The Open Road

SourceForge, despite competition, remains the leading repository for open-source projects. Many of the world's best open-source projects--JBoss, MySQL, SugarCRM, and others--start there, and plenty never leave.

For these reasons and others, each year I look forward to the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards, which allow the open-source community to vote on the industry's top projects. SourceForge has just announced that nominations are now open for the Sourceforge.net Community Choice Awards 2009.

While such direct democracy has yielded some odd choices in the past, the competition remains one of the best places to discover up-and-coming open-source projects.

This year, the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards get a few new categories, as well as some old favorites:

• Best Project
• Best Project for the Enterprise
• Best Project for Gamers
• Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins
• Best Visual Design
• Best Tool or Utility for Developers
• Best Commercial Open Source Project
• Best Project for Academia
• Best Project for Multimedia
• Best Project for Government
• Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything
• Best New Project

I really like the expansion to include commercial open-source projects as a specific category, and I think it's telling that there's now a category for government, which has seen such significant adoption in open source in the past few years, as well as academia. Open source is quickly branching out beyond its foundations in infrastructure software, and the awards categories reflect this.

Nominations will be accepted until May 29, and the 10 projects with the most nominations in each category will become finalists. The winners will be announced at a party held at the Agenda Lounge in San Jose, Calif., starting at 6 p.m. PDT on July 23 during the week of OSCON.

I'll be there. Will you? Regardless, nominate your favorite open-source projects now.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Microsoft offers a full ecosystem of software to would-be buyers, but its greatest success may actually result from its strategy to present customers with an "and" decision when initially purchasing Microsoft technology, rather than a difficult "or" decision.

Microsoft technology has generally been light enough--in terms of cost and in terms of resources required to deploy and manage it--to enable enterprises to add its technology into existing environments, rather than forcing immediate, wholesale rip-and-replace decisions. With a beachhead in place, enterprises slowly (or quickly) find themselves deploying more and more Microsoft software.

Red Hat does things differently. Today, Red Hat's primary mindset is "replace," as in "wholesale swap out expensive Unix for value-driven Linux." Red Hat recently told me that it's seeing more and more Oracle (BEA) WebLogic and IBM WebSphere customers trading for JBoss at the platform level: rip and replace. This is good, but the mentality is still "or," while most customers want "and." It's about choice.

To gain serious scale Red Hat needs to be more "and" than "or," as it is not big enough to compel wholesale rip-and-replace decisions (which are somewhat rare, anyway) once it starts having to compete with Windows, which is coming soon, and in a contest which it is often likely to lose. Consider that, according to IDC, Microsoft wins more of the Unix replacement business than Red Hat (or Linux, more generally), does. Why? Because Microsoft offers Unix shops a more complete solution, one that goes beyond "or" to include "and" with great developer tools and relatively easy-to-use software.

Integration with the existing (proprietary) world and expansion of its open-source offerings is the model for Red Hat expansion. JBoss works just fine with Windows, and it should continue to do so. Red Hat has partnered with Likewise to enable Red Hat Enterprise Linux to be used with Microsoft's Active Directory, and should continue to do so.

In fact, Red Hat needs to seek more ways to integrate itself into and hence infiltrate the Windows world. Red Hat can't grow like it needs to by demanding that the world beat a path to its open source-only solutions. It needs to give would-be buyers a near-term "and" decision by integrating with customers' existing environments and offering them incremental, open-source alternatives to their existing technology investments. Through things like its RHX program, Red Hat can offer enterprises a way to move to full open-source solutions at their own pace, not Red Hat's.

It's the strategy that Novell has been taking, and it's paying off for Novell. Red Hat should emulate and extend this strategy, not with patent deals and the like, but rather with technology that enables real integration with a customer's existing proprietary environment, then gradually expanding the Red Hat partner ecosystem, easily consumed through Red Hat, as well as adding to its own product portfolio.

Give customers real choice, in other words. "And" is a more palatable choice than "or."

In a post on Computerworld UK, tech writer Glyn Moody tackles the ever worsening outlook for Microsoft Vista, and comes up with an absolute gem of a thought in the process:

What's really important about this is not so much that Vista is manifestly such a dog, but that the myth of upgrade inevitability has been destroyed. Companies have realised that they do have a choice - that they can simply say "no". From there, it's but a small step to realising that they can also walk away from Windows completely, provided the alternatives offer sufficient data compatibility to make that move realistic.

