Once More unto the Breach

The Linux Foundation Announces the Open Compliance Program (on CodePlex)

Companies have been concerned about software license compliance with respect to free and open source software for some time. Part of this is due to simple competitive FUD designed to frighten people away from using FOSS or to sell services and tools around it, and part of this was due to genuine concern with license compliance when lawsuits appear because of violations. The Linux Foundation announced the Open Compliance Program at LinuxCon in Boston today to help companies understand and manage such compliance needs. I describe and comment on the program on my CodePlex Foundation blog.

Open Core and the Open Source Business Model Debate (on CodePlex)

The past few weeks have seen a resurgence in the debate over whether or not open core is a valid open source business model or not. There has been a lot of passionate and pragmatic discourse from lots of knowledgeable people (Phipps, Ingo, Mickos, Aker, Aslett, Proffitt, O'Grady).

I add my take on the debate on the CodePlex Foundation blog.

Software Freedom and Open Source Software (on CodePlex)

I just posted my opening thoughts on the current debates over software freedom versus open source software as a foundation for a discussion about open core as a business model. They are over at the CodePlex Foundation blog. Please discuss there rather than here.

The CodePlex Foundation and the Free Software Foundation Redux

It was brought to my attention that the FSF has re-posted its CodePlex Foundation commentary from last Fall on the day it was announced that I took the position as technical director at the Foundation. I'm not sure that anything has been added to the new commentary. Re-reading the FSF re-post, I can't but point back to my original response. I will add a couple of clarifications:

• CodePlex.com is a Microsoft owned and staffed forge that encourages the development of open source software based on Microsoft technology. The CodePlex Foundation is a separate not-for-profit software foundation to enable and encourage the development of open source software in the commercial world. Microsoft is the founding sponsor of the Foundation. There will be other sponsors. I work for the Foundation, not Microsoft.
• The naming confusion was not the most inspired move, but reflected an earlier idea for the Foundation. It will be resolved over time, and hopefully the confusion with it.
• The CodePlex Foundation is completely free and open source software license agnostic. The Foundation is also technology agnostic. If you want to use AGPL or GPLv3 or BSD or EPL, the Foundation has no opinion and will happily support your project or gallery. If you want to run on Mac OSX, Linux, Windows or all three, the Foundation likewise doesn't have an opinion.

The CodePlex Foundation has taken a while to get going, but there are already six projects across two galleries, some of them non-Microsoft. Paula Hunter joined as executive director last March, and I arrived a few short weeks ago. It's early days yet. Rome was not built in a day.

Pax.

Cross-Posting to "Once More unto the Breach" and the CodePlex Foundation

I have begun to blog on the CodePlex Foundation blogs page as well as my blog here. When I believe the subject matter will have relevance to both audiences, I will cross post. Just so everyone knows that cares. (The RSS feed on the CodePlex Foundation should be up shortly.)

Eclipse 2010 Survey Notes Contribution in Open Source Software Projects Declines

I saw from Dana Blankenhorn's blog post the other day that the Eclipse Foundation has once again published its excellent annual survey of Eclipse usage in the world. This is an annual survey that is always interesting because it shows the rise of many free and open source software projects beyond the Eclipse world and their subsequent competition with each other and the traditional products in the marketplace (e.g. Windows, Oracle). There were 1696 completed surveys this year to last year's 1365, i.e. there were almost 25% more respondents this year.

Dana caught sight of a trend noted by Ian Skerrett in his blog post announcing the survey:

Trend #7. Open source participation seems to be stalled. In the survey, we asked a question about the corporate policies towards open source participation. In 2009 48% claimed they could contribute back to OSS but in 2010 only 35.4% claim they could contribute back. Conversely, 41% in 2010 claimed they use open source software but do not contribute back but in 2009 it was 27.1%. Obviously not a trend any open source community would like to see. I am not sure the reason companies would become less restrictive in their open source policies. Any insight or feedback from the community would be appreciated.

