(Credit:
Open Source Initiative)
Red Hat is generally credited as the industry's leading open-source company, but it's a distinction that is as meaningless as it is incorrect. While Red Hat's revenue directly derives from the open-source software it develops and distributes, other companies like Sun, IBM, and Google actually write and contribute far more open-source code. It may be time to stop talking about open-source companies and get back to the importance of open-source code.
Open source is increasingly the foundation upon which software and Web companies depend. MySpace made waves on Tuesday by open sourcing Qizmt, a distributed computation framework (running on Windows Server, intriguingly) that currently powers MySpace's "People you may know" feature. But MySpace, as VentureBeat notes, was simply playing catch-up to Facebook's recent open sourcing of Tornado.
Neither move is an attempt to score brownie points with the "in" crowd. Both moves are motivated by self-interest, self-interest that increasingly requires inviting developer communities to embrace and extend one's Web services/software through open source.
It's also a way to improve software quality. By embracing open-source projects as a foundation for a company's software, and then extending it through its own open-source projects, the collective quality of open source is strong and growing, as Accenture's Kit Plummer notes.
It's this enlightened self-interest and the quality is engenders that has turned open source into essential infrastructure for virtually all commercial software, and which means Red Hat and other pure-play open-source companies are no longer the center of the open-source universe.
The Linux kernel is comprised of 11.5 million lines of code, of which Red Hat is responsible for roughly 12 percent (measured in terms of lines of code changed). Even if we add in JBoss Application Server (another 2 million lines of code or so) and other Red Hat projects, we're still left with far less open-source code from Red Hat than from others.
Take Sun, for example. Sun is the primary developer behind Java (more than 6.5 million lines of code), Solaris (over 2 million lines of code), OpenOffice (approximately 10 million lines of code), and other open-source projects.
Or IBM, with 12.5 million lines of code contributed to Eclipse alone, not to mention Linux (6.3 percent of total contributions), Geronimo, and a wide variety of other open-source projects.
Conservatively, we've released about 14 million lines of code. Android tops 10 million lines of code, and then you have Chrome (2 million lines of code), GWT (300,000 lines of code), and about a project released every week over the last five years. Then you have a couple hundred Googlers patching on a weekly or monthly basis.
While DiBona was quick to suggest that Google doesn't claim the crown for Open Source Top Contributor ("We'd say we're 'among' the largest [contributors]"), it almost certainly is the world's largest open-source code contributor, especially when one considers its other open-source activities, including hosting perhaps the world's largest repository for open-source projects, with more than 250,000 hosted projects, at least 40,000 of which are actively contributed, not to mention its Summer of Code. After all, lines of code, while useful, is not necessarily the best measure of the value of open-source contributions.
In fact, Patrick Finch of the Mozilla Foundation speculates that Google's best open-source contribution may have nothing to do with writing new code at all:
Google's biggest contribution to open source is arguably not code, but proving that you can scale Linux on whitebox hardware.
It's a great point, and one that underscores the fact that the "open-source company" distinction is somewhat useless. Google doesn't call itself an open-source company, and rightly so. Open source is simply part of its strategy for distributing software that will help it sell more advertising.
Sun attempted to turn itself into an open-source company, but once Oracle completes its acquisition of Sun, Oracle certainly won't take on that label. Not because it's a bad label, but because it's simply not a useful one anymore.
We are all open-source companies now. Which also means that none of us are. Open source is simply a way that we enable some aspect of our businesses, whether we're Red Hat or Microsoft or Google or Facebook.
And given that Web companies like Google don't need to directly monetize open source, we may actually see far more open-source code emerge from these Web companies than we ever have or ever will from traditional "open-source software companies" like Red Hat, MySQL, or Pentaho.
Some in the open-source camp would have you believe that open source is an all-or-nothing proposition. For such people, to believe that Linux makes for a superior server operating system is also to dedicate oneself to using open source for business applications, personal productivity, mobile, and likely brushing one's teeth. Open source on a proprietary platform like Mac OS X? Perish the thought!
But life is more complicated than that, and it turns out that there is exceptional open-source software for the Mac (or for Windows, for that matter).
