Once More unto the Breach

The Microsoft SD Forum Open Source Event

Microsoft and the SD Forum jointly sponsored the Zero Day event this year before the Open Source Business Conference. The past two years this has been a Microsoft sponsored day for ISV partners developing businesses around open source. There was time dedicated in each event to presentations of the relevant Microsoft programs for ISVs, and Sam Ramji would kick off the day with a good Q&A session discussing Microsoft's positions, accomplishments, and announcements around open source software. This year the content was broader, with the afternoon's sessions being organized by the SD Forum. Participants that wanted to engage with Microsoft around their programs could talk with any of the program directors present.

This being the age of Twitter, people were encouraged so to do under the tag #msoss09, and there was some reasonable discussion throughout the day. I also posted a few photographs on Flickr.

www.flickr.com

Bryan Kirchner is now Director of Open Source Software at Microsoft. He acted as master of ceremonies and kicked things off in the morning with a brief discussion of his hopes to continue developing a mutual understanding and deepening relationships with the open source community at large.

Sam Ramji then took the stage. What followed was interesting. This year, with not much new or contentious before OSBC got underway, he chose to talk about the health of the Windows ecosystem in the context of the current economic crunch (reminding people that a staggering 96% of Microsoft revenue comes from partners, i.e. no direct account control). Microsoft is seeing CIO training budgets dropping to zero and many projects are deferred so there was a definite move to cost savings around virtualization and consolidation. (It's interesting that this is how the world started to move when the bubble burst seven years ago.) He also talked about the growth of Windows in the low cost server space and on netbooks. Sam was essentially conveying that the Windows platform is healthy and people should continue to consider it as a deployment platform for open source. He also discussed the new Web Application Gallery initiative at Microsoft as an attempt "to connect markets and forges" around open source so users can easily install and support PHP-based web applications. It's not that the Gallery is particularly an open source initiative, but rather that it supports the sharing of applications written in PHP.

Matt Aslett from the 451 Group took the stage next presenting his latest analysis from their report Open Source is Not a Business Model. Essentially, the 451 Group analysed 114 vendors using open source software within their businesses, against (i.) their choice of open source license, (ii.) their development model, (iii.) their own vendor licensing strategy, and (iv.) the actual revenue trigger. Matt's blog post covers a lot of the ground he presented, so I won't cover it here. I will be debating with him soon on other things to consider in the report. (An added perk for morning participants was a copy of the report.)

Next up was a panel on "Working together in an Open Source World in a New Economy" moderated by Cliff Reeves, who runs the Emerging Business Team at Microsoft which runs the BizSpark program. Panelists included:

• Clint Oram, VP Product Management, SugarCRM
• Erica Brescia, CEO, Bitrock
• Aaron Fulkerson, CEO, MindTouch
• Dan Merrits, VP Marketing, Eduify

It was a good discussion. SugarCRM and Mindtouch certainly saw the rise of downloads and leads as the economy failed and people became more interested in low cost open source based solutions. There was also interesting honest discussion from the participants on what it's like working with Microsoft as a partner, with concerns being expressed about the complexity of the programs at times, as well as praise for engineering support (FastCGI and PHP being the typical example cited).

After lunch we got to the more general open source part of the program organized by SD Forum. Larry Augustin kicked off the afternoon with his keynote on "The Future of Software: Why Open Source is the Safe Bet". [Larry has kindly allowed me to host his slides. Download SDForum-20090323-v4.pdf (493.5K).] Larry started the presentation with the idea that just like no one got fired for buying IBM in the past, at this juncture in history no one gets fired for buying open source software. He then went on to present the health of the open source based business world from the perspective of investment and adoption (with several case studies).

Next we had two brief mini-talks.

• Andrew Aitkin (Olliance Group) talked about his views on open source adoption differences between Europe, North America, and Japan.
• Sam Ramji returned to give a shortened version of his morning's presentation for those that just joined for the SD Forum part of the program.

