Enterprises and other users deploy open-source software because it works. For those of us in the open-source vendor community, however, too often we waste time talking about issues that have relatively little resonance for the vast majority of users.
We miss the mark on open-source marketing. In fact, it's often the case that the very standards we seek to set for the software world--interoperability, transparency, etc.--are better observed and delivered by open standards than by open source.
As a case in point, Red Hat and other open-source companies (including Alfresco, my employer) routinely advertise "no lock-in" as a key reason to buy open source. There are two problems with this marketing pitch: one, it's only technically true, and two, customers don't care, as Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady recently noted.
On the first, it's true that open source can reduce vendor lock-in by ensuring that a customer can get support and ongoing code development from someone other than the original developer of the software. But this is only trivially true.
Once a customer invests in a particular vendor (be it Red Hat or Canonical or Novell or MySQL or...), there will always be a cost associated with leaving that vendor, a cost that arguably isn't much different whether that vendor's code is open source or proprietary.
Cost aside (which is easier said than done, as cost is the primary consideration for the buyer), the support options for Vendor X's code from Vendor Y or Z are unlikely to be on par with what Vendor X can deliver. Just ask Red Hat about CentOS or Oracle Enterprise Linux support. ("Compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux can only be verified by Red Hat's internal test suite.")
Apparently there's no lock-in...so long as you stay with the original open-source developer. :-)
The reality is that open-source vendors should be pitching real value to real customers. As Josef Assad presented at the Open Source Days 2008 conference, open source should strive to "lose the TCO (total cost of ownership) war with proprietary vendors." Open-source value is about performance and flexibility at a great price--and not necessarily about absolute freedom from lock-in.
Red Hat gets this. That's why most of the time it sells the value of its subscriptions, and not the hocus-pocus "no lock-in" story. Red Hat doesn't have 75 percent of the paid Linux market (or, probably more accurately, 62 percent, according to IDC) because of its lock-in story.
Would-be customers don't care about that. Really. They just want Red Hat's performance and price, especially compared with Unix.
In fact, to the extent that customers really do want interoperability and reduced vendor lock-in, it's open standards that they should be asking for, not open source.
IBM's Savio Rodrigues points this out in his analysis of the different permutations on the open-source WebKit project. Serdar Yegulalp adds to the analysis:
Source code is a building block, not a standard. It's something you turn into other things. A standard is something that stands above and apart from all of those things, a guideline for what that finished product ought to be like....
The problem with using code as a standard is simple: it's too fluid. The minute you implement it in something, it's not the same code anymore. It almost always has to be changed to fit its container, as water changes to fit.
Open source is an indispensable complement to open standards, but it's not a substitute for them.
This isn't the only area where open-source vendors misread customer tea leaves. For years open-source insiders have debated definitions for "open-source vendor," even as customers shrugged their shoulders and continued using open source--from different vendors with very different business strategies--without worrying about the various shades of ideology and pragmatism that fuel open-source development. I'm as guilty of leading this foolish march as anyone.
Real customers simply don't care.
This is why I think Sun open-source guru Simon Phipps' proposed expansion of the Open Source Initiative's charter is misguided, though very well-intentioned. (The 451 Group's Matt Aslett also weighs in on the proposal.)
Phipps wants the OSI to establish a "holistic vision of software freedom against which businesses can be benchmarked" because too many companies, apparently, are calling themselves "open source" without a consistent definition for what this means.
I don't think it matters. The reality is that businesses don't seem to have any trouble adopting open source regardless of such "truth-in-labeling" initiatives. Gartner suggests that 85 percent of businesses are already using open source. Forrester tells us that a big majority of enterprises are adopting open source because it's delivering real cost and quality benefits to them.
And so the problem is...?
Well, the problem is that open-source advocates are often out-of-sync with open-source adopters. We probably need a new breed of open-source advocate, as ZDNet's Jason Perlow suggests, the kind that reflect customer interests in pragmatic adoption and not advocates' interest in controlling and fine-tuning that adoption.
We don't need paternalistic oversight of open-source adoption, and we don't need to fuel it through vague and inaccurate marketing. Open source is a fantastic way to develop and distribute software. Customers recognize this and don't need to be cajoled or confused into buying.
This week's Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco surprised me: I thought the content was, on balance, the best it's ever offered.
In part this stems from a new pragmatism that has settled on the commercial open-source world, where we're increasingly striving to solve customers' business problems, not vendors' business-model problems. It shows up in some of the event's discussions--a few of which are captured in Matt Aslett's excellent OSBC synopsis and in Dries Buytaert's OSBC wrap-up.
