Would Microsoft sue Linux?

Of course, Microsoft couldn't sue a technology. But would it sue Linux providers? Like IBM, as the biggest target? I, for one, hope so. Here's what Ballmer said in his recent Forbes interview:

What's going on in terms of Microsoft IP showing up in Linux? And what are you going to do about it?

[Asay note: Again, leaving aside Dan Lyons' softball questions to Ballmer....]

Ballmer: Well, I think there are experts who claim Linux violates our intellectual property. I'm not going to comment. But to the degree that that's the case, of course we owe it to our shareholders to have a strategy. And when there is something interesting to say, you'll be the first to hear it.

I, for one, can hardly restrain my glee. I can't think of anything better than Microsoft suing members of the open source commercial community.

For one thing, it wouldn't have any larger (long-term) impact than SCO has. (Remember SCO? Didn't think so.) Short-term impact? Sure. But I'm actually not convinced that the further ill-will Microsoft would earn itself would make it any friends.

Headline: "Microsoft, angry that a rival operating system actually works, is available to buy (unlike Vista), and doesn't require minute-by-minute security patches, sues Linux. Users, which now include every company on the planet, revolt."

I wonder sometimes if Microsoft remembers what it's like to compete, to live....

Microsoft has done so little for so long that it must be terrible to have to move its girth to actually compete. That the only way it knows how to compete is with a possible lawsuit is testament to how far the company has fallen.

Microsoft's compatibility and innovation problems...

Steve Ballmer needs to occasionally visit Planet Earth. His recent Forbes interview is full of blog fodder. I'll take it in small doses....

Forbes.com: Right now, I can go out and get a free alternative to just about every product Microsoft sells. Why do people keep paying you for something they could get free?

[Asay Note: This is a MAJOR softball question, but then, Dan Lyons is anything that isn't open source. What's interesting is how telling Microsoft's response is to what should have been a home run pitch.]

Ballmer: One, people value their time. Our stuff does more, and they like that. Two, people value their time, and those [free] things tend to be clunky. Let's say you think you can save $50. And then you go and waste three hours. You tell me how quick that payback is. You can sketch that out at the enterprise level as much as you can at the individual end-user level. So people value their time, and people value their capability. Frankly, people value not only the compatibility our stuff has with itself, but they value the add-ons and the third-party customization that people have done. As long as we keep pushing the pace of innovation and delivering that value, I think we have a great opportunity.

I 100% agree with Ballmer on one thing: people value their time. But I'm not sure it leads to the conclusion he thinks it does (viz. People value their time, therefore people value Microsoft). For example, the fact that I value my time, I buy Red Hat Enterprise Linux instead of Fedora: I don't want to futz with stabilizing and supporting a kernel. Or I pay for a SugarCRM subscription. Or whatever.

In fact, because I value my time, I buy a Mac, instead of a Windows machine, because I don't want every spammer, phisher, and virus-writer on the planet using my system. If I were an network administrator, I'd value Linux for largely the same reasons.

As for the economics of Microsoft beyond its bloated software, consider what Ballmer said: "People value not only the compatibility our stuff has with itself...". Did you catch that? Microsoft is compatible with...itself (and the third-party customizations and add-ons he mentions later). This means that if you have a large network to administer, and have Windows, NetWare, Solaris, and Linux on it, you're not really any better off with Microsoft than you are with Linux. It's only when you buy wholesale into the Microsoft ecosystem that all the magical benefits appear. (Of course, this is also when those same benefits cripple users because they're held hostage to one vendor and its myriads of enemies who dream up all sorts of viruses and such for its products....)

Let me state that again, to be clear: the Microsoft value proposition only makes sense if you buy into it completely. Everything Microsoft is compatible with itself. Once you're like 90% of the planet that actually has to use anything else, you might as well embrace Linux and other open source software, because Microsoft is no better with heterogeneity than anything else.

Arguably, it's worse, because it wants so much to dominate. Hence, Microsoft requires you to have an MSN Passport account for random, silly things. Want to collaborate on documents? No problem. You can get SharePoint Services for free! (With the purchase of Windows Server 2003, which isn't free.) Oh, you want to actually do something real with document management and collaboration? Then you need SharePoint Portal (which doesn't scale, is weak on performance, etc., but never mind...), which will only really work if you also buy/use SQL Server, Office, Windows Server 2003, IIS, Internet Explorer, and any other Microsoft product developed in the last 100 years.

Microsoft is an all-or-nothing deal. And the price is high.

As for innovation, please! Let's be clear: where does Microsoft make nearly all of its money? Windows and Office. When was the last time those things appreciably changed? (By "appreciably," I mean enough so that people actually care, and don't mean "added 100 unrelated things (like the browser) to try to inhibit competitors from compatibility.) Microsoft has the main email client and server that people use - yet what innovations has it introduced? Virtually none. It owns the browser market...and has done nothing there. It owns Office, and it took a few volunteers very little time to come up with something that is functionally very close to Microsoft Office.

Microsoft may spend a lot on R&D, but it does not meaningfully innovate. The company's primary innovation is in finding ways to prolong its existence as a vendor of Windows and Office. It may have been a technology innovator once, but those days are long gone.

Camino rocks - goodbye to Firefox!

I've felt guilty for the past few years that I've never really liked Mozilla's Firefox. It's everyone's open source consumer darling, but I think it's clunky, very slow, and ugly (even when it tries to skin itself to look like Safari). Other than that, it's great. :-) (Actually, I do like the fact that there's an active development community around it, which makes cool extensions that I can't get anywhere else.)

I prefer Safari, but have found that some sites (like my SugarCRM system and, occasionally, my Hertz and Delta sites) don't work well with Safari. So I've used Firefox for those sites because it was my only other good option.

Until now. Camino (designed exclusively for Mac OS X - Windows or Linux users stay with what you've got) is lightning fast, works with everything I've thrown at it, and is pretty (though I wish they'd give me a skin that would make it look like Safari). This is an awesome product. If you're a Mac user, you definitely want to download it.

Here's a snapshot:

You think the software model is broken? Try airlines...

I consider myself a reasonably intelligent pereson. Not overly so, but I can add and subtract.



Not cheap. But how does adding a Boston flight make it cheaper?



OK. MAYBE it really is cheaper to fly to Boston, too, and not just back to SLC. I can't explain it, but maybe. But then how do you explain that flying out to SFO is roughly the same...



...and flying from SFO to SLC to Boston somehow adds ~$600 to the price?



I guess I need a PhD in Airline Pricing Strategy.

Please sir, may I have some more?

Over the past few months, I've been helping to grow Alfresco's systems integrator ecosystem. Because Alfresco doesn't have a professional services arm - we do 100% of our implementations through partners - we spend a lot of time working with our partners. They are our lifeblood.

This is why I've talked before about how important it is to choose SIs carefully and why it's critical to us that our SI partners feed our well-being in parallel with our feeding theirs. To put it much too simply, it's important that our partners make us money, and that we make them money.

