The Open Road

I remember talking with the CIO of a large law firm a year or two ago. During our conversation, he lamented the demise of one of his smaller vendors, and particularly the fact that despite an escrow agreement, the company's code largely died with its bankruptcy. "I tried to convince them to open source the product," he remembered, "but they didn't and now I'm left with nothing."

Consider the open-source alternative, as The 451 Group does in reviewing the status of OpenQRM since its project sponsor, Qlusters, died: Downloads and project traffic are both up.

As this OStatic interview with one Qlusters executive suggests, a good open-source project will always be bigger than any one company, or any one person. The code is king in open source, something that no escrow agreement for proprietary software can replicate.

No, open source is no guarantee of eternal life. But it's a step in that direction.

I was very excited to see on OStatic that OpenClip, an open-source copy-and-paste application for the iPhone, is out.

In case you needed proof in a divine being....

Could Apple shut it down, as it has with other applications that it doesn't like? Well, as OStatic points out, OpenClip "uses shared space, outside the common resource space that Apple's SDK protects, to facilitate copy and paste." So maybe it's on firm legal territory.

I wouldn't want to put myself up against Apple's legal team, however, which is why making the application open source makes a lot of sense. The code is loose: how is Apple supposed to put it back in its cage?

For the U.S. federal government, it's no longer a question of "if" when it comes to open source, a Federal Computer Week article notes, but "how much" and "which projects."

Government officials who support open source now find they have a new decision to make: whether to use one of the growing number of open-source packages that could handle higher-profile agency operations, such as business intelligence analysis, content management or customer relationship management (CRM), to name a few.

I know from personal experience that there are very few federal organizations that are not already using open-source applications or are evaluating them. Recent survey data suggests that at least 55 percent of U.S. federal agencies are using open source now. I suspect the number is actually much higher. The genie is out of the bottle.

The reason is clear. As the article states, the two primary drivers of open-source adoption are "lower upfront cost and a greater ability to customize." More flexibility. Less cost. It's a perfect combination.

Cloud computing promises to liberate its adherents from the bother of messy implementations of software, while also freeing them from the constraints of hardware capacity. At the same time, however, cloud computing has the potential to deliver the ultimate in vendor lock-in.

My colleague, James Urquhart, has put together a proposed "cloud computing bill of rights" to help guide would-be cloud customers to those clouds best able to guarantee their freedom. Just as some are now clamoring for open-data commitments, James' suggestions are intended to deliver the value of the cloud without the lock-in:

No vendor shall, in the course of its relationship with any customer, claim ownership of any data uploaded, created, generated, modified, hosted or in any other way associated with the customer's intellectual property, engineering effort or media creativity. This also includes account configuration data, customer generated tags and categories, usage and traffic metrics, and any other form of analytics or meta data collection....

Vendors shall always provide, at a minimum, API level access to all customer data as described above. This API level access will allow the customer to write software which, when executed against the API, allows access to any customer maintained data, either in bulk or record-by-record as needed.

The Cloud Computing Bill of Rights is far more extensive than this, but I invite you to visit James' post to comment and help improve it. For the open-source friendly among us, we're going to have to look beyond licenses to protect essential user freedoms in the world of clouds, as Tim O'Reilly insists. James has offered a good start on how to go about doing this.

The VAR Guy puts together a compelling argument for Red Hat's focus on JBoss middleware over the desktop. The net? There's a lot more money in JBoss than in the desktop, at least in the short term.

Red Hat's vice president of global channel sales, Mark Enzweiler, confirms:

JBoss middleware is like a central nervous system. It's so mission-critical that customers are willing to pay Red Hat or the company's integration partners roughly $11.12 in consulting fees for every $1 they spend on JBoss itself.

Contrarily, the desktop drives nowhere near that level of secondary income.

Here's the catch, though: if this is true of JBoss middleware, it's even more true of enterprise applications like customer relations management and enterprise resource planning. Why do you think Oracle has moved so quickly into applications, just as the storm clouds were gathering around the commoditization of the database? It's difficult to commodify an application because it runs a company's critical business functions.

Will this drive Red Hat into applications over time, just as it drove it higher up the software stack into JBoss? Perhaps. Red Hat managed to pacify partners like IBM for a long time by keeping out of the middleware fight, but its JBoss acquisition set it at odds with IBM and others.

IBM, in particular, has cozied up with Novell's Suse Linux more and more as a way of trying to neutralize Red Hat's growing power beyond the operating system.

Getting into applications will exacerbate that friction, but at some point, the friction is worth the return.

"Follow the money" was Deepthroat's suggestion to journalist investigators in the Watergate scandal. Several decades later, that same advice helps to unravel the mystery of why Microsoft keeps upping its investment in Novell's SUSE Linux certificates...while simultaneously denouncing Linux for violating its intellectual property and generally wishing that Linux would cease to exist.

As context, Microsoft and Novell today announced an expansion of their 2006 interoperability agreement, which included a controversial covenant not to sue over patent infringement. "The investment focuses on enhanced programs from Novell to provide tools, support, training and resources for customers seeking an enterprise-class Linux platform and specifically, the optimal interoperability solution between Microsoft Windows Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server," writes Fox Business.

