It was bound to happen. With the U.S. government promising truckloads of cash to overhaul the U.S. health care system, while simultaneously making positive noises around open source, it was just a matter of time before someone connected the dots.
That someone appears to be Joanne Rohde, former executive vice president of worldwide operations at Red Hat, who has launched the Axial Project, a stealth-mode start-up that aims to "combin[e] the principles of Open Standards and Open Source...to connect all the parties in the Health ecosystem safely and securely."
It's a big task, but then, that's precisely what open source is good for tackling.
Indeed, as I've written before, the U.S. health care system, with its myriad of providers, insurers, etc. is ripe for open source. Open source isn't a panacea, but it has proved itself adept at resolving precisely this sort of complexity, with Linux and the various Apache projects as just two examples.
I've been talking with Rohde for at least a year now--most recently meeting for breakfast in Raleigh in April--and have enjoyed seeing her ideas germinate and flower. The company has gone through various guises (and names: as late as April, Rohde was calling the company EHRmail), and is now growing to meet the challenges ahead of it.
Axial has been quietly assembling a team of seasoned veterans from Rohde's Red Hat and UBS past, including Michael Yuan and John Casey, but most recently Matt Mattox, Red Hat's director of ISV alliances, who announced via e-mail his move to Axial:
(Credit: Matt Asay)Axial has not yet raised venture funding, but planned to raise its seed money through alternative avenues, at least as of my April conversation with Rohde. Given the company's mission--to build an integration tool kit around a message broker for health IT companies, universities, and corporations that allows sending and receiving of data across existing infrastructures--coupled with its open-source approach and roster of seasoned executives, I'm guessing funding won't be an issue.
The real issue is whether even open source is powerful enough to fix the U.S. health care system. Good luck to Mattox, Rohde, and the Axial Project team as you seek to answer that question in the affirmative.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
I've suggested before that Index Ventures could well be the "best venture firm in Europe." Index has one of the most interesting investment portfolios of any venture firm on the planet, having invested in companies like Skype, Openads, Oanda, DimDim, and others.
Mike Volpi, Index Ventures new Partner
Today, Index became even more interesting, adding Michelangelo ("Mike") Volpi to its investment team as a partner based in London. Volpi was most recently the CEO of online video company Joost, but made his name as the mergers and acquisitions maestro at Cisco, where he oversaw 75 acquisitions.
Given Volpi's background as a deal-maker, the question is whether he's going to be investing for Index or selling for Index.
The answer is "both," of course, and Volpi's recent failure with Joost should prove useful instruction for his future Index investments, as suggested in an interview with D: All Things Digital. Look for Volpi to take a hard-headed view on Internet business models: less advertising, and more transactional business models.
Index was already a leading light in the global venture investment constellation. Adding Volpi should make it even better.
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Microsoft's Internet Explorer's market share is absolutely falling. The question is, by how much?
I've reported before that Internet Explorer (IE) drops 5 percent market share points each year, while Mozilla Firefox gains 5 percentage points per year. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that IE's market share may be dropping more precipitously than previously reported, falling to 60 percent share in June 2009 instead of the 68 percent share expected.
Or is it?
The answer may depend on the source of the information, and the reliability of its data. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler uses StatCounter data to discern a 60 percent share for IE but, as ZDNet's Larry Dignan points out, this data may not hold up.
For Microsoft's sake, it had better hope not, as this chart compiled by Dotzler shows:
Internet Explorer market share falling faster than reported?
(Credit: Asa Dotzler (Data from StatCounter))That's not the sort of chart with which Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer likes to sweeten his coffee in the morning.
Net Applications, the other big source of browser market share data, still hasn't posted its results for June 2009, noting that it is trying to make sense of "some significant variations in browser and operating system statistics."
Given that market share data isn't a one-month phenomenon, it's not necessarily helpful to celebrate or fret over the June data, especially since much of the market share share data is going to get skewed in the summer months, anyway. For example, given Firefox's disproportionately large following in Europe, coupled with Europe's disproportionately long holiday season in the summer, I'd expect to see Firefox drop some percentage points against IE through August, only to rebound strongly in September.
Regardless of short-term variations, one thing seems clear: Firefox is gaining on IE. Microsoft spent too long enjoying its browser dominance, and not enough time innovating. It's starting to pump R&D dollars into IE again, but it's not yet clear whether its monolithic approach to browser development can compete in the long term with Mozilla's community-developed Firefox.
Microsoft needs to compete again, or risks seeing even StatCounter's data understate just how quickly it's falling.
Mozilla, for its part, faces a host of new challenges. It can't afford to waste much time with back slaps and high-fives. The browser has become the center of computing. Microsoft isn't going to give up easily, nor will Google or Apple.
