Startups

Marten Mickos at OSCON: Open source produces better software...

Tim O'Reilly had a fireside chat (minus the fireside) with Marten Mickos during today's Executive Radar at OSCON. Marten, ever insightful and pithy, didn't disappoint.

Here are a few of the things that caught my attention most in Marten's comments:… Read more

Open source applications...magnets for open source infrastructure

Ian Howells, Alfresco's chief marketing officer, did some analysis of the company's customer and user community, and I found the results interesting. I've been hearing rumblings for some time that Windows increasingly serves as a great evaluation platform for open source, but most companies use Linux when they're serious and want to go into production. Ian's data confirmed this, and more. (Zmanda has published data that corroborates our findings.)

First of all, the Alfresco data shows that Windows is plays a healthy role in the open source ecosystem. (In the graph, Windows = green, and Linux = blue, in case you can't see it well.) We have plenty of companies going into production with open-source Alfresco sitting on top of closed-source Windows. From my work with SugarCRM, JasperSoft and others, I know the same holds true for them. I don't suspect that this is going to change anytime soon.

Windows plays a large role because it's the OS sitting on the most desktops. But when customers are serious about production, the majority favor Linux. Again, I think you'd find very similar results were you to talk with MuleSource, Funambol, SugarCRM, etc.… Read more

Enterprise backup made sexy a la Zmanda

I was fortunate to have lunch today with Pete Childers, Chander Kant, and the Zmanda team. We got together to exchange notes on strategies and markets that are working well for our respective companies.

The most interesting takeaway for me, however, was just how consistent the open source market has become in selling value. You still get new entrants that don't realize that open source for open source's sake became passe a year ago. But for companies like Zmanda that have been around for awhile, you sell value. Open source might get you in the door, but value closes the deal.

In Zmanda's case, it has the opportunity and challenge of building a business around a robust community project, the Amanda network backup project. This is an opportunity because, like Linux, Amanda adoption is widespread and hence provides a strong pool of proponents to sell into. However, it's also a challenge because many in this community get along very well with Amanda (command-line driven), without need for any commercial frills around the edges.… Read more

Fairtilizer: Digg for music

Today, I'm taking a look at Fairtilizer, a potential new haven for indie musicians. Fairtilizer bills itself as a "trusted filter" for new music. If you are familiar with the concept behind Digg, this is going to be really easy to understand.

Anyone can submit a song (in MP3 format) to Fairtilizer as long as they hold the rights to that song. Unlike Digg, where once you submit a story the public starts reviewing it right away, Fairtilizer requires their editorial board to review every song submission to ensure that it is good enough for the site. I am not exactly sure whether this editorial board judges songs based on their musical merit or if they are just weeding out bad quality recordings and other junk that floats in, but that is definitely an important distinction. Tracks then make their way to the front page of the site, or "The Charts" as they call it, if they have enough user votes and listens in the Upcoming section.

I am not sure whether or not Fairtilizer is attempting to take on the wildly successful MySpace Music, but it certainly does appear that they are taking a much different approach to MySpace. Although there is a profile page for people who are submitting music, it is nowhere near as robust as what MySpace Music offers. The focus is more on individual tracks and music than bands here, and that's not a bad thing.

One thing that I really like about Fairtilizer is their integration of RSS feeds. You can subscribe to a feed of tracks from all over the site. For example, if I wanted to subscribe to someone's feed of submitted tracks in iTunes, I can just grab the URL, put it in iTunes, and it will automatically grab new tracks from that person whenever they submit them.… Read more

Open-source vendors: Monopolies waiting to happen?

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

In the trenches with...Janice Smith of rSmart Group

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

Time Out New York communicates with Zimbra

I asked people to share with me their experiences moving to Zimbra, and I've had a great deal of responses. One, in particular, I found interesting from Time Out New York. I glommed onto this one immediately because I reference Time Out whenever I'm in London. It's the best source of information for what's going on.

Jeffrey Vargas of Time Out New York related: [Used with his permission]

Time Out New York is a weekly print publication, so we rely heavily on Macs. Out of 150 computers, about 125 are Macs. Even are servers are Xserves, for a majority of our work.

We've been using Apple's mail services in OS X since 10.2. After a messy migration to OS X 10.3 and several issues with an update from OS X 10.3.8, we were over frustrated with Apple's frugal mail services.… 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

In the trenches with...Taylor Dondich of Groundwork

In this installment of In the Trenches, we get back to the core of any open source company: development. Taylor Dondich is a senior developer at Groundwork. Groundwork is an interesting company because it builds on the popular Nagios monitoring solution. As such, Taylor's work involves a careful balancing act between contributing to the Nagios community while also building out Groundwork's offering around it.

I caught up with Taylor to discover how he balances the two.

Name, company, title, and what you actually do

Taylor Dondich, Team Leader, Groundwork Open Source, Inc. My role in the company is to develop the front-end technologies that present our product to the user. However, I also develop some back-end technologies and act as a technical resource for network monitoring with Nagios and other tools as well as act as an open source evangelist in the company and outside.… Read more