The Open Road

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?

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.

Two, easier for developers to grok. Writing portlets for Jira was an art form. Gadgets are far more pervasive, and the technology underpinning them--HTML and XML over HTTP--is the linqua franca of the Web. OpenSocial meant our products were immediately more accessible to more developers.

Three, instant interoperability. We not only got interoperability within our own portfolio, but with other OpenSocial gadget containers, like iGoogle and Gmail, and with hundreds of other OpenSocial gadgets, from Box.net to Remember The Milk.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The mobile-computing world is increasingly a two-horse race between Google and Apple, with Apple clearly in the lead but Google Android making up ground quickly. Microsoft and Symbian are also still in the game, but the ultimate winner will be the one that best appeals to consumers or developers.

Or both.

This struck home while reading Mark Sigal's analysis of the "inevitability" of Google Android. On his way to dismantling the idea that Google's victory is assured, Sigal stumbles into apparently divergent interest groups:

[U]nlike the PC, where "good enough" was the bar required to seize the market,...for most consumers, their mobile device of choice is a lifestyle decision, a personal, ever-present extension of themselves that is resident in a way that never existed before with the PC--a value proposition that Apple has completely run with on iPhone (and iPod before that).

Fundamentally, though, mobile is a platform play, a game that is largely won by securing the hearts and minds of developers, and for them, the expectation bar is now set pretty high, owing to the success of iPhone across so many domains....

If you're Google (or Microsoft or Symbian), then, who do you target? Developers or consumers?

It's a real question, as while both parties' interests ultimately converge (consumers want developers to make great applications so that those same consumers can pay the developers lots of money), the short-term interests of consumers (sexy product) and developers (ease and richness of development platform) don't necessarily go together.

Motorola RAZR? Sexy product, lame development platform. Windows Mobile? Arguably a solid development platform...with almost zero sex appeal for consumers.

This is why John Carroll is probably right to argue that Microsoft should reinvigorate its mobile strategy with an emphasis on .Net as a powerful way for developers to write powerful mobile applications, it's not going to be enough. Microsoft can port all the business applications it wants for Windows Mobile. It won't matter.

Consumers don't buy business applications. Not until after they've chosen a phone that meets their personal needs, first.

Yes, enterprises do try to dictate corporate standards with Blackberrys and dull Dell PCs heading the list. But in the fast-changing mobile market, you can't hope that consumers will be forced to use your software. You want them to want to do so.

This is why I believe Google has a good chance of taking a serious bite out of Apple, and Symbian and Microsoft do not. Symbian is too difficult an application development platform, as Gartner notes, and Microsoft...is boring.

Not that it needs to be. XBox certainly isn't, and actually helped Microsoft surpass Apple in a recent consumer survey focused on product innovation.

But not in mobile, or even in computers. Apple understands how to create wicked cool products that consumers want, which is why its Mac sales are projected to grow by 26 percent in 2010, right through the recession, and why its iPhone continues to thrive.

But Apple's Achilles heel could well be developers, which are reportedly tiring of Apple's apparently arbitrary application approval and updating process. If Google can continue to help handset manufacturers to achieve the "Wow factor," while simultaneously creating a more open, robust development platform, it just might be able to beat Apple at the game it started.

In other words, the winning mobile vendor will be the one that marries sex appeal for consumers with platform appeal for developers. Google is on course to deliver, but it probably needs to win big with consumers before it makes waves with developers.

In the past week, the open-source business community appears to have reached consensus: making money from open-source software is a bad model, but making money with open source is golden.

This can't be good for Microsoft.

Microsoft has long maintained that as the open-source industry has matured, it has become more and more like the commercial world it sought to leave behind. Fundamental freedoms of open source, like the right to modify source code, are signed away to secure a support contract with Red Hat or another vendor.

In many ways, Microsoft was right. Unfortunately for the Redmond giant, however, the new consensus should lead to less commercialization of open source, and more commercialization around open source. There's a big difference, and it's one that threatens to seriously undermine Microsoft and every other traditional software vendor.

That is, unless Microsoft responds in kind.

The new consensus

This consensus has been articulated by TechDirt, Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady, GigaOm, and here on The Open Road.

In fact, it's a drum I've been beating for over a year as Tim O'Reilly's wisdom on the topic finally caught up with my 33MHz brain.

There are fundamental, strategic benefits to open source: ease of distribution, friction-less adoption, costs, etc. There are also serious downsides when it comes to selling it: people chafe at paying for something if they can get it, or something similar to it, for free.

Such problems don't plague companies like Google, which distributes open-source software to drive more adoption of its proprietary advertising or SaaS services. Even Red Hat isn't really in the software business: not with its Linux distribution, anyway. It's in the business of providing certification and update services; of managing the complexity of an operating system.

It's a great business, but if you had to choose between Google's sales or Red Hat's, it's a no-brainer.

Microsoft's response

As this lightbulb goes on across the industry, companies like Microsoft, which insist on direct monetization of software, with little in the way of open-source complements to fuel adoption (or simply undermine competitors), are going to struggle. More and more companies will give away Microsoft's core business as open-source complements to their own.

So, here's a suggestion for Microsoft as just one good way to respond: open-source Internet Explorer.

