and powerful industries are about to be destroyed en masse by the rise of asynchronous Javascript or data as the Intel inside. These Web 2.0 markers are great developments, and are enabling great applications to get attention and immediately dominate the Web applications they replace. They've clearly valuable. As of yet, though, Web 2.0 is a revision of the Web and what has been built on it, not a revision of the world, which was the premise of the last bubble.

A good defense, though I think it falls a little short of dispelling the current mania surrounding Web 2.0. It's not O'Reilly's fault by any stretch, but the kinds of silly things getting funded (little, pretty features - see the comments down at the bottom of Marc's post) are, well, silly and little. But they're getting funded like crazy, which calls to mind...a bubble.

The one gem in all of this is something I'll dub "The Bubble-up Economy." Tom calls it the "upload economy." Tim talks about "architectures of participation." It's all the same thing, more or less. The little guy bubbling up into One Big Thing. Is there a certain amount of exaggeration in all this, as Nick Carr points out? Absolutely. But there's also a lot of value.

News; Check Point buys Sourcefire for $225M

Who says there's no money in open source? Not Sourcefire, as Red Herring reports.

Of course, both Check Point and Sourcefire downplay the open source aspect, somewhat dampening the news (from an open source angle). Said Check Point's chairman:

"The Sourcefire team was able to translate Snort from just an open-source technology and turn it into one of the fastest-growing businesses."

"From just an open-source technology...." You know, like Apache. Linux. Bind. Etc.

Sourcefire's CEO, Wayne Jackson, wasn't much better:

"Snort [the open source software for which Sourcefire is known] is a relatively small part of our technology portfolio," said Mr. Jackson. "We've invested an enormous amount in the technology differentiators including RNA."

Translation: Open source? Sure, but our IP is really what matters.

All of which may be true, but it does make me wonder why the open source business community (including VCs) has looked to Sourcefire as a shining example of open source capitalism at its best.

Commentary: Nick Carr on 'The Amorality of Web 2.0'

It's so hard to find intelligent contrarians these days. I experienced that firsthand today and yesterday at LinuxWorld UK, where you were cheered for saying inane but popular things like, "My dream is to bless the world with Linux desktops - every last child." But jeered if you said anything that remotely smelled like sanity relative to open source. (Sadly, I must admit that I tempered my (in my opinion) rational view of open source because I, too, didn't want to be tarred and feathered. Sorry to Nick @ Microsoft, who had to go it alone. :-)

Nick Carr has a wonderful piece on Web 2.0 today. Scathing but measured, he tackles the somewhat immature hubris We, the Web sometimes find ourselves spewing. He starts light, with Wikipedia:

In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing - it has to be a beautiful thing if the Web is leading us to a higher consciousness. In reality, though, Wikipedia isn't very good at all. Certainly, it's useful - I regularly consult it to get a quick gloss on a subject. But at a factual level it's unreliable, and the writing is often appalling. I wouldn't depend on it as a source, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a student writing a research paper.

Before you cry 'Foul,' read his examples (Bill Gates and Jane Fonda). The entries really do stink. He's right. He goes on:

The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity. Perhaps nowhere, though, is their love of amateurism so apparent as in their promotion of blogging as an alternative to what they call "the mainstream media." Here's O'Reilly: "While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls 'we, the media,' a world in which 'the former audience,' not a few people in a back room, decides what's important."

I'm all for blogs and blogging. (I'm writing this, ain't I?) But I'm not blind to the limitations and the flaws of the blogosphere - its superficiality, its emphasis on opinion over reporting, its echolalia, its tendency to reinforce rather than challenge ideological extremism and segregation.

Again, before you cry 'Foul' and argue that the mainstream media does the same, read his post. He concludes:

And so, having gone on for so long, I at long last come to my point. The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die. The same thing happens when blogs and other free on-line content go up against old-fashioned newspapers and magazines. Of course the mainstream media sees the blogosphere as a competitor. It is a competitor. And, given the economics of the competition, it may well turn out to be a superior competitor. The layoffs we've recently seen at major newspapers may just be the beginning, and those layoffs should be cause not for self-satisfied snickering but for despair. Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.

Agree or disagree, he has a point.

News: Open source project Nessus closes its code (ZDNet)

This may be unprecedented - leading network security tool, and open source project, Nessus has decided to close its doors. No, not of the company, but of its code, as ZDNet reports. ZDNet writes:

"Nessus 3 will be available free of charge ... but will not be released under the GPL [General Public Licence]," wrote Renaud Deraison yesterday to the software's e-mail mailing list....

The developer, who has been working on the product since at least 1998, said commercial pressures facing Tenable Network Security, the company he started in 2002 around Nessus, was forcing him to stop making the software's source code available.

"A number of companies are using the source code against us, by selling or renting appliances, thus exploiting a loophole in the GPL," he wrote in a later e-mail justifying his decision.

"So in that regard, we have been fueling our competition and we want to put an end to that. Nessus 3 contains an improved engine, and we don't want our competition to claim to have improved 'their' scanner."

I wonder why MySQL, Novell, Red Hat, JBoss, and others who use the GPL/LGPL haven't cited similar concerns, despite being open to similar copycat pressures? I actually don't know the answer to that question....Seriously, why should Tenable's position be more precarious than that of these companies?

Also, as an aside (and to beat the dead horse on outside participation in open source projects), Deraison also complained about the lack of outside developer contributions to the code, despite it being open source:

"Virtually nobody has ever contributed anything to improve the scanning engine over the last six years."

Maybe he should have read my blog about the size of the active open source development community.... :-)

News: Trump's MBA in a day (The Times)

Donald Trump is such a caricature. But, as The Times reports [Not yet online, but should be here shortly], the man only gets more cartoonish every day. Consider his new university, TrumpU (I'm giggling as I type it). As The Times notes:

TrumpU...offers An MBA in a Day. This is presented by Professor Steven Straiser and distils the troublesomely long conventional MBA programme into four one-hour sessions, delivered over the Internet.

