The launch of Apple's iPhone 3G S has justifiably caught the media's attention, what with its elegant design and speedy performance. But for all the noise that Apple is making in mobile, open source--not Apple--may well be doing the most to define the future of mobile communications, as two leading open-source projects suggest.
No, I'm not talking about the Palm Pre, with its Linux-based operating system and its new open-source applications portal. Nor am I referring to Google Android.
Rather, I'm referring to the InSTEDD project, which The Economist recently highlighted, as well as GNU Radio, the project made popular by Path Intelligence, a company I've profiled before on CNET.
Both companies/projects are interesting because they treat mobile as a data source, not as a computer.
In the case of InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters), it's a nonprofit that helps developing nations coordinate disaster relief efforts by helping relief agencies share, aggregate, and analyze data from mobile phones.
InSTEDD's GeoChat technology accomplishes this by enabling mobile phone users to broadcast alerts ("Typhoon has hit our city"), but it becomes even more interesting when combined with InSTEDD's Mesh4x technology:
Mesh4x allows information to flow between established applications (like Excel, Access, GoogleEarth, MySQL, Oracle and many others), and between devices (laptops, smartphones, PDAs, and servers) reliably, selectively, and securely in a distributed "data mesh". If necessary, Mesh4X can synchronize data over nothing but a stream of SMS messages, merely by plugging an ordinary cellphone into a laptop.
While InSTEDD has open-sourced the technology to help improve disaster relief, it's not hard to see how the technology could be used for commercial applications.
Indeed, this is what Path Intelligence has done with GNU Radio. GNU Radio describes itself as a "free software development toolkit that provides the signal processing runtime and processing blocks to implement software radios using readily available, low-cost external RF hardware and commodity processors." Sounds complicated, right?
Well, in the hands of Path Intelligence, such mobile data becomes a way to track consumers through a shopping mall, for example, so as to identify which marketing displays are most effective, the best places to locate high-margin products, etc. While the company is primarily focused on such a retail application today, its markets are much broader.
Neither InSTEDD nor Path Intelligence makes a shiny device that people will covet and buy. Both, however, can use those shiny devices to generate, aggregate, and analyze data that can save the world...or a company's bottom line.
In this way, these open-source projects, even more than Apple, may well prove to be the cutting edge of mobile. It's all about the data.
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Last week rumors swirled that Novell was planning to put some or all of its assets on the auction block. The rumors derived from J.P. Morgan analyst John DiFucci's misinterpretation of Novell CFO Dana Russell's comments, suggesting that Novell "entertained the possibility of breaking out some parts of or selling the entire company, in order to maximize shareholder value given the current depressed valuation levels."
Novell has since denied the implication that it's for sale. But it shouldn't be so hasty.
As The Register's Timothy Prickett Morgan suggests, a company should "never say never" about selling its assets, particularly when Novell has struggled to grow a profitable business.
Or, in Novell's case, when a company has assets like Groupwise that dilute the company's focus and do little to improve its top-line revenue growth. Novell's Linux and Identity Management businesses have potential. Its Workgroup business, on the other hand, continues to slide every single quarter.
While Russell is right to dispel public rumors of Novell being sold, the reality is that Novell should be considering the sale of some key assets, and likely is. Novell would be foolish to do otherwise.
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Steve Ballmer needs to brush up on Roman history. Otherwise he seems doomed to repeat it, as two recent Microsoft campaigns suggest.
Microsoft has been dominant for so long that it has grown soft. As Edward Gibbon wrote in his exceptional "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," it is not outside enemies that crushed Rome so much as its own effete greatness:
The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.
Two new Microsoft directives suggest that the writing is on the wall for the once-great company. And this isn't even to mention Microsoft's tactics to squash Linux's growth in the Netbook market.
First, Microsoft has kicked off a "Get the Facts" browser campaign that is long on hyperbole and short on facts. Reading Microsoft's browser comparison chart, one would think that using Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome is a fast track to leprosy: IE apparently dominates in security, privacy, ease of use, healing the sick, and causing the lame to walk.
Speaking of "lame," IBM's Savio Rodrigues warns us to not be fooled by comparison tables that dramatically favor one product over others. Internet Explorer has gotten better over the years (It only had one way to go), but Microsoft's claims aren't even credible when it skews the results so dramatically in its favor.
Mozilla's own marketing for Firefox is very, very different.
Not content to let false advertising do the trick, Microsoft has also resorted to paying people to use its browser and calling users "idiots" if they opted to try something else. As TechCrunch reports, Microsoft has backed down from the ad hominem attacks, but the company is starting to look desperate.
