So we all know that most open source projects are licensed under the GPL - Ken Krugle's graph shows that clearly over 75% of projects are GPL or LGPL - but it turns out that most open source software used by enterprises are not licensed under the GPL … companies are using primarily Apache licensed software! 

OpenLogic has over 300 projects in our open source software library - added by customer request.  (Our customers being large enterprises.)  Taking a look at those projects I discovered that:

• 29% of them are licensed under the GPL or LGPL
• 35% of them are licensed under the Apache license

But wait!  It gets even more interesting if you look at just the top 20 projects.  I sorted our library by number of customers actually using the open source software package, took the top 20, grouped by license and found:

• 75% Apache
• 20% GPL or LGPL
• 20% CPL, Eclipse, Perl, BSD

(Note that this ads up to more than 100% because several projects had several licenses.  That's why I didn't put these numbers in a pie chart - it would imply that each project just had one license.)

 So now the interesting question is: is this coincidence or cause and effect?

1. Do companies prefer the Apache license and so they tend to gravitate to projects licensed under the Apache license? 
2. Do companies have anti-GPL clauses in their open source policy that prevents them from using more GPL licensed software?  
3. Does the Apache Foundation (which is all Apache licensed) create better than average software and so that software tends to be more widely used? (Lots of projects on SourceForge are trial projects run by one person that never really went anywhere.)
4. Is there actually more Apache licensed code out there than people have been counting because they usually run their statistics on SourceForge data?
5. All of the above?

I'm voting on a little of all of the above.  What do you think?

One of the most common questions we get is about how the OpenLogic support model works.  People that hear about it are often curious about how we can provide support for 300+ open source software projects.  I think most people are used to the standard commercial open source support model, where a company owns many or some of the committers for a particular open source package and provides support around it.  This commercial open source model is pretty intuitive since it parallels the “commercial proprietary” world that people are used to.   However, part of the promise of open source is freedom – and we think part of that is freedom is to get support from whomever you feel can best provide it.  That means that there will be choice for customers, and we have to offer our customers a choice that they think is worthwhile.  Otherwise, they won’t buy from us.

What enterprises look for

Our focus is on serving the needs of enterprises.  Most enterprises we talk to are using dozens to hundreds (yes, hundreds) of different open source packages.  Some of those packages go into production, and some are used as part of the development process.  These open source packages are almost never used in isolation – many open source packages are used together, and typically in conjunction with commercial & custom solutions.  What these enterprises want is someone that can support them across many or all of the open source packages we use.

How we support them

That brings us back to the question of how we actually support all of these 300+ open source packages.  The answer is that we don’t do it by ourselves – we use a combination of in-house experts, partners and open source community members.  (See our OpenLogic Expert Community program for more information on that.)  

So how do we do it?  To answer that, let’s look at the type of calls we get. 

• Less than 10% of our calls are software defects.  (Probably anybody familiar with support could have predicted that.)  When we run into a software defect we work closely with the committers on that project to write a fix and check it in.  Our Expert Community includes project committers.

• Many of the issues we get are really “questions.”  We get a lot of questions that involve integration of one or more open source software packages with an in-house or commercial applications.  Almost no open source package is used in isolation, and customers need help getting it all to work together.  We have a lot of expertise with this since our company has been configuring and integrating open source packages since we were first founded. 
   
• We also get some pretty complicated troubleshooting and how to questions.  We work on it no matter what application appears to be the problem.  We answer them through a combination of in-house, partner and Expert Community expertise.  What our customers like is that we work with them until the problem is solved.  Traditional commercial proprietary vendors often try to pass the support “hot potato” as quickly as possible – prove the problem is not in their application and then point the customer at some other vendor.   We take a different approach.  We don’t point fingers.  In fact, we have continued to work issues even after it became clear that the problem was definitely not in the open source package but in some custom code created by the customer.  Our customers love it.  We’ve solved problems involving systems that included open source along with home grown apps and commercial solutions such as BEA WebLogic and Oracle.  When customers express their appreciation at three in the morning, we say it’s the open source way.

Who solves issues

So what percentage of issues do we solve in-house? First off, we make sure that 100% of all customer issues are resolved no matter what open source software package is involved.  We don’t “hand off” the issue so much as we pull in additional resources.  We solve about half of all customer calls with our in-house support staff and the other half we solve with help from our Expert Community – both individual committers and commercial partners.

One of the things I really like about working with our Expert Community is not only do they not point fingers but they jump in to help each other out.   Right after we started doing support, we had a bug in an open source project.  The community member that fixed the bug wasn’t actually a committer, he was just available right away and said “I know how to fix it.”  Within 30 minutes of him posting the fix to our system, another community member that was a committer on that particular project said “I’ve checked it in.”  We are all working in the best interest of the open source software packages and their users.

