It’s always good when respected open source luminaries such as Matt Asay begin to question long held open source software truths.  Matt wonders whether the GNU General Public License is “an alternative way to release proprietary software?”  Matt argues:

“With the Web making open-source licensing largely irrelevant, anyway, it’s a good time to evaluate the merits of the two dominant open-source-licensing approaches (GPL & the Apache Software License). For this moment in time, they’re essentially equivalent, at least to end users and Web developers, neither of which is required to contribute back derivative works.”

Matt uses Eric Raymond’s post titled “The Economic Case Against the GPL” to bolster his evolving view that the Apache Software License (ASL) is a more effective license for the future of open source than the GPL.

Before writing off the GPL in the long run, there are three situations to consider.  They all deal with the viability of the open source vendor considering the GPL vs. ASL.

1. Does the GPL license encourage customers to purchase a license more so than the ASL would?

2. Does the GPL license encourage partners and/or OEMs to purchase a license more so than the ASL would?

3. Does the GPL protect the open source vendor’s IP against a (larger) competitor more so than the ASL would?

1. Customers:
I was going to argue that the GPL encourages customers to pay for the software more so than the ASL does.  But that’s false, and if it isn’t today, it will be in 5 years.  There was a time when inside counsel would recommend their companies stay away from using GPL software for fear of the GPL’s viral nature.  Today, customers understand that the viral nature of the GPL is only applied if the GPL software is modified and distributed outside of the company’s walls.  The overwhelming majority of enterprises and business using open source products do not satisfy both of these requirements.  As a result, there is nothing inherent about the GPL that would drive higher open source vendor revenue than if the ASL was used.

2. Partners & OEMs:
Some ISVs, SIs and device manufacturers may want to use open source software within their final product without having to open source the product’s software.  In this situation, the GPL in conjunction with a commercial license will result in higher open source vendor revenue than the ASL in conjunction with a commercial license.

It is interesting that device manufacturers such as Cisco and Western Digital are using GNU/Linux in their products and are opting to open source their software versus paying a license fee and keep their software private.  I believe that device manufacturers are going to increasingly open up their software in ways that encourage the interested/skilled user base to tinker. So from a device manufacturer standpoint, I’d argue that there is little OSS vendor revenue difference in using the GPL vs. ASL.

Next, let’s consider ISVs and SIs.  On one hand you could argue that since software is going to be increasingly delivered through the mythical cloud, the GPL’s role as a stick to encourage a license purchase will diminish.  But I don’t believe that the enterprise world is moving to SaaS as fast as they hype would suggest.  For years, if not decades to come, the vast majority of ISV and SI delivered applications will be distributed to enterprises and installed on corporate servers as they are today.  As such, the GPL’s role in driving open source vendor revenue from ISVs and SIs will remain an important reason to select the GPL.

3. Hostile Competitors:
The final reason to use the GPL over the ASL is that the GPL provides better protection against competitors, especially larger ones, using the OSS code to compete with the open source vendor in question.  However, I could quote examples of GPL and ASL licensed open source products that have been forked to varying degrees by larger competitors.  In the two situations that come to mind, it can easily be argued that the forks have been unsuccessful.  The open source vendor’s brand has proved to be a more realistic barrier to entry than the license was thought to be.

Summary:
I can think of only one business reason that an open source vendor would select the GPL over the ASL; namely, the revenue opportunity from ISVs and SIs who would rather pay for a commercial license than have to open source their own applications.

What do you think?

Follow me on twitter at: SavioRodrigues

PS: I should state: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.”

The hype around Google Chrome OS is palpable.  We all need to take a deep breath. In taking that deep breath, it becomes clear that Google has grown to become open source’s biggest foe while at the same time being one of open source’s biggest friends.  Confused? You should be.

