Many governments, particularly those in developing nations, are increasingly legislating preferences for open-source software. A much smarter approach may be that recently adopted by Hungary, however, which has mandated the use of open standards.
Hungary's flag
Smarter, because for all the noise about open-source mandates in places like Latin America, I've been hearing from contacts in these markets that government IT workers have continued to use the software they prefer, not the software mandated by legislation.
And smarter, because it focuses on creating real competition in government IT, which arguably is a much better way to keep vendors honest and citizens empowered than an open-source license. If you can have both, even better, but the right place to start government policy is in the realm of standards.
The Open Standards Alliance proposed and lobbied for the change to Act LX of 2009 on electronic public services within Hungarian law. The goal? To "promote the spread of monopoly-free markets that foster the development of interchangeable and interoperable products," thereby opening up the market to "broad competition."
It's a laudable goal, and arguably much better than those efforts to mandate a particular licensing approach to software, which could result in adoption of software that doesn't work as well as its proprietary peers.
I like the way the Open Standards Alliance describes it:
Any device using a standard plug can be connected to the electric power supply by means of a wall socket. Connecting a television set or a refrigerator to the mains does not require the expertise of an electrician. And if the refrigerator is unplugged and a television plugged in instead, the television will work, too.
Similarly, the two types of portal set out by Hungarian legislation (the administrative portal and the client portal serving individual users) will function as statutory standard 'sockets' in intercommunication between computers.
In other words, the law isn't picking winners. It's not deciding between open-source and proprietary software. It's actively fostering competition between open and closed systems.
The devil is in the details, of course, but the approach is promising. There are still questions to be answered, e.g., will Microsoft file formats like .docx be considered open standards? Some suggest the answer is yes.
Does this degrade the value of the legislation?
On a related note, it's also very possible that "open standard" may be redefined, as Glyn Moody points out may be happening with the European Interoperability Framework, to include not-so-open standards.
Even so, it's good to see a government focused on the interconnections between software, rather than the licenses thereof. As we increasingly see with open source in cloud computing, licenses matter little for ensuring openness. Standards, however, continue to have a big role to play.
BUENOS AIRES--Open source has successfully navigated its first two phases of development and adoption. We're now entering the third, and possibly final, phase: the time when consumers of open-source software also become producers.
Can enterprise IT make the leap?
Enterprise IT to give open source a piece of its mind
Billions of dollars in IT investment are at stake. Perhaps even more importantly, billions of lines of code could be, too. While significant software products are written for sale, arguably much more software is written by enterprise IT to run businesses as diverse as Safeway stores and Barclays banks.
Unlocking and distributing the value of that enterprise IT, developed to run behind the firewall, is the next big step for open source.
As Red Hat's general manager for Latin America, Julian Somodi, and Red Hat's Latin America marketing director, Martin D'Elia, speculated on Thursday at a lunch meeting here in Buenos Aires, open source's greatest value is unlocked when one moves from being a mere consumer of open-source software to also being a co-producer of such software.
It's a message Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has been sounding for the past two years, and it may finally be catching on.
Today, enterprise IT is adopting and using open source on a grand scale. Gartner finds that 85 percent of enterprises are using open source today. (My hunch? The other 15 percent are, too, but the CIOs surveyed simply didn't know.)
The percentage contributing back? I've seen no data on this, but my personal, anecdotal evidence suggests that few enterprises contribute back to open-source projects, for a variety of reasons. Legal is probably the biggest, as enterprise IT weighs the risk of exposing itself to potential lawsuits from faulty or IP-infringing code.
This concern would appear more intractable had the vendor community not already navigated it in the second phase of open-source development. Vendors had the same concerns that plague enterprise IT today, and ultimately discovered that the value of open-source participation trumps its risk.
As a sign that we're coming to the close of this second phase, even laggards like SAP have announced significant progress in their open-source development efforts.
The same benefits that attracted SAP et al. will propel enterprise IT into this third and final phase of open-source participation, too.
Which benefits?
For starters, open-source software development offers a quicker path to resolution of bugs, a recent analysis finds.
It also enables finer-grained control and customization, as the French army has discovered with Mozilla Thunderbird, the customizations of which can be shared so as to offload the burden of supporting the code.
