People

Firefox extensions: A strategy born of compromise

Firefox has surpassed 22 percent global market share, its popularity driven in large part by the thousands of extensions and add-ons that personalize the Firefox experience for diverse users.

Intriguingly, however, Firefox's extensions strategy didn't start out as a strategy at all. It was a compromise to keep the project's developer base together, as Mozilla's Asa Dotzler explains in this interview I conducted with colleague John Newton earlier this week.

The History of Firefox Extensions - An Interview with Asa Dotzler from Matt Asay on Vimeo.

SugarCRM CEO Roberts replaced by board member

John Roberts on Wednesday resigned from his post as CEO of open-source CRM vendor SugarCRM, leaving board member Larry Augustin to assume the role of interim CEO while the company conducts a formal search for his replacement.

Roberts, whose grounds for leaving the company and future plans remain undisclosed, has made a huge impact on the open-source world, innovating the "Open Core" business model and helping drive open-source applications into the enterprise.

SugarCRM, despite losing Roberts, will be in good hands with Larry Augustin, who, as founder and former CEO of VA Linux, sits on a number of … Read more

Who gives most to open source?

I like l2admin's list of the Top 10 contributors to open source because it remembers that not all open sourcerors are developers, and additionally reminds us that important as corporations are to open source, code is written by individual developers, not corporations.

While l2admin's list does include hard-core developers like Linus Torvalds, it also includes people like Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, whose contributions to open source have been as much marketing as code.

Ditto for Richard Stallman. Yes, he's written some great software like Emacs, but his real contribution is in raising the profile of free … Read more

Open Source Goat Rodeo 2009 - The Video

The Open Source Goat Rodeo did its 2009 edition at Alta and Snowbird, Utah, on March 26 to 28, with a great group of executives from the open-source business community.

The snow was fantastic. The food was amazing. The friends? Even better.

Open Source Goat Rodeo 2009.

OSGR2009 included the following fine folks: Matt Asay, Alfresco/CNET; Larry Augustin, Investor; Jay Batson, Acquia; Jeff Borek, IBM; Dries Buytaert, Acquia; Fabrizio Capobianco, Funambol; Tom Erickson, Acquia; Lonn Johnston, Page One PR; Paolo Juvara, Openbravo; Matt Mattox, Red Hat; Josep Mitja, Openbravo; Jose Morales, Jaspersoft; Mike Olson, Cloudera; John Robb, Yahoo/Zimbra; … Read more

OSGR 2009: Better skiing, better open source

I wasn't able to blog yesterday, as the Open Source Goat Rodeo kicked off its 2009 edition at Snowbird with amazing snow, bright sunshine, and wonderful people (some of whom can shred snow as if they never actually go to work...Lars/John/Paolo/Bryce, I'm thinking of you!):

The day ended in Salt Lake City with a Mormon Mousse Pie (Don't ask), consisting of white chocolate, dark chocolate, and milk chocolate mousse fillings, white chocolate shavings, and a dark chocolate crust that I improvised early Friday morning.

One great part of the first day for me, … Read more

Zimbra founder becomes Redpoint partner

Satish Dharmaraj, founder and former CEO of Zimbra, one of the industry's top open-source start-ups, has joined Redpoint Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, as a partner, Dharmaraj confirmed to me by phone on Tuesday.

Dharmaraj sold Zimbra, an open-source e-mail and collaboration company he founded in 2003, to Yahoo for $350 million in 2007. Earlier this year, Dharmaraj left Yahoo to focus on "other things." It's now apparent that the "other things" Dharmaraj had in mind included joining Redpoint, one of the industry's top venture firms.

I asked Dharmaraj about the … Read more

Red Hat chairman prescribes open source to solve state's economic woes

Once a missionary, always a missionary.

That's the thought I had while reading Red Hat chairman Matthew Szulik's recent op-ed piece on improving North Carolina's economic competitiveness. Szulik, who led Red Hat for over a decade, was known for an almost evangelical zeal for open source.

I found it inspirational; Red Hat competitors found it unsettling.

It's perhaps not surprising that Szulik is still preaching the open-source gospel, this time to his home state of North Carolina. Seeking to rejuvenate his state's financial prospects, Szulik "demand[s] new and innovative strategies from our elected … Read more

Catching up with GroundWork's new CEO, Peter Jackson

Open source has seen a flurry of executive appointments in the past few weeks, but no open-source company can top GroundWork for the level of CEO turnover in the past two years. In 2007, Ranga Rangachari helmed GroundWork. By 2008, company co-founder Dave Lilly had replaced Rangachari.

In early 2009, GroundWork slotted Lilly into the COO role, replacing him as CEO with Peter Jackson. Jackson was recently CEO of Intraware, a company he grew to $100 million in sales and eventually sold in January 2009, and seems a competent chief to lead the company.

Even so...three years, three CEOs. Worried a bit by all this change, I reached out to Jackson to get his perspective on GroundWork's business and its open-source opportunity.

You come from a Web 2.0 background. What brought you to GroundWork?

What's nice about Web 2.0 technologies is that they're really focused on creating controlled communities. The original Web development efforts didn't do a good job regulating users on what they can and can't do. Applying that thinking to open source allows producers and users to share in safe and open areas. This includes blogs, entitlement-based distribution, shared testing and QA, questions to groups, uploading training videos, etc.

In GroundWork's case, we need to appeal to both the open-source community and to IT-reliant enterprises. This combination of Web 2.0 community building, while understanding and meeting the demands of enterprise customers, is a great chance for me to bring my experience in both areas to the company.

You took Intraware public. Do you think GroundWork and other open-source companies will have the same opportunity?

I see open source radically changing the software market in the next 24 months. Customers of traditional enterprise products and services have way overpaid for years. As companies analyze their capital expenditures more deeply, they suddenly find huge value gaps between their historical IT management purchases and open-source alternatives.

With this in mind, if the stock market recovers in a couple of years, there should be many IPOs in this sector.… Read more

Executive moves: Acquia, Alfresco, Groundwork, and Black Duck get new leadership

While the technology industry has been laying off large numbers of employees, the open-source software industry has been hiring, at least at the executive level.

In the past week, Acquia, Alfresco, Groundwork, and Black Duck have all added executive leadership:

Acquia - Company founder Dries Buytaert announced Tom Erickson as Acquia's new CEO, replacing Jay Batson in that role. Batson will remain with the company in an as-yet undefined role. Erickson brings to Acquia a wealth of experience, including as CEO of Systinet, which he successfully sold to Mercury Interactive in 2006. Erickson is a great addition to the … Read more

Open-source guru Ruby leaving IBM for Microsoft

It's increasingly common for prominent open-source developers to leave IBM or other open-source-friendly companies to try their luck at Microsoft. It's not common at all for them to blog about it before actually getting a formal offer.

Yet that is what Sam Ruby, prominent Apache Software Foundation director and Atom developer, has done on his blog. Ruby was hired by IBM directly from Christopher Newport University in 1981 and has never left.

Until now. Or, rather, in about two weeks from now. Ruby writes:

I expect to receive a credible offer from Microsoft in the next two weeks. … Read more