opener

Digital music imitating open source?

Just read this in The Independent. I admit to never having listened (knowingly) to Ash, a Northern Ireland band, and the band's decision to move all new releases to the web probably won't change this. As in open source, the fact that someone releases their code as open source (or songs on the web) doesn't necessarily make them a good company/band. It just means they have the right licensing model, though perhaps no talent.

What I find interesting about Ash's decision is, however, just how closely the band's thinking mirrors much that we see in open source:

Frontman Tim Wheeler said that Ash... would be "dedicating ourselves wholly to the art of the single for the digital age." By abandoning traditional recording and publishing methods, Wheeler said fans would be able to download new music as soon as it was recorded.… Read more

Open source: returning dignity to the developer

I was watching the BBC's production of Elizabeth Gaskell's wonderful North and South on my flight home from London today. What a powerful production! One of my favorite lines from the movie (and book) comes at the end of the first segment. Margaret Hale, the protagonist, reflecting on the working conditions in England's northern cotton factories (textile mills) says,

I have seen Hell. And it is white. Snow white.The cotton trade enslaved workers to an almost bestial existence in Gaskell's time, though her words also reflect the factory owners' servile dependence on the same labor. … Read more

Microsoft's bloatware problem (and how open source could help)

Fake Steve takes a swipe at Microsoft's bloatware problem, and strikes true:

For years people have been begging Microsoft for leaner, simpler products with fewer features. Not just befuddled and baffled consumers but CIOs at big companies, guys who manage tens of thousands of PCs, who are considered "thought leaders," and who definitely have Microsoft's attention. They've been screaming this from the rooftops: Fewer features, greater ease of use, greater reliability. They've done everything but put up billboards on the roads around Redmond saying, "Small. Fast. Cheap. Easy." They don't want slightly fewer features. They want a lot fewer. Like 90% fewer. So what does Microsoft do? It rolls out a huge new OS and a new version of Office with a 10x gain in features. Then it hires an army of MBAs to go "unlock value" and get customers to use all those features that they've already told Microsoft they don't want.... Microsoft seems to have lost sight of the fact that its rise to power came as a result of Bill Gates positioning Windows as smaller, cheaper, easier and faster than OS/2 Presentation Manager. Windows 3.0 was lean and mean and, relatively speaking, open. OS/2 with PM was big, bloated, expensive, and all about locking you in to IBM. IBM was the big monolith trying to protect its market share and suck everything into its maw. Microsoft was the disrupter, using a little toy weapon to attack a fortress. Amen.

It's not simply Microsoft's problem, of course, but pretty much all of enterprise software's. Enterprise software has worked so hard to justify itself that it has lost sight of the normal customer's needs.… Read more

OSI and the value in holding firm

I was reading The Economist on my flight home from London today, and came across this paragraph in an article that resonated with me, because it reminds me of the various non-profit "lobbies" within the open source software movement.

Too many Brussels think-tanks accept large chunks of their funding from EU institutions and national governments. Others depend on big corporate sponsors, so that the lines between research and lobbying becomes queasily blurred....Nobody seems able to change the default formula for Brussels policy seminars: good coffee and croissants, dull speeches and a brief exchange of conventional wisdom. The painful comparison is with Washington, DC, where the best think-tanks refuse public money, compete to set the agenda with provocative ideas, and enjoy extraordinary access to administration and Congress alike. (June 9, 2007. 45) Open source software has the OSI, the Free Software Foundation, the Software Freedom Law Center, he Linux Foundation, various conferences (OSCON, OSBC, LinuxWorld, etc.), and various other overtly open source or friendly-to-open source organizations. How effective they are in promoting open source is, to my mind, directly proportionate to their independence.

I thought it was a net negative to see the Free Standards Group merge with OSDL. FSG was a "bottoms-up" organization, despite its corporate funding. OSDL was never more than an attempt to rein in Red Hat. I think very highly of Jim Zemlin, and think he bleeds more FSG (his original home) than OSDL, and believe he can do much good. But he has his work cut out for him to ensure the community's voice is heard in the Linux Foundation.… Read more

Is there a natural divide between open source and proprietary software market opportunities?