The H Online has kicked off a nice "Open Source Stars for Mac OS X" series, one that I'd recommend all Mac users review. But for those who just want to know the best of the basics, here are my favorites:
- Firefox (Web browser) - Given Firefox's availability for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, this one won't be a surprise to anyone, but if you haven't used it lately, do give it a try. It continues to be the most feature-rich Web browser due to its large and variegated add-on community.
- Adium (instant messaging) - We will use Adium in heaven. Not only does it let me dress up my icon in an Arsenal uniform, but it manages all of my different instant messaging accounts (AIM, YIM, MSN, Skype, Facebook, Gtalk, and even Twitter/Identi.ca). It's like Trillian for Windows, only about one trillion times better.
- Zimbra (e-mail) - While geared toward enterprise-class messaging, you can use Zimbra (either the Web client or desktop or, in my case, both) for personal e-mail, as well. With the ability to extend its functionality through Zimlets and a Web user interface that continues to be best in class, Zimbra rocks.
- OpenOffice.org (office productivity) - I don't use this open-source alternative to Microsoft Office for word processing or spreadsheets, in part because I rarely use Word or Excel except for contracts and the occasional spreadsheet, two things with which I don't want to risk file format compatibility. But I actually prefer OpenOffice's presentation program to PowerPoint. It has some functionality that PowerPoint lacks.
- Handbrake (video converter/ripper) - I travel a lot and want my movies to travel with me, without having to carry DVDs around with me. So I rip them to my hard drive with Handbrake. It's a tremendously powerful (because it's so simple) program. It's now available on Linux and Windows, but it grew up on the Mac and is still best on OS X, in my opinion. Get it. It was created by angels.
- VLC (media player) - If it has a codec, VLC will play it. Heck, VLC will probably play it if the file even remotely resembles video or audio. It just works, and it works with everything.
- Audacity (audio editor) - Have a music file that you want to convert to a ringtone for your Blackberry? Or simply want to clean up that podcast before you publish it? Audacity is powerful and fairly easy to use.
- Seashore (image editor) - Seashore doesn't have nearly as many features as Adobe's Photoshop, but if you want a basic image editor with more-than-basic functionality, check out Seashore. Based on Gimp, Seashore is easy to use, though I do wish it had image transformations. I do so like making my pictures look even more cartoonish.
There you have it. That's the basic list of open-source applications I use on my Mac. I use them because they work, and in some cases work exceptionally well, far better than their proprietary equivalents.
This, incidentally, is also why I prefer the Mac. Life is too short to use a given application simply because it's open source (or Microsoft, or whatever). Use what works. Increasingly, this will lead you to use open source. But for me, the Mac is still the best desktop platform available, period. I'm therefore loving the combination of Mac OS X and a variety of open-source applications.
Maybe you will, too.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner is no Robin Hood. At Microsoft's global sales meeting, as reported by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, Turner declared Microsoft's intention to take market share from a host of competitors in the coming year, among them Oracle, Google, VMWare, IBM (Lotus), Apple, and...
...OpenOffice.
I can understand Microsoft keeping an eye on the OpenOffice "killer rabbit," but devoting any time and attention to taking market share from perennially poor (in market share) OpenOffice?
That makes Microsoft the anti-Robin Hood, taking from the poor to give to the rich.
I can only imagine that Turner mentioned OpenOffice to remind antitrust authorities that it's under siege from a variety of competitive forces. I can't believe that a single Microsoftie loses a nanosecond's worth of sleep contemplating OpenOffice and its effects on Microsoft Office market share.
Foley "wonder(s) whether Microsoft's arrows are missing some key targets (Mozilla, Red Hat, Amazon) and are focused too much on competitors from the past." I couldn't agree more. But in the case of OpenOffice, it has never mounted a credible challenge to Microsoft Office, making it fit in neither category.
Don't get me wrong: I like OpenOffice just fine and use it regularly. But let's be honest: it's not a clear and present danger to Microsoft and Microsoft must be joking to suggest OpenOffice is one of the primary competitors from which it intends to take market share this year.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
While Microsoft Office is actively used by roughly 50 percent of U.S. Internet users, according to a 2,400-strong survey administered by ClickStream Technologies, 5 percent of U.S. Web users also actively use the open-source productivity suite OpenOffice.org.