This last point - making our partners money - happens concurrently with our releasing code. An SI partner can take our code, implement it for their customer, and collect services (and support) revenues, without ever involving Alfresco. Great for them, right? And, frankly, not terrible for us. It's nice to be widely used, even if it doesn't directly (or indirectly for that matter) bring us cash.

However, as it works out in practice, those partners that "feed us" are the ones that we, in turn, feed deals/leads. We have some partners with whom we work constantly, bringing them our largest, ripest deals. Why? Because they have both brought us big deals and they consistently promote the importance of our certified, supported version (Alfresco Enterprise). Those that default to Community because it's an easier sell will tend to see less business from us.

Talking with other open source companies, it's no different elsewhere (and is the same outside the open source world): companies exist to make money, and will focus on partners that help them achieve this goal. Very simple.

So, if you're an SI, your first conversation with a prospective technology partner shouldn't be about geographical or market exclusivity. It should be about how you're going to promote that company's premier product, as well as concrete deals that you will bring to them. If the company you're talking to is like Alfresco, you'll quickly find the return on your investment to be immensely profitable.

Just how much does it cost to use open source?

No answers, yet. But the more I sell and implement the Alfresco open source application, the better I think the general open source story is.

Still, rather than answer it myself, Larry suggested I quit my whining on his blog and do a session at LinuxWorld on the topic. So, I am. I'll be moderating a great panel on the cost of bringing open source into an enterprise: "The Real World of Open Source Application Implementations: Case Studies from the Front Line." Take a look at the session here.

This is something I'm going to be hitting hard this fall in Boston at OSBC. The more I sell and implement open source in real enterprises (rather than just talking about it), the more I think there is to say on the topic. The TCO studies don't get their fingernails dirty - the best place to flesh out real costs of implementation are with real, live users and SIs.

Off-topic: Arsenal 2 Juventus 0

Looking forward to my new open source Blackberry service, Fabrizio....

John Newton in the blogosphere!

Despite having one of the longest histories and biggest brains in the content management space, John Newton (CTO and co-founder of Alfresco) used to not have a public place to share that experience/brain power. No longer. John is now live at his Content Blog. Take a look.

I'm personally interested in reading John's thoughts on ECM, but also his changing perspective on how open source affects this industry. John has been the primary agitator behind Alfresco's shift to a pure open source model, which is pretty surprising given how much success he's had in the proprietary world. Stay tuned....

This blog's new model

To make my friends at InfoWorld a little happier, I'm putting this blog on a slight time delay. My InfoWorld blog (the "Enterprise" version ;-) will carry my posts first, with AC/OS lagging a day or a few days behind.

So, if you want the most updated World According to Matt (and if you want it combined with Dave Rosenberg's inspired rabble-rousing), please subscribe to http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/rss.xml.

Having said this, there will always be things I talk about here but not at the InfoWorld site. I can be cheekier here than I can there, and because they don't like me to talk much about Alfresco or OSBC (because it might be considered advertising...whatever), those topics will primarily be discussed here.

Matt

Repenting for your proprietary youth

I just finished reading Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Early into it, I came across an interesting passage that struck me as highly applicable to my own life, and to open source.

Defoe writes:

I have...often observed, how incongruous and irrational the common temper of mankind is, especially of youth, to that reason which ought to guide them in such cases - viz. that they are not ashamed to sin, and yet are ashamed to repent; not ashamed of the action for which they ought justly to be esteemed fools, but are ashamed of the returning, which only can make them be esteemed wise men.

Most incumbent, proprietary vendors now realize they have a problem: the world wants open source, and they don't offer it, at least, not in any meaningful way. Instead of "repenting" and quickly moving to open their code, however, as IBM, Novell, and some others have done, they continue to manacle themselves their sinking, proprietary ships, more beholden to their sales forces, engineering groups, etc. than to their customers.

A word to the wise from someone who has been through it before, several times: just do it. Open up. You can survive without big up-front license fees (the crack cocaine that keeps you from seeing reality: your traditional enterprise software model is broken and gone forever.

Be wise. Go open source.

Lies your vendor tells you

It's a wonderful time to be selling (er, licensing, or renting subscriptions to, or whatever the business model is :-) open source. That said, it's amazing the sort of lies that you hear in the market by those incumbent, proprietary vendors as they vainly attempt to protect their turf. Tony Byrne over at CMS Watch has a great collection of lies/myths that vendors (both open source and proprietary) vendors spew to gain/maintain market share. While focused on the Content Management market, they're pretty applicable to any software market.

In order, with a synopsis of Tony's (and my) response, the lies are:

1. "Our interface will sell itself"
   Tony: Ease of use is in the eye of the user, not the vendor
   
   
2. "You only need XY thousand to get started"
   
   Tony: Entry-level pricing tends to obscure the true costs to get to a workable product.
   
   Matt: What Tony doesn't mention, but which has become clear to me as I sell against bloated systems like Vignette, Documentum, etc. is that there is a MASSIVE difference in both acquisition costs and implementation costs in proprietary systems and open source systems (the mainstream ones, at any rate, like Alfresco, Plone, Droopal, etc.). It really is a factor of 10X in many cases. I'm daily meeting enterprises that paid $500K+ for a Vignette/Documentum/FileNet/etc. system, and can't get it to work at all, despite hordes of consultants on the case.
   
   For this, source code matters. In good projects, source code access is of critical importance to helping SIs grok and then implement the code. And it's highly useful for enterprises to be able to make an initial investment in a technology that costs them less than 10 full-time employees.
   
   
3. "You can recoup your software expenses by re-assigning the web team"
   
   Tony: Sorry, but software doesn't run itself. It's simply not the case that any software product is so easy to use that few to none need administer it.
   
   
4. "Our open-source solution means you'll get off cheap" and "Our commercial solution is better supported than open-source alternatives"
   
   Tony: He's right in saying that the "really big expenses lie in customization and integration" but, in my experience with quality open source projects (see above), he's wrong to argue that "some open-source tools will cost you more than their commercial equivalents." Well, he's not wrong, but it would be important for him to point out those projects that end up costing more. I've yet to see it.
   
   With a commercially supported product like Alfresco, for example, we have customer after customer that has spent dramatically less on both the licensing costs and the implementation costs. And, again, we tend to be bidding against both greenfield and incumbent installations of proprietary software products that have run enterprises hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in both acquisition and implementation costs, only to have the overpriced system not work.
   
   Does this happen with open source? Sure. One of our prospective customers is considering a move off their open source system because it hasn't scaled or implemented well. But the cost of their failure is a fraction of what our proprietary competitors impose.
   
   As for the support question, it all depends on comparing apples with apples. Typo3 support (a la Enomaly is going to be as good or better than you'd get from OpenText. Ditto, in another world, with SugarCRM support from Sugar and/or Corra Technology. Or Compiere in the ERP space. The important thing is to compare apples (commercial company support) with apples (commercial company support from the open source product vendor or their SIs).
   