But it's not the interoperability provisions that anyone is going to be talking about. It's the $100 million in additional SUSE Linux certificates that Microsoft is buying. I know from friends at Novell that customers are indeed lapping these up, but not for the reasons publicly stated (patent protection (Microsoft) and interoperability (Novell). No, the primary reason is that they are cheap.

With this underwriting of Linux by Microsoft, Novell is able to sell its Linux software at highly advantageous pricing. As Novell's Linux business has grown, it has been able to stand more and more on its own and discount less, but to follow Deepthroat's counsel, you really need to ask why Microsoft would want this.

How do the two companies benefit? As eWeek's Joe Wilcox suggests:

Columnist John Dvorak thinks that Adobe Systems has a Microsoft problem and that Linux provides a clear solution:

Adobe could port its Creative Suite...to Linux as a shot across Redmond's bow. Then the company should embrace Linux in-house and develop a complete, optimized Linux OS designed to run a high-performance version of its Creative Suite on Linux optimized for Adobe products, to be sold as a bootable bundle for multicore-workstation hardware.

The idea is to produce a near-dedicated Adobe computer designed to use all the power of the newest chips to run the Adobe software under Linux. Having complete control of a high-powered OS would make all of the performance-demanding Adobe software run rings around any other implementation, if engineered correctly. It would become the viable desktop alternative to both the PC and the Mac.

It's not a bad idea, though I'm not sure the world is ready to move to single-purpose PCs, at least not those that focus on creative applications to the exclusion of e-mail, Web browsing, etc.

Yes, Dvorak notes that all of these applications can be had on the Linux desktop. Applications like Firefox work as well on Linux as on the Mac or Windows. But I think I'd take Dvorak's suggestion one step further: perhaps Adobe should band together with Google (or Yahoo) in a desktop partnership to bring the best of the Web and creativity applications together. Adobe and Google may butt heads in some areas, but they are the respective leaders in their markets and could find compelling reasons to work together to unseat Microsoft.

His vision of an Adobe-centric Linux desktop has potential, but it has a much better chance of succeeding if it managed to marry Adobe to a great Web brand like Google. Google has an equal interest in tying its bits down into a desktop, and Linux provides an ideal, open platform.

Possible?

In a sign of a snarkier times to come for the New York Times, The Register's Ashlee Vance has announced that he'll be joining the Times, effective September 2. Ashlee is, of course, my cohort (along with MuleSource's Dave Rosenberg) on the Open Season podcast, which may wither at the Times. Methinks it's not into open-source podcasts....

As he noted in an email:

I'm leaving The Register after more than five glorious years at the publication and heading to The New York Times. I'll be covering enterprise/business computing stuff, so much the same beat as I handled at The Register. I'll be reporting online and in print.

I wish Ashlee the best of luck. He's a great guy and a great journalist. He's also famous: Fake Steve Jobs managed to ridicule him on a number of different levels. What could be better than to have Dan Lyons (aka "Fake Steve Jobs") trash you when you're at a publication that takes great delight in trashing others? :-)

In all seriousness, here's hoping that The Register finds a capable replacement. While I'm glad to see Ashlee at the Times, I don't want The Register to lose its edge.

Most enterprises needn't worry about the "viral" aspect of open-source licenses. Because most enterprises use software for internal purposes, rather than distribute it, they don't trigger the standard open-source requirement to contribute back derivative works. A recent Federal Computer Week article by John Moore does an admirable job of clarifying this.

There are, however, instances in which an enterprise might well trigger the contribution requirement of open-source licensing. If a company sold off a division to another company, complete with the servers running modified open-source software, this would likely trigger a "distribution" and might well affect the value of the deal.

For this and other instances, it's helpful to have a dual-licensing strategy. In this way, customers get all the benefits of open source, especially the ability to view and modify source code to suit their particular needs, without the obligation to contribute back derivative works.

Unfortunately, this perpetuates the problem that Jim Whitehurst of Red Hat has been highlighting: the more software created in isolation, the greater the industry's inefficiency and the higher the cost of software. Dual-licensing doesn't solve this problem. It is, however, a good way to help guide enterprises into open source on comforting terms.

In a clear indictment of Microsoft's Windows strategy, new research suggests that up to a third of all new Windows Vista machines get downgraded to XP, either by the hardware vendors like Dell, or by customers.

That is a massive number. Ironically, it's a number that works to the short-term advantage of Microsoft's top and bottom lines, but it still represents a vote of "no confidence" in Microsoft's Windows strategy.

Microsoft's only hope at this point is that customers will forget Vista as rapidly as they did Millennium and ramp up anticipation for Windows 7. Actually, it's real hope is that Windows 7 will be worth waiting for.

No one is buying Apple's machines because of an upgrade from OS X 10.3 to 10.5. They're upgrading from Windows XP or from the iPod or iPhone. They want, in other words, a different computing experience, not merely an improved operating system. No one thinks about operating systems anymore. Or not much.

Until Microsoft finds some compelling reason for people to care about its operating system, or provides differentiated value beyond the operating system, it's going to find that Windows 7 won't solve its ills. Midori, which blends the cloud with the desktop, is a much smarter bet. Windows 7? It feels like more of the same Vista problem.