Commentary

Adios 2008

Posted on by tarus

In a few short hours 2008 will be history. To paraphrase Dickens, it wasn’t the best of times, and it wasn’t the worst of times.

For the OpenNMS project, it was a good year. We got a new stable release out and we had a great Dev-Jam in Atlanta.

For the OpenNMS Group, it was a decent year. Sales were up slightly (our usually robust fourth quarter was pretty flat this year), but we managed to start new work with a couple of very large telecom clients.

I traveled about 95,000 miles on airplanes, and visited 8 countries. I stayed 53 nights in Marriott hotels. Next year my goal is to hit Platinum status on American with exactly 50,001 miles and come nowhere close to Gold status at Marriott.

I love the new year. For me, 2009 stretches out like a clean slate, full of possibilities. And I for one am hoping it will be much, much better than the advanced reviews.

Here’s my heartfelt wish that you have had a marvelous 2008 and may the most that you wish for in 2009 be the least you receive.

The War for Open Source

Posted on by tarus

Starting about the time that Bill Gates wrote his infamous Letter to Hobbyists, the commercial software industry has sought to control and restrict access to source code. Before that time, code wasn’t explicitly free, but it was often freely exchanged. The rise of the commercial software industry put an end to that.

When the modern open source software movement was formalized by Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond, the commercial software establishment pretty much ignored it. There was no way that useful software could be created for free. Then along came the Linux kernel, the GNU operating system and applications like the Apache web server, and suddenly open source software was not only useful, its adoption started growing phenomenally.

Since it is hard to say software isn’t useful when millions use it, the commercial software industry changed its tactics. A campaign of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt was started. Can you trust software made by a bunch of anonymous hippies? Who will support it? Who can you hold accountable?

In response came companies like Red Hat, who said “hey, I’ll support it, and I’ll give you better, more responsive service than you get from the commercial software guys.” Slowly, the FUD argument started to fade.

Now I’ve seen the next front on the war for open source. Commercial software companies are attacking the term itself. They are trying to say that commercial software and open source are actually the same thing, even though there is a huge difference between companies that garner most of their income from the support of software and those that earn most of their revenue from the sale of proprietary software licenses.

Words are important. One of my favorite philosophers, the late George Carlin, based much of his work on the examination of how words are used to control people. Take the invasion of Iraq by the United States. Following on the heels of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, the US government sought to justify it by associating Iraq, even though not a single terrorist charged in the attacks was from Iraq and studies showed no link between Saddam Hussein and those terrorists. Yet in 2007 a Newsweek poll showed that 41% of Americans thought that Iraq was responsible, which was actually an increase of 5% from September 2004.

Now it is not the purpose of this post to start a debate about the war, but I wanted to demonstrate that if you say something enough times, even if it is false, people start to believe it. The commercial software companies know this.

For example, let me pick on Matt Asay (I could probably pick on Dave Rosenberg but I don’t read his blog). On December 22nd he ran a blog post with the paragraph:

Five years from now, I’m not even sure what it will mean to talk about “open source” and “commercial software” as if they are two separate and distinct things.

See, Matt works for an open core company that makes their money from selling commercial software licenses on top of a core piece of software that is published under an open source license [Note: see comments below – after researching it, it seems that Alfresco is not “open core” but neither is Alfresco Enterprise “open source”]. To drive value to his company he has to make the argument that while open source is good, it can’t produce value unless someone pays for it, thus there must be a commercial software component. I disagree.

He follows this up on Christmas Day with a post about an InfoWorld article on the future of open source:

Dave Rosenberg writes that 2009 will be the year when open source becomes paid software, but I think we’re already there. We’ve been there for at least two years, in fact. We just didn’t know it.

Once again the association that open source and commercial (paid) software are one and the same.

Now I have no doubt that commercial software companies will have to become more open. They’ll have to provide better and more free APIs and they will have to work hard to build communities around their products, but that doesn’t make them open source.

Finally, the next day Asay follows up with a very paternalistic post on the struggles that the data portability field is having on defining what is “open”. I say “paternalistic” because he comes across as if the whole topic is boring and beneath consideration.

See, we in open source have been through this (attribution/badgeware debate, anyone?), and we resolved it by throwing up our hands in despair and moving on.

Oddly enough, that was probably the right thing to do, as the only people that really care about such things are the vendors involved. Customers don’t care

I claim that customers don’t care because they don’t understand. It’s posts like Matt’s that really blur the lines between open source and commercial software. They didn’t care about Linux when no one used Linux, but suddenly less than a decade later Linux is doing well. Now as open source moves up the stack it’s the same situation. Once true free and open source software becomes a viable alternative it will cause customers to care.

