Marc Fleury, founder of the successful JBoss open-source project and company, is largely considered one of the great open-source pioneers.
Not many people can claim to have have built a project that continues to inspire tens of thousands of downloads each month, plus the commercial envy of Larry Ellison and $350 million from Red Hat.
Fleury can, but he's not resting on his laurels. Having upended the application server market, Fleury is now funding OpenRemote, an open-source home automation project that was inspired while Fleury was shopping for a "geek chic" home automation system and discovered that it cost far more than he thought it should.
I reached Fleury at his Madrid home on Monday to discuss a wide range of issues. But the longer we talked, the more we focused on the value of open-source communities.
After all, how many developers do you know who have the aptitude to contribute to low-level home automation controls? This is a very different market from, say, operating systems for servers, personal computers, or even mobile phones. While many people use remotes to control everything from their TV to their lighting system, virtually no one knows how to program them.
Hence, I asked the question, "How does community even apply to this market?" His reply:
Marc Fleury
Automation is a primitive software industry, though it's advanced in hardware. There are very few standards. It's 100 percent proprietary. Everything here is deployed in a very proprietary fashion: business models, hardware, software. Everything.
Electricians are our installer community. They're great at what they do, but they're not software developers. It's a fairly rare skill to be able to develop this kind of software. But then, open source has never really been about thousands of developers, contributing to a project. It's about millions (or thousands) of users.
Yes, you need a few good guys, which we've funded through an off-shore Chinese development group. (JBoss, incidentally, was much the same: we funded the development exclusively early on.) The open-source dynamic kicks in when you have a big body of users.
I felt like I was hearing heresy, what with the dearth of paeans to community, but then Fleury has never seemed overly concerned with catering to consensus. This is the guy who dressed in Flavor Flav (Public Enemy) style at Javapolis 2006.
But Fleury wasn't disparaging the value of open-source communities. He was simply being realistic about the value and nature of such communities over the life of an open-source project. Until you have established an exceptional project, you can't hope to attract users. And if you lack users, forget about trying to find a significant body of committed developers.
So what does OpenRemote need more than anything else now? Users. And why? Because users attract installers, and the product with the most installers wins. Period.
Fleury noted:
Home automation is a highly fragmented market, which makes it hard for any company to become big. There are no standards here, so you have hundreds of little vendors. So, if you really want to have a standard, then you need to integrate all of those vendors.
But open source helps to alleviate this, attracting a user community that can hold off competitors while attracting a partner ecosystem. Open source serves as a rallying cry; a rendezvous point. We make the system modular and provide the integration points, and then work to attract an installer community to take advanage of these. It's not a short-term strategy: we're in this for the long haul.
The interest in driving a community of users is that we will breed the next generation of home automation installers. If we can scale the awareness of OpenRemote through a community of users, then we can rise above the noise and get installers to take us seriously. They don't want to spend time on a small player. As we gain mass, we should start to see some of the more traditional benefits of open source, like debugging and development assistance.
Not that OpenRemote hasn't had outside contributors. Fleury noted that as awareness of OpenRemote has grown, the project has attracted a trickle of outside contributions. He expects this to grow over time, but said he won't be concerned by a lack of significant outside contribution until the five-year anniversary of the project. (He also noted that one developer is worth 1,000 users, so he clearly recognizes the value of outside contributions.)
For now, OpenRemote employs virtually all of the developers who work on the project and has recently acquired the exclusive rights to iKNX, an iPhone stack that works with the widely popular KNX automation hardware. If this sounds like JBoss' strategy, it's because it was.
And, like JBoss with Java application servers, the time for OpenRemote may be ripe. Despite the morass of nonstandard technologies and bit players in the automation market, OpenRemote's open-source approach just might have a chance to unify the market. It's now possible to put a $200 computer in the wall, which suggests it just might be feasible for OpenRemote to open source a deeply proprietary and fragmented industry.
Would you bet against Fleury?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
(Credit:
LogMeIn)
A Netbook's extremely limited hard drive space (typically half that of a laptop and one third of that for a desktop) makes it terrible for storing files, but its Internet-connectedness and light weight make it ideal for carrying around.
LogMeIn, a company best known for its free and pro-level remote access applications, is looking for carriers and Netbook manufacturers to preload its LogMeIn Ignition remote access software onto Netbooks so that consumers will be able to view and edit photos and documents from their main desktop or laptop computer from their tiny Netbooks. The deal would give carriers that sell Netbooks with mobile broadband plans and Netbook-makers two products in one--the remote tools for users to access their main computers, and an IT administration tool for themselves--called LogMeIn Rescue+ Mobile--that would let their support staff remotely access your Netbook for troubleshooting purposes. Both might become available to you for an additional fee.
Of course, for customers to use LogMeIn, their primary computer must be turned on--that's fine when you're planning to work remotely, but a stumbling block if your need to view files is more sudden. While a deal with carriers and Netbook makers would introduce more customers to remote access solutions, LogMeIn Free is a version of the remote-access software that end users don't need to pay for to use on a Netbook. An additional offer of speedier remote support, however, is what rounds out the advantage for the consumer, and what could make the extra service worth a subscription.
This post was updated at 4:20 p.m. PT with Nintendo's response.
The Nintendo Wii is the subject of yet another patent dispute.
On Wednesday, Maryland-based Hillcrest Labs announced that it has filed a complaint for patent infringement with the U.S. International Trade Commission, as well as a separate patent infringement suit in a U.S. District Court in Maryland regarding Nintendo's video game console.
Hillcrest Labs says the technology behind the Wii remote is too similar to its own The Loop remote.
(Credit: Hillcrest Labs)Hillcrest is asking the ITC to stop the import of Wii consoles into the U.S., and is requesting that the U.S. District Court award unspecified monetary damages.
Hillcrest, which makes and licenses interactive media systems to consumer electronics companies, says it owns three patents related to "a handheld three-dimensional pointing device," and another on a "navigation interface display system that graphically organizes content for display on a television."
The company makes a motion-sensitive remote called The Loop, which Hillcrest says is protected by the patents at issue.
"While Hillcrest Labs has a great deal of respect for Nintendo and the Wii, Hillcrest Labs believes that Nintendo is in clear violation of its patents and has taken this action to protect its intellectual property rights," Hillcrest Labs said in a statement released Wednesday.
Nintendo of America has yet to see any official filings, according to a company statement. "We have not been served with any lawsuit or other action by Hillcrest and therefore have no comment," said NOA spokesman Charlie Scibetta.
This isn't the first time it's been targeted by patent owners recently. In July, a federal court in Texas found three Nintendo controllers--but not the Wii remote--in violation of patents held by Texas-based Anascape. Nintendo has appealed the decision.
Intel has developed technology that lets people remotely power up their computers and retrieve files across an Internet connection, according to a report on The Wall Street Journal site on Wednesday.
The technology, called Remote Wake, will work only on PCs that use a recently introduced chipset from Intel and requires new software to be loaded onto the PC, according to the report. The technology will also reportedly allow PCs that use Internet-based phones services to be remotely activated to receive calls. Remote Wake could also allow consumers using a Web-enabled phone or a laptop connected to the Internet to activate their PCs and retrieve files, according to the report.
Programs that let people remotely access files on their PCs are already on the market, but those computers must be left turned on to allow access to files. Remote Wake will allow access when people put their PCs in "sleep" mode, thereby conserving energy, the newspaper reported.
Remote Wake's greatest application is expected to be with Internet phone calls, which require PCs to be turned on to receive calls.
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