With open-source software businesses, you have two options. Actually, three, but the third belongs to Red Hat, and it applies to roughly no one else.
The first option is to sell support for open-source software. This option is generally advocated by those who have never grown a business beyond $10 million. It's a terrible model unless your only aspiration in life is to run a services company.
Hence, the support model might be good for Accenture or systems integrator, if they want to take on the burden of support, but it's a poor model for Red Hat, MindTouch, Microsoft, or other software company.
The second option is to contribute heavily to open source but not build your revenue model around monetizing that software directly. This is what the New York Times points to in its Sunday expose of allegedly fizzling open-source business models.
Open source can drive adoption like little else. It's not, however, necessarily a great driver of revenue. For that, you need to be selling something beyond the source code, and that "something" is often going to be proprietary, be it hardware, software, or a service.
Proprietary search revenue funds a lot of open-source development at Google.
That's the way successful companies are run: they take ownership of what they ship. They are influenced by but not controlled by the mystical whims of The Community.
Even Red Hat, which piggybacks on a lot of Linux kernel development, increasingly includes more home-grown software in its distribution and takes great pains to certify its Red Hat Enterprise Linux will work in the most demanding environments before putting its brand on the label.
Some, including me, have wrongly concluded that Red Hat's business model would apply to other product markets beyond the operating system. It doesn't. It only applies where the moving parts in the product are complex, multitudinous, and frequently changing.
For everything else, there's Option 1 (if you want a business that doesn't scale well or possibly at all) or Option 2 (which is really no different from the old proprietary model except that it effectively uses open-source complements to lower engineering costs and possibly sales/marketing costs).
Even Option 2 won't work if you under-invest in marketing and development, as Symbian is learning to its hurt. It turns out that there is no free lunch, even in the land of free software. It always takes work. And money. Lots of both, actually.
When an open-source project is working optimally, can proprietary-software companies hope to compete?
Eat my dust, proprietary sloths
Greg Kroah-Hartman, a prominent Linux kernel developer and Novell fellow, suggests that the answer is no. Speaking to the How Software Is Built blog, Kroah-Hartman makes the case that the pace of Linux development leaves competition in the dust:
[The Linux kernel development team adds] 11,000 lines, remove[s] 5,500 lines, and modif[ies] 2,200 lines [of code] every single day.
People ask whether we can keep that up, and I have to tell you that every single year, I say there's no way we can go any faster than this. And then we do. We keep growing, and I don't see that slowing down at all anywhere.
I mean, the giant server guys love us, the embedded guys love us, and there are entire processor families that only run Linux, so they rely on us. The fact that we're out there everywhere in the world these days is actually pretty scary, from an engineering standpoint. And even at that rate of change, we maintain a stable kernel.
It's something that no one company can keep up with. It would actually be impossible at this point to create an operating system to compete against us. You can't sustain that rate of change on your own.
Microsoft might beg to differ, as would Apple, but the reality is that neither is updated as often or as extensively as Linux is, which supports a far broader hardware portfolio than any other operating system in existence.
Linux is pretty incredible. But it's not alone. Mozilla Firefox, Eclipse, and other projects produce best-in-class software at an almost frightening pace.
Can anyone compete with an open-source project at the top of its game?
The answer might well be no, as the top open-source projects are collaborative efforts between multiple companies that pool resources and expertise to drive development. And while it might seem reasonable that a single corporation could best open source's seeming "development by committee" approach, the reality is that well-managed open-source projects have none of the inertia that one might expect from a communal approach.
Quite the opposite.
Having said that, very few open-source projects actually meet the criteria that enable Linux's success. Most appeal to a too-narrow and too-small population of developers (i.e., single-company projects) to glean the benefits and scale of Linux-like development.
As such, the proprietary-software companies probably won't have to worry about competing with indomitable open-source competitors. Not most of the time, anyway.
For those that do, however, better stock up on the pumpkin pie. It may be the only thing to be grateful for this Thanksgiving season.