It might well be, as Gartner's Brian Prentice argues, that ultimately only vendors care about open source. But I think this view only rings true if enterprise IT remains blinded to the big benefits that derive from open-source participation, rather than mere consumption.
While not every company will have a great experience all of the time (witness, for example, the problems Farelogix had developing community around its open-source travel management point-of-sale tool), enough enterprises are experimenting that to suggest the third-phase train is leaving the station for good:
JP Morgan Chase led the way by open-sourcing its AMQP project. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange has also jumped into the fray with Linux. Reuters has its OpenCalais project, a project that is even being used here at CNET.
And so on. It's happening. It's real. And for those enterprises that jump into this third phase of open-source participation, the benefits promise to be palpable.
Atlassian is one of those curiosities within the open-source world: like Apple, Atlassian doesn't tend to release its software as open source. But as with Apple, the open-source world loves to use its software.
From JIRA to Confluence and just about everything in between, Atlassian's software is broadly deployed within open source. Intriguingly, Atlassian turned back to that open-source community to integrate its own applications using OpenSocial, as I learned in an interview with Jay Simons, Atlassian's vice president of marketing.
Many people tend to think of OpenSocial as a way for Web sites like LinkedIn to share data with the Web, but Atlassian chose to use it to unify its applications behind the firewall. Why?
Simons: Roughly a year ago, Atlassian took a hard look at improving the integration between our eight products and upgrading the dashboard implementation of Jira, our popular issue tracker. Jira had a decent dashboard, and portlets based on our own technology that customers--and often some of our own engineers on different teams--sometimes struggled to use.
We had a choice: stick with what we have (slightly dated, but solid portlet technology), but make it bigger and better (engineers love this one, usually), or go open.
Asking seven independent teams to learn Jira's clunky portlet stack so they could integrate their products with Jira wasn't a popular option internally, and didn't really buy us much, so we intrinsically preferred the open option. There have been a few different standards for portlets over the years--JSR-168 and WSRP the most well known--but they all felt long-in-the-tooth. And then we took a close look at OpenSocial.
Many initially heard about OpenSocial a couple years ago, when it was billed as a Facebook killer--a shot fired by Google, echoed by the dozens of other consumer social networks scrambling to catch up to Facebook.
OpenSocial defines two concepts--an API for defining and working with social data (profiles, attributes, relationships) and specification for gadgets. OpenSocial's fundamental promise was interoperability--write an application once and host it in multiple social networks. Sound familiar? That's what we wanted to do with our own products.
A year later, and we've shipped OpenSocial in the guts of both Jira, our issue tracker, and Confluence, our enterprise wiki, thanks in large part to Apache Shindig, an open-source reference implementation of the OpenSocial container. Both Jira and Confluence are now OpenSocial gadget containers and producers, and the rest of our portfolio produce gadgets these two products can consume.
The benefits to Atlassian should be clear, but the benefits to our customers are also immediate: display build activity from the Bamboo build server, search results from the Confluence wiki, and recent commits to the SVN through Fisheye on a Jira dashboard that organizes that information alongside the issues and tasks related to an individual project. Everything a development team needs on a single page.
So OpenSocial wasn't a way for you to connect Jira with LinkedIn (or kill Facebook, for that matter)? What are the top-three reasons for choosing OpenSocial instead of some alternative integration technology?
Simons: One, it's open. OpenSocial's openness means it is consistently benefiting from the contributions of the community. Dozens of companies now are starting to work with it, from Atlassian to Google, and the spec is evolving quickly. Gadgets are an important ongoing part of Google's strategy across several products, so our customers benefit from Google's investments and innovations, as well as our own.
What's next for OpenSocial?
Simons: The OpenSocial community is quite active. The Apache Shindig project is also quite active. The OpenSocial specification 1.0 (it's on v0.9 currently) should be released in January 2010.
What originated as a technology for consumer social networks, is quickly gaining traction amongst enterprise software vendors, and enterprises. We've created a site to explain how we use it, and hopefully we'll see more enterprises use it well beyond the consumer Web for which it was originally envisioned.