The question as asked in the survey reads differently to me: What best describes your organization's policy towards the use of open source software? (Choose one.) Possible answers were:

• Does not allow the use of any open source software (1.4%)
• Uses open source software, but does not interact with open source project communities in any way (35.6%)
• Uses open source software and contributes back (through bug reports, code, resources) to at least one open source project community to help improve the quality of the projects we consume (30.7%)
• Contributes significant development resources (contributors, committers and/or maintainers, project leaders) to at least one open source project community in order to help influence the evolution of the projects we consume (7.7%)
• Has a business model that relies on open source software for its success (11.4%)
• Individual, not affiliated with an organization (9.2%)
• Don't know (4.1%)

There hasn't necessarily been an increase in participants that say they can't contribute, but rather that they don't contribute back. Dana and Ian both ask why this might be the case. Looking to the demographics, there may be a number of reasons.

There's an increase in the percentage of financial services participants over the years (6% to 6.8% to 8.4%). This is a group that has historically been careful in how they contribute and where. The IT crowd is also interesting because using FOSS means that they don't need to figure out how to talk with the accounting department to create a PO for a software trial to solve a problem, but turning it around to the contribution side of the equation, they also don't need to figure out how to find a lawyer to ensure they're giving back in an appropriate manner.

There's an increase in the number of students over the last two reports (8.6% in 2007 down to 8.1% then to 9.8%). This number may be the more interesting set of numbers because the fewer students, the higher the contribution status it seems in the graph (p. 27 in the 2010 report). There are absolutely students that contribute and whose contributions are deeply valued by a number of open source communities, but as a rule, they would be less experience developers and are faced with the learning curves of the project, the technology, and the growth of their own programming skills. This has significance in terms of things that are accepted by the community. They also may simply not know how to contribute as many FOSS repositories do a poor job of delivering the guidance to develop a vibrant community that encourages new developers to join.

All in all, the survey is always a great piece of work and the other trends it finds in it's developer community are always interesting.

I've Joined the CodePlex Foundation as it's Technical Director

All: I've joined the CodePlex Foundation starting Monday, 17 May as the Technical Director reporting to the executive director. My responsibility is to set the strategic technical direction of the Foundation, and work with the gallery managers and project leaders on a day-to-day basis. I'm excited about this. I believe the CodePlex Foundation has a great role to play as we continue to see more and more commercial organizations participate in open collaborative software development.

The CodePlex Foundation exists to encourage and support the creation of more open source software, specifically working with commercial organizations. People have shared software since we started programming computers. The sharing bandwidth used to be mag tape sized packets and conference schedule delivery rates. Now we have the Internet which changed the dynamics and economics dramatically. Historically, software foundations tied to free and open source software grew to support a particular licensing scheme or project technology community. I think the CodePlex Foundation complements existing organizations quite nicely. The Foundation is an excellent opportunity to broaden the contribution base from commercial organizations and I want to ensure processes and education are in place to enable those contributions.

My first order of business will be to meet with the existing gallery managers and project leads to begin to put in place any process and services they urgently need. From that point forward it will be to help define and shape the rest of the project and IP management processes that are needed to make the Foundation's value proposition a reality for new sponsors and contributors.

A few friends and colleagues have asked what it means for Microsoft's open source initiatives. I don't know. I certainly don't speak for Microsoft. The CodePlex Foundation has a very straightforward mission and I work for the Foundation. Microsoft is the first and founding sponsor, essentially putting their money where their mouth is with respect to managing their own contributions. I expect there will be more sponsors and participants over the coming year and my goal is to enable them all.

Open Source Communities and Customers in Pictures

[Update (11-May-2010, 10:37): Matt Aslett posted commentary on this post at the 451 Group CAOS blog.]

Debate continues on whether open core business models are a winning strategy with a capital "w" or not, and whether customers care. Matt Aslett's recent excellent posts continue the discussion. The big concern for those that criticize or express concerns is that customers are mis-lead, essentially that there's a bait-and-switch free-versus-product or a deliberate lack of clarity in the marketing around the product value.

I want to take a different approach to the discussion here. Before we had Internet-sized bandwidth on which to collaborate around software, traditional software business looked something like the first diagram. R&D delivered product. Marketing delivered messages. Sales and marketing managed and qualified leads through a pipeline and if the product solved a customer problem properly, a market was made and you could measure the profits.