   
5. "Access to the source code protects you in an uncertain marketplace"
   
   Tony: "...[I]n uncertain times, the best thing to count on is a large, vibrant user community -- something only a minority of commercial products and open-source projects can boast." Very true. Also true that source code access itself is not a huge comfort, except in instances where the customer is active in the code, which is more common than you might think....
   
   
6. "No requirements? No problem! Our business analysts can get you started"
   
   Tony: This lack of requirements points to a problem in the enterprise buyer's business, something that software can't solve.
   
   
7. "Most enterprises deploy our solution within 4-6 weeks"
   
   Tony: "Most enterprises deploy a full-blown CMS over the course of a year. Sure, you can implement smaller projects and departmental pilots over the course of say, 3-4 months."
   
   Matt: I think this is largely true of most software markets. Software is only part of the solution - tying it into an enterprise's existing business processes is where the real time (and expense) comes in.
   
   
8. "Our migration scripts will take care of your existing content"
   Tony: "Garbage in, garbage out." As Tony implies, migration is never "point-and-click" simple.
   
   
9. "Our product is better than Vignette, for a fraction of the cost"
   
   Tony: "[Th]ere are tiers in the marketplace. Some products -- like Vignette -- are geared to tackle big, complex problems. It's true that buyers frequently overspend on CMS products, including Vignette, when they could have gotten away with something simpler and cheaper."
   
   Matt: Actually, the "lie" above is actually 100% true in some instances. Again, it depends on which open source product you have in mind. Is Sugar easier to install and administer than, say, Siebel? Absolutely. Does it depend on what the enterprise's needs are? Of course. Same with MySQL, JasperSoft, Zimbra, etc. But I think, on balance, enterprises do themselves a huge disservice by not considering open source alternatives. They tend to be much cheaper, more stable (for the good - read: actively developed with a robust community - open source projects), and easier to work with.
   
   
10. "We're the only product with..."
    
    Tony: This sort of product differentiation tends to be fleeting.
    
    Matt: Real competitive differentiation tends to be customer service, at the end of the day. Open source is licensed in such a way that it must be more customer friendly. I don't get paid on a day to day basis unless I'm delivering superior customer support - there is no big, up-front license fee to grow fat and lazy on....

Optaros: Open source ECM white paper

Optaros has put together an excellent white paper that compares the various open source content management systems. We've tried to buy off Seth several times, and the !%!%!% guy simply refuses to sell his opinion. :-) That said, Alfresco still shows up well in the bake-off.

I really like the fact that Optaros put this out, and wish that we had more SIs doing this kind of "academic" work. IT buyers benefit from having candid, honest opinion on open source alternatives. In fact, I'm looking for ways to add more of this to OSBC Boston, so if you have ideas, please email me.

Here's the executive summary:

The open source community has produced a number of useful, high quality content management systems which presents an opportunity to deliver tailored content management solutions without the high licensing or management fees associated with commercially-licensed or hosted software. However, the sheer number of open source CMS projects and the ineffectualness of traditional commercial software selection techniques can make the task of finding the right open source software an intimidating challenge. The strategy of using feature matrices is particularly ill-suited to open source software selection. A more practical approach is to match your needs to a common business problem that others have solved using open source software and engage with the community to learn about their experiences in implementing the solution. Doing so will take advantage of the unique aspects of open source software: the openness of the user community and the transparency of the development process.



The content management use cases that are particularly well served by open source are: informational websites, online periodicals, collaborative workspaces, and online communities. This paper briefly describes some open source projects that have been successfully applied to support these use cases and gives techniques for how to engage with the community. While open source is frequently and successfully used as an alternative to custom development of unique solutions, the use of open source software will be the topic of another white paper or case study.

Investors Business Daily must not know me very well...

This from today's Investors Business Daily story on the rising valuations for open source startups.

How do you put a price on free?

That's the question facing investors in open-source software firms. Few doubt that such companies are reshaping the software landscape. Their products -— based on publicly available code and developed by global open-source communities - are giving pricey commercial software a run for its money.

But since the underlying software of open-source companies is free, analysts wonder if they're worth multimillion-dollar valuations from investment funds and big-name suitors. Even fans of the open-source movement see signs of froth.

"I suspect we're in the midst of another bubble time for open-source companies and would do well to be prudent in our expectations," wrote Matt Asay, on his Web site.

He's no random crank. In addition to organizing the Open Source Business Conference, he runs U.S. business development for open-source firm Alfresco.

For the record, I may not be random, but I am a crank. :-)

The story does a good job of raising an important issue: is most of the money (and there's a lot of it - $1B and growing, by my calculations) going into open source dumb money? Not dumb in terms of the VCs funneling the money to startups, but dumb in terms of the business thinking underlying the startups? Kim doesn't think so:

Kim Polese, CEO of open-source firm SpikeSource, concedes that the deals might not make sense using traditional valuation benchmarks. But the old assumptions about return on capital might not apply when it comes to open source, she says.

Case in point: Most users don't pay for the product. At the same time, the collaborative nature of open source cuts development and marketing costs.

Open-source firms "have a phenomenal user base and are a disruptive force," she said. "That can be worth a lot of money."

I think the world of Kim, but I disagree here. At the end of the day, a company must be measured in MONEY. Eyeballs are nice. But money is what attracts the public market.

Open source companies that make friends but no money deserve the same bankruptcy that failing, non-open source companies get. Period.

The myth of open source sales and marketing cost savings?

Nick Halsey and I shared lunch at Novell's BrainShare conference yesterday, and fell to talking about the benefits inherent in an open source business model, real and imagined. One cherished benefit? Significant savings in sales and marketing costs. (Larry Augustin drove this point home at OSBC 2005, and John Roberts preaches this gospel frequently, in his OSBC 2006 keynote and elsewhere. I've said it, too.

Question: Is it true?

It's certainly true of open source companies at a certain stage in their existence. Alfresco, today, manages to sign marquee customers without stepping on an airplane, without having a hefty direct sales force, and without paying me a dime in commission. (This last part kind of hurts, though John did tell me I can have Arsenal season tickets if I hit a fairly massive number.... :-) But will we always be able to do this?

MySQL has increasingly hired direct sales people as its market heft increases. Buyers simply aren't going to spend $100K over the phone with someone they haven't met. (But MySQL mitigates direct sales costs in some exceptionally smart ways. Ask Mark or Marten some time how they do it.) Even SugarCRM is starting to hire more direct sales people.

Is this bad? Does it mean that the promise of open source - significantly lower sales and marketing costs, with those savings going into building a better product - is a sham?

No. It doesn't. What it does mean is that open source is a cheaper way to start and fund initial product development. It's a better, faster way to go from 0 to 60. But at some point, people, and not merely products, are important.

And, as Nick astutely observed, any successful company - open source or not - needs to learn how and where to spend sales and marketing dollars. Inside sales for sub-$5000 deals, for example, with direct sales looking at the $50-100K+ deals and the channel moving deals in-between. Open source simply lets you get farther on that inside sales team to build a base upon which the direct sales team can build the monster deals.

Is open source mostly about free?

Truth in advertising: I'm easily swayed by Monica Kumar. Monica is director of Oracle's Open Source Program Office, is very smart, and actually fun to talk with.