Google helps the open source movement through its contributions to various open source projects, funding of open source summer development projects, open source conference sponsorships and simply by being a poster child for its internal use of open source.  Google also open sources elements of its product portfolio in an attempt to gain market acceptance for a given product.  Google Android, Google Chrome and later this year I should say, Google Chrome OS are examples of open sourcing to help drive adoption.  For these reasons, it’s easy to argue that Google is an open source friend.

But, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Google deserves the “foe” badge when we consider open source vendors and organizations that are at the forefront of the open source movement. The Google Chrome OS, while based on Linux, is directly competitive with offerings from Red Hat and Canonical and other Linux vendors targeting consumers.  Google Chrome is competitive with Firefox, Google Docs is competitive to OpenOffice.org and Google Apps is competitive with Zimbra.  This list is certain to grow down into the middleware stack, i.e. Google App Engine of the future, and up into the consumer applications stack with Google’s ambitions.

Don’t get me wrong, competition is great for users as it forces all vendors to raise their game.  However, we should not ignore the fact that Google has deftly become the largest threat to open source vendors, the same vendors who are driving open source adoption today.

When I woke to read an email about Google Chrome OS from an MBA friend, Asif, a light bulb went off about Google’s “foe” status.  Asif has forgotten more about world history and politics than I’ll ever learn, but he would never be accused of being a computer geek.  And yet, here he was sending me a link to the Financial Times story about Chrome OS.  He had never mentioned Ubuntu, Red Hat or any other open source entity to me in the past two years I’ve known him.  If regular consumers like Asif, who generally have a strong view of the Google brand, get behind Chrome OS, then the likes of Ubuntu and other Linux distro’s are in for a world of hurt; at least from a consumer angle.  But it won’t stop there.  As Google expands further into middleware and consumer applications, open source vendors that compete in these areas will have to compete against Google.  It’s one thing for an open source upstart to throw stones at Microsoft, Oracle, IBM or SAP and position themselves as being unlike those vendors.  But this strategy won’t work when competing against Google, a known “friend” of open source, and especially when Google has open sourced the competing product in question.  The “it’s closed source” argument won’t hold much weight.

Nobody ever accused MySQL of being an open source foe because it competes with PostgreSQL, so why is Google a foe just for competing with open source vendors? No open source vendor, by itself or in some informal collaboration, has the brand, reach, ability to execute, resources or level of customer preference that Google does.  The competition will be nowhere close to fair.  If Google wins against these individual open source vendors, the resulting Google stack will be much homogeneous than we’re accustomed to.  The choice that open source drives will be severely limited.  Open source will win and lose at the same time.

Note to self; don’t be surprised to receive an email from Asif in 5 years titled: “It’s a Google world; you’re just living in it. Enjoy.”

Follow me on twitter at: SavioRodrigues

PS: I should state: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.”

TechCrunch is reporting that the free version of Google Apps, Standard Edition, is no longer being actively marketed. Google Apps includes Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheet, Page Creator and Start Page. There was previously a no charge Standard Edition and a Premier Edition for $50/user/year.

The confusion and panic is somewhat funny and interesting; well, for someone whose data isn’t entirely beholden to Google. I say “entirely” because my personal email is stored somewhere on the Gmail servers. But I digress.

In any case, it seems that Google has shifted from offering Standard Edition free for anyone, including businesses, to offering Standard Edition free only for non-businesses. Although any user, business or non-business can still hit the Standard Edition page and register for the Standard Edition offering for free. Well, at least for now.

So why all the fuss?

Two key concerns arise from reading the comments on the TechCrunch story. First, there is the general “how dare Google take away my free lunch” sense of anger. Second, and more interesting, readers are asking “what happens to my data?”

The free lunch argument is understandable, but hey, everyone has bills to pay, even Google.

The concern about data sitting in Google Apps is much more worrisome. Data portability, or the cost of exit, as Alfresco’s John Powell schooled me on, continues to be increasingly important day by day. The Cloud/SaaS proponents haven’t really addressed this to the degree that users feel comfortable with their ability to move from vendor A to vendor B and bring their data along easily. But you could easily argue that this is no different than traditional enterprise applications.