The Internet happened, dramatically removing friction from the process of collaborative software development and delivery. Developers could share the economic cost of software creation (innovation and construction) and large repositories of useful building blocks were born and made available through these project-focused communities. The Web accelerated the early Internet trend.

Companies began to form around some of the projects and for the past decade and a half there's been confusion as people debated how to make money when you give away the software, or the other side of the economic equation around variations on why people work for free. This has unfortunately led to the idea of community and customer interaction akin to the following diagram. The community is jammed into the middle of the customer pipeline. The community gives stuff to R&D which still delivers product. Marketing now messages to customers AND [worse] the community, and the company tries to "convert" the community into customers.

This probably started around the time that MySQL AB observed they had a paying customer for every thousand downloads. This mis-set expectations in a fundamental way. People assumed causality. It created false metrics around driving downloads and improving conversion rates. (We'll come back to this ....)

Marten Mickos (while CEO at MySQL) observed that the early community has time but no money while the later community has money but no time, and that his customers are in the latter bucket. This is the start of a better model for understanding community and customer. Let's use the "time is money" line as the division between community and customers because by forcing the separation of the two groups we can add clarity to both and the things a business would need to do differently with each.

Instead lets treat the community (time but no money) as a completely separate entity from the customer pipeline (money but no time). The community members engage with R&D over the project. They engage with marketing in a conversation about project direction, and ancillary things like translations in other markets. Customers are qualified through the pipeline based upon the product.

Indeed you can start to see how to think about these different groups of people using different well understood and documented processes for community development and sales channel management.

This allows you to clearly address each groups's selfish needs.

Community	Customers
They have time but NO money	They have money and no time
They want a problem solved and look to the project	They want a problem solved and look to the product
They can’t be converted	Your Community is the litmus test of solution viability.
They can contribute time, so: What do you want them to do? What do you need to enable? What do you need to let them know?	You manage leads through the qualification pipeline and conversion process like any other customer-focused sales process
They will not waste time, so the project needs to solve a problem for them before they will invest themselves in it

Product for customers is clearly differentiated from project and community. How the product is differentiated depends upon the company and the value proposition to customers. At it's simplest, the product may be a supportable and maintained collection of software, certified to run on specific supported platforms and with particular applications, and trivially installable. The product may be the support and maintenance itself. Some companies pack more "enterprise ready" marketable differentiated features or attributes into the product. Others (e.g. Red Hat, JBoss, MySQL) develop a valuable network offering that includes support, maintenance, certifications, additional warranties, monitoring, indemnifications, and the like into a single subscription model. Regardless, there is well-defined value that solves a customer's problems.

Companies like Alfresco and Hyperic and JBoss all saw conversions in the pipeline because potential customers came to the web site, learned what they needed to learn, downloaded the appropriate things to try, and used the community as a litmus test of the solution before returning (self-qualified) to buy product.

This visualization also clears up debate about "open source" and "community". Some companies publish their product source code under open source licenses and never try to develop a real community. There's nothing wrong here if indeed they're running a more traditional software business model and don't care specifically about enabling the community to directly engage with the project. Publishing the software is a sign of strength and confidence in their product and their ability as a company to satisfy customers with a valuable solution that is more than just the software.

Some companies also develop large successful communities without ever publishing their product software. This is why community building is so important for your company and why community development is an essential ingredient in your solution pitch to customers. Communities historically anchored your customers. Communities create knowledge, expertise and experience, all necessary to provide a complete solution for your technology pitch to the customer. Communities create advocates and evangelists to spread awareness about your solution. Communities create enormous inertia in the status quo around your technology. This is why companies like Microsoft invested millions in developing the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN). It has taken more than a decade for other Internet communities around interesting open source projects to wear down the inertia inherent in MSDN. Likewise, IBM has invested enormous amounts of money in the IBM Developer Network, incorporating free and open source software to meet their solution needs and value propositions to their customers. With open source projects relating to your company, the community is anchoring your solution.

This is the real "conversion". The community enables customers. It is correlative not causative. Community members that have solved their problems using your technology base will carry their excitement, knowledge, and commitment into new places where customers exist. With well organized open source communities, the community now fronts your technology to new customers as well as later anchoring customers once they exist.