I'm reading through Si Chen's excellent paper called "An Economic Model of Open Source Software Adoption." I got lost in the calculations Si uses, but the conclusion hit home:

[T]he hurdle for adoption of open source software is a function of the relative feature sets, size of user base, scalability of features, and profit margin of competing commercial products. Where existing commercial products enjoy a large user base, can address a high portion of user needs out-of-the-box, and the profit margins of the vendor are reasonable, open source software must offer comparable or better features to gain mass adoption. If, on the other hand, user needs are highly heterogeneous, the commercial product's vendor has excessive profit margins, or where the software is fundamentally not scalable, then an open source product with significantly lower feature sets could gain mass adoption.

These conditions suggest that open source and commercial software models may be well adapted to separate niches of the software industry. Open source software may fundamentally be more suitable for software whose features are not scalable, whereas commercial software may be better suited for mass market software with highly homogeneous user requirements and features.… Read more

News flash: Microsoft finds that it is god of its own world

I must admit that I am shocked - SHOCKED - that Microsoft found that its software is better than open source software on the desktop for European schools. Shocked, I tell you! I mean, after hours of rigorous study and painfully bought and paid for research, to find out that it likes its own software more than open source.... Who would have thought?

For those who aren't aware, Microsoft paid Wipro Technologies to come up with findings (as Mary Jo Foley and others have reported) that show that open source software on the desktop stinks for schools, and that Microsoft is manna from heaven.

Among the "findings":

In schools where both Microsoft Office and Open Office are available, student and teacher satisfaction with Microsoft is consistently higher. For desktop productivity, 48?50 per cent of schools reported that student satisfaction with Microsoft products is higher than with OSS, but only 17?26 per cent reported the same for the open source platform.… Read more

Making enterprise software more like the web

Yesterday was the second day of Alfresco's quarterly management meeting (and no, I don't like this one because there are no football matches during the summer, though I am going with Luis to see The Drowsy Chaperone tonight. During the meeting, we spent awhile talking through changes in enterprise software; or, rather, changes that should happen in enterprise software.

What's the biggest problem in enterprise software today? I mean, besides how expensive, complex, and clunky it is?

It doesn't work the way the world works.

What do I mean? I mean that despite the fact that, as John Donne might write, "no corporation is an island, entire unto itself," most enterprise software treats corporations (and their denizens) exactly as islands. Little pools of creativity who share within the walls of their own corporation, if at all (and generally not at all). … Read more

Traveling The Open Road with Matt Asay

Consider this my "Hello World" from the Land of CNET. I've spent the last year or two of my life talking with you from my Open Sources blog on Infoworld.com. Now it's time to open a new chapter.

For better or for worse, however, I'm the same person. With the same biases. And gunning for the same goal: complete and absolute world domination. :-)

Not really, of course. I'm a pragmatist and understand that the world moves slowly, especially in IT. Remember, I used to work for Novell where the company largely stopped … Read more

Sun supper offer appeals to Torvalds

In the latest word in a peculiarly public interchange, Linux leader Linus Torvalds appears inclined to take up Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz on his offer for dinner.

Last weekend, Torvalds expressed some "cynical" thoughts about Sun's intentions regarding its open-source Solaris operating system, which in turn led Schwartz to invite Torvalds to dinner to demonstrate Sun's intention of being a team player in the open-source realm, not a parasite.

In an interview Wednesday, Torvalds indicated he was interested in the dinner date, even given the condition Schwartz attached.

"I'm a fervent (believer … Read more

Congratulations....it's a BLOG

Even today's most tech-savvy parents didn't grow up in a digital era. For those of us who live on the cutting edge of the latest developments, it comes as quite a shock to realize that there is still a techno-generation gap developing between us and our children. Adults assimilate technology much like they learn a second language, while our kids are "native speakers."

We may think we were pretty cool for growing up with an Atari 2600 or Radio Shack TRS-80 desktop computer, learning to program in BASIC, but what will our kids make of the … Read more