(This last thing should not be underestimated. I remain of the mind that people prefer to do business with nice people, not jerks. On that score, I also have to admit mea culpa for casting Oracle with a broad "jerk" brush. The funny thing is, everyone I know there now, I like. So, maybe Oracle isn't a mean, bullying company after all.... :-)

Anyway, I bumped into Monica at Novell's BrainShare conference this week in Utah. She gave me a few CDs for the Oracle Database 10g Express Edition and suggested I actually try it out, instead of spouting off about Oracle's imminent demise and failed open source strategies.

Done. Verdict? It's a great product. No question. But I still think Oracle needs to fix its marketing of the database. It's obviously intended to be a defense against MySQL invading the low-end of the database market (though I'm with Zack on this one, and wouldn't classify Yahoo!, Google, Travelocity, etc. as "low-end"). But it's missing something that I really do think matters, even if no one actually looks at the source code: code freedom. Here's the marketing spiel from the Oracle website:

Oracle Database XE is a great starter database for:

• Developers working on PHP, Java, .NET, and Open Source applications
  
• DBAs who need a free, starter database for training and deployment
  
• Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and hardware vendors who want a starter database to distribute free of charge
  
• Educational institutions and students who need a free database for their curriculum

With Oracle Database XE, you can now develop and deploy applications with a powerful, proven, industry-leading infrastructure, and then upgrade when necessary without costly and complex migrations.

Free as in cost is important. Very important. People have to be able to try out the product without an upfront outlay of cash.

But MySQL, and open source generally, is much more than this. Freedom of code actually matters. There's something about a free system that does nothing more than lead me to an expensive, proprietary version that...doesn't work. And there's little reason that you should make your product free without also opening up the code (for the low-end version and for the high-end version, and perhaps particularly for the high-end version: No one is going to run a massive Oracle database, with sensitive, critical data inside, without paying for support.

So why not just open source the whole thing, Monica, and let people pay you for a supported, certified version? (50% of your revenues are tied up in support/maintenance, anyway, so you're well on your way.)

That would be a credible alternative to MySQL.

Self-selecting users?

I'm not sure how representative this is of commercial open source, generally, but I thought this might be an interesting data point for would-be open source companies. At Alfresco I've found that the majority of users self-select at the point of download: they're either Community (free as in $$) or Enterprise (pay for a certified, supported version). We do have people that download the Community version and then migrate over to Enterprise, but a surprisingly small percentage. At least, here in the US.

I'm not sure how to read this data. I suspect that we're a microcosm of what happens every day in the larger market. For example, companies self-select themselves as free WCM buyers (and use PHP-Nukes, Plone, or something like that) or paid WCM buyers (Interwoven, Vignette, etc.). Now they can do this within the same company with SugarCRM, JasperSoft, MySQL, etc. Try out a free version or go straight to an enterprise-supported/ready version. All within the same company.

For some things, I'm an "Enterprise buyer." When I want FIFA 2006, I pull out my wallet and expect to pay. When I want a DVD ripping utility, I'm a "Community buyer." Interestingly, I'm sure the roles are reversed for a wide range of people reading this.

More interestingly, I'm sure people bring different buying behaviors to IT. Some may not find content management of high priority, and are happy to use a free, open source option. They pull out the wallet for business intelligence applications. Or CRM. Or whatever.

In this way, open source enables IT buyers to have their cake and eat it, too. They no longer have to settle for a weak ECM, BI, CRM, ERP, etc. system just because it's not their top priority. They can have the best (though usually unsupported) of an application space and invest those dollars elsewhere, for something they're more comfortable supporting themselves or less interested in paying for. The end result? A lot more choice.

Selling freedom, not free

As the open source business ecosystem grows and matures, I'm finding it increasingly important for me to not only pitch my company's paid version, but also others'. Were I true Adam Smith, I'd argue that

...every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.

But I'm not. I'm with John Nash: I'm best served by helping myself AND my community. Smith would argue that my goal is to induce those around me, out of their own enlightened self-interest (he calls it "self love"), to serve my needs because it also serves theirs. I don't disagree.

But I think there's a higher good, and one that best serves my community and myself in the short term. And that is, again, by actively trying to build up my community.

So, back to open source. When I first started at Alfresco, my goal was eradicate barriers to selling as much of our products as possible. This often meant promoting Alfresco with the free, unpaid versions of the default components that go into our ECM solution, namely: MySQL and JBoss (or Tomcat). It wasn't that I didn't want to help these other companies, but rather that my self-confidence in being able to sell Alfresco wasn't strong enough to also take on the sales task of promoting these others.

A few months later, Alfresco is kicking tail (we have a customer and active pilot list that any company, open source or proprietary, would covet). I'm happy about this, of course, but I'm increasingly mindful that some of this success has come at the expense of the long-term viability of the open source ecosystem. The more I perpetrate the myth that open source is free (not ours, but others') the more I limit Alfresco's long-term market potential.

Should I be promoting MySQL 5.0 Pro over Community Edition? Absolutely. Do I need to promote it at the expense of an Alfresco sale? No. But I think I (and, frankly, we) can be doing a lot more to foster an extra-Alfresco understanding of why paid-for open source is a better investment than "in the wild" open source, at least where there is the option of commercial support.

As for systems integrators, they also shoot themselves in the foot when they quickly abandon a commercial product for a free open source project at the slightest sign of customer push-back. "The customer is always right" (a sentiment I believe) should not be an excuse for poor salesmanship. If our sales pitch is only successful when we're pitching "free" as in gratis, we're not worth our commission.

Exciting sports and open source

Contrary to (American) public opinion, soccer/football really is the most interesting sport in the world. And a group of American statisticians have proven it. As E. Ben-Naim (Los Alamos) and colleagues suggest in this report [PDF], a sport is most exciting if the end result (Team A will beat Team B) is often in question. Using this as a measure, they find that soccer is the most exciting sport due to the unpredictability of its results.

As reported in Nature:

A sport's 'upset probability' is calculated from the number of times that the team with the worse record wins. The larger this quantity is, the more evenly matched the teams are - in other words, the more competitive the league is.

They find that, since records began - before 1890, in the case of English football - the chances of an upset have been consistently greater in English soccer than any of the American sports. The underdog wins 45% of the time in soccer, but just 36% of the time in American football.

I had no need for a scientific report to tell me that American football is boring. But I'm glad they've proven it, all the same.

Interestingly, however, the scientists find that soccer is, over the past 60 years, and especially in the last decade, losing some of its excitement. Why? Because results are becoming more predictable as money flows into the game. Chelsea, Manchester United, etc. - these teams regularly trounce their lesser-monied Premiership fellows because they can afford to acquire every player worth having. Not interesting to watch. In turn, this influx of money is turning the Premiership, in particular, into a league nearly as boring as the Italian Serie A league. The more money in a league, the higher the stakes, the bigger the incentive to play to not lose.

