Once More unto the Breach

Open Source, Software Development Futures, and Monki Gras 2012

2012-02-08T09:28:33-08:00

I had the pleasure of attending Monki Gras 2012 last week in London, UK. It is a fabulous small conference and that will always be it's challenge. (More on this in a moment.) Monki Gras was probably the best small conference I've ever attended. It was ostensibly a conference about where we're going in software development, tying it back to ideas of craft over industrialization. Following along that theme, we had craft coffee for the breaks, craft beer in the reception and as a tasting at dinner, and enjoyed craft food at the breaks and lunch.

The presentation content, however, was incredible. The format was "short" talks lasting 20-30 minutes. It worked well, allowing lots of time to talk amongst the participants. There were ~150 participants and speakers and this was a perfect size. Over the two days, I walked away with something new to think about from almost every single talk.

Some highlights for me included (and I'll post slide references as I received them):

Excellent observations from Matt Lemay (@mattlemay) from bit.ly on "What we share is different than what we click". Best quote: "We've had social media for long enough to be embarrassed by ourselves."
Matt Bidulph (@mattb) talked about new ways to consider social media data analysis and presented ideas for the "Place Graph" alongside the "Social Graph" (see pictures below). In a question: What is the Holborn of Amsterdam? Or the Williamsburg of London?
Laura Merling (@magicmerl) walked us through a great introduction to the idea of the "craft telco" building on the history of the telco space, and comparisons to the brewing industry from pure to industrialization to craft. (Think Twilio.)
Kohsuke Kawguchi (@kohsukekawa) talked about developing developer communities from his experience in Jenkins and the idea of a developer pipeline (analogous to customer pipelines) and how to get developers qualified through it by making everything relentless easier. Slides here on SlideShare. This talk was a great complement to my blog post on software development discipline and developing communities. I also blogged Kohsuke's talk separately on the Outercurve Foundation blog.
Jason Hoffman and Bryan Cantrill gave an enormously entertaining "Doppelbock" talk on the differing roles of CTO and VP, Engineering with some wonderful anti-patterns. Slides here on SlideShare. Best quote from @bcantrill, "Process doesn't write software."
Zack Urlocker (@zurlocker) gave a great talk on considerations for distributed product development practices.
Mike Milinkovich (@mmilinkov) also gave a great talk on the relevance of foundations in an open source world. (There was a broad debate on the subject back in November 2011.)

Those were my highlights from Day One in Conway Hall in Bloomsbury. Okay, I also had the Best Espresso of My Life from the Barista-for-Hire. And the beer tasting at dinner led by Melissa Cole was also awesome.

Day Two moved us down to Rich Mix, an equally interesting and completely different venue in Shoreditch. The talks were equally brilliant. My top picks:

Gavin Starks gave us great insight into developers and apps driving social change at amee.com. Very cool example of Autodesk integrating with the AMEE environmental data feeds to allow designers to model carbon footprints of designs while still designing, rather than discovering the cost in manufacturing.
Paul Downey (@psd) talked about hardware forks and gave us a view of solderpad.com (@solderpad). (Think git for hardware developers only better — very cool.)
Donnie Berkholz talked about how much assholes cost projects with examples from the Gentoo world. (They lost 20% of their community from trolls and trouble makers and they NEVER CAME BACK even after the asshole problem had been solved. That's how expensive it gets.)
Dave Neary (@nearyd) gave a great introduction into how to develop developer communities from a different perspective to Kohsuke, but again emphasizing the need for detail and craft. He built on ideas of mentorship and apprenticeship and examples from the world of Go. (Ask him about the design of Go boards sometime if you want to be blown away by craft.)
Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier (@jzb) introduced people to ideas for promoting their projects with the press and some insight into the world of tech journalists being pitched by PR. A very good how-to with slides here on SlideShare.
Leisa Riechelt (@leisa) gave a wonderful talk on "Why most UX is Shite." Her [excellent] notes are up on her blog with a link to slides.
Finally, Irene Ros (@ireneros) and Alex Graul (@alexgraul) gave a great presentation on what makes good data visualization and how subjective it can be from both the presenter and observer perspectives.