The final two sessions of the day were panels. First we had "Is there still Open in Open Source" with Mike Fauscette (IDC) moderating, and Jack Repenning (CTO, CollabNet) and Adam Blum (Rhomobile). It was an interesting panel and very much a development process perspective. Discussion revolved around the idea that it's not about the source code, but about the openness of the development process, the social contract, the transparency, and building a community that wants to contribute.

Last up was the venture panel on "Where's the Money?" Mark Radcliffe (DLA Piper) moderated Robert Theis (Scale), Andrew Braccia (Accel), Tim Guleri (Sierra), and Peter Sonsini (NEA). Not surprising but the VCs want us to know they're still open for business, and they're interested in Software-as-a-Service and Cloud related technologies. Also not surprising we learned VCs will fund deals with a compelling solution to a customer problem, or a compelling way to monetize a solution. [This is why I generally don't have a lot of time for VC panels.] There was one point where Peter Sonsini (NEA) observed there needed to be a compelling way to monetize the community for an existing project (with which I violently disagree), but Andrew Braccia (Accel) supported the richer idea that rather than trying to monetize the community one should look at upstream value of a new solution based on the project.

All and all a worthwhile experience. We finished the day with the hosted reception!

Building an Effective Commercial Open Source Strategy

Initmarketing partners Sandro Groganz and Roberto Galoppini taught a day long workshop entitled "Building an Effective Commercial Open Source Strategy" in Berlin at the Open Source in Mobile conference. I was unfortunately unable to attend (and I love Berlin), but I contributed to the materials. It is essentially our combined experience and expertise wrapped up into a one day how-to seminar.

Roberto has posted a great summary of his presentation on his blog.

OSCON 2008: Open Source Software Economics, Standards, and IP in One Lesson

I was fortunate enough to give a talk at OSCON 2008 in Portland. I realized on Tuesday (the day before the talk) that my business tutorial slides that I normally use as a level set when consulting were just NOT going to cut it. Here are the OSCON slides:

Open Source Software Economics, Standards, and IP in One Lesson

view presentation (tags: oscon2008 ip ipr open source)

Brad Smith Keynotes the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC)

[Updated (1-Apr-2008 21:37): I posted follow-up commentary in a separate post.

[Updated (12-Mar-2008 13:20): My apologies — Matt Asay points out that there will be a 30 minute slot for questions from the audience after the panel has had 30 minutes. I would still encourage we begin the tuning and discussion early: What would YOU ask Brad Smith at OSBC?]

We're just a couple weeks away from this year's Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco. Brad Smith, general counsel for Microsoft, is the closing keynote on the first day. This speaking slot has previously been filled by the likes of Clayton Christensen, Geoffrey Moore, and Lawrence Lessig, and each of these gentlemen have given us deep talks that have forced one to think about open source in the world at large from an economics, business, and legal perspective. Mr. Smith has large shoes to fill, and this worries me.

You see Mr. Smith is a corporate executive, and most execs (with a few notable exceptions like Mårten Mickos) feel compelled to "pitch the company." Mr. Smith is a lawyer (and general counsel to boot) so language is his oeuvre. We've seen Brad Smith's pitches before now. Here's what I hope we don't see at OSBC:

• A rehash of last's months announcement about how "open" Microsoft is. It is indeed a historical moment for Microsoft, publishing protocol specifications that were previously secret and offering generous patent licensing terms regardless of their motivation. The non-commercial restriction on the open source patent covenant makes it a non-starter. It demonstrates either remarkable naïveté of how the open source world works, or it's a deliberate snub. Either way it's irrelevant and not appropriate for this audience.
• Yet another lecture on how important patents are, the need to get a return on your innovation investment, or that the open source community wants special IP rules. We value IP. We don't want special rules. We understand the patent system and as software business people we often choose different IP tools by the necessity of our size. We also see the likes of most other large vendors sophisticated use of their asset portfolios. Most of us think US$40B per year is a pretty good return on investment. We've all asked to be told which of your patent claims you think we're infringing, so we can fix it. Microsoft is either in the room playing well with the rest of us or it's not. But don't pretend to play. That's boring and transparent. (The wrong sort of transparent.)
• More declarations on patent licensing innovation with Novell, Xandros, et al. Those are business cross licenses. Really. Move on. You're being lapped by the likes of IBM, Sun, and Oracle with respect to business innovation and open source.

