One App Store to rule them all?
(Credit: Apple)Apple has an app store, of course. So does Microsoft. Google has two, one for Android and now one for Wave. In fact, it's hard to find anyone who doesn't have an app store these days.
We're swimming in app stores. Or drowning.
I'm serious. At the Symbian conference in London on Tuesday, I attended a panel that was overrun with app stores. Nokia, Symbian, GetJar, Sony Ericsson, Handmark, and Handango were all promoting their respective app stores, each talking about how great theirs is.
They're probably right. They probably are all great. But how am I, as a lay consumer, going to figure out which one to use?
More particularly, how will developers decide which platforms to target?
After all, everyone wants to be a platform these days. Does that mean that no one is?
Developers may be spoiled for choice, but "choice" in this case may not be what they want. Developers need to feed their families and will follow the money. Money is more easily made when choice is manageable (which is a euphemism for "limited").
This means we'll see plenty of application developers remain with Apple (though it's debatable whether the iPhone is the land of milk and honey for anyone but Apple), but we'll also continue to see a stampede to Google Android.
At present, every other mobile platform is playing for third place, but this could change: Symbian, as a foundation, is in a good position to launch an effective challenge to both Apple and Google if it can get its marketing and execution right.
Outside of mobile, it's unclear what role app stores will play. It's nice that Google Wave is getting an app store, but it's just one more "forge" among many. Every vendor (my employer, included) seems to feel an irresistible urge to create a forge/app store where third-party developers can "add value" to their "platforms."
Do we really need these? Or do we need more general repositories like Google Code and SourceForge?
I wish I had a definitive answer. I'm just not sure that these competing app stores do anything more than appeal to vendor vanity, and they could end up causing customer confusion.
As a consumer, I don't want to have to think about sorting among competing app stores. I just want applications.
Presumably, if I use a Sony Ericsson phone, I'll automatically find myself within its app store (unless my wireless provider doesn't slot me into its app store first, that is). But if that's the case, what's the point of making a big deal over a glorified catalog of applications that work with my given device/software/etc.?
It strikes me that app stores, like the cloud, are simply a way to dress up old ideas. If they help to organize potential buyers and sellers of software, great. But I still think I'd prefer meta-repositories of applications, similar to SourceForge, than individual application repositories for every single device or piece of software that I happen to buy.
How about you?
SourceForge on Thursday announced its acquisition of Ohloh, operator of Ohloh.net, an open-source data and community service. While the acquisition makes sense--Ars Technica dubs the move "the latest in a string of very smart moves that are rapidly turning SourceForge into the collaboration powerhouse that it originally aspired to become"--I wanted to know more about the "how" of the deal.
When did the deal take shape, and how did it come about?
To get answers, I asked Jon Sobel, group president of media at SourceForge, to provide some details.
Q: How and when did this deal first begin to take shape?
Sobel: The companies first began to explore combining about a year ago. We took our time, and got to know each other well. Specific deal terms took shape about one to two months ago.
This is the first acquisition for SourceForge in a while. Was there a particular pain that prompted the deal?
Sobel: No. As we've been steadily building out our platform and thinking through how to most effectively serve our key constituents---developers, consumers, and advertisers---we've felt effective collection and analysis of data is important. We began working collaboratively with Ohloh several months ago, and doing some work together for shared clients. We worked well together, got good feedback from clients and potential clients, and felt this would be a good time for both companies to do this acquisition.
Fair enough. Tell me more about how you are planning to use Ohloh's data to create better targeted advertising.
Sobel: Ohloh's recommendation-based insights will help us better identify, target, and validate marketing efforts with a data-driven approach. Marketers are responding well to this idea in early discussions with them.
Ohloh tracks informations from 3,500 code libraries on developers, users, projects, commits, and lines of code, and is also developing metrics around social activity on developer forums and on Facebook and Twitter. These metrics span a variety of dimensions, such as timme, verticals, open-source licenses, technology and API's, programming languages, IDE's, geography, and operating-system platforms.
With this data, we will suggest to marketers which projects or environments within SourceForge are likely to best match their goals and be most effective in helping them; we will target their marketing accordingly; and over time we will measure changes (both on our forge and on other forges) in the adoption and use of the products and services being marketed.
We do some targeting already, but this takes it to another level. We also hope to offer Ohloh-generated insights about our hosted projects and others' to both our audience and to our clients. SourceForge has historically surfaced only a small fraction of all the data generated on our forge. Ohloh will help us include additional data, and better analyze and show the data we already have.
What changes can SourceForge users expect to see in the future as a result of the acquisition?
Sobel: More data about projects from other forges, more data on our sites, and maybe even a little bit more of Ohloh's AJAXy style. In time, Ohloh may also help us provide links to and services (such as recommendations and reviews) for projects on other forges.