But it’s comments like this that make the process take longer. I’ve helped build a business around OpenNMS, which remains 100% open source software, and as I try to explain the value to potential customers I can no longer rely on “it’s open source” to mean what it used to mean. We still get replies like “yes, it’s open source, so how much is the enterprise version?” It’s “free food” all over again.

Now some of my detractors will say that I just make up terms to suit me, and that my understanding of “open source” is not valid. I get mine from The Open Source Definition by the Open Software Initiative. If anyone says that it is not valid, I’d love to hear the reasons why. What I love about it is that it starts off with “Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code” (emphasis mine). The commercial/open core/hybrid/shareware folks would love for people to believe that’s all it means.

I can’t say that I blame them. I’ve seen the power of open source in action and if I ran a commercial software company it would be in the best interests of my shareholders to leverage anything I could, including even the most tenuous association with it. But likewise it is in my best interests to point out how wrong they are.

I’m not going to have any effect on those companies, and I realize this. Heck, Matt has his bully pulpit on cnet and my three readers get to visit my rants on an old Dell server with donated bandwidth. But who I really want to reach are those that might consider buying these companies. As Matt says the clients don’t care about open source so the investors shouldn’t either. They need to judge the value of a commercial software company against other commercial software companies.

And they need to keep in mind that projects like OpenNMS are growing stronger every day. While our open core competition might have prettier interfaces and more features, we’re catching up. We’re also focusing directly on the needs of our community, and not the buzz-word du jour. How much value does a piece of commercial software have when we might be able to replace it in six months? Customers might not care about truly open source software in large numbers now, but I’m willing to bet they will. I’m wondering who’s betting they won’t?

The Soloflex Effect

Posted on by tarus

The book Predictably Irrational had a big impact on me, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. It made me see how things that many would consider minor can have a big impact on decision making. Since I need to be able to showcase the benefits OpenNMS provides to clients, understanding their decision making process is very important.

I often harp on the “open core” crowd for using the term “open source” to describe their products. Some would call me a hater, but it is a distinction that is very important to me. By charging for proprietary software licenses in an “open source” product, they skew the discussion from a comparison of solutions to a comparison of software features.

Think about it. Take a look at a press release from any network management product, open core or commercial, and you’ll see it focusing on features. This one monitors VMWare. This one monitors cloud resources. And for these new features you’ll pay a licensing fee (at least for the most powerful and useful ones).

So when I go to talk to a potential customer, they focus on “what features does your product provide?” Quite often features do not lead to solutions. I call this “The Soloflex Effect”.

I’m a fat guy. I’ve always been a fat guy, but many years ago I saw an ad for a Soloflex exercise machine. For just a few dollars a month I could get sculpted abs and big biceps. So I ordered one. I wanted a “Body by Soloflex”.

It showed up in two big boxes, and each one was extremely heavy. It took both me and the delivery guy to get them up the stairs to my second floor apartment. He asked me what they were, and I told him it was an exercise machine. I said that I wasn’t going to unpack it – I would just drag the boxes up and down the stairs a couple of times a day.

Needless to say, for the first month I used the machine regularly. The second month was much more sporadic, and by the third month I was hanging clothes on it.

I had fallen for the trap that I could just go out and buy a thin body. It was just so easy, at least according to the ads. While this was nearly 20 years ago, today there are ads for the “Soloflex Whole Body Vibration Platform”. I don’t even have to work out, “just stand and let the vibration do the work.”

Many people take this approach to network management. All they have to do is by X product, and the network will manage itself. Many sales guys drive expensive cars based on this aspect of human nature.

At OpenNMS we have to do things differently. We sell solutions – not software. When starting a discussion about using OpenNMS we often don’t talk about the features of the product. Instead we ask what problems the client is trying to solve. Believe or not, this is often not an easy question to answer. “I just want to manage my network,” they’ll say, but what does that really mean?

In some of our consulting engagements we ask to spend some time in the Network Operations Center (or just with the guys who are responsible for the network in smaller companies without a formal NOC) just to see what happens on a day to day basis. We talk with those people to find out from where the most pain is coming. And then we try to address it.

For example: one client I worked with many years ago managed tens of thousands of modems (I said it was years ago). I sat in the NOC and watched while the operators spent most of their day tracking down bad modems that needed to be reset.

