UK Needs To Be More Open To Open Source

During a discussion in Whitehall, industry experts concluded that the government needs to embrace open source more.

The UK is laging behind Europe and the US when it comes to the adoption of open source in government.

That's the conclusion reached today by a senior Ovum analyst during a roundtable discussion on the government’s use of open source software.

Laurent Lachal, Ovum's open source research director, said that, from the start, Europe has been interested in the adoption of open source but has since dragged its heels.

“In the US there was some sort of prejudice against open source but in effect they used it from the start, just didn’t talk about it. Now they are out," he said. "The UK started out like the US but didn’t really warm up to it until recently.”

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How to Bring Open-Source Software into the Enterprise

Open-source software has gained growing acceptance in the enterprise. Once enterprises put in place the same governance, policy and support processes around open-source software as they do with proprietary software, there is no limit to how much open-source software they can bring into their organization. Here, Knowledge Center contributor Carol J. Rizzo offers five tips on how to bring open-source software into your organization in a way that maps to your corporate risk factors, making open-source software no more or less of a risk than proprietary software.

Over the past decade, I've served as CTO of three different Fortune 500 companies. In each of those companies, one of my primary responsibilities was to mitigate risks associated with technology. During the same period, open-source software has gained growing acceptance in the enterprise. Properly sourced, open-source software can bring so much to the table: lower cost solutions, high-quality software and all the other benefits that come from active and altruistic developer and user communities.

However, there is a long-established, risk-averse mindset within many large companies. Companies have established software procurement practices which depend upon an interaction and relationship with a vendor. This has slowed the adoption of open-source software which, similar to commercial software, still has to be adopted under certain guidelines.

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Vancouver becomes role model for open source

Open source activists are praising the Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source motion passed by the City of Vancouver last month. City Councillor Andrea Reimer provides an update on what to expect next.

Open source activists are praising the Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source motion passed by the City of Vancouver last month.

Proposed by City Councillor Andrea Reimer, the motion encourages the adoption of open standards, promotes distribution of open data and places open source on equal footing with commercial software during procurement cycles.

Vancouver is the first municipality in Canada to pass a motion that embraces the "open" city concept. But "we took some of our lead from Toronto, who did a 1.0 version of a motion last fall and is looking at rolling some stuff out," said Reimer

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Open Source Tool to Simplify Mobile Programmes

Sun Microsystems has partnered with Orange, the Vodafone Group and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications in an endeavour to enable software developers deliver Java programmes on a mobile phone.

The vendor launched the open-source testing tool at its annual JavaOne developer conference in San Francisco.

A software developer has to test the programme many times before it reaches the consumer. These tests are very expensive, and a single test can cost about $ 200. The price may escalate depending on the programme.

The tool is a part of Sun's initiative to simplify the process and reduce the number of tests. The company simultaneously enhanced the five year old Java Verified programme used to certify Java ME programmes on mobile devices.

Emergence of Apple's iPhone and Google's Android has eclipsed the use of Java on mobile phones. With this new initiative unveiled for the developers, Sun hopes to reclaim lost ground.

Source : http://www.channeltimes.com/

Should Microsoft's CEO summit have been 'open source'?

The biggest business story in Seattle this week occurred on the Microsoft campus -- and the media barely covered it. They weren't allowed to.

The Microsoft CEO Summit drew more than 105 CEOs representing 25 countries. Altogether, these titans represent about $2.9 trillion in annual sales and 8.9 million employees.

Among the names released were Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett and News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch. The three-day meeting began May 19 at the Microsoft campus in Redmond.

If these leaders were elected officeholders meeting as a public body, their gathering would have probably been subject to open meetings laws. There's no such sunshine law for the meetings of leaders of private companies.

Microsoft has been hosting these summits for 13 years, and they've become a world-class forum.

The event was news in itself even though no news was announced. They discussed the convergence of technology, business issues, economic trends and making the world a better place. The exact agenda was private.

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Apache better than GPL for open-source business?

I have spent years advocating the GNU General Public License as the optimal open-source license for commercial open source.

Roughly nine years after I first became a fan of the GPL, I think I've been wrong.

My admiration for the GPL mostly stemmed from its ability to mimic, but then invert, proprietary licensing. The GPL is like opening a cannister of radioactive waste: while your competitors can touch it, you're dead certain that they won't.

Given that openness is increasingly a winning business model--if not the winning business model, as Red Hat executive Michael Tiemann argues--one has to wonder if pretending to be open through the GPL accomplishes as much as fully opening up through Apache-style licensing would.

Open-source luminary Eric Raymond is pretty clear on this point:

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Just how strong is Red Hat's open-source business?

Red Hat stands alone as the only significant public open-source company. Is this a testament to its execution, or is it a hint that open source is not well-suited to big business?