North Bridge Venture Partners' Michael Skok came up with one of my favorite lines from the conference, as detailed in Aslett's post:
If we have a better product, and it happens to be open source, we're going to win. But it has to be in that order.
The application of open source to business was highly pronounced in the various keynotes, in particular those delivered on the second day of the conference by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Microsoft President of North America Robert Youngjohns, and IBM Vice President of Linux and Open Source Bob Sutor.
Stephen Walli captures the gist of their various presentations and gives the winning ticket to Sutor. As Walli notes, Sutor bucked the trend in the other keynotes to describe open source as "just about business," insisting instead that "it's NOT about business. It's about solving hard problems."
That's a great distinction, and an important reminder.
Microsoft, for its part, asked the open-source community to judge it by its actions. Its actions have hardly been consistent, and many have been destructive of open source as Dana Blankenhorn argues. Still, I'm hopeful that the vocal minority within Microsoft will power the company to more transparent, open communications with the world.
What may be happening, however, is that Microsoft is adopting open-source principles to power the proliferation of SharePoint. As ZDNet's Oliver Marks highlights, it's free to evaluate, offers community-based add-ons, and has widespread distribution via Microsoft attaching a free version to every copy of Windows Server.
SharePoint is quickly becoming Microsoft's next operating system, as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has confirmed, with customers required to use it in conjunction with Microsoft's other software.
It's a one-way street into Microsoft, with a proprietary data repository to make it difficult and expensive to get out. Cisco Systems is fighting back, as is IBM, but few have figured out how to distribute as efficiently as Microsoft. Open source may be the only alternative to Microsoft.
Is this what we can expect the proprietary software world to learn from open source--distribution efficiency but not the freedom that accompanies it in open source? If this is all we get from the new pragmatism in open source, we'll go backward, not forward.
This was the best OSBC ever, with standing room only on the first day, and full sessions throughout. But if the lessons we're learning are simply enhanced ways to lock in customers, we're going in the wrong direction.
Disclosures: I am chair of the Open Source Business Conference and vice president of business development for Alfresco, an open-source competitor to Microsoft SharePoint, which surely factors into my view on SharePoint.
Follow me on Twitter at 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.
TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid asks, "Since when did my data become a bartering tool?"
Answer? Ever since we started ceding control of our code and our data to the cloud.
One response is easy: demand that the underlying source code behind Web services be open source. No, 99.999 percent of the population won't be able to do anything with it. But .001 percent will, and that's the percentage required to ensure that your data remains your data. The interim response is, of course, competition simply based on data retention policies.
Kincaid's complaint stems from Web mail providers purging user e-mail in order to free up storage and drive the upselling of premium Web mail products. Surely, if Yahoo is wreaking havoc with a user's email, another provider can offer a better retention policy to stick a finger in Yahoo's eye.
But this competition gets teeth with open source, which is why the Web mail providers won't go down that road--and why we need them to do so.
Larry Dignan at ZDNet calls out a significant customer concern with SaaS: data lock-in, particularly if a SaaS vendor goes out of business. How can a SaaS customer get its data out of a failed SaaS system without undergoing the burden of escrow agreements?
The answer is simple, but perhaps not palatable to SaaS vendors: open source a version of their software.
SugarCRM does this, letting its customers run SugarCRM "in the cloud" but giving them the code via an open-source license so that they can support their own deployment if necessary. Why couldn't a Salesforce.com or RightNow do the same?
Answer? They could, and wouldn't even need to open source their code today. Perhaps they could create a special escrow agreement that triggers open sourcing the code upon a winding down of operations? There are problems with this, of course, as it may diminish the value of the vendor's assets, but it's a relatively clean resolution to a customer concern, and one that is already being used in the industry.
Disclosure: I am an advisor to SugarCRM.
Cloud computing promises to liberate its adherents from the bother of messy implementations of software, while also freeing them from the constraints of hardware capacity. At the same time, however, cloud computing has the potential to deliver the ultimate in vendor lock-in.
My colleague, James Urquhart, has put together a proposed "cloud computing bill of rights" to help guide would-be cloud customers to those clouds best able to guarantee their freedom. Just as some are now clamoring for open-data commitments, James' suggestions are intended to deliver the value of the cloud without the lock-in:
No vendor shall, in the course of its relationship with any customer, claim ownership of any data uploaded, created, generated, modified, hosted or in any other way associated with the customer's intellectual property, engineering effort or media creativity. This also includes account configuration data, customer generated tags and categories, usage and traffic metrics, and any other form of analytics or meta data collection....
