Open Source for Enterprises

Is Open Source just like terrorism?

Srini Murty — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 09:40:00 GMT

When I read the first few sentences of the Dana Blankenhorn/Paula Rooney blog post on Steve Ballmer I got the feeling of deja vu. It felt like he was describing the war on terror, in particular what is currently being waged against the likes of Al Qaeda.

"You can’t fight open source as you would fight IBM, or Novell, or the U.S. Justice Department, the enemies from the 1990s. Those foes put their pants on one leg at a time, just like Microsoft did.

Open source is not like that. Open source is not a person, or a company, but a movement. It’s an idea. It’s like water. You fight water you drown."

Boy, that sure sounds like the way many an opponent of the "war against terrorism" defines the war. " Fighting a New Kind of War" says Time magazine! " America gears up for a new kind of war" says Guardian Unlimited!

The parallels, however, are not just restricted to words. The Blankenhorn/Rooney post also focuses on the futility of Microsoft's 90s style war on Open Source when they should really be fighting it some other way. They also speak about turmoil within Microsoft as to how they should respond to or clarify Ballmer's comments.

Talk of weird parallels!

235 - The Open Source Number

Srini Murty — Mon, 21 May 2007 10:59:00 GMT

When Microsoft decided to talk about its 235 patents claim against the Open Source communities, several pundits talked about the reasons for them doing so. From the usual Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) to the publicity Microsoft needed to further its own lobbying against software patents, the rumors have been flying thick and fast. Among many comments, I liked Fabrizio Capobianco's actions the best. Perhaps we can circulate dozens of his t-shirts to places like Think Geek and others to sell.

Microsoft should open source original Xbox

Srini Murty — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 13:01:00 GMT

I recently blogged in another one of my blogs about Microsoft pulling the plug on game compatibility between the original Xbox console the and newer Xbox 360. Many people like me have invested significant amounts of money in the old console as well as many games. Now that they are not longer going to promote game developers to develop compatibility I would recommend turning development to the Open Source community. And by Open Source I do not necessarily mean GPL, a term that is obviously anathema to not just Microsoft but most of the proprietary software world.
I am fortunate enough to own both and have invested considerable amounts of money buying games for my 5 year-old. Most of these games are rated E so he can play without confronting too much blood and gore. However, until now, most of the games that were made compatible were the more popular Teen or Mature rated games. An open source community of dedicated developers would very quickly evolve and turn the E-rated games into compatible games for the Xbox 360 using Microsoft XNA. XNA is Microsoft's game development platform and a set of APIs. However, it is only meant for Windows and Xbox 360. Clearly, no further development is going to take place on the old Xbox, either by way of hardware add-ons or software. I think it is time to turn it over to a community, preferably open source. Eventually, with the Xbox Live platform some of these older games could be made available to the Xbox 360 platform. If money matters to Microsoft, and it obviously does, they could end up making some money when they present these games on Xbox Live. Anyone at Microsoft listening? I doubt it.

Use Windows documents inside Ubuntu apps

Srini Murty — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 17:44:00 GMT

This is not one of my usual entries about OSS and Enterprises. In my home network I run Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy) on an old Dell Optiplex system of 2000 vintage. I also have a well specced out Alienware Area 51 system running Windows XP Pro. Understandably, the Alienware (suitably named Vulcan!) has lots more disk space. So most of my shared files reside in an XP Shared Documents folder. While I have permission to read and write files on that folder from my Ubuntu system, I had a pesky problem I was trying to overcome. I use Gmail on the Ubuntu box and frequently need to attach files to email messages. These files, more often than not, sit on the XP's shared folders. They do not show up when I use the "Browse" option to look for files.

I finally found the solution to my problem. Many thanks to user Matchless for this great little How-to. You don't know how much of a headache this was for me, as it was for Matchless, judging from his comments. I simply substituted the IP address with "Vulcan" and used "smbmount" to mount my remote shares and it worked like a charm.