Game on.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Martin Veitch, Editor of CIO.co.uk
If your football club (soccer team) were a software company, which would it be? Martin Veitch, editor in chief of CIO.co.uk, has written two wonderfully insightful (and painful, depending on which team you follow) analyses of which football clubs lost their software twins at birth. See here and here.
Among my favorites:
Google would be Arsenal: Fancy footwork, nice location in central London, clever ideas, and easy on the eye. The players are all young but a lot of the time all the good work goes nowhere. Best players have recently ended up demanding transfers. (OUCH!)
IBM would be Manchester United: Old money and great tradition. Everybody ends up going there in the end, even if they don't like them.
Oracle would be Real Madrid: Forceful leader reeking of money, fine wine, and cigars. The strategy is to buy anything that moves. It usually works in the end.
Red Hat would be Manchester City: Started out with odds and ends donated by local community but somehow ended up with loads of money flooding in.
Adobe would be Everton: Dogged and outperforming but they only have one plan and they live in the shadow of a bigger and better bunch just down the road.
Novell would be Leeds United: They used to be huge when I were a lad.
There are many more, and they're funniest when comparing to the more obscure teams, in my opinion (i.e., you really have to know the game to get the joke), but very funny and dead-on more often than not.
Try coming up with some for other sports.
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Over the past 10 years that I've been involved in open source, one thing has become strikingly clear to me: there are no real predictors of open-source success. There are, of course, general principles that contribute to the creation of successful open-source projects, but serendipitous "right project, right time" circumstances often matter most.
Apache Software License 2.0.
(Credit: Apache Software Foundation)I was therefore intrigued to read two articles that crystallized my own thinking around critical components of successful open-source projects.
The first is from BusinessWeek and details the mechanics of Mozilla's Firefox community. Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, reveals that while 40 percent of Firefox is contributed by outside developers, what and where they contribute may not be what many would expect:
There's structure in (how Firefox is developed). But at the same time you allow people to innovate and to explore and (give them) the freedom to do what they want along those edges--that's where innovation tends to happen in startling and unexpected ways (emphasis mine).
This may be easier for the Mozilla Foundation, given its nonprofit status, as you'd expect developers to more willingly build around a product if they trust the foundation (pun intended) upon which they're building.
But the general principle holds: most open-source development and, for that matter, most development around proprietary software, happens at the edges. Whether it's Microsoft Windows or Mozilla's Firefox, developers generally don't touch the core: they create add-ons, complementary products, and so forth.
So, principle No. 1: Open-source projects that create a strong, valuable, easily extensible core that developers have the ability to build upon, as well as the pecuniary or reputational interest in extending, are more likely to succeed. No one works for "free."
The second principle is related to the first, and deals with ownership of add-ons. While some people are motivated by peace, love, and open source, others (rightly, in my view) see open source as a means to an end, and not the end itself.
As such, the license used for an open-source project matters a great deal. I've long been a proponent of the GNU General Public License (GPL) because it enables vendors to bless customers (free code!) while cursing competitors (we just open-sourced your entire value proposition and you won't dare touch our code!).
But lately I've been seeing the role Apache-style licensing can play in fostering vibrant open-source communities. Daniel Jalkut, founder of Red Sweater Software, describes this well:
As the developer evaluates communities to participate in, they must evaluate the legal impact such participation will have on their own project. The closed-source communities are, by definition, uninviting to outsiders. GPL communities are open and embracing of other GPL developers, but generally off-putting to liberal-license and closed-license developers. Only the liberal-license communities are attractive to developers from all three camps.
It's your party, and you're entitled to write the guest list. But take a look around the room: not as many folks as you'd hoped for? Liberally licensed projects are booming. Speaking for myself, a developer who has been to all the parties, I'm much more likely to pass through the door that doesn't read "GPL Only."
If you want maximum participation whatever the cost, Apache/BSD is probably the right way to go. Most companies and project owners, however, have to make a living, so it's reasonable that they measure the costs of going Apache, which likely means they'll trade a liberal license to some of their code for a proprietary license of the rest of their code.
IBM is an example of this strategy on a big scale, but so are Day Software, Microsoft, SpringSource, and others.
Principle No. 2, broadly stated, is this: Your odds of encouraging adoption of your product go up if you use a liberal license like Apache, but your ability to directly monetize Apache-licensed code vaporizes.
This isn't a bad thing. It just means you have to separate community creation from customer creation, as Funambol's Fabrizio Capobianco has stated. The two aren't necessarily the same, and are sometimes inimical to each other.
As noted above, however, you don't have to license your software as open source to encourage community around it. Microsoft, with its vibrant partner ecosystem, demonstrates this, as does Apple with its amazing iPhone ecosystem.
