The Open Road

Some of us take longer than others. Tim O'Reilly moved on years ago from talking about open-source licenses and instead focused on the importance of data to business success. In the open-source industry, we heard his words but clearly didn't understand them.

We kept selling software through our "awkward teenage years," even as Google, 37Signals, Facebook, and others gave it away.

Years later, as Google pays for mountains of open-source code by aggregating data and selling data-rich services, we're starting to grok O'Reilly's message. It's what makes companies like Path Intelligence so interesting.

Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady notes:

Much has been made of the lack of an obvious revenue model for properties like Twitter, and to a lesser extent, Facebook. But when looking at the organizations' balance sheets...it seems self-evident that the value of the data assets involved is seriously underreported...

The economic value being assigned to data helps to explain why, while being sympathetic to questions about Twitter business models, I've never been overwhelmingly concerned. Where the revenue model for the dot-com era "eyeballs" strategy was equal parts indistinct and aspirational, the Web 2.0 businesses are being built out in an era of customers increasingly predisposed to analytics and data driven decision making. In other words, there's a market for their most valuable asset.

As Microsoft's Windows, Office, Xbox, and SharePoint businesses demonstrate, the real money is in the platform business, which is, or which can be, a data business. The more businesses and developers that build upon your software, the more valuable that software becomes. Even systems like Twitter are being turned into platforms.

But how you build the platform is increasingly important. Microsoft is Platform 1.0. Open source is Platform 2.0. It's a more efficient way to build community around a core, which is why Google and other savvy companies increasingly turn to open source as a fundamental way to entice developers, which developers create more software which invites more adoption which yields more data...you get the picture.

It's also why I believe Google Android, in its platform battle with Apple's iPhone, will ultimately prevail, so long as it can work in peaceful coexistence with the developer community (which has not always been the case).

Unlike many open-source companies, however, Google et al. have the singular benefit that since their business is data, not software, they can shepherd open-source development without taking a heavy hand in community management. More open source leads to more adoption, which leads to more data, which leads to the Googles of the world being able to give away even more software for "less than free."

It's genius. And it's amazing that it took so many of us so long to heed the counsel O'Reilly offered years ago.

In sum, this isn't a suggestion that companies should forgo profits in exchange for mindless popularity contests, as 37Signals' Jason Fried rightly pillories.

Instead, it's a call to look for ways to fund open-source development with rich, data-driven businesses. Most open-source companies focus too much on software, and most Web 2.0 companies focus too much on data. It's the blend of the two that makes a company successful.

Just ask Google.

(As an end note, I think Gartner's Brian Prentice is on to something when he speculates that enterprise applications may increasingly be communally developed by IT end users, though perhaps coordinated by vendors. It's a very interesting prospect, one that will enable even more open-source development in an area where data may not fund it.)

Oracle is determined to keep MySQL if it acquires Sun, but the reason likely has little to do with open source and everything to do with Microsoft. Oracle doesn't compete with open source. Not really. Open source is simply a means to an end, and in the case of MySQL, a means to denting Microsoft's rising strength in emerging markets where Oracle's expensive database technology doesn't resonate.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has said that he has no intention of spinning off MySQL to win EU approval of Oracle's bid for Sun. This isn't because Ellison has a soft spot for open source, but rather because MySQL helps Oracle compete in markets--like Web applications, small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and emerging markets--where its existing database technology doesn't compete well, but in which Microsoft's SQL Server does.

In fact, in a recent survey by Evans Data, over 50 percent of developers in the emerging markets of China, India, Eastern Europe, and Latin America use Microsoft's SQL Server, compared to 46 percent using MySQL.

Oracle database technology? It's used, but not nearly as extensively.

MySQL gives Oracle a club with which to beat Microsoft. It's not about open source. It's about the MySQL developer community and its competitive price point, two things that Microsoft also has going for it. Arguably, though, open source provides Oracle a strong competitive differentiator against Microsoft in these markets.

Even so, I think we'll eventually see open source aiding both sides in this battle, as Microsoft learns to drop its acrimonious stance toward open source and instead strategically embrace it, as IBM, Oracle, and others have done before it.

Oracle can't afford to abandon MySQL. It's the key to unlocking its ability to effectively compete with Microsoft in tomorrow's big markets.

Microsoft is launching an open-source foundation. Google is promising to keep user data portable. Both moves seem to cut against the financial self-interest of the two technology giants. Have the gods gone crazy, or are the business strategies of the industry's biggest players more subtle than "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish"?