What's the open source analog? Open source is profiting, in part, from the big software companies' desire to not lose. They've sold about all they can sell, and have huge financial commitments to given customers and markets. As Clayton Christensen writes, their incentive is to keep feeding their existing customers with bloated, feature over-rich products. They consolidate (tantamount to the big soccer clubs purchasing all the talent) and then duke it out with other software hegemons. They have no incentive to play innovative soccer, as it were. Their incentive it to defend and eke out a 1-0 win or, worst case, a draw. There's too much money at stake to experiment.

Customers, for their parts, don't like this tedious IT any more than I like watching lazy soccer. Yes, enterprise buyers want predictability in their IT systems. But they also want innovation (product and business model), and they're simply not getting it from the hegemons. They're getting it from open source.

In short, open source = Arsenal. Enterprise bloatware = Juventus.

How people work

Many thanks to Paul K. for pointing out this story from Fortune on how a range of executives work. An enlightening read, in large part because most of the executives don't waste time trying to convince the interviewer that they work hard.

I find it interesting the comparatively little time they spend on email, and that few of them (except Marissa Mayer at Google, Amy Schulman of DLA Piper, and 1-2 others) seems to make a point of talking about how long they work. Is it a technology thing to fetishize just how hard we work by talking about how long we work (as if the two were synonymous?).

I mean that sincerely. I have a hard time turning off my laptop at night, and almost always work a few hours after my kids go to sleep (and whenever I can on Saturdays). I see this as a very negative thing, and not a sign of what a cool workaholic I am. Email is often the culprit. I'm seriously considering junking my Treo so that I can at least reclaim that part of my life/attention. It would be nice to talk to people again, rather than just type to them....

Open source abundance theory

I've been on a plane for the past 10+ hours, so forgive me if this comes across as inane gibbering. (I mean, more than usual.) A thought just struck me. I don't know that it's particularly novel, but after conflating A Beautiful Mind with Trollope's The Way We Live Now, as well as a small dose of Gladiator, here's what emerged:

There's far more money in abundance than in scarcity.

Simple, right? Obvious, right? A platitude of the most banal kind.

And yet most businesses emphatically build on the very opposite theory: scarcity.

Copyright, patent, trade secrets. These things are designed to exclude, to protect for one's individual benefit. Very proper and Adam Smith-ian of us, no doubt, but also arguably detrimental to both those around us and ourselves.

Why? Because there's a lot more money to be made in a vibrant, big, growing market than there is in a controlled, small, stifled market.

Sure, some in closed economies make a lot of money. I doubt, however, if they make as much as they could in an open economy. A closed economy, almost by definition, has limits on the amount of currency that can be scooped up and consumed. An open economy, by name and by definition, does not.

Which brings me to open source. We have an opportunity here. We can narrowly focus on self-interest, company by company. This, so classical, Adam Smith-style economics would tell us, is the way to maximize the overall "pie."

But John Nash's equilibrium theory and common sense argue that in parallel with self-regard and self-seeking we should also seek the good of the group. In seeking our own benefit we may tangentially benefit the wider population. But if we make enough room to maximize our own take while simultaneously seeking to do those things that will benefit the whole, I think we end up with a bigger market to monetize.

This means, for example, that it is important for any single open source company to have a strong open source ecosystem around it. The more open source succeeds, the more an individual player can sow from that success (and eventually reap). In the case of my company (Alfresco), we succeed to the extent that there are great open source databases, application servers, operating systems, etc. We could succeed without Red Hat, MySQL, SugarCRM, etc. But we can succeed much, much more in tandem with these others' success. And vice versa.

John Donne, then, was right. No man is an island, entire of himself, whatever Paul Simon might sing to the contrary. It pays to fund abundance. If you're an open source company, it pays to selflessly/selfishly strengthen open source projects and open source commercial entities. It's just good business.

My personal rules of productivity

I had forgotten that I'd written this until the magazine arrived today. Oddly enough, it actually gives some useful information. I'll share it here, in case you're interested.

(This is from Connect Magazine, a Utah-based technology publication I've been a columnist with for the past year or two.)

Working in a large company, it’s easy to forget how much real work there is to be done. In November I left Novell to join an open source Enterprise Content Management startup, Alfresco. I spent three years with Novell, and made the move with some trepidation.

Nearly three months later, I’ve yet to catch my breath. There’s something about working at a small company that demands efficiency and one’s best work. Perhaps it’s because there’s nowhere to hide — if you don’t deliver, everyone knows, because who would deliver in your stead? Or maybe it’s because so much rides on so few that you just don’t have time to take breathers.

Regardless of the reason, I don’t know that I’ve ever been happier. It feels good to be productive, to be needed. I’m not fully persuaded, however, that I needed to wait until Alfresco to be a productive human being. Looking back, there are things that I could have done better in my time at Novell, and things Novell could have done better for me. I’d like to share a few here.

Employer Rule No. 1: Give employees ownership of real deliverables. Depending on the kind of manager you are, you’ll either shy away from this because: a) you can do it better, or b) you don’t want to overload your direct reports. Either is a mistake. In my experience, most complaints I’ve had with any of my past employers have related to having too little to do, rather than insufficient salary/title/etc. Give your employees meaningful work, and they will (eventually) love you for it.

Employee Corollary No. 1: Insist on personal accountability. Yes, it’s scary to have people counting on you. It’s much easier to coast along behind the scenes. But admit it: it’s not very satisfying. Sloth never is. It’s much better to be king of an infinitesimal pond than a nobody in a massive ocean. Go for the responsibility, not the title. (I’ve made this mistake on several occasions, and each time I’ve regretted it.)

Employer Rule No. 2: Less is more. You really don’t need 10 people for two jobs. You need one. I’ve become a big believer in slow, organic growth in organizations. It’s much better to hire one person and stretch them thin than it is to hire 10 people and have them struggling to find sufficient work to keep them occupied.

Employee Corollary No. 2: More is less. If you’re in Sales, you “just need Feature X in the product to sell millions of Product Y.” If you’re in Marketing, you just need Research Report Z in order to do a quality competitive analysis, figure out the product direction to take, etc. If you’re in Engineering, better hardware, more software, etc. is your complaint. In every case, you’re wrong. You don’t need more. You just need to work with what you have. There is a customer base out there for nearly any product; the best product marketing/competitive due diligence is done out in the field, getting your hands dirty (and not some overpriced tripe from an analyst who sits in an office all day); and the best code is often free, done on cheap commodity hardware. The less you have, the more resourceful you’ll become — this makes us think like a real customer, who has to stretch an IT budget. Speaking of which….

Employer Rule No. 3: Every employee should be revenue-additive. This is the most important of them all. Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL, once told me that he thinks business development is something every employee should do, all of the time. I didn’t believe him then, but I do now. Every employee should understand how she contributes to the company’s top and bottom lines, and should be held accountable for how she measures up. Everyone should be selling, developing product, marketing it, etc. No exceptions.