How does this fit into some of your other recent moves like your Hosted Apps and new software configuration management (SCM) support? What can we expect next?
Sobel: This is all consistent with Hosted Apps and our additional SCM offerings. All are part of our parallel efforts to:
- Help "creators" by building out our forge's functionality as a modern developer workbench with a more robust data platform.
- Improve our experience for consumers, again through better use of data and more modern consumer functionality, such as recommendations.
- Serve both audiences by collecting and making available data and insights about projects from other forges.
We're working hard to launch an improved version of our consumer experience within the next two months.
(end of interview)SourceForge, apparently tired of being taken for granted and watching open-source projects move to Google Code and other repositories, has been active lately on a range of fronts. The Ohloh acquisition is just one more example of a company making some bold moves to reinvent itself.
This bodes well for SourceForge and, in turn, augers well for open source.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
SourceForge, despite competition, remains the leading repository for open-source projects. Many of the world's best open-source projects--JBoss, MySQL, SugarCRM, and others--start there, and plenty never leave.
For these reasons and others, each year I look forward to the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards, which allow the open-source community to vote on the industry's top projects. SourceForge has just announced that nominations are now open for the Sourceforge.net Community Choice Awards 2009.
While such direct democracy has yielded some odd choices in the past, the competition remains one of the best places to discover up-and-coming open-source projects.
This year, the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards get a few new categories, as well as some old favorites:
- Best Project
- Best Project for the Enterprise
- Best Project for Gamers
- Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins
- Best Visual Design
- Best Tool or Utility for Developers
- Best Commercial Open Source Project
- Best Project for Academia
- Best Project for Multimedia
- Best Project for Government
- Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything
- Best New Project
I really like the expansion to include commercial open-source projects as a specific category, and I think it's telling that there's now a category for government, which has seen such significant adoption in open source in the past few years, as well as academia. Open source is quickly branching out beyond its foundations in infrastructure software, and the awards categories reflect this.
Nominations will be accepted until May 29, and the 10 projects with the most nominations in each category will become finalists. The winners will be announced at a party held at the Agenda Lounge in San Jose, Calif., starting at 6 p.m. PDT on July 23 during the week of OSCON.
I'll be there. Will you? Regardless, nominate your favorite open-source projects now.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Many open-source projects would love to offer a hosted version of their products, but lack the resources to be able to do so. SourceForge, the world's largest repository of open-source projects, is therefore stepping into the void to host open-source applications.
The company actually announced this new program in October 2008, initially with just three applications: LimeSurvey, MediaWiki, and phpBB. Since then, SourceForge has added another half-dozen or so applications, and plans to grow the service further.
In a conversation I had on Thursday with Ross Turk, SourceForge community manager, I suggested that this could be a way for SourceForge to more effectively monetize its SourceForge.net asset. (Currently, the company advertises on the site, including on the applications it hosts.) Why not charge commercial open-source vendors to host their projects? Or why not charge users for access to hosted applications?
Turk responded that SourceForge doesn't have any current plans to charge for the Hosted Applications service, preferring to keep its model focused on advertising. Given the company's recent success in this area, I can understand. I still believe, however, that users and commercial open-source companies would happily pay for the service. Something for the company to consider....
The service isn't for everyone, of course. SugarCRM, for example, has made hosting a central part of its offering, and currently 30 percent of its customers pay SugarCRM to host their Sugar deployments. But for those projects that aren't ready to build out their own hosting infrastructure, or would simply prefer to offload that task to someone with more expertise, SourceForge Hosted Applications may be a viable option.
It's also an option that I suspect others like Google Code will take up. As open-source project repositories seek to differentiate themselves, hosting is almost certainly going to be a differentiating service. Just as Amazon has packaged up its excess computing capacity in its EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service so, too, can I see Google using its excess server capacity to host open-source projects.
For now, SourceForge stands alone in offering to host its tenants applications. In the future? Well, anything is possible.
Disclosure: I am an advisor to SugarCRM.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
SourceForge recently reported results for its second fiscal quarter of 2009, and seems to have finally found its rhythm. The company, which for years tried to split its time between software (SourceForge Enterprise, purchased by Collabnet in 2007) and media (Slashdot, ITManagersJournal, Linux.com, etc.), and struggled to tell a coherent story.
As its most recent results suggest, however, SourceForge is beginning to find consistency as a media company, as demonstrated in its year-over-year growth in key areas:
- Ad Network revenue increased 84 percent;
- Premium product revenue grew 100% to $1.0 million;
- Media uniques grew 9 percent to 36 million;
- Revenue per thousand page views increased to $9.59 from $9.36, while page views increase 2 percent.
