Cool story:  I just got out of a meeting with a VC who is a potential investor in OpenLogic.  At one point during the meeting, he asked about adoption of open source application frameworks — specifically Struts and Spring.  I pulled up the web site for The Open Source Census, went to the All Packages by Name report and found out that Spring had been found on 8% of the machines scanned so far and Struts on 16%.  The VC's mouth dropped open.  He started staring at the screen and writing all sorts of numbers down in his notebook.

This is the promise of The Open Source Census.  I know we've got a ways to go to collect more data, but the data makes people salivate.  And it's only going to get better.  Now that is cool.

In a recent post on open source business models, Fabrizio Copabianco from Funambol states his belief that a business model based solely on support won't work.

I can't believe a pure model based on support is going to scale to the one billion dollars we always talk about. A pure support and services model works for a while, then customers get comfortable with what they have and pull the plug on it. Your best customers leave you because they are too satisfied… It is sad but inevitable. Maybe you can make it with an operating system, but if you move up the stack you are screwed…

I believe the issue with open source support models is because of the way they have worked up till now …which is often too much money for too little value.  In the end, companies are willing to pay if the cost is commensurate to the value they get and is better than alternative options (eg self support or community support).  Because open source support is often significantly cheaper than proprietary license plus maintenance costs, it may be easy at first to overlook the fact that we still need to ensure that the value customers get justifies the cost.

More than once at OpenLogic we have been called by companies who had already dropped support from a commercial open source vendor because they value/cost relationship was not there.  They later ran into support issues that they needed help with.  Inevitably, when we help solve those problems, they are happy to sign up for a support subscription.  The customer was always very willing to pay for support – just not the price that the vendor wanted to charge.

 As commercial open source vendors, we need to deliver value commensurate with our cost.  Sounds obvious, but I think it's been easy to skate by on the fact that open source is cheaper than proprietary software.  I don't think that will be the case for much longer.  As the economy tightens, as customers get more familiar with open source, as the competitive landscape emerges, successful open source support companies will be the ones that deliver a lot of value at a low cost.

The old adage, "you can't manage what you can't measure" applies to open source as well.  Bernard Golden recently posted on why it is important for CIOs to understand what open source software they are using in order to adequately address both the infrastructure needs and legal requirements of open source.  He looks at the challenges that this lack of awareness can present.

Think about the risk exposure this represents. Obviously, there are questions regarding whether the company is complying with the license obligations of the open source software, so the company's attorneys are likely to be concerned.

To my mind, though, legal risk is only a small part of the overall risk this CIO faces. The far larger risk is that there is no visibility into the makeup of a significant portion of the company's IT infrastructure. How can you confidently plan for SLA commitments when you're not sure of what software you're running, its maturity, supportability, and so on? Furthermore, as a CIO, you face the very real potential of being unable to adequately map out your workforce skills planning, since you are unaware of what development and operations commitments accompany these invisible software implementations. Finally, it's hard to attest to important regulatory requirements (if you're subject to regulations like recoverability and so on, as financial institutions are), when you don't know what will need to be recovered.

OpenLogic developed OSS Discovery — a free, open source tool that finds installed open source on your machines – to address just this problem.  IT organizations can download OSS Discovery and use it to scan a sampling of machines in their organization to find out what open source they are using.  OpenLogic also provides a free inventory analysis of the first 500 machines.  This inventory is the first step to open source governance.

Once you have the data about what open source you are using, you can:

• ensure compliance with open source licenses
• determine the type of support and SLAs required
• plan for skills needed in your organization
• ensure compliance with regulations and internal policies

You can also benchmark your open source usage against that of other similar companies by taking the results from OSS Discovery and anonymously submitting them to The Open Source Census.  By doing so, you will get access to benchmark reports that show opportunities for using more open source software.

The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment has been making the rounds and has been quite amusing from many angles.

Ironically, I received this email from my Mom a few minutes ago:

“I keep getting a notice on the screen that I should install the latest version of Flash. Seems like nothing is working right this morning on the usual things I look at like the NY Times, eBay, etc. Is this all connected? Is the Flash Update free? What do I do? Help.

Mom
“

Sounds almost identical to the failures in the Ubuntu girlfriend experiment.

The kicker? My Mom is running OS X.

When you decide to not only use an open source software project but to really rely on it, accessing community viability is important. You don't want to build your business around a project only to discover that nobody is really working on it, bugs never get fixed and there are no new releases.

At OpenLogic we've created a number of ways to measure a community's viability including things like the size of the developer community, number of code commits, bug fixes, forum posts, etc. However, one thing that is hard to measure is the importance of the first lead developer. I think once a project has been handed down to someone else, this is less important, but the first lead developer plays a crucial role in a project. As Paula Rooney points out, the Reiser file system may fail if Hans Reiser goes to jail. There's nothing wrong with the file system and it has an active community but it's still being led by its first lead developer and if he drops out (especially to negative publicity), the project may not keep its momentum.