Microsoft Failing Its Own OOXML Standard (ISO/IEC 29500)

I was dismayed this morning to see Andy Updegrove's write-up on Alex Brown's post on Microsoft failing it's own Office Open XML (OOXML) standard (formally known as ISO/IEC 29500). It is the second anniversary of the ballot resolution and approval of the standard. While Andy was reporting from the trenches through the final ballot resolution, Alex was responsible for the negotiations that allowed the standard to pass. Essentially Microsoft seems to be breaking the promises it made to the international standards community to get the standard through the process.

If Microsoft ship Office 2010 to handle only the Transitional variant of ISO/IEC 29500 they should expect to be roundly condemned for breaking faith with the International Standards community. This is not the format “approved by ISO/IEC”, it is the format that was rejected.

Unfortunately it's unclear what condemnation will bring. Even were the EU Commission to involve itself as Alex later suggests, it is unlikely that this would effect shareholder value in any meaningful way.

Alex also wonders at how such bad implementation can be allowed to happen:

So why — given the awareness Microsoft has at the top, at the bottom, and round the edges [for standards] — does it still manage to behave as it does? Something, perhaps, is wrong at the centre — some kind of corporate dysfunction caused by a failure of executive oversight.

It's nothing sinister I suspect. Cynically — it was nobody's job, and by that I mean no development manager or program management manager (or test manager for that matter) of any reasonable authority or seniority likely had it as a primary rewardable objective on their annual review. If the bugs were even filed, they were likely never deemed sufficiently important to fix during bug triage on the road to release-to-manufacturing. I saw bug triage meetings circa 1999 on the road to Windows 2000 where non-critical bugs that were effecting 10,000 beta customers were ignored because there were other bugs effecting 100,000 users. When you ship a product that has a consumer base of tens of millions, you learn different skills in the triage process. I suspect it's similar on the Office side of the company.

And Alex is completely correct, there would be no executive oversight pushing down from above on the Office development organization. The vice-president that published the open letter two-years ago making the promises has probably either (a.) moved on to other responsibilities, or (b.) assumed he had made the promise and someone else was to carry it out. It won't be on his review objectives either so he's still being well paid. So too with any other exec in the pipeline two-years ago. Even the standards team that worked so hard to get it through the ECMA and ISO processes will have moved on to other standards (and certainly wouldn't be so naive in the product-centricity of Microsoft to have accepted such an objective so far out of their control). The marketing team got its talking points two years ago. This is a cultural problem. The development teams within the company (i.e. the revenue generation engine) with a few exceptions in a few Web-related product teams just aren't tuned to deal with standards in a serious manner the way certain other vendors do.

Until there are serious lost sales to do with non-conformance from large government organizations, and the field organization starts to seriously yell, there will be no understanding in Redmond that it really mattered and that certain government officials may even have bet their careers on such promises. Even then, the first question in Redmond will [cynically] be, "How much do we sell to the Ministry of [Big Issues] in [Name-of-small-northern-European-country]?"

Alex finishes with the quote:

In short, we find ourselves at a crossroads, and it seems to me that without a change of direction the entire OOXML project is now surely heading for failure.

Failure indeed. I used the photograph at the top of the post two-years ago when I cynically predicted how this was going to go down over time. I summarized my opinions on the battle between ODF and OOXML and how Microsoft should have played the war as one of the examples in a standards primer I wrote around the same time. It will be interesting to watch how Microsoft responds to Alex's post. The world is indeed watching.

A New Blog about Big Data in the Cloud

Ideas behind the future and importance of Big Data and the Cloud continue to thrive. Tim O'Reilly has been hammering home the message for some time that data will become the "Intel Inside" of the next generation of lock-in, (most recently in a fabulous keynote at OSBC). Companies like Cloudera are making big bets on the platform architecture of the next wave. And when the Economist starts to dedicate special reports to the topic, you know it's reached a particular threshold in people's minds.

I've had the pleasure of knowing Carolyn Johnston for some time. She's a math geek and lead researcher in the MSN Advanced Engineering team specializing in location data and data quality. She's started blogging last week, and her topics will be both fun and educational. (I've the privilege of seeing early drafts in the pipeline.) If you care about the evolving world of big data in the cloud, I encourage you to give her a read.