While SourceForge hasn't seen double-digit growth in most areas, it has seen consistent growth across its product line. This is good news for the company and, in turn, for its product portfolio which makes up a significant part of the open-source online community. Take away Slashdot and Sourceforge.net, for example, and open source would suffer.
It's therefore encouraging that the company has seen three trends in its fiscal 2009:
- Revenues from ad networks has grown;
- Revenue from standard Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) banner ads has shrunk
- Revenue from premium, custom interactive ads has grown.
Even as the market contracts, SourceForge has grown. In part it is demonstrating the execution of a winning, Google-esque business model: provide serious informational content in a lively forum and target ads to the audience that gathers to consume it.
But it's also showing that old brands can revive themselves if they focus on their core competence. SourceForge (then VA Software) was never a successful software company, and diluted its media brands by pretending to be such. Now that it can focus on delivering compelling content and intelligently advertising to its readership, it's doing much better.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
The dam holding back U.S. federal adoption of open source just burst with the introduction of the Defense Department's Forge.mil.
Forge.mil is an open-source project repository built in the image of SourceForge.net, Federal Computer Week reported Friday.
Despite being based on SourceForge's technology, Forge.mil has one significant difference: security. As David Mihelcic, chief technology officer for the Defense Information Systems Agency, told Federal Computer Week, the Department of Defense's code repository has been "upgraded to meet DOD security requirements," with smart cards used to provide log-in credentials.
There are only three open-source projects hosted at Forge.mil so far, and it's initially restricted to the Defense Department's technology community, but I suspect this number will soon increase as various federal agencies discover it and ask to collaborate on code through it. It's also a new way for vendors to participate in Defense Department projects, as Mihelcic noted about one project, which is designed to automate server configuration:
"Our intern had to stand up 50 Linux machines in a lab and he said, 'Boy I don't want to do this by hand; why can't I use Bastille to do this for me?'" Mihelcic said. "He looked at Bastille and saw it couldn't do all the things he needed, so he started an open-source project. He got folks like Red Hat to jump in and participate."
All of the code is open for public view, though only those with the right Defense Department credentials can edit or contribute to the projects. As the public sees the code, however, it's almost certain to lead to individuals wanting to contribute to the code.
The Defense Department, which has been pushing hard to get involved in open source for some time as a consumer, is now involved as a developer. In just a few years, open source has gone from being "risky" to one of the best ways to mitigate risk.
Editor's note: The code is actually based on CollabNet's SourceForge Enterprise code, not the SourceForge.net code base. CollabNet enables Forge.mil.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Valleywag reports that SourceForge.net was hacked Wednesday, resulting in site downtime while SourceForge tracked down the hacker. SourceForge's Ross Turk confirms the report:
We played a game of cat and mouse with a "security enthusiast" from Europe yesterday. :) No harm done, though, and everything's running smoothly.
Given that projects upload their code to the SourceForge repository on a regular basis, there's not any serious cause for concern that a security breach would be a long-term threat. Additionally, it's doubtful that anyone would download and install any critically important software in the minutes or hours a security breach might allow, get it into production, and incur serious liability as a result. Last time I checked, enterprise software adoption and implementation doesn't work quite that fast.
Still, it's cause for SourceForge to bolster its defenses, especially how it gets the word out in case of a breach.
From where did you download your last open-source project? In nearly all cases, the answer is, "SourceForge.net." With more than 25 million visitors to SourceForge each month, it's not surprising. What is surprising is that SourceForge has never really done much to monetize its huge traffic and central role in the open-source ecosystem.
Until now. SourceForge just released its SourceForge Marketplace, and it promises to shake up the way open source is bought and sold.
The SourceForge Marketplace complements commercial and community efforts to directly monetize open-source projects. For example, Openbravo could sell its software/support subscriptions on the Marketplace, opening up a new channel. SourceForge will continue to be the center of the open-source download universe, but imagine if some percentage of those could be directly monetized on the SourceForge site. I think that's pretty compelling.
What interests me most, however, is what this means for all those projects that currently don't have easy ways to build a business around a budding project.
... Read moreJames Maguire has written a great article tracing the history of SourceForge, one that is well worth reading, if for no other reason than to get some historical context for one of open source's enduring treasures. SourceForge has become creaky in its eight years, and hasn't kept up with the times in many ways (causing several would-be anchor tenants to host their projects elsewhere).
But it's still a fantastic tool for any new open-source project, and hence the place where most open-source projects are born.
Back in 1999, the folks at VA Linux were just crazy enough to think launching a site for open-source projects was a good idea:
When [VA Linux] went public in December (symbol: LNUX), its stock rocketed from $30 to almost $240 in one day ? a delirious 700 percent return. [Matt's note: I tried desperately to get shares for this. I failed. :-) ]Amid these dizzying champagne fortunes, the company had an idea. A wildly optimistic idea.
... Read more
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