It's increasingly difficult to separate "open-source vendors" from "proprietary vendors," but Demandware, a proprietary software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor, is attempting to do so in an effort to stem the rising tide of Magento, an open-source e-commerce project. Demandware's criticism of Magento largely falls flat, however, because it uses outdated descriptions of open source.
Demandware walks through a litany of complaints about open source--requires too many developers! forces you to upgrade your software all by yourself! forking and fragmentation!--but none hit the mark. Why? Because each is only somewhat accurate of the state of open source 10 years ago. As a critique of open source today, and specifically of Magento, Demandware's criticisms fall short.
There is a big difference between community open source and commercial open source, not to mention a diverse array of quality even within the "community" or "commercial" open-source areas. Some of Demandware's critiques might be true of certain community-led open-source projects, but they seem wildly off-base for any of the more popular projects, including Magento.
Unfortunately for Demandware, it turns out that open-source vendors care just as much about quality, stability, performance, etc. as proprietary vendors do. The difference is that open-source vendors shift the risk of deployment onto themselves rather than foisting it onto customers.
Equally unfortunate for Demandware, most of the leading open-source projects are increasingly under vendor guidance and control, as Gartner finds. This means that Demandware's complaints are relevant only to a dwindling population of open-source projects.
What's particularly ironic (and a bit galling) is that Demandware, after spending so much time criticizing open source, then goes on to describe its own software as...open source:
Much of our software stack--operating system, application servers, etc.--is open source. But we build a commercial SaaS platform on top of it and do all the heavy lifting for our customers.
How interesting. This sounds much like the model that Varien, the company behind Magento, uses. In fact, it describes the commercial open-source business model: give away a free and open-source version of the software but then charge customers for additional packaging, support, etc.
Fortunately, prospective customers of Demandware don't need to take the company's word for it on Magento. As open source, they can download it for free to see if it works for them. The same cannot be said for Demandware. If you're interested in evaluating Demandware, it appears that you've got just one choice: contact the company and let it start the sales machine:
Demandware sales model: Heavy on people
Apparently Magento is good enough to sell itself. But you won't hear that from the Demandware sales representative.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Correction at 6:35 a.m. PDT: This article was initially written on the assumption that the study was new. It was actually published in 2005.
For those waiting for a grand cataclysmic battle between Gog (Linux) and Magog (Windows), with one supreme victor, don't hold your breath.
I was reading through a 2005 study by Harvard Business School professors Pankaj Ghemawat and Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, and was surprised by how little has changed in the past four years, despite Linux and Windows duking it out in ever-increasing intensity.
Since that study was released, Linux has continued to swipe at Microsoft's Windows market share. But, as the study predicted, Microsoft's huge installed base has proved both a strategic beachhead and an impenetrable fortress against the Linux threat.
Not that Microsoft can afford to rest on its laurels. Open-source interest and adoption grows from strength to strength, with government adoption, as recently highlighted by Gartner, feeding into enterprise adoption. This, coupled with Microsoft's weakening core business in Windows client software, suggests an opening for Linux that its proponents are eager to exploit.
And yet, as the study's authors surmised, a duopoly between the two is much more likely than a monopoly by either. What's most interesting to me is that this same duopoly dynamic seems to be playing out across the open source/Microsoft divide, most visibly in the browser market. Open source seems to beat many proprietary vendors relatively easily, but Microsoft is tough.
The study, despite its vintage, gives hints as to why Microsoft remains a formidable competitor for open-source alternatives like Linux:
Our main result is that in the absence of cost asymmetries and as long as Windows has a first-mover advantage (a larger installed base at time zero), Linux never displaces Windows of its leadership position. This result holds true regardless of the strength of Linux's demand-side learning. Furthermore, the result persists regardless of the intrinsically better design and potential differential value of Linux. In other words, harnessing demand-side learning more efficiently is not sufficient for Linux to win the competitive battle against Windows.
Microsoft's huge installed base and its ability (and willingness) to lower prices to compete with open-source solutions like Linux keep its moat broad and its gates high. It's one thing to be able to trounce Unix with a massive price differential, but it's quite another to displace Windows with its comparatively low cost and ecosystem benefits (i.e., Microsoft can lower the cost of Windows while keeping the cost of complements like SQL Server or Exchange high).
This is why we see Red Hat displacing Unix at a torrid pace, but so far doing little to cripple Microsoft. It's why other open-source solutions manage to topple non-Microsoft proprietary solutions first, with Microsoft generally the last target.
Most proprietary vendors lack the breadth of Microsoft's offerings. Most also have prices that start so high that it's difficult for them to credibly (and profitably) drop prices enough to effectively compete with open source. Microsoft is different.
Perhaps this explains Microsoft's visceral, early response to open source. I once asked Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith, why Microsoft stands largely alone in its adamant opposition to open source. He didn't have a compelling answer, but this study suggests a couple: Microsoft has fought open source so hard because it, more than any other vendor, has perhaps the most to lose and because it has the best tools to fight with.