While I believe that open source will increasingly be the heart of many big technology businesses, it will almost certainly feed new entrants to markets, not incumbent vendors.

Looking at Red Hat's report on its most recent fiscal year (FY 2009), however, suggests that for these new entrants, open source can be a very profitable business indeed. I've already reported on the high-level financial results.

What is particularly intriguing is the data behind those results:

• Red Hat is forecasting $720 million to $735 million in FY 2010, an annual growth rate of 10 percent to 13 percent over 2009.
• 40,000 new Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers in FY 2009, the "vast majority of which are...customers that are starting off small." Lots of room to grow, in other words.
• Nearly half of Red Hat's top-100 renewal customers upgraded to or increased the number of RHEL advanced platform servers in their Data Centers. (In its fiscal Q4 2009, Red Hat renewed each of its top-25 contracts up for renewal at 132 percent of the prior year's value.)
• 30 percent of Red Hat's largest 30 deals included a Middleware (JBoss, usually) component.
• Average contract lasts 23 to 24 months, with pricing remaining "consistent for the last several years."
• Channel bookings grew 23 percent in FY 2009, while Red Hat more than doubled its number of partners to 4,500.
• In fiscal Q4 2009, Red Hat closed two large deals, one of which was a multi-year, multi-million dollar deal that represented its largest conversion from free-to-paid (a key initiative for FY 2010) as well as a six-figure conversion deal with another customer.
• 57 percent of bookings came from the Americas, 28 percent from EMEA, and 15 percent from APAC.
• The recession has not "changed the length of [Red Hat's] sales cycle in any meaningful way."
• Subscription gross margin improved 60 basis points over the year to approximately 94 percent while training and services gross margin improved approximately 280 basis points from Q4 last year, driven mainly by better utilization and higher gross margins from the Amentra business.
• Red Hat ended its fiscal year with $846 million in cash and investments and is now debt free.
  

One of Red Hat's big initiatives for FY 2010 is to increase the rate of adoption of its for-fee products from prospects still using for-free versions of its software (Fedora, CentOS, etc.), a process it only started in late 2008. As Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst notes in the earnings call, enterprises often find it "very expensive" to support themselves. As the data above suggests, Red Hat is getting better at convincing them to move to Red Hat's subscription offerings.

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Red Hat, Synnex Enlist Open-Source ISVs for Midmarket Channel Push

Red Hat wants a bigger piece of the midmarket, and it's enlisting the channel expertise of Synnex (NYSE:SNX) to help open-source software to gain more traction in this lucrative market segment.

On Tuesday, Red Hat introduced the Open Source Channel Alliance, a group of 9 open-source ISVs that have signed distribution deals with Synnex to bring a wide range of applications to market through the distributor's network of VARs and integrators.

Roger Egan, vice president of North American Channels for Red Hat, said the goal of the alliance is to extend the flexibility and cost savings of open-source software to a broader audience, as well as to move from a point-product focus to one more attuned with what he defined as "solution stacks."

Founding members of the Open Source Channel Alliance include: Alfresco (content management), EnterpriseDB (database), Ingres (database), Jaspersoft (business intelligence), Likewise (identity management), Pentaho (business intelligence), Zmanda (backup and recovery), Zenoss (network and systems monitoring) and Zimbra (e-mail and calendar groupware).

"We've come to learn that we have jewels in the relationships we've nurtured with open-source ISVs," Egan said. "We're trying to take our relationships and knowledge of channel and extend that to them."

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Microsoft Open to Open Source?

That's what one Redmond exec says. Plus, Microsoft hits Apple on its price tag, certification as a game, and more.

When it comes to open source, Microsoft has a balancing act that would be tough for Philippe Petite. Redmond must pacify shareholders by hanging onto commercial licensing, but it can't totally irritate open source-friendly IT pros. If Microsoft is too much of an open source enemy, IT can turn their backs and move to Linux, MySQL and Apache in droves.

Microsoft argues that it's on the right open source track. It believes that open sourcers should respect Microsoft patents, and conversely Microsoft should interoperate with key open tools.

Recently, Microsoft exec Robert Youngjohns took to the podium at the Open Source Business Conference to argue Redmond's case. Youngjohns pointed to support of open file formats and PHP on Windows as examples of the new open source détente.

Mac Attack
I am a fan of the Mac for its stability, elegance and sheer fun factor. But there's one thing I hate: the price. I can buy an Acer netbook for around 300 bills -- less than a third of the price of the cheapest mobile Mac.

