I spent some time with a large customer of Alfresco's today, and heard an interesting reason for why choosing open source was critical to them. Granted, it's a large media company, and so its needs may not fit those of most other enterprise customers.
But I thought the importance it placed on open source was enlightening:
Open source is critical for us, because on our old [proprietary] content management system, we were completely dependent on the vendor if something went wrong. Alfresco's open-source CMS enables us to get into the code and start working on a fix to any problems immediately, then join up with you to ensure the fix makes its way into your supported product.
Phil Moore, formerly Morgan Stanley's executive director of UNIX Engineering, once made this point at the Open Source Business Conference, arguing that his team could provide better software support than most vendors because of its proximity to the problems. Long term, enterprises don't want to be in the support business. Short term, some of them have to be, given the critical nature of their systems.
Open source makes customers and vendors equal partners, and gives enterprises the ability to resolve immediate needs on their time, not the vendor's, when necessary. It's not for every enterprise, of course, but it just might be for you.
Disclosure: I am an employee of Alfresco.
An old friend from the open-source world, Ira Heffan, called me today about his company, TopCoder. Ira is a smart guy so I figured anything with which he was involved must be good.
And it is. At its most basic, TopCoder stages programming competitions, both for itself (that is, its direct consulting clients) and for third parties like Google. Companies hire TopCoder to stage competitions to build functionality for them (as well as to scout for new talent). TopCoder also provides consulting services and uses competitions to create the requested applications, and heavily reuses its portfolio of applications and components to drive down development costs.
As an example, TopCoder has its premier competition in Las Vegas next week at the 2008 TopCoder Open (May 12 through 15), hosting 120 finalists from 30 countries. $260,000 in prize money is on the line.
Ira told me that one developer made over $500,000 last year in TopCoder prize money. Not too shabby. This, coupled with recruiting interest from top companies means that developers may be winning themselves a new job, as well as a competition.
However, it's actually a lower-profile component of TopCoder's business that I find the most fascinating: Bug Races.
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Whenever I'm writing something here and my subconscious whispers, "You're probably wrong," I should learn to stop and ask. Alas, I'm a blogger with a day job, so I usually hit "Publish" and wait for someone on the other side of the issue to set me straight.
Such is the case today with Mozilla's Firefox 3.0 release, which I (and a wide range of others) reported would be shipping with 80% of its (remaining) blocker bugs/issues still unresolved. The truth is not so simple, as it turns out.
Mike Shaver of Mozilla clarifies "blocker bugs" and puts things in perspective:
At some point, of course, the number of "bugs we'll ship with" will hit 100%, unless we manage to produce the first piece of bug free software I?ve ever worked with, but even with such numerical truisms aside, the picture here isn?t as simple as it seems.
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Whatever happened to open-source projects being released according to development readiness, rather than an arbitrary release schedule?
Mozilla seems to have forgotten this, with The New York Times reporting that the upcoming Firefox 3.0 set to ship with only 20 percent of its remaining 700 "blocker" (serious enough to justify postponing a release) bugs resolved before it ships.
Of course, Mozilla has already fixed over 11,000 bugs, according to Mozilla developer Asa Dotzler. Even so, that doesn't answer the apparent fact that the Firefox development community is planning to ship a product before a wide range of known blocker bugs are resolved. (Firefox 3 meeting notes can be perused here.)
For now, the mountain to climb appears quite high, as The New York Times notes:
As Mozilla pushes to post Beta 1 of Firefox 3.0, it has asked developers to prioritize already-identified bugs so that the most important can be fixed. But according to notes of yesterday's Firefox 3.0 status meeting, that will leave about eight in 10 bugs untouched.
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In the beginning was the Chumby. And on the second day the community created the BUG, the latest entrant in the open-source hardware market.
Open-source hardware hasn't really taken off...yet. But Dave Rosenberg today alerted me to a new player in the space from BugLabs, which hopes to develop in much the same way that open-source software does. Here's BUG's premise:
BUG is a collection of easy-to-use, open source hardware modules, each capable of producing one or more Web services. These modules snap together physically and the services connect together logically to enable users to easily build, program and share innovative devices and applications. With BUG, we don't define the final products - you do.
Silicon Alley Insider took a look and likes what it saw. But the most interesting thing from its report was how small the (initial) market is:
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