We found out that we could get traps from the modem bank devices when a modem reported an error, and by using event reduction we could count how many errors a modem was experiencing. Then, if a particular modem generated 5 errors in a rolling 60 minute window, we’d send a command to reset the modem, and then generate an event stating the reset had been attempted. The operators only had to take action if the reset failed.

Nowhere will you find a software company advertising an “error modem reset” feature. But this freed up a tremendous amount of time for the NOC staff. The next step was to repeat the process for the second most painful issue. Over time the NOC was much more streamlined and much more responsive since a lot of the drudgery had been taken out of their lives and they were left with interesting and challenging problems to solve. That’s focusing on solutions and not features.

Our business plan is “spend less than you earn”. My diet plan is “eat less, exercise more”. There are no easy solutions to either, but at least I’m doing well with one of them.

Predictably Irrational

Posted on by tarus

I’ve been working on OpenNMS for over seven years now. Before that I spent over ten years with proprietary tools, including software from most of the big players like IBM’s Tivoli and HP’s OpenView.

When I first got involved with open source management software, I thought pretty much what everyone thinks: cheap OpenView. What I’ve learned in all those years is that free and open software is so much more than just “cheaper”. In fact, trying to sell open source software as a cheaper version of a proprietary product is the wrong way to go. It puts the buyer into the position of comparing the two products as if they were the same, and thus they only focus on what they are familiar with, the features of the proprietary product, and not the real benefits of the differences.

Free and open software does not mean cheaper licensing fees. It means freedom from licensing fees altogether. It moves the power to direct how the product is used and developed from the vendor to the consumer. This results in both the removal of vendor lock-in as well as the ability for the solution to grow with the business with out any “management tax” that per-node pricing models impose.

Unfortunately, the open core crowd, by using the term “open source” to describe their proprietary software, muddies the waters quite a bit. By positioning themselves as the “cheap OpenView” they end up competing in terms of the proprietary software, as in “do you have this feature” and not with “here’s how to manage your network better”.

I’m often surprised by the success of open core software, especially in the US. To me it is a bit irrational. Why give up per-node priced proprietary software with the attendant vendor lock-in for cheaper per-node priced proprietary software with vendor lock-in, even if there is an open component?

I’ve attempted to understand this with my Free Food analogy. Suggesting an open source software solution is like offering someone free food. If someone offers you free food out of context, you immediately think “is it safe to eat?” This is followed quickly by “what’s the catch?” In the case of open core, the decision makers, once they find out that, yes, there are software licensing fees involved, relax. They understand licensing fees and they are comfortable making a decision within the framework of “cheap OpenView”.

I was talking about this with Alex Hudson in London, and he turned me on to a book by Dan Ariely called Predictably Irrational. It’s a great read, and it demonstrates, complete with experiments, how we moist robots often act irrationally when making choices, but in a predictable fashion. Given a particular situation, one can reliably predict which irrational decision will be chosen.

As a businessman I need to be able to position the strengths of OpenNMS against proprietary products on a basis other than “cheap OpenView”. I need to be able to describe the power of the community, the flexibility in getting exactly the features you need in weeks instead of years, and the wonderful things that can happen when you put a tool like OpenNMS in the hands of a capable administrator. I need to make sure that, when presenting OpenNMS as a solution, that the decision to choose it is rational.

The first example in the book involves a magazine subscription. The buyer is presented with three options:

  • On-line content only: $59
  • Print content only: $125
  • Print and On-line content: $125

Notice that the Print and Print+On-line options are priced the same, so a rational person would never choose Print only (although I am certain a few Luddites would do it if the sample was large enough). However, Ariely found out through experiment that many more people would choose the $125 option over the $59 option when all three options were presented than if it was removed. The addition of this “decoy” option caused people to value the $125 option more, even though there was no rational difference between the two offers.

I can see how this would work. By seeing the three options my thinking might run something like this:

The Print option is $125 and the On-line option is $59. The Combined option is $125, which represents a savings of $59 since On-line is included free. If I subtract the $59 from $125 I come up with $66, so I’m actually getting the Print version for nearly half price!

Of course, this is complete bollocks. If my main source of accessing this information is on-line, then the Combined option actually costs me more than twice as much, but Ariely’s experiments showed that this is how many people make decisions.

So, what does this have to do with open source software?

In other sections of the book, Ariely explores predictable irrationality in a number of different contexts. While all of them have some bearing on selling in general, several really struck me as relevant to open source: “The Cost of Zero Cost”, “The Cost of Social Norms” and to a lesser extent “The Effect of Expectations” and “The Power of Price”.