(In need of charity itself, Microsoft is contributing to charities for every download of IE8. Awww....)
As if this browser desperation weren't enough, Microsoft has kicked off a second initiative that reveals just how unloved its "innovation" has become. Microsoft has confirmed its 18-month Windows 7 to XP downgrade policy.
There are very good reasons for software vendors to prod customers into staying current with software releases, but it is amazing just how hard Microsoft has had to work to convince Windows customers to leave XP. Apple and Linux customers seem to upgrade to their latest and greatest operating systems, while Microsoft customers seem to be pining for the good ol' Windows days.
It's one thing to have an upgrade policy. Having to articulate a downgrade policy is a signal of Microsoft defeat, not victory.
Gibbon wrote that "instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long." I feel the same way about Microsoft. It has done so much for the software industry--some very negative, much very positive--but it seems to have lost the plot. It is telling when the company's best product in years is the XBox, a hardware platform, as Bob Rosenberg noted to me over email.
Microsoft is a victim of its own desktop success, a fact that Google is using against it. Unless Microsoft can break out of its downward spiral of negative advertising born of stifled innovation in its products, it will fall. Sort of like Rome. Because of immoderate greatness.
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Last week I suggested that open source still has work to do to penetrate the SMB (small to medium-sized business) market. Immediately various open-source companies started contacting me, either corroborating my contention or contradicting it.
Untangle is in the latter camp.
Untangle's active deployments skyrocket with open source
Untangle CEO Bob Walters talked with me in 2008 and indicated the company's switch to open source had paid serious dividends. As I learned in this follow-up email, the momentum has accelerated, as shown in the graph at right, and it's apparently all coming from the hard-to-reach SMB market.
Untangle sells software that allows small businesses to securely connect their local networks (LAN's) to the Internet. In other words, Untangle is a "secure network gateway" company, as Bob describes it. The company has now open sourced roughly 90 percent of its code, which is given away free of cost, and then charges for advanced features, similar to the business models used by SugarCRM, Zimbra, and others.
That move to open source has proved beneficial, as can be seen in how deployments have soared since Untangle open sourced its code. But I still wanted to know how Untangle successfully reaches the SMB market, particularly in light of the fact that Untangle doesn't build appliances which might make the software easier to adopt than a download-and-install-it-yourself model.
Open source has helped turn Untangle's customers into a self-reinforcing community:
Nothing sells like free during a recession. And those 18,000 active Untangle sites become both spokespeople for and prospective customers of ours. It's then our job to put highly-useful complementary commercial products in front of them.
Well over 99 percent of our customers have fewer than 100 employees. These include accounting firms, professional services firms, retail franchises, and small government agencies/offices. We are also popular for schools, especially private middle and high schools. (These can sometimes exceed the 100-user mark.)
Fine, but how do you reach such a scattered, tight-fisted market?
... Read moreGoogle blew the minds of developers with the introduction of its innovative Google Wave, a new approach to real-time content collaboration, but its odds of breezing into enterprise computing anytime soon remain remote.
Within enterprise IT departments, starved for compelling ways to collaborate on application development, however, Google Wave may find a ready audience.
Enterprise computing remains in the Stone Age, by modern standards, a topic nicely addressed by the Financial Times recently. While the consumer Internet offers diverse ways to connect (via Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and other services), the enterprise remains somewhat buttoned-down, relegated to Microsoft Exchange and the occasional fling with IBM's Lotus.
Pardon me while I stifle a yawn.
This isn't necessarily Microsoft's or IBM's fault, of course. Both offer other products that push the envelope on enterprise computing. But it's hard for enterprises to easily digest rapid-fire innovation, and it's not exactly easy for software vendors to recoup investments in groundbreaking innovations, either, as RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady noted in his review of Google Wave:
We don't see a lot of dramatic leaps forward in software, I'd argue, both because it's exceedingly difficult to develop and launch revolutionary products, and because the economics act against it.
It's difficult, of course, to produce them: how many vendors can afford the indulgence of turning high-quality resources loose on a multiyear project with no clear revenue plan in place? But it can be even more difficult to market (or sell such revolutionary products) because, well, they're not what people are used to, and they take some explaining.
So, given that Google Wave may have moved much further than most enterprises are able to willing to accept, at least for now, what good is it?
Equitas IT Solutions' Ryan Cartwright suggests an answer. He indicates that Wave offers "the chance to...make a big improvement in the way we develop free software."
He's absolutely right, but why stop there?
