Following on the heels of this post outlining a debate as to whether open source leads to a winner-take-all phenomenon, John Prendergast of Jefferies Broadview pinged me to suggest that perhaps Roy, Dave, and I were missing a critical point.
I asked if I could post his comments, and he graciously acquiesced. He writes:… Read more
During my trip to Raleigh, I was fortunate to catch up with Iain Gray, vice president of Global Support Services at Red Hat. With my Alfresco hat on, I wanted to find out how Red Hat manages support, and with my CNET hat on, I wanted to share that insight.
Specifically, I wanted to get Iain's perspective on how open-source support differs from support in the proprietary software world. (You can tune in to a Red Hat video of Iain talking about this topic, too.)
Iain brings to Red Hat over a decade of support and services experience honed at Sun and SCO Group (back when it was a Unix company, not a law firm). As such, the obvious question was...… Read more
A committee formed to devise the United States' position on Microsoft's Open XML document format voted against recommending it as an ISO standard on Friday, according to one participant.
Rob Weir, an IBM employee and advocate of the rival OpenDocument format, on Sunday detailed in his blog the proceedings of a three-hour meeting of the committee, which is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
Despite a number of Microsoft partners joining the committee in recent … Read more
A few months ago a friend recommended smcFanControl, and I've been cool ever since. Cool as in temperature, not cool as in Mark Shuttleworth.
Macs are awesome, of course. This goes without saying. But it also goes without saying that you can fry eggs on the MacBook Pros (and the Powerbook G4s before them). I have third-degree burns from long blogging sessions.
Enter smcFanControl.… Read more
JBoss developer Loopfuse co-founder [I must have been very, very tired when I called Roy a JBoss developer] Roy Russo wonders if all open-source companies are de facto monopolistic. Like many others that I respect (Dave Rosenberg, Lonn Johnston, President Bush, Oscar the Grouch), Russo says any market ultimately has room for only one purveyor of free software. He writes:
(Open-source software) companies focusing on proprietary competition win out in the end, but if history is a guide, they also manage to squash their own OSS competitors by doing so.
So much for peace, love and open source.… Read more
I found this submission for the "In the Trenches" series to be intriguing. If you wanted to find someone with experience analogous to working in an open source community, where would you look?
According to Janice Smith of The rSmart Group, in academia. This may be particularly true for Janice, given rSmart's focus on open source applications in the Higher Education vertical, but I think it's telling that Janice found the same sort of collegiality and community-approach in open source as she had in her previous life in academia.
But let's hear it directly from Janice:
Name, company, title, and what you actually do
Janice A. Smith, The rSmart Group, Senior Education Consultant. I conduct on-site client assessments, develop requirements, design customizations, offer virtual and on-site training, and provide functional/technical support for an open source application in higher education and K-12.… Read more
OpenMosix, an open-source project to run software across a group of computers, will shut down on March 1.
Moshe Bar, who launched and led the project, announced the move Sunday on the OpenMosix project Web site. Bar more recently has been involved in two virtualization projects--first Xen and later KVM--that have the potential to achieve some of what OpenMosix could have enabled, a computing infrastructure that can flexibly adjust to changing work demands by shifting running software from one physical machine to another.
"The increasing power and availability of low cost multi-core processors is rapidly making single-system image (… Read more
While I believe that a market of one is no market at all, I also firmly concur with Dave Rosenberg's suggestion that open source companies that spend all their time competing with each other are wasting the world's precious supply of oxygen.
If you work for an open source company and your team is focused on trying to beat other open source products you are doomed to economic failure. That kind of focus means you can't see the big picture and you should just return the money to your investors so they can invest it in companies that have bigger goals. It also probably means that your company is fueled by ego and your investors should probably take the money away from you before you start building Lenin-esque monuments to your engineers for refactoring a project ten times.
Bingo. As Dave notes, most open source companies are not doing enough in revenues to bother competing against them. That will change two or three (or ten) years from now, but it's the case today.
I've never once competed with an open source project or company in a single deal that I've done. Never. My competition is the 95% of the market that doesn't use content management because it's too complex and too expensive.… Read more
I go away for the weekend to Lake Powell and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and I come back to some highly intriguing news from Open-Xchange: the release of the company's Express Edition. First there was the standard server product, then the hosting solution, and now Express.
Express is cool on a number of different levels. First, unlike proprietary e-mail systems, Open-Xchange doesn't foist on the IT administrator a range of hidden costs. You get the full-fledged e-mail and collaboration server without paying a nickel extra for the operating system, directory service, etc. You pay for the product, and nothing more. (This seems like it should be the norm, but it's not.)
This is especially good to know given the market at which Express Edition is targeted: the small to medium-size business. SMBs don't have huge pockets filled with cash to buy ancillary software, hire an expensive administrator, etc. They just want it to work, and Open-Xchange's Express Edition seems to fill this need particularly well. (I'm downloading it to try it out, and will let you know if it lives up to its billing.)
Second, and extremely interesting to me, Express Edition runs on Ubuntu. Why does this matter? Well, for one thing it shows Ubuntu's stablity and performance. But on an even more interesting note, take a look at Open-Xchange's management team, and in particular its CTO, Jürgen Geck. You might remember that he was the CTO at Suse....Or check out Open-Xchange's co-founder and EVP of engineering, Martin Kauss. Yep, he was a Suse guy before, too. The list goes on....… Read more
Tonight I was thinking back to the first time I visited Red Hat's office in Raleigh. Havoc Pennington (among others) was interviewing me. On my resume I had something about developing a mixed source strategy for Lineo (or maybe it was helping articulate Novell's in Developer Services - I can't remember, and I've since purged all mention of "mixed source" from anything I've written ;-).
I distinctly remember Havoc reading through my resume, and then looking up and asking with perfect, deadpan sincerity:
"Why mixed source?
I stammered out an answer, but the pride I had taken in my cleverness ("See, you give away the open source code and make money on the valuable IP!") dissipated. Completely. Forever.… Read more
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