Employee Corollary No. 3: If you’re not making money for your employer, you’re a waste of money. If you don’t understand how you fit into the Circle of Life for your employer, find out. Or figure it out. But don’t just collect a paycheck. You owe it to your employer and to yourself to help defray the cost of your paycheck, as well as that of others’. The more revenue-driven we become, the more effective and the better our chances of improved future employment.

In closing, I wish I had lived up to the three employee corollaries while I was at Novell. Too often I blamed the company’s bureaucracy, without recognizing that I was contributing to it. Or I complained about the company’s direction without giving myself to the effort to improve it. I was a whiner more than I was a fixer.

I’m lucky to have landed somewhere that demands that I improve on this. But you can find this same fulfillment wherever you work. You just have to take personal, financial responsibility for your company, in whatever role you’ve been given. Good things will come to you if you take that role seriously.

LinuxWorld football grudge match: Funambol vs. Alfresco/Juventus vs. Arsenal

For those who find LinuxWorld to be a bit dull, let's liven it up a bit. On Wednesday, April 5 (mid-week of LinuxWorld), my club, Arsenal, will play Juventus, Fabrizio's club, in the second leg of their Champions League Semi-Finals "tie." I somewhat doubt Fabrizio and I will be manning our booths at that time....(Join us in the lounge to watch the slugfest!)

I'm willing to bet Fabrizio a free Afresco subscription (value: $7500/CPU) (for use by Funambol) against Funambol's open source Blackberry-killer server software (for use by Alfresco internally). So, Arsenal wins, Alfresco gets the market's top open source mobile email solution. Juventus wins (heaven forbid!), and Funambol gets the greatest open source Enterprise Content Management solution. Software only (no ugly Blackberries or server hardware included).

Deal, Fabrizio? Think your overpaid team can keep up with Europe's rising force? Nah, neither did I.

If anyone else wants to weigh in, put your software on the line. I'll keep track of bets.


[Pictured: Patrick Vieira, running in abject terror at the prospect of facing his old club, Arsenal.]

News: SCO's revenue slides while Novell's Linux revenue jumps

Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols is reporting that SCO's revenues continue to slide. No big surprise there, though it's almost funny to hear them continue to blame Linux for all their woes, rather than admit that trying to sue the entire planet was a poor strategic move:

Revenue for the first quarter of fiscal year 2006 was $7.34 million, as compared to $8.86 million for the comparable quarter of the prior year. In SCO's prior quarter, ending Oct. 31, 2005, the Lindon, Utah company's total revenue was just over $8.5 million.

SCO CFO Bert Young blamed the decrease in revenue on the continued competitive pressures on its Unix products and services from Linux....

Meanwhile, a few miles north in Happy Valley, Novell has been battered due its Q1 earnings. My question: Why?

Novell reports:

During the first fiscal quarter 2006, Novell recognized total Open Platform Solutions revenue of $56 million, which was up from $14 million in the year ago period. Total Open Platform Solutions included $43 million from sales of Open Enterprise Server (OES) and $13 million of revenue from other Linux* Platform Products and Other Open Platform Products. The year ago period did not include revenue from OES as it was introduced in the second fiscal quarter of 2005.

Yes, this means (as the company spells out) that NetWare-related revenues continue their 11% downward slide, but this slide was well underway before I joined the company in 2002 and had continued apace until I left in 2005 (I take no blame or credit for that decline. :-)

But it also means that Novell is successfully transitioning customers to Linux (OES is NetWare services on Linux). And a 22% increase in SLES sales is nothing to sneeze at, either, even though, as IT Jungle points out, Red Hat is growing its Linux subscriptions twice as fast as Novell with 5x the revenues coming in.

Regardless of anything Red Hat is doing (and they're doing lots of things extremely well), Novell is finally seeing its long-promised transition start to bear fruit. If I'm a Novell customer or partner reading this earnings announcement, I'm happy with the company's direction, rather than wringing my hands over how far behind they still are. What is needed (as usual) is for Wall Street to think beyond the quarter to see the larger trend in the business.

News: Free-lovin' Firefox making serious bank ($72M)

Interesting, the return that freedom can bring. $72M, according to Jason Calacanis. While Mozilla claims the number is inaccurate, it also says it's "not far off."

How is Mozilla (Corp.) making that money?

Mozilla makes much of its money through the Google search box that ships on the popular Firefox Web browser. Each time a user clicks on a sponsored link in those search results, the company receives approximately 80 percent of that revenue, says Calacanis.

"They also have Amazon in the search box, and other services that I'm sure kick them back some affiliate fees," he added.

In other words, it's not banking on its code, but rather on its data. (Tim must be very proud. :-)

This is actually a fundamental tenet of all successful open source businesses: you must be able to apply an accelerator effect to your software. The way to make it pay best is to find some way to distribute and sell more software/services/whatever-you-want-to-call-it than it takes in people costs to actually develop and sell it. This is true of all software, of course, but it's particularly true/critical of open source software, where you don't have the benefit of a bloated license sale. You must have volume of distribution, and not merely large median dollar amounts on low distribution.

This high price, low distribution works in proprietary software (or "worked"), but it fails in open source, where conversion rates of paid versus free-riders will always be relatively low.

So, Mozilla has found a way to make A LOT of money off very small transactions. Can this model be borrowed by other, less Web 2.0-y open source companies? Perhaps there's a way for SugarCRM to monetize the value its customers get from the sales leads it captures? Or Alfresco to monetize the value of the documents and content it stores and distributes? Not sure - it seems pretty speculative to me. But then, who would have thought a company could make ~$72M just by letting people search from a toolbar? (I think I've clicked through on two ads in my life....)

Way off-topic: And then there was one

No more Chelsea. No more Liverpool. Only



Now if only Fabrizio's !%!%! Juventus wouldn't have won, I'd be breathing easier. But with Barcelona, AC Milan, and Juventus still in the running, Arsenal still have a long way to go (to win the Champions League, for those ignorant of football/soccer).

Baseline: Top 10 IT Projects in 2006

I've been telling OSBC sponsors for years that they're wrong to solely look for "IT" or "CIO" in a title to see who controls IT spending, and now Baseline's most recent survey offers up some proof. (On OSBC, 78% of OSBC attendees are directly involved in deciding IT spend, and well over half control budgets of $100K or more, despite only 10% of our attendees being IT executives.)

In the publication's Top 10 Projects in 2006 survey, 62.7% of respondents said business executives—up to and including the CEO—get the final sign-off on the "most critical" technology projects. Meanwhile, just 16.3% said their company's CIO has the final stamp of approval. This doesn't mean CIOs lack authority, but rather that IT projects are not seen as pure technology buys anymore.

(Also, Baseline notes: "23.4% of those working for companies that spend $10 million or more annually on information technology said CIOs have final sign-off on major projects, compared with 12.8% for organizations that spend less than $10 million on I.T." So, the bigger the company, the more autonomy the CIO appears to have.)

More importantly, the survey reveals where IT dollars are going this year. I'm glad to see some of it will be coming my way (Collaboration/ECM), but I'm actually surprised to see EAI off the list. It was Baseline's number one project last year and intuitively makes sense: companies are increasingly tying together existing systems to wring value from them, rather than buying new systems. But I guess I got outvoted....

