Oliver Alexy of Technische Universitat Munchen (TUM) Business School has written an interesting paper titled "Putting a Value on Openness: The Effect of Product Source Code Releases on the Market Value of Firms." 
The research traces the impact of open source on company market valuations from January 1, 1999, to April 30, 2007. The research is hampered somewhat by a lack of private-company data, but it still offers up some useful conclusions.
Alexy tracks open source through the pre-bubble era (mostly hype leading to outsized but highly transitory investor returns) to today, where open source is becoming the de facto way of building software businesses. You can see the rise, then fall, and subsequent rise in the graphic at right.
Along the way, he suggests, investors have grown wiser as to what kind of open-source business models make sense.
Intriguingly, the early bible for would-be open-source capitalists (Martin Fink's The Business and Economics of Linux and Open Source) turns out to have offered up mostly wrong advice, so far as investment returns go. Using open source as a competitive weapon to batter competitors yields paltry returns, according to Alexy:
... Read moreI will admit to being a Linux desktop nonbeliever. It feels a bit like yesterday's battle fought with the wrong weapons: geekiness rather than ease of use. There's a chance--still a slim one, but a chance nonetheless--that Ubuntu will change that.
In three separate places today I read reviews of Ubuntu's new desktop (7.10). Two were very complimentary, while the third suggested that Ubuntu give up.
Ubuntu upgrades the Linux desktop experience in two ways: user interface and form factor. While Novell continues to be the leader in traditional desktop replacements, Red Hat is reinventing the Linux desktop for new markets with its One Laptop Per Child involvement. Ubuntu is arguably doing the same, but is going one step further in disruption: Changing the notion of the Linux "desktop" completely:
... Read more
Stacey at Hyperic has an excellent post parsing research from recent Nobel Prize winners, Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson. Digging into their research, she uncovers the following analog to open source:
...when discoveries are "sequential" (so that each successive invention builds in an essential way on its predecessors) patent protection is not as useful for encouraging innovation as in a static setting. Indeed, society and even inventors themselves may be better off without such protection. Furthermore, an inventor's prospective profit may actually be enhanced by competition and imitation.... Read more
As reported on the MoneyforJam blog, Microsoft is heavily discounting Windows to keep market share in the face of cheaper Linux offerings. Reuters notes:
In a significant development, Asustek said it would also offer a version of the ultra low-cost PCs with Microsoft's Windows operating system, after initially saying that all the computers would carry the open-source, free Linux system. Windows versions of the computer would cost about T$1,000 more than Linux versions [T$1,000 = US$30.00], leading many to say that Microsoft had offered the Windows systems at a big discount from its usual price of T$2,000 to T$3,000 for mass buyers.
So now Windows is worth $30.00. That seems about right. As MoneyforJam notes, XP (which is what ASUS will ship) is now the Vista Poverty Edition.
Indeed.
I saw this on Digg this morning. I'm not a Microsoft partner, so I can't access the file, but apparently it gives a competitive breakdown of Microsoft Exchange versus Zimbra, and candidly admits Zimbra's superiority in several areas. You can see the file in the image below.
I think it does Microsoft credit that it is admitting its fallibility. What I find much more interesting is that Microsoft is taking time to position itself against Zimbra at all. After all, Zimbra has almost no market share compared to Exchange. Yet Microsoft obviously views it as a threat.
... Read more
Acacia/IP Innovation has gone on the record as saying that it's not trying to kill open source: it just wants to suck anyone and everyone dry of cash, regardless of license. I don't know about you, but I feel strangely comforted. :-)
Acacia says:
IP Innovation is not attempting to inject itself in the ongoing philosophical debate of whether products or services which utilize open source are subject to the same intellectual property laws/behaviors as non-open source offerings. Acacia and its subsidiaries do not philosophically differentiate any company, but rather seek to consistently and fairly monetize patent rights from those companies which incorporate patented technology.
So there you have it. Acacia is just a troll. We can rest easier now.
There are so many features listed on Apple's Leopard landing page that it might be easy to overlook this one (which Glyn Moody pointed out): OpenDocument Format, or ODF, support in the new operating system. It's baked right into OS X, and TextEdit will also support both Microsoft Word 2007 and OpenDocument formats.
At some point, Microsoft may also come around to ODF. In the meantime, there's Apple. Innovative as usual.
[UPDATED: As someone pointed out to me in an email, I made a mistake on "OpenDocument" in TextEdit. That appears to be a reference to Microsoft's confusingly named "open" format. But the ODF reference was right.]
Amazon used to be known as the "World's Largest Bookseller." Today, it sells a wide range of things, but also can boast one of the world's largest developer networks. Today, Krugle is announcing that Amazon has selected Krugle's syndicated code search technology, Krugle DevNetwork Edition, to help software developers more easily find code within the Amazon Web Services developer network.
This is the fifth such deal Krugle has signed lately, putting its code search tools in front of 1/3 of the world's 14 million developers. Other developer networks powered by Krugle include IBM developerWorks, Yahoo! Developer Network, SourceForge.net and Collab.net.
This puts Krugle at the axis of open source and Web (SaaS) development. While today Krugle is in the mode of enabling developer productivity through search, it will be interesting to see where it goes next. ... Read more
It might seem odd for Alfresco to be announcing that it has open sourced its JLAN technology - given that the company already releases 100% of its code under the GPL (with a FLOSS Exception) - but today the company announced that it has open sourced its JLAN technology as open source.
Why? Because while JLAN was available before as part of its open source content management solutions, it had also been available under a proprietary license (due to legacy reasons - Alfresco acquired the code from another party back in 2005). Today, JLAN is completely open and offered as a separate component.
Who cares? Well, anyone that wants to offer an embedded virtual file system that offers the only Java client and server implementation of Microsoft Window's CIFS (Common Internet File System) protocol, allowing content, system administration information, and rows in a database to appear as a shared drive. The shared drive is the de facto document management interface for the vast majority of computer users today. JLAN gives everyone - including Alfresco competitors - the ability to offer an intelligent shared-drive interface to a content repository.
... Read moreOpenAds is one of my favorite open-source companies. It's disrupting a market that is, itself, disrupting other markets. A match made in heaven.
But Scott Switzer, founder of the company and erstwhile CEO, is not taking its future for granted, and has left many key decisions to the OpenAds community, as noted in Linux.com. This is what separates a successful open-source project from a project with an open-source license and proprietary mindset.
Switzer says listening to the community is the most important aspect of commercializing an open source project. ... Read more
