There's a lot of buzz today on the Obama Administration's decision to run WhiteHouse.gov on Drupal, the popular open-source Web publishing system. Given the U.S. federal government's widespread adoption of open source, however, the amazing thing is that it took so long.
It is now, anyway. This is a big shift in the federal attitude toward open source.
Back in 2004, I worked in the Linux Business Office at Novell and met with the CIO for the U.S. Senate. He knew about open source and admitted that other departments were dipping their toes in it, but the Senate was a decidedly Microsoft shop and had no plans to change.
While I don't have an update on the U.S. Senate's adoption of open source, the rest of the government seems to have gone far beyond "toe dipping." Open-source adoption throughout the U.S. federal government is rampant, and started long before President Obama took office.
NASA's Nebula platform is just one example of how the government is actively using open-source technologies (like Apache SOLR, RabbitMQ, MySQL, and Eucalyptus), but also contributing back.
Unlike other geographies, which have relied on government mandates and preferences to accelerate open-source uptake, the U.S. government hasn't been the driving force in open-source adoption, or even the primary force. U.S. public and private sectors have been equally enthusiastic about open source.
For example, it's nice that WhiteHouse.gov runs Drupal, but adoption in the private sector by FedEx, Sony Music, and many others precedes President Obama's choice of Drupal.
The open-source train has left the building. Even companies like Qualcomm, the patent powerhouse that has traditionally disdained open source, are making open source a core business strategy. Qualcomm is setting up a subsidiary to focus on mobile open-source platforms.
Yes, pigs can fly.
What's driving this adoption? It's not necessarily open source's price tag. After all, in the short term, open source isn't necessarily less expensive, once you factor in migration costs, retraining, etc. (Note: you'd hit these same costs even if you moved to a different proprietary system.)
Of course, proprietary software is no bargain-basement cost saver, either. Even Windows 7, that no-brainer IT decision in the wake of Vista's pain, could cost enterprises as much as $1,930 per instance, according to Gartner.
No, in my experience, open source is winning converts because it gives CIOs more control of their destiny.
In part such control stems from the nature of competition itself. As open source proves itself a viable contender for CIO dollars and thereby spark price competition, CIOs save, as Novell CMO John Dragoon notes.
But open source's superior value proposition goes deeper. Open source calls into question the highly profitable maintenance fees that Oracle, SAP, and traditional software vendors use to juice their earnings, but which do little to help customers.
In fact, the traditional software economy can be downright hostile to buyers, as Ingres CEO Roger Burkhardt opines.
Open source is different. Because the code is open, open-source vendors are forced to deliver a constant stream of value to justify subscription renewals. ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn captures this well:
When you can see the code you have a different relationship with it. You're no longer asking what it can do. You're asking how you can adapt it to your needs.
With code visibility, you and your vendors become partners in trying to make something work. The vendor can't over-promise, but you can't over-assume either. This may be one of main hidden reasons for IT failure, the two sides of the transaction not being on the same page.
It's not surprising, therefore, that Red Hat continues to be the CIO's darling for lowering costs and delivering value. It's also not surprising that the Obama Administration adopted Drupal for WhiteHouse.gov.
No, what is surprising is that it took so long.
The best open-source projects have little problem with adoption. Their problem, increasingly, centers on monetization of their popularity. From Drupal to MySQL to Audacity, sometimes the best things in life truly are free...which can be a problem. The solution, however, may be cloud computing.
I've articulated this before, but theory met reality this past week with announcements from DimDim, an open-source Web conferencing provider, and Acquia, the focal point for Drupal support and value-adding services. Both have interesting new cloud strategies that promise to deliver customer value while funding the vendors' payroll.
DimDim, as TechCrunch reports, recently launched DimDim Webinar, a hosted webinar service targeting small and medium-size businesses (SMBs). The service "is accompanied by a couple of helpful resources that guide organizers through the necessary steps to monetize and analyze the performance of their webinars," making it easy to set up and track the value of the webinars. This is just the sort of offering my own company (an SMB) would find useful.
Acquia, for its part, isn't really targeting its new Drupal Hosting to the SMB market, instead focusing on helping companies "scale [their] site[s] to millions of page views, and more if necessary." While small and midsize businesses will undoubtedly also sign up, Acquia's service promises to be a great way to minimize the IT investment required to successfully deploy Drupal-based websites.
In both cases, DimDim and Acquia are improving upon their open-source code offerings...by making the code somewhat irrelevant.
Some, like Gartner, warn that cloud computing threatens to undermine the appeal of open source. But this is only a problem if open-source communities fail to offer cloud-computing options, as SugarCRM has, options that also include source code in case the buyer ever wants off the cloud.
Recent data from the United Kingdom suggests that cloud computing promises to be a winner for Microsoft alternatives like Google Apps. There's no reason that open-source companies can't also benefit from this shift. Microsoft has billions of dollars in profits tied to its 'desktop' dominance. Open source does not.
