Archive for the 'Open Source Software' Category
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
Open Source Advice for the next President of the United States - Part I
Brian Gentile
It’s November 3, and I (like so many other Americans and others
around the world) breathlessly await the results of tomorrow’s U.S. Presidential
election. Regardless of your party affiliation, political ideals, or social leanings, you must
acknowledge the historical significance of this election. Americans will elect either the first
African American President or the first female Vice President. Most importantly, perhaps,
U.S. citizens will appoint a leader who will inherit so much of what has gone right and wrong with
American politics, foreign relations, economic policy, market regulation, and the very gravitas of the
sole, remaining Superpower. What do you think? Will America once again find its mojo under the
inspired leadership of either John McCain or Barack Obama? We’ll see.
In the meantime,
I’ve thought long and hard about some specific advice for America’s next president. And,
I’ve decided to collect these thoughts under an “open source” banner, believing that
building community, transparency and more rapid advancement is not only good for software products, but
for nation-building as well. So, here goes – my advice for the next President of the
United States . . .
Fix the U.S.
economy. It’s true that the global economy is
more intricately connected now than ever. But, as President, your first responsibility is to get
America back on its economic track. Remember that, at more than an estimated $14 trillion in
2008, the U.S. GDP still represents nearly 25% of the global GDP. So, in many ways, as the U.S.
economy goes, so goes that of the world. Overcoming the current financial markets collapse, getting
people back to work, and moderating spiraling prices in staples (such as energy, food) and other expenses
(healthcare) should be top-priority. Don’t waste any time here. Appoint to Cabinet
positions the nation’s best and brightest to craft creative solutions and track their progress
until GDP is growing 4% annually.
Build the
Global Community. There is no telling how much foreign
relations ground we’ve lost in the past decade or more. But, as President, you must focus on
the future – and re-building America’s standing among all nations will likely be your
greatest, enduring challenge. In open source software, our existence is owed to building
strong community and so I urge you to remember that building great community means to first be a great
community member. To do so may mean letting go of some of the pride and proprietary thinking
that has plagued many of your predecessors. Embracing a new level of transparency in policy and
chivalry in character will serve you and your country well in reaching out anew to a world that deserves
and wants a respectful role model.
While the world
is a global village, there is a domestic aspect to building community. Technology has penetrated so many facets of our lives and has had a profound impact on the
"flattening" of economies around the world. Yet,
the U.S. government and its leaders have not integrated into their work what we in the technology call
“Web 2.0”. Can you imagine a world where citizens and leaders at all levels could communicate
openly in online forums made possible with open source software? I would call this
“OneWorldForge” and the implications for governance are profound. As President, you can
lead this online change and build the world’s largest and strongest community, starting with the
United States as the example.
Open Source Advice for the next President of the United States - Part II
Brian Gentile
[This post continues from the one above]
Invest in the
Future. America is a nation of builders and
innovators. The strength of the economy and the very psyche of the country are founded on
innovation. But, you surely know that the number of U.S. college graduates focused on science and
math have been declining for two decades. As we approach 2010, the U.S.’s distinction as a
top generator of the world’s best engineers, scientists, and mathematicians is clearly threatened.
To maintain the country’s storied reputation, re-institute the government-sponsored
scholarship and grants process so that more students will continue on with their education and choose
technical subjects as their field. Also, re-enable private student loans and corporate tax credits
(with special incentives), especially for those students focused on continuing education in the technical
fields. It may take another decade to really pay-off, but there are no more beneficial long-term
programs that will fuel America’s future.
Demand better
technology in Government. The U.S. Federal Government, by
and large, is known for spending more and getting less from technology than practically any other
organization. This is despite a byzantine set of spending and procurement policies and rules which
were ironically designed to do the opposite. Here, I can offer one incredibly useful
tip: require that all U.S. government organizations consider open source software alternatives
wherever they exist. Some European governments have been doing so for several years and are already
reaping tremendous cost and technology advantages as a result. If you need any specific advice about
open source business intelligence software, there is a community of technology innovators pushing the
envelope and I, as well as many others, would be happy to share our knowledge.
I am sure that
your first few months in office will be grueling. As you take the helm of the largest economy
and most influential country in the world, remember there is good news and bad news. The good news
is that the conflict and war in Iraq seem to be improving, which should give you more time to focus on
the advice I’m providing here. The bad news is that if the good news is Iraq, you’ve got
a tough road ahead of you. I wish you good luck. And, God bless America.
Brian
Gentile
Chief Executive
Officer
Jaspersoft
Technology Leaders Summit: Where is Open Source?
Brian Gentile
I was sure this would be a valuable and interesting use of my time as
I filed in to the plush Four Seasons Palo Alto conference room. DLA Piper (a large, well-known
global law firm) had invited me to attend their day-long “Technology Leaders Summit” earlier
this week and I wanted to arrive early – not only to enjoy the variety of high-end breakfast foods,
but to ensure a good seat for the featured speakers and panelists. To summarize, I will
simply say there were highs and lows which corresponded with the caliber of those presenting and the
ideas they represented (or how well they represented them).