The more the merrier.
Despite all the handwringing about Microsoft's market clout in the European browser war, the real threat to Firefox may be Google, not Microsoft. Even as Microsoft's browser market share deflates to 64.36 percent, Google has upped its game with its increasingly extensible Chrome browser.
Chrome to crash the IE/Firefox party
For those of us who cling to Mozilla Firefox because of its library of excellent add-ons and extensions, suddenly we have another viable, open-source choice.
Internet Explorer remains a viable threat to Firefox due to Microsoft's heft in operating systems, which helps to create enough inertia that most Windows users who start with IE simply never discover that they have browser alternatives.
But while IE plays catch-up to Firefox in sheer extendability and third-party innovation, the real contender could well be Google Chrome, which marries open source with a strong developer/extension story and bests just about everyone in performance.
I love Firefox, but mostly because I love the third-party innovation that Firefox enables. Add-ons like ForecastFox (in-browser weather updates), AdBlock Plus (blocking ads), and so on make my browsing experience awesome.
Such add-ons, however, tax the resources of my MacBook Pro. Considerably.
As I type this, I have 15 tabs open and have 22 add-ons installed. As a result, Firefox is eating up roughly 30 percent of my CPU, even beating resource hog Java.
(Credit:
Matt Asay)
That's a lot of juice to power my browser, even when considering that most of my work is done within the browser (from common browsing to Zimbra e-mail to Google search to...you name it).
According to TechCrunch, development of add-ons for Google Chrome is much easier than it is for Firefox, and those add-ons apparently no longer constrain Chrome's performance in the same way that Firefox add-ons do for Firefox.
If true, then Mozilla needs to be doing a lot more than simply opening up a Firefox add-on marketplace in 2010, as The Register reports it will. Instead, Firefox should be heads down on improving browser performance.
A marketplace makes sense for enriching the Firefox developer community and, hopefully, diversifying Mozilla's revenue sources so that it's not so heavily dependent on Google.
But given that Google Chrome's improved extensibility is aiming squarely at Firefox, Mozilla has more than a monetary problem. It has a serious competitive threat looming, one that will only be won by significantly improving performance while maintaining its excellent track record with developers.
I'm confident that the Firefox team can do it. I'm equally confident that it must. Yes, Mozilla marshals a more diverse and robust open-source community around Firefox than Google does for Chrome. But users arguably won't care.
The Google train is coming, and it's not going to stop...not even for a longtime ally like Firefox.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Once a monopolist, always a monopolist? Not in Microsoft's case. While no one will accuse Microsoft of being a forlorn Tiny Tim, it's also no longer the Ebeneezer Scrooge that it once was. In fact, Microsoft seems haunted by the ghost of monopolies past, to the point that it has lost its ability to fight on equal terms for new markets.
Look at the markets the U.S. government sought to open by suing Microsoft for monopolistic practices. Microsoft's market share in media players, Windows, etc. remains largely unaffected by the government lawsuits.
I miss the smell of monopoly in the morning
Where Microsoft has lost market share (as in Web browsers and mobile), the competition hasn't relied on consent decrees and the like to win. Firefox wins because of its community development and distribution. Apple's iPhone and Google Android are trouncing Windows Mobile because they significantly change the rules of engagement for mobile while providing a better experience.
Government, in other words, probably solved little. But what it did was create a culture of caution within Microsoft that stultifies its ability and desire to compete. (We should note that just today, the European Commission formally ended its browser-focused antitrust pursuit of Microsoft, following concessions by Redmond.)
Microsoft's competitors, like Google, thrive in the wake of this fear, uncertainty, and doubt that plagues Microsoft. Ironically, competitors like Google do many of the same things that got Microsoft into hot water with the U.S. Justice Department.
Google et al. are free to compete. Microsoft is not.
Granted, this constricted freedom may be more psychological than real. As a journalist friend said to me on Tuesday, "Everybody thought Microsoft laughed off the antitrust thing. But I think it really did take the wind out of their competitive sails."