What Ariely found out in his research was that the term FREE! has a profound affect on behavior. In one experiment they offered a Hershey’s kiss chocolate for 1 cent and a Lindt chocolate truffle for 15 cents. Since the truffle costs about 30 cents, it was the better deal, and people realized it.

However, when he lowered the price of each by one cent, making the kiss free, the situation was reversed. Many more people chose the kiss, even though the economic value was the same in both situations.

Being a geek, I immediately thought that part of the problem could have been the purchase process itself. I may not want to stop and purchase a candy but I might pick one up for free in passing. I could rationalize that my time has a certain value. One thing I love about this book is that Ariely takes this into account (he’s either just a good experimental behaviorist or a geek – maybe both). When the experiment was repeated as part of a cafeteria check out line (where the consumer was already in the process of purchasing so the choice of whether or not to buy candy added almost zero time to the transaction) the results were the same.

This would seem to be a good thing for open source, and in many cases it is. A harried sysadmin with little time or patience for the purchase process might grab MySQL or Apache, even on Windows, just because it is free.

The problems arise when you bring the idea of commercial open source into the mix. By commercial open source I don’t mean open core but commercializing an open source project in a manner that doesn’t involve proprietary software licenses, such as services and support. When you add in a cost, any cost, it seems to bring the discussion back into comparing software products and not solutions. Thus a product like OpenNMS now gets put into the same feature for feature comparison of a commercial software product like OpenView, even though the value offered is totally different.

When this happens a number of things take place. In one sense brand awareness and expectations come in to play. In the Expectations section of the book a particular food dish is described as a “mélange of the freshest roma cherry tomatoes and crisp field greens, paired with a warm circle of chèvre in a fruity raspberry vinaigrette”.

Sounds a lot better than “goat cheese salad”, doesn’t it? One would expect it to taste better than a plain ol’ goat cheese salad, too.

In the “Power of Price” chapter Ariely shows studies where patients experienced a more rapid and complete loss of symptoms when they believed they were taking a more expensive medication, even if the two choices offered were the same drug, or even when the more expensive medication was a placebo. Expectations and price play a big role in the buying decisions we make.

This affects OpenNMS, especially in the high end markets such as carriers. When a company is used to spending tens of millions of dollars per year on management software, it is inconceivable to them that they could get the same thing for free. Again the problem comes from comparing the price of OpenNMS software against, say, IBM software and not the solutions themselves, which are a combination of software and services. No one at the carrier level buys software without a huge services component, but in trying to position the services that The OpenNMS Group supplies against those from, say, IBM Global Services, it seems that it it often shifts back to the software.

I had to laugh at the recent row between Groundwork and HP over the practice of Groundwork comparing the price of its solution against OpenView. Groundwork is an open core software company that cobbles together a number of rather good open source tools. Unfortunately, in the accounts where we have replaced Groundwork with OpenNMS our experience with that product shows that it is nowhere near as well integrated as OpenView’s various parts (and that’s saying something) and it is definitely not worth the rather large price they place on it – OpenView or no OpenView.

Seeing Groundwork trying to compare itself to HP reminds me a lot of Hyundai’s latest campaign to compare its Genesis car against brands like BMW and Lexus. Due to a bad car accident I was in many years ago that was caused by a Hyundai driver, I’ve never liked the brand. Recently I rented a car and was given a Sonata, and I had to admit it wasn’t a bad car. It wasn’t a car I would buy, but for an economy sedan it had a lot of high end features.

The problem is that you can’t take a car that was originally designed to compete on price and suddenly move it into the luxury market. In people’s minds the expectation has been set that Hyundai is a cheap car. Not necessarily a bad car, but definitely not a luxury vehicle. The price and value of a Hyundai have been anchored in peoples minds (see the chapter “The Fallacy of Supply and Demand” in the book to learn about anchors) and once anchored it is hard to change. That’s why there is a Lexus for Toyota and Acura for Honda – it was necessary for those companies to break the existing preconceptions.

Open source software has almost always been marketed on price, and when that happens it will always be hard to break into the markets controlled by expensive commercial software. It is very important for the industry to focus on the non-software benefits – freedom, adaptability, ease of ownership and the benefits of the community – instead of trying to just be a less expensive version of an established product. Part of that is to be honest about the differences between open source and open core. Bringing closed software licenses into the model will just cause confusion.

