software

Open source amongst the cave dwellers

I spent some time today reading Plato's classic, The Republic and, in particular, his famous Allegory of the Cave. I have many good friends who work for proprietary software companies, and I'm always puzzled by their inability to see how open source could benefit them. They persist in believing that maximum money derives from maximum control over their software and, hence, maximum control over their customers.

This strange insistence on seeing the world through proprietary glasses perplexes me as the software world moves online and companies like Google show that you can make huge mountains of cash by giving your core service away for free. Infatuated as they are with bits and bytes, they have completely missed the movement of software away from software, per se, to service.

Which brings me back to Plato's cave.

And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:--Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets....… Read more

Coming soon to The Open Road: the "Open Source @" Series

The Open Source CEO series is still going strong, and will continue through next week. In fact, I expect to have some high-profile surprises to add to the roster next week....

However, I wanted to put readers on the alert that soon after I'll be kick-starting the "Open Source @" series. I'm fond of giving grief to traditional enterprise software companies for failing to "get" open source. Well, starting next week I'll be giving an open forum to some of the world's largest software companies to share their open source activities with the … Read more

CentricCRM to go open source next week

There has been a lot of fuss kicked up lately over the definition of open source (kicked off by Michael Tiemann), and the OSI's role in defining that term. Word on the street is that CentricCRM will be launching a significant piece of code (Team Elements) under Larry Rosen's Open Software License early next week. This is fantastic news for CentricCRM, as well as for open source (OSI-approved open source).

Why for open source? Because Team Elements is cool and very useful technology. It's a 100% open source, Java-based "Enterprise 2.0" product. It ties together discussions, wikis, blogs, RSS, issue tracking and trouble-ticketing, project management, document management, and federated search into a single, unified application running on a relational database.… Read more

Dell lightens the preinstalled software load

Dell took notice earlier this year when customers and the media reiterated complaints over the glut of crapware, or preinstalled PC software, packaged with new computers. Many PC makers said they do offer ways for consumers to wipe a new computer's slate clean. But this week, Dell announced it would hand more control over to customers during the purchase process.

Dell.com customers buying an XPS system, Inspiron notebook or Dimension desktop can select a "no software preinstalled" option. This will eliminate productivity, ISP, photo and music software, but not everything.

Adobe Reader, trial versions of antivirus … Read more

The Open Source CEO: Kelly Herrell, Vyatta (Part 7)

In this seventh installment of the Open Source CEO Series, I talked with Kelly Herrell, CEO of Vyatta, the open source network software company (router and firewall).

I first bumped into Kelly back in 1998 when my employer (Mitsui Comtek, the high-tech subsidiary of Mitsui & Co.) invested in Cobalt Microsystems (Linux microserver company acquired by Sun for $2.1 billion). I bumped into him again years later when he was running operations and strategy for Monta Vista, an embedded Linux pioneer.

Kelly is one of those people that you respect even when he's kicking your tail (as was the case at Monta Vista - I was at rival Lineo). Once known for being "the world's best-dressed Linux backer" [Correction: I inadvertently linked to an article on Peder Ulander, who dresses much better than Kelly, though I do have to say the first time I met Kelly he was wearing a green shirt and matching green shoes :-) ], Kelly's reputation is now right where it should be: a tier-one open source executive.… Read more

Getting Mom and Dad on the same calendar page

Moms often end up feeling like their brain plays the role of the family "hard drive," especially when it comes to scheduling. Someone has to know exactly what, where and when each family member needs to be. Moms get frustrated when they have to do it all, and Dads feel left out of the process when they might like to be involved.

I've looked for a tool to manage this family scheduling and communication, which can often add up to a job as complex as managing a business team. But the products I've found have been … Read more

Microsoft's bloatware problem (and how open source could help)

Fake Steve takes a swipe at Microsoft's bloatware problem, and strikes true:

For years people have been begging Microsoft for leaner, simpler products with fewer features. Not just befuddled and baffled consumers but CIOs at big companies, guys who manage tens of thousands of PCs, who are considered "thought leaders," and who definitely have Microsoft's attention. They've been screaming this from the rooftops: Fewer features, greater ease of use, greater reliability. They've done everything but put up billboards on the roads around Redmond saying, "Small. Fast. Cheap. Easy." They don't want slightly fewer features. They want a lot fewer. Like 90% fewer. So what does Microsoft do? It rolls out a huge new OS and a new version of Office with a 10x gain in features. Then it hires an army of MBAs to go "unlock value" and get customers to use all those features that they've already told Microsoft they don't want.... Microsoft seems to have lost sight of the fact that its rise to power came as a result of Bill Gates positioning Windows as smaller, cheaper, easier and faster than OS/2 Presentation Manager. Windows 3.0 was lean and mean and, relatively speaking, open. OS/2 with PM was big, bloated, expensive, and all about locking you in to IBM. IBM was the big monolith trying to protect its market share and suck everything into its maw. Microsoft was the disrupter, using a little toy weapon to attack a fortress. Amen.

It's not simply Microsoft's problem, of course, but pretty much all of enterprise software's. Enterprise software has worked so hard to justify itself that it has lost sight of the normal customer's needs.… Read more

Is there a natural divide between open source and proprietary software market opportunities?

I'm reading through Si Chen's excellent paper called "An Economic Model of Open Source Software Adoption." I got lost in the calculations Si uses, but the conclusion hit home:

[T]he hurdle for adoption of open source software is a function of the relative feature sets, size of user base, scalability of features, and profit margin of competing commercial products. Where existing commercial products enjoy a large user base, can address a high portion of user needs out-of-the-box, and the profit margins of the vendor are reasonable, open source software must offer comparable or better features to gain mass adoption. If, on the other hand, user needs are highly heterogeneous, the commercial product's vendor has excessive profit margins, or where the software is fundamentally not scalable, then an open source product with significantly lower feature sets could gain mass adoption.

These conditions suggest that open source and commercial software models may be well adapted to separate niches of the software industry. Open source software may fundamentally be more suitable for software whose features are not scalable, whereas commercial software may be better suited for mass market software with highly homogeneous user requirements and features.… Read more

SolarCity tracks solar-panel output via the Web

You've just shelled out thousands of dollars for solar power, but what if your shiny new solar panels are underperforming?

Solar installer SolarCity on Monday is expected to announce a system that lets businesses and home owners get a real-time readout of their solar panels from a Web portal.

Called SolarGuard, the monitoring system collects data on system performance, which is then transmitted back to SolarCity every 15 minutes.

The idea is that problems can be identified and service technicians can go out to fix the problem quickly after analyzing the data coming in from customers, according to the … Read more

Making enterprise software more like the web

Yesterday was the second day of Alfresco's quarterly management meeting (and no, I don't like this one because there are no football matches during the summer, though I am going with Luis to see The Drowsy Chaperone tonight. During the meeting, we spent awhile talking through changes in enterprise software; or, rather, changes that should happen in enterprise software.

What's the biggest problem in enterprise software today? I mean, besides how expensive, complex, and clunky it is?

It doesn't work the way the world works.

What do I mean? I mean that despite the fact that, as John Donne might write, "no corporation is an island, entire unto itself," most enterprise software treats corporations (and their denizens) exactly as islands. Little pools of creativity who share within the walls of their own corporation, if at all (and generally not at all). … Read more