Importantly, ClickStream wasn't measuring installations. It was measuring use. The company actually installed client-side software that tracked which applications the users were running. To have OpenOffice in use across 5 percent of U.S. Internet users is pretty amazing.
How many people does this translate into? According to recent data, there are 303 million people living in the United States, 72.5 percent of which have Internet access. This suggests that of a population of 219 million U.S. Internet users, nearly 11 million actively use OpenOffice.
In other words, OpenOffice is not a niche geek phenomenon. With more than 46 million downloads of version 3.0 alone, OpenOffice could prove unpleasantly disruptive to Microsoft's desktop business.
True, 5 percent U.S. market share doesn't sound like much, but an estimated 11 million people interacting with OpenOffice on a daily basis sounds like an incredible beachhead for much broader market penetration.
OpenOffice.org developer and Novell employee Michael Meeks calls OpenOffice "profoundly sick" and chides Sun for retaining too much control over the project for its own good. He's right, and here's why.
First, though Meeks thinks it's critical that the raw numbers of OpenOffice volunteer developers be high, this isn't necessarily true. He writes:
In a healthy project we would expect to see a large number of volunteer developers involved, in addition - we would expect to see a large number of peer companies contributing to the common code pool; we do not see this in OpenOffice.org. Indeed, quite the opposite we appear to have the lowest number of active developers on OO.o since records began: 24, this contrasts negatively with Linux's recent low of 160+. Even spun in the most positive way, OO.o is at best stagnating from a development perspective.
Well, no. OpenOffice could actually be thriving from a development perspective in light of a decrease in the sheer number of contributors. Why? Because all significant open-source projects depend on a small-but-committed core of developers that do 85 percent of the development. The idea of a global, free-flowing (and freely coding) pool of open-source developers actively contributing significant code to projects is largely a myth. It always has been.
The important thing, therefore, is for that committed core to be...committed. But in the case of OpenOffice, Sun is both the gatekeeper to commitment and contribution, as Meeks intimates, and Sun's commitment to writing code seems to be dwindling:
It is clear that the number of active contributors Sun brings to the project is continuing to shrink, which would be fine if this was being made up for by a matched increase in external contributors....
Sun and Novell have long been the dominant contributors to OpenOffice, but Sun is apparently cutting back on its contributions without opening up the project to outside contributors. This is the big problem in OpenOffice. Or, rather, one of them. The other? OpenOffice is such a complex, monolithic piece of code that outside, would-be contributors struggle to know how to quickly become productive and contribute.
The answer isn't to start focusing on AbiWord or other open-source alternatives, as TechRepublic's Jack Wallen suggests. The answer is for Sun to turn OpenOffice into a foundation, similar to Eclipse, and get out of the way.
This won't resolve OpenOffice's code problems, but it just might resolve its code commitment problems. Until the latter is resolved, there's little hope, precisely because there's little incentive, for fixing the former.
I read OStatic's review of a stripped-down, speedy version of OpenOffice on Tuesday - Go-oo - with considerable interest.
Go-oo is a fork of OpenOffice version 2.4, for Windows and Linux. It doesn't include some of the features found in OpenOffice 3.0 but it is much faster, and includes some compatibility features that can be handy to have around even if you primarily use the OpenOffice suite...[T]here are several ways to run both, which makes a lot of sense.
I was just about to download and try it out, as it sounds like a useful fork to OpenOffice, when I happened across comments like this below the post:
Maybe I'm off-base, but it looks to me like MS-infected OOo. It's coming from Novell (which I refuse to use), and is paid for by MS-license fees.
From this and other commentators, I gather that Go-oo is being positioned by some as a devious plot from Microsoft to undermine OpenOffice.org. (Cue wicked laughter.) It's not the first time that Novell and Microsoft have been cast as the villains in the OpenOffice debate, but it just seems a bit silly to me.
Of more concern was the TechFlash's news that Bill Gates, Craig Mundie, and other top current and past Microsoft officials make a regular pilgrimage to the patent troll, Intellectual Ventures, to feed it ideas which it turns into patents. Regardless of what one thinks about patents, shouldn't Microsoft be feeding itself with patents, not another company? In other words, shouldn't it be the patent troll?