It’s somewhat surprising how much we’re willing to trade off freedom tomorrow for productivity today, a point that Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady makes. The “Google Apps for Business” FAQ makes no mention of how one would ever migrate their company’s data off Google Apps. As a buyer, I’d like to know that the vendor has at least thought of this and provides some tools. It would give me a sense of comfort with my purchase decision. As a user, who isn’t paying Google a dime, I should also care about the cost of exit, but I’m willing to set aside those concerns for the free lunch they’re providing me. At least for now.

What about you?

Follow me on twitter at: SavioRodrigues

PS: I should state: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.”

Reading ComputerWorld’s article on the anti database movement reminded me of James Governor’s “SOA flatlines: BRAIN!” post.  I always love going back to James’ post when someone proclaims that Y is so much better than X, that while X is used widely, X will surely die.  Here’s a choice set quotes:

“Windows- Windows is obviously dead. MacOS and Linux have killed it stone dead. Yeah 80%+ market share is a terrible place to be. And don’t even get me started on IE. Because it. is. dead.

Unix is dead. Damn straight. Oh yeah don’t forget the relational database. Dead. Cobol – totally dead. Hundreds of millions of lines of new code each year. That’s dead right? Dead, dead, dead.

Everything is dead.”

Back to the ComputerWorld article.  The article is based on a NoSQL confab held in early June which attracted 150 attendees.  The article could be viewed as NoSQL propaganda, as some comments on the post and at HackerNews have suggested.

For example:

“FaceBook, for instance, created its Cassandra data store in-house to replace its use of MySQL…”

In reality, a reader comments:

“Facebook is still MySQL backed and uses Cassandra for only specific things and that they use many different technologies where they’re good (like heavy use of memcached as a key-value store to reduce load on MySQL where queries aren’t needed).”

To be fair, the original quote did not suggest that Facebook has completely ditched MySQL.  Just that Cassandra, a NoSQL option, is being used for work that was previously done with MySQL.

Or the following quote from NoSQL confab organizer Johan Oskarsson:

“Many, said Oskarsson, had even dumped the open-source MySQL database, a long-time Web 2.0 favorite, for a NoSQL alternative, because the advantages were too compelling to ignore.”

Again, context is key here.  What’s the value of the data in question?  What if the data isn’t always consistent? User profile or deposit/withdrawal data is of higher value, with a higher requirement for consistency than voting data from a website poll.

As the MonoDB guys say,

“Databases are specializing – the “one size fits all” approach of the RDBMS no longer applies.”

But this doesn’t mean approach Y will completely displace approach X.  I’m reminded of the open source (Y) versus traditional software (X) argument.  Far from Y killing X, we’re settling in on a software industry where both models are appropriate, depending on the use case.

Vendors that can bridge the gap between RDBMS and the NoSQL movement are going to be the winners.

The proponents of NoSQL are too early in the game, and may indeed be too heavily invested in differentiating from RDBMS, that they will pay little attention to this bridge.  Traditional RDBMS vendors would prefer that customers use RDBMS products to address these extremely high volume, low value data scenarios that the NoSQL movement is better suited.  SpringSource’s Javier Soltero nails this sentiment:

“Oracle would tell you that with the right degree of hardware and the right configuration of Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) and other associated magic software, you can achieve the same scalability. But at what cost?”

Enterprises need to be shown that both the RDBMS and NoSQL approaches have their place and can both be applied to drive business benefit.  IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, you listening?

Follow me on twitter at: SavioRodrigues

I’m an equal opportunity critic of bad decisions, regardless of whether they’re coming from an open source or closed source purveyor.

A few weeks back I wrote that the IE8 “Get the Facts” campaign gets it wrong by showing little respect for the target audience’s intelligence.  Today, I’m calling out Mozilla for needlessly playing the “Get the facts” game (or “See How we Stack Up” in Mozilla speak).