TrumpU's mantra? "Learn to succeed. When you want. How you want." Apparently for TrumpU students, the answer is: "In 4 hours or less." I think I have time to get my MBA before I head off to sleep tonight....

News: What do academic stars and footballers have in common? (The Times)

The Times has not yet put the article online (I read the paper copy today), but I'll type in what I can. It's likely to show up here in the next day or so.

What's the article? And what's the answer to the question above? Money, of course. Lots of money. As The Times' Nunzio Quacquarelli reports,

Teaching bright young potential business managers may not be as exciting as playing in front of a crowd, but professors have plenty of spare time for sport.

Being allowed unlimited and lucrative consulting assignments may not match David Beckham's sponsorship deals [For the Americans in the reading audience: David Beckham plays soccer. It's a sport.], but not many careers offer such freedom to moonlight. And don't forget lifetime tenure after six or seven years and the long summer holidays.

This actually reminds me of a conversation I had with Joe Grundfest, former commissioner of the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission in the US) and one of my professors at Stanford Law School, whom I also worked for as a research assistant. One afternoon I visited his office to discuss a research project I was working on for him, only to find him finishing up a phone call (discussing a consulting engagement). When he got off the phone, I joked, "Time to get back to your real job now, Professor Grundfest?" His reply was a withering, "And just what, Mr. Asay, is my real job?" I had thought that the answer was obvious - teaching - but Joe's rhetorical question that supposition whimpering in pain on the floor. :-)

Btw, lest you think the consulting gigs for big-time academics don't measure up, let me disabuse you of that notion with two data points:

• Clayton Christensen - $50,000 speaking fee (if in California/West Coast. It's slightly cheaper as you move closer to Boston.
  
• Michael Porter - $150,000 speaking fee (and a private jet to fly him roundtrip to the speaking gig)

Still think the money is in a startup? :-)

News: Microsoft Office on Linux? (ZDNet)

At yesterday's "Great Linux Debate" at LinuxWorld UK, the question was raised: Will Microsoft port its Office suite to Linux? The answer was no (and a firm "no" at that), but came across soft in Nick McGrath's response. As such, this ZDNet news story picks up on Nick's hedge, which is accurate according to his words but not what he really meant.

My contribution to the question? Why do we even care? Why are we still fixated on yesterday's market as an open source business and development community?

Matt Asay, director for Linux Business Office at Novell, also taking part in the panel on Wednesday, said that Microsoft would never put its Windows desktop position at risk by building Office for Linux. However he claimed that the open source community should stop fixating on what Microsoft or hardware vendors are doing around Linux and let the market decide their fate.

"We need to get over our fixation with Microsoft. The question is not what Microsoft is doing; it is what are we doing? The open source movement is a bottom-up, not top-down, action," said Asay.

"We should be talking about how we can use the benefits of open source and Linux to leapfrog what's out there at the moment. After years of eating into Unix, Linux is finally starting to take market share from Windows on the server," Asay added.

Commentary: Nat on Zimbra/The value of marketing

Nat Torkington (O'Reilly) has a great write-up on Zimbra and all the value that isn't Ajax related. (Whew! :-) From Nat:

The Ajax webmail client is slick and featureful, but it's really just a demo of their underlying server system. The server platform is the Microsoft Exchange killer we've all wanted. There's an ocean of people who want the Exchange feature set without the Exchange nightmares: administration, performance, and security. The folks at Zimbra have released it as open source, not just the Ajax client and the toolkit used to build it, but the server as well. Their tests show 2-3x performance over Exchange [MNA: Translation: It actually works :-) ] with the same workload, and they have drop-in compatibility with Outlook and other Exchange-built clients.

For administrators, the idea of Exchange without Exchange is sexy. You can do all the group calendaring and meeting management that Exchange provides, without needing a tricked-out Windows box grinding away on the backend. You don't even need Windows clients--the Ajax client means anyone can use it.

Interesting stuff, though the fact that Nat and others care speaks volumes of the team (outward, marketing-focused) behind Zimbra, and less about its technology. AppTran and CanyonBridge have had the same Exchange functionality ("clonemanship") for longer than Zimbra, but (in AppTran's case) have not done as good a job of selectively leaking information as Zimbra, or (in CanyonBridge's case) as good a job at showing up at the right events and talking it up/showing it off.

CanyonBridge, for its part, has had serious, enterprise-grade "mashups" in place for nearly a year - with Salesforce.com, WebEx, and others. They do web services integration better than most, the UI better than most, and performance best of most (so far as I've seen). But their marketing has been weak.

And, as a result, the market doesn't know they exist. Much the same with AppTran, unfortunately, which has great financial backers and a superb management team.

The other thing that Zimbra is doing right is open source. Scott and team know that they're only as relevant as the breadth of their uptake, and open source is a great way to drive that uptake. (What's ironic in this is that I watched CanyonBridge struggle to raise money on a proprietary model because the VCs couldn't see where the money was going to come from...but Zimbra is giving it away and suddenly there's money in that? Ah, the twisted logic of VCs....)

Having made my little parenthetical dig at VCs, I should say that I tend to prefer the financial model that Zimbra presents to a proprietary one. There's money in volume, whatever the precise model. Zimbra is looking for volume, and is doing the right things to achieve it. Head to the company's site to give the technology a try. Worth a long look.

News: The market will take care of Microsoft

MacWorld does a good job of covering the spirit and content of yesterday's LinuxWorld panel on open source. Here's a snippet:

Open-source software allows anybody who has a great idea to "stand on the shoulders of giants," whereas in the commercial world it has to be patented, the underlying infrastructure has to be licensed and the idea has to be tried, said Mark Shuttleworth of the Ubuntu Foundation.

