commercials

Sifting open-source wheat from the chaff

BusinessWeek is asking an important question of open-source companies: despite the rapid growth of some open-source businesses (e.g., Red Hat, Novell Suse, Alfresco, SugarCRM, and others), it's still very much an open question as to whether open source can deliver outsized returns for investors.

"A pure service business is not particularly defensible," says [Red Hat CEO Jim] Whitehurst. "Some open-source companies have not truly figured that out." If the open-source movement, now in its second decade, is to realize its promise for vendors and investors, more of its purveyors will need to get the message soon.

Savio Rodrigues of IBM has been beating this drum for some time, suggesting that pure open-source business models have a built-in glass ceiling. While I think this is a bit overstated, I 100 percent concur that any business must figure out a "proprietary" differentiator that tells a customer, "This is why you buy from me rather than my competitor, and rather than taking it from me for free."

Support, as Jim Whitehurst suggests, is not a compelling enough argument for most would-be buyers.

This is why I've argued for a phased approach to open source. It's inefficient to try to "reap" every prospective customer in the early stages of a business: making the code open source lets a company sow a wide field of prospective buyers.

But it's also inefficient to rely on faith and goodwill to reap customers later in a company's growth and revenue trajectory. There must be a compelling reason to buy. This is where many in the open-source world lose their way. But what should that reason be? That is the nettlesome question.… Read more

Virgin Galactic unveils the WhiteKnightTwo

The WhiteKnightTwo high-altitude aircraft carrier that will be used to launch a spaceship of Virgin Galactic passengers was unveiled Monday in Mojave, Calif.

The new spaceship carrier and launcher has been named Virgin Mothership Eve, after Richard Branson's own mother, Eve Branson.

The aircraft will be used to carry the SpaceShipTwo passenger plane to Earth's upper atmosphere. It's capable of climbing up to 50,000 feet.

In January the public was shown a small model and CGI images of what the WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo might look like, but this is the first time the actual carrier itself … Read more

Retro Tech: Mego's 2-XL

When I was growing up, the closest thing we had to artificial intelligence was something called 2-XL (if you're younger than 30, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about). We've always had trivia games--what made this one interesting, especially to a generation that's just seen Star Wars, was that these trivia questions were asked by a plastic robot.

In 1978, when I got my hands on 2-XL, I was ecstatic. It was the it toy back then. 2-XL was a trivia robot created by Michael J. Freeman, an inventor with an interest to educate … Read more

Back to the future for MySQL

As I'm occasionally reminded, MySQL didn't start out as open source. In fact, MySQL's original license was very similar to what it is trying to achieve today: Free for noncommercial use, but not-so-free for commercial use. It didn't decide to go open source (GPL) until 1999.

So for those of us that get caught up in MySQL's decision to keep some extensions closed to paid subscribers, perhaps a refresher course in MySQL history will make it seem a bit less shocking. (Also be sure to check out the early 2001 brouhaha over trademark violations surrounding MySQL.org. Fascinating stuff.)

With that said, there's an ongoing tension between commercialization and adoption that MySQL (and all commercial open-source projects) have to manage. As a friend noted in an email to me yesterday:

Remember that Monty [co-founder of MySQL] chose to go open source only after the world totally ignored his work. There is a real value that goes along with being open source that lends itself well to adoption. If you have to pay, then that will deter adoption of immature products in ways that it won't with free products.

His take on Monty's reasoning is a bit strong, and I don't agree that MySQL had been ignored, but still he has a point: Open sourcing one's code can lead to far greater adoption in a short period of time than proprietary source.

The question, however, remains for all open-source projects: Is it fair or productive to close off the code after open source has made it popular?… Read more

Between two consenting corporations...

Is proprietary software really that bad? Or is it a fair contract between consulting corporations? The answer is "It depends" and "Not really." Both depend on the strictures a vendor puts in place to inhibit its ability to lock a customer into its software. In MySQL's case, MySQL has no intention to lock customers in, as far as I can tell. It just wants to convince customers to pay so that it can prove its worth.