Someone at Mozilla wants me to believe that Firefox is so much better than IE that Firefox leads 6 to 1 in the “handy browser comparison chart”.  I don’t disagree that Firefox leads in the items that Mozilla included in the comparison.  But if Firefox didn’t lead in “Thousands of free way to personalize your online experience”, Mozilla would not have put that item on the comparison table.

Does this comparison really help someone evaluating which browser to download and use?  Absolutely not. Product comparisons are better left to a third party that will include criteria important to users, not simply criteria that the owning vendor’s product is best at.

This is a waste of time, both for employees of Mozilla and Microsoft and for anyone who has stumbles across these “comparisons”.

I don’t know why, but I would have expected Mozilla to take the high road in this comparison game.

Sun’s Thorsten Ziehm of the OpenOffice.org engineering team wrote a post titled: “Does OpenOffice.org 3.x have a general quality issue?”

Unless my mind is playing tricks on me, and I’m 98.2% sure it isn’t, Thorsten’s post was edited between when I first read it in the morning and when I decided to blog this afternoon. The edits seem to have removed any suggestion that OOo could have a quality issue. Even in the original version of the post Thorsten had concluded that OOo does not have a general quality issue. But in the original version he did discuss some information that could point to a quality issue. For instance, the original showed that the total bugs reports had grown to over 13 thousand, of which about 3 thousand were new feature requests. If memory serves me right, the defects and total numbers were much higher than previous releases. But with more OOo users, this increase did not point to a quality issue by itself.

Thorsten concludes that, while there may not be a general quality issue with OOo:

“We have to work still on stabilizing the existing functionality instead of concentrating on newer functionality only.”

This is a similar conclusion that Andre Schnabel comes to in his reply to Thorsten’s post (not sure if Andre’s reply was to version 1 or version 2 of Thorsten’s post).

“While one may argue (endless) if the product as a quality issue or not, the real point is, that the OOo project’s process of identifying, handling and finally fixing bugs is not really satisfying.”

Andre goes on to conclude that we can make OOo better:

“- joint and better coordinated efforts from QA and development to *fix* bugs
- the common goal of the project to work on bugfixing (instead of the separate statement of the QA project that fixing bugs is not within our responsibility)
- the commitment to fix bugs even in old features (and not only regressions). Each feature once was new. Following our current policy you just need to wait long enough to counter the regression argument.”

OOo is facing a difficult balancing act between fixing bugs and adding new features. Software developed using the traditional software business model often has a larger focus, emphasis on “larger”, not all, on their time on the latter. Who’s going to buy version 5.0 of a product that touts “stuff that you expected to work in version 4.0, now does”. But there is absolutely a focus on reducing the defect backlog. Who’s going to buy version 5.0 of a product when version 4.0 crashed all the time? Wait, hold off the Microsoft jokes :-)

The fact that OOo is facing the same issues, and the project is also spending more of its time on new features, vs. defects, is an interesting response to those that view OSS as a panacea. Both the OSS and traditional software business models can produce high quality software or trash. Producing high quality software starts with a focus on not just track, but systematically reducing defects. It’s good to see more talk about processes focused on reducing defects at OOo.

I’ve been thinking more about the Eclipse Foundation over the past day.  As many have written, getting 33 projects, consisting of 24 million lines of code, to deliver one day is truly impressive.

What’s more impressive is the collaboration across 44 competitors and vendors with their own plans and agendas that was necessary to deliver against the release schedule.

By in large, Eclipse projects are shepherded by employees from one or more vendors whose business are tightly linked to the project.  Each of these vendors across different Eclipse projects have different business targets and customer demands they’re trying to address.  As a theoretical example, the Mylyn project, driven by Tasktop, may have been ready to launch on June 1st with key features that their customer base was looking for, while the PHP Development Tools project, driven by Zend, may have needed a few more days to pull in a whiz-bang feature.  And yet, both projects released on June 24th. (I picked the Mylyn and PHP Development Tools projects because they came to mind first.)