Disappointing to me was the very
first session, a moderated Q&A session with Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s current Chief Architect and
storied pioneer of much that is software. I’m afraid I found almost no good answers to some
pretty good Qs. Surprisingly content-free, relative to my expectations. My primary take-away
was that Microsoft has NO interest in continuing to pursue Yahoo, despite its belief that an
advertising-focused delivery model will be important to the future of software (umm, errr, did he mean
that it already is important, or just that Microsoft isn’t participating particularly
well?).
Next, a panel session on the
“Latest Developments in Business Models”, included open source in its description (along with
all the other likely suspects, such as SaaS, cloud computing and social networking). But, I should
have known something was askew when the expert panel included no one with background or insight in open
source. Still, I had to listen. After about 50 minutes of interesting dialog on cloud
computing and how to enable innovation and disruption within a large, established enterprise, one other
member of the audience was suffering from my same curiosity. Before I could act, he rose and
asked: “What about open source? Is this category now relegated to the equivalent of generic
drugs, destined to provide not innovation but only faster, cheaper alternatives to proprietary
technologies? And, if so, is that fundamentally bad?” The panel muddled through
some answer which amounted to “faster and cheaper is not inherently bad because it can inspire and
enable new solutions where they couldn’t have emerged before because of cost or budget
limitations”. The panel then moved on to conclude with comments on cloud computing and
disruptive innovation in the enterprise, I think.
So, I was left to ponder, alone for
the moment, where in the midst of a conference designed for technology leaders had the vibrant discussion
of open source gone. My answer came when Jonathan Schwartz took the stage right after lunch. As
the Chief Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems, Jonathan is an outspoken believer in open
source. So much so, of course, that his company spent $1 billion to acquire MySQL earlier this
year. You can follow Jonathan’s thoughts and ideas through his well-written blog on Sun’s
site. Not only did Jonathan restore my faith that the
most innovative, high-quality software being created today is all being done using the open source model,
he reminded me that the most interesting customers and users of these products are the new
faithful. I particularly enjoyed his reference to proprietary software vendors dominating
customer environments in categories of basic application functionality, the kind of systems that IT
staffs seek to make ever-more efficient (ERP, CRM, Payroll, etc.). In contrast, open source
software and vendors are dominating in areas where computing resources need to be maximized and more
fully leveraged, especially in web-based application design, development, virtualization, and
delivery. Think of the world’s largest media, social networking, and global services
firms. The complete software stack driving those environments is open source, nearly from top to
bottom. I realized that while open source may not solve all the problems in software, it
surely continues to share a seat at the table of disruption because it delivers so many powerful
advantages for the customer. In this sense, I was reminded that open innovation, as a primary reason
for and advantage of open source software, was indeed alive and well – it had just been temporarily
misplaced behind the spinach quiche in the foyer.
As Jonathan explained Sun’s
commitment to open source, based on its business and technical merit, my anxiety faded. Then, I
focused on my personal commitment in my role at Jaspersoft: to create the simple, powerful business
intelligence that will reach more people in the world than any of the aged, proprietary vendors that
preceded us. Amen.
Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft
Open Source Momentum in Europe
Brian Gentile
For me, this week is full of
press and analyst meetings and precedes a week of conference activities that will draw together open
source leaders and aficionados for some of the most advanced thought and discussion in all of open
source. Must be in California, right? Wrong. Europe. The two events
next week (both in Paris), the Open Source Think Tank and the Paris Capitale du Libre, will surely advance the open source agenda and spirit of collaboration
destined to further this cause.
In case you weren’t aware,
Europe has been quietly leading many aspects of the open source revolution. Formal adoption and use
of open source products and technologies is highest in the Euro zone. A study conducted
earlier this year by Forrester shows, for example, that 24% of (surveyed) organizations in France have
already put open source software into production use with another 15% likely to do so during this coming
year. Doesn’t hurt that several major European governments are literally requiring the
consideration and use of open source software by all government organizations . . . and this is trickling
into the private sector as well.
We’re very proud of
Jaspersoft’s European roots and momentum. Our technology founders, Teodor Danciu and Giulio
Toffoli, are Romanian and Italian respectively and we have long-created our core products in development
teams across 3 European countries. And, while our community continues to grow rapidly throughout
the world, the interest and contribution from Europe seems to continue disproportionately, remaining
second-to-none.
We have many significant points
of European community and commercial momentum that I’ll be describing here in this coming week and
next. In the meantime, I invite you to check out the expanded French and German content at
Jaspersoft’s commercial web site, www.jaspersoft.com (select the "Worldwide Sites" option). Merci and Vielen
Dank.
Brian Gentile Chief Executive Officer Jaspersoft
OSCON Executive Briefing Wrap-up
Barry Klawans
The OSCON Executive Briefing is now over for 2006. Last year was the first
time that OSCON had a business oriented track, and this year is the first time it was a seperate day long
event. (And the first time Matt Asay helped organize it.) I’ve covered my favorite sessions in
gory detail already, and now I’ll conclude my coverage with a summary of the rest of the day.