Abusing the OSS and Community model

Srini Murty — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 02:34:00 GMT

Many OSS projects seem to be going through a recurring cycle these days:

1. Build the core product with a small team
2. Build a community and enhance the community version of the product
3. Finally, with a long-term business model in mind, they build a commercial version

I call this the MySQL business model although I may not be strictly correct in my assumptions. However, this is basically using the community to build the basic product and add significant differentiating features to the commercial version. Strictly speaking, not a bad business model. But in my opinion, this is like gaming the community system by using it when needed but providing more goodies in the commercial product.

Dana Blankenhorn's blog about OrangeHRM paints this scenario. However, this is no different from a bunch of other product companies that are doing the same thing.

The TCO for Open Source

Srini Murty — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 05:20:00 GMT

For years, Microsoft has run a series of commercials, advertisements and infomercials touting the lower TCO of Microsoft products through independent studies. Given the somewhat murky backgrounds of some of these studies, it would seem that a better discussion would be on the exact parameters used for such studies. Alex Fletcher mentions the key cost drivers for a TCO analysis in his blog. I agree with one of his arguments in favor of Open Source - Ease of Integration. In actual fact, integration is one of those crazy ideas that make people like me successful selling services in my regular day job! As a rule, integration is needed when enterprises buy software packages that are not meant to play nice with each other from the get go. Add complexities due to customization and things get even trickier. I am not so sure how SOA is supposed to be the silver bullet for integration woes except that it appears to provide a mechanism to help integrators integrate products. To my mind SOA also leads to cobbled systems, just that the cobbling is a bit more refined. I would much rather configure systems to work together rather than using SOA or some such technology to make integration work. I think Alex's point is well made when he says that integration "can involve business process, policy and governance". Very often, implementation of processes, policies and an overall governance framework can improve integration of systems without costly customizations and SI work.

Open Source Franchises - About Time

Srini Murty — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 04:40:00 GMT

And now, a drumroll please....HERE's to the Open Source franchise. OpenForum Europe provides a certification framework and a platform to standardize Open Source services. It helps organizations planning to take the Open Source plunge to understand the risks of going with specific vendors. It also enables organizations analyze their existing portfolio to identify lock-in risks and mitigation paths and plans. This service is based on the standards created by the somewhat confusingly named The Open Forum Europe - TOF-e, not to be confused with the former organization!

Although the potential service providers and service users are expected to be small companies, there is no reason why this cannot be scaled at either end to support larger companies. The platform also suggests a judicious mix of open and closed systems. Admittedly, while OSS shines in many areas, not all are covered by OSS products. The need of the hour is to use the best possible closed products until viable OSS options become available.

Linux is just imitation

Srini Murty — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 21:27:00 GMT

Is Linux just imitating features in Windows, Vista and OSX? That is what Emmett Dulaney would have you believe. In his article in CertCities he suggests that Linux is mostly playing copycat via Mono, Wine, OpenOffice and the X/Windows desktop managers like Gnome and KDE. He then suggests in his blog that he is going to "be quickly blasted" for writing this article and asking these questions. As of this read, one reader (Ray Reynolds of NYC) came out swinging against Mr. Dulaney.

May I suggest something to people like Emmett Dulaney?

First - Mono, Wine, OpenOffice, Gnome and KDE are examples of how Linux is expanding the scope of Linux-based software to ease the transition for Windows and Mac users

Second - He mentions that even the in the space of web hosting Linux the lead is questionable (perhaps statistics from Netcraft point to this) - however, if you look at pure numbers, the Linux/Apache combination has nearly a 60% market share compared to Windows' 35%. Even if we factor in the large numbers of "virtual domains" out there, Linux still wins hands down here, barring the last quarter of 2006. Windows appears to have shown a major positive jump owing to the addition of over nearly 620,000 hosts using Windows Live.

Third - Where is the innovation in Linux? For starters, let us focus on security. A good illustration of Linux security versus Windows is available in this fine article showing a comparison of the Linux and Windows.

Fourth - Virtualization is also referred to in the article above. User Mode Linux and Xen are two great examples of innovation in the Linux world. Of course XenSource is reaping the benefits of the open source community to sell their products and services in the commercial space. Nothing wrong with that.