Greg Kroah-Hartman interview discovered via @glynmoody's ComputerWorld blog.
Life has never been better for enterprises and consumers. From free music to free software, the digital economy is an all-you-can-eat free-for-all.
That is, unless you're a vendor.
Traditional vendors are getting shellacked by the digital economy, spurring some, like Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp., to threaten to stick a finger in the dike and demand that users pay for content. (At Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, users already do pay to access some stories online.)
The problem with this approach is that not everyone is willing to follow suit. Why? Well, not everyone needs to. The BBC responded to Murdoch's plans by declaring it won't charge for content. It doesn't need to. U.K. taxpayers already fund it.
Different strokes for different folks. And different business models, too.
Google makes money by making it easy to discover others' content. So does Apple's iTunes. Google can afford to give away lots of free software (and even free hardware) to nudge people into its advertising model.
That's hugely disruptive.
In software, Microsoft doesn't like competing with free Linux. Microsoft spends a lot of money developing Windows. It must seem unfair to have to compete with the rest of the industry, which increasingly coalesces around Linux (or Android, or MySQL, or...).
But that's life in the open-source economy. Your core competence is always going to be someone else's throwaway complement, and ripe for open-source commoditization.
How would you like your software today?
(Credit: Domino's (Screenshot by Matt Asay))Could Domino's have bought an off-the-shelf system from Oracle, SAP, or another vendor and customized it? Probably. But then, this isn't how most IT gets built, anyway.
Most software is written by enterprises to use, not for sale, as Bruce Perens and others point out. So while we credit Microsoft, Oracle, and others as the backbone of the "software industry," the reality is that these companies are really a drop in the software bucket, with companies like Sony, Wal-Mart, and GE the true backbone of a much larger software ecosystem than the vendors comprise.
As open source matures, we're going to see these "software users" develop more software in-house, often building from open-source projects. Gartner calls out intriguing proof of this trend, but it's equally evident in anecdotes like this one, highlighting Virgin America's adoption of open source to reduce costs and improve innovation.
Virgin America is writing few checks to external vendors. That money is paying internal developers instead.
Digitization, then, may not be destroying the software market so much as reshaping it. In this new model, companies like Domino's will need more internal developers as they rely less on outside software vendors.
There will still be a need for companies like SAP, of course, as there are broad industry needs that a company or open-source foundation can satisfy. But for strategic IT projects, we're likely to see more open source plus internal development, and less packaged software purchases.
Justin Erenkrantz, President, Apache Software Foundation
(Credit: Matt Asay/CNET)There's something different about the Apache Software Foundation. While Apache hosts some of the world's most important software development, its members seem more concerned with good code than good politics.
It's no secret that I've become enamored lately with the Apache License, but it's less well-known what first attracted me to the license: the wonderfully nice people affiliated with Apache. From Greg Stein to Geir Magnusson to Brian Behlendorf, it's hard to find a jerk at Apache. I'm sure they exist, but they hide pretty well.
In fact, in a presentation today I attended at SAP in Walldorf, Germany, Apache Software Foundation President Justin Erenkrantz called out the importance of good manners to good governance at Apache:
There are going to be people on an open mailing list who are idiots, or maybe they're just having a bad day. Don't feed the trolls. Don't become a poisonous person.
It seems like reasonable advice, but it's discouraging to see this basic rule of polite society regularly broken within the wider open-source community. Some feel that a license to code is a license to shout others down. It's not. At least, not at Apache.
Perhaps this is particularly important to Apache because of the way it manages project development. It's one thing to be open source but, as I've written recently and as Erenkrantz highlighted in his presentation, open source doesn't necessarily equate to real openness:
You see a lot of people doing open source, but not a lot of people doing open development...At some open-source projects [Erenkrantz mentioned Mozilla], all of the technical decisions, even if the license is open source, are not subject to public comment. At Apache, everything is done in the open over public forums.
Or, as Day Software's Roy Fielding says, "If it doesn't happen on-list, it didn't happen."