Open-source companies should be leading the shift to cloud computing. Some, like Red Hat, clearly are, with Red Hat actively seeking to become the platform for cloud computing, just as it's the dominant Linux platform for Linux server-based computing in the enterprise.
Cloud computing is the fulfillment of much of the marketing behind open-source software, promising to shift value to services and away from software. DimDim and Acquia are two examples of open-source companies that "get it" and will marry the best of cloud computing with open source.
They're among the first. They won't be the last.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Drupal is a fantastic Web publishing platform that derives much of its value from a disparate community of contributors, as Xconomy recently wrote. With more than 4,000 contributed modules from over 3,000 active contributors (741 of which contribute to Drupal Core), Drupal has something for everyone, which is both its greatest asset and biggest liability.
The same holds true for Red Hat, which charges a premium for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution to enterprises that want to tap into Linux but don't want the bother of rolling their own version of Linux from Kernel.org.
The problem, however, is that such a business model depends upon the complexity of the underlying platform. If that complexity goes away, does the business model?
The Drupal-focused company Acquia is thriving because deploying Drupal, what with its myriad of choices, can be complex. Ditto for Red Hat. There are thousands of packages that comprise Linux, making it worthwhile to pay a trusted guide like Red Hat.
I don't believe so, but that is certainly one way to read IDC data that shows unpaid Linux adoption is now outpacing commercial Linux adoption, which has the potential to disrupt Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, and other Linux vendors.
It's less an issue, however, for Acquia, which has been rolling out for-free software and services to augment Drupal, including enterprise-class search. Acquia's Drupal distribution teases the complexity out of Drupal, but it also extends beyond Drupal with enterprise-only features. It is therefore well-positioned to foster the Drupal community while simultaneously feeding its top and bottom lines.
For this reason, I believe Acquia's model has more staying power, though it has a long way to go before it generates Red Hat's nearly $1 billion in annual revenues. Acquia's model allows it to thrive even if Drupal becomes easy, and also affords the company greater latitude to enter new markets, like the application market, where product complexity is not as much of an issue.
Red Hat, on the other hand, must resolutely focus on core infrastructure, an area of the software stack that is naturally prone to such complexity, because of its adherence to its complexity-dependent business model.
Both models are generating impressive returns. But Acquia's open-source model seems to offer more potential in the long term than Red Hat's does.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Drupal logo
Baris Wanschers has posted a great review of 10 cool Web sites running Microsoft SharePoint, apparently to prove how good SharePoint is as a Web publishing tool. But I can't help but smile at the irony that Wanschers' site runs Drupal, not SharePoint.
Wanschers writes:
Because so many friends and colleagues of [mine] think of SharePoint as a boring, team-site-only Document Management System I decided to show them some great-looking SharePoint publishing sites and prove them otherwise.
He then provides several examples (Ferrari, Starbucks, and more), but the best counterexample to his post is the "paper" his post is written on: Drupal, an excellent open-source Web content management and publishing system.
To be fair, Wanschers describes himself as both a SharePoint and Drupal developer, so it's natural that he use both (though his blog has exclusively covered SharePoint since its March 2009 launch). But for me it's instructive that however much he may talk about SharePoint as a Web publishing tool, Drupal is what he actually uses to do the job.
Actions speak louder than words.
He's not alone. In fact, with over 1 million downloads each year, it's safe to say that Wanschers is in good company in preferring Drupal for Web publishing. FedEx, Nike, R.E.M., and many others share Wanschers' preference for Drupal for Web publishing.
Disclosure: My company, Alfresco, both partners and competes with Microsoft SharePoint and Drupal.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Occasionally I get brilliant ideas about who should merge with whom in open source. OK, so it's very occasionally, but I think I'll start sharing them under a "mix and match" headline.
Forget fantasy football. It's time for "fantasy open source."
The first is OpenX, an open-source ad-server company that I've written about several times, and which I continue to believe offers a disruptive way to shake up the online advertising business, especially for smaller Web publishers. While Drupal is used by plenty of marquee brands like Intel and FedEx, it has a strong base of support within these smaller Web publishers.
While we're at it, why not also provide the e-commerce engine to turn ad-related interest into paying customers? Magento, which I've also covered several times, is a natural fit.
Yes, Magento, like Drupal and OpenX, has its share of big customers, including Germany's equivalent of REI, Globetrotter. But Magento already has a lot of traction within the mid-market segment that Drupal and OpenX also serve.
Disagree? Which companies (at least one of which must be open source) do you think should get together?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
For four years, Google has brought together some of the best open-source projects and most promising young programmers in its Summer of Code.
(Credit:
Google)
Now in its fifth year, Summer of Code 2009 promises to do the same, with a range of new countries and projects represented.
Of the 70 countries involved, here are the ones with the most students: United States (212), India (101), Germany (55), Canada (44), and Brazil (43). And for the first time, student programmers from the Dominican Republic, Iceland, Luxembourg, and Nigeria will also participate.