Developers will flock to the platforms that offer them the most return, whether financial or in reputation (which eventually translates into money). Liberally licensing of your code might tip the scales in your favor if you lack the largess of Apple or Microsoft. But no guarantees.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady writes a bleak, but likely accurate, eulogy for open source's relevance to cloud computing. In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those "horses," in terms of the entry cost to compete, and where big vendors like Amazon and Google are already divvying up the market, the odds of a small-fry, open-source start-up challenging "Goliath" are slim.
Peter Paul Rubens: David beats Goliath
It's not a new argument: Nick Carr has been suggesting for some time that only a few, big companies can afford relevance in this hardware-intensive business.
Given this fact, O'Grady thinks the best we can hope for (and he thinks it's pretty important) is "a loose coalition or confederation of [open-source] projects and vendors that will together comprise an increasingly viable top to bottom alternative to some of the cloud providers today." He includes projects like Puppet (Reductive Labs) and Hadoop in this mix, but is careful to point out that he doesn't see a full-fledged, open-source alternative seriously challenging the closed platforms of Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and the other mega-clouds.
This 'David' alternative to the 'Goliath' big vendors doesn't beat them, but instead helps to keep Goliath honest. Really, when you think about it for more than a few seconds, that's what open source has done for traditional computing, too.
Look around. The big vendors controlling IT and the Web are...the same vendors that controlled it yesterday, and are likely the same vendors that will control it 10 years from now. Sure, they'll swap places for a few years, but does anyone really believe that IBM and Microsoft won't still be cat-fighting a decade from now?
But now consider what open source has been doing, mostly behind the scenes. Open source is changing the way these big vendors operate, because it's altering customer expectations.
Open source has permeated Microsoft to the point that it is now considering throwing its weight behind the Spring Framework and other open-source projects.
Google, for its part, went from a happy consumer of open source to an active contributor to open source on a very big scale. Not because Google is "not evil," but because it realizes that open source can give it a competitive advantage in the market.
We'll see more of this as open source challenges otherwise proprietary vendors to compete through openness. We're already seeing some of this as vendors like Red Hat seek to claim parts of the cloud for open source.
In so doing, open source will continue to challenge and change the buying conversation, resetting expectations to transparency, something we desperately need: if the allegation that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pressuring governments to buy Microsoft technologies is even remotely true, the best antidote may be open-source procurement policies.
In sum, don't expect open source to "win" in the cloud; at least, not in the form of an open-source vendor doing the winning. Rather, look to open source to influence, to shape the cloud.
Just like it has to traditional, proprietary software.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
I wake up at 5:30 AM to write this blog, then spend the rest of the day (and sometimes evening) working my day job at Alfresco, an open-source applications company.
Meanwhile, my brother-in-law, Josh Robbins, taunts me by sending pictures of him chumming around with Thierry Henry (FC Barcelona), Ryan Babel (Liverpool FC), Alessandro del Piero (Juventus), Mathieu Flamini (AC Milan), Steve Nash (Phoenix Suns), Tony Parker (San Antonio Spurs), and others at a Steve Nash Foundation event. His job? He's director of finance at Calle, a cool street soccer sporting goods manufacturer that he helped found.
Yes, I did get to meet Cesc Fabregas on a trip to London a few years back, but I'm still wishing that I got to dress up sports stars in cool sports gear rather than shelling out $100 to $600 to watch these same stars kick balls around whenever I go to London.
I believe in divine retribution, and I'm earnestly praying for Josh to get some. Soon.
Or maybe I should simply stop writing about low-cost, open-source software and focus on the bling? Microsoft has an executive box at the Emirates Stadium where Arsenal plays. I got to sit in it once for the opening match of the 2007/08 season. Perhaps if I agree to say something nice about Microsoft once every few weeks, they'll invite me back.
Or not.
Josh Robbins dresses Thierry Henry in Calle gear
(Credit: Josh Robbins)Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
While some organizations continue to hide their open-source adoption, NOiV (Nederland Open in Verbinding), has published a map of over 200 open-source products currently in use by the Dutch central government as of mid-2009. (Translation here.)
Spoiler alert: there's a whole lot of open source being used by the Dutch government.
NOiV concludes in its study (PDF) that that Dutch central government is on the right track with open source for the operating system (platform) and middleware, but is in a very early phase of looking at business applications.
Open-source Networking Software Used by Dutch government
(Credit: NOiV)The main obstacle for moving from closed to open source even faster than it has is the high cost of migration, something that afflicts middleware and applications more than it does operating systems, as Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst recently noted.