So let's turn it around. What GREAT things could Mr. Smith announce to demonstrate that the Microsoft executive team gets open source software and they actually want to engage? What property or asset could they liberally share into a collaborative development community (that includes businesses), instead of publishing yet more licenses or making positioning statements? In essence, what could they DO. How about:

• Announce the release of the Sharepoint software base as open source software. Let the world know you will be genuinely exploring the revenue streams of support/maintenance/network in the context of this line of business, while encouraging innovation on the platform, and encouraging a community engagement unlike others in the Microsoft world.
• If he wants to talk about patents, then back up the earlier CIFS/Samba announcements with unrestricted patent covenants to any patents required, and scope the covenant to implementing CIFS. This seems a reasonable way to encourage the community (including businesses) while clearly stating the conditions under which infringement will not be tolerated outside of CIFS implementations.

At the end of the keynote, questions have been limited to a distinguished panel consisting of Stephen O'Grady (Redmonk), James Bottomly (SteelEye CTO), Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu/Canonical), and Andy Updegrove (Gesmer Updegrove). I started to think about what I would want to ask and came up with the following:

Question: If you have the list of patents whose claims you believe are infringed by Linux, why won't you release it such that the community can deliver on its statement that they will fix the infringements?

Rationale: Regardless of how some people in the free and open source community feel about software patents, we all understand that it is the legal system we have in place. We all understand that changing that system is a different discussion. The community deeply respects intellectual property. The entire free and open source licensing space is based on strong IP law. People want to fix infringed claims. But we can't fix what you won't share.

Question: Why doesn't Microsoft share more software under open source licenses?

Rationale: Microsoft has a wealth of software assets that are not products. So take the discussion of "not a business model we can embrace" off the table. Microsoft has been "studying" open source and "learning" from open source for almost a decade. No one is suggesting the release of the Windows or Office software base. Why have so few small experiments been done?

But we live in the Internet age. I would love to hear what other ideas and questions people have. So here's a web site that will allow you to enter your questions and ideas, and vote on the others already in place: "What would YOU ask Brad Smith at OSBC?"

Thanks to Sandro Groganz for putting the survey site together so quickly once I asked.

EclipseCon 2008 Open Source Software Business Track

Donald Smith has a dilemma. Over the years, EclipseCon has built a premier event for the Eclipse development community. With the success of the Eclipse Foundation, and the growth of the number of businesses built around and upon the Eclipse technology base, the Foundation has been building out the business track at EclipseCon as well. And herein lies Donald's dilemma — no one knows about the business track.

This year promises to be better than ever. Brent Williams is returning. (Last year at EclipseCon Brent gave what I believe to be the best talk on software businesses ever.) R0ml is returning. Donald outlines highlights of the business track in a blog post here. The full schedule and registration site is here.

If you're doing anything from a business perspective with Eclipse, whether building tools or contributing to the technology base, EclipseCon is the place to be.

GOSCON Discussion on Open Document Formats

Deb Bryant is blogging, which is great news. Deb is of course the creator and executive director of the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) that is held each year in Portland, OR.

The closing session of last Fall's conference was an executive panel on open document formats that included representatives from Sun, Microsoft, IBM, and Adobe. Deb's latest post points to the video of the panel, as well as the ongoing GOSCON forum discussion between the panellists. If you're interested in either the open document standards debate or government involvement in free and open source software, I would encourage you to have a read.

My China FOO Presentation (一起建桥梁)

Update [2007-11-11, 21:14]: The slides are here (PDF 416.8K)

This Friday (9 November) marks the first China FOO event in Beijing. O'Reilly Media is gearing up for the event and I've confidence it will be a huge success. I was invited, but unfortunately I'm not able to go. I was even going to be brave and attempt to give a lightening talk demonstrating how poor my Chinese is! But then I realized I could contribute regardless.