Such transparent development creates great software, given that it fosters a true meritocracy. You know exactly who's doing what at Apache: it's all on the mailing lists.
Erenkrantz also noted a few other interesting aspects of Apache:
- Each Apache project is independent, which means that status on one Apache project is not fungible to another Apache project. I can be a core committer on the Apache HTTP project and it won't get me any brownie points with the Apache Cocoon project.
- Microsoft was a sponsor before it was a contributor. Its sponsorship was meant to send a message to Microsoft internally that it was OK to contribute to Apache projects.
- Erenkrantz stressed that Apache developers tend to believe that code, not licensing, should motivate contributions. Apache doesn't believe in forcing contributions through licensing or other mechanisms.
It's a great way to do development and, as Day Software and other companies have discovered, it's also a great way to do business. Open-source development, done openly.
And no jerks allowed.
Ars Technica's Ryan Paul wants to know, "Can a [truly open smartphone] be done?" But the real question is, "Should we care?"
Hello? Can I get some freedom around here?
Hence, Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center expresses anxiety about the future of freedom in mobile...
We are in a very precarious time with regard to the freedom of mobile devices. We currently have no truly Free Software operating system that does the job.
...when he really should be concerned with choice in mobile. Right now, we're spoiled for choice in mobile, what with Apple's iPhone, Google Android, Symbian, LiMo, Moblin, etc., which suggests that users are free to move between devices.
In this case, it's not the license that makes users free. It's the market.
Open-source software plays an important role in ensuring user choice, but it's not the sum total of the freedom/choice equation. It's just one factor. As Tim O'Reilly reminds us, it's not even necessarily the most important factor, either.
Kuhn and other free-software advocates worry that the nuts and bolts making up the software on mobile phones be free, but this is surprising given the increasing irrelevance of single-node freedom when it's tied into a network. This is what I've described as "the Hotel California of tech," and it suggests we should be far more concerned with freedom between nodes than freedom of the nodes themselves.
In other words, the real concern should be over open data, not open phones. No matter how open my phone's software may be, it's meaningless if I can't move my data between devices or wireless providers.
Even here, there's cause for hope. For example, Funambol's open-source mobile cloud synchronization and push e-mail software is in use by 10 of the leading mobile service providers, as identified in a new report, which arguably should be more relevant to the Freedom fighters than whether Bluetooth is open source.
Glyn Moody, a journalist with strong free-software leanings, understands this. That's why he makes the case for an open cloud, and not simply "open node in the cloud":
Ideally, what we need is a completely open source cloud computing infrastructure on which applications providing people with things like (doubly) free email and word processing services could be offered....The trick here is not to fight the battle on the opponents' terms, but to come up with something completely different.
For example, how about creating an open source, *distributed* cloud? By downloading and running some free code on your computer, you could contribute processing power and disc space that collectively creates a global, distributed cloud computing system. You would benefit by being able to use services that run on it, and at the same time you would help to sustain the entire open source cloud ecosystem in a scalable fashion.
One can quibble with the feasibility of this approach, but at least Moody is thinking at the right scale. Those who are still stuck in the Open Source 1.0 of isolated, client-side software are not.
I suppose someone has to fixate on upper-case Freedom above all other priorities. Like usability. Or ubiquity. Or...well, anything.
But most of us don't think this way, because the world is a lot more complicated than Freedom on one hand, and Slavery on the other. Also, the focus of freedom has evolved in our networked world, though some free-software advocates seem mired in Freedom 1.0.
It's time to upgrade. Freedom is more than a license. It derives from a competitive market, one that is assisted by open source but not exclusively or even primarily defined by it.
We have reached a critical inflection point for open source.
With everyone from Qualcomm to UBS to Microsoft embracing open source in one shape or another, the question is no longer "why" to use open source, but rather "how."
Because of this changing mindset around open-source adoption, we no longer need evangelists encouraging open-source adoption. Adoption is a given. It's the default.
