Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Oracle makes a picture-perfect suggestion as to why consolidation is creepy. I'm not sure whether would-be buyers are supposed to be encouraged or dismayed by this advertisement that I found in the Wall Street Journal:
Oracle wants to be everything to you
Seriously, why would you want one vendor to service all needs? It's the absolute best way to ensure that you get stuck with an ever-increasing maintenance bill. The best way to keep costs down is through choice. It's what a free market is all about.
Facil, a Quebec-based open-source organization, has sued the Quebec provincial government for buying Microsoft software without considering open-source software, as CBC reports. The problem, it seems, is that Quebec has an "open markets" policy that it is supposed to follow. In practice, however, the Quebec government IT buyers have been shoveling money into Microsoft and other proprietary vendors without any real consideration for open source:
In [the lawsuit], the group says the provincial government has refused to entertain competing bids from all software providers, opting instead to supply public-sector departments with products bought from proprietary vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle Corp.
Government buyers are using an exception in provincial law that allows them to buy directly from a proprietary vendor when there are no options available, but Facil said that loophole is being abused and goes against other legal requirements to buy locally.
Perhaps most egregiously, nearly $80 million has been spent on Vista licenses this year. Now we know who is buying Vista. :-)
While I think the government should absolutely live up to its policy obligations, I also believe that good software, including open source, eventually finds a home, even despite Microsoft's lobbying. I have some experience selling open-source software into Quebec: the government buys when the price and functionality is right.
In my recent travels to Latin America, I heard much the same: companies and governments are buying into open source in droves, but not necessarily because they are legally required to do so. In fact, I heard the opposite: the governments buying into open source are often those where they are not forced to do so. Ultimately, a purchasing decision is a human decision. You've got to reach the humans before you can sell the software.
I'm sympathetic to Facil's cause, but I believe it should be spending more money on educating buyers on the merits of open-source software, not of open-source software government policies.
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- government policy,
- open source,
- Quebec
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Acquia has finally taken the wraps off its commercially supported Drupal distribution, and it looks like the wait was worth it. Drupal was already a great web content management publishing system, but Acquia's spin on it should make it even better:
The release is essentially a hardened distribution of Drupal, complemented with technical support and network service offerings. Code named Carbon for now, the package includes a select set of community contributed modules alongside the Drupal core. Acquia has taken the task of pre-testing, reviewing, and comparing all community contributed modules to offer a set of the most relevant and reliable contributions. Site administrators are notified of updates to Carbon modules through the network, code named Spokes. The system differentiates between feature, bug fix, and security updates, and informs users of compatibility issues or other dependencies amongst different modules.
I really like the idea behind Spokes. Drupal has a fantastic community, but some of the code it produces is not up to enterprise quality. Enter Acquia to make it clear what is worth using, and what is not. Complexity breeds opportunity.
What I'd like even more is for Acquia to notify the customer as to whether its own modifications to the Drupal distribution will work with an update, and what would be required to make it function if an update will break the modified distribution.
I think this is a great first step - boiling down the Drupal ocean to a comprehensible choice of add-ons - but given that modification is a fact of open-source life, enabling customers to color outside the lines and still be supported...that's the Holy Grail.
Disclosure: My company, Alfresco, competes with Acquia in web content management. I'm also a fan of Acquia. The two aren't necessarily contradictory.
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- Startups
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Dennis Howlett writes a thought-provoking piece on proprietary maintenance revenue, challenging the value that software vendors provide or, rather, the generic way in which it is provided. Howlett proposes a way to customize maintenance fees to the actual value provided by a vendor:
In software terms, we already know that [differentiation for customers] happens through software implementation, configurations and customizations that are a core part of delivering to customer needs. There is no reason why the same principles cannot be applied to the maintenance element of the business relationship. If you stand back and put aside the notions of the last 30+ years, it is blindingly obvious.
It is obvious for example that in the early stages, customers will consume a considerable amount of resource as they learn and become familiar with the product. They should therefore pay an economic price that reflects the services they consume. However, the software vendors need do three things in order to soften the impact and reduce the long term burden....
I'll leave it to you to read Howlett's post to discover the three things, but even in the short blurb above Howlett unwittingly calls out a fundamental difficulty in open-source software revenue models, one that Savio Rodrigues has been banging on for awhile, and one that NBC iVillage CTO Jon Williams has also called out:
Open-source vendors start making money from their customer base precisely at the point that the customer base is least likely to renew.
... Read more
Dave Rosenberg thought that this press release was a spoof on my affection for Red Hat. Yes, it's true that I'm a fan of Red Hat's - I think it does a lot of good for open source - but this goes too far.... :-)
I really resent that I have to play backup.
If you needed any further testament to the colossal failure that is Microsoft Windows Vista, just read this Wall Street Journal article detailing PC manufacturers attempts to design around Vista's shortcomings, shortcomings that no amount of marketing are going to fix.
...[S]ome PC makers are trying to improve that [Vista] experience by adding their own proprietary software to their machines. In some cases, they're creating new user interfaces intended to make Vista faster and easier to use. In other cases they're replacing applications from other software companies with their own....
Today, Microsoft encourages PC makers to build software "on top of Windows Vista that enhances the customer experience," according to an email from Lauren Moynihan, a senior product manager at Microsoft.
This is the problem: they can't. At least, not as much as they'd like. PC manufacturers are trying to stand out, but given that they've ceded so much power and control over the computing experience to Microsoft, the best they can provide is "Windows dressing."