I do, too. In fact, a few years ago a friend and I set out to start a business delivering Microsoft Office-like functionality to mobile phones, which we ultimately abandoned. We didn't worry about Microsoft suing us for patent or copyright infringement. My friend had successfully sued Microsoft for anticompetitive practices in the Caldera litigation. We knew Microsoft's hands were tied by its antitrust settlement.
Microsoft is not the same company it once was. It's under siege, and seemingly incapable of responding. I think we're the poorer for it.
No, this isn't a paean to Microsoft monopolies. Rather, it's a plea for a Microsoft that competes vigorously to win.
Not one that repents in sackcloth and ashes for the "sin" of competing with open source. Not one that is continuously constrained by various antitrust authorities even as it erodes market share for the products in question.
I don't want a monopoly. I understand the important competitive principles that Mozilla and others are fighting for in the ongoing browser/etc. wars.
But I want a competitor again. Microsoft has lost its fight. This should concern us.
It should bother us because companies like Google need to be kept on their toes. It should nag at us because Microsoft writes great software that is comparatively easy to use, and we need its influence on the market.
I hardly use Microsoft software, preferring Apple and Google and open source. But I'd still like Microsoft's influence on the market, and not as a milquetoast competitor too afraid of antitrust shadows to thrash a competitor. Man up, Microsoft.
This post was updated at 2:30 p.m. PST in light of Microsoft's apology, which confirmed the anti-Drupal ads.
Microsoft has launched an advertising campaign against Drupal, an open-source Web publishing system, to promote its WebsiteSpark program. Some will see this as a devious plot on Microsoft's part to crush open source beneath its monopolistic feet.
But here's a more rational explanation: Microsoft competes with Drupal. This is what competitors do: compete.
Here's what Microsoft is accused of doing:
The other day I was checking Listology.com for the Drupal website list. But what attracted me more on the page was the small Google adsense block with the title "Forget Drupal and get:"...
Oops, here is an advertisement against drupal on a very page that lists all drupal websites. But the biggest surprise was that the advertisement was from none other than Microsoft. Clicking the advertisement takes you directly to the page of Microsoft's new product - Webspark, on Microsoft.com.
The horror! The horror!
Microsoft's WebsiteSpark program is designed to make it easy for Web developers to work with Microsoft technologies like .Net. It's hard to find anything nefarious in this, but some see Microsoft's alleged attempts to steer Drupal developers to WebsiteSpark as evidence that Microsoft is more worried about Drupal than it is Google, since it's using Google AdWords to place the ads.
As for Microsoft, no sooner had the community reared its incensed head than Microsoft's Mark Brown dashed out an apology:
I want to offer my sincerest apology for this. I have contacted Google and we are working on having this ad pulled as soon as possible. In addition we are working internally to ensure this doesn't happen again.
Really? For what? Having a business? For competing in the same way the Drupal community does?
This is silly. Microsoft is simply using the advertising channel open to it on the Listology Web site, trying to nudge developers its way. Acquia, the company set up by Drupal's founder to commercialize Drupal adoption, is doing the same thing.
Both are simply advertising where they hope to have a significant return on advertising dollars spent. It's called business. It's not personal.
It's the very same reason that Acquia advertises on Joomla.org, a competing open-source Web publishing system, as Joomla leader Elin Waring notes.
Take off the hair shirt, Microsoft. It doesn't become you.
After all, Microsoft is also promoting Drupal in Google searches:
A Jekyll and Hyde moment for Microsoft? Not really. The Web Platform team, of which Mark Brown is part, undoubtedly wants Drupal developers building on Windows.
But guess what? The WebsiteSpark team wants such developers building on Microsoft's Web technologies. It's a big company with different teams and different priorities.
In other words, it's nothing about which to be concerned. In fact, I'd worry more if Microsoft were doing the kumbaya thing with every open-source project, forgetting its fiduciary duty to compete vigorously...including against open-source competitors.
There is no free lunch with open source and there is no free pass for open source. We're grown-up boys and girls. We can compete. As for you, Microsoft, stop pandering to the hurt feelings of open-source developers who should know better.
It's reasonably clear that open source is the heart of cloud computing, with open-source components adding up to equal cloud services like Amazon Web Services. What's not yet clear is how much the cloud will wear that open source on its sleeve, as it were.