With a steady adoption of open-source business and development strategies, Microsoft has gone from open-source hater to open-source embracer in just a couple of years:

• Created its own open-source foundation, the CodePlex Foundation.
• Launched CodePlex, an open-source project-hosting site.
• Started actively contributing to outside open-source projects, including those of the Apache Software Foundation, which it also financially supports.
• Embeds open-source code such as JQuery into its own products.
• Releases complementary open-source projects to augment its customer relationship management software, SharePoint, and other products.
• Received "unanimous approval" by the Open Source Initiative for a few open-source licenses.

This isn't to whitewash all that Microsoft has not done well vis-a-vis open source (e.g., I'm not a fan of its patent-licensing arrangements, including the "interoperability" agreement with Novell), but clearly, Microsoft has been actively adopting open source as part of its business strategy. I'll address the "Why?" question below.

Google, for its part, has long supported open-source software. And it's easy to see why: the company makes its money from data, not software. The more people that have access to a great Web experience through Firefox or Chrome, or have computer access through low-cost Chrome OS-based Netbooks, the better, as they'll almost inevitably find their way to data-rich services from Google.

Google, in other words, has a strong interest in promoting open source and closed data.

All of this makes Google's Data Liberation Front--"an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products--so intriguing. The DLF appears to be giving away Google's single best option for monetizing its user base.

What is Google thinking? One answer may be that Google is trying to head off government scrutiny and intervention. As CNET News' Tom Krazit posits, "anything Google can do to show that it isn't planning to create an impenetrable fortress surrounding user data, it's going to do."

That's one cynical and likely accurate view. But I think that there's more to the story.

Google has created an array of services that increasingly dominate their respective markets. Consumers and businesses are apparently very happy to give more of their time and attention to Google products.

As such, Google's primary concern revolves around keeping those users from leaving. While the DLF makes it easier for customers to leave Google, it also obviates the need to do so. So long as Google customers feel sure that they can leave on their own terms, they likely won't.

Microsoft is starting to learn the same thing. Its customers tend to use Microsoft products because they work, not because some evil genius in Redmond dreamed up diabolical ways to keep them locked in through closed file formats.

Don't believe me? Look at Microsoft's support for CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services), a new content standard that promises to do for content management systems what SQL did for the database market. CMIS enables information portability between different content repositories. (Disclosure: Alfresco, my employer, was a founding member of CMIS, along with IBM, Microsoft, EMC, and others.)

In other words, CMIS makes it easy to move content out of SharePoint into, say, Documentum. It also enables application vendors to write to the CMIS standard, rather than specifically to SharePoint.

Microsoft has been actively engaged in drafting the CMIS specification and appears to be a strong proponent of it. Why? Why would Microsoft, which has much to gain from SharePoint being the center of a new lock-in strategy, support an open standard that makes it easy to move content out of SharePoint and into competing repositories?

Because Microsoft knows that it can win.

Take Microsoft's pre-CMIS partnership with Documentum. As CMS Watch anecdotally references, SharePoint is much easier to use than Documentum, making any partnership/integration between the two a largely one-way street from Documentum to SharePoint, just one reason that SharePoint has boomed, even as the economy has busted. This is only going to get better for Microsoft with CMIS interoperability.

Interoperability favors the vendor whose products are easier to use. By opening up, Microsoft is opening its doors to more customers and, hence, more money.

Google and Microsoft aren't supporting open source or open standards or open data because they grew up as Boy Scouts or Girls Scouts, and feel that it's the right thing to do.

Rather, they're increasingly engaged in open business strategies because they recognize the financial rewards that can stem from doing so. Openness is not a religion; it's a business strategy--a strategy that Microsoft and Google are learning to play too.

The business intelligence community has made much of its ability to transform the way enterprises operate, and even the way the world works. Open source takes this to the next level, as OStatic recently described. And yet, as exciting as open-source business intelligence is, it's not what gets me out of bed every morning before sunrise. What drove me out of bed to climb 2,474 feet on my mountain bike this morning is the personal intelligence movement or, more accurately, the personal data movement.

Tim O'Reilly talks eloquently about "data as the Intel Inside" of companies like Google, and he's right. But the data-driven businesses that are changing my life are applications on my iPhone that remind me to exercise, to avoid that second helping of chocolate mousse, and that help me manage my personal finances.

It used to be that the more ambitious among us managed our time and goals with a Franklin day planner. "Goal: Lose 20 pounds. Run five miles each day. Etc."

