The Open Road

IBM has been busy this past week at LinuxWorld, releasing some of its supercomputing code as open source, plus partnering up with Novell to battle Microsoft's Small Business Server and with Canonical/Ubuntu, Novell, Red Hat, and others to go after Microsoft's hold on the desktop:

The company said its HPC Open Source Software Stack, which includes IBM's Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit, was its first ever contribution of open source code for supercomputing....

IBM also said it would work with Canonical/Ubuntu, Novell and Red Hat and a number of hardware partners it did not name to deliver in 2009 "Microsoft-free" PCs with Lotus Notes and Symphony. The company said integration between Linux and Microsoft desktops and the proliferation of client computing devices such as the Smartphone would provide the opportunity to finally make a noticeable dent in Microsoft's stranglehold on the desktop.

It remains to be seen whether smaller companies will want IBM's Lotus software. When I was with a start-up that used it I found it to be clunky, and our IT department (that is, "Jim") found it cumbersome, causing us to dump it for Exchange).

But I like the direction. Google and others are pushing new paradigms for desktop computing, but IBM still has billions at stake in wrenching Microsoft out of enterprises, both small and large. IBM has the heft to give Microsoft a run for its money on the traditional desktop. It's one thing to have Novell, Red Hat, and Canonical/Ubuntu pushing the Linux desktop, but it's quite another when IBM gets into the fray. IBM is just as biased but the move brings a brand that commands respect beyond Linux. This should matter.

A more natural, near-term fit, however, is IBM's supercomputing move. IBM is huge in high-performance computing. Any contributions it makes should be welcome...unless you're HP or another competitor seeing IBM seed the market with its own free and open-source tools.

All in all, a great set of moves by IBM.

I had to laugh when this error came up today when accessing LinuxWorld's website:

www.LinuxWorldExpo.com:
Microsoft JScript runtime error '800a138f'
'brandGlobalXML.selectSingleNode(...)' is null or not an object
/live/template1.asp, line 42

To be fair, it's just a conference company that organizes a wide range of conferences, not all of them focused on open source. Indeed, IDG also runs (or ran) the website for OSBC and ran it on a Windows infrastructure, too.

In both cases, it's still mildly ironic to see IDG making money with open source...but paying money to Microsoft.

Someone needs to tell the Open Source Initiative, Google, and others who fret about license proliferation that the market has already cut down the number of actively used licenses to just a small handful: L/GPL, BSD/Apache, MPL, and a few others (EPL, CPL). Even so, the OSI has decided to kickstart its stalled movement to reduce the number of open-source licenses condoned by the OSI.

As OSI board member Russ Nelson writes in the board minutes:

Mr. Nelson moves that we form a license proliferation committee to evaluate all existing licenses into two tiers - an upper tier and a lower tier of licenses (e.g. "recommended" and "compliant"). The role of this committee would be to establish criteria for assigning the tier for each license, use a new license-proliferation mailing list for discussion and come up with a final list of two tiers of licenses....The deadline for presenting the draft recommendations from the committee back to the board will be October 2008.

It's a worthy cause, but one that has already been effectively fought and settled by the free market. I would hazard a guess that upwards of 95 percent of all open-source projects are licensed under less than 5 percent of open-source licenses. (The last time I checked, 88 percent of Sourceforge projects were L/GPL or BSD. It's been a non-issue for many years.)

There is no open-source proliferation problem. Do we have a lot of open-source licenses? Yes, just as we have a lot of proprietary licenses (in fact, we have many more of those). But we don't have a license proliferation problem, because very few open-source licenses actually get used on a regular basis.

This is a phantom. It seems scary, but it's not real.

Disclosure: I used to serve on OSI's board.

Microsoft's research-and-development spending hit a record high in 2008, according to its most recent annual report. At the same time, the company's R&D spending relative to employee head count has gone down.

Not that it matters. For all Microsoft's spending on the future, it continues to focus its business on guarding the past. Yes, it builds cool (but useful??) things like the Sphere, but when was the last time you saw Office or Windows significantly improved by that R&D spending?

In Microsoft's defense, perhaps we've tapped out the desktop software metaphor, and there's simply not much it can do there (beyond building SharePoint and the next tier of lock-in services to guard cash cow product lines). Unfortunately, this "defense" is also my biggest critique of Microsoft: its future is so tied up in protecting its past that it's unlikely to ever unleash true innovations from the labs that could destabilize the desktop.

If you believe, as I do, that there's a bright future beyond the traditional desktop, it's hard to get excited about Microsoft's R&D spending, knowing that it's likely to lead to more of the same, with the occasional circus curiosity like Sphere.

Microsoft's R&D spending at an all-time high

(Credit: Todd Bishop)

Disclosure: My company, Alfresco, has a product that competes with SharePoint.

It was depressing to read that William Patry, Google's senior copyright counsel, has decided to stop blogging. With only occasional gusts of lucid intelligence in the blogging community, Patry's blog was a full-out gale.

Due to "crazies...who do not have a life of their own and so insist on ruining the lives of others" by comment-bombing Patry's blog, and due to the deteriorating use of copyright to harm rather than help, Patry has opted to leave the blogging building:

Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again.

On the "crazies," I completely understand. Anonymity and geographical distance make people bold to say things that ought not be said. I'm also guilty of this. I suspect we all are. Some things are too easily said with a keyboard.