Eucalyptus, an open-source platform that implements "infrastructure as a service" (IaaS) style cloud computing, aims to take open source front and center in the cloud-computing craze. The project, founded by academics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is now a Benchmark-funded company with an ambitious goal: become the universal cloud platform that everyone from Amazon to Microsoft to Red Hat to VMware ties into.
Or, rather, that customers stitch together their various cloud assets within Eucalyptus.
I caught up with Eucalyptus founder and Chief Technology Officer Rich Wolski to learn more about how Eucalyptus hopes to displace industry leaders like VMware, and the role that open source plays in growing the cloud-computing market.
While Wolski made a big deal about the company's open-source credentials, I found his argument about the open architecture of Eucalyptus more compelling:
... Read more[Eucalyptus] is architected to be compatible with such a wide variety of commonly installed data center technologies, [and hence] provides an easy and low-risk way of building private (i.e. on-premise or internal) clouds...
Thus data center operators choosing Eucalyptus are assured of compatibility with the emerging application development and operational cloud ecosystem while attaining the security and IT investment amortization levels they desire without the "fear" of being locked into a single public cloud platform.
Google Android adoption--both that which is publicly announced and that which is still under wraps--is amazing. Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently declared that Android adoption is set to "explode." This is good news for Google, of course, as well as the wireless carriers and handset manufacturers that support Android.
Even as the mobile telcos seek winning alternatives to the controlling grasp of Apple, that same industry is simultaneously enthusiastic and leery about Google: enthusiastic about the operating system, but leery about tying all of their customer data into Google's cloud services.
Enter Funambol, the open-source mobile cloud sync and push e-mail.
Funambol ensures mobile operators maintain control over customer data, rather than sacrificing it to Google. E-mail, social networking features, contact information, etc.: Funambol can sync it all, with the mobile operator and its end-customers retaining ownership.
The fact that Funambol is open source doesn't hurt. Not only does it nicely complement Google's open-source Android strategy, it allows mobile operators, handset manufacturers, software vendors, and others to tailor Funambol's Java software to suit their particular needs.
Small wonder, then, that ten of the top mobile companies use Funambol, a list that includes companies readers of this blog use every day...in just about any developed nation (and others beyond). Such customer traction is translating into greater than 100-percent sales growth every quarter.
Recession? What recession?
In fact, as Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco told me on Wednesday, it is the recession that has accelerated Android adoption and, by extension, Funambol's adoption. Mobile operators don't want to pay hefty royalties for Windows Mobile and need software that sets them apart in a crowded, competitive market.
If this sounds like a perfect storm for open-source Android, that's because it is. But it's also creating an exceptional opportunity for Funambol, and could well establish beachheads for a range of other open-source products that sit within the Android ecosystem.
Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun-MySQL has turned into a political circus, with both sides digging in their heels in preparation for a fight. However, the most interesting commentary on the deal may actually be coming from two highly interested parties with two very different perspectives on the takeover: MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius and IBM.
What's interesting in their positions is that only one of the parties pretends to be neutral. Surprisingly, the overtly biased party, IBM, comes to a very different conclusion than Widenius.
It has everything to do with money.
As Pamela Jones at Groklaw acutely analyzes, Widenius and his appointed lobbyist, Florian Mueller, are compromised by financial incentives to bar Oracle from owning MySQL. Jones writes:
They have big plans for a business around MySQL, and they want to make some money from it. MariaDB is their fork of MySQL...
So, what stands in their way? In their mind, the GPL [GNU General Public License]. They scorn the idea of a community project of GPL'd code and view Linux's commercial success, despite it being GPL code, as an aberration. What did they tell the EU Commission about licenses, then, and how to make money from FOSS? That the two most successful open-source business models are dual licensing, like MySQL, or open core, as in EnterpriseDB, the core of the code being open source, but with proprietary modules, and that is what they want to turn MySQL into.
Even if you don't buy Jones' contention that Widenius and Mueller want to make MySQL "proprietary" by licensing it under the Apache Software License, her excerpting of key commentary within their own brief (PDF) for the EU is sobering...and damning.