"“From an innovation point of view, they [a company] have to have every bright idea, they have to get it right every time, and it costs them a lot to do it," Shuttleworth said. "Whereas in the free software world, we do take an evolutionary approach, and we know over time that evolution beats intelligent design, right?"

Shuttleworth wasn't the only one who forecasted hard times for commercial software developers. But Matt Asay, director of open-source strategy at Novell Inc., said rather than focusing on why Microsoft isn't developing programs for Linux, developers should be focused on customer value.

"“It is precisely that customer-pleasing trajectory that ends up killing companies over time as they move up and up," Asay said. "When was the last time Microsoft Office became appreciably better for you to use? Ten years ago. The market will take care of Microsoft."

Linux has taken market share from Unix, but is gaining on Microsoft, Asay said.

"If you look at whatÂ’s happening on the server, finally for the first time Linux is starting to take Windows market share," Asay said.

News: Sun and Google partner to deliver...squat

Steven Vaughn-Nichols does a great job describing the non-news Google and Sun concocted. Delivering the Google Toolbar (as an option) with Java? Who cares???

Thus spake Steven:

There was Sun, with the most popular open-source office suite in the world. There was Google, the one technology company big enough to go mano-a-mano with Microsoft and win.

Together for the first time.

The caged tag-team death match between Eric Schmidt and Scott McNealy vs. the dark overlords of the Evil Empire, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Winner takes the desktop.

They talked it up on Slashdot. There were over 6,000 blog entries on "Sun, Google Office." Some reporters, none of the ones with my crew, I'm thankful to say, wrote it up as done deal.

Click here to read the details about the Google-Sun software partnership.

So, did we get Google Office, based on Star Office 8? Or, Google Office, based on OpenOffice.org 2.0? Or, the one I would have put money on, Google Office, based on Java Desktop System?

It was none of the above.

We got "Google Toolbar as an option in its consumer downloads of the Java Runtime Environment."

I guess Google is too busy with nano-bio-meta-humano partnerships with NASA to be bothered with Sun. Maybe next time.

Commentary: The sky's not falling for the movie industry (The Register)

The Register does it again with a scathing critique of the phony movie crisis, i.e., that piracy is killing Hollywood's revenues and profits. But Andrew Orlowski goes one step further: he indicts the "liberals," as well, including my old professor, Lessig:

Listening to our old friend Lawrence Lessig and former MPAA boss Jack Valenti debate each other on National Public Radio last week, it became clear. The dears sounded like a couple of senior citizens grumbling their way a cold day trip to Brighton Beach - but in reality the phony crisis suits them both.

Representing the pigopolist lobby, Valenti wants to instill widespread panic so he can outlaw new technologies of storage and distribution. History tells us that rights holders have always profited from such new technologies, and it's a point Lessig has himself made superbly in the past.

Representing the technology determinists, Lessig also wanted to tell us the sky is falling, because copyright was the real obstacle to technical innovation. The favorite narrative of today's techno-utopians goes "X is the end of Y as we know it!" (or "Z changes everything!") - it's a recurring adolescent fantasy.

History tells us that copyright has always bent to accommodate the new technologies, and the social contract always engineers new compensation models. Instead, Lessig concluded with a little Hallmark Card homily to the power of creativity, citing "14 million blogs" as a testament to human ingenuity. No, really.

The geek lobby sees the power of computer networks being frustrated by rights holders, and wishes those rights away. The rights lobby sees its value being eroded by the lack of new compensation models to go with new technology, and so wishes the technology away. But neither those rights, nor the technology, are going to be wished away.

So a permanent war suits both lobbies.

Sounds plausible....And familiar. I had to endure a series of questions regarding patents, Microsoft's monopoly power, etc. at today's LinuxWorld UK. Any student of history (Alas! There's the problem. Dave Dargo correctly tells us that the tech industry lives in and for NOW...always) can tell you that the most formidable monopoly today is likely to be a shambles tomorrow, as it (in Clay Christensen thinking) clings to its old ways in the light of new technologies, new business models, etc. Let the old world take care of itself - I want to build a new world.

Analyst: Open source growing up or selling out? (Comino et al.)

I think this will be the last of the academic papers for awhile. It has been great to step back from the open source community, and look at from the onlooker's perspective, rather than as a participant. Some of the myths we take for granted are clearly dispelled when you look at open source through the (somewhat) objective lens of academia/science.

None of its benefits disappear, really. Just some of the myths.

For instance, Comino, Manenti, and Parisi wrote a great paper called "From Planning to Mature: on the Determinants of Open Source Take-Off." In it they analyze the evolving nature of open source development. They find, among other things,

...[T]he less restrictive the licensing terms the larger the likelihood of [a project] reaching an advanced development status...[which] effect is even stronger for newer projects. [They] also find [no big surprise here] that projects geared towards system administrators appear to be the more successful ones. (Abstract)

This is somewhat interesting in light of speculation by many that more restrictive licenses engender bigger development populations, because developers want maximum code freedom (as in RMS) - i.e., they want to make sure they're code will not be taken by commercial interests without their permission.

However, I suspect that the trend toward more successful (i.e., Downloaded and used) and less restrictive projects has more to do with commercialization than anything else. (The authors hint at this, as well.) The more Alfrescos, SugarCRMs, etc. that come on the market, with more need to control the direction of their respective code bases, the greater the tendency will be toward less restrictive (in the open source sense) licenses (that accord less "RMS freedom" but more "project owner freedom/flexibility"). This isn't an organic trend - it's fed by these companies' marketing dollars.

The authors also find, as I mentioned from a separate paper, that "around 80% of the [SourceForge projects as of December 2004 do] not show any interaction within the community of developers, having recorded no bugs, patches nor feature requests since [the projects'] registration" (6). In other words, SourceForge is long on project starts, but short on project development. Young and restful...as shown below.