Here are the top 10 IT projects for 2006:

Still fretting about mudbloods

Gianugo is on one again. Now, how he (or anyone else for that matter) can think of something as trivial as open source software and world code peace is beyond me when there's a good chance that smug Jose Mourinho will be humbled today by mighty Barcelona, but we all have our priorities.... :-)

Gianugo's complaint? Mudblood open source. He writes:

I have a growing feeling of discomfort when I sit and look at the current scenario of OSS-related business. I think I've been through enough winters to understand that the world is a competitive pool full of sharks and deal with it, but still I'm disturbed by the number of people trying to exploit the Open Source wave with little to no clue. I think that the final catalyst of a growing bad feeling has been this recent quote from the Splunk CEO about their stupid business model: It's the classic commercial open source strategy: entry level open source version and an enterprise version that mixes open and closed source. Seeing that screwed baitware model labeled as a "classic commercial OSS strategy” makes me sad and considering carrot farming as a good alternative.

I'm feeling more and more uncomfortable in providing advocacy and activity for this kind of people who are just trying to use Open Source either as a bait, as sales tactics or as code dumps. Free rides are fine, but just to some extent, and I'm feeling ankward [?] in being considered in the same gene pool as these people. My main reasons for falling in love with Open Source a dozen of year ago were really about the values coming from cooperative development in diverse communities: I just happen to resonate fully with Ted Leung's idea of commons-based peer production of software, and I know a whole lot of you are as well. We all know that software without community is of little to no value, but I'm wondering if we're really able to put this message across.

...I'm more and more convinced that someone should do something to clarify the situation, stating loud and clear that a license is a necessary yet not sufficient condition to achieve the status of what most of us perceive as the "real" Open Source....

Now, is it just me getting old and grumpy?

Yes, Gianugo. It is. Splunk aside (my real complaint with the comment is that I don't think there is a "classic" open source model yet. I'm still experimenting, and assume everyone else is, too. No one has found The Right Model yet), I'm not sure what "real" open source means.

What do you think of Red Hat, Gianugo? Its model is almost exactly the same as Splunk's - free code but not free access to the enterprise product. I'd consider Red Hat the paragon of open source business, but I wouldn't classify them as free love and beer. They're a savvy business making money on open source software, and are net producers of free code (just as Splunk is - why complain about the 10% kept back when they're releasing 90% of it into the open source wild?).

I do think that the "real" open source community tends to view itself with elitist [deleted "Aryan"] pride sometimes, and fetishes over what's being kept back rather than what is being given away. The upshot of even the lamest of open source companies is that a huge amount of code (much more than if the "real" community were left to its own devices - just take a look at the growth in Sourceforge since the mudbloods invaded) is now free. This is a positive thing, whatever the negatives (and I've written similarly to Gianugo's comments before.

Are there negatives? Of course there are. Of course there are freeriders. But that's a small price to pay for the new code we've been given. In the end, Gianugo, take comfort that these emperors without clothes - companies without community - will wither and die tragic corporate deaths. Surely the sadist in you loves that? :-)

You like Macs...you don't like spam...

...you need SpamSieve. From time to time I recommend excellent software, usually for the Mac (like Handbrake...but speaking of playing around with MPEG, if you're on Windows you should use VCDgear. It's a fantastic way to shrink DVDs to SVCDs, among other things. And it's open source).

Back to SpamSieve. I've been using it for several years now, and have found nothing better to trim spam from my inbox. Consider: I have several public email addresses (Alfresco, OSBC, others....) and so I get spam from every person in Russia, as near as I can tell. Thousands of spam messages each week. I see maybe 2-3 in my inbox, and almost no false positives. Maybe 1 per week.

Try it out. Or tell me if you think there is a better alternative out there.

Back to the future: Greenplum's business model

Greenplum's announcement of its "Bizgres Network" earlier this week is interesting on a number of different levels. From a purely technical standpoint, it's very cool to have another excellent spin-out from the PostgreSQL database project (one other being EnterpriseDB). Web 2.0 gets all the buzz about "remixing" technology - here's a great example of a company taking an already excellent database and making it that much better - better for itself, better for customers, and better for the Postgres community.

It's also interesting because Bizgres MPP "combines parallel processing with fault tolerance in a shared-nothing architecture optimized for BI." What this means is that Greenplum is dramatically dropping the price of data warehousing (and business intelligence). Like many of the open source projects out there, this should result in a far greater population of enterprises/SMEs actually getting to use data warehousing, rather than it being the province of the elect BigCos.

Open source: democratization of IT for the little guy. Lots of little guys = very big market.

The third thing I find interesting about the announcement is the business model. Want to try out Greenplum? Knock yourself out. It's free. But the company has a clever business model (as I hinted at a week or two ago): you start to pay as you start to scale out.

This is similar to SugarCRM's, Alfresco's, and others' models, but it's different in that there's a clear line of demarcation between production and development. Basically, the minute you need to start scaling (which you'd likely only do if you were going into production), adding a database, you trigger the need to pay for support/advanced services from Greenplum. So, developers get what they want - free access to a solid system - and Greenplum gets what it wants - monetization of the commercial usage of the system.

I like the idea. Hack for free, and pay when you're using the system to make money.

Larry Ellison still doesn't understand open source

Mr. Ellison spouted off on open source yesterday and showed that he has a very sophisticated understanding of open source...as it existed circa 1998. What Ellison doesn't seem to understand is that open source hasn't been about free love and free beer for a long, long time. As such, no one is particularly surprised (at least those that read this blog shouldn't be) to find out that Linux, for example, had a huge chunk of it contributed by Intel, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, etc.

Hence, he says,

"Open source becomes successful when major industrial corporations invest heavily in that open-source project. Every open-source product that has become tremendously successful became successful because of huge dollar investments from commercial IT operations like IBM, Intel, Oracle and others...."

This would be true if it weren't mostly false. It is true that many "in the wild" open source projects (Linux, Apache, etc.) have achieved faster commercial success through commercial involvement, but it's emphatically not true that all successful open source companies have required big investment from companies like Oracle. And it's not necessarily the case that Linux, Apache, etc. wouldn't have achieved large-scale success on a different timeline without BigCo investment.

Surely he recognizes that not all open source projects are "in the wild," as he's in the process of trying to buy one of the companies (JBoss) behind a wildly successful project. For the record, that project became a significantly better app server without your involvement, Mr. Ellison, and without IBM's, HP's, etc.

Beyond JBoss, there's also MySQL, Alfresco, SugarCRM, and a range of others. It's only a short-term argument to counter, "But none of these companies is doing SERIOUS revenues," because each of these companies is already closing big deals (and MySQL did $40M+ last year, and should double that this year) and has robust communities growing around them. At Alfresco, in fact, our biggest problem is that we have too many Fortune 500 companies in our customer mix (both actual and near-term deals to close). We're trying to pull in more SME-sized deals so that our revenues are spread more thinly across a larger volume of deals.