All of the strategies the study's authors noted for fighting open source (selective pricing discounts, FUD, co-option, etc.), Microsoft has deployed. If the authors' suppositions continue to prove themselves correct, we'll continue to see much more of this over the years, but we're unlikely to see either Linux or Windows ultimately topple the other.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Watching Andrew Keen mercilessly beat up the strawman he creates for open source, I was tempted to leave the flame-bait post alone. But then I realized that Keen doesn't mean to beat up on open source - he actually agrees with it. He simply doesn't understand how it works. He is about a decade behind the times in terms of understanding open source, so consider this a Primer on 21st Century Open-source Economics.
Keen writes:
Mass unemployment and a deep economic recession comprise the most effective antidote to the utopian ideals of open-source radicals. The altruistic ideal of giving away one's labor for free appeared credible in the fat summer of the Web 2.0 boom when social-media startups hung from trees, Facebook was valued at $15 billion, and VCs queued up to fund revenue-less "businesses" like Twitter. But as we contemplate the world post-bailout, when economic reality once again bites, only Silicon Valley's wealthiest technologists can even consider the luxury of donating their labor to the latest fashionable, online, open-source project.
It's unclear when Facebook and Twitter came to be even remotely connected with open source, but here's a clue, Keen: open source doesn't depend on peace-loving hippie radicals with either free time or free cash to burn. Open source is a free market, capitalist phenomenon that depends upon M-O-N-E-Y. It has been for at least a decade, and the economic downturn only sharpens its value to money-grubbing capitalists.
Will an economic downturn slow open-source development? No, because open source is an effective way to undermine competitors (give away what your competitor values, and charge for your own differentiation), serve customers (lower prices, better software), and get software into prospective customers' hands cheaply and widely.
Are there people that contribute open-source software without expectation or realization of payment? Sure. But they're in the minority on the projects that matter most. For example, Linux isn't going to get hurt by a downturn: IBM, Red Hat, Intel, Novell, and others will probably increase funding to Linux kernel development, because Linux lowers the cost of selling other services or hardware (Intel, IBM) or provides the basis of a software business (Red Hat, Novell).
In short, it might keep Microsoft and others comforted at night to imagine open source getting hurt in a downturn, but dreams don't put food on the table. Open source does, and that's why it's going to have a happy, healthy life during an economic recession.
If we were going to award a proprietary software vendor for the "Worst Open Source FUD of 2008," TeleSoft International, not Microsoft, would take the prize. Indeed, in a year that has seen Microsoft embrace open source to an increased degree, TeleSoft has gone on a full-frontal assault, claiming in a video that open source is poorly tailored to customer needs, ruins their profitability, and delays their time to market.
In other words, TeleSoft is claiming that open source will do precisely the opposite of what companies normally find that it delivers.
Open source FUD
(Credit: Telesoft)Perhaps recognizing that not everyone will buy into its FUD, TeleSoft claims to support the popular Linux operating system, but with a kernel-loadable module approach that keeps its IP safe from that voracious appetite of IP-stealing Linux. Nice. TeleSoft wants to have its cake ("open source is terrible!") and eat it, too ("but our open source is not so terrible!").
... Read moreThat didn't take long. Nokia announced just last week that it would be open sourcing Symbian, the world's top mobile operating system by market share, and a few days later Microsoft has started a FUD war against the move.
The ironic thing in this Microsoft FUD offensive is that it's using precisely the wrong example from open source to wage the war: Linux. While it could have found some examples of open source that fragments, is more costly than proprietary software, etc., it chose Linux, which isn't:
[Microsoft's] Rockfeld sums up those challenges with what some might call the "F word": fragmentation. Fragmentation is bad, he says, because application software developers have to create multiple versions of their code for different operating systems, or different versions of the "same" operating systems. "There are more Linux consortiums that come and go than there are Linux phones," he says....
... Read more
I will admit it: I think Microsoft and other proprietary companies are often guilty of spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) about open source. Microsoft did it recently with its "number-crunching" on Firefox security and on Linux security. To me it's clear: proprietary software companies feel threatened by open source and react with FUD.
But is the inverse also true? Do open-source companies/projects/developers do the same thing about Microsoft and other proprietary companies? Of course they/we do. Some of it may well be based on good information and given for good reasons, but I'm not sure the open-source world has cornered the market on good intentions. Somehow it's considered OK to FUD one way but not the other.
A double standard? Thoughts?
Paul McDougall at InformationWeek may be reading too much into Microsoft's recent patent deal with Kyocera, but he does ask an interesting question. Does the agreement reveal Microsoft's patent position, at least as it relates to embedded Linux? (Or does it simply reveal that Japanese companies would rather settle with Microsoft than stand up for themselves, since they seem to be falling like flies before Microsoft's patent FUD?)
McDougall writes:
Under the deal, Microsoft gets to add patented Kyocera Mita technology to its Windows and Office products.
What does Kyocera get? The right to use patented Microsoft technology in its printers, copiers and "certain Linux-based embedded devices."
... Read more
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