First off, my overriding impression is that the day was really more about Web 2.0 than open source.
Many of the companies featured were not what I consider open source companies - Google, Yahoo!, craigslist, Second Life and
Dabble DB may be built on open source software, but they are not
open source companies. Odd for a show that is all about open source. Its not to say that the sessions
were not interesting (they were) but just that they were not particularly about open source.
(Aside: Yes, I know that JasperSoft has a closed source commercial product. But we don’t claim
that it is open source, and we sell it to a different market than we market our open source products to.
We do not use our open source products to sell our closed source products. I don’t keep my
portfolio invested in a single market sector either.)
Highlights and my thoughts from sessions not covered in detail already:
My favorite quote was from Jim Buckmaster, CEO of craigslist - “10,000,000 users are more
effective than your staff”. Hard to argue with, and Jim has done a great job of keeping 10 million
folks happy.
Danese Cooper of Intel grilled Bill Hilf of Microsoft about their open source strategy. He made a
bunch of claims which didn’t hold water for me. Amoung other dubious claims he stated that
Microsoft had never spread any disinformation about Linux and that the infamous “Get The
Facts” campaign was never targeted to the open source community. A person sitting near me muttered
“yeah, it was targeted against us.” Bill also ducked questions about why the Open Office
“export as Office” was significantly better than the Office 2007 “import Open Office
document” plugin and made some vague claims about the need for backwards compatability. I doubt I
was the only person in the audience who wondered why Open Office’s lack of support for old versions
of Office causes problems creating an OpenXML file that can be opened correctly by the latest versions of
Office. (For those interested in learning more, be sure to check out Rob Weir’s report on
ODF->Office translation at his blog.)
Finally, when asked if IE 7 would contain support for features that would allow Microsoft to continue
trying to force browser lock in, he replied that IE 7 “will be the most standards complient browser
out there” and ignored the question of proprietary extensions. Jason Matusow, you will be missed.
Finally, there was a facinating discussion between Tim O’Reilly and Chad Dickerson of Yahoo!
about open access to data, again with heavy Web 2.0 emphasis. They discussed who owns data on sites like
Flickr, especially the meta data added by the community as tags. Who owns the metadata, and what
rights do they have towards them? Should metadata providers be able to download or export the data they
have provided? Should the owners of the material being annotated be able to do the same? Who owns the
metadata? Some of the ideas floated included requiring taggers to assign a license or Creative Commons
restriction on each tag! The issues raised also apply to such sites as del.icio.us or even sites Yahoo! doesn’t own
OSCON Executive Briefing, Part III - Asymmetric Competition
Barry Klawans
We had a brief technical glitch earlier today which has now been resolved. I’m catching up on
the last few sessions now.
The last session before lunch was between David Skok of Matrix Partners, Michael Tiemann of Red Hat,
and Paul Weinstein of MySQL (sitting in for Marten Mickos), moderated by Tim O’Reilly and Matt
Asay. The topic was Asymmetric competition - that is, competition between players using different rules.
Think David vs. Goliath. The questions were all about competing as small, commercial open source
company against a large conventional software company.
A brief aside: I guess the days of being able to talk about commercial companies vs open source
companies is officially dead, as all the panelists work for commercial companies.
My favorite topic was all about how disruptive is open source, really? David Skok claims that it is
disruptive, since a traditional software vendor’s biggest expenses are sales and marketing. Open
source cuts these costs out IF you have a large enough community. Matt disagreed, pointing out that even
with open source you end up doing a “push” to sell - its not a case of “if you publish
it they will buy”. (Matt has written about this several times on his blog.)
I have to agree with Matt. Open source, at least when dealing with software aimed at businesses, is
at the end of a day a distribution channel. It allows people to try out your software in a stress free
environment, but price alone isn’t a sufficient reason to buy it. Junk is junk, and cheap junk is
still junk. At the end of the day your product has to solve a real problem, have real value or people
won’t pay you for it.
Matt asked a related question that I loved. He asked all the panelists why do people buy you and
guessed that none of them would say “because of the price”. He also asked if that was true,
why don’t they charge as much as the closed source companies. The answers were surprising.
David Skok, speaking about JBoss, said it IS cost. They pitch that JBoss’ application based
support pricing (vs server based) means that as you scale by adding servers, your software costs
don’t go up. They emphasize that their (JBoss’) support costs are cheaper than the other
guy’s maintenance fees.
Michael Tiemann, Red Hat, said it was about value, not cost. Its about both increasing revenue and
decreasing costs.
Paul Weinstein, MySQL, said its about being different than the established closed source players.
There are things that MySQL does better than Oracle, and people who need those features will choose
MySQL. He also said that some of their competitor’s business practices (mandatory maintenance
fees, etc) drive people to MySQL simply to feel that they, the customer, are still in control.
I like Paul’s answer the best. Open source companies need to focus on doing something better
than anybody else, not just being cheaper.