Lightening talks are constrained to five minutes, but I've cheated here. I worry that when you deal with a multilingual environment, one has to allow for people's internal translation rates. And I've of course tried to cover too much ground. In English AND Chinese. To whit:

• Free and open source software is important to China's future growth. (开放代码软件对中国未来的发展很重要)
• It will allow China to deliver better software faster.
• It will allow China to build better companies more quickly.

BUT ...

• Language defines culture. (语言创造文化)
• Our community cultures are different, and we need to understand each other's cultures to build the relationships to allow us to build a bigger community.

All in eight minutes. With examples.

I'm not entirely happy with the audio over the slides. (My apologies.) This was a first exploration with Keynote, iMovie, my old G4 laptop and a video camera. I have some ideas for next time. Heart felt thanks to Jethro Cramp in Beijing for all his help with the Chinese translation. I've been learning Chinese, but the vocabulary needed was a little beyond my current state. All mispronunciations are obviously mine.

If you prefer Google Video to YouTube, you can find the presentation here.

谢谢你

Free and Open Source Software Licensing Presentations (including GPLv3)

I've recently listened to an excellent presentation on free and open source software from Jason Haislmaier, a partner at Holme, Roberts & Owen in Boulder, Colorado.  His slides are posted on his blog.  He presented the work as a webinar at Matt Asay's (Alfresco) request.  I offered to host Jason's audio through my podcast, and to that end I have broken it into 3 parts:

• Episode 02 - Free and Open Source Licensing (Part 1) [29:05]
• Episode 03 - Free and Open Source Licensing (Part 2) [40:05]
• Episode 04 - Free and Open Source Licensing (Q&A)    [26:25]

[If you're an iTunes fan, you can find the podcast feed via the iTunes store as well.  Search for "Stephen Walli" in Podcasts.]

Mark Radcliffe from DLA Piper LLC also recently published a presentation that is a great introduction to free and open source software in general, and the GPL Version 3 (GPLv3) in particular.  The early presentation is pretty straight forward introductory level material, but around 34:00 [slide 12] he begins the discussion on GPLv3.  Mark led one of the committees (Committee C) that helped develop GPLv3 so it's a great perspective.  Instructions to get to the slides and audio are available on Mark's blog. 

If you're interested in legal issues and free and open source software, both gentlemen bring great experience and perspective to the issues through there blogs. 

OSBC 2007: Mårten Mickos Keynote

Mårten Mickos invariable gives great keynotes.  This year's keynote at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, "Why Freedom Makes a Better Business Model" (PDF 220K), was no different.

The joy of a Mickos keynote is that he actually wants to educate the audience, sharing his experience, and realizes that the audience didn't come to hear a sponsoring company product pitch.  (There is exactly one slide in the deck where he talks directly about a new offering from MySQL, BUT he does it in the context of how the company is exploring the business model.)  Mårten shares his experiences and observations from MySQL around freedom as a business enabler, innovation, the network effects enabled by using free software as part of the business model, as well as the challenges.   All in 22 short slides that mostly stand on their own.  Enjoy!

[If someone knows of a recording of the talk online, please send the link along.]

COSS.fi and the Verso Open Source Business Programme

I spoke at the Verso Open Source Business Programme last Thursday in Helsinki, Finland.  The programme is organized by the Finnish Center for Open Source Software (COSS), with partners Verso, Finpro, and Tekes.  It provides seminar days regularly to hear presentations on using open source software, open content, standards, etc. in new innovation opportunities in Finnish high tech businesses.  They have a great track record of getting good speakers.  Matt Asay presented this week as well, and Bob Sutor (IBM), and Chris DiBona (Google) have been past speakers.  (The programme is also planning a trip for a group of people to this year's Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco in May.) 

Matt gave a great presentation.  It is similar to his talk from OSCON last Summer, but updated with 8 more months of experience and expertise driving Alfresco's business in the U.S. His slides are here. 

My presentation slides are here.  While some of it will look the same to regular readers of this column, I spent a long time talking about Core, Complement, and Context as well.

Matti Saastamoinen (programme project manager) and I