Today, with our iPhone strapped to our arm or thrown into our Camelback, we're still managing our goals but the data feedback is unforgiving, instantaneous, and deeply motivating. Lose It!, for example, is a phenomenal weight-loss tool. I've mostly been using it to maintain my preferred weight, but I've watched my good friend Bryce Roberts melt away 30-plus pounds while getting into the best biking shape he's ever been in.

Not that Runkeeper hasn't helped. Both Bryce and I use it to track our mountain bike rides. Using the iPhone's built-in GPS capabilities, Runkeeper tracks my rides, calling out to me each mile what my pace has been, motivating me to ride harder. As if that weren't motivation enough, I have Runkeeper set to automatically post my times and workouts to Twitter: I often refuse to rest simply because I know my Twitter friends are going to pillory me if they see a weak pace.

This ability to minutely track my exercise and diet regime so easily has literally changed my life, so much so that I've been exploring other areas that could be improved through data feedback and analysis.

One that I discovered over the weekend is Ego, which tracks Google Analytics statistics, Twitter follower counts, and more. I had already been tracking my statistics for this CNET blog on an hourly basis, for example, to see which posts were resonating and where, but Ego now gives me the ability to take that obsession on the road with me.

Given the recession, never before has it been more important that my wife and I manage to a budget. I've been a Wesabe user for a year or two now, and am just now starting to experiment with Wesabe on the iPhone. My wife, however, uses Mint, a similar service, which also is available on the iPhone.

I'm sure that such tools can be used to excess, but my experience thus far has been that they greatly improve the control I have over my life. These iPhone applications have helped me to track my progress against personal goals and, in so doing, have facilitated that progress.

Even as the Googles of the world get rich on the aggregation of our personal data, other companies like the makers of Runkeeper enriching our lives by making data personally useful and actionable. To make this happen, we simply needed mobile devices to be as powerful as they were ever-present with us.

Now that this has happened, there is no end to the possibilities our personal data affords us, especially as application providers find ways to allow us to mingle our data with others to drive enhanced value for both parties.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

In a new study, Evans Data says that the developer population in established economies is expected to decline by 35 percent this year compared with last year, as InformationWeek reports. Despite this dearth of developers, however, we continue to see an explosion of open-source projects and social-Web applications.

What gives?

It's very possible, of course, that a dwindling number of developers is pushing more of its development work to the public eye of the Web, creating the appearance of more development activity even as the total number of lines of code written declines. Rising unemployment might be contributing to this.

In other words, perhaps that out-of-work Citigroup developer, who used to spend all of her time as one developer among many contributing to a big intranet application, has now launched an open-source project (or two) to ease the burden of unemployment?

Or perhaps the development tools made available for writing Facebook applications, for example, make it easier to crank out more projects by fewer people. Maybe productivity gains are enabling fewer developers to do more.

I'm not sure. But it does seem that the developer drought, spurred by a sickly economy, isn't having an adverse effect on open-source and social-Web development. If anything, the weak economy may be encouraging more development, not less.

How would you explain the increased number in open-source and social-Web applications, in light of a reported decreasing developer population?

UPDATE @ 11:51 PDT: As noted in the comments below, I inadvertently describe a 35-percent decrease in the developer population, rather than a 35-percent decrease in developer growth. That said, the same quandary/question remains: the pace of new development in open source and the social Web exceeds the growth of the developer population. Your thoughts on why?

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

The European Commission has a bold plan for improving software quality: make software developers liable for their code. The purported reason? Consumer peace of mind, according to the European Union commissioner of consumer affairs, Meglena Kuneva:

If we want consumers to shop around and exploit the potential of digital communications, then we need to give them confidence that their rights are guaranteed. That means putting in place and enforcing clear consumer rights that meet the high standards already existing in the main street. [The] internet has everything to offer consumers, but we need to build trust so that people can shop around with peace of mind.

Because, you know, the Internet has really struggled with consumers due to the poor quality of code. Google has a wide range of products in beta that really struggle to find users because who could possibly trust the beta version of Gmail, News, etc.?

What tripe.

I'm personally not against software liability, but have yet to discover a software vendor, open source or proprietary, that tries to evade responsibility for the quality of its products. In other words, I think this is a case of regulators seeking to justify their existence, not a plan for actually improving anyone's software experience.

On that note, the EC should be careful to avoid hurting the software industry, and minimizing its benefits, even as it seeks to help consumers of that industry by ensuring those benefits. For example, one of the reasons that software remains comparatively inexpensive is that the cost of legal liability is not baked into the purchase price. The EC's action could well result in pricing software beyond the reach of many current consumers and businesses.

Don't worry, some may claim, there's always open-source software! It's free and high quality!