But on the latter, it's dispiriting to see confirmation from such a copyright expert that we may be past redemption. In both copyright and patent law, the powerful continue to hoard their power (which is natural), while judges and lawmakers seek to capitulate to that power (which is not natural--or shouldn't be).

There are certain things that open-source and Software as a Service (SaaS) companies increasingly need, and which a new crop of vendors is rising to provide.

On the one hand, as JasperSoft's recent outsourcing of its forge software demonstrates, open-source companies need a place in which they can engage their community. (SaaS companies like Salesforce.com are increasingly doing the same thing, e.g., AppExchange.)

But subscription-based vendors also need subscription management tools (e.g., OCS), as well as "networks" to deliver updates, add-ons, and more, such as Bitrock is providing.

We're at the early, formative stages of this "enablement" market, but it's starting to feel like it could be offer real value in the midst of a gold rush. Much as the vendors of pickaxes and shovels reaped hefty rewards from the Forty-Niners so, too, could the Hyperics, Bitrocks, etc. of the world stand to clean up as the world moves to open source and SaaS models, even if only in part.

Why? Because these services enable add-on, proprietary value. In an open world, having a differentiated product to sell alongside the completely open version matters a great deal, as Savio consistently argues. There's a time and season for it - phases of open-source growth - but it's going to come.

When it does, the enablers may well make as much or more than those they enable.

Infoworld does an annual review of the best enterprise open-source applications, called the BOSSies, and just announced the 2008 winners. An Infoworld editorial team makes the selections, so this isn't a matter of open-source projects rallying the troops to vote for their projects (which sometimes has odd results, though often gets things right)

• Alfresco, Content Management
• Compiere, Enterprise Resource Planning
• dotProject, Project Management
• Hyperic HQ, Application Monitoring
• Intalio BPMS, Business Process Management
• JasperReports, Reporting
• Liferay Portal, Enterprise Portal
• Magento eCommerce, E-Commerce
• Pentaho Open BI Suite, Business Intelligence
• SugarCRM, Customer Relationship Management

Other categories include the best open-source productivity applications, best open-source middleware, and other categories. You can see the full details here or a snapshot view of the winners over on OStatic.

One nit? I don't like that CentOS was listed as the top open-source operating system. True, it wasn't listed in the enterprise category, but CentOS (which is just Red Hat Enterprise Linux without Red Hat's trademarks) is, in my mind, the worst sort of open source: It sucks money out of the system while giving nothing back. CentOS contributes no innovation to the Linux kernel and instead makes it harder for companies like Red Hat and Novell to invest in research and development.

While Bill Gates rightly argues for "creative capitalism" that will "most effectively spread the benefits of capitalism and the huge improvements in quality of life it can provide to people who have been left out," his old company, Microsoft, continues to ignore one of the best ways to drive value into and from those developing economies:

Open source.

Proprietary software treats developing economies as "vassals" to Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, etc. Open-source software, on the other hand, gives developing economies the raw materials to build up their own IT ecosystems. Instead of shipping rubles back to the US to pay for US-developed software, Russia and the developing IT economies of the world can keep their currency local, and then start inviting others' currencies in.

Some criticize Gates' proposals as misplaced. I tend to agree, but not for the reasons these critics highlight. No, I think Gates simply isn't "creative" enough in his capitalism. He suggests:

Apple makes beautiful products, but don't try looking under the hood to see how secure they are. I'm a huge Apple fan, but I found this news that two presentations on Apple's security were pulled from the annual Black Hat conference.

One was a presentation by Apple employees on the company's security policies. On that one, it's shocking that the employees were planning to speak at all, as Apple is very tight-lipped about anyone within the company speaking publicly.

But the other, as the Slashdot commentary highlights, was to discuss problems with Apple's FileVault encryption system. This sort of public discussion is critical to helping to resolve security issues, especially with Apple recently found to have the most security vulnerabilities by an IBM research team. Security through obscurity doesn't work.

As Apple (thankfully) becomes a bigger force in the market, it needs to ensure its security is top-notch. Its architecture and Unix underpinnings already give it a headstart, but working through potential security problems in a transparent manner would help further.

Yes, Apple is skittish about any public disclosure. But security is one area that it can't afford to keep its cards too close to its vest.

Click here for full coverage of Black Hat 2008.

Microsoft has news for those who hold to the "Six degrees of Kevin Bacon" theory. We are linked with everyone else on the planet by 6.6 degrees of separation, not six.

As The Guardian recounts,

Researchers at Microsoft studied records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people in various countries....This was 'the first time a planetary-scale social network has been available,' they observed. The database covered all the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging network in June 2006, equivalent to roughly half the world's instant-messaging traffic at that time.

It's a nice corroboration of the "six degrees" theory, but I actually find the data used much more interesting. What would you do with 30 billion electronic conversations?

What would I do? I'd use that data, and other such data from Facebook and other social networks, to describe my social graph and thereby provide trusted commercial connections with others. Knowing my connection to that person on the other side of an eBay purchase? Priceless. I suspect we'd act very different online if we knew how closely we're actually connected to that hitherto anonymous buyer or seller.

Trust is the currency of any viable economy. Whoever can figure out how to corral the data behind our respective social graphs and turn it to commercial use will be the next billion-dollar business. Hint: It starts with the address book.