In addition, projects with at most two developers account for more than 80% of the SourceForge projects. (8)



This isn't a bad thing, per se, as it could simply mean that open source happens on a much smaller scale than originally mythologized (as I've blogged before). Or it could mean that open source follows the rule that the rest of the world follows: the 80/20 rule. (I.e., 80% of the work is done by 20% of the contributors.) The authors suggest as much. (12) So, small development "communities" are not necessarily a bad thing. But the phenomenon does call into question the size of the open source development community that we've generally assumed.

Again, I don't think this is a bad thing. Why? Because I care less about development than I do about use. I care how many people/companies derive value from a given project. Open source is only important (to me) to the extent that it's useful. And I measure "useful" by end-user uptake, not developer uptake (though, if you can find both, that's obviously a huge bonus). As for where it's being used (i.e., for whom it's being developed), we'll end with this data from Comino et al:



Mostly developers writing for other developers (including system administrators). Not much end-user code in there...though commercialization will change that. Thankfully.

Analyst: Open source commercialization: transparent but not permeable (O'Mahony and West)

This is related to O'Mahony's and West's work on sponsored communities. I can't provide a link to the new research, because they sent me a pre-release version of a soon-to-be-published paper, but it should be out shortly.

Those deeply embedded in the open source business community won't find this surprising, but others may:

While all sponsors [of various open source projects comprising their data set, including SugarCRM, MySQL, Mozilla, etc.] hoped to receive new ideas and bug fixes from community members, only some noted significant community contributions to the code (such as the reduced cost of testing) - for many this was a secondary goal. Instead, sponsors emphasized factors such as encouraging product adoption and fostering a third-party supply of complementary products, consistent with West (2003; West and Gallagher, 2004). (15-16)

The idea that open source (for commercial firms, anyway) may be more about distribution than development should surprise none that have attended OSBC in years past, or otherwise kept up with the ongoing discussion.

Used well, open source creates a highly efficient distribution mechanism. Siobhan and Joel find that most sponsored open source projects aren't in it for the code they'll get back, but rather for "increased public awareness, accelerated low cost distribution, and reduced costs of marketing." (16) They then capture John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM (they don't identify him in the paper, but I've heard this inspired rant from John before, so I'll assign credit :-) at his best:

"Every dollar you give [proprietary competitor], 70 cents to goes to fund the sales and marketing efforts, and maybe 11-14% actually goes to pay the engineering salaries that write the code.

The barrier to entry into this marketspace isn'’t building a better product, it is having $50-60 million a year just to blow on sales and marketing. And thatÂ’s really a shame. I just thought that was really frustrating from someone that is an innovator, someone that wants to compete by building a better product [rather than] on just the sheer economics of sales and marketing."

Great stuff, John.

Importantly for those thinking of starting open source companies, Siobhan and Joel find that existing sponsored projects generally err on the side of transparency, but few actually give true permeability. (17-19) That is, most sponsored projects are happy to have outside contributors look and even contribute back code, but they retain (for some obvious reasons, not the least of which is support) ultimate control over the code itself.

Question, then: is this open source? Or is it shared source? It's funny to me that Microsoft gets pummeled for being so restrictive with its code, when what they offer (for some code, mind you, not all) something not too dissimilar from what, effectively, some of our leading open source projects offer. Transparency, but not true permeability. (Btw, I'm not taking sides on this. I just find it ironic.) I think it squarely fits within the emerging, expanding view of open source.

Hi, I'm from the government of Venezuela - can you sell me Linux?

I spoke at LinuxWorld UK today. It was a (mostly) lively, engaging discussion (which, unfortunately, got mired in anti-Microsoft finger-pointing at times - that is, the audience couldn't get off its anti-Microsoft fixation). I got to meet two people I greatly admire: Mark Shuttleworth, Founder and funder of Ubuntu, and Klaus Knopper, founder of Knoppix (live CD Linux which you should try, if you haven't already - it was actually the first distro I ever used).

The best part of the day, however, came immediately following the panel. Two gentlemen approached me and said (no kidding):

"Hello. We are from the government of Venezuela, and would like your help migrating from Microsoft."

I missed the memo on this one, but Venezuela's government has decided (over two years ago) to move to open source (and, specifically, GPL'd open source) for its software needs. Nick McGrath of Microsoft, with whom I had been talking, took it in good stride, and we both told them to carefully consider TCO, etc.

After Nick left, however, I took them straight up to Novell's booth. :-) (Which, btw, was pretty packed all afternoon. The conference itself seems to have greatly benefited from the merger of the Linux User & Developer Expo and LinuxWorld UK.)

News: Microsoft loves open source

The Register, in advance of this week's LinuxWorld UK Conference (I'll be speaking there - please drop by, if you're local), has a great "Come to Ballmer" confessional by Martin Taylor, Microsoft's General Manager of Platform Strategies.

But in fact this is Microsoft's latest approach to the niggling challenge (opportunity?) presented by Linux and open source software: public humility.

Call him what you want, but Martin Taylor says the approach is working, and that it is one of the reasons the debate raging around Linux vs. Microsoft is probably quieter today than it was two years ago. Whether you accept that the debate has lost any of its fire is another question entirely.

Looking back, Taylor says that in the past Microsoft has been "a bit emotional" in its response to Linux and open source, but that this was because it didn't really understand:

"So we hired some Linux people to, among other things, give us a connection to the OS community. We'd rather embrace open source, because we'd rather see open source applications running on Windows than running on Linux," he explains. "And when people don't choose Microsoft, we want to know why."

Hmm....Not that he was listening to me, but haven't I been saying this is what Microsoft should have been doing all along? I tried to get Jason to speak about it at OSBC Boston, but he says he has something better. We'll see....