Lest you think this move to open source is inspired by a cloud of cannabis smoke, the report also mentions significant improvements in interoperability (31 percent), cost reduction (8 percent), and quality improvements in the municipal governments (22 percent).
If that's what open source delivers, pass the bong!
The adoption map shows a wide range of open-source technologies being adopted, but the big winners at present are Linux, MySQL, Nagios, OpenOffice (and associated ODF plug-in), Firefox, Apache (Web server), SSH, and Tomcat.
With Forrester suggesting that 2009 IT budgets will fall 10.6 percent in 2009, it's a good time to be looking at high-value, low-cost open-source software. Just like those crazy Dutch.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Could VMware be the next Novell? That's the question Gartner managing vice president and chief of research for Infrastructure David Cappuccio asks in a provocative post, one that bears further discussion. While VMware is at the top of its game, there are several historical analogs between VMware and Novell.
I'll let you read Cappuccio's excellent post for his full argument, but the crux of it is that in the face of dominant but pricey technology, many buyers will turn to "good enough" to fill their needs. For Novell, that competition to its 90 percent market share came from Windows, which displaced Novell's "great technology that was more complex (or complete) than most customers needed."
Today, VMware faces a host of rising threats. Cappuccio picks out Microsoft's Hyper-V as chief among them:
[L]urking in the background is this little thing called Hyper-V; not as robust, or as tested as VMware, with almost no install base, and certainly not ready for prime time in most people's minds. However, it will be an integral part of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 7 in 2010. Why should you (or VMware) care? Because like "free networking", or "free SharePoint", hyper-V will get used, slowly at first, but as more and more systems get installed the base will increase and within just a few short years companies will discover (surprise, surprise!) that they have business applications running on both VMware and Hyper-V.
Free-and-good-enough is a great strategy, and one that Microsoft has long used to exceptional effect.
Of course, Microsoft isn't the only one playing this game. Xen is included for free in Linux, though Red Hat is pushing to move users to KVM (and succeeding to an increasing extent). Virtualization customers are spoiled for choice.
All of which leaves VMware exposed. This isn't to suggest that VMware should resign itself to obliteration. Indeed, VMware has gone on the offensive, releasing a host of software as open source to combat open-source alternatives, most intriguingly its open-source virtualization client, as OStatic's Sam Dean notes.
Novell didn't respond to its Netware demise until it was too late. VMware seems to be learning from history.
The real question is whether it will be able to go as low as Microsoft and the Linux vendors on price while still maintaining "good enough" profits. I suspect it will fail in this because for VMware, virtualization is core and it must price accordingly. For Microsoft, Red Hat, and Novell, virtualization is a critical complement, but not the core of their businesses. Complements are cheap, core is not.
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Ever since Microsoft dropped its bombshell on Linux, claiming that the open-source operating system violates 235 of its patents, the Linux community has responded with a cogent counterargument: "If we're, in fact, infringing, point out the infringements and we'll simply code around your patents."
With Microsoft's lawsuit against GPS device manufacturer TomTom, Microsoft gave the community what it wanted, which has now resulted in the Linux community coding around Microsoft's two FAT file-system patent claims against Linux.
Two down, 233 more to go?
In 2008, Microsoft filed suit against TomTom for patent infringement related to GPS technology and its FAT file-system patents, allegedly infringed by TomTom's use of Linux. The two parties eventually settled, but Microsoft gave enough of a clue as to its patent claims that the Red Hat-sponsored Open Invention Network and others set off to sift through the merits of Microsoft's patents and, if possible, code around them.
As Andrew Tridgell recently explained to the Linux kernel mailing list, it would appear that the Linux community has accomplished exactly that, providing a workaround to Microsoft's patent claims.
The reasons are somewhat technical, but the approach seems to pass muster, as Ars Technica reports:
The Linux Foundation arranged for the patch to undergo extensive review by patent lawyers. They are confident that the patch will effectively evade the common namespace method described by Microsoft's patents. It will also function properly in virtually all cases. The only situation in which it will be problematic is when the data on the filesystem is accessed from old versions of DOS or Windows that still require the 8.3 filenames. Tridgell believes that such a scenario is rare enough that it will not impact a significant number of users. Those who require compatibility with those older versions of DOS or Windows can use the Linux "msdos" filesystem, which enforces 8.3 names and doesn't use Microsoft's patented dual-naming convention.
In early 2009, open-source luminary Larry Augustin urged the Linux community to "get the FAT out." While Tridgell's approach doesn't quite do this, it does appear to obviate Microsoft's patent claims.
This should make Linux users happy. Whether it will make Microsoft happy to see how trivial it is to code around its patent claims remains to be seen. That's the problem with launching nuclear marketing attacks against the legal integrity of open-source code: given enough eyeballs, all patent claims are shallow.
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