Most of the world's software is not written by open-source software developers, nor is it written by Microsoft or other traditional software vendors. It's written by enterprises for internal use. As such, if Google Wave has the potential to facilitate software development by facilitating real-time collaboration on code--and it does--then why not unleash its potential within enterprise application development?
Google Wave may well crash on the shore of enterprise adoption, but I suspect that it may well roll into the enterprise, anyway, as a code collaboration tool deployed by enterprise IT for its own use. Eventually, that "personal" consumption should trickle out to business users clamoring for their enterprise-computing experience to catch up with their consumer-computing world.
This could be Google's game to lose.
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As community becomes the currency increasingly driving cash in the technology industry, there's a lot of pressure to force communities to bend to corporate desires. This, as community evangelist John Mark Walker suggests, is perhaps the best way to kill the goose that lays the golden community.
Sting sings that "if you love somebody, set them free." Walker applies a similar principle to online community-building:
[T]he way forward is much the same as with the search for happiness: take care of the community building blocks, like your choice of web platform, community governance principles, interesting conversations, and a sense of purpose, and the rest will take care of itself.
Walker goes on to say that a lot of focus needs to be given to feeding the free-loaders, those pesky people that hang around and don't pay your company a dime. "Freeloaders help to add 'activity' and 'center of gravity' to your community," Walker writes, which might well provide the ambiance would-be paying community members need to feel comfortable sticking around.
"Community" can be a squishy concept at times, simultaneously important yet very hard to quantify and qualify. Even so, Walker's suggestions point to ways to get the most value from communities by giving the most value to those communities.
Funny how that works.
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Some have described Google as an advertising company. This might have been accurate at one time, but given the sheer breadth of Google's ambition and product mix, it's far too limiting a description.
Google is a search company. It's a cloud company. It's a subscription services company. And, as is becoming increasingly obvious, Google is the world's largest open-source company.
Tim O'Reilly has been telling us this for years, but it wasn't until I read this brilliant Keir Thomas article that I appreciated the clarity of O'Reilly's vision.
As Thomas writes, Google is the antithesis of Microsoft. Where Microsoft is closed, Google is open. Where Microsoft is limiting, Google is expansive. Where Microsoft is desktop, Google is the Web.
Microsoft has a problem, and it's this: Its entire business model is built around discrete computers running discrete applications....
The key thing about online applications [like Google] is that they are platform agnostic....Open source doesn't require licensing fees, and is like a double-jointed Russian gymnast: It's flexible. Really flexible. This puts it in a far better position to provide a platform for the new platform agnostic online world.
Chrome (technically Google Chromium) is open source because it makes no sense for Google to lock-down software to one hardware platform or architecture. The platform no longer matters in the Google universe, and this perhaps is the biggest difference between the Microsoft and Google philosophies. Microsoft needs you to keep you using Windows and an x86 platform.
Google [doesn't] care what computer or platform you use, and is actively encouraging you to be eclectic in your choice. Microsoft's approach is all about restriction. Google's approach is all about freedom.
In short, Google can afford to give away everything that makes Microsoft valuable. Everything. How can Microsoft hope to compete, except by trying to tether the online experience to its legacy desktop?
This is a good strategy...for now. It takes a lot of time for industries to change, and it's very possible that not all enterprise applications will successfully migrate to the cloud, as Dan Woods posits.
As such, enterprises will stick with Microsoft and on-premise deployment of software for many years to come.
But that phase in our industry's history will end. Already, as Chris Nuttall notes in the Financial Times, "the inevitable primacy of the browser and web applications is becoming clear."
Google, creator of some of the best of such Web applications, is the quintessential open-source company. It can afford to open all of its code, even if today it does not, because Google isn't selling code, and it can derive significant benefit from extensions to its online services through open-source development. Open platforms, as venture capitalist Fred Wilson suggests, are the future.
Google, in short, is what open source wants to be when it grows up. It illustrates what a true services company looks like: not support and other old-world services, but instead Web services. Most open-source companies only strive toward this goal. Google has fulfilled it.
The writing is on the wall, and that writing says that Microsoft and its model is dead. Google has killed it. Unless we're careful, however, Microsoft won't be the only casualty. Anyone hoping to monetize software directly is at risk.
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Microsoft's Internet Explorer continues to hemorrhage market share to Mozilla's open-source Firefox browser. But Microsoft is set to surpass Mozilla in one area: adoption of its open-source Microsoft Public License (MS-PL), according to research from Black Duck Software.