I’ve often said that the main strength of The OpenNMS Project is its community. By being totally free software, and sharply separating the commercial services business from the project, we have managed to gather a small but dedicated core of individuals who are emotionally invested in it.

Ariely addresses this community in the chapter on social norms. He divides social interaction into two types: those governed by social norms and those government by the market. Severe problems can arise if one tries to mix the two.

His first example describes a Thanksgiving dinner. In the US the Thanksgiving holiday falls on the fourth Thursday of November, and it is usually celebrated by family gatherings and a large meal, quite often a feast. This feast is often prepared by a matriarch in the family (in my case it is my mother) He imagines what would happen at the end of the meal someone got up and offered to pay this person. I know in the case of my family my mother would be mortified. She cooks (for days) as a labor of love, and to try to turn that effort from a gift into work (which is what happens when you place a monetary value on it) is highly offensive.

Quite often businesses try to form a more social relationship with their clients due to the vast benefits it brings (I probably could not afford my mother’s Thanksgiving meal if I had to pay for it) but this can backfire. In the book there is an example of a day care center that had a problem with parents picking up their children late. It was a small business and the owners and the clients had a social relationship, so when the parents were late they felt bad about it and tried to be better in the future.

However, the owners decided to impose a fine if the parents were late in an effort to reduce the tardiness even more. The moment the fine was brought in to play, the dynamic changed from social norms to market norms. Now that parents were paying for being late, they decided to judge being tardy not in terms of inconveniencing the owners but in terms of the cost versus whatever was causing them to be late. In other words, they had a market way of determining how being late affected them without regard to how it affected the owners of the day care center.

There’s more. Since the fine actually increased the number of late pickups, it was removed. But the parents’ behavior didn’t change. Once the relationship moved from the social to one based on the market, it was very difficult to move it back.

This, more than anything, is why I am happy that we have been so vigilant about separating the community side of OpenNMS from the commercial one. The OpenNMS Project is a community owned and community run endeavor that is governed by social norms, and The OpenNMS Group is a business, run by market norms. We still strive for a social relationship with our paying clients, but the commercial side is a real, profitable business and not a charity. If we started to offer proprietary extensions to OpenNMS, I bet that part of our community would then start to view the project in terms of market norms and we would lose a good part of the benefit the community provides.

While I still have yet to digest everything I read, I did take away some key points:

  • Remember that they power of open source comes from the community, so make sure not to destroy it by introducing market norms into the relationship.
  • Competing on price turns a discussion of solutions based on open source into a discussion of software versus software. In many cases open source will lose.
  • The value of FREE! is strong, but the commercial open core companies use of the term “open source” dilutes that. We in the free and open software business need to be vigilant about educating the market on the difference.

I don’t recommend “business” books very often. In fact, I can’t remember recommending anything other than Crossing the Chasm, so take that into account when I say to run out and get Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.

Open Core Software

Posted on by tarus

I got to chat with Jay Lyman of the 451 Group today. Most analysts (with the exception of Coté) tend to ignore our little ol’ project but the 451 Group likes to get in touch every several months or so.

It was fun to think and talk about the market for open source management tools for awhile, and I also wanted to find out who came up with the term “open core” (apparently it was Andrew Lampitt). I first saw it used in a 451 CAOS Theory blog post by Matthew Aslett.

As my three readers know, I have a bug up my skirt about the “hybrid” open source companies, where part of the code is closed off but part is open. I call it the “shareware” model where some of the functionality it open but you have to buy a commercial closed license to get all of the features.

I won’t rehash all of the reasons why I hate this model being referred to as “open source software” but I would like to focus on the term “open core software”. In my mind it is more descriptive of what the hybrid companies are doing than “open source” and it doesn’t have the negative connotation that “shareware” brings to mind.

So I plan to steal it.

I don’t think that you’ll see “open core network management” any time soon in the marketing literature of these companies. “Open source” is a much more valuable term, but “open core” is at least a more honest approach, meant to represent a company that releases the core of their product under an open source license but generates revenue as a vendor of proprietary additions to that core.

Jay asked me how our business was doing in the wake of the worldwide recession, and I said that on the whole things were okay. Fourth quarter is usually strong for us, and this year is no exception, but currently we have a lot of projects sitting in limbo. Everything has been approved but most of the large companies we are dealing with are holding their breath on spending in any form. We’re still seeing 40% to 45% year over year growth, which is a lot less than some of the open core companies are reporting, but then again we’ve been seeing that for four years now and they just haven’t been around that long.