There were a number of great observations flying around the twitter verse during the conference but two bear repeating:

#monkigras is a new kind of conference where the participants are equal to the top calibre speakers
— alexis richardson (@monadic) February 2, 2012

And from Matt Lemay, one of the speakers:

Unsurprisingly, @monkigras was a tremendous success. This will be the future model for many, many tech conferences. This is a *moment*.
— Matt LeMay (@mattlemay) February 1, 2012

And therein lies the challenge. It was the perfect size at ~150 people. It wasn't an invite only event so there was a wonderful mix of people. Smaller would have been fine, but bigger and it will lose some of the sense of intimacy and informality that makes the side conversations easy and important. (One person observed that the U.S. event last Fall was more interactive. I've heard of that difference between the U.S. and UK at similar sized events in the past.) I believe James Governor did design the agenda, asking speakers to give specific talks and I've seen this work really well before (Transfer Summit/UK) at bringing an underlying sense of coherency to a small conference. It certainly worked brilliantly well at Monki Gras. Pairing the event with craft beer and craft coffee also worked in ways I didn't imagine.

All in all, a brilliant conference. Redmonk hopes to have all the filmed talks online soon, and I'll update a link as it becomes available.

Update [15 Feb 2012]: I have also written about three perspectives on the care and feeding of development communities on Network World based on three talks given at the conference.

www.flickr.com

Catching up on the Network World Posts

2011-11-29T11:53:58-08:00

It's been a while since I last blogged here as I continue to post to my Network World blog when I've something to say. Here's a quick summary of what I've been posting over the past year.

The Role of FOSS Foundations
Clean IP management and neutrality encourage collaborative development.
There’s an excellent discussion begun over the past few days on the value of foundations in the free and open source software (FOSS) world. It includes people calling into question the Apache Software Foundation’s role, promoting foundations, and discussing the broader role of FOSS foundations. This was my take.
Do Lawyers Ignore Copyright Law?
Creating software versus creating contracts and a little irony to start your week.
A view on the irony of lawyers ignoring copyright law to make the practice of law easier for them, while making software developers lives more complex.
Software Discipline and Open Source
Software discipline is critical to successful community development
Good software is developed by good software developers. It involves a discipline not found in most programmers. Rigorous version and configuration management, checklists for style and review, “desk” checking reviews before commits, automated (continuous) builds, and fully automated test frameworks are all necessary steps to successfully, reliably delivering executable software that works. I argue that scaling a software project (open or otherwise) is impossible without this discipline.
Peace and Harmony between FOSS contributors and lawyers
Version 1.0 of the The Harmony Documents Launch
Harmony is an effort that was begun and shepherded by Amanda Brock, the general counsel at Canonical, makers of Ubuntu Linux. The intent was to create a small collection of consistently-worded contribution agreements (both licenses and assignments) for free and open source projects to use to reduce the friction such agreements can cause when they’re encountered for the first time by corporate counsel unfamiliar with FOSS licensing. The first version of the work was published in July, 2011 and this was my take on it.
Re-inventing SuSE and Three Futures for Mono
Imagining the potential for Mono going forward
In June 2011 we saw the rolling announcements out of Attachmate as SuSE gets spun into a separate organization with a return to Germany and Mono employees (along with many other Novell employees) finding themselves on the outside looking in. Here were three ideas for the future of SUSE and Mono.
The End of the Symbian Foundation
The end of the Symbian Foundation was in sight before it ever began.
My analysis of how the Symbian Foundation failed before it ever got going properly.
Red Hat Obfuscation is a Tempest in a Teapot
Voting with one’s pocketbook and one’s feet is exactly what software freedom is about.
I encounter another reference in the mainstream analysis about Red Hat “obfuscating” their work on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This really is a tempest in a teapot, and I outline why I think that's so.
Solving the Apple App Store Incompatibility with the GPL
What’s needed is a little legal linguistic grease to enable the two orgs and their differing goals to slide by one another.
Here was an idea for all open source legal experts to gnaw on and solve for the community. I saw that Apple pulled down the VLC media player because of the conflict between the GPL and the Apple App Store terms of service. I think there are easy ways around the GPL software on Apple Appstore debate.