The commentary on Slashdot is sharp and at times highly insightful. Could Microsoft be feeding Intellectual Ventures ideas that it, in turn, can bludgeon Microsoft's competitors with? It's a stretch, but perhaps not as much of one as would first appear. Intellectual Ventures can pick fights - perhaps with open source? - that are politically nettlesome for Microsoft.
I don't believe that Microsoft is the source of all evil in the software world. Even if it were, it could find more efficient ways to wreak havoc than through OpenOffice (which has its own issues) and Intellectual Ventures.
Citing cost and ease of use considerations, the State of Pahang in Malaysia has officially moved to OpenOffice. I wrote yesterday about how emerging economies may prove to be the best source of growth for desktop Linux. Here is one more proofpoint:
The driving force for this migration seems to be cost of proprietary software and the fear of unlicensed software. OpenOffice.org is the obvious solution to these two pressing problems (thanks, BSA!) What is good is that they have chosen ODF by default, and they are not changing the file format to the binary proprietary ones.
What is interesting is that the public sector in Malaysia is moving towards FOSS independently from any government directive or mandate....
That is good, though the memo (see link above) does reference a preference for open-source software. That preference, however, seems to revolve around cost, not freedom. At the end of the day, lower-cost software that is of equivalent (or better) functionality will win. It just so happens that open source increasingly provides this value.
OpenOffice.org (download for Windows | Mac) has a range of problems: Monolithic architecture, declining interest in fat-client software, etc. But it's primary problem may be its corporate ownership, as Michael Meeks, long-time OpenOffice developer and Novell employee, notes:
I think one of the sad things we see at the moment is the decreasing amount of interest in investing in OpenOffice.org. So we see Sun cutting back their developer count on OpenOffice.org, while we still see them demand ownership for all of the code, which kinda retards other people investing in it....
But the sad thing is [Sun's] failure to build a community around it, getting other people involved. And that's tied to Sun owning OpenOffice.org. It's a Sun project. They own all of the code, they demand ownership rights, and that just really retards developer interest. I mean: [Who] would want to work cleaning someone else's gun?
This isn't just a Sun problem. Michael's comment speaks to a much broader problem as more and more open source goes corporate: How do you encourage development as a corporation?
... Read more
(Credit:
OpenOffice.org)
Much as I like the idea behind OpenOffice, I've never particularly liked the reality. Until now.
As a Mac user, I've long relied on Patrick Luby and the NeoOffice team to deliver the power of OpenOffice in a Mac-friendly UI (the native version of OpenOffice has always required the ugly and clunky X11). Today, however, I downloaded OpenOffice Aqua Beta, and find that my old complaints are just that...old.
One of my biggest peeves? OpenOffice for Mac used to lack embedded video support. Not anymore. I was easily able to drop my favorite video clips into a presentation I had just converted from PowerPoint.
The conversion? Perfect. While I doubt OO.org will be able to perfectly convert all of my files, I don't really expect it to do so: Ever tried converting your files between different versions of Microsoft Office? Good luck on finding perfection.
... Read moreComputerWorld's Preston Gralla has suggested that Google should "embrace" OpenOffice.
If Google really wanted to deliver a knockout punch to Microsoft, it would integrate OpenOffice with Google Docs, and sell support for the combined suite to small businesses, medium-sized business, and large corporations. Given the reach of Google, the quality of OpenOffice, and the lure of free, it's a sure winner.
Well, no. Perhaps Gralla should ask the question, "Why does OpenOffice attract relatively little outside contributions, Sun (which manages it) and Novell excluded? It's a gargantuan ball of code, that's why.
The best open-source projects are modular so that an outsider can quickly become a development insider. OpenOffice largely lacks this feature. It was not originally developed as an open-source project, and its pedigree shows. I like and use OpenOffice, but think Google's developers would be wasted in this exercise.
Could Google fix this? Perhaps. Google could invest a tremendous amount of resources to improve OpenOffice, but with the same amount of resources it could come up with a pretty killer Google Docs offering. So why bother with OpenOffice?
The desktop is yesterday's battle. The cloud is tomorrow's. Google, not Microsoft, is winning tomorrow's battle. How would dropping an anchor in yesterday's war help it?