Visualizing Open Source Business Models

Matt Aslett gave a great talk about the evolution of open source business strategies last week at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. In it, he presented a model to allow one to visualize businesses that use open source in their solutions, and what it means in terms of relationships with customers and the community.

The community relationships are driven by the lower triangle:

The customer relationships are driven by the upper triangle:

Matt goes on to apply the model across a collection of companies and business models, visually demonstrating how different companies have made different choices and evolved those choices, as well as playing out a number of scenarios. It's an excellent model.

Matt and I have debated in the past as to whether or not there is such a thing as an open source business model. I've argued there's no such business model, but discuss it as a set of tools that are applied to the business. Regardless of one's opinions however, Matt has provided an excellent visual model for the discussion and presentation of the ideas. It works in much the same way as the Business Model Design template in visually capturing the information to ensure a completeness of discussion and an understanding of how the parts relate. I'm looking forward to the continuing evolution of the model over the coming year as he prepares the next major open source business report from the 451 Group, and would encourage you to give the entire presentation a read.

Book Burning in the New Millenium

The juxtaposition of two recent New York Times articles quite terrifies me. The first which I read a week or so ago concerns the fact that the religious right is now attacking science again, but this time they are not restricted to merely Darwin's theory of evolution. It opens with:

Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation’s classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools.

Other fine quotes include:

The linkage of evolution and global warming is partly a legal strategy: courts have found that singling out evolution for criticism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state. By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution can argue that they are simply championing academic freedom in general.

And:

In South Dakota, a resolution calling for the “balanced teaching of global warming in public schools” passed the Legislature this week.

“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” the resolution said, “but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life.”

And the article closes with:

After that, said Joshua Rosenau, a project director for the National Center for Science Education, he began noticing that attacks on climate change science were being packaged with criticism of evolution in curriculum initiatives.

He fears that even a few state-level victories could have an effect on what gets taught across the nation.

James D. Marston, director of the Texas regional office of the Environmental Defense Fund, said he worried that, given Texas’ size and centralized approval process, its decision on textbooks could have an outsize influence on how publishers prepare science content for the national market.

“If a textbook does not give enough deference to critics of climate change — or does not say that there is real scientific debate, when in fact there is little to none — they will have a basis for turning it down,” Mr. Marston said of the Texas board. “And that is scary for what our children will learn everywhere.”

It's a disturbing article to read in general. It's terrifying because it presents the idea of small steps, none of which are catastrophic (e.g. South Dakota), leading to a destination where the world has changed in the most fundamental of ways (i.e. Texas setting the tone for the national market).

The second article (actually the first chronologically) was in the business section. It gets scarier still. It has to do with MacMillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks, introducing fully editable textbooks. The article begins:

In a kind of Wikipedia of textbooks, Macmillan ... is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes.

Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations. [srw &mdash Emphasis added.]

While many publishers have offered customized print textbooks for years — allowing instructors to reorder chapters or insert third-party content from other publications or their own writing — DynamicBooks gives instructors the power to alter individual sentences and paragraphs without consulting the original authors or publisher. [srw &mdash Emphasis added again.]

I have great confidence that the contracts the authors sign will give MacMillan the ability for appropriate copyright control to allow this sort of re-editing. But let's be really really clear. This is NOTHING like Wikipedia. The ability to change the author's original content to suit one's own needs is not the same as providing a rich editing environment where controversies are clearly apparent. The ability for a professor at a university with a strong religious bent in a State "simply championing academic freedom in general" to edit text books to suit their needs is a recipe for disaster. Credible sources (and the original author's brand and credibility) can be twisted to support the insanity of challenging established science. This is not good.

Writing the rules such that content can be changed without changing an author's intentions is still a recipe for disaster as it will place efforts to police, debate, and correct things on the authors and the system. The damage will have been done. Orwell suggested that language precedes thought. If there is no word for a concept, it cannot be expressed. A proper tyranny would do well to remove such words from use. In the modern web connected world, the concept may still exist on the web, but sowing confusion may replace the need to remove a word from use, or to destroy a book outright.