I will keep posting collections here from time to time to keep readers abreast of what I'm writing in other places.

Coffee Houses and Code Communities (and other Network World blog posts)

2010-11-29T03:39:17-08:00

I was invited last Summer to blog at Network World and have been a bit remiss in keeping up on the home blog. Here's the list to date. Several ideas I think are very worth capturing with respect to the discussion around open source community, business, and IP management

Of Coffee Houses and Code Communities
We can learn a lot about successful community building from Starbucks
Brian Proffitt has a great article on the difference between communities and crowdsourcing and how companies still often get it wrong with respect to their community building by treating them as a group that will get things done. I came across a good model for this separation of ideas quite by accident and it differentiates between the co-creation of the asset and the co-production of the community.
Makers, Users and Buyers of Open Source Software
Understanding your relationship to a project lets you ask the right questions.
More and more is being written about governance and license compliance and open source. The FUD of lawsuits continues unabated. Simon Phipps has an excellent post on trying to break out of the conversational frame that some use around compliance and governance. I try to frame a participants relationship to a project so they can best understand what they do (and don't) need to care about.
How to Talk to Your Lawyer about Open Source Software
Lawyers know surprisingly more than they think about open source software.
If you’re a developer that wants to use free and open source software then sooner or later you’re going to need to talk to a lawyer. Many developers have a working understanding of software intellectual property, but unfortunately software copyright is a space fraught with exceptions and edges and ambiguities. Karen Copenhaver came up with a great way to explain open source to a lawyer, and I managed to find the recording of it again.
It’s Not That Complicated
Too much is being made of FOSS licensing complexity.
We seem to be seeing a rise again in the discussions surrounding free and open source software licensing complexity, and the fear that open source may infect or taint your software. I'm tired of it. It's just not that complicated to maintain a clean IP environment in software development.
Please Don’t Confuse Standards with Open Source Software
While standards and FOSS may overlap, they can’t be merged into one mega concept
Some people want to merge the idea of free and open source software with standards, and indeed open the discussion into one of “open standards.” This confuses two ideas that are very different once you get beyond the idea they both involve collaboration in a technology community.
Open Source: No one is working for free
To understand the economics of open source, look to the R&D of collaboration.
People continue to wonder how to make money in the free and open source software world. It’s dressed up in discussions of how one makes money when you give away the software for free, or why developers are working for free. It can likewise lead to a management backlash of not contributing to FOSS projects because some think their developers are working on FOSS instead of their own work. I take another run at explaining why the economics is in a business's best interests.
A FOSS project isn’t necessarily a software product
For FOSS the question isn’t just build vs. buy but also borrow versus share.
Confusion often reigns over how to judge free and open source software (FOSS) as people investigate using it in their businesses. Do they use Red Hat Advanced Server? Fedora? CentOS? Should they use the community edition of the Alfresco content management server or buy the product? How does one judge the “software” and whether it’s “right” for one’s business? These are all questions that confront developers and IT managers as they encounter the FOSS world. I try to tease it apart for people so they understand the difference between a product for sale and an open source project.

Enjoy!

882 Patents

2010-11-29T03:14:24-08:00

So I'm confused. (Not an unusual state for me, I know.) From the Novell acquisition 8-K as referenced in Andy Updegrove's excellent indepth analysis of the deal so far:

The Patent Purchase Agreement provides that, upon the terms and subject to the conditions set forth in the Patent Purchase Agreement, Novell will sell to CPTN all of Novell’s right, title and interest in 882 patents (the “Assigned Patents”) for $450 million in cash (the “Patent Sale”).

N.B. I'm presuming "Assigned Patents" in the above quote refer to the 8-K, and not the USPTO terminology below.