Anyway, nice to see Microsoft (perhaps) learning the difference between a development/distribution methodology (open source) and a competitive technology (Linux). They're really not the same.

News: Steve Mills steps in "it"...twice

Steve Mills is a smart guy. IBM is a smart company. But apparently they haven't figured out a way to overcome "gravity" in the IT world. What do I mean by "gravity?" I mean Clay Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma. In (very) brief, the more companies fixate on pleasing customers (which they should do), the more they're forced to innovate up a customer-pleasing trajectory that takes them out of the mainstream user's actual requirements, leaving a soft underbelly exposed to the "not-yet-good-enough" upstart competitive technology.

eWeek has a great interview with Steve Mills, SVP at IBM Software. Steve apparently misses some of the irony in his comments....

What's your strategy for keeping ahead of the Pac-Man-like commoditization that open source represents?

In some sense we're driving a dual strategy - —that is for part of the market we're going to embrace commoditization. [MNA: This is actually quite smart, but probably only possible in a company the size of IBM, where the right hand really can go months without knowing what the left hand is doing.] The Gluecode model is the classic open-source model - —take a collection of open-source code that effectively is available for free, package it, offer installation and support.

You put a fee on your packaging, installation and support, and you're selling something that is an application server system but at a dramatically lower price because it didn't cost you any money to have to produce the code. You're working on integration, enhancing usability, not working on base level code. That gives you a much lower cost base and therefore the ability to charge less money.

So it allows you to participate in parts of the market where commodity level pricing is the way the market works. And then, in our case, we take the rest of our investment and continue to drive up market. [MNA: Do I sense an innovator's dilemma looming? Apparently, Steve does not....] That's what WebSphere XD is all about, that's what the WebSphere Business Integrator family is all about.

There are more than 200 products in the WebSphere family today, and they're principally focused on up market, more complex, industry vertical-based solutions.

Or, in other words, IBM is following Christensen's theory to a "T." One wonders if they actually walk around all day, noses in their individual copies of The Innovator's Dilemma, making sure they don't miss anything. :-)

But it gets better:

[Mills] I would look at all of these [open source] startups and say they all have that potential to flame out along the way because the over-promise, under-deliver phenomenon is all too prevalent in the tech industry.

These companies are exploring very precarious, in my view, business models. What they've done is they've said an element of the value I'm going to essentially forgo - I'm not going to write code. I'm going to pick up code, I'm going to leverage open source and get this big savings in investment. [I guess he missed the memo on Red Hat's recent earnings report. They seem to be doing quite well on cobbling together others' code. Novell is also doing very well, but has had to trudge through a transitional mire on the way to its upswing.]

So the good news is you can probably start up one of these companies with relatively little money and relatively few resources. [Um, yes, like Google. Or Amazon. Or eBay. Or MySQL. Or...I think you get my point.] We could start a software company around open source and we could claim we're successful, we're earning a living.

Now, if we let VCs come in and give us more money, then they want big returns so now the expectations rise. [Here, he's right. It's actually not too dissimilar to what happens to a conference the minute you take sponsorship money....]

But the business is more of a services model than it is a software model. [Ah, here's where the irony really starts. With a $billion (with a "B") services business, IBM is hardly the group to turn up its nose at services-based business models.] And services companies have never commanded the kind of multiples that software companies have commanded. [Used to be true, but increasingly untrue as VCs and the market come to grips with the fact that this is where the industry is clearly headed, whether we like it or not.] And so giving a high multiple to an open-source company I don't think makes a lot of economic sense.

They're trying to move in against established players that are significantly better funded, more mature, have deep customer relationships and a level of certainty and guarantee that they bring to the table because their models are more stable.

Exactly. That's what the "dilemma" is all about. It's precisely those resources that make big companies move glacially, think prehistorically, and eventually buy (those mangy little open source startups) indiscriminately. ;-0

Analyst: The effects of code architecture on open source

I just finished reading an interesting research paper [Links to .pdf of the paper] on the effect(s) that code architecture has on open source development communities. Carliss Baldwin at Harvard Business School wrote it, apparently with some help from the (former) dean, Kim Clark. Worth a read, though the formulas can be skipped (unless you're r0ml). (Many thanks to Siobhan for recommending it.)

Baldwin starts fairly general:

We...argue that the architecture of a codebase is a critical factor that lies at the heart of the open source development process. To support this argument, we will define two observable properties of an architecture: (1) its modularity and (2) its option values. We contend that developers with appropriate skills and training can make informed judgments about modularity and option value from early, partially implemented code releases. Their judgments in turn will influence their decisions to work on the codebase and to contribute their code back to the community. Finally, their contributed work will cause the codebase to evolve along the paths specified by the original design. (4)

Nothing earth-shattering here. The premise is that code architecture matters. But it's the analysis of why code modularity matters, as it intersects with option theory (In this paper, the "option" to implement a new design in the face of competing modules (7)), that is very interesting.

As Baldwin finds, modularity lowers both the barrier to new developers joining a project by facilitating ease of incremental development, but also the barrier to deriving personal value from the code. (17) With modular architecture, I can make very small extensions without having to upset the balance of the larger project. The value, therefore, to my contributing, rather than going it alone, is heightened. It is heightened even further if there is a large population working on the code, because I may not be "stuck" with my own contribution if someone else's is better. The value of free riding, in other words, actually "converges" on the value of contribution in an actively developed code base. (22-23)

The reason it makes sense to join a collective effort is that, with option value, parallel work is not necessarily redundant. A Robinson Crusoe [i.e., Solo developer going it alone] developer loses out on the possibility that another worker's finished codebase might be superior to her own. This possibility in turn tips the balance of payoffs in favor of joining a collective process.