Textbooks still have weight in our society. It's not just the literal weight of paper, but the sense of organization and flow and prestige and credibility. They are also a legacy of a particular way of teaching subjects. As more professors explore the ability to develop course materials from an array of online sources into a coherent collection that matches their curriculum, the textbook will rightly shift in the minds of students and lecturers alike into something that is less important. In such a case, one might presume that individual course collections maintain copyright appropriately, with individual authors credited for their contributions, as well as the overall collected work copyright. This is a interesting marketplace design problem where individuals, journals and historical textbook companies make materials available for use to lecturers assembling course readings. More importantly, however, it means the integrity of the original materials will be maintained. No "books" need be destroyed in the process.

The Future of Book Publishing Business Models

Tim O'Reilly tweeted a great article from the New York Times on the math of publishing traditional print versus eBooks. If you publish print books, and aren't as aggressive as O'Reilly Media at experimenting with new forms, or looking over your shoulder at Scribd, then you would feel very justified about the entire NYT article. But it ignores the future in a very fundamental way. It assumes the weight of the entire book publishing process from author and editor through paper manufacturing, distribution, and end-retailer needs to be maintained.

I would mourn the loss of book stores as much as the next bibliophile. There are a thousand or so books within easy reach in the apartment. There are amazing bookstores throughout the world in which I find peace and solace from the chaos amongst all that collected human creativity, knowledge, and imagination. Good book stores smell right, and you know a good book store the second you walk into them. Book stores are indeed holy places.

But I remember growing up with Sam the Record Man in Toronto. Three floors of goodness, with the finest collection of jazz, classical, and rock music in Canada. Sam's spawned an entire chain across the country. A&A Records was next door to the flagship Sam's. There were many pilgrimages to the pair of stores through my teen years and early twenties. And like a good book store, Sam's just smelt right. I will always have the memory and my daughters will never know what they're missing, except they don't want to either. They have their own generational memory. The way we consume music has changed. Records were supplanted by cassettes, then CDs. Now many of us live in an iTunes and Amazon MP3 download enabled world. The traditional distribution chain changed. New musicians often self promote for a period of time, producing their own CDs and selling their music through iTunes, before being "discovered" by a label to help them scale. The music now promotes the concert tour revenue stream, rather than the other way around.

This will happen to the book publishing industry. The model will change. People outside the publishing house will re-invent the book and how it's consumed.

• When does someone set up an Internet marketplace for authors, editors, copyeditors, and illustrators to find one another and share the revenues directly? Google has a tool base for online collaboration and are certainly interested in books. With Amazon's latest royalty offering for Kindle, an author can deliver a Kindle edition and could "share" their 70% royalty with editors that made the book better or illustrators that did the cover design. Or maybe the payment system front loads the payments to the supporting "staff" before the author begins to make the lion's share. Indie movies and indie music have been around for a while, when do we end up with a serious indie book industry?
• When does Amazon create the iPhone/Android app and the programme that will allow bookstores to receive a cut of every Kindle edition they sell? I scan the book's in-store barcode with my smartphone, and I get the Kindle edition delivered, and the store gets its cut. Why is this different in concept than Borders on-line store being run on Amazon, or any of the independent book sellers that front through Amazon? It's not the normal book mark-up, but people already browse bookstores and buy on Amazon. This is better than no revenue. (When was the last time you went to a travel agent?)
• If we have an indie eBook publishing industry, does producing limited copies for browseable book stores and gifts become a new publishing industry? Do such copies in bookstores become collectibles because they're more scarce? What publishers (in what countries) will become the de facto efficient producers of one-off or limited run books?
• Public libraries are interesting from an economics perspective. They exist to support and encourage literacy. Their funding model is local government set. The books they buy are often a more robust expensive package (as are their books-on-tape, and their CD prices are often higher to reflect replacement costs). They often provide Internet access but even here on Microsoft's doorstep in Redmond, Washington, the 25 or so PCs are always in full use. I don't think libraries are going to be replaced by eBooks any time soon, but some publishers are already trying to reconfigure to chase strictly the high margin school/library market.
• When is the vanity of coffee table books and browsing the book case when you visit someone's house get replaced by a digital wi-fi connected picture frame rolling the covers of the family's collected eBooks collections? Or when indeed do beautiful photo coffee table books become the download for the picture frame on your living room wall (with the helpful text a bluetooth read on your tablet away). Or does having books themselves become the cultural vanity item?