So, thanks for the smug self-congratulation, Mr. Ellison, but we built a better open source ECM system on a few hundred-thousand dollars than Oracle's weak ECM offering, which must have cost you in the tens of millions of dollars. As for your insouciance about MySQL, I'm sure Marten would prefer it that way...right up until the day he acquires you.

Welcome to the 21st Century. It started a few years ago. Try to catch up.

Perhaps consolidation isn't for everyone...

Tonight my daughter said something that made me fear that she's an anti-globalization terrorist waiting to happen.

Scout: Daddy, I've seen a few Red Balloon toy stores, and Toys'R'Us, but I've only seen one Tutoring Toy and one Nifty Cool Toys.

Me: Yes, that's because there probably is only one of those.

Scout: Tutoring Toys, I know, is owned by a family.

Me: So, I believe, is Nifty Cool Toys. Those others are owned by big corporations.

Scout: Yeah, I don't like them as much. Their toys are...I don't know...

Me: Kind of all the same? [I say this with some authority, having tried to buy "native," local toys for my kids in Venezuela, Paris, and London, and finding them all the exact same, no matter where I go. Depressing....]

Scout: Yeah. I don't like it. You can't get different, cool toys at those kinds of toy stores. I mean, they have lots of Barbies, but not those cool German animals.

She's right (as I note above). The same is true of IT. It's true that costs go down and, theoretically, quality goes up with economies of scale. Microsoft, Oracle, etc. make great software.

The problem is (and I include Alfresco in this problem) that less differentiated IT (something which Nick Carr views as inevitable) isn't necessarily better...it's just cheaper. In my ECM world, Plone, Mambo, and other less-scalable alternatives to Alfresco are probably just what many organizations need/want (SME, normally, but they can also serve departments in large enterprises). Yes, they could go with Alfresco or, if they're feeling really rich/wasteful, they could go with Documentum, Vignette, etc. Many will want to simply for the security of buying the same "toy" that everyone else has.

But for those who want a more finely tuned system, who want something a little bit different, they're better paying more to tailor an open source system. It's not for everyone, but I think there's probably something legitimate to my daughter's complaint about the dull sameness about the large toy retailers, and its analog to the IT world.

Generating community, OSCON style

Nat from O'Reilly has an interesting piece on the difficulty of attracting community to open source projects. As Jason Matusow points out here and various other places, open code doesn't matter to most people. But open process - and, as I like to call it, "people permeability" - matters a great deal.

So how do you build community? I've talked about this before, with some (hopefully) helpful technical pointers. But Nat hones in on perhaps the most important requirement: people (or, rather, a person), as Nat suggests...

Most open source project leaders have online charisma, an online persona that inspires others to work by being an inspirational leader: someone who is smarter, harder working, better in some way than the drone. Occasionally there are some projects where the ideology is the inspiration, a cause worth sacrificing oneself for (or if not oneself, then one's social life). In a lucky some (e.g., FSF) there are both: an energetic articulate charismatic (online) leader and an inspirational message. Those companies who would launch an open source project by firing sourcecode over the enterprise firewall with a Sourceforge trebuchet need to take heed: finding someone technical, engaging, and inspirational to lead that open source project is just as much a necessary and sufficient condition for open source success as making the source code available.

There's an excellent place to learn the nuances of working with community, and no, I'm not pitching OSBC here.

No, the best place for meeting and "groking" the community is OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. You should be there. I know that Nat, the organizer, is working on a range of community-related sessions designed to help IT buyers and vendors navigate the sometimes difficult waters of open source communities. Not to be missed.

If a tree falls in a forest...(Matusow takes on IBM)

...does it make a sound? That's the question I'm pondering right now, in light of Jason's once-a-year posting to his blog. We miss you, Jason. Don't forget to write!

This time, perhaps to make up for the years of silence, Jason gives IBM a slap. He's responding to Bob Sutor's (perhaps self-congratulatory) blog entry on open source and its superiority, especially as it relates to security, standards, and all things pure and beautiful.

Call me jaded, but I'm with Jason on calling a spade a spade: IBM is one of the Good Guys in open source, sure. But I'm not yet willing to start calling its founding "The Immaculate Incorporation." Some of the things Bob (who, incidentally, is VP of Standards and Open Source at IBM) says deserve a little slap, given their source, as Jason points out:

Sutor: "Not knowing why governments would possibly decide to use proprietary or vendor-dictated specifications when they are clearly against the long-term best interests of the citizens, especially those who are now young and will have to deal with decisions made now once they reach adulthood."

Matusow: I hope the irony of this statement coming from IBM is not lost on my readers. This one is all about the ODF / Open XML File Format debate but before I comment on that specific issue I think there is a higher-level concern. Governments should be evaluating all solutions (in-house, commercial-off-the-shelf, freeware, shareware, open source, public domain) based on the technical merits and value-for-money they receive from the solution. I wonder if IBM would suggest that governments should no longer consider purchasing proprietary IBM software (approx. $15B revenue stream resulting in more than 30% of IBMs profits) because it may be built upon vendor-dictated specifications and may result in their taxation data, military secrets, etc. be "locked-in" to DB2/Websphere/Notes solutions?

Touche! Matusow 1, Sutor 0. :-)

However, Jason overstates his case when it comes to security:

Sutor: "People are sick of not knowing. Not knowing if code contains security problems because they can't see it.

There are two assertions here. The first is that transparency of source code increases trust. I completely agree with that and that is why >13,000 organizations in >60 countries are eligible to look at Windows source code. Unfortunately, very few organizations care about source, nor have the expertise to understand what they are looking at even if they care to look. The second assertion is that source code licensed under an OSS license is more secure because of the openness. That has proven to be completely untrue and is damaging to all OSS-based businesses to continue to make. If there was ever an issue where the entire industry should get together and sing kumbayah together, it is security.

I can't follow Jason on this one, because I think he misconstrues Bob's argument (sophistry at its best ;-).

It's not a question of whether Company X or Company Y view the source code - they don't. The point is that the option of choice serves as a very useful surrogate for exercise of that choice, as I've noted before. It really does matter that Windows is closed and Linux is open, for example, both because of the incoming code problem, as well as the ongoing code maintenance problem. If a security bug is found (either through lots of eyeballs or in production when Company X's systems are breached), the communal, open approach to the fix will be faster where a strong community exists (with a strong core of developers). (Where no such community exists, companies shouldn't bother to use the product. Open source without community is...closed source.)

This is the way liberal (little "l") democracy works, too. It's not that everyone chooses to get involved in the process (electoral, community, etc.), actively writing the laws and what-not, but rather that they collectively can influence and direct the few that actually touch the "code" (laws, emergency response to disasters, etc.). In a closed government, it is that government's discretion that determines when/how it will act on a matter, with no real responsibility directly to the people.

So, Microsoft may be benevolent with its market power, but who would know? Yes, it has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders, and yes, it has a financial incentive to please customers, but I would argue that that responsibility and incentive may not always align. In an open company/process, the alignment may not be perfect, but I would argue it has a better chance of being tightly coupled.