For Sony, HP, or other PC manufacturers hoping to create an Apple-esque experience, forget it. Your best chance of doing so is with Linux. When you pre-install Windows, you pre-install Microsoft's view of the world, with all the bad (and good) that comes with that view. Dell can replace Skype with its own VoIP software, but it can't replace the look, feel, and experience of an increasingly all-consuming Windows experience.
Perhaps Dell, Sony, etc. should band together with Adobe, Google, and others to create Linux-based computing experiences for consumers and/or enterprises. Each of these companies arguably has the brand awareness to take the Linux out of the Linux desktop, and re-brand it as their own. Windows will never give them this opportunity, no matter how hard they try.
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I don't think there's much of a mainstream future for the Wiz, a new open-source gaming unit from GamePark Holdings, but that may be the point:
...[T]he question of whether or not the device can truly challenge the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable is liable to arise when discussing the advent of any mainstream open-source portable. While the Wiz may never be able to capture the mass market in a significant way, the attractive device could become a hit amongst savvy gamers: the flexibility of the device is extraordinary, and making use of homebrew doesn't require time-consuming firmware hacking that could irreversibly damage the device.
It's a capable device (ARM9 533MHz processor with a 3D accelerator, 64MB of RAM, 1GB of built-in NAND flash memory, etc.), with a capable community: unlike many open-source projects, the Wiz has a built-in developer audience that loves to play games and hence may turn its attention to creating games for the Wiz, as well as updating its Linux-based firmware to improve the Wiz.
Will it go mainstream? Almost certainly not. But perhaps the Wiz will point the way for Nintendo and other gaming manufacturers to improve the transparency and malleability of their own devices to make innovation more of a community effort. Probably not, but it's possible.
Have you always wanted to be the antagonist in Pink Floyd's "Have a Cigar"? Now's your chance.
A new U.K. venture, Bandstocks, is making mini-moguls of the music masses, allowing people to invest in up-and-coming bands and share in the proceeds. Bandstocks joins a small but growing group of related companies .
According to a Wednesday article in the Guardian:
Bandstocks will let the public buy a stake in an artist in 10 pound (roughly $18) increments. Once funding reaches a preordained level, for example 100,000 pounds, the money will be released for the act to record an album.
Investors will get a copy of the album, a credit on the CD sleeve and a percentage of the profits from its sale and licensing. They will also get priority ticket booking and the opportunity to buy limited edition releases. For the artist, founder Andrew Lewis claimed that Bandstocks would offer a better return than a major-label deal, as well as more freedom and control over copyright.
It's a pretty cool idea, though music discovery remains nettlesome. That is, who will discover hot new bands? Assuming the answer is Bandstocks, the model defeats the purpose behind Bandstocks, as it would stand to make a great deal more money on its hit bands if it managed them alone, rather than sharing in the wealth with the masses.
Even so, it will be fun to see if Bandstocks can deliver the goods. So far it has two bands in which fans can invest. Me? I'm waiting for the next Radiohead. Once Bandstocks has someone like that in the wings, I'll invest.
There's more than a whiff of truth to The VAR Guy's suggestion that Google's Android antics make it seem like the Microsoft of yore: heavy on marketing and light on substance. In particular, I'm equally dismayed by Google's "vaporware" announcements:
Throughout the 1990s and even today, Microsoft often pre-announces products to engage and excite ISVs (independent software vendors). Win the ISV battle, and you'll win the resulting product wars. It's a smart strategy, and Google adopted it when the company announced the path to Android. (Check out this preview video of Android devices.) But the strategy also has some downside: ISVs get early access to developer tools, but their work on an "emerging" platform often distracts them away from existing platforms and immediate business opportunities.
"Downside" for competitors, that is. This strategy is very tempting: you want the market to slow down and wait for you as a vendor, but few vendors have the brand impact to be able to command the market to do so. Microsoft does, and Google does. But the harm to real vendors that actually deliver substance is significant.
Google has always undercut this vaporware tendency with its "perpetual beta" product release strategy. This allows it to ship product without shipping "product." "Oh, it doesn't work? Well, it's just a beta!" Clever, and thus far effective, as Google's betas often outclass established products from other vendors.
Android, however, is different. It has underwhelmed, but has sucked up a lot of marketing oxygen. Let's hope this is an anomaly and not the beginning of a trend from Google.
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As The Register reports Wednesday, Linux servers are increasingly under attack from Phalanx2, a "self-injecting kernel rootkit designed for the Linux 2.6 branch that hides files, processes and sockets and includes tools for sniffing a tty program and connecting to it with a backdoor."
According to The Register:
The attacks appear to use stolen SSH keys to take hold of a targeted machine and then gain root access by exploiting weaknesses in the kernel. The attacks then install a rootkit known as Phalanx2, which scours the newly infected system for additional SSH keys. There's a viral aspect to this attack. As new SSH keys are stolen, new machines are potentially vulnerable to attack.
The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team has recommended an approach to counteracting the risk, but this is where Linux (and Windows and Solaris and...) security meets reality: Linux may be inherently more secure as a system, but ultimately security is a question of process and people, not merely code.
Administrators must apply the patches. If Linux server administrators are anything like Oracle server administrators--65 percent of whom never install critical security patches--then Linux security will be as fallible as that of any other system. If IT administrators won't secure Linux, it won't be secured.
Much is made about security in open source, and often for good reason. But judging from the lack of chatter on the Web about the Phalanx attacks, I'm not optimistic that we're responding fast enough as a community to this new security breach.