This reality is not lost on Microsoft, which recently launched an ad attacking the economics of Apple ownership. I haven't seen the commercial yet, but apparently Lauren, a young woman, wants a laptop with a 17-inch screen. She goes to the Apple store and quickly finds the only screen she can afford is four inches too small. Instead of uttering the words I might ("$6%%8&!!!!") she deadpans that she's "just not cool enough" for the Mac. Instead, she buys an HP for $700.

My daughter is a young woman named Lauren. She had an HP but ditched it for a MacBook, and so far my Lauren has never looked back. Somehow, I just couldn't talk her into that $300 Acer netbook!

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Open-source firms urged to go on legal offensive

Open-source software companies are missing out on a relatively inexpensive way to fight concerns about patent liability, according to an attorney who spoke at an open-source conference in San Francisco this week.

More open-source companies should be asking the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office to re-examine patents that may pose a threat to them, as a cheaper, sometimes more suitable alternative to waging a patent lawsuit, said Van Lindberg, an attorney with Haynes and Boone LLP, who spoke at Infoworld's Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco.

Fears about patent litigation have plagued both open-source companies and their customers, and stem from patent trolls as well as competitors. Microsoft, for example, has claimed that Linux may violate hundreds of its patents. It is currently suing GPS maker TomTom, partly over TomTom's use of the Linux kernel in its products.

Filing a re-examination request involves arguing to the USPTO that a patent should not have been granted in the first place, often because the technology was too obvious or because prior art, or previous examples of the technology, existed. Some open-source groups are using this method already, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation with its Patent Busting Project. But the strategy is underutilized by the open-source community, Lindberg said.

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Microsoft's secret deals on open source

It's a familiar story. Microsoft does a secret deal with a company over patent licences. Almost no details are provided about which patents, how much money has changed hands, or why, except for one vaguely worded press release that talks about how such secret deals benefit the customer through openness and innovation.

This time, the lucky donor of cash for secrets is Brother, which will now be allowed to use Microsoft patents to make printers. As Microsoft doesn't make printers – indeed, doesn't even make printer drivers – it is an interesting exercise to try and guess what's actually happened. It's fruitless to ask either of the companies – and we did try. In cases like this, as in the best gangster movies, nobody ain't sayin' nothin'.

Patents, you might remember, are designed to encourage innovation by the disclosure of information: when a $1.8bn company pays a $230bn company a secret amount for secret rights to a secret list of patents – something else is going on than the open promotion of innovation and "a healthy and vibrant IT ecosystem."

In this case, as so often, it involves Linux. Brother uses Linux in some of its printers. Microsoft claims that Linux infringes its patents. It won't say in public which ones, and it doesn't attempt to press such claims against companies – such as IBM – who would want to fight back and not care about the cost (Ask SCO how that business with AIX went). It doesn't go after people who have little to lose and plenty to gain by fighting back, such as individual high-profile developers or small open-source teams. And it has never gone to court on this matter.

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The smallest threat to open source in 2009

How much of a problem is security updating for open source software going to be in 2009?

On Jan. 1, Dana Blankenhorn published the sensationally titled The biggest threat to open source in 2009.

His thesis is simple: that, because open source software usually lacks any mechanisms for easily updating to the latest security patched version, the growing popularity of open source software will render it more vulnerable to problems than its closed source counterparts.

As a lead-in to his main point, he said:

There is no longer any doubt that hackers and malware writers are going after open source projects as they once went after Windows. Vulnerabilities are being found, discovered, created, exchanged.

There seems to be a common malady amongst opinionated tech writers--that of never quite getting it when it comes to the fundamental principles of security. A particular favorite for being ignored is that of security through obscurity.

Many many moons ago, I wrote what I think is a decent treatment of the subject as it applies to open source software, Security through visibility. While it makes a pretty strong case for ignoring the bleatings of "popularity is insecurity" doomsayers, it's really only the first step toward full understanding of all the problems with the assumption that the only thing "secure" about open source software is obscurity.

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Open Source Software Shines in Recession's Gloom

With a tough economy forcing organizations to look for ways to cut costs—and with many open source projects reaching a maturity level that IT executives are comfortable with—the technology might be on the verge of making serious inroads into corporate IT environments

Not that long ago, open source software was regarded by many technology leaders as something to be used in a limited, even experimental way. Even today, some CIOs are skeptical about open source as a viable option for enterprise applications or to support critical business functions.

But interest in open source software is high, according to industry research. A report released by Stamford, Conn., research firm Gartner Inc. in November 2008 shows that the adoption of open source software is becoming pervasive. Of the 274 worldwide companies surveyed by Gartner, 85% said they were currently using open source in their enterprises and the remaining 15% said they expect to use it in the next 12 months. Only one-third of the 1,017 technology and business professionals surveyed by Forrester Research Inc., Cambridge, Mass., in December 2007 expressed no interest in open source products.