In the commercial software world, or when a single vendor is driving the release schedule of an open source project that they control, cross project release planning is easy, or, at the very least, easier.  Anyone working at a large software company, with different divisions on different schedules will tell you about the fun of lining up releases into a complete and integrated platform.

The Eclipse Foundation deserves the accolades it’s receiving for getting 44 vendors to march in lockstep. Eclipse remains one of the top three examples of meritocratic open source driven by an open community (Apache & Linux being the other two).

And to think, all this started as an IBM Canada project.  Happy early Canada Day (July 1st) ;-)!

Follow me on twitter at: SavioRodrigues

News out today that the Eclipse community has delivered Galileo, the 2009 Eclipse release train, made up of 24 million lines of code across 33 projects, with contributions from 380 committers and 44 companies participating.  As a product manager, I must say this is a pretty impressive accomplishment by the Eclipse Foundation and everyone involved with Eclipse. Well done!

The Galileo release offers new capabilities along these three themes:

1) Expanding adoption of Eclipse in the enterprise
2) Advancement of EclipseRT runtime technology
3) Innovation of Eclipse modeling technology

Details of each are provided below:

“Expanding adoption of Eclipse in the enterprise
Adoption of Eclipse in the enterprise continues to grow.  New features in Galileo help expand the use of Eclipse by enterprise developers, including:

-    New support for Mac Cocoa 32 and 64 bit.
-    New Memory Analyzer tool to help analyze memory consumption of Java applications
-    PHP Development Tools (PDT) 2.1 is first PHP toolkit to support the new PHP 5.3 language release, including namespaces and closures.
-    New Mylyn WikiText support for editing and parsing wiki markup.
-    New XSL tooling for XSL editing and debugging.
-    Developer productivity improvements to Business Intelligence Reporting Tools (BIRT) report designer and performance.

Advancement of EclipseRT Runtime Technology
EclipseRT is the set of Eclipse technologies that provide OSGi-based frameworks and runtimes useful in building software systems. The Galileo release includes a dedicated category of EclipseRT components including elements from Equinox, RAP, RCP, Riena, BIRT, Swordfish, EclipseLink, ECF and EMF. Notable feature updates that advance the EclipseRT technology stack include:

-    Eclipse Equinox has been updated to support the draft OSGi Release 4, v 4.2 specification.
-    Target Platform provisioning support in the Plugin Development Environment (PDE) makes it easier to develop, test and deploy software to EclipseRT runtimes.
-    The Equinox p2 provisioning system has been updated to be faster, more robust and make provisioning OSGi bundles to embedded, desktop and server environments easy.

Innovation in Eclipse Modeling Technology

The Eclipse Modeling community continues to create new innovative technology for model-based development frameworks, tools and standards. Key new innovations in Galileo include:

-    Xtext, a new Eclipse project that allows for the creation of Domain Specific Languages (DSL). Xtext will create customized Eclipse editors for the DSL, making it easier for developers to focus on a smaller set of APIs and write less code.
-    Connected Data Objects (CDO) is a framework for distributed shared EMF models focused on scalability, transaction and persistence.  New enhancements in CDO include distributed transactions, pessimistic locking and save points, change subscription policies, an asynchronous query framework and security hooks in the repository.
“

What are you waiting for? Go download Eclipse Galileo!

Very cool news that a group of independent film makers (with programming skills) have developed a firmware update to the Canon 5D Mark II digital SLR.  According to the team:

“…the software in video mode has limitations, even after the recent 1.1.0 upgrade from Canon that fixed the most glaring manual exposure “bug”.

