The Open Road

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.

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?

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.

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.

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:

[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.

... Read more

Whether you're an enterprise or a consumer, ultimately your big concern in buying technology is "Will it do what I want it to do?" Sometimes components matter, but most people most of the time just want something that works.

Gartner's consistently engaging Brian Prentice suggests this is already happening with open-source software. Vendors care about it because open source gives them high-quality, low-cost components with which to build solutions for customers. Customers may notice the lower price tag, but they don't invest much thought into why the price is lower.

I'm going to assume that at some point over the last 20 years you bought a car. So, how important was the car maker's use of just-in-time manufacturing to your purchase decision? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it was of no consideration at all.

Well, I think we're fast approaching the point where open source to software will be like JIT to automotive manufacturing. While it will critical to the producers of software, woven into the fabric of its operations, it will be of no importance at the point of consumption.

As hard as this might be to accept, open source is not a value proposition in its own right.

As hinted above, this is mostly true. Customers do care about the things that open source offers (lower cost, higher quality, etc.). But they probably don't recognize (or care) that these benefits stem from open source, per se.

Consider the Web. Open-source software provides the fundamental building blocks for nearly all Web services like Facebook, Amazon, etc., not to mention the infrastructure for public and private clouds.

End customers aren't asking for open source on the Web or in the cloud. They're asking for well-managed services that solve their problems. It's the vendors who care, because it allows them to grow highly scalable businesses at a modest cost.

Indeed, many of the customer benefits of open source (i.e., the ability to view, modify, and redistribute code) disappear or get muted on the Web and in the cloud. This hasn't stopped customers from buying into the Web/cloud.

Red Hat may disagree. It's apparently betting that customers care about components in the cloud. Why else would Red Hat Enterprise Linux pricing be much more expensive than Windows on Amazon EC2, despite being much cheaper for on-premises deployments, as IBM's Savio Rodrigues finds?

But I suspect Red Hat will need to change its pricing, as the OS is even more commoditized in the cloud than it has been for on-premises deployments. Both Red Hat and Microsoft will race to the bottom in pricing, with the emphasis being on the applications that run on them.

After all, this is the thing that drives customers' purchasing decisions. Red Hat knows this, which is why it (rightly) makes a big deal of the huge ecosystem of applications that run on RHEL.

In the cloud, even more attention is focused on service that customers use. Open source, in such a world, is essential infrastructure, but it's infrastructure that every vendor shares or will soon share, making the battle all about end-user facing applications, and not about developer-facing open-source components.

This is a very good thing. It means we can get back to focusing on solving customer problems, rather than fetishing and battling over open-source licenses. It's about time.

Want to know what prominent Apache Software Foundation and former Google developer Greg Stein thinks about MySQL, the GPL, and the European Commission's antitrust stance on Oracle/Sun? You've got two options.

You can read his original post here, of course. But if you want better commentary, you'll need to read this same post on Facebook.

Except that you probably can't, unless you're Stein's "friend" on Facebook.

Open Web, meet your closed cousin, Facebook.

People rightly fret about Facebook's twisting, turning approach to privacy, but perhaps a far greater concern is that so much great content is locked up at all.

Let's be honest: as much as we may pretend we're concerned about our privacy, the reality is that most of us most of the time appear to be hell-bent on revealing details about our innermost thoughts on a scale only the Internet can provide. As ZDNet's Larry Dignan opines, "We're all Google-tethered zombies who go about life without a hoot for privacy."

That's why, as TechCrunch reports, we're even happily sharing the details of our credit card transactions online.

Really.

The real concern is that we share so much behind the closed doors of Compuserve-esque Web "sites" that serve as Hotel Californias for our content. Yes, I want to keep some conversations private, but as more of my ramblings move to Facebook and other closed corners of the Web, I want to broaden the conversation beyond the borders of my "friends" list.

I can't. I'm stuck. What happens on Facebook, stays on Facebook. Even content that is cross-posted elsewhere: the ensuing commentary (often of equal or greater value to the original post) is trapped.

Professor Jonathan Zittrain raises a warning voice about this in his "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It", but I can't help but think that the convenience of Facebook will trump the social benefits of broadening conversations beyond the borders of such services.

Of course, it's very possible that openness trumps all, and that, like Compuserve before it, Facebook's walled-garden approach to the Web will go out with a whimper.

Unlike Compuserve, however, Facebook is helping people to tame the disorder of the Web. There really wasn't much content to tame prior to AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, etc. These companies corralled and created the content that populated their services. Facebook doesn't.

Do you share my concern? Or do you think it's just a moment in time that will resolve itself quickly? Please comment here...and not on my Facebook page. :-)

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.