The evidence is particularly troubling when considered against IBM's response to the proposed takeover of MySQL. IBM, next to Microsoft, is Oracle's biggest competitor in the database market, and so presumably would have a big incentive to keep the popular MySQL database out of Oracle's hands.
But that's not what is happening.
In fact, IBM's Steve Mills has clearly stated that the acquisition would create no antitrust issues.
None.
Surely, if someone had a financial incentive to block the acquisition, it would be IBM. But IBM has its long-term credibility on the line, and it knows that specious arguments made for short-term gain have long-term negative consequences.
Oracle doesn't compete with MySQL. Oracle has said this. MySQL has said this (well before and after the proposed acquisition). And now IBM is saying it.
Widenius and Mueller, who have perhaps done more than any others to slow the Oracle-Sun deal, costing Sun hundreds of millions of dollars in lost sales in the process, are not saying it. But then, if Jones' analysis is right, then they have a serious conflict of interest that would prevent them from saying it.
MySQL is an open-source database, licensed under the GPL, which ensures that its code is open and available to anyone. The license works, as its co-author, Eben Moglen, recently articulated.
That is, it works to preserve software freedom. It says nothing about Widenius' freedom to make money from MySQL, nor should it. That's a business model question for him to overcome, not a political question for him to lobby.
In many markets, open source has played catch-up for years to the proprietary incumbents. Now, however, open source is taking the lead in areas as diverse as operating systems (Linux), browsers (Firefox), and databases (MySQL).
Oddly, given the ubiquity of e-mail, we've never seen a really good open-source e-mail client. Mozilla wants to change that with Thunderbird.
Mozilla's track record with its hugely popular Firefox Web browser suggests that it may have more than a sporting chance, despite a mostly unproductive history with e-mail. Thunderbird, Mozilla's e-mail client, has been around since 2003, with almost no market share to show for its nearly seven years of development.
Could it be that Thunderbird has been a victim of Firefox's success? If so, has anything changed to suggest that Thunderbird is ready to innovate and lead, as Firefox has done?
The answer is a qualified but optimistic "yes." Mozilla just released Thunderbird 3, and early reports suggest that it's a keeper. CNET, for example, lauds Thunderbird's search capabilities ("Microsoft Outlook doesn't offer anything that comes close to the level of granular control that Mozilla has given Thunderbird users"), among other things, and declares that it "rates as a top-notch e-mail client, and it's definitely the best freeware one around."
Sexiest nun in the convent?
Or perhaps inaccurate?
It may be true that Thunderbird is the best open-source e-mail client, though as an avid and enthusiastic user of Zimbra, I'm not convinced.
Regardless, in terms of freeware...I'm not so sure. After all, while not exactly freeware, Microsoft Outlook and Apple Mail are both excellent e-mail clients, and come free...with the purchase of other hardware or software.
But who cares about the client at all? Apparently not Microsoft or Apple, whose e-mail clients have barely budged in terms of innovation in years. They're great products, but they're still essentially the same as they were when I started using them at the beginning of the decade.
Only Zimbra really pushes the innovation envelope because it puts more power in the server than in the client. Given how the world is moving to the Web, shouldn't Mozilla, too, be focusing its development efforts on the server, rather than the client?
Mozilla CEO John Lilly insists that the foundation is doing just that, focusing on both server and client innovation. According to Mozilla Messaging lead David Ascher, Mozilla will be investing heavily in add-on innovation, similar to Firefox, that keeps the platform agile while enriching Thunderbird's functionality. Such add-ons will take advantage of advances in both the client and server.
It sounds promising and comes with a real monetary commitment from Mozilla. The foundation now has 60 people working on messaging, compared with just two back in the early days.
I first used Thunderbird four or five years ago and found it weak. I'm going to give it another try to see if it can replace Apple Mail as my client of choice for personal e-mail. Given Mozilla's impressive track record in browsers and its newfound commitment to e-mail, it may be time for you to check it out, too. Let me know what you think.
Update at 5:06 AM on 12/10/09: I originally repeated reports that Mozilla now has 60 people working on Thunderbird. David Ascher, Mozilla Messaging chief, contacted me to say that this number had been misreported by The Register. The number is actually 16. My apologies for the confusion.