Taking a quick look at what the USPTO has to say about patents Novell owns as assignee, we find:

Patents with Novell as Assignee Name or Novell as Inventor Name: 467
Patent Applications [published] with Novell as Assignee Name or Novell as Inventor Name: 290

So 757 patents and applications. Even adding Attachmate's patent portfolio (14 plus two applications) doesn't really make a difference. I don't know how many "unpublished" patent applications exist in the mix. I don't know if there are a pile of provisional filings that don't show up in the list. I don't know if there are patents outside of the USPTO that are different (unlikely) or overlap in different jurisdictions (in which case one wonders at the import of them if only ~100 were cross-filed. Even doing a search through the USPTO "Patent Assignment Database (Assignments on the Web)" only brings up 775 patents with Novell's name on them.

So to me (naively) it looks like Microsoft vacuumed up the Novell portfolio because it could. I find it more interesting that US$450M was paid for the portfolio. That's about a half million dollars per patent. That seems like a rather large premium when the average patent is supposedly worth about US$75K to file and maintain over its lifetime. (Investors should be curious.) I'm betting it has more to do with Microsoft having a lot of cash and needing to make the overall deal terms palatable to all the partners. So as Brian Proffitt pointed out, I'm not sure things are any more dire today than they were a week ago.

The CodePlex Foundation is now the OuterCurve Foundation

2010-09-28T06:31:30-07:00

The CodePlex Foundation has re-branded itself to the OuterCurve Foundation. There continued to be confusion between the Foundation originally sponsored by Microsoft and the Microsoft forge site (codeplex.com). In June the Board decided it was time to rebrand the organization to clear up the confusion. [Most recently we were given credit for some excellent sponsor work the forge did in the open source community, so we knew the rebranding work was still necessary.]

We worked with a professional agency (Protobrand) and investigated a number of names that conveyed attributes we wanted to have associated with the Foundation. We wanted the name to support our efforts to build credibility for the Foundation within the open source community, and make the Foundation an attractive investment for additional sponsors. And of course we also had to find a name where we could own the urls. In the end we chose the OuterCurve Foundation. We hope it conveys our goal of helping the expanding universe of companies using open source to contribute to the communities they care about and to create their own.

A number of press articles have positioned us as "putting some distance between Microsoft and the Foundation" as the rationale for the rebrand, and I want to emphasize that the distance we're hoping to create is between the forge and the Foundation. We have an excellent working relationship with Microsoft as our founding sponsor. The Codeplex name was originally chosen as there was thought to be more affinity between the forge and the Foundation but it proved not to be so. Not every plan is flawless in its entirety.

The rebranding also coincides with our anniversary. The Foundation is now a year old. In that year, the interim Board put an initial governance structure in place, hired core staff (Paula and I) and we have accepted the creation of two galleries and a half dozen projects. More are on their way. The mission hasn't changed. The Outercurve Foundation exists to provide a software IP management process and project development governance to enable organizations to develop software collaboratively and encourage the growth of the open source software as a development methodology. It's an exciting time.

Some of the coverage:

Dana Blankenhorn: CodePlex Foundation becomes OuterCurve
Joab Jackson (NYTimes): CodePlex Foundation Called OuterCurve
The Register: MS-backed CodePlex Foundation morphs into Outercurve [And no, Paula doesn't gush about things.]
DJ and H-Online: CodePlex Foundation becomes Outercurve Foundation

The Linux Foundation Announces the Open Compliance Program (on CodePlex)

2010-08-10T18:03:50-07:00

Companies have been concerned about software license compliance with respect to free and open source software for some time. Part of this is due to simple competitive FUD designed to frighten people away from using FOSS or to sell services and tools around it, and part of this was due to genuine concern with license compliance when lawsuits appear because of violations. The Linux Foundation announced the Open Compliance Program at LinuxCon in Boston today to help companies understand and manage such compliance needs. I describe and comment on the program on my CodePlex Foundation blog.

Open Core and the Open Source Business Model Debate (on CodePlex)

2010-07-13T22:07:06-07:00

The past few weeks have seen a resurgence in the debate over whether or not open core is a valid open source business model or not. There has been a lot of passionate and pragmatic discourse from lots of knowledgeable people (Phipps, Ingo, Mickos, Aker, Aslett, Proffitt, O'Grady).