Importantly, the necessary payoff to contributing developers decreases in proportion to modularity andassociatedd option value:

According to this view of the open source development process, "“fame and fortune" benefits only have to compensate developers for the costs of communication. As the model is constructed, the perceived value of the codebase plus the ability to "“exchange" effort are what bring developers into the collective process. Within the process, the perceived values of individual modules are what elicit their coding effort. Thus only one step in the overall process - —communication - requires compensation other than the simple right to use the codebase....

How does code architecture affect the costs and benefits of communication? First of all, a modular architecture substantially reduces the effort associated with a minimal communication, just as it educes the effort associated with a minimal contribution. Emails and postings can be shorter if the code is modular. This reduction in the cost of communication may make it easier to elicit contributions based on feelings of reciprocity, altruism or a wish to be affiliated.

A modular architecture also allows many contributors to be recognized for their work on different parts of the system. Nevertheless, the "“fame and fortune" value of a single contribution undoubtedly goes down as the number of modules goes up, and as a result, developers who are "hungry for stardom" might prefer to code in isolation. Offsetting this last effect, however, is the fact that option values, which justify multiple efforts directed at the same target, implicitly create tournaments in which developers can compete to provide the best design. Indeed, a modular architecture with substantial option value in the modules creates many such tournaments, involving different areas of specialization and different levels of difficulty. Also, by reducing the scale of a typical tournament, modularity increases the frequency and specificity of competitive interaction and feedback. Finally, an open source community provides would-be competitors with ready-made opponents, judges, and an audience. Thus "“stardom" may be more easily achieved within an active community than by working alone. (39, 40-41)

In sum, modularity - generally thought to be important - may well mark the difference between a successful project start and a doomed one. And once one has a project developing strongly, it becomes even clearer why code modularity is important: modularity improves the option value of third-party add-ons, increases likelihood that would-be users will be able to tweak one's code to their own benefit, etc.

News: Linus Torvalds on "specs" (KernelTap)

This is an awesome snapshot of Linus' mind in action, this time with reference to the value of specifications in computer code. (Found on KernelTap. Enjoy:

..."[A] 'spec' is close to useless. I have _never_ seen a spec that was both big enough to be useful _and_ accurate. And I have seen _lots_ of total crap work that was based on specs. It's _the_ single worst way to write software, because it by definition means that the software was written to match theory, not reality."

Linus went on to list two reasons to avoid specifications when writing software. First, "they're dangerously wrong. Reality is different, and anybody who thinks specs matter over reality should get out of kernel programming NOW." Second, "specs have an inevitable tendency to try to introduce abstractions levels and wording and documentation policies that make sense for a written spec. Trying to implement actual code off the spec leads to the code looking and working like CRAP." As a "classic example" he pointed to the OSI model, "we still talk about the seven layers model, because it's a convenient model for _discussion_, but that has absolutely zero to do with any real-life software engineering. In other words, it's a way to _talk_ about things, not to implement them. And that's important. Specs are a basis for _talking_about_ things. But they are _not_ a basis for implementing software."

Commentary: Marten Mickos in the big leagues

I just received this email from the ETRE Conference, a top-tier executive gathering for the IT industry. Notice the bolded name below....

Dear Matt,

We are preparing an outstanding ETRE together with the city of Athens at the Intercontinental Hotel, October 16-19.

This year's ETRE will bring together over 600 CEOs, entrepreneurs, industry leaders and venture financiers. ETRE members include Irwin Jacobs of Qualcomm; Niklas Zennstrom of Skype; Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurevetson; Leo Apotheker of SAP; Hermann Hauser of Amadeus Capital; Frans van Houten of Philips Semiconductor; Hossein Eslambolchi of AT&T; Rob Glaser of RealNetworks; Marten Mickos of MySQL and Neil Holloway of Microsoft, among others.

Please let me know if you are interested to join and I will follow up with ETRE registration details and an updated list of participants. I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,
xxxx

Congratulations to Marten - CEO of the little database that could, speaking with some of the biggest titles in the industry. At least with Marten, they get both the title and the substance to go with it. (Not often the case with senior execs....)

News: Rimer's rules for open source (BusinessWeek)

If you're starting an open source company, Danny Rimer is one of the best VCs on the planet to know. His firm, Index Ventures, has one of the most interesting portfolios of any venture capital firm, anywhere.

With an explosive investment in Skype, promising investments in MySQL, Trolltech, and Zend, and no signs of slowing anytime soon, BusinessWeek caught up with Danny for an interview. Some excerpts here:

MySQL was your first open-source investment. How did you get into the deal?

We knew MySQL as a technology, and I was chatting with another VC about different open-source projects, and he mentioned I should check out MySQL. At the time, I didn't realize it was a company.

It ended up being a fairly tough deal to get into primarily because certain U.S. VCs were very interested in it. But no other European VC was interested, and the company wanted one U.S. VC and one European VC. So they picked Benchmark for the U.S. one and picked us for the European.

At the time they were generating some revenue, but it wasn't apparent they were going to be a successful business. It was apparent it was a successful phenomenon, as most Web sites either looked at MySQL or were using it as their database.

How does your MySQL investment reflect what you look for in an open-source deal?
Early on we had to come up with key criteria. It's not difficult to create a successful small business if you're an open-source vendor. But we're a VC firm looking to make returns [of 10 times our initial investment] for [our investors]. We're looking for $100 million in revenue potential.

A small business that's highly profitable, making $15 million a year, is not going to move the dial for us. We're looking to invest in major software vendors.

So what are those criteria?
I call them the three Cs. These are necessary from the onset to make it an attractive story. The first is community. There has to be a huge amount of interest in it. [MySQL, Zend, and TrollTech] were already incredibly popular [when we invested]. The community is your marketing and evangelism arm. They're going to contribute and make sure this piece of software truly becomes mainstream.

The second C is commodity. Open-source companies absolutely can't have a new, innovative technology. They have to be smarter approaches to existing technology. They have to be [technologies] that developers and buyers already understand.

