Open Channels

Archive for the ‘Open Source’ Category

A while back I was doing some research for a client and came across an apparent GPL slight of hand engineered by Sun and IBM.  Time constraints and competing priorities kept me from writing about this until now, and Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has taken Sun off of the hot seat (see in particular paragraph 2, Non Assertion), but it’s still a pretty juicy story.  What’s more, I think it’s healthy to expose vendor behaviors that cut against the spirit of open source, creating unfair advantages for a privileged few at the expense of everyone else. Read the rest of this entry »

Although I’ve read many articles about open source licensing, I’m continually surprised by the amount of confusion and disinformation I find related to the GNU General Public License (GPL).  This post is written by a lay person for other lay persons.  I’m not a lawyer, but I do a fair amount of IP strategy consulting with open source companies and have had the benefit of working  with some of the best open source attorneys in the world.  So I know enough to be dangerous and have an (more or less) informed point of view. Read the rest of this post with the understanding that I am offering my own views of the GPL, not legal advice. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been doing research on open source licensing strategies and community interactions for an upcoming report.  My research brought me to the Ingres Community Forum, where I hoped to gain some insight about Ingres’ traction as an open source player.  Ingres uses a dual-license model (GPL v2 with FLOSS exception) and runs a vendor-managed community.

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EnterpriseDB announced a new program today aimed squarely at Oracle users who are fed up with Oracle’s drumbeat of price increases.  Oracle recently announced a 40% hike in the price of its database tools on the heels of a 20% increase in the price its core database product in 2008.

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Stimulated in part by a controversial Eric Raymond blog post, open source thought leaders like Matt Asay are publicly questioning the contemporary merits of the GNU General Public License (GPL).  In fairness, Matt has long been a GPL advocate.  And it’s never bad to question whether past practices make sense going forward.  All that said, the notion that open source vendors should simply abandon the GPL in favor of liberal licenses like BSD/Apache is myopic and wrong-headed, in my opinion.
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O’Reilly Radar published an interesting interview with Jeffrey Hammond, a veteran analyst at Forrester Research, on the organic infiltration of open source technologies into enterprises.  Hammond’s primary research audiences include developers, enterprise architects and development managers, and his research domains include Web 2.0, rich internet application development, software change and configuration management, application life cycle management, software modeling, mobile development, IDEs and programming languages.  I’m not quite sure how one guy covers such a broad patch, but Hammond has been around for a long time and is a respected analyst.

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As disclosed by Peter Galli, a Microsoft open source community spokesperson, Microsoft intends to include C# and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) in Microsoft’s Community Promise, a public commitment not to assert patent claims or other rights related to the implementation of those standards.  According to Galli:

Under the Community Promise, Microsoft provides assurance that it will not assert its Necessary Claims against anyone who makes, uses, sells, offers for sale, imports, or distributes any Covered Implementation under any type of development or distribution model, including open-source licensing models such as the LGPL or GPL.

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Some open source vendors are preoccupied with counting community downloads.  Why?  They believe that downloads are a leading indicator of commercial sales pipeline.  The theory is that a meaningful percentage of community relationships will develop into commercial relationships, and sooner rather than later.  While it’s certainly true that some community relationships will cross over, the percentages are small, the durations are tortuously long, and the consistency (i.e., repeatability) of that cross-over motion is low.  Thus, revenue models based on the premise of community monetization are, with few exceptions, doomed from the get-go. Read the rest of this entry »

Bruce Byfield takes a rational position in his Datamation article about the ongoing Mono controversy.  For those new to the subject, Mono is a “free” implementation of Microsoft’s .NET framework.  The crux of the issue is that Mono shares a core of intellectual property with .NET, and that core is covered by Microsoft patents.  The free software community fears that, if Mono becomes integral to popular open source distros (i.e., that wish to offer compatibility and interoperability with .NET), Microsoft will some day assert its patent rights.  Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you are using a pure open source strategy or a hybrid approach such as “open core” (open source foundation with high-value closed source add-ons), a significant component of your bookings is tied to support subscriptions.  Too often, early stage open source companies put a significant amount of thought into attracting community downloads and not enough thought into what they should be doing between the download event and the production deployment of applications based on their solutions.  Impending deployment, of course, signals to an open source sales rep that his chances of selling a support subscription are pretty good. Read the rest of this entry »

Many software companies are operating in the dark ages of marketing.  Their notions of demand generation are to drop hundreds of thousands of emails on cold, externally-sourced contact lists, watch for activity on their landing pages, and shoot at whatever moves. Read the rest of this entry »

After a cacophony of issues associated with its 5.0 and 5.1 releases, including those documented during the vocal departure of Monty Widenius, Sun is rejigging MySQL’s development model.  According to Robin Schumacher, MySQL’s Director of Product Management, the new release process will be comprised of the following: Read the rest of this entry »

Today EnterpriseDB announced the release of Postgres Plus Advanced Server 8.3R2.  This is a significant step for EDB’s product strategy.  8.3R2 creates meaningful distance between Advanced Server and the other products in EDB’s database line-up – Postgres Plus Standard Server and PostgreSQL community database. Read the rest of this entry »