Microsoft's Internet Explorer continues to hemorrhage market share to Mozilla's open-source Firefox browser. But Microsoft is set to surpass Mozilla in one area: adoption of its open-source Microsoft Public License (MS-PL), according to research from Black Duck Software.
The MS-PL is now used by 1.02 percent of open-source projects. This is impressive given that it was only approved by the Open Source Initiative some two years ago. The Mozilla Public License (MPL), by contrast, has been around for many more years and is used by 1.25 percent of open-source projects, ranking ninth in terms of popularity. MS-PL is 10th but is gaining fast.
It's a matter of coloring inside the CodePlex lines.
The MPL offers some benefits over its long-serving peers like the GNU General Public License (50.17 percent market share), but often the benefits are outweighed by the sheer momentum of the GPL. Whatever its deficiencies, the GPL is a relatively well-understood license.
For those developers looking to go "off-piste" with a different license, and particularly for those with a Microsoft inclination--as is the case with Microsoft open-source code hosting repository CodePlex--it's far easier to opt to do so with the MS-PL versus the MPL, the Eclipse Public License, or another license.
As CodePlex continues to gain in popularity, I expect we'll see the MS-PL push past MPL and potentially even past the MIT License, which currently ranks seventh at 3.79 percent share. When that happens, it will be a sign that Microsoft has truly arrived as an open-source player.
Of course, I suspect that Microsoft would rather beat Mozilla in browser market share than in license market share. But you can't have everything, now can you?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
By any measure, MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative, which seeks to "open source" education by making course ware from premier institutions available online to all for free, is a success.
But recently published data for OpenCourseWare suggests that it's an even bigger success than I had supposed. Consider:
- More than 53.7 million individuals have now visited OpenCourseWare's site/affiliated sites;
- OpenCourseWare servers have now delivered over 3.1 billion files ("hits") since launch;
- 8.5 million zip files of full course content have been downloaded from the site;
- 2.1 million OpenCourseWare videos have been downloaded from iTunes, with its videos viewed more than 2.5 million times on YouTube.
Wow. These are almost mind-boggling numbers, and they don't simply represent the local state college student who didn't get admitted to MIT. MIT uses OpenCourseWare to reach out to high school students, international students, and more.
It's a deeply impressive effort, one that seems to be getting the distribution that it deserves.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has been talking for the past year about how a vast, largely unexplored repository of great software is the enterprise, and how much value could be unlocked by open-sourcing it.
Open source creates better software, Whitehurst argues, so why not expand its value by expanding its community?
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology apparently has heard the call, opting to open-source its Mobile Web project, as reported by ReadWriteWeb. The code "offers a staff and student directory, a campus map, the shuttle schedule, an event calendar, class announcements for students, emergency information, and status updates for many of MIT's tech services."
In other words, it offers much the same functionality that every university would likely want to provide its students and faculty. Because MIT has open-sourced the code, there's the potential for a community of universities to co-develop the project further, reducing MIT's support burden for its code and enriching the code base.
It's perhaps not surprising that MIT, which has won awards for its open-source innovations in the past, is the institution behind the open-source Mobile Web project. What is surprising is that so many universities and enterprises persist in reinventing the wheel, dumping resources into writing software that is common across their market segments that could more efficiently be created or maintained by a community.
Time to follow MIT's lead. Time to embrace open source and its efficiencies.
(Credit:
MIT)
Peter Lofgren of Redpill (Sweden) sent over a link to Scratch, a cool open-source project from MIT Media Labs. The purpose? Make programming easy and approachable for kids as young as eight-years old. If the gallery of existing projects is any indicator, it seems to be working.
Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web. Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.
I like the fact that Scratch makes development easy, but it also teaches correct principles. As an open-source project, it teaches kids how to interact with the new world of open development. Anyone out there have kids that have used Scratch and can offer up a testimonial?
(Credit:
MIT)
Who says open source isn't innovative? MIT just won an InfoWorld 100 award for Thalia, its enterprise "Flickr" application [PDF] used for managing images and media (e.g. print, web, lecture presentations, online exhibitions.) Thalia allows users to tag media with customizable, user-defined metadata (tags, discussion comments etc).
What powers it? OpenLaszlo and Alfresco.
MIT is integrating Thalia with Stellar, its course management system. More details on Thalia can be found here [PPT]. It's very cool.
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I had a great lunch with associates from rSmart, Unicon, and MIT today at the JA-SIG Conference, and we talked about a vexing issue that plagues software, open source and proprietary alike (though it hurts the open source vendor more): the high cost of sales. (I credit John Lewis, Chief Software Architect, Unicon, for any intelligence in my musings, and take full blame for the inane shrapnel that is my personal contribution to the thread.)
The proprietary world's P&L operates much like the VC's: high, upfront return (license) to cover the expense that Purchasing puts vendors through to earn its business. (Repeat visits, RFPs, etc.) In other words, the proprietary vendor spends five figures on five deals to hopefully get a "home run" return on one of them to subsidize and exceed the costs.
Open source vendors operate differently, as Larry Augustin pointed out at OSBC. [PDF] Open source vendors are about volume in leads, with the leads finding their way back to the company to purchase. Four figures (or less, often) to close a deal, with the intention being that more deals within the pipe will close.
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