I just returned from Germany where I spoke on The Open Source Census at the Open Source Meets Business conference.  At the same conference, HP announced the FOSSBazaar initiative, which OpenLogic is sponsoring along with Olliance Group, Novell, Google, Coverity, DLA Piper, SourceForge and The Linux Foundation.  The press release and presentation on FOSSBazaar has generated a lot of confusion.  In his blog, Dana Blankenhorn states

• OSS Discovery - scans any number of machines and generates a list of all of the installed open source software and version numbers, regardless of license.  OpenLogic released OSS Discovery as open source last month.  We’re looking for people that want to expand the fingerprint library, so go to ossdiscovery.org to learn more.   
  
• FOSSology - scans source code and generates a list of all the copyrights and licenses it finds.  It doesn't identify what open source packages are installed - it finds licenses.  HP released it as open source last week.  FOSSology and OSS Discovery are complementary, and will often be used together -- OSS Discovery to inventory open source software across a number of machines, and FOSSology to identify the licenses.
• FOSSBazaar - a website where you can find open source governance resources (including links to tools like OSS Discovery and FOSSology), and share best practices.  It was launched by a group of companies, led by HP, but it's a working group of the Linux Foundation and has nine partners sharing resources: Linux Foundation, HP, OpenLogic, Olliance Group, Novell, SourceForge, DLA Piper, Google and Coverity.
• Open Source Census - a global, collaborative project to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open source software in the enterprise.  It collects and consolidates the data found by OSS Discovery.   Results will be shared publicly to encourage the use of open source software! It's an initiative started by OpenLogic and we will soon announce partners - we have over half a dozen signed up.
  

I'm packing my bag for Australia.  I thought I'd let you all know where I'm at, so if you are also there, we can get together.

A while back we added governance capabilities to OpenLogic Exchange (OLEX.)   This is really cool because it means that not only can you get your open source software through OLEX but you can set your policies and run your approval process through OLEX. 

Continuing my study of whether or not external rewards kill intrinsic motivations, I read a paper Norms, Rewards and Their effect on the Motivation of Open Source Software Developers that Luis pointed me at and Matt Asay blogged about.  (For the record, the paper is as long as its title implies it might be.)  The authors of the paper were also interested in whether or not paying open source developers would demotivate them.  They did a survey with college kids that concluded that paying open source software developers doesn't demotivate them.  However, I think and they agreed, that the research has yet to be done on a real open source software project.  They did point out three really interesting facts.

If, like me, you've wondered why with all our email and conference calls, we spend so much time on airplanes, then you should read How Email Brings You Closer to the Guy in the Next Cubicle from Wired.  I don't think he completely answered it but he makes two good points:

1. NYC "pay for grades."  New York City is offering financial incentives to students to encourage them to do well in school.  Kids are being offered up to $500 a year to take the standardized tests, get good grades and attend school regularly.  Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice is very critical of the plan.   He says that by paying them we may actually make them less likely to want to go to school (unless they are paid.)  Instead he says we need to figure out why kids don't want to do well in school.  We need to work at making them internally motivated to do well in school. 
   
2. Kids & Crayons.  In the same New York Times editorial, Barry Schwartz pointed to another study that shows how external rewards can kill intrinsic motivations.  This study was done with preschool kids - they were given some special markers.  Some of the kids were given awards for playing with the markers and some were not.  Those that got rewards were less likely to play with the markers again and less likely to draw pictures.  They associated drawing pictures with earning rewards not with having fun and so were less likely to draw pictures just for fun! 
   
3. Swiss nuclear waste.  In a slightly different twist, a study was done to see if external rewards were more or less motivating than internal rewards from the onset.  (Actually, I don't think that's what they were studying but that's the question they ended up answering.)  A few years ago Switzerland was trying to figure out where to put its nuclear waste - no town wanted it.  Researchers went door to door and asked people if they would take the waste in their town.  When they were reminded that it was their duty as a Swiss citizen, 50% of them said ok.  When they were told they'd be paid a substantial sum (about six weeks pay every year,) only 25% of them said ok!  It wasn't worth the money.
4. Israeli Daycare.  An Israeli daycare also conducted an unintended study on motivations.  They were tired of parents arriving late to pick up their kids, so instead of giving the parents a hard time and explaining that their workers wanted to go home on time they decided to start fining parents.  Parents saw the fine as sanctioned baby sitting and started showing up late even more often.  They no longer had to feel bad about showing up late because they were paying for the service!  The scary thing (for the daycare) was that when they removed the fines (because parents were showing up even later,) parents didn't go back to their original behavior!  (I think the daycare must not have charged enough.  My daycare charges a $1/minute and I have to say that's motivating!  Although I am more motivated by the embarrassment of being the last parent and of making my kid feel bad.) [Dave Neary pointed me to Luis Villa's post on this one.]
5. Household chores.  Motivation crowding theory cites a study that found that kids that were paid to mow the lawn would only mow the lawn if they were paid to mow it.

I've been thinking about Data is a commodity:

When you look at the acquisition of MySQL by Sun, many pundits and  bloggers point to the acquisition as a way for Sun to fill the database slot in their offering. (PaulaRooney at ZDNet, Forbes)   But I think that leaves out a couple of key underlying market drivers -- consolidation and competition -- that may help to explain Sun’s acquisition, and to understand potential future implications for the industry as whole.

We are now hiring a product manager.  You can check out the job description on our website. 

I’ll start off with the traditional “I am not a lawyer” disclaimer.

I recently read a blog post by Savio Rodrigues in Infoworld that started off with the premise that “Cash is Still King”. That’s a pretty hard statement to disagree with. The post, however, went on to talk about which open source business models would or wouldn’t be successful. This is where I think Savio’s logic went a little off track.

I've heard from many sources that Bill Gates' keynote at CES wasn't all that good.  One opinion is that is was bad for lack of content.  From The Truth That Dare Not Speak: The CES Keynote Sucked:

When you enter information into your Facebook profile, does it belong to you, to Facebook or to the people you share it with?  Right now there's an interesting debate going on in the websphere: Robert Scoble used a script to get all of his Facebook friends' information.  Since that's against the Facebook terms and conditions, his account was disabled.    Scoble was wrong - he violated the terms of the Facebook user agreement which he accepted when he joined Facebook.  However, the debate isn't about whether Scoble violated Facebook terms.  The debate is about whether users should be allowed to download their friends' data.