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.
Perhaps you didn't notice, but 2008 marked the last year when SourceForge downloads mattered.
Throughout the year, and for a consistent period of several months, the statistics function on SourceForge stopped working. My own company, which had been tracking our downloads closely, suddenly was flying blindly.
Guess what? Life went on. Not only that, but we moved our central downloads repository to our own Web site because we needed consistency that SourceForge apparently couldn't give us. It also became obvious that download tallies were secondary to something SourceForge never gave us: insight into those downloading our software.
The download economy, in short, gave way to the customer economy, at least for Alfresco.
Chris Anderson, longtime champion of "the Long Tail" and the power of giving stuff away, has captured this idea well in a Saturday column in The Wall Street Journal. He argues that the allure of "free" is no longer as strong as it once was for businesses that need to make a buck:
Until September of last year, the model (for companies trying to build a business on the Web) was pretty simple. 1.) Have a great idea. 2.) Raise money to bring it to market, ideally free to reach the largest-possible market. 3.) If it proves popular, raise more money to scale it up. 4.) Repeat until you're bought by a bigger company.
Now steps 2 through 4 are no longer available. So Web start-ups are having to do the unthinkable: come up with a business model that brings in real money while they're still young.
In boom times, it's enough to be popular. In down times, you deservedly die if you don't make money. Open source has shifted from the "free" economy to the customer economy, and downloads have largely become irrelevant.
Of course, open-source companies still need to drive downloads. Downloads feed into leads, which feed into customer conversions.
The critical strategy for open-source vendors is no longer to find ways to goose download numbers; it is to devise product strategies that encourage more paid adoption, something I addressed at OScon in 2006 that has become much more important in the past two years.
This is why Sun Microsystems' MySQL has been changing its business model to accommodate commercial add-on services that help drive paid subscriptions to an otherwise free database. It's why Red Hat has always constrained access to its Linux binary distribution. And it's also why Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth is going to have to move beyond "free" to create a compelling business out of Ubuntu.
SourceForge download statistics didn't work for much of 2008, which helped us to see that they largely don't matter, anyway. Conversions matter. Customers matter. Welcome to the open-source customer economy.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
The next time you're tempted to pull out your copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention or your local LUG (Linux User Group), don't bother. While the open-source world often gets credited with Libertarian leanings, recent poll results from SourceForge, which it provided to me yesterday, don't support this view.
In fact, the poll of US-based Slashdot and SourceForge visitors has 56 percent of this largely open-source crowd voting for big-government Obama, with only 30 percent voting for McCain.
Outside the US, the poll found that 93 percent of international visitors to the sites would vote for Obama if only Acorn would manufacture their registration to vote. (Don't worry - it probably will. :-) A miniscule five percent opted for McCain, and most of them probably thought he was the Scottish usurper to 10 Downing Street, not a US presidential hopeful.
Despite the hippie-esque "free love, free software" soundbites of some early leaders of the open-source (err, "free software") movement, I'm a little surprised by the results.
No, it's not that I think anyone should be excited by McCain's potential presidency, but rather that I view open source as an inherently conservative phenomenon. It is a way of reining in excessive waste and power, and of putting power close to the people (read: system integrators, software users, and developers). These are inherently Republican ideals.
Instead, the Sourceforge crowd seems to be voting for centralized power and government solutions to local problems. Microsoft, in other words.
That said, if I were worried about the accuracy of the polls, I'd just need to correlate the presidential data with the "news source has the least amount of bias or media spin." The top vote? Fox News. Yep. Fox, that paragon of unbiased reporting, barely edged out The New York Times, the other neutral observer of the world's news.
Regardless, as Obama nears a likely four years of doling out stays in the Lincoln Bedroom, we can take heart that absolutely no one outside the US wants to hack his or Senator Biden's email, according to the poll. Could we get those pesky internationals to stop sending spam to Obama's country, too? :-)
Just a few short years ago, there was one open-source hosting service worth considering: Sourceforge.net. It was by no means perfect (Alfresco's analytics, for example, have been down for over a month on Sourceforge, with no apparent urgency to fix the problem), but it was good enough, free, and everyone else used it.
Today, there are multiple options, including Google Code, Microsoft CodePlex, CodeHaus, GitHub, and, interestingly, Canonical's Launchpad.
Yes, Launchpad. Launchpad is the brainchild of Mark Shuttleworth's Ubuntu team, but it has aspirations beyond hosting the Ubuntu code, aspirations that recently attracted MySQL to move its code over to the Launchpad service.
I don't recall Launchpad starting with this third-party code hosting premise in mind, but it certainly has gone there fast. OStatic has an excellent write-up on its new features, and whether they're compelling enough to put your open-source project there.
For a new project, it's definitely an interesting choice. But the larger question is whether an established project - especially commercial projects - gets adequate value from any hosting service to justify hosting with a prefabricated hosting service. SugarCRM moved from Sourceforge to hosting its own project, and other companies have done the same. (My own company is in the process of exploring options.)
Why host your own project? Why take on that cost?
... Read moreThe Sourceforge Community Choice Awards were announced tonight at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, with few surprises.
Well, I suppose the biggest surprise is that people stubbornly vote for the same projects each year, even when they fail to live up to their billing, or have already surpassed their category. I noted before that there were some curious finalists. The winners? Curiouser and curiouser.
- Best Project: OpenOffice.org
- Best Project for the Enterprise: OpenOffice.org
- Best Project for Education: OpenOffice.org
- Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition: phpMyAdmin
- Best Project for Multimedia: VLC
- Best Project for Gamers: XBMC
- Most Likely to Change the World: Linux
- Best New Project: Magento
- Most Likely to Be Accused of Patent Violation: WINE
- Most Likely to Get Users Sued: eMule
- Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins: phpMyAdmin
- Best Tool or Utility for Developers: Notepad++
I can't understand some of these. phpMyAdmin is a project, not a corporation. It cannot be purchased for $1 billion or even $1. Why vote for it in a category in which it doesn't apply?
Also, I like and use OpenOffice, but Best Project? I voted for Drupal. OpenOffice has had years to demonstrate that it's a serious contender, but it has yet to displace Microsoft. Mozilla's Firefox or Yahoo!'s Zimbra would be better contenders, in my view, than OpenOffice has proved to be. And OpenOffice as Best Project for the Enterprise? Well, perhaps, but not until enterprises actually start using it in any significant quantity. Today, lots of individuals do, but few enterprises in any systematic fashion.
As for Linux, well, hasn't it already changed the world?
Regardless of my quibbles, these are excellent projects. I encourage you to take a look at them and, even better, download and use them.
Sourceforge.net has announced its 2008 Community Choice finalists, and includes a wide range of projects that I'm seeing for the first time. Sure, there are old favorites like OpenOffice and Firebird, but when was the last time you used Sphinx (SQL full-text search engine), FreeMind (mind mapper), or Habari (next-generation blogging platform)?
Some of the finalists - or, rather where they were voted - are quite silly. Under the "Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition" category, only a small fraction of the candidates are actually corporations capable of being purchased for $1 billion. (Zenoss, Magento, and Talend welcome your $1 billion. :-)
Others are a little closer to the truth. Under "Most Likely to Change the World," Linux and Ubuntu both feature, though arguably they already have. OpenOffice also features there but, come on, if it hasn't changed the world by now, why should we expect it to do so tomorrow?
... Read more