I add my take on the debate on the CodePlex Foundation blog.

Software Freedom and Open Source Software (on CodePlex)

2010-07-12T12:26:36-07:00

I just posted my opening thoughts on the current debates over software freedom versus open source software as a foundation for a discussion about open core as a business model. They are over at the CodePlex Foundation blog. Please discuss there rather than here.

The CodePlex Foundation and the Free Software Foundation Redux

2010-06-23T06:15:04-07:00

It was brought to my attention that the FSF has re-posted its CodePlex Foundation commentary from last Fall on the day it was announced that I took the position as technical director at the Foundation. I'm not sure that anything has been added to the new commentary. Re-reading the FSF re-post, I can't but point back to my original response. I will add a couple of clarifications:

CodePlex.com is a Microsoft owned and staffed forge that encourages the development of open source software based on Microsoft technology. The CodePlex Foundation is a separate not-for-profit software foundation to enable and encourage the development of open source software in the commercial world. Microsoft is the founding sponsor of the Foundation. There will be other sponsors. I work for the Foundation, not Microsoft.
The naming confusion was not the most inspired move, but reflected an earlier idea for the Foundation. It will be resolved over time, and hopefully the confusion with it.
The CodePlex Foundation is completely free and open source software license agnostic. The Foundation is also technology agnostic. If you want to use AGPL or GPLv3 or BSD or EPL, the Foundation has no opinion and will happily support your project or gallery. If you want to run on Mac OSX, Linux, Windows or all three, the Foundation likewise doesn't have an opinion.

The CodePlex Foundation has taken a while to get going, but there are already six projects across two galleries, some of them non-Microsoft. Paula Hunter joined as executive director last March, and I arrived a few short weeks ago. It's early days yet. Rome was not built in a day.

Pax.

Cross-Posting to "Once More unto the Breach" and the CodePlex Foundation

2010-06-23T06:07:00-07:00

I have begun to blog on the CodePlex Foundation blogs page as well as my blog here. When I believe the subject matter will have relevance to both audiences, I will cross post. Just so everyone knows that cares. (The RSS feed on the CodePlex Foundation should be up shortly.)

Eclipse 2010 Survey Notes Contribution in Open Source Software Projects Declines

2010-06-23T06:00:37-07:00

I saw from Dana Blankenhorn's blog post the other day that the Eclipse Foundation has once again published its excellent annual survey of Eclipse usage in the world. This is an annual survey that is always interesting because it shows the rise of many free and open source software projects beyond the Eclipse world and their subsequent competition with each other and the traditional products in the marketplace (e.g. Windows, Oracle). There were 1696 completed surveys this year to last year's 1365, i.e. there were almost 25% more respondents this year.

Dana caught sight of a trend noted by Ian Skerrett in his blog post announcing the survey:

Trend #7. Open source participation seems to be stalled. In the survey, we asked a question about the corporate policies towards open source participation. In 2009 48% claimed they could contribute back to OSS but in 2010 only 35.4% claim they could contribute back. Conversely, 41% in 2010 claimed they use open source software but do not contribute back but in 2009 it was 27.1%. Obviously not a trend any open source community would like to see. I am not sure the reason companies would become less restrictive in their open source policies. Any insight or feedback from the community would be appreciated.

The question as asked in the survey reads differently to me: What best describes your organization's policy towards the use of open source software? (Choose one.) Possible answers were:

Does not allow the use of any open source software (1.4%)
Uses open source software, but does not interact with open source project communities in any way (35.6%)
Uses open source software and contributes back (through bug reports, code, resources) to at least one open source project community to help improve the quality of the projects we consume (30.7%)
Contributes significant development resources (contributors, committers and/or maintainers, project leaders) to at least one open source project community in order to help influence the evolution of the projects we consume (7.7%)
Has a business model that relies on open source software for its success (11.4%)
Individual, not affiliated with an organization (9.2%)
Don't know (4.1%)

There hasn't necessarily been an increase in participants that say they can't contribute, but rather that they don't contribute back. Dana and Ian both ask why this might be the case. Looking to the demographics, there may be a number of reasons.