No, what we need now are those that can illustrate how to derive the most benefit from the inevitable adoption of open source.
This is perhaps evident in MindTouch's just-released survey of the most influential people in open source today, as voted by over 50 top-level open-source business executives. People like Larry Augustin, Marten Mickos, Dries Buytaert, Mark Radcliffe, and Andrew Aitken make the list. (Note: I am honored to be on the list as well.) They are there not because they're open-source cheerleaders, but because they have helped vendors and customers alike understand how to get the most from open-source investments.
The trend away from evangelism is also apparent in the types of industry events that still draw an audience. The Linux Foundation's inaugural LinuxCon amassed over 700 attendees, in large part because it promised (and delivered) tutorial-like education on how to get the most from Linux deployments.
In a similar manner, O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), Open Source Business Conference (Disclosure: I'm program chair for OSBC), ApacheCon, EclipseCon, Red Hat Summit, and other such events remain popular because they give attendees real-world insight into how to get the most from open source.
The message used to be, "Open source is powerful! You should try it." The market got the message, to the point that open source is a de facto component of virtually every technology vendor's strategy and is reaching ubiquity in enterprise deployments, too.
It's time for the next phase of open source, the practical phase where we focus on how to deploy open source, not why.
This is what I (unsuccessfully) tried to say in my "Free Software Is Dead. Long Live Open Source!" post. I certainly wasn't saying that GPL-licensed free software is dead, or should die. Rather, I was (and am) arguing that pragmatism is the new order of the day: how real companies and developers derive real benefits from real software.
No ideology. Just adoption.
That's the message that resonates today and, frankly, always has been the right message for open source. It's what is driving widespread open-source adoption and will continue to do so, provided we can effectively help would-be adopters understand "how" now that they've bought into "why."
For years, Red Hat sat unopposed at the top of the CIO Insight Vendor Value study. In 2008, however, Google pushed Red Hat aside with its low-cost, easy-to-use enterprise applications. This year, Red Hat has come roaring back to share the top ranking with Google.
Could this be a sign of CIOs' restive relationships with traditional vendors and an increasingly insatiable appetite for the cost and ease-of-use advantages of open source and software as a service/cloud computing?
The answer is almost certainly "Yes." It is telling that old-school vendors like IBM (ranked 20th overall), Microsoft (25th), Novell (29th), and Oracle (35th) are so far down the CIOs' list.
It is equally telling, however, that it is with these apparently less-preferred vendors that CIOs spend the vast majority of their IT budgets. Or perhaps that's the point? In other words, CIOs spend with such vendors today because they have to, but given their druthers, they're going to invest more money in Red Hat and Google going forward.
Red Hat and Google are still rounding errors in the overall IT spending picture, but CIOs seem to be signaling an appetite for more. It's not about reducing lock-in and other colorful marketing phrases, either: it's about great, easy-to-use software at a compelling price.
You know, the very thing that Microsoft used to win CIO plaudits for delivering.
From the report:
CIOs are more likely to try software as a service (than traditional, packaged software), which is better understood and simpler to use and requires no upfront investment in hardware or software.
This is the heart of the CIO uprising. And it's why low-cost, high-value companies like Intel (ranked first overall), Cisco/WebEx (ranked sixth and 11th, respectively), and Sun (sixth) are climbing the charts.
For now, however, Google and Red Hat rule the roost in the Software category of CIO Insight's annual study:
Both Red Hat and Google essentially offer the same thing: great software on a subscription basis. While this model often offers lower prices than competitors, it's important to note that "free" is not the value proposition here. (If it were, for example, Red Hat customers would be leaving in droves for Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone, CentOS. They aren't.)
No, the value proposition is customer control via the subscription model that enables less costly ways to buy into the software, and to turn off maintenance costs, if desired.
It's a winning formula, one that more vendors should consider adopting. Today IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle command the majority of IT dollars, but this survey suggests a rebellion is underway. Inertia can only support the traditional vendors for so long.
