To the extent that open source becomes more pervasive, and acquisitions of OSS companies continue, the lines between OSS and proprietary companies may appear to blur, but their business practices involve distinctions that must remain in order to continue to bring incredible value to the market. On the financial side there is the huge benefit of paying on a subscription basis, whether that payment be considered for support only, support & updates or other benefit. The old model of paying tens or hundreds of thousands up front based on expected usage, then paying 20-25% a year after that is dead. While some may appropriately tack on code offerings that are not technically open source, sticking with the subscription model is critical.

Secondly the article touts the flexibility of open source licensing schemes, but let’s go a step further.  Open source software, partly by design, and partly just due to much of it being more recently developed, tends to adhere to open standards to a greater degree than proprietary rivals.  This allows for greater transportability of applications and any progress towards being less locked in to specific vendor solutions is a good thing.  Finally, vibrant communities that form around OSS bring greater resources to the market and greater R&D leverage available to those who utilize the solution.

So, yes, the popularity of OSS in a recession is growing quickly, and cost is a key factor as is flexibility.  Add to that the greater adoption of open standards, availability of resources, and greater R&D leverage, and it’s all good business in any economy.

 

I’ve taken on BI projects in the past where there was a large capital outlay up front to acquire the suite of tools necessary to just get started. At my last company, we took on a large enterprise-wide rollout of BI, and spent almost $200k before we delivered the first report or analytic view of data from our ERP solution.  The project never moved beyond reporting of financial results.

Here at Ingres, by utilizing open source, and standards based software, we were able to avoid perpetual license fees, and spend on a per-use basis. Beyond that, the time it took developers to load data from our CRM, ERP, and Service systems was cut into fractions of what it took to do this at my last company. The tools are better, they are more flexible, and developers take to them more easily, all resulting in greater productivity. When it took a Jaspersoft developer 2 days to roll out a complete data mart with several analytic cubes, I knew we really had managed to make every penny count.

 

Keane

I first caught Keane at Coachella, then at a small theater in Berkeley, CA for their first and second tours. This most recent tour is to support their third release, “Perfect Symmetry” and we caught the show at the newly remodeled Fox Theater in Oakland, CA on May 8, 2009. Keane was indeed in perfect form, particularly vocalist Tom, who sounded better than on the album, hitting his highest notes clearly and forcefully. The lyrics from Perfect Symmetry are varied and include tomes about love lost, and the weight of the world. But you can also hear messages about turning your life around and reaching your potential. As a whole, the messages are powerful and resonated most effectively in this live setting and with the band’s exciting delivery. Highly recommended!

 

Favorite moment was Jeffrey’s likening of open source acceptance to the six stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.  Most of my collegues have moved to the ‘acceptance’ stage and beyond, and I am working with some of my associates who are adopting OSS going up the stack from OS, through database, web/app servers, and now horizontal plays, such as BI and content management, as we have done at Ingres. All sound advice, and particularly important when shopping to get the greatest innovation while managing to a reduced budget.

 

I just went to see Rick at Hampton Court in celebration of King Henry the 8ths 500th anniversary, where he presented “Six Wives” in it’s entirely to small audiences of 5,000 patrons on May 1st and 2nd.  This was my first and possibly last chance to finally see Rick with orchestra and choir, and though I have never traveled overseas specifically to attend a concert, this seemed like the right time to do it, particularly since it appears that Rick will not be traveling to the US again.

The show combined six band members, original analog, acoustic, and digital instruments, with full orchestra and choir, British personality Brian Blessed as narrator, and King Henry’s tudor style castle used as a backdrop.  Rick was clearly in top form assuring that the live presentation transcended the original recordings making for a truly remarkable concert.  This one was fulfilment of a dream, and worth every bit of the cost and effort to attend.

 

That feeling of vertigo is actually all of us falling backwards in time, when we lacked choice and you really had to be ‘locked in’ to one vendor who provided the complete stack of solutions.  We experienced a wave of innovation in this industry when we moved from purchasing all solutions from one or two mainframe companies, to many companies, all innovating and marketing solutions up and down the stack of technology. A host of new software companies brought amazing functionality to the market separately from the major hardware players and we thrived on that innovation. We have gone through waves of consolidation and new start-ups along the way, much of which has been healthy and is to be expected. But one stack, one provider horizontally and vertically through the organization means ‘lock down’ to be sure.

Fortunately, today, while some continue to consolidate the competition, others are still opening up code, adopting standards based computing, and innovating. The open source movement is thriving, but those looking to Sun for leadership are saddened today. Based on Oracle’s historical pricing and business practices, when it comes to the open source assets acquired from Sun, this acquisition will mean moving from ‘open source’ to ‘open wallet’!

 

Just before the show we went to the “store closing” sale at the Virgin mega-store close by the venue. Digital downloads are continuing to force the rest of the brick and mortar music retailers out of business, leaving only big-box chains to carry what statistics show as top sellers. While I am nostaligic for the experience of buying physical music product, most of the music I own now, including this new release by Lily Allen, makes my collection via convenient digital only downloads. I have adjusted to the loss of quality, and break out original CD’s or LP’s more rarely at this point. The price for convenience is being paid, but the experience, for me, is not quite as good.

 

After a rather imprecise definition of what cloud computing actually is, this call to action admonishes cloud vendors to adhere to their proclaimed goals of an “open” cloud: choice, flexibility, speed/agility and promoting skills availability.  These stated goals are then followed up with 6 principles calling on providers to (1) work together to address cloud adoption challenges (2) not use market position to lock in customers (3) use and adopt existing standards as appropriate (4) be pragmatic and judicious so as to avoid creating too many new standards (5) make community efforts customer driven, and (6) just ‘play nice’ and work together with standards orgs, advocacy groups, and communities.

Certainly in the world of open source software, we promote the same things, all of which have been discussed in this column, and all of which accrue great benefit to the users of open source software. From that standpoint, I applaud the ideals stated in the manifesto. The challenge will be that many of the vendors working in the “cloud” space are generally making huge capital investments in infrastructure, with little if any community to some of these offerings, just lots of interested customers and individual developers. If the innovation behind the elasticity of compute power can be openly shared, for instance, it will benefit those of us who may write solutions intended to run in the cloud. Conversely, it may be considered too core to the unique offering of a few and protected. So far, both Microsoft and Amazon are balking at the manifesto, and some are calling it a ploy by IBM to exclude others. Let’s hope for the best, but stand ready to carefully evaluate the use of cloud technologies based on the efficacy of the solutions and the evaluation of the vendors involved.  Basically, due diligence.

 

Our own argument about security, stated on our Live site, is that there is no reason to believe open source software to be any less secure than proprietary software, and there is a potential for it to be greater.  In fact the best players build security into software by design, and security vulnerabilities are more typically found through reverse engineering, not by reading source code. A recent blog posting advising our president to please “Buy Open Source“, takes another angle, which includes the notion that should the government or any other user in an open source community, could contribute to the security of a particular solution through the open source model, and that transparency should lead to increased security.

No matter how it’s stated, unfounded concerns about security have killed more innovation that any other such fear, and in this case it is misplaced. CIO alert - don’t let the naysayers help keep you locked into the legacy model. Move on!

 

When I see a band whose peak popularity was 10, 20, or more years ago, I often wonder what their lives have been like, and how they survive financially (telling myself that would be the downside of following that particular dream!). Dale cleared that up for us between tracks, admonishing the audience, something like “you kids, don’t listen to what the financial people tell you - save your money and put it under your pillow or you will end up without any!”. Argh…looking forward to the recovery!