Fifth - I somehow believe that Mr. Dulaney's idea of innovation centers around glitzy user interface elements. How about something less visually appealing but equally important for people to use like BitTorrent? Open source innovation at its best, according to me. "Joe User" would also like to watch web downloadable movies and listen web downloadable songs and radio shows, right? Technologies like BitTorrent are making this possible.

Sixth - How about collaboration using Zimbra? Brilliant technology, great features, and Ajax-based unlike Microsoft's clunky SharePoint.

This list could go on but I hope I have set the ball rolling on the response to Emmett Dulaney. As I reread the article a few times another point struck me. He mentions the multitude of Linux versions causing problems ("What you know RedHat but not SuSE?"). I believe this makes no sense. Choice is wonderful. I would much rather have more operating systems to choose from than depend on one vendor. This is very much like making the OS a commodity. We don't worry any more about whether MS Office will work on an HP PC as opposed to one from IBM or Dell. The same should and will happen with Operating Systems too.

As for his assertion that all Linux vendors are now asking for a maintenance contract, I would like to know which closed source innovator does not insist on a maintenance contract to support a customer? If one were to perpetuate the myth that Linux is "free" then this would be an issue worth pointing out. But nobody said anything is for free. Emmett Dulaney should know this oft-repeated American slogan - "there ain't no free lunch". Which is true of Open Source and Linux too. What it means, however, is that because the product is Open Source, even a fairly underused Linux distro is bound to get support from the community.

I would also like to end with another fantastic innovation in the Open Source/Linux world. The development of Linux as an OS that competes and clearly surpasses Microsoft in the cellphone, handheld and specialty devices are taking over the technology world like a tsunami. Visit LinuxDevices.com to see what is going on.

Forbes magazine - an alarmist view of GPL v3 and Stallman

Srini Murty — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 16:19:00 GMT

Forbes magazine published an article in October 2006 in what I would term was a hatchet job on Richard Stallman. I do not know Stallman personally nor am I writing to defend GPLv3. However, much of the article was in poor taste, particularly when dwelled on Stallman's personal idiosyncracies in somewhat gory, gruesome details.

Subsequently, Novell wrote about the article and refuted some of the assertions made by Forbes. In particular, while the Forbes article mentions that Novell refused to comment on the issue, Novell's blog says that they told Forbes "the industry will works its way through the problem". This is somewhat significant given the past crises that the Open Source community has faced and how they have been overcome. Yet, Forbes not to mention it at all. In fact, the Forbes article is extremely slanted against Stallman. It also makes it look like industry heavyweights like IBM, HP, Novell and RedHat are helpless against the "anarchist", "kamikaze" Stallman.

Further developments in the GPLv3 debate include Sun's announcement that they would release the new version of OpenSolaris under GPLv3. However, Linus Torvalds has weighed in saying this is just a lot of "hot air" being blown around. ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn says Linus is probably right. However, he also says there are a bunch of "lawyer ants" in smaller Open Source firms who are getting busy right about now talking about GPLv2, GPLv3, and DRM.

Open Source that works for a Business

Srini Murty — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 19:24:00 GMT

I read an article on Backcountry.com in Inc. magazine's latest issue. I also found an interesting article along similar lines about them here.

The Inc. article mentions a number of very important things. However, I think many of the "problems" of going for OSS can be addressed and fixed. Backcountry's CEO talks about having a fulltime team of OSS gurus to run and tweak the applications. Clearly, support for many OSS products is a big issue. Particularly when a organizations such as Backcountry.com need to run their entire set of applications on the platform. Therefore, their decision to have a staff of OSS techies is probably justified.

This again brings a major problem related to OSS to the fore. That of a standard infrastructure for user-level documentation, support and user guides. Backcountry has the requisite technical strengths to do some of their wizardry with the source code of products they are using. Smaller outfits or those that primarily need to focus on the business side of things need other alternatives. When none is forthcoming from the open source world they logically gravitate towards closed source products. For far too long and in too many places, OSS has been touted as free software. Unfortunately, although one can get OSS for "free", organizations do need support to make things work. OSS groups have a tendency to release versions (pre-alpha, alpha, beta....what have you!) and just hope users will have the patience and the necessary geek-quotient numbers to make it work. What if they were to think of a few other issues surrounding their product such as documentation, user guides and a more robust user forum for support? Of course, the last part is being addressed by most OSS vendors through their paid support services. Which is not a bad idea at all. But we live in an OSS ecosystem that is made up of, for instance, the LAMP stack, various other applications and utilities for reading emails, browsing the web, group calendaring systems and many others. How can we have a system where a larger set of support services is created for the entire OSS stack or even one particular set of the stack?