One of the most inspiring things I've witnessed in my 10-plus years in open source is its gradual embrace of pragmatism. By "pragmatism" I don't mean "capitulation," whereby open source comes to look more like the proprietary world it has sought to displace. Rather, I would suggest that the more open source has gone mainstream the more it has learned to make compromises, compromises that make it stronger, not weaker.
Let me explain.
While free-software advocates provided the early backbone of the larger open-source movement, the market has been made by open-source backers. Free software makes for great headlines ("Miguel de Icaza is basically a traitor to the Free Software community"), but it is far too demanding, and of largely the wrong things, to capture mainstream interest.
To go mainstream, free software needed to become open source.
Open source also makes for great headlines ("Open Source Code Worth US$ 387 Billion"), but its real value is not in generating controversy but rather in alleviating it, turning the focus from open-source personalities to open-source code, and the value that companies and individuals can derive from it.
Free software demands one way. Open source encourages many ways.
To get there, open source has softened its elbows and opened its arms. Jason Perlow recently wrote on ZDNet that he, like most of the world, has to work with both open-source and proprietary software, and can't afford to dogmatically cling to one or the other. (It's a message that even Steve Ballmer begrudgingly repeats, suggesting that Microsoft must support those that "for whatever crazy reasons don't want to be on Windows, might want to be on Linux.")
For that reason, Perlow further writes:
But some people, particularly our free software leaders, are so mired in their hatred of Microsoft and proprietary systems that they will use only free and open source software for the sake of ideological reasons alone....Stallman and the FSF [Free Software Foundation], like his Cretaceous ancestors 65 million years ago, isn't evolved enough to see that his reign is about to come to an end. The open world needs interoperability, not shut itself off from other standards just because they originate from proprietary sources.
Hard-hitting, but true. Open source embraces interoperability, whereas free software takes a hard line that even Microsoft, despite its preference that customers use its complete software portfolio exclusively, won't take.
It's certainly not a line that open-source advocates should take, as it cuts against the very idea of open source: choice. Sometimes, after all, an open-source project is absolutely the wrong choice for a customer (just as sometimes a proprietary product may not be a good fit). There is no one-size-fits-all for either software approach.
Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and a staunch proponent of open source, with a penchant for free software, suggested as much in his LinuxCon keynote in which he argued that Linux 'desktop' developers need to be far better at meeting real customer requirements, not simply scratching their own, developer-focused "itches" (to use the Eric Raymond-inspired vernacular).
The path forward is open source, not free software. Sometimes that openness will mean embracing Microsoft in order to meet a customer's needs. After all, fierce partisanship and an unwillingness to compromise in software accomplishes is just as pointless, distasteful, and useless as it is in government.
Free software has lost. Open source has won. We're all the better for it.
Most vendors must guess what customers want to buy, and how they'll use it. For IBM, however, with about 400,000 employees, it has the potential to be its own best laboratory, one that becomes even more potent when mixed with active participation in open-source communities.
That potential, as I discovered in an interview on Friday with Jeff Schick, IBM's vice president of social software, isn't a "gimme," but is powerful if you can enable the right sort of corporate culture and processes.
For example, Schick mentioned that IBM has a technology adoption program for employees that spans the gamut of new products, add-ons and patches to existing products, and still-raw technologies direct from IBM's labs. While the invitation list and process is different for each particular item, IBM generally encourages its product groups to "experiment" upon each other. The earlier in the development process, the better.
At the heart of this open approach to technology adoption are open standards and open source. When I pressed Schick on the relative importance of both ("If you could only choose open standards or open source, which would it be?"), he responded:
Our products may include open-source components, and often do, but ultimately open standards are the most important consideration for customers. As customers integrate our products into their various enterprise systems, open standards are critical for ensuring they work.
Point taken, but it's impressive just how much open source influences IBM's product development. Gartner estimates that 80 percent of commercial applications will include open-source components by 2012. At IBM, the number may even be higher.