All of these are of course random ideas of an unknowable future. But as Clay Shirky observed this week: "Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. Society knows how to react to scarcity."

P.S. Sam's is literally gone now. You can still see a little of the Sam's logo painted on the wall of the back alley. A&A's was taken over by HMV for music and videos. And the Future Shop (like Best Buy for U.S. readers) ironically was there as well. HMV and the FS are expanded and down the street now on better real estate.

Open Source Software Economics in Pictures

Updated [22-Mar-2010]: Added a little text around the Ohloh javascript widget so Google Reader sees a URL to follow.

Recently, I've encountered several technologists that still don't understand open source software economics and got suitably cranky about "people giving away software for free" and "destroying the value of innovation". I thought it time to try to reach for an easier way to demonstrate what's happening in the industry in pictures.

Everyone is familiar with the idea of a normal "bell curve" distribution representing R&D investment over time. As a technology is better understood and a product succeeds in the marketplace, R&D investment increases, and over time as new technologies advance, the R&D investment in the original technology and product wanes. The integral represents the total R&D investment over time. The function can also represent the "knowledge" gained or the increase in the intellectual asset base.

Good companies develop and invest in new successive waves of sustaining technologies. So, looking at Microsoft's success with PC operating systems, DOS was replaced by a greater investment in a more innovative Windows, was replaced by a larger investment in a more innovative NT.

This also fits nicely with Christensen's original observations about incumbent companies being good at sustained innovations and well run companies knowing how to jump from technology to technology along a sustaining innovation path. This all makes sense when considering a single company's R&D investment. It applies equally well to Sun Microsystems when considering that the steeper slope of successive sustaining innovations was on the hardware side versus the slower (but not inconsiderable) investment from SunOS (a BSD variation) to Solaris.

The investment curve for projects like Linux and Apache, with lots of individual and corporate contributors, still looks like a bell curve, but the contributions might better be viewed as a stacked bar chart. Individual contributors invest to meet their specific needs. Because there is enormous overlap in their common needs, they all share the overall investment.

Individual contributors get enormous return on their investment. (One gives a few bug fixes to the Apache httpd team, and in return one gets an entire HTTP daemon.) Corporate contributors give for the same ROI. They get enormous return on their investment in technology they use in a product complement space or as a component in their overall solution to the customer. (Before someone takes issue with my Red Hat example above below, understand the "solution" in the customers mind was "UNIX-like servers on inexpensive 'PC' hardware" and not "Linux".)

Christensen was careful in subsequent work to point out that the disruption wasn't about technology but about business model. The disruption often started when someone assembled standard cheaper lower performing parts into a solution that solved a completely different need with a very different cost basis. The new solution begins its own sustaining innovation curve until the new technology can compete with the incumbent compared against the criteria about which the customer/consumer cares.

The disruptive business model isn't about Linux so much as the ability for corporations to do collaborative development at the component/complement level in a "frictionless" well-managed Internet-enabled community. (The original OSF/1 shared-development of a UNIX-like replacement failed: too few players, too much politics.) Linux is a much stronger disruptive business solution as a way to handle a particular sourcing problem.

It would be interesting to consider the difference between projects with enormous inbound code contribution (versus all the other strengths a well run community brings to the table) distributed across a wide group of players like we see in the Linux and Apache projects, versus projects managed more tightly by a company like MySQL was. Another interesting attribute of this collaborative business model to investigate is how contribution mutates over time. Christensen's work demonstrated that an incumbent gets in trouble when they begin to over-deliver on functionality for attributes their customers consider important. The customer can't absorb the sustaining technology innovation any faster and literally won't pay for it. The slope of the sustained innovation of the competing technology is sufficient to cross into the space covered by the incumbent's solution.