Well, yes, but oddly enough, it also comes with absolutely no warranties, indemnification, etc., at least when used without commercial backing. It's a good thing, too: imagine releasing your software free-of-charge onto SourceForge.net, only to get hit with a lawsuit because some company's business was hurt because your software allegedly failed to work as expected. Talk about a raw deal.

On this point, Glyn Moody quotes security guru Bruce Schneier, who suggests that open source could get a free pass because open-source software is distributed without contracts. Open source, in other words, might be the ultimate get-out-of-EC-regulation-free card.

If this free pass works as advertised, presumably we'd see more software companies distributing software under open-source licenses, and only taking the blame for the proprietary add-ons/extensions that complement this open-source software. It's unclear how this would be helpful to the consumers the EC is straining to protect, but it's the stance I'd take if I were a vendor.

In this way, the EC's proposed changes to software liability could end up leaving businesses and consumers with less protection, not more, with open source providing a convenient escape hatch. Perhaps this is good as it means more software released under open-source licenses. But the idea of open source used as a means to evade legal liability doesn't sit well with me, and likely would ruin the positive connotations that currently attach to open source.

As noted, the Web seems to have thrived despite (or perhaps because of?) the lack of software-liability regulation. Open source, too, has fared exceptionally well, and has yielded significant benefits to companies and consumers...despite offering exactly zero software liability.

But this is the problem when bureaucrats, not common sense, rule. Subscription-based business models protect commercial customers, and open-data policies protect consumers, far better than any software-liability regime can. The freedom to change software vendors is a far better antidote to poor software quality than some EC bureaucrat.

In short, despite getting a lot of bad press lately, the market remains the best way to protect customers. If the EC would spend more time ensuring open markets, instead of trying to regulate closed markets, European consumers and businesses would find much better software protection.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Thursday I blogged that I'd like to see Google (or someone...Apple, Mozilla, someone else?) aggregate social Web applications so that I don't have to trip all over the Web checking what so-and-so is doing on Facebook, then sprinting back to LinkedIn to help someone else on a job search.

Judging from the comments, quite a few people disagree, to a great extent due to mistrust of Google with their data. I can appreciate that, though Google has expressed a desire to open up social-networking applications with open-data policies.

Regardless of promises, many mistrust Google because it's so darned big. This, as James Stewart reminds us in The Wall Street Journal, is not a problem in itself: there is nothing illegal and much to love in a natural monopoly.

Me? I don't have a problem with how big Google is. I just wonder if any of us work for anyone else anymore.

I find myself tweaking headlines and my initial paragraphs to accommodate Google News. As important as Digg, Slashdot, and other content aggregators can be, I find they drive less traffic than top placement on Google.

I'm not alone in this. The newspaper industry is up in arms about Google's power, yet is incapable of cutting Google off because so much of its traffic comes from Google, as CNET reports. Google's Marissa Mayer recently advised the newspaper industry on how to optimize its content for Google, which strikes some as galling given that Google may not be all that efficient at monetizing content.

And yet we cater to Google. We write news and blogs (and tweets and wiki updates and...) for Google. Even dead writers apparently write for Google. We write open-source software that Google consumes. We craft our Web sites to ensure they show well on Google.

Google started by offering a way to search the Web. It now effectively owns the Web because it's such an efficient way to make sense of the Web's noise. Lest we become riled up, Google is trying to make us feel better about its heft with a new charm offensive, as CNET reports.

But we don't really need Google to change. We need competitors to compete. We need Microsoft to start competing in earnest (Yikes! Did I say that??). Microsoft talks about being disruptive in search, but I've yet to see it. Let's hope it's not another tired retread of Google search as both Yahoo and Microsoft have tried before.

Or how about this for disruptive? Perhaps we need Mozilla to step into a role as the Web's primary platform, and really change the rules of the game for Google. For those interested in bludgeoning Google, perhaps there's a way to do that by contributing to Mozilla's Firefox project, and helping to steer it in a way that is beneficial for a non-Google patrolled and controlled Web?

Regardless, we don't need a crippled Google. Instead, we need serious competition. We also need to stop trying to look back to the past of content monetization and instead learn from Google, without necessarily capitulating to Google. Content creators need to change, even as Google's competitors need to change.

Google? It should just keep doing what it's doing.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Cisco has been on a software acquisition spree this past year, acquiring Jabber, PostPath, and now Tidal Software, among others. But as Cisco goes after the data center with its new Unified Computing push, one open-source company should be on Cisco's radar screen: Reductive Labs, creators of the Puppet project, a framework for automating system administration.