He also asked what I thought about the business prospects for the open core guys and I had to admit that they don’t look that great from where I sit. Since they tend to compete on cost, there are at least three main pressures that are going to be bearing down on them in the next few months.

First, pressure from the established commercial players. Sure, the open source part of their product is free, and it is hard to beat free, but what about their commercial part – the part that they sell to keep the doors open? A small OpenNMS customer has a network of 1000 devices. Some of the open core vendors charge per device, on the order of US$250 to US$500. So this translates to US$250K to US$500K per year. One can usually get a Tivoli or OpenView solution for 1000 nodes at much less than that. Will someone go with the newcomer or the established player when the established player costs less?

Now, everyone realizes that there is no one out there paying those prices for the new guys. If you have a 1000 node network you can easily negotiate them down to a fraction of the list price as they are desperate to get new clients. And for some people getting 90% off of a price that was made up in the first place is a deal. But if what they are buying are “ease of use” features the second source of pressure will be from the smaller commercial players like Solarwinds. Why pay US$25K a year when you can get a complete out of the box solution for slightly less than that and only pay for it once? Orion runs on Windows, it is very pretty and it is reasonably priced. And you don’t have to deal with that pesky open source stuff.

The third source of pressure comes from the pure-play open source guys. A couple of years ago I had dinner with Peter Fenton, a smart VC with Benchmark. He told me that a product really needs to “own the bottom”. I didn’t agree with him and pointed out things like Mercedes Benz that sell to the top. I was told by others that I wasn’t supposed to argue with the VC, but I did anyway and in the end he convinced me he was right. After all, Mercedes had to seriously reinvent itself when Lexus came to market with a similar product at a lower price.

By having a totally free alternative, users of other products will constantly question their need to pay for commercial software. In many cases, like the small and medium businesses that use Orion, something like OpenNMS isn’t quite for them. But for others, products like OpenNMS provide a real alternative to their current solutions.

Most of the open core players are VC funded, and eventually those VCs will want to cash out. To do that they need to increase revenue. Thus you can expect those low, low, introductory prices to go away, and when companies find out the real cost for the open core software they will be looking for alternatives. They will be looking toward the bottom.

In the meantime we plan to keep running OpenNMS profitably. This means that year after year it will keep getting better, and slowly but surely the pressure on those other solutions will just keep building.

For those companies it is a race; a race to build themselves up and get acquired before they lose their customer base. It is hard to compete against the bottom, which was the point Peter was trying to make. I think Sun’s current lack of success with MySQL has made everyone a bit cautious about open source acquisitions, and with the current economic climate I don’t expect that to change any time soon. In that context the prospects for open core companies don’t look so rosy to me.

Is Apple Evil? Will Fedora Save OLPC?

Posted on by tarus

Many readers of this blog will know that I like Apple products. I bought a 12″ Powerbook back in 2003 when it was announced and I haven’t looked back.

However, I did have some issues with my purchase and had to return it for service. I mentioned this on a Slashdot comment and got slammed by the fanboys. Yeah, I did use the inflammatory “I’m a sucker” line, but that was all I could think of on short notice that was close to “switcher”. The fanboys were not amused.

At the moment I’m on my third Apple laptop. I run a lot of FOSS on it, but I like the machine and the OS quite a bit. It let’s me get things done.

But I’m not happy with Apple’s management of the iPhone/iPod Touch App Store. They have been denying certain applications pretty randomly. Some are denied on the basis that they compete with built in software (built in Apple software, there are something like 12 calculators out there), and they have also been very vague on what the rules are. I can understand things like “no tethering apps” since the Apple/AT&T business model is built on preventing that, but some of the denials are quite arbitrary.

Think about it. As much as those of us in open source dislike Microsoft, Microsoft never actively prohibited anyone from installing software on Windows. Heck, some would say Microsoft makes it easy for darn near everyone to install software on your copy of Windows, most of the time without you knowing it.

Now the iPhone is not OSX, but if this model works for Apple, there is little preventing it from extending it to the OS. Can you imagine OS 11 where one could only download software from the App Store?

Might happen.

Now most of this is a lot of FUD, but as someone who cares and thinks about the freedom aspect of free software a lot, it has me worried. And with Linux desktops getting better and better, I’m seriously thinking my next laptop will be running Linux as the host O/S.

So for all the Apple fanboys out there about to yell at me: Apple is just making this decision easier, that’s all I’m sayin’.