In the case of MySQL, because of Oracle, everyone already knew the relational database. Open source is about coming up with an alternative that's cheaper, not going after a new area.

The third C is price cushion. There has to be a big enough difference between what proprietary vendors are charging and open source is charging, so that over time open-source companies can charge more and still have enough of a price cushion to make it interesting for customers.

Those three qualities are what help us evaluate companies. We've made four investments and looked at three dozen.

These are similar "C's" to those stipulated by Larry Augustin in his OSBC San Francisco 2005 keynote. They also mesh well with the factors John Newton (Founder and CTO, Alfresco) told me had driven him and co-founder, John Powell, to push Alfresco as an open source project, and which he'll be discussing at this fall's OSBC Boston.

The one area where Danny and I apparently disagree? Open source applications. As he says,

What do you think about all the investing in open-source application companies?

I think the jury is out. I think you will have open-source components making up applications, but I don't know if you're going to have open-source applications. With business applications [that run things like call centers, accounting, and human resources], you're going to want some proprietary-ness to it. They can't be commodity, and in my logic, commodity is critical, or you don't have an interesting open-source company.

I have a tough time believing financial applications like enterprise resource planning will ever be open-source. ERP is really complex, and you have companies like SAP and Oracle that are being very, very intelligent about adapting their smarts and making them co-exist with open source.

I think the commercialization of open source changes this equation, because it changes Danny's "community" 'C.' The increasing corporatization of open source is showing both that community, in the traditional sense, was never quite what we thought it was (gargantuan, widespread), and that user community can be manufactured/developed.

I believe that user community is more important than developer community, because the data shows time and time again that the global development community that will actively work on a given project is relatively tiny compared to the user community that will take the code, try it out, and maybe submit bug fixes.

JasperSoft and SugarCRM have both shown that user community can be built, effectively from scratch. A good product will generate downloads.

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Commentary: Open source consolidation and JasperSoft

Dana talks with JasperSoft, which notes

JasperSoft...has reached important milestones and is now a real company. The software has been downloaded 750,000 times, the company has 10,000 relationships, and JasperReports is now at Version 1.0....

JasperSoft has made its first "acquisition," taking on the sponsorship of iReport. Campa prefers the term sponsorship to acquisition as being more descriptive of what actually takes place.

"iReport is a report designer that runs on top of Jasper Reports. Think of it as a UI that allows you to graphically design a report, which is executed by Jasper Reports. It's’ the most popular one for JasperReports. It'’s used by over 65% of our users."

The deal means the two programs can be integrated, so iReport will handle all new features in JasperReport as they are added. Before the designers at iReport had to wait for releases of new JasperSoft code, then write to them, before making improvements. That lag will now go away.

Campa's term, sponsorship, also speaks volumes about how open source consolidation will occur. "I think consolidation will happen.," he said. "You will see an open source gorilla emerging in the next two to four years. Someone who wants to own many projects. Right now open source companies are category specific. No one crosses categories. But in the commercial world there is a lot of overlap.

"Once you make the basic investment it's easy to extend into more projects. It's happening now within categories, as we did with iReports. We won'’t stop there."

Interesting take, Al. I actually believe consolidation in the open source world will be more difficult than in the closed-source world, at least where true community projects are concerned. With two companies, yes, that's relatively easy. But mingling developer culture with corporate culture is going to be a tougher task. Still, I'd love to be proved wrong.

Note: Full disclosure: I am on JasperSoft's advisory board.

News: Google is smoking some serious NASA

Because I don't subscribe to the "Google is God" theory, I suppose I'm allowed to be puzzled by the company's MOU (memorandum of understanding) with NASA. Haven't heard about it? Take a look at NASA's press release:

NASA and Google have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that outlines plans for cooperation on a variety of areas, including large-scale data management, massively distributed computing, bio-info-nano convergence, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial space industry. The MOU also highlights plans for Google to develop up to 1 million square feet within the NASA Research Park at Moffett Field.

Whew! I was worried that someone was going to forget about the need to get moving on "bio-info-nano convergence," but it looks like Google is on the case. Are these guys for real?

Granted, I'm a mere earthling without a PhD in thermo-molecular-bio-jambajuice-nuclear arthritis, but at some point one has to rein in the free-wheeling ubergeek culture at Google and tell them to get a real job. It's nice that someone is doing "pure" research, but I sure wish I could do something with it. Well, besides use it in my new space tourism startup, which it appears Google's partnership with NASA will also facilitate.

While Google engages in somewhat silly, the-only-reason-we-can-get-away-with-it-is-because-investors-are-still-smoking-serious-crack-thinking-that-56x-earnings-is-a-reasonable-valuation activities, other worthy pursuits - which actually fit its core strengths - go untapped. Like genealogy, as I've written before, which is banking MyFamily.com well over $100M this year (on a torrid growth rate). It's perfectly suited to Search (structured data with hierarchies between them), but is currently woefully anemic in Search. Or shopping (Froogle stinks - it's amazing how bad it is given Google's strength in search). Or ... I'm sure you can think of things, too, that you'd put before "bio-info-nano convergence."

You have a $90 billion market cap, Google. That valuation (bloated though I think it is) is due to your doing useful things like search, not space tourism. Come back to earth. Get back to work.

(OK, OK. Gibberish about whacked-out convergence aside, the deal does have some merit. As stated in the Merc:

The space agency collects and stores massive amounts of data from its various space probes and missions. Google is adept at taking massive amounts of information, sorting it and making it available to the public.

``This is an amazing and proud day,'' said Scott Pace, director of the NASA Ames Research Center.

``Aside from Google being on your desktop everyday, what they do in information technology is crucial to organizing information. And NASA is drowning in information, and we welcome someone who can help with this technological challenge.''