Tidal is a performance-monitoring solution for data centers. It's a nice start, and a definite upgrade over Cisco's baseline Unified Computing management tools. But as Forrester senior analyst Glenn O'Donnell suggests, "Cisco is the new kid in town in the data center and will need a solid software strategy to go against HP and IBM."

In other words, Cisco needs a more holistic data-center management strategy, and Puppet could play a key role. Puppet gives Cisco the ability to semantically encode "why" instead of just "what" or "how" into data center solutions, making data center deployments more manageable over time:

I was only seeing the static state of the working system. What if you want to change things? If you have working images, you have to reconstruct "What" by discovery, good luck with "Why." If you are lucky, it was you that set up the systems and it wasn't over six months ago. The "What" and "Why" were apparent to someone, potentially you, when the systems were first set up, but now you just have this bucket of bootable bits that ostensibly does something. If it isn't working, or there is a need to change something significant, the choice is poking around the bucket of bits until the new "What" is in place or starting over with a new "Why" that is lost as soon as the new image is finished.

If Puppet is building your services, "What" and "Why" can be recorded, clarified, recovered, and manipulated. Version control becomes straight forward, manageable, and transparent. Services can have clear definitions and relationships. So obvious...can't believe it took me this long to "get it"...

In other words, describing services in Puppet provides both the ability to configure machines but also the ability to ensure they are configured properly over time. An enterprise data center isn't static. Understanding and configuring its dynamics is what makes Puppet so interesting, and what should make it intriguing to Cisco.

Even virtualization doesn't make this any easier. If anything, it compounds the problem of management. Puppet, however, can facilitate management of virtual servers.

Cisco is entering an established market with strong incumbents like IBM and HP. To win, it needs to innovate in its data center strategy. Puppet, used by Stanford, Google, Sony, and other leading-edge companies, could offer it a way to disrupt the incumbents with an innovative approach to IT management: a way to manage data-center resources over time, and not merely at deployment.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

I admit that I nearly got caught up in my former colleague James Urquhart's excellent analysis of Canonical's Ubuntu 9.10 release, code-named Karmic Koala. I saw the word "open" laced heavily through the post, and given Canonical's commitment to fully open-source Ubuntu experience, I played along.

But something doesn't quite fit in Canonical's story.

It's called Amazon.com. Yes, Ubuntu 9.10 will give users an option to build its own Elastic Compute Cloud-style service, using open-source Eucalyptus (or another cloud provider), but the intent certainly seems to seamlessly plug users into Amazon's closed cloud:

Ubuntu aims to keep free software at the forefront of cloud computing by embracing the APIs of Amazon EC2, and making it easy for anybody to set up their own cloud using entirely open tools...During the Karmic cycle, we want to make it easy to deploy applications into the cloud, with ready-to-run appliances or by quickly assembling a custom image...Wouldn't it be apt for Ubuntu to make the Amazon jungle as easy to navigate as, say, APT?

Or is Ubuntu simply making it easier to navigate one's way into the Amazon jungle but not to get out of that jungle?

This isn't meant as a criticism. After all, I've increasingly seen that the best way to monetize open-source software is with the careful inclusion of proprietary software. I told The New York Times' Ashlee Vance that Mark Shuttleworth would eventually have to grapple with this same strategy, basing it on my own conversations with Shuttleworth about how to effectively monetize Ubuntu.

That strategy increasingly points to tethering an open server (and desktop) with closed cloud services. That's not a critique. It's a fact.

Unfortunately, it's also a fact that once Ubuntu hands off its customers to a closed cloud, it depends on that cloud vendor to offer open data policies. The delivery of such policies is out of its hands. It won't have much say in the matter.

It's ironic, in many ways, that the key to Canonical monetizing Ubuntu will be proprietary software. There's a very good reason that Canonical isn't leading with a link into open-source software like Eucalyptus: just as Red Hat depended on proprietary Oracle to drive its early business, Canonical's best chance of driving open-source revenue from Ubuntu is likely to be closed-source Amazon.

Amazon's service is popular. It's also proprietary. Depending on an open but weak cloud service would be futile; building bridges to proprietary Amazon will likely not.

Canonical, just as Google has done in search, is helping its users build habits. I am sure that there will be positive financial remuneration to Canonical, the more that Ubuntu users indulge their Amazon EC2 habit--a habit that Canonical therefore will have an interest in feeding.

Is this bad? No, it's business. Even Canonical needs to make money, and it's really, really hard to make a lot of money by giving everything away.

Some things need to be closed. In this case, it's the cloud that Ubuntu will feed.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.