MySQL is contemplating introducing extensions to its core database that are only available to paid subscribers, for compelling reasons. This is not, as has been suggested, in and of itself proprietary. Red Hat does the same by providing an initial gate to its RHEL code which only a paid subscriber can access unless they get it from an existing customer of Red Hat's.

The question is not the open-source legitimacy of an otherwise open-source binary wrapped in a closed contract. This is simply a way of preventing services (like the Red Hat-provided compilation of that binary from source code) from free redistribution.

The question is one of redistribution of binaries.

There are actually ways to do this that let MySQL balance open source with closed permissions. I've drafted language for a license grant below that I think does this. It's not open source, but might be a way to balance its need for more cash growth with continued emphasis on community growth.… Read more

Commercial interests and open source: Oil and water?

InfoWorld just released an excellent "roundtable" series on open source with a range of open-source thought leaders (including me) weighing in on the future of open source, competition for open source, and whether all the open-source infighting actually does more good than harm.

On competition with proprietary software companies, I suggested the following:

For the moment, I just want to see Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and IBM develop their own vibrant corners of the open source universe. I want them at the table as full participants. This will require them to change some aspects of their business, but I think they'd find them revelatory rather than ruinous. These are some of the smartest companies on the planet. I'd love to see the open source communities they could create, if they but wanted to do so.

Much more interesting to me were Javier Soltero's comments on whether commercialization of open source is good or bad for projects:… Read more

The effects of commercialization on open-source communities

Recent research suggests that much of the core development work on open-source projects is done by paid developers. Is this a bad thing?

The answer is in the data. I just finished reading Evangelia Berdou's Ph.D. thesis "Managing the Bazaar: Commercialization and peripheral participation in mature, community-led Free/Open source software projects," and highly recommend it to anyone seeking to understand how open-source communities operate, especially in light of the increasing encroachment of commercial interests into open-source development communities. Berdou looks at paid vs. unpaid developer contributions to GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) and KDE (K Desktop Environment) and reaches some interesting, if unsurprising, results.

Berdou starts with four primary hypotheses, only two of which end up making the grade:

Paid developers are more likely to contribute to critical parts of the code base. Paid developers are more likely to maintain critical parts of the code base. Volunteer contributors are more likely to participate in aspects of the project that are geared towards the end-user. Programmers and peripheral contributors are not likely to participate equally in major community events. (134)

Only Nos. 2 and 4 end up surviving her analysis, though her data (and my experience) suggests that No. 1 is also true.… Read more

Jonathan Schwartz's tell-all on the MySQL acquisition and why the deal is good for you

I was surprised that Sun could go from idea to acquisition on MySQL in just five weeks. What turns out to be more surprising, however, is that Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, had been talking with Marten Mickos of MySQL for over five years on precisely that topic, as Jonathan reveals on his blog. The real question, then, is why did it take so long?

Jonathan doesn't say, but the answer is clear: Marten wanted to build an IPO-able, independent MySQL. He eventually sold because it made sense (and, I suspect, because the prospect of living in the glare of Wall Street's impatient eye was not looking as appealing as it once had, but that's just Matt Asay personal conjecture).

Jonathan's post is a fascinating read. Here's just one of the sections I found revealing, coming on the heels of his suggestion that there are no "cost synergies" in the deal (Sun isn't going to save money by marrying salesforces, for example):

Where are the revenue synergies?… Read more

When will kids' online safety be taken seriously?

I've been writing (parent.thesis) for about six months now, and the New Year seems like a good time to reflect on the themes that have developed. I love technology, and at the same time, I am cautious when it comes to kids and tech. Here are the three issues that are really bugging me right now:

• Disconnect between product design and online safety • Commercialization of kids online • Information control, privacy, and data mining

… Read more