How do we work with the Expert Community

We pay the Expert Community (both individuals and partner companies) to help us resolve issues The individuals we work with are already committers and contributors on the open source packages they support.  The partners we work with, companies like Covalent, are also experts on the packages they support.  If commercial open source companies do exist, we always try to involve them in our partner program whenever possible.  We think this partnering approach is a “win-win” for everyone –enterprises get consolidated support across the many open source packages they use, OpenLogic can tap existing open source companies to provide that support, and those open source companies receive new revenue streams that we can bring them.

This model has worked extremely well over the sixteen months since we launched it.   We’ve solved hundreds of issues for customers and we’ve paid out money to the Expert Community members and partners who have helped us.  We want to grow the use of open source in the enterprise by providing open source services and tools that companies see as valuable.  We are excited to work with the entire open source community to make that successful.

Paul Duvall has an interesting post about rewarding your lazy programmers - the ones that write good interfaces, abstractions and easy to support code.  They are good programmers because they are so lazy they don't want to have to support the code or help others figure it out so they write their code well the first time.  This idea meshes really well with my favorite management rule: give anything really tedious and repetitious (i.e. automate-able) to a good programmer.  They will automate it for you just so they can move on to something more interesting.

A couple of days ago the Software Freedom Law Center filed the first GPL violation lawsuit in the US.  Basically they are saying that Monsoon Multimedia is shipping GPL software without the source code (or an offer for the source code.)

You can read about it:

• The SFLC’s press announcement,
• The filing itself,
• Lots of blogs that follow legal open source happenings:
• Luis Villa
• Mark Radcliffe
• Jason Haislmaier

This case just underscores the fact that you have to know what open source software you are using (see our free Discovery tool) and what licenses that software is under (see OLEX, the OpenLogic Exchange.)

People that work from home know that every once in a while there are some unique challenges like dogs barking or the door bell ringing.  Today I encountered a new one.  My dog started snoring during the conference call.  How exactly do you explain that one?

Anyone interested in how outsourcing, the internet and open source software have change the world should read the first few chapters of Thomas Friedman's  The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. He gives a really good anecdotal history of how the internet and open source have changed how we work.  I highly recommend it and I plan to give it to a few people that keep asking me "what's this open source thing really about?"

If you are up for it (the book is looonnngg), he goes on to explain all sorts of interesting things. For example, by the end of it, I understood in several different ways how outsourcing is changing the business - I especially like how he says India is trying to beat us to the top, not to the bottom. They want to be better than us, not cheaper.  I could have skipped the few chapters at the end where he tries to explain that we need to keep up the good work even if it means terrorists also have access to it.  He was definitely on a rant there.

The Linux Foundation has announced two Legal Summits for open source software, a place for attorneys to get together to discuss the legal aspects of open source software.  Since there are a lot of legal concerns around open source and the legal talks at open source software conferences are always very popular, I think it's great they are creating a place for attorneys to get together to discuss open source software.  Unfortunately, the first event is for Linux Foundation members only.  I wonder if they'll be blogging or sharing the discussions?  (The disclaimers alone would be miles long!)

So, I swing by a Starbucks on my way into the office this morning and pick myself up a latte.  Nothing out of the ordinary yet.  

Now comes the odd part.  This lady behind me (who I had noticed walking from a table outside where her husband was sitting with their Dachshund - important to note that I had also noticed that her and her husband both already had drinks) tells the barista that she needs the usual for her dog.  That perked my ears up, but then I just assumed that she had intended to get her wiener dog a cup of water, so the whole thing tailed off for me.  

Then, I notice that the barista does not get her a cup of water, but instead shoots 3 pumps of vanilla syrup into a child-size coffee cup.  I'm captivated at this point, so as I'm waiting for my to-be-drank-by-a-human latte, I continue to pay attention to what's going on.  The end result of the coffee cup that started with three pumps of vanilla is a vanilla steamer (steamed milk) with whipped cream…. for the dog.

This situation officially turned into a bizarro world type of moment for me… the kind of moment where I started thinking that maybe I was the only person out there who doesn't get a Starbucks drink for their dog every morning.  Is this a common thing?  Are my dogs being abused because they're only drinking water?

If you like seeing how things are connected, you should check out some of TouchGraph's products. You can explore the connections between webpages, books on Amazon or even your friends on Facebook. Add the TouchGraph application to your FaceBook profile and you can see not only how you are connected to your friends but how they are connected to each other. I could easily see my high school group of friends, my college group, the GNOME group, etc. You can see which friends are hubs - The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference and Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means in action! - and which groups dominate among your friends.

If you want to play a real live "7 degrees to Kevin Bacon" game you can join the Columbia University Small World experiment. They give you a target, for example a housewife in Australia, and you have to see if you can reach her by forwarding the message through your friends.

I rarely ( read never ) blog about other blogs.. that seems so … plagiaristic … to me. But,

I caught this from the O'Reilly feed, and jumped to the link. It is a youtube video on Startup Metrics.  I have no original thoughts about it, other than to say it is good listening / watching and I recomend giving it a view. While everything said does not apply to every startup, there are some good lessons learned in there..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irjgfW0BIrw