Google, meanwhile, will get access to the scientists who manage one of the world's most powerful supercomputers -- a 10,000-processor machine called Project Columbia. Although Google will probably not have direct access to the government-owned computer, its engineers will be able to discuss supercomputing design with NASA engineers. That could help the company with its efforts to create products such as 3-D maps.

Google will also gain access to NASA's space data and imagery. Google already uses satellite imagery in its Google Maps service and for its Google Earth software. Google could enhance the imagery with data about temperatures or crop patterns, said Peter Norvig, director of search quality at Google.

This, at least, starts to make business sense. Last time I checked, Google was still a business....

Ode to (Tim) O'Reilly

Bryce Roberts (an OSBC friend) and I went to see Batman Begins the other night. On the drive home, we fell to talking about Tim O'Reilly. I was relating to Bryce how I had emailed Tim to ask for his help - a person I met during my last trip to London was looking for funding for a trading card game; I didn't have a clue where to look for that sort of funding; and so I had asked Tim, figuring if anyone knew, it was him. Later that day I received an email from Tim, introducing me to two heavyweights in the industry (one a CxO at Sony Online). I was dumbfounded. Why had Tim done so much for me, and how did he manage to know every person on the planet? And how did he gain so much clout as a book publisher?

Bryce's answer was dead on: "Because he's more than that. He's been in the industry for two decades or more, calling the trends during all that time."

Wired must have had the same question as I, and came to much the same conclusion as Bryce, because they have a great feature on him in this month's magazine. Given how understated Tim can be, it's actually shocking that he has become the industry figure that he is. He's not out patting himself on the back for predicting significant market trends. I guess, eventually, Justice requires that the cream will rise to the top. It certainly has with Tim, though I think it has taken far too long, given how influential he has been. Wired writes:

...[T]he man behind the menagerie is emerging as a figure in his own right. The conferences he hosts generate a lot of buzz; they also establish a sort of geek's conventional wisdom and build a community around O'Reilly's own hand-rolled view of what's hot or going to be hot. His conclaves come in varying shapes and sizes, from large gatherings like Emerging Technology (ETech) - for which programmers, entrepreneurs, and VCs pack hotel conference rooms every spring - to the intimate Foo (Friends of O'Reilly) camps, which are like pajama parties- for propeller-heads. No matter the event, the highlight is usually O'Reilly's opening talk. Hair a bit mussed, eyes gleaming behind wireframe spectacles, dressed in studiously informal garb - khakis topped with T-shirt or fleece - O'Reilly will insist to his audience that "you are our radar; we're just picking it up."

With some, you'd think Tim was just putting on a show of false modesty. But not Tim. He's genuine. At the first Open Source Business Conference, Tim sat next to my wife during one of the keynotes. She had no idea who he was, but when I spotted the two of them together (Tim chatting casually with her), I said, "Jen, you're so lucky! You're sitting next to Tim!!" His reply was something like, "Actually, I thought I was the lucky one." He's a fantastic person.

I've come to know him through OSBC, which he has supported (despite its being competitive, sort of, with OSCON). He has joined me at Lightspeed Venture Partners, when I asked for his help providing insight into open source. He has spoken at OSBC. He has suggested books to read (Samuel Johnson, Karl Jaspers), and while I was still at Stanford encouraged me to write a paper on Karl Popper and open source. He has always been extremely generous with his time and intellect.

An amazing intellect, brimming with insight:

Most recently, O'Reilly's dead-on inner compass led him to anticipate the current stage of the Internet. Powered by the bottom-up nature of sharing and collective action, it's exemplified by such developments as the barn-raising methodology of Wikipedia; group efforts like tagging; open source systems; Wi-Fi; open API's in ecommerce sites like Amazon, eBay, and Google; RSS; the spontaneous connectivity of Apple's Rendezvous; and dozens- of other dots that are being- connected to fulfill the original promise of the Net. He calls it the architecture of participation. In O'Reilly's world, sharing increases value - so much so that it becomes unthinkable to close off information or to adopt nonstandard proprietary systems. The result is a virtuous cycle where openness becomes the norm, encouraging even more participation.

Tim is important because of his ideas. His ideas have made many people extremely rich. Tim has done well, but not as well as he could have had he sold out:

...[I]n 1995 he sold Global Navigator Network] to America Online for $11 million, mostly stock and options. "If we'd held on until- the peak, that stock would have been worth a billion dollars," he says.

Still, he has pocketed some nice change over the years by investing in companies that show up on his radar. (As an early funder of Blogger, which Google bought, he wound up with a chunk of pre-IPO stock in the search giant; more recently he's invested in the bookmark-sharing service del.icio.us.) But he's nowhere near as loaded as some others who did well during the boom. "We never had a megascore," he admits. "We could have gone public if we wanted to, but why cash out and get all those headaches?"

I love Tim. I think that last statement of his sums him up. He's not an obnoxious ideologue that spurns money, nor is he an obnoxious capitalist that covets it. He's just Tim, one of the most influential people in technology. I'd put him in the top two, and I'm not sure who I'd elevate to number one. So, maybe it's him.

How to sum him up? I'll let him do that:

"There's a wonderful phrase in a different context from Wallace Stevens, talking about a metaphysical view of reality versus the information." From memory, [Tim] translated a passage from Stevens' Esthetique du Mal. The key phrase: "Beneath every no / lays a passion for yes that had never been broken."

"I just love that," O'Reilly said, his ever-present sheepish grin taking on a late-afternoon wistfulness. "'Beneath every no lays a yes that had never been broken.' To me, there's this wonderful spirit."
… You know, I believe people are fundamentally good and want to find things that make life better for themselves. There are social dynamics for people that work, and there are ones that are pathological. But beneath every no lays a yes that had never been broken. I put my life-faith in that."

Here's to a man who deserves even more success than he has had, and yet never covets that "loss."