Forget Office. Forget Windows. Forget all those other billion-dollar cash cows. Microsoft has no revenue directly tied to Internet Explorer, but IE is the gateway to the next phase of Microsoft's growth. Open-source it.

Cut Google's Chrome and Chrome OS off at the knees. Undermine Mozilla Firefox's raison d'etre. Give the European Commission a reason to love you.

More importantly, give developers something to embrace and extend. Microsoft has been steadily losing browser market share as Firefox eats into it. In some countries, like Germany, Firefox has even surpassed IE's market share.

Fight fire with fire. IE is still the world's most popular browser. Make it the world's most open browser, too.

Every Microsoft business could benefit from this move. Even if one assumes that Microsoft isn't ready to take the plunge and fully open up the development process around IE, here's some comfort: neither has Google around Chrome. Microsoft can still steer the IE ship, even if it were open source.

Microsoft needs a proactive open-source strategy, rather than the reactive policy it has had to date. Open source is a threat, yes, but it's a threat to everyone, especially as the industry collectively comes to grips with open source as a business enabler, rather than as a product to sell.

If Microsoft wants to win big in the new world of Web-based software, it needs a bold strategy. Open-sourcing IE is the starting point.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

With open-source software businesses, you have two options. Actually, three, but the third belongs to Red Hat, and it applies to roughly no one else.

The first option is to sell support for open-source software. This option is generally advocated by those who have never grown a business beyond $10 million. It's a terrible model unless your only aspiration in life is to run a services company.

Hence, the support model might be good for Accenture or systems integrator, if they want to take on the burden of support, but it's a poor model for Red Hat, MindTouch, Microsoft, or other software company.

The second option is to contribute heavily to open source but not build your revenue model around monetizing that software directly. This is what the New York Times points to in its Sunday expose of allegedly fizzling open-source business models.

Open source can drive adoption like little else. It's not, however, necessarily a great driver of revenue. For that, you need to be selling something beyond the source code, and that "something" is often going to be proprietary, be it hardware, software, or a service.

Google is the master of this model. It gets roundly criticized for its half-open, half-closed open-source efforts, but the reality is that Google's products--Chrome OS, Android, etc.--are open enough to facilitate adoption without giving away the keys to the car, which drives wherever Google wants it to go.

That's the way successful companies are run: they take ownership of what they ship. They are influenced by but not controlled by the mystical whims of The Community.

Even Red Hat, which piggybacks on a lot of Linux kernel development, increasingly includes more home-grown software in its distribution and takes great pains to certify its Red Hat Enterprise Linux will work in the most demanding environments before putting its brand on the label.

Some, including me, have wrongly concluded that Red Hat's business model would apply to other product markets beyond the operating system. It doesn't. It only applies where the moving parts in the product are complex, multitudinous, and frequently changing.

For everything else, there's Option 1 (if you want a business that doesn't scale well or possibly at all) or Option 2 (which is really no different from the old proprietary model except that it effectively uses open-source complements to lower engineering costs and possibly sales/marketing costs).

Even Option 2 won't work if you under-invest in marketing and development, as Symbian is learning to its hurt. It turns out that there is no free lunch, even in the land of free software. It always takes work. And money. Lots of both, actually.

Twitter and Facebook are duking it out to own the future of the social Web, though users won't have noticed. Indeed, for those who use both, this may come as a surprise, since the two, while both social media platforms, seem to serve very different purposes.

Tell that to Twitter and Facebook, which increasingly have painted big bull's-eyes on each other.

They probably should spend more time painting their home pages. While the two Silicon Valley companies have opted to skirmish in the hinterlands of APIs and data feeds, the war will almost certainly be won somewhere else: user interface and ease of use.

Facebook groks this more than Twitter, which is why your mom/dad, teenage neighbors, and friends all use Facebook, and probably don't use Twitter.

Both companies have open APIs that encourage third-party developers to build out their respective platforms. Facebook has the Open Stream API; Twitter, the ">Open API Service.

These are critical components of a platform strategy, but they're secondary to the lesson that Microsoft and Apple have taught us: if users don't care about the front end of software/services, developers won't care about the back end of the same.

Facebook largely works because people know how and why to use it. Twitter...not so much.

It's telling that Twitter's "big" feature of the last six months is...lists. I use and love Twitter, but after a month I still can't get myself excited about creating or following Twitter lists. I'm not even sure why I'd want to do so.

Is this the best Twitter can do?

This is perhaps why Twitter seems to work for a narrow class of user: Caucasian, middle-aged urbanites with no kids.

In other words, not teens, not your mom/dad, and probably not you.

Facebook's demographics look very different, probably because its current range of uses is very different.

To me, this is a user-interface problem, and not a defect in the DNA of the Twitter platform. It's simply not immediately obvious what one should do with Twitter. That's not the case with Facebook.

We learned this long ago in open source. What separates a good but doomed project from a truly great project is documentation (to help developers know how to use the system) and user interface (to help end users know how to deploy the software). That's why Linux was interesting but not ubiquitous until Red Hat, IBM, and others added the finish that made its power usable by the general business world.

Twitter has a lot of promise, but not yet much polish.

It's nice that New York gangs have found new ways to dis each other using Twitter. It will be better when Twitter makes it easy and obvious for me to talk with my parents using Twitter.