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Open source is in our DNA, argues Yahoo! exec

I once took Jeremy Zawodny, technical director at Yahoo!, to task for not contributing enough back to open source. Today, Zawodny made it clear that openness and open source are in Yahoo!'s DNA. It is a trend that started long ago, Zawodny writes, and will only accelerate over time:

We've been on the openness road for a long, long time at Yahoo. And we take it rather seriously. Some times it hasn't been as visible as others, but believe me, the trend is quite clear when you look at all the data. The Open Source adoption and work. The APIs. The way we communicate with users and partners. The Blogs. The RSS feeds....… Read more

Revisiting Apple's iPhone strategy

In the post I wrote about Rich Miner of Google saying that the Android mobile software stack will gain more users than the iPhone, several people commented. The general consensus is that Apple is the BMW of the personal computer industry and is the standard for innovation that its competitors, with far more market share, follow. Android is a non-factor.

The challenge for Apple is to keep coming up with proprietary products that fuel its business model, which is based on innovation and R&D around both hardware and software. Since Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company has … Read more

Google to competitors: I drink your milkshake

Henry Blodget, a Wall Street analyst during the dot-com heyday who now runs Silicon Alley Insider, published a report Friday that examines Google's advertising growth in 2007 against those of 17 online and traditional media rivals, including Yahoo, Microsoft, Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, CBS, and Clear Channel.

Specifically, Blodget's analysis, which was drawn from company press releases, showed that Google is drinking everyone else's milkshake.

From the story:

"The year-over-year growth of revenue (in 2007) on Google.com (U.S.)--approximately $2 billion--was more than twice as much the growth of ad revenue in all of … Read more

Open Season Episode 13: Advice on open source that you can actually use

For this week's Open Season we had the always enjoyable and fully bearded Michael Cote from Red Monk joining the illustrious team of myself, Matt Asay and Ashlee Vance.

This time we actually focused and talked about things that are important, including why you still can't trust Microsoft, why Google is inevitably evil and why the Sarah Lacy SXSW meltdown didn't seem that bad when watched online.

Rock on.

Open Season: Episode 13

Rejecting a looming online advertising monopoly

Sometimes disruption can be taken too far. Unfortunately, it often is as a company grows and looks to adjacent markets to grow further. Such is the case with Google and its recent entry into the ad-management market. TechCrunch rightly opines:

It's yet another example of Google knowing no bounds in its quest to know everything about every person and site.

This is good and provides customer value...to a point. But it's starting to sound an awful lot like Microsoft's voracious appetite on the desktop.

Why should publishers care? Because it makes Google their biggest competitor and stifles competition, as open-source ad-serving company OpenX notes:… Read more

Buzz Out Loud 681: Pi Not Pie

EPISODE 681

Happy Pi day! http://www.piday.org/

Trend Micro’s Web site hacked in massive attack http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9894181-7.html

Verizon embraces P4P, a more efficient peer-to-peer tech http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/ 20080314-verizon-embraces-p4p-a-more-efficient-peer-to-peer-tech.html http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-P2P-Verizon.html

Sweden pursues illegal file-sharers http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080314/ ap_on_hi_te/sweden_file_sharing

Music industry proposes a piracy surcharge on ISPs http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/ 2008/03/music_levy

Google exec: Android will outsell iPhone http://news.yahoo.com/s/cmp/20080314/tc_cmp/206903637

What if Apple really opened up … Read more

Behind Google's FUD campaign against Apple

Forgive my flippancy, but I'm trying hard not to bust into giggles after reading about Rich Miner's prediction that sales of Android-based devices will outstrip sales of the iPhone.

"Once you have devices out there from Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and so on, there's a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone," he said during a conference held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. He later added, "There are things I saw people doing with the first version of the Android SDK that it seems like you can't … Read more

What makes the most valuable tech companies so valuable?

How do we value technology companies? Ingenuity and invention, quality of service, brand loyalty, manufacturing muscle, operating efficiency, supply-chain management, price, great place to work. There are lots of metrics.

For those unfamiliar with the wily ways of Wall Street, the stock market has its own way of expressing what it thinks of companies. It's called market capitalization or market cap for short.… Read more

What if Apple really opened up the iPhone?

Will Android beat iPhone?

Speaking yesterday at the Emerging Communications Conference at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, Rich Miner, Google group manager for mobile platforms, predicted that sales of Android-based devices will outpace those of the iPhone.

In other words, the iPhone will be unlike the iPod-iTunes combo when it comes to dominating a market.

Miner uses the Microsoft licensing and open-source models to make his case. "When you have devices out there from Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and so on, there's a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone," Miner said.

In … Read more

A cure for the "cancer within open source": the OSI approves the Affero GPL

One of open source's biggest failings has been to extend its relevance into the Software as a Service world. The OSI has finally corrected this with the approval of the Affero GPL.

Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of mobile open-source company Funambol, has been the most ardent crusader for development and approval of a license like the AGPL. In a blog posting, he talks through the importance of the AGPL, and identifies perhaps its biggest opponent: Google.

In GPL v2, those who ran open source software in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment, and modified the open source code, were not required to return the changes back to the community....For me, this has always been one of the worst risks for open source oblivion. If you can take and you do not give back, defeating the copyleft concept, you kill open source. The ASP loophole is the cancer of open source....