There is clearly a need for some organizations to step up with an OSS version of SaaS (Software As A Service) that IBM has been talking about for quite a while now. Perhaps they will extend it to the OSS stack too, who knows? How about HP? They have made tons of money by selling and providing services around OSS.

Coming back to Backcountry.com. There is a more than clear hint from their CTO in the Inc magazine article that they have turned to non-OSS applications when required. After all, one has a business to run, not evangelize OSS. Is it possible that there are enough OSS applications of good quality to justify not looking at proprietory sources.

Over 8 million Ubuntu users

Srini Murty — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 20:42:38 GMT

"Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth talks why it may finally be time for Linux to out-innovate Apple and Microsoft on the desktop."

Personally, I have been using various flavors of Linux for 12 years now. Among the many variants that I have seen, Ubuntu does stand out. It has a fairly easy installation process, provides easy updates to the system, and has an excellent desktop setup with features that many novice Linux users would find easy to use. However, I would like to see how they, or any other Linux provider, can help improve documentation for their products. In particular, some of the Linux applications could definitely use major improvements to their documentation. Despite its many flaws, Windows does have an integrated help system for the OS and also provides the infrastructure for other application developers to create their own help systems. Linux applications, on the other hand, suffer from a lack of standards in producing documentation. Some are in HTML format that switch users to a browser window. Seriously, I would be hard-pressed trying to help my old aunt figure out a way of reading the help and then switching back to the application to use it. I clearly see this both as a challenge and an opportunity for someone to truly out-innovate the commercial OS vendors.

For example, I have recently been using InkScape, an excellent vector graphics package not unlike Corel Draw. However, InkScape's biggest disadvantage is its lack of documentation. Not even the InkScape website provides much help. In fact, for any users of InkScape who are looking for an excellent document regarding the software, get "A Guide to Inkscape" by Tavmjong Bah (real name Stephen Schrenk). This is an excellent book on InkScape. Perhaps the makers of Inkscape ought to either include it as part of their software or provide a link to the HTML version of the book. But one does not even see a mention of the book in the InkScape web site or user forums. What a pity! I must admit, though, that the book was probably written for an older version of the tool since many of the screenshots shown in the book do not resemble what appears in the version I am currently using (0.44).

The point I was trying to make, before I departed on my InkScape tangent, is that Linux and Open Source software, in general, really need to get organized on the customer experience, preferably by looking at software documentation to begin with. Create the infrastructure so that perhaps a "Tavmjong Bah" for AbiWord will emerge!

Firefox Man Loses Faith In Google

Srini Murty — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 18:20:16 GMT

Blake Ross, one of the key people behind the Firefox browser, says that he is losing faith in the antics of the search engine Google.

Google certainly seems to be stumbling for a while now. Just yesterday we heard about how several Gmail users lost all their emails. Google's very wordy "apology" was long on platitudes and short on technical information. Likewise, I am beginning to get worried about other Google services such as docs.google.com, which is the erstwhile Writely. What if users like me were to lose documents stored there? The loss of Gmail messages is certainly a huge blow not only to Google but to all online service providers that facilitate storage of documents, emails and other pieces of information. Given the fact that Gmail is not a paid service, perhaps users are going to further turn to other service providers who will provide some kind of guarantee that their data will be protected. Besides, even if it were true that Gmail was the victim of a hack attack, things are likely going to get worse with Google fast becoming the next big target, a la Microsoft, for all kinds of hacker wannabees.

read more | digg story

Open Source Software in Government

Srini Murty — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 03:35:00 GMT

I just read a post in Digg about how certain county governments in Holland as well as the City of Amsterdam are asking for suppliers to provide open source software in their bids. In the Digg post, however, I read a variety of comments ranging from raves for OSS to rants against OSS and in favor of paid for (read "closed source") software. Clearly, the Digg community is rather unfair to Open Source as is evident from highly charged comments against OSS. OSS end-user software still has a ways to go before being able to compete in terms of slickness of interface to that from, say a Microsoft or an Adobe. That said, however, OSS provides good enough, and sometimes excellent, alternatives to commercial products. It is true that some products really do suffer from quality of interface, ease of use and lack of documentation.