Despite IBM not releasing its core software products under open-source licenses, Schick noted just how integral open source is to IBM:
From a development perspective, as we build our social software products in Lotus, we're always looking at ways to improve quality and time-to-market. Open source often helps us with both areas.
For example, we were blogging within IBM for a long time before deciding to build the Lotus Connections product, which is fast approaching hundreds of millions of users. After some study, we decided to build the blogging piece of Lotus Connections using the Apache Roller project, an open-source Java blog software. We have become active contributors to the project since then.
But it's not just in Lotus Connections. As you look across nearly every capability across our social-software strategy, open source plays a critical role. Open source is an integral part of how we build products. Our engineers are very much in tune with the wide variety of open-source components that are available to them, and use and contribute to them. Regularly.
IBM seems to have figured out better than most how to marry the global open-source laboratory with a massive internal laboratory. Talking to Schick, there appears to be a very blurry line between "internal" development and "external" development, giving the company a significant advantage over proprietary (Microsoft) and open-source (Liferay, Open-Xchange) competitors alike.
Some competitors may be able to match IBM's scale, but few to none have managed to marry internal scale (employees) with the power of external scale (open-source communities) in the way that IBM has.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Twitter has become an excellent way to quickly scan headlines. It's terrible at just about everything else. It's hard to have a coherent discussion in 140-character soundbites, and even harder when the architecture of Twitter is set to "broadcast" rather than "discourse." But maybe, just maybe, Twitter's not to blame. We are.
After all, Twitter is simply a creation of our society, and reflects our priorities.
Not all of society, of course. After all, as The New York Times reported, teenagers, usually technology's early adopters, hardly use Twitter at all, with only 11 percent of people aged 11 to 17 using the service. They are, however, heavily into Facebook, preferring to share with friends rather than talk at strangers.
A generational thing?
Perhaps. But I think the technology we build and use says a lot about society.
Competition from Bing, Ask, and other search engines is just one click away and likely equally good for Google users, yet we stick with Google. Why? Because it's fast, free, and has never disdained its users with a cluttered interface. Many of us were with Google early on and continue to reward its early respect for its customers. We're a loyal people that likes a crowd.
This phenomenon is hinted at in personal computers, too. While I'm part of a rising group of people who prefers the Mac to Microsoft Windows, I'm also in a distinct minority, according to data from Net Applications. The reality is that most people look at their computer the way they do toilet cleaner: necessary to get a job done but not anything to get worked up about.
Back to business. As well as open source is doing in enterprise IT, the reality is that CIOs and CTOs don't get too worked up about freedom and such. There's a very good reason that IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft dominate enterprise software, and "choice" is not it. These vendors simplify purchasing decisions by providing limited, but still good, choices.
Business, in other words, is business, not religion. OpenOffice is nearly as good as Microsoft Office in most ways, and better in a few. But it still captures anemic market share because it's simply not worth the bother for most enterprises or consumers. (Firefox, on the other hand, is, and continues to gain market share because we value the increased options its add-on library brings us.)
Open source is absolutely getting adopted, but only where it accomplishes tangible goals like cost reduction and increased productivity. As a society, we don't seem to want to waste hours of the work day fighting ideological battles. We just want to get work done.
Well, except for when we're furiously friending on Facebook during work hours, costing employers as much as 1.5 percent of productivity. You see, we're not all work and no play.
Which, incidentally, suggests that there just might be something to attempts by IBM and others to marry social software with enterprise IT. Our work lives are increasingly blended with our personal lives. They're just about the same thing.
All of which must increasingly be done in real time, as Twitter, instant messaging, SMS/texting, and other immediate or near-immediate technologies suggest. Even e-mail, which used to be considered "fast" communication, has moved to mobile devices so that it's omnipresent and, hence, that much quicker.
All of which raises the question, "Why are you still reading this post?" After all, you've spent 3,000 characters here in which time you could have already plowed through 21 tweets. Think of all the headlines you could have read. :-)
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