Now it turns out that I’m going to get some first hand experience with a modern Linux distro on a laptop. Fedora is working on a project to insure that Fedora 10 runs on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO computer.

I really like the idea behind OLPC, especially when it comes to FOSS. However it seemed the project hit a roadblock after last year’s debut when people complained about the software that shipped on it and requested Windows. I think it would be great if a full featured Linux distro was also available as an option, and so I’m going to help test Fedora 10 on OLPC hardware, and in the meantime see how much of my daily laptop needs can be met with Fedora. Most of the time I just need an editor, spell checker, browser, e-mail client and terminal app. While I don’t seriously expect the XO to be my next work laptop, it will let me experiment a bit, and, I hope, contribute something back as well.

Oh, on a side note, I’m curious about the hardware of choice for those who do run a Linux desktop as their main machine. Prior to “switching” I always liked Thinkpads, but I was wondering which vendor produced the most Linux-friendly hardware.

Yes, Virginia, There is Commercial Open Source

Posted on by tarus

After yesterday’s post some people might think I’m a long-haired, all software must be free and open, hippie, and that anyone who is trying to make a buck on open source is evil.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I buy a lot of software, it is just that I pay small amounts for it. My belief is that software will take one of two paths. Stuff that is designed to just work out of the box with little user training will become a commodity, and the expensive, high-end stuff that requires a ton of consulting will become open. Plus, I have short hair (the better to fit under a motorcycle helmet) and I pay my mortgage on open source.

The problem is that neither of these paths make it easy to make the serious amounts of money in a short amount of time that one could in the past. People aren’t willing to pay 6 to 7 figures for commodity software, and it is hard to sell free and open software licenses since, well, they’re free.

Now what happens is that the people who long for the good old days and want to sell millions in software licenses stick the term “open source” on it and hope no one will notice. This is my take, in a nutshell, on the current state of “commercial open source” software.

But there are a couple of examples of companies that truly are “commercial open source” and are doing well. Plus, they are in the US of all places. However, the two companies that first come to mind are not in Silicon Valley. I know some amazing people in Silicon Valley, but sometimes when I’m there I get this vibe that it’s a bunch of smart people who are still a bit insecure, and thus they have to spend a lot of time patting themselves on the back for how clever they are. The clever/smart density outside of the Valley is much lower, so we actually have to get some work done [I kid, I kid].

The first company is Digium in Huntsville, Alabama. Our own Jeff Gehlbach is currently is Arizona at AstriDevCon and has let me know of some great things coming in the near future. I come from a telephony background, and what Digium has done with Asterisk is quite amazing. We use it, and I was humbled that OpenNMS was only one of two open source projects that made TechTarget’s Product Excellence Awards last year, and the other was Asterisk.

Even though a number of companies have tried to commercialize the Asterisk code, Digium remains solidly behind the free and open source model, as Mark Spencer recently said:

I believe it would be foolish to attempt to make Asterisk’s innovation only available as a proprietary product when clearly it is its Open Source foundation that made it so successful and continues to do so, in spite of emotional and to a lesser degree business challenges imposed by people who leverage my work without contributing — and in some cases directly attacking the very company that makes it possible for them to succeed.

The second one is my old favorite, Red Hat. Located about 30 miles away from our offices in Raleigh, NC, they are quietly moving forward, recently posting a 29% year over year revenue increase. Unlike the Valley open source firms, the goal is not to rapidly get acquired and cash out, but to build something lasting. In fact, it is Red Hat that is doing the acquiring.

What I love about Red Hat is that they enable us to exist. Even though we run on Windows and Solaris, if there wasn’t a stable, supported Linux distro out there my job would be a lot harder. I would estimate that about one third of our clients are also Red Hat clients, with another third using CentOS. The last third is spread around Solaris, SuSE and Debian/Ubuntu.

Neither of these companies have a business model based mainly on proprietary software licenses, yet they are doing well. As it was demonstrated, at least in Europe, there are different expectations overseas for software that calls itself open. As more and more business is being done overseas, it will be companies like these (and I hope, OpenNMS) that see the lions share of growth in market share and revenue.

That sounds pretty “commercial” to me.

Radio Free Europe

Posted on by tarus

Some of my friends have a habit of trying to push my buttons. Many times they succeed (grin), and thus today I was asked to comment on a blog post by Larry Augustin about the difference in viewpoints on open source between Europe and the United States.

This post was based on his take on the first Europe Open Source Think Tank. I know they hold one of these in California every year, but I don’t get invited to that one either so this was the first I’d heard of it.