Vendors shall always provide, at a minimum, API level access to all customer data as described above. This API level access will allow the customer to write software which, when executed against the API, allows access to any customer maintained data, either in bulk or record-by-record as needed.
The Cloud Computing Bill of Rights is far more extensive than this, but I invite you to visit James' post to comment and help improve it. For the open-source friendly among us, we're going to have to look beyond licenses to protect essential user freedoms in the world of clouds, as Tim O'Reilly insists. James has offered a good start on how to go about doing this.
As an employee of Alfresco, I'm somewhat biased in reporting that Alfresco yesterday announced full SharePoint integration with the Alfresco 3.0 Labs release. Even so, I think it's highly significant precisely because of what it says about the importance of Microsoft's continued battles with the European Union over proprietary protocols.
Most that reported on the release missed this. OStatic, however, got it dead on:
As part of complying with the EU's demands, the company has released the specifications for the Microsoft Office interfaces, and now we're seeing some of the benefits spill over into open source. Alfresco, which makes open source enterprise content management (ECM) software, has added SharePoint interoperability....This looks like a good move from Alfresco and lets hope the EU's two-fisted stance toward Microsoft results in more of this kind of sharing.
Bingo, and bravo to Microsoft, whatever its intentions and pressures that resulted in opening up the SharePoint protocol. The net result is a huge win for customers. Why?
Well, for the first time enterprises can get the benefits of SharePoint-esque functionality and interoperability without having to adopt Microsoft technologies wholesale. This is the other big news in Alfresco's release, also mostly missed by the media. CMS Watch, however, nailed this aspect of the release, and points to the critical importance of getting out of the SharePoint thicket that Forrester criticizes before SharePoint and Office merge at the next release:
... Read moreIn talking with a large enterprise buyer today, I was struck by an argument he used against subscription models, open source and otherwise. Granted, he was negotiating and I've heard the inverse argument from others, but he had a good point.
The point? That an upfront proprietary license might actually work better for some IT buyers.
Subscription value is clear: The vendor is tasked with delivering constant software and support to earn the customer's business on a daily basis. No sell-them-and-run deals. It completely changes the way vendors engage with their customers.
But on the IT buyer's side, a subscription's price is likely to be higher on an annual basis than the maintenance on a proprietary license. In the first year, a subscription is dramatically cheaper. But over five years...? Or how about just in the second year, or third? It's no longer so clear-cut.
What is clear is when the vendor takes their profit: Upfront in the case of license-based businesses, and in the future in the case of subscription-based businesses. It's that niggling question of the future that may be problematic for open-source businesses.
... Read moreAlfresco, my employer, is based in London, so I go over once per quarter for management meetings. Because I'm there so often, I took the time to get an Oyster card, which manages payments while riding on London's public transport. Little did I know that Linux enables my transfers from Paddington to Arsenal Tube Station....
As ZDNet reports, Transport for London opted for Linux to remove its fetters to proprietary systems that had been crimping its ability to innovate:
The Oyster contactless card system...[previously] suffered from lock-in to proprietary systems, which hindered developments to the online payment systems...."The hosting was on a proprietary system, centred on one application....It demanded certain hardware, and was locked into one design of infrastructure."
With open-source Linux, however, the system is open for London to take the system in any direction required, without concern for some proprietary vendor holding its system for ransom. Why would any public agency lock itself into a proprietary vendor? For that matter, why would anyone?
I woke up this morning to a great Techcrunch review of Microsoft's new/old strategies. For those who watch Microsoft on a regular basis, it's no surprise to hear that the company's dedication to its 20th-century businesses (more billions, please!) cripples its ability to move forward and catch up with the 21st Century.
Microsoft is a company with a lot of good people doing amazing things, but those people are like a horse that has been handicapped out of the race with the baggage of Microsoft old. They are putting up a good fight to be seen and listened to, but it's a hard ask. Microsoft is clearly a company that is changing, the only remaining question is will the whole organization transform into the new Microsoft quickly enough to survive the rapidly changing way companies and individuals interact with technology.
And so Steve Ballmer at Mix'08 was relegated to old jokes about Apple and panicky suggestions that Microsoft is the "little engine that could" against Google. It's not. At some point Microsoft will have to admit that its old model of install (Microsoft) once, control everywhere" is precisely why it isn't relevant in the 21st Century of software.
How do we know that Microsoft is struggling to catch up?
... Read more