There's an increase in the percentage of financial services participants over the years (6% to 6.8% to 8.4%). This is a group that has historically been careful in how they contribute and where. The IT crowd is also interesting because using FOSS means that they don't need to figure out how to talk with the accounting department to create a PO for a software trial to solve a problem, but turning it around to the contribution side of the equation, they also don't need to figure out how to find a lawyer to ensure they're giving back in an appropriate manner.

There's an increase in the number of students over the last two reports (8.6% in 2007 down to 8.1% then to 9.8%). This number may be the more interesting set of numbers because the fewer students, the higher the contribution status it seems in the graph (p. 27 in the 2010 report). There are absolutely students that contribute and whose contributions are deeply valued by a number of open source communities, but as a rule, they would be less experience developers and are faced with the learning curves of the project, the technology, and the growth of their own programming skills. This has significance in terms of things that are accepted by the community. They also may simply not know how to contribute as many FOSS repositories do a poor job of delivering the guidance to develop a vibrant community that encourages new developers to join.

All in all, the survey is always a great piece of work and the other trends it finds in it's developer community are always interesting.

I've Joined the CodePlex Foundation as it's Technical Director

2010-05-18T06:14:16-07:00

All: I've joined the CodePlex Foundation starting Monday, 17 May as the Technical Director reporting to the executive director. My responsibility is to set the strategic technical direction of the Foundation, and work with the gallery managers and project leaders on a day-to-day basis. I'm excited about this. I believe the CodePlex Foundation has a great role to play as we continue to see more and more commercial organizations participate in open collaborative software development.

The CodePlex Foundation exists to encourage and support the creation of more open source software, specifically working with commercial organizations. People have shared software since we started programming computers. The sharing bandwidth used to be mag tape sized packets and conference schedule delivery rates. Now we have the Internet which changed the dynamics and economics dramatically. Historically, software foundations tied to free and open source software grew to support a particular licensing scheme or project technology community. I think the CodePlex Foundation complements existing organizations quite nicely. The Foundation is an excellent opportunity to broaden the contribution base from commercial organizations and I want to ensure processes and education are in place to enable those contributions.

My first order of business will be to meet with the existing gallery managers and project leads to begin to put in place any process and services they urgently need. From that point forward it will be to help define and shape the rest of the project and IP management processes that are needed to make the Foundation's value proposition a reality for new sponsors and contributors.

A few friends and colleagues have asked what it means for Microsoft's open source initiatives. I don't know. I certainly don't speak for Microsoft. The CodePlex Foundation has a very straightforward mission and I work for the Foundation. Microsoft is the first and founding sponsor, essentially putting their money where their mouth is with respect to managing their own contributions. I expect there will be more sponsors and participants over the coming year and my goal is to enable them all.

Open Source Communities and Customers in Pictures

2010-05-06T23:03:39-07:00

[Update (19-Nov-2010, 15:41 GMT): Voici une traduction en Français par Philippe Scoffoni.]

[Update (11-May-2010, 10:37): Matt Aslett posted commentary on this post at the 451 Group CAOS blog.]

Debate continues on whether open core business models are a winning strategy with a capital "w" or not, and whether customers care. Matt Aslett's recent excellent posts continue the discussion. The big concern for those that criticize or express concerns is that customers are mis-lead, essentially that there's a bait-and-switch free-versus-product or a deliberate lack of clarity in the marketing around the product value.

I want to take a different approach to the discussion here. Before we had Internet-sized bandwidth on which to collaborate around software, traditional software business looked something like the first diagram. R&D delivered product. Marketing delivered messages. Sales and marketing managed and qualified leads through a pipeline and if the product solved a customer problem properly, a market was made and you could measure the profits.

The Internet happened, dramatically removing friction from the process of collaborative software development and delivery. Developers could share the economic cost of software creation (innovation and construction) and large repositories of useful building blocks were born and made available through these project-focused communities. The Web accelerated the early Internet trend.