In a shared collaborative development environment, however, because the technology isn't being driven by a single corporate entity, the community of corporations collectively contributes to their own needs and the technology may (i) stabilize where it needs to stabilize, and/or (ii) be taken in new and interesting directions. There is less pressure (if any) to over-deliver with new innovation. The consumers are the developers, but it's a very broad community indeed. This is what I believe just happened with the MeeGo announcement and the combining of the Nokia Maemo and Intel Moblin projects. This is a great inflection point for Linux into the new mobile Internet device space.

One only need read the report from the Linux Foundation charting the growth statistics in the Linux kernel to understand the enormous value generation happening release-on-release, four times a year. Using the Ohloh rules-of-thumb of US$55,000 per person year one gets US$142M of value creation in the 2.6 Linux kernel. The fact that some business models have been destroyed (Sun), or threatened (Microsoft) doesn't mean there's not enormous ongoing value creation in the technology.

Ohloh value chart for Linux 2.6 kernel.

Neither is intellectual property being "destroyed". Again, this is a disruptive business model discussion. Intellectual property is a business choice made on how a company will protect certain intellectual assets as legal property. Which assets to protect, and how, and which property to defend is a business choice based on the cost model a business uses with respect to turning assets into value propositions customers will buy. When a group of companies chooses to collaboratively develop a technology complement/component, they're making a business model choice on how they will selfishly share certain intellectual assets. Nothing was destroyed along the way.

MeeGo: Nokia, Intel and the Future of the Mobile Internet Platform

This week Intel and Nokia announcement the merge of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo platforms into MeeGo, a single platform for mobile computing. This is a great announcement for a number of reasons.

Nokia demonstrated it's ability to participate within active open source communities as it developed and launched the N770 tablet as a consumer device and maemo as a computing platform several years ago. (The N770 pre-dates the iPhone.) This wasn't a cut and run on the Linux kernel to grab a fork then forever be stuck supporting it. This was an excellent demonstration to themselves that they could use an active royalty free OS and continue to share the development costs. Ari Jaaksi's report on the experience is enlightening. Nokia has since acquired TrollTech, released the Qt tool kit appropriately, (and then acquired Symbian Ltd. and released its handset OS software assets into the open source wild through the Symbian Foundation).

Intel developed and released Moblin over the past few years as a Linux distro for mobile computing. They carefully positioned it NOT for handsets, but for all the other cool mobile Internet devices in your life like tablets and in-vehicle systems. They could do lots of interesting device related work on the Linux kernel for things in which the mainstream Linux wasn't interested and still get the cost advantages from shared development for the platform as a whole. In a very short time it has become one of the more interesting Linux distributions from a hardware innovation perspective.

The positioning is key here. By focusing this on "mobile Internet devices" they avoid the whole iPhone versus Android debate, Windows Mobile has no comment to make, LiMo is still wandering in the wilderness, and Symbian isn't in a position to comment. All of those are thought of as handset operating systems. This is future forward and about the mobile Internet. And don't just think iTouch and tablets in the coffee shop. Think of your home as a wifi space. Microsoft and Apple continue to demonstrate that people DON'T want another PC in the living room for media management. So what are all the other devices you can imagine in your home that are NOT "computers" that could become the synchronization hub of your world's information and media.

• What about a wifi device suctioned to my refrigerator door where the shopping lists are kept and the family calendar at a glance (with reminders),
• or a device that looks like a VoIP phone with a wireless handset in a stand that also has the family phone book(s) in it, but synchronizes with your mobile phone handsets for calendars and contacts,
• or what if my "media centre" didn't look like a media centre at all, but was a tablet that talked to a black box shoved out of site behind the couch, but would also sync my mobile phone or Kindle or Nokia N900 Internet Tablet,
• or there was a small charging pad on the kitchen counter where keys and mobile phones and personal media players are dropped to sync across family calendars, contacts, and the latest episode of a show I'll watch or listen to on tomorrow's commute (while inductively charging my phone).
• What if all these devices could communicate with one another?

All of these imaginings will need an operating system. Microsoft may have made computing in the home ubiquitous in a PC-centric world, but no consumer OEM or ODM today will want to repeat history and watch all high margin profits go to a single software company via royalties. Maintaining individual forks of Linux isn't cost effective either. But sharing the value creation of a robust complete applications platform in an open source project free to all would certainly answer the call.