The MS-PL is now used by 1.02 percent of open-source projects. This is impressive given that it was only approved by the Open Source Initiative some two years ago. The Mozilla Public License (MPL), by contrast, has been around for many more years and is used by 1.25 percent of open-source projects, ranking ninth in terms of popularity. MS-PL is 10th but is gaining fast.
It's a matter of coloring inside the CodePlex lines.
The MPL offers some benefits over its long-serving peers like the GNU General Public License (50.17 percent market share), but often the benefits are outweighed by the sheer momentum of the GPL. Whatever its deficiencies, the GPL is a relatively well-understood license.
For those developers looking to go "off-piste" with a different license, and particularly for those with a Microsoft inclination--as is the case with Microsoft open-source code hosting repository CodePlex--it's far easier to opt to do so with the MS-PL versus the MPL, the Eclipse Public License, or another license.
As CodePlex continues to gain in popularity, I expect we'll see the MS-PL push past MPL and potentially even past the MIT License, which currently ranks seventh at 3.79 percent share. When that happens, it will be a sign that Microsoft has truly arrived as an open-source player.
Of course, I suspect that Microsoft would rather beat Mozilla in browser market share than in license market share. But you can't have everything, now can you?
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Imagine you wanted to create the Kindle killer, a revolutionary e-book device that matched and improved upon its functionality. What would you do? Well, you could, Mission Impossible-style, break into Amazon's Seattle headquarters and carry off the source code for the Kindle, then copy and extend its functionality to create a competitive device.
Or you could simply download the Kindle's source code from Amazon.com, where Amazon has already released the source code to the Kindle.
In fact, as TechCrunch rightly notes, the Kindle source code has been available since 2007.
Given this fact, why haven't you been doing anything with it? Why hasn't Apple taken the code and built the Kindle's winning technology into the iPhone? Why did Sony bother developing its own e-book reader?
Well, not only is the code in question not directly related to the actual Kindle application experience, as Rod Begbie notes, but instead "just the GPL libraries used to power the Kindle software," but it's also somewhat beside the point.
Apple doesn't use the Kindle code because any e-book it releases will be based on its own design, operating system, etc. Same for Sony and, presumably, for you.
While source code can be useful for learning how to solve complex problems, the actual approach and deployment a developer chooses often precludes her from using someone else's source code, and particularly a big body of code like that used in the Kindle. It could prove to be more work tailoring Amazon's work than simply starting from scratch.
So, bravo to Amazon for living up to its commitments under the GPL and releasing some of the Kindle source code, but don't expect to release a Kindle-killer based on Amazon's code. Amazon has brand, hardware OEM relationships, and other strengths that make its Kindle source code valuable, attributes that you and I almost certainly lack.
Such things are arguably better barriers to competition than patents and copyright.
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Since the unveiling its own browser, Google's continued support of Firefox has been somewhat puzzling. But to the world's dominant Web search provider, helping increase the amount of Web use ultimately means more Google searches.
Google has been a good partner to Mozilla over the years, pumping tens of millions of dollars into the open-source foundation that have helped make Firefox arguably the best browser in the world.
More recently with the launch of its open-source Chrome browser, however, Google became both partner and competitor to Mozilla. Given the potential to hurt Firefox adoption, it's interesting to note Google's calculus for introducing Chrome, as detailed in a recent O'Reilly Radar interview with Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience:
We think that, overall, if you make the Web better, people use the Web more. And that ultimately benefits Google because we believe that search is a certain and rather fixed percentage of people's online activities each day. It's hovered right around 5 percent from the very beginning of the Internet...If that's true, one way we can grow search is by gaining market share from other competitors. The other way we can gain share is by just growing the market overall, where we don't necessarily gain share but we gain on overall volume.
So we have a number of things that we do that try and make the Web more pleasant and easy to use...As we looked at the browser market, people have gotten really good at rendering HTML. But there hasn't been a lot of innovation. And there's been almost no attention on JavaScript at all. And so we thought we could build a browser that is just a lot faster for the Web, and it's much more optimized for JavaScript.
As Mayer further details, Google doesn't expect to be the source of all browser innovation. It wants to continue working with Firefox, for example, helping prod the market forward.
As Mozilla CEO John Lilly has said, increased competition in the browser market can spark innovation. Competition isn't comfortable, but because it pushes vendors to do their best work and "often results in innovation of one sort or another," it's ultimately good for customers and competitors.
This is why we should be cheering Google's entry into the browser market--even if we ultimately want Firefox to win. Perhaps especially if we want Firefox to win.
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