Companies began to form around some of the projects and for the past decade and a half there's been confusion as people debated how to make money when you give away the software, or the other side of the economic equation around variations on why people work for free. This has unfortunately led to the idea of community and customer interaction akin to the following diagram. The community is jammed into the middle of the customer pipeline. The community gives stuff to R&D which still delivers product. Marketing now messages to customers AND [worse] the community, and the company tries to "convert" the community into customers.

This probably started around the time that MySQL AB observed they had a paying customer for every thousand downloads. This mis-set expectations in a fundamental way. People assumed causality. It created false metrics around driving downloads and improving conversion rates. (We'll come back to this ....)

Marten Mickos (while CEO at MySQL) observed that the early community has time but no money while the later community has money but no time, and that his customers are in the latter bucket. This is the start of a better model for understanding community and customer. Let's use the "time is money" line as the division between community and customers because by forcing the separation of the two groups we can add clarity to both and the things a business would need to do differently with each.

Instead lets treat the community (time but no money) as a completely separate entity from the customer pipeline (money but no time). The community members engage with R&D over the project. They engage with marketing in a conversation about project direction, and ancillary things like translations in other markets. Customers are qualified through the pipeline based upon the product.

Indeed you can start to see how to think about these different groups of people using different well understood and documented processes for community development and sales channel management.

This allows you to clearly address each groups's selfish needs.

Community	Customers
They have time but NO money	They have money and no time
They want a problem solved and look to the project	They want a problem solved and look to the product
They can’t be converted	Your Community is the litmus test of solution viability.
They can contribute time, so: What do you want them to do? What do you need to enable? What do you need to let them know?	You manage leads through the qualification pipeline and conversion process like any other customer-focused sales process
They will not waste time, so the project needs to solve a problem for them before they will invest themselves in it

Product for customers is clearly differentiated from project and community. How the product is differentiated depends upon the company and the value proposition to customers. At it's simplest, the product may be a supportable and maintained collection of software, certified to run on specific supported platforms and with particular applications, and trivially installable. The product may be the support and maintenance itself. Some companies pack more "enterprise ready" marketable differentiated features or attributes into the product. Others (e.g. Red Hat, JBoss, MySQL) develop a valuable network offering that includes support, maintenance, certifications, additional warranties, monitoring, indemnifications, and the like into a single subscription model. Regardless, there is well-defined value that solves a customer's problems.

Companies like Alfresco and Hyperic and JBoss all saw conversions in the pipeline because potential customers came to the web site, learned what they needed to learn, downloaded the appropriate things to try, and used the community as a litmus test of the solution before returning (self-qualified) to buy product.

This visualization also clears up debate about "open source" and "community". Some companies publish their product source code under open source licenses and never try to develop a real community. There's nothing wrong here if indeed they're running a more traditional software business model and don't care specifically about enabling the community to directly engage with the project. Publishing the software is a sign of strength and confidence in their product and their ability as a company to satisfy customers with a valuable solution that is more than just the software.

Some companies also develop large successful communities without ever publishing their product software. This is why community building is so important for your company and why community development is an essential ingredient in your solution pitch to customers. Communities historically anchored your customers. Communities create knowledge, expertise and experience, all necessary to provide a complete solution for your technology pitch to the customer. Communities create advocates and evangelists to spread awareness about your solution. Communities create enormous inertia in the status quo around your technology. This is why companies like Microsoft invested millions in developing the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN). It has taken more than a decade for other Internet communities around interesting open source projects to wear down the inertia inherent in MSDN. Likewise, IBM has invested enormous amounts of money in the IBM Developer Network, incorporating free and open source software to meet their solution needs and value propositions to their customers. With open source projects relating to your company, the community is anchoring your solution.

This is the real "conversion". The community enables customers. It is correlative not causative. Community members that have solved their problems using your technology base will carry their excitement, knowledge, and commitment into new places where customers exist. With well organized open source communities, the community now fronts your technology to new customers as well as later anchoring customers once they exist.