Summer of Code has been an excellent way for Google to reach out to the open-source community. But it has also been a great way for open-source projects to bond with Google and improve themselves. Drupal is an example of a project that has derived significant value, from its five-year association with Summer of Code. But it's not alone.
I'm looking forward to seeing the results of this summer's efforts.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, is running for president.
No, not that presidency. The presidency of the Drupal Association, the organization that oversees the development of Drupal.
It's somewhat astonishing that Buytaert should have to campaign for a position that he so clearly has already earned, but it's also a testament to the meritocracy that is open source, as well as to Buytaert's own humility, that he feels compelled to do so, anyway.
And so Buytaert writes up a list of reasons why the Drupal community should vote for him, including this one:
Despite our extensive activities in 2008, the Drupal Association has been held back by the lack of more active contributors, and particularly, contributors in some key areas of our organization.
One role of the president is to lend focus to particular areas where the project should focus, to draw attention to the areas of the project that might be somewhat dysfunctional, and to bring in leadership to address these problems.
Given that, I want to outline a few of the areas where I want to push the Drupal Association and where I believe we should extend the current team.
Imagine if we had that level of candor, transparency, and humility in our national governments!
Buytaert's campaign may be a foregone conclusion, but it's also a reminder of how powerful the open-source ethic can be.
My vote is with Buytaert for Drupal's president. Yours?
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Over the Christmas break, I've watched one of the basic powers of open source in action. Two employees from my Alfresco team did something that is largely impossible in the proprietary world:
They wrote integrations to third-party open-source software, the Apache Hadoop and Drupal projects. No contracts changed hands. No NDAs. Just code.
Open source, of course, is a great way to get one's code in the hands of would-be customers, and then sell them support or other add-on services or software. But it's also a fantastic way to collaborate with would-be partners. Not a single lawyer need get involved until the code is working, and then only to divvy up responsibilities and revenue, if you so choose.
Try the above integrations between two proprietary companies. First you get contacts from both companies (probably the executives, depending on the size of the company, because who has authority to make that kind of a decision?) to start talking about the integration. Then, before any real work happens, the lawyers need to get involved. (While at Novell, I had one of the most distressing experiences in my life trying to negotiate a partnership with Siebel. It's not an experience I'd wish on my worst enemy, much less a partner.) Further work will then need to be done to define the integration, marketing teams will need to get involved to define the go-to-market strategies and whatnot. And so on, until eventually code actually gets written, a year or so later.
With open source, you just need one guy and a week or two of downtime over Christmas. With proprietary software, you need a small army. Which do you think is the more efficient model?
Installing an open-source enterprise application has never been easier. No hardware? No sophisticated IT department? No problem. At least, not if you use one of 38 JumpBox-enabled open-source applications, as it announced recently.
A rising number of companies offer virtualized instances of popular open-source applications, but JumpBox takes it a step further, deploying to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, almost completely obviating hardware and setup quandaries.
JumpBox offers small to midsize organizations a library of open-source applications packaged as pre-built, pre-configured virtual appliances through JumpBox Open, its annual subscription service. Public Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for 12 JumpBox applications, including Ruby on Rails, (Alfresco, Movable Type, Magento), Drupal, SugarCRM and more have been made available for free. AMIs for the full suite of 38 applications are available to plus and premium subscribers to JumpBox Open.
Pricing of JumpBox Open starts at $299 per year (for one persistently running JumpBox instance of each application), rising to $999 per year to run up to 15 simultaneous production instances of any JumpBox-enabled application. In other words, it's dirt-cheap.
Powerful software, low price, and no fuss. What's not to like? If you're an SMB customer, probably not much.
But if you're an open-source application vendor, I suppose it's still an open question how JumpBox will work with you to share revenue. In my conversations with the JumpBox founders, this potential conflict has come up, and I know the JumpBox team is working on it. How well it gets resolved may well determine how much emphasis open-source vendors will put on the JumpBox sales channel which, in turn, could decide the fate of JumpBox.
With or without the vendors, however, this is a great service and suggests a bright future for enterprise software.
Disclosure: I work for Alfresco and advise several of the companies whose open-source applications JumpBox distributes.
Dries Buytaert in Brussels
(Credit: Matt Asay)Dries Buytaert celebrates his thirtieth birthday today. For someone that has built an open-source community that numbers in the millions of downloads and hundreds of thousands of contributors, Dries is a very unassuming, interesting, and likable person.
It's even more impressive to me that Dries wrote Drupal in his spare time as a PhD student in Belgium. Bonus points for doing it in PHP, despite the fact that most of his academic work has related to Java.
Businessweek paid homage to Dries earlier this year, naming him a "2008 top innovator." It's a nice honor, one that I'd love to have.
But for me the real measure of Dries' success is the thousands of cool websites that run Drupal, a number of which Dries has profiled on his blog.
Actually, the real measure of Dries' success is that he remains a good person despite the success. I was in Belgium last year and we sat down for gyros and frites, and dug deep into the metrics and methods for open-source success. I learned a lot, and loved spending time with him.
Happy birthday, Dries. You deserve it!