I had the pleasure of having dinner with a group that included Larry about 18 months ago. He intimidates me a little. He is a very nice guy in person, and he is probably one of the most financially successful people involved with open source. But then I read about things like the MedSphere debacle and I don’t know what to think except to be a little scared. In all fairness I never heard the Medsphere story from Larry in person, so there might be a nicer take on the whole thing.

Anyway, Larry put up a detailed chart comparing the views of open source between companies in Europe and in the United States. The OpenNMS Group has customers in over 18 countries outside of the US and from my experience the analysis is dead on.

When you say “open source” outside of the US, it means 100% free software. If you look at the column labeled “European View” it pretty much echos what I’ve been saying for years. The “commercial” open source business model as seen in the United States View is not open source.

Free and open source software represents a shift in the ownership of software from a small, tightly controlled group to a large, disperse community. It is 100% transparent and 100% free. Thus the value moves away from the code itself and onto those who can best use it. The Europeans seem to understand this.

In the US a lot of new software companies are driven by venture capitalists. Contrary to popular belief, VCs are actually very conservative and sometimes quite timid. They only want to try things that have been done successfully before. They know how to sell software, and now that open source is a popular buzzword, they want to sell open source software. So what happens is that either a mature commercial product that isn’t selling is labeled “open source” in order to garner interest, or a new product is created with an “open source” part in order to garner interest.

I think the tolerance of this model is driven by my free food analogy. Corporate decision makers are wary of “free” software and wonder what the catch is. When they find out that they actually have to pay for it in order to realize true benefit they return to their comfort zone. The fact of the matter is that in the US these people could care less about open source. They want the cheapest solution, and if it has to come with an open source label so be it.

For some reason the Europeans (and Asians and the Pac Rim in my experience) expect open source to mean free and open software, and they grouse at any attempt to pervert the term. Perhaps it is because Europe consists of so many different languages that it is harder to dilute meaning.

I could go on forever about “enterprise” editions v. “open source” editions, etc., but even now I begin to repeat myself. So let me end this with three points.

First, while the European understanding of open source is solid, the rate of adoption is lower than you might imagine, especially in the UK. While we have a number of clients in England in some cases it was a hard sell.

Second, during my dinner with Larry the talk was all about how to deal with Nagios. I think the bigger concern is how to deal with Solarwinds. Orion is mature, pretty to look at, affordable and in many cases a useful tool. How do you get someone to pay US$100/node for “free software” when they can get unlimited management for US$20,000? If cost is the basis of your business model, prepare to get undercut.

Second, not all companies in the US misunderstand the usefulness and power of open source. I’m at a client right now who really gets it. They’re excited, I’m excited, and we are doing great things.

We are pretty sure we know how to become very successful without having to resort to selling software (I won’t blog about the details on that though – a boy’s got to have a few secrets). In the meantime I also have no doubt that one or more of Larry’s companies will make lots of money. He’s smart that way.

It really depends on the ultimate goals of the software creators and the people who back them. Do you want to make a lot of money fast, or do you want to build something that lasts? I know a number of wealthy people whose life’s work is a footnote in some other company’s portfolio.

I want OpenNMS to be around for decades. Okay, so I won’t be able to buy a Ferrari in the next year, but then again my hope is the project will be around long after the car is a pile of metal.

And I’d much rather have a V-Rod.

Major Security Breach?

Posted on by tarus

I’m a big fan of the American Airlines AAdvantage program, and I have both the company credit cards and my personal credit card with CitiBank in order to earn miles.

Recently, I received notice that both my business account and my personal accounts were being closed, and that Citi was going to reissue new cards to me. The reason is that “some vendor” that I do business with had a large number of credit card numbers stolen. I tried to press them to reveal the name of that vendor, but they wouldn’t because that vendor is preparing to announce it in the near future. Unlike a software exploit, telling people that their card was compromised immediately doesn’t seem to me to be a problem, but it could be a public relations nightmare that might be softened with a line like “we have proactively contacted all of the affected banks” etc. etc.

I’m going to make a prediction that Amazon.com, one of my favorite online vendors, is the culprit. This is the only vendor where I have used both my personal and business cards. Note that with the business, only my card was cancelled, no one else in the company needed new cards since I am the one who buys gear from Amazon.

So, anyone else having there cards torn up and reissued? If so, do you use Amazon? Any other guesses?

I hope I am wrong, but if it does turn out to be that the Internet’s largest retailer got hacked, do you think vendors will start to think seriously about security for a change?