Microsoft Failing Its Own OOXML Standard (ISO/IEC 29500)

2010-04-01T11:15:40-07:00

I was dismayed this morning to see Andy Updegrove's write-up on Alex Brown's post on Microsoft failing it's own Office Open XML (OOXML) standard (formally known as ISO/IEC 29500). It is the second anniversary of the ballot resolution and approval of the standard. While Andy was reporting from the trenches through the final ballot resolution, Alex was responsible for the negotiations that allowed the standard to pass. Essentially Microsoft seems to be breaking the promises it made to the international standards community to get the standard through the process.

If Microsoft ship Office 2010 to handle only the Transitional variant of ISO/IEC 29500 they should expect to be roundly condemned for breaking faith with the International Standards community. This is not the format “approved by ISO/IEC”, it is the format that was rejected.

Unfortunately it's unclear what condemnation will bring. Even were the EU Commission to involve itself as Alex later suggests, it is unlikely that this would effect shareholder value in any meaningful way.

Alex also wonders at how such bad implementation can be allowed to happen:

So why — given the awareness Microsoft has at the top, at the bottom, and round the edges [for standards] — does it still manage to behave as it does? Something, perhaps, is wrong at the centre — some kind of corporate dysfunction caused by a failure of executive oversight.

It's nothing sinister I suspect. Cynically — it was nobody's job, and by that I mean no development manager or program management manager (or test manager for that matter) of any reasonable authority or seniority likely had it as a primary rewardable objective on their annual review. If the bugs were even filed, they were likely never deemed sufficiently important to fix during bug triage on the road to release-to-manufacturing. I saw bug triage meetings circa 1999 on the road to Windows 2000 where non-critical bugs that were effecting 10,000 beta customers were ignored because there were other bugs effecting 100,000 users. When you ship a product that has a consumer base of tens of millions, you learn different skills in the triage process. I suspect it's similar on the Office side of the company.

And Alex is completely correct, there would be no executive oversight pushing down from above on the Office development organization. The vice-president that published the open letter two-years ago making the promises has probably either (a.) moved on to other responsibilities, or (b.) assumed he had made the promise and someone else was to carry it out. It won't be on his review objectives either so he's still being well paid. So too with any other exec in the pipeline two-years ago. Even the standards team that worked so hard to get it through the ECMA and ISO processes will have moved on to other standards (and certainly wouldn't be so naive in the product-centricity of Microsoft to have accepted such an objective so far out of their control). The marketing team got its talking points two years ago. This is a cultural problem. The development teams within the company (i.e. the revenue generation engine) with a few exceptions in a few Web-related product teams just aren't tuned to deal with standards in a serious manner the way certain other vendors do.

Until there are serious lost sales to do with non-conformance from large government organizations, and the field organization starts to seriously yell, there will be no understanding in Redmond that it really mattered and that certain government officials may even have bet their careers on such promises. Even then, the first question in Redmond will [cynically] be, "How much do we sell to the Ministry of [Big Issues] in [Name-of-small-northern-European-country]?"

Alex finishes with the quote:

In short, we find ourselves at a crossroads, and it seems to me that without a change of direction the entire OOXML project is now surely heading for failure.

Failure indeed. I used the photograph at the top of the post two-years ago when I cynically predicted how this was going to go down over time. I summarized my opinions on the battle between ODF and OOXML and how Microsoft should have played the war as one of the examples in a standards primer I wrote around the same time. It will be interesting to watch how Microsoft responds to Alex's post. The world is indeed watching.

A New Blog about Big Data in the Cloud

2010-03-22T11:00:04-07:00

Ideas behind the future and importance of Big Data and the Cloud continue to thrive. Tim O'Reilly has been hammering home the message for some time that data will become the "Intel Inside" of the next generation of lock-in, (most recently in a fabulous keynote at OSBC). Companies like Cloudera are making big bets on the platform architecture of the next wave. And when the Economist starts to dedicate special reports to the topic, you know it's reached a particular threshold in people's minds.

I've had the pleasure of knowing Carolyn Johnston for some time. She's a math geek and lead researcher in the MSN Advanced Engineering team specializing in location data and data quality. She's started blogging last week, and her topics will be both fun and educational. (I've the privilege of seeing early drafts in the pipeline.) If you care about the evolving world of big data in the cloud, I encourage you to give her a read.