open

Rob Curley is shaking up journalism, and doing it with open source

It's great to see Rob Curley just some of the attention he deserves. Rob, VP of Product Development at washingtonpost.com/Newsweek Interactive delivered a keynote at OSBC 2007 and made my day. Now Fast Company has a special feature on him.

In light of a dying newspaper industry...

...along comes Curley, unburdened by pieties about "how we've always done it." Unlike previous ink-stained generations, he and his mostly young charges practice journalism with software code, video, podcasts, audio, slide shows, blogs--whatever works. Multimedia storytelling comes as naturally to him as satire did to Mencken. Likewise, … Read more

An interview with...myself

OK. This feels a bit odd, referencing an interview with myself. (Actually, Glyn Moody did the interview the last time I was in London.) I only include it because, reading back through it, I can't help but be grateful for the serendipity that led me to where I am right now. Glyn noted before that I've "had what amounts to the perfect career in open source."

But I had nothing to do with it. i never consciously set out to do anything with open source. It just happened to me. Despite my best efforts, at times.

Talking through my last 10 years, it all flows with a unifying trend toward an appreciation for freedom in code at its heart. But I didn't start there (I was a mixed source zealot of sorts), and I never intended to land where I am today. It felt chaotic living through it. Only hindsight reveals the theme.

Anyway, in this interview I comment on the Microsoft/Novell patent deal, the dilution of the meaning of "open source," Alfresco's shift from MPL+Attribution to 100% GPL, the founding of the Open Source Business Conference, my departure from Novell, and my law studies under Larry Lessig.

On this last/first point, here's a snippet from the interview:… Read more

Software without community: Does the crowd or the player make the game?

Watch this wonder goal from Argentina's Lionel Messi:

Now tell me whether the game would be the same without that announcer. Without the crowd?

Exactly. You think I'm joking, but if you've ever watched one of those games where the stadium was empty (because the crowd had gotten out of hand at a previous match), you'll know that it's a very flat experience. Boring, almost regardless of what's happening on the field.

A bit like software without community. A bit.

Tim O'Reilly argues that reciprocity for SaaS would have killed GPL, but would it kill the web?

I was disappointed to wake up to this from Tim O'Reilly, commenting on why GPLv3 was right to abandon the attempt to rein in free-riding SaaS companies on open source software:

Web-delivered applications are just too important to too many people for the horse to be taken back to the barn. It would have been a death blow for GPLv3, making it impossible to adopt.

I'm actually not sure where Tim falls on this. When I initially commented on his blog, I read the above to suggest that a) the web is different and b) SaaS companies need not abide the same rules as non-SaaS companies vis-a-vis open source.

Reading his comments again, it feels like he's actually just saying that GPLv3 would have died in the face of opposition from Google et al. had the Free Software Foundation pushed the issue. That's certainly what Eben said at OSBC and I can appreciate the quandary.… Read more

The secret of successful open-source companies, Part II

Last year (almost to the day), I wrote a post that detailed how JBoss went from $0 to a $350 million acquisition by Red Hat and scored a range of paying customers along the way. The research for that post was actually done in preparation for an OSCON presentation I was to deliver, which is the same impetus for this post.

One year later, my analysis of JBoss has proved to be remarkably accurate (at least for Alfresco). However, I was a little off on my timing (see the slide at right), and I didn't give enough credit to the power of open source to drive sales.

One year later, I'd add the following observations to my original analysis:

You don't need much in the way of field sales for the first three years, and maybe four, but you must balance this lack of quantity with exceptional quality. Basically, you want your field sales person (and it probably should just be one person per major geographic) to cover the big strategic accounts. It's not that inside sales can't do these but rather that you want them going for volume and the field sales person developing depth within a few strategic accounts.… Read more

Dragging one's feet to open source

I have to say I'm disappointed. CentricCRM released a significant chunk of code under an OSI-approved open-source license, yet still doesn't seem to appreciate that open source means something to the community, and to the industry. That meaning is not for CentricCRM to define. It is for the community to define, and such definition has almost universally been found in the OSI (Open Source Initiative) for nearly a decade.

As Brian Behlendorf has declared, the purest right in open source is the right to fork. That right is inviolable if you want to call your software open source. This is nonnegotiable. Period.… Read more

So you want to contribute to an open source project? Tristan Rhodes gives you 10 ways

I just finished reading Tristan Rhodes' "The 10 roles in an open source community" and recommend it to anyone wanting to get better insight into how open source communities are shaped, and how you can get involved.

In particular, as someone who doesn't know how to code, I appreciated learning that even a non-developer like I can contribute as a translator (given that i speak French):

One of the coolest things about open source communities is that they are international. This means that your users will understand many different languages. Therefore, the more languages that you support, … Read more

Open source @ IBM: Savio Rodrigues speaks

Ask a simple question, get a simple, but subtle answer. I asked Savio Rodrigues, who replaced me on the Open Sources blog but originally blogged here, to comment on the state of open source at IBM. He gave me a bit more than that.

You know, IBM, the company that essentially carried open source into the enterprise on its back in 2000 when it pledged $1 billion to fund Linux. Lately, though, IBM's has been less flashy with its commitment to open source though, as Savio points out, no less involved. As Savio reports, however, IBM's commitment to open source is broader than source code. Open source without open standards isn't of much interest to Big Blue.

In this fifth installment of the Open Source @ Series on The Open Road, Savio gives us much to think about in terms of the power of open source...and what it means in the absence of standards.

Savio writes...

Matt Asay asked the question: What is the State of Open Source at IBM?

Our answer? Excellent!… Read more

Enterprise software: customers upgrading at a snail's pace

Oracle owns the database world. And this may be precisely its biggest problem.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, customers aren't planning to snap up its newest version of its industry-leading database, 11g. The reason? Oracle is improving its database at a much slower pace, providing fewer reasons to upgrade:

[I]t typically takes at least several months for a company to fully shift to a new version of Oracle's database software -- the larger the company, the longer it takes -- and lately Oracle has made several small, incremental changes in new releases rather than a few large, important ones that would compel a company to switch quickly, customers say....… Read more