I think the direction taken by Canonical, Ltd., the creators of Ubuntu Linux, are showing the way to many other OSS communities. Ubuntu's Linux has a great interface, is generally well documented, and also provides a very good user experience. Likewise, Mozilla's Firefox is another example. For the millions Microsoft has spent in developing and promoting Internet Explorer, Firefox has proven to be a more than worthy opponent, literally kicking Microsoft's rear end in the functionality department. So much so, IE7 finally had to come out with several interface elements that were mostly popularized by Firefox.

Shuttleworth: Open Source projects need better collaboration

Srini Murty — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 01:08:51 GMT

"Bugs, feature planning, release management, translation, testing and QA … these are all areas where we need to improve the level of collaboration BETWEEN projects. I think Launchpad is a good start but there’s a long way to go before we’re in the same position that the competition is in - seamless conversations between all developers." Mark Shuttleworth's blog about the need for collaboration between projects makes for interesting reading. Clearly, what open source developers need is industrial strength Project, Code, Change and Configuration management tools. Where is the Open Source equivalent of IBM's Rational suite products. One unified repository for all software code, release and deployment management and a standardized method of making them interact. IBM has taken steps towards helping the Open Source development community in a few ways. In October 2005 IBM announced that it would contribute a subset of the Rational Unified Process to the OSS community in the form of the Eclipse Process Framework Project. That was a well-intentioned step with industry heavyweights like Capgemini, BearingPoint, Covansys and others lending their support. One can only hope that further development of a unified repository for bug tracking, software architecture and design, and change management tools is in the offing.

read more | digg story

Original Design Manufacturers (ODM) - the new paradigm

Srini Murty — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 21:10:00 GMT

McKinsey has a very interesting take on how communities including networks of individuals and organizations are being assembled to create new products. They talk about a "Creation Net", where hundreds or thousands of individuals and organizations (participants) from very diverse settings participate and collaborate in creating "new knowledge, to learn from one another, and to appropriate and build on one another's work". Sounds very much like how the Open Source movement and Linux, in particular, was developed.

While theMcKinsey paper focuses on using Creation Nets to create physical products, it also sets the ground rules for how these rather loosely constructed networks can collaborate and benefit both in the commercial sense and in product development.

I particularly like the 4 management approaches. This gives us a clue on how ArrowHand is also likely to function and thrive:

1. Choose appropriate ways to coordinate the activities of the network
2. Balance local innovation with "global" integration
3. Desig effective action points
4. Establish useful performance feedback loops

I hope to expand on each of these approaches in future blog entries. Each approach on its own deserves an in-depth discussion.

The best free OS-agnostic applications

Srini Murty — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 21:06:15 GMT

This Digg article has a bunch of very popular free software packages. Some of them like Firefox and OpenOffice are well known. Others are not. I regularly use Azureus, the very powerful BitTorrent client. It is Java based and I have used both Windows and Linux clients. The other one is Scribus. Scribus is an Open Source software package that provides functionality similar to PageMaker and Microsoft Publisher. It works very well in combination with other Open Source graphics products like Gimp and InkScape. It has a few built-in templates but many more are available from other web sites.

read more | digg story

VCs Rule

Srini Murty — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 16:58:00 GMT

Tuesday, December 5, 2006

I attended a breakfast session that had a panel of speakers from the VC community of the Washington DC area. The whole meeting room/hall was full with over 200 people. Looks like the entrepreneurs are still coming out in droves. While there were several areas of generic information provided by the panel, some of the interesting things related to their take on the whole Web 2.0 euphoria, tips on what to say and, more importantly, what not to say to a potential VC investor.