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Is Web 2.0 Possible with Existing Open Source Technologies?

If you Google "AJAX Web 2.0" you'll get over eight million hits, but what technologies will you find in that mix that can truly deliver on the promises of Web 2.0 today? While there's no single definition of Web 2.0, at its heart lays the Internet acting as a platform for social networks, where information can be created and shared in a community of interest. Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) relate to Web 2.0 concepts only in that they enhance the platform by providing a more effective user interface. AJAX relates to Web 2.0 only in that it provides a lightweight approach for developing RIAs that execute through a single ubiquitous interface, the Web browser.

An examination of the interaction models for existing social networking platforms like wikis and blogs reveals that they lack the instantaneous nature of true human interaction. This is an artifact of the synchronous Web model that must be overcome when we consider next-generation platforms envisioned in the Web 2.0 spectrum. Internet-based chat is the most basic example of the near-instantaneous interaction that Web 2.0 demands, but even delivering these basic capabilities in a scalable, lightweight, browser-based mechanism is beyond the scope of most AJAX technologies. In fact, if you sift through those eight million Google hits, you'll find only a handful of open source technologies that address the problems associated with pushing content asynchronously to the user through standard browser mechanisms. We'll provide an overview of those technologies later, but first some basics.

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From the Editors: Microsoft and open source

Microsoft has long had a hate-hate relationship with open source—not only with specific open-source projects like Linux, but also with the concept of non-proprietary software.

It’s not hard to see why Microsoft execs like Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have been historically vitriolic about open source. Many of Microsoft’s most profitable products have open-source competitors. To name just a few: Windows has Linux. IIS has Apache. SQL Server has MySQL. Visual Studio has Eclipse and NetBeans. Internet Explorer has Firefox. Office has OpenOffice. .NET has Java (which is sort of open source).

Some of those competitors, like Linux-based servers, represent a serious long-term threat to Microsoft’s revenue. Others, like OpenOffice, haven’t had a significant impact. Even so, Microsoft has also had a philosophical difference with the entire open-source movement. Ballmer, for example, has made public statements claiming that open-source software is a cancer and that open-source software is not trustworthy.

One should not blame Microsoft for speaking out against competing products and against a model for software development that’s the opposite of its own closed-source, proprietary-protocols model for customer lock-in. As a for-profit company, Microsoft’s executives have a fiduciary responsibility to consider their company’s revenues. If they honestly believe that open source is a threat to their revenue, they have no choice but to fight against it.

However, it’s clear that today Microsoft does not see open source as a complete threat like it did in the early 2000s, when it was most vocal against Linux and other open-source projects. As our interview with Sam Ramji shows, Microsoft is beginning to provide its product teams with the flexibility to work with open-source software and to consider interoperability with open-source software.

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How Open Source could save the Media Industry

Youtube was a brilliant idea. Allow users to sign up for accounts and upload video after video after video. Without dolling out so much as a penny Youtube managed to gather millions of user-created videos that other users could watch and enjoy (or not). It was content created by the masses at no charge to the owner.
But if you read the licensing close enough you realize that basically once you upload a video you can not modify said video (or any aspect of the youtube experience). You can not redistribute user videos on Youtube even though the user may have no copyright on the video.

I would like to see the Youtube experience taken a step farther. I would like videos, as long as the creators of said videos would agree, to be modified. Say, for instance, someone makes a short movie but wants to know how to improve the movie. The creator could upload the movie and ask other users to help to finish the creation. Open Source!

Where I am going with this is simple: the media industry (especially the recording industry) is severely broken. And because of the greed at the top of that particular food chain is so strong, it’s going to take a miracle to fix it. I think open source might very well be the solution.

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Open Source Business: Model or Tactic?

ReadWriteWeb points readers to a report released by the 451 Group stating that open source is not a true business model, but more of a "business tactic."

Traditionally, the "open source business model" is perceived as "free/open software, with paid support and configuration services." The report found, however, that many of the responding open source businesses incorporate some commercially licensed software in their product line. It also found that the "paid support/free software" idea -- while theoretically, at least, valid -- is multi-layered, complex, and highly variable between software product, software company, and industry.

The research included 114 open source vendors, including Red Hat, Alfresco, IBM and Oracle. Of all the vendors studied, 70% offered support services, but less than 8% called their support services their primary revenue stream. The 451 Group stated that they realized the inclusion of "proprietary vendors" (as opposed to the broader definition of "vendor," which could include those making open code available on a mirror) would possibly skew the results, so the research centered mainly on businesses specializing in open source.

It's not surprising that these vendors, which vary in size and customer base, use different methods to keep themselves afloat. It's not terribly surprising that licensing weighs heavily on how development, support, and revenue-generation strategies are formulated.

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