Indeed. While Moody would undoubtedly like to see more of that Vista angst turn into Linux love, it's more likely that it's helping the Mac, which saw its market share jump again in November to nearly 9 percent, according to Net Applications.

For all the lame things Apple does (like fighting open-source iTunesDB to protect its DRM-heavy iTunes), and for all the great things that Microsoft has done, as Directions on Microsoft recently noted, Apple provides a viable, compelling alternative to Microsoft, and people are taking that choice.

To Moody's interest in desktop Linux, there is no reason to think that the move to the Mac will stop there. Once people have rediscovered choice, they're unlikely to trade one monopoly for another. I'm a good example: I love my Mac, but most of the applications I run on it are open source. When forced to work with an "office productivity" application, I split my time between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice (which I use almost exclusively for presentations because it has a better feature set).

That's what choice does: it doesn't mean we trade one overlord for another. It means we keep the competing overlords...competing.

Reading through Ina Fried's excellent interview with Microsoft's Brad Brooks, I can't help but wonder how Microsoft cornered the market on chutzpah. Microsoft has become so dominant in markets like the desktop that its best argument for consumers and enterprises avoiding the Mac and open source is, "But it will cost you so much money to leave Windows."

Now there's a ringing endorsement. Brooks doesn't argue that his product is better. He doesn't argue that Windows is competitive with the Mac. He argues, rather, that consumers are fools for not understanding just how scary and expensive it will be for them to leave Windows behind:

There really is a tax around there for people that are evaluating their choices going into this holiday season and going forward. There's a choice tax that we talked about, which is, hey, you want to buy a machine that's other than black, white, or silver, and if you want to get it in multiple different configurations or price points, you're going to be paying a tax if you go the Apple way.

There's going to be an application tax, which is if you want choice around applications, or if you want the same type of application experience on your Mac versus Windows, you're going to be purchasing a lot of software. And even at that you're not going to get the same experience. You're not going to get things like Microsoft Outlook, you're not going to get the games that you're used to playing....And so you've got all of these things that are truly taxes.

In other words, it's cheaper to continue paying the Microsoft tax, wherein companies give up any hope of future innovation or industry competition, than to try that dreaded, costly thing called "choice." Brooks conveniently forgets the "monopoly tax," the "security tax," its proposed "patent tax," and other taxes that Microsoft happily heaps upon its users.

Brooks may very well be correct about consumers taking a short-term hit in terms of productivity and what-not by choosing a Mac, but by that same logic everyone should just buy into the Microsoft Borg and rely on it to provide eternal sustenance. There is a cost to choice, but there's also tremendous upside. It's called a free market, and costs inevitably fall in truly free markets.

Perhaps that's what frightens Brooks.

Mozilla's open-source Firefox browser is more and more popular in Europe, hitting nearly 29 percent market share in March. It's also growing in popularity in New Zealand and Australia, where it reached 31.2 percent, according to web analytics company Xiti.

In North America, however, March saw Firefox drop 1 percent. No one seems to know why.

I suspect it's just a momentary blip, however, as Firefox has seen continued growth in market share over the past few years. There was a time that its growth might have been driven by ideology. Not any more.

No, Firefox increases in popularity now for one very simple reason: It's a better browser. The fact that it can increase at Internet Explorer's expense, despite IE coming pre-installed on 99 percent of computers sold, says something about Microsoft's increasingly tenuous hold on the desktop computer market.

I ran into a VC friend at breakfast this morning and we fell to talking about enterprise software. I noted to him that most of the support issues I see relate to configuration, not bugs, and how deploying software in a Software-as-a-Service model would largely eradicate this issue, leaving developers free to focus on development, not supporting deployments.

His counter was interesting:

SaaS is great if the only color you want is black. SaaS doesn't allow customers to fine-tune their implementation. If the vendor decides to update the UI (and force new training costs on the customer), that's too bad. Customers worry about security in a multitenant environment and are screwed if the system goes down, as Amazon's S3 recently did.

SaaS is generally billed as the end of software and the beginning of nirvana. But is it nirvana for customers or vendors?