That’s where Magic Lantern comes in — it turns your 5D Mark II into a 5D Mark Free. We’ve written extensions and widgets that fix many of the annoyances in working with the 5D Mark II on a film or video set. Our first set of fixes are targeted at the audio limitations of the camera, but there are some video enhancements included, too:

* On-screen audio meters
* Disabled AGC
* Manual gain control
* Zebra stripes (video peaking)
* Crop marks for 16:9, 2.35:1 and 4:3″

They’ve released the Magic Lantern firmware under the GPL and are seeking donations, programmers with ARM assembly or embedded systems skills and folks who don’t mind risking their expensive 5D Mark II cameras!

Reading the 5D-II forum, the response has been quite positive.  I’m not a lawyer, but the EULA seems to have terms and conditions that restrict the work done by the Magic Lantern team.  This begs the question, what should Canon do about, or as a result of, Magic Lantern?

Canon could open source its firmware and encourage community contributions. The thinking follows that Canon’s hardware (CMOS, lenses) is a whole lot more valuable than its software.  While competitors could potentially reuse Canon’s open source software firmware, these competitors would not be able to match Canon’s hardware R&D and manufacturing processes.  And in most cases, the firmware is pretty hardware specific to Canon.  Or one could argue that Canon’s software is very important to its value proposition, but that opening up to an open community of developers will help Canon innovate faster than it could using its internal resources only.  On the flip side, Canon’s camera product portfolio would be disrupted if a programmer was able to add some firmware-based capability to a lower end model that is only officially offered in a higher end model.  But even here, one could argue that the vast majority of Canon users will only install the official Canon firmware which would not have to include features that Canon didn’t wish to add to a given product level. On the other hand, wouldn’t these folks be the exact users that Canon wants to upsell to the higher end model?

I could, and have, gone back and forth on this one.  What about you?

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Reading the Windows Internet Explorer 8: Get the Facts marketing campaign instantly made me wonder “When did Microsoft hire Oracle’s marketing team?” While Oracle is getting much better, they were legendary for making bold claims by cherry picking “data”.  It used to drive me nuts when I was in the IBM market intelligence group and was asked to pull background data to refute these claims.  Not because the work was hard.  But because I felt that the work was unnecessary.  After a while, readers and customers learned to discount the bold claims.

In any case, back to the current story at hand.  I’m probably more pro-Microsoft than most open source folks, which is why the IE 8 Get the Facts marketing stings more than it probably should.  I have nothing against IE 8, and it may very well be an excellent browser.  For what it’s worth, I use both Firefox, the “View in IE” Firefox extension and IE 7 daily.

When I read a comparison table and one product has a check on every item and the other two competitors have, at most, 4 checks, I am instantly weary of the comparison.  Markets are way more competitive than the story Microsoft is painting with this comparison table.

I’m really wonder who Microsoft is targeting with this campaign.  For most Windows corporate and consumer users, IE is on their desktop and they’ll continue to use it.  This campaign doesn’t mean much to them, and can’t really be targeted at them. If these users are using Firefox, it’s because someone they know or someone in the IT department has convinced them to use Firefox.  To get my little cousin to stop using Firefox, Microsoft has to get me to stop using Firefox and wait for me to tell her that IE 8 is much better than Firefox.  But this comparison table treats me like a moron.  Especially when you consider that I’m using Firefox and have pre-existing views on many items on the comparison table.  Only IE 8 gets a check for “Security” “Privacy” and “Ease of Use”?  Really? At a minimum, Microsoft should have used Harvey Balls to show that the competitors have capabilities, which may not be as strong as IE 8.  Microsoft could have posted videos that show how easy it is to carry out a common task in IE 8 and compare it to Firefox with the relevant add on installed.  Show us what happens when a session crashes and how much better the combination of “tab isolation and crash recovery” is in day to day use versus Firefox.  In this case, simply having two features versus one or the other, doesn’t tell me anything about my day to day experience.

If Microsoft wants me and others like me, to take IE 8 seriously, I expect them to treat our intelligence with some respect.  Anything less, and after a while, we’ll have been taught to discount their bold claims.

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