Once a project has moved on to a second lead developer, with the blessing of the first one, I think the project is much more stable and less dependent on the lead developer. 

Mark Radcliff gave a talk at OSBC about making sure your legal strategy matches your open source strategy. One of the things he talked about and blogged about was how to pick a license. He mentioned 7 factors to consider when picking a license:

1. the sources of revenue
2. the type of product
3. business model
4. type of project
5. channels
6. type of community
7. competitors

One he forgot (although it may fit into community) is who is going to use the project and how. I know a company that released a cool product under the GPL to discover a year or so later that nobody was using it for fear of copylefting their own products. They changed the license to the LGPL and their user base and therefore their community grew rapidly.

I've heard rumors lately that the One Laptop Per Child program may go to Windows. That would be a shame. And not because I think Linux should win over Windows but because OLPC has the largest, spontaneous community I've seen and OLPC would lose them immediately if they moved to Windows. When I'm at conferences, I see people walking around with their green OLPC's explaining and giving demos to anyone who is interested. When I ask them their affiliation to OLPC, "none" is always the answer.

OLPC is cool - it's a cool project (just look at it - bright green, made for kids, cool little antenna things) with an awesome mission that everyone wants to be associated with - computers for kids in developing nations. If OLPC goes to Windows only, they will lose all of their open source community backing.

Instead of moving to Windows, they should figure out how to leverage all of the community goodwill they currently have.

Microsoft just held their 2008 "MVP Global Summit" in Redmond last week.  This is an internal conference where they recognize awardees in a number of divisions and have over 400 technical sessions on a variety of topics.

The interesting bit for me is that Jamie Cannon reports that there's an informal meeting of Microsoft Rubyists going on at the event.  They're planning to discuss IronRuby, open source, and other topics.

Wow, Ruby is definitely getting some love lately.  I'm excited about that because OpenLogic has been a heavy user of Ruby, Rails, JRuby, and related projects for almost a year now.  The more people use it, the better it gets.  Once an open source project hits critical mass, it really takes off.

Speaking of which, I think JRuby will start to hit its stride this summer if they really do concentrate on Rails performance next as Ola Bini suggests.  I'm very much looking forward to having the option to deploy our OpenLogic Exchange (OLEX) on JRuby.  Mongrel is great, don't get me wrong, but I've always been a little suspicious of server processes that need to be monitored and restarted so frequently.  Call me crazy.

As we're on the topic of alternative Ruby implementations, I'm anxiously awaiting the first releases of IronRuby.  Will it really be the JRuby of the .NET world?  Will it be fast, reliable, scalable, and fully-compliant?  I sure hope so.  It would be great to have yet another deployment option even though I'd like to standardize on a JVM if I have a choice.

With Microsoft's growing interest in the world of open source and some internal Ruby programmers, I tend to think they'll get there.  Perhaps JRuby will have some real competition on Windows next year.

A number of people have asked about my "Would you do it again for free?" presentation. It's a talk about why open source developers started working on open source software and how money and companies have changed that. 

One of the things about the open source community that continues to baffle those non-open source people is, "why do you do it?" Open source developers work on open source software for a number of reasons from scratching an itch to gaining a reputation to building a resume to contributing to a good cause.  The interesting problem comes when money enters into the equation. Research shows that when someone works on something for free (for internal rewards) if you start paying them you replace those internal rewards. Then if you stop paying them, they will stop working on it.  Does that hold true for open source software?  Are commercial companies killing open source by paying people to work on it?

You can find the talk in ogg format. (Note the file is about 100MB!) You can also get the audio and the slides. If you know how to convert from ogg to something I can embed in a blog post, please let me know!

I gave this talk again at SCALE and there I added more of "here's why developers work on open source software and here's what they can do to help companies work with them effectively."

I just read Matt Asay's blog post MySQL adoption: Deep and wide in which he refers to an anecdote on Jonathan Schwarz's blog about MySQL adoption in the enterprise.

In the anecdote, Jonathan meets with a CIO who claims that they don't run MySQL.  A Sun sales rep counters this claim with the tidbit that there had been 1300 downloads of MySQL from that company in the last year.

This is not uncommon — we frequently hear from CIOs who tell us they barely use any open source.  However when we use OSS Discovery to scan their machines, we find they are using a heck of a lot more open source than they realize.  This was the impetus for launching The Open Source Census yesterday.

So I decided to go check on the status of MySQL in The Open Source Census.  I found that of the 400+ machines scanned to date, about 37% had MySQL installed.

If this CIO participates in The Open Source Census, he will know how much open source and which open source packages are being used in the company.  And he will be able to compare his open source usage to that of similar companies.

Maybe Sun will pass it on.

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/freedom_s_choice