Once More unto the Breach

Open Source Education for Executives

Optaros (my employer) is delivering a couple of open source education seminars for executives in the near future.  As part of the ongoing growth in our business, we need to get customers up the education curve to understand the benefits to their enterprises that can come from open source adoption for applications assembly and development.  People typically think, "oh, you mean Linux" or they have to deal with the FUD and mythology. 

r0ml, Dave, and I will be doing our best to help people understand open source applications development in their organizations:

• r0ml will be talking about the benefits of open source adoption.  (He most recently presented at EuroOSCON, and a couple of Optaros exec ed. presentations in Geneva and Zurich, and as was observed here, could make reading his shopping list sound interesting.)
• I'll talk about overcoming the barriers to open source adoption.
• Dave will present best practices.
• We have demonstrations of how fast you can assemble custom business solutions using open source components (including the SOX compliance auditing solution we're releasing shortly on SourceForge). 
  

These free half day events are in Boston (8 Nov) and Manhattan (17 Nov).  If you have an executive in your life that needs a bit of open source education, the registration page is here. 

A Short Follow-up on the Optaros Free and Open Source Software Policy

Update (28-Oct-2005, 16:04): A slightly expanded version of this post ended up on Groklaw at PJ's request.
Back at the end of June, we published the Optaros Free and Open Source Software Policy. It was our statement of our belief of how we as a consulting services company have to engage with the free and open source community at large, and how we intend to run the business.  I've always been as concerned/cynical as Matt Asay of companies talking the talk without walking the walk.  As he points out:

... I sometimes worry that too many executives will spoil the original flavor of open source. By this I don't mean the "community," .... Rather, I mean the ethos of open source: giving back, collaboration, etc.

I wanted to follow-up with what we're doing since publishing our policy:

• We modified a key master services agreement such that the customer can release work-for-hire back to the appropriate communities. We have put in place a simple mechanism whereby we can agree with the customer and legally document areas that we can contribute code back that is part of the work-made-for-hire.  We continue to work forward with enterprise customers to set up our services agreements to this end in the first place.  
• We are contributing code back in a couple communities, notably ActiveMQ (we have a developer that has earned a committer role on the project), and we are getting ready to submit code back to the Spring community. 
• We are building our own first community around an in-house developed application for SOX auditing (RADAR). We claimed our SourceForge site, and the code will go up in the next week.  We're releasing it under the GPL.  Please join the project RSS feed if you want to know when the code arrives. 
• Dave Gynn has released (under the Apache license) his collection of run-time diagnostic tools which assist Java developers building Web applications, particularly using open source frameworks.  He's anchoring that community at http://www.wtfigo.org. 
  

Even I've responded to a few support questions in the OpenOffice community as I get things to where I want them on my new Mac, although admittedly that doesn't quite stack up to the work I see happening around development projects within Optaros.

It is however a good feeling to know that no one else need necessarily go through the same learning curve or make the same mistakes I made.  I've long maintained the economics of community is simple: you always get more than you give — but you have to give first.  Within a day of posting one solution I received notification of a fix to a much bigger problem I was having. 

As the management team at Optaros, we have nothing but commitment for our participation in open source communities and collaborative development and for the continued growth of that participation.   

Open Sources 2.0 is published!

Open Sources 2.0 from O'Reilly has hit the stands.  This is the new collection of essays five years after the original collection was published.  This time the focus is more on the evolution of open source in business, and how open source collaborative methods are reaching into other areas. 

I have an essay in this collection. It is the original material out of which last Spring's USENIX presentation was taken (and that I'll present again next week).  But the rest of the collection is awesome.  There are essays from Mitchell Baker, Chris DiBona, Matt Asay, Doc Searls, Ian Murdock, Ben Laurie, Mike Olsen, Jeremy Allison, Pamela Jones, Tim O'Reilly and many many more.  (The table of contents is here.) I haven't seen a copy yet, but if it's anything like it's predecessor, it will be a great book to read. 

Congratulations to Danese, Mark, and Chris for getting it out the door.

Optaros is Hosting the Boston PHP Users Group Again, 3 Nov

Optaros, Inc. is once again playing host to the next Boston PHP Users Group meeting.  It will be 3 November, from 6:30-8:30 p.m.  The guest speaker is me this time, presenting a version of the talk I gave at USENIX last Spring, "Under the Hood: Open Source Business Models in Context". This is obviously not a PHP specific talk. 

My understanding is that O'Reilly Media will be on hand this meeting as well. 

Directions and map to the Optaros U.S. Corporate Headquarters are here.  We're right around the corner from the TD Banknorth Garden and North Station, with access to the Green and Orange Lines. (N.B. Apparently there is a game at the Garden that night.)

Welcome back!

Corel and the Open Document Format Standard

I almost called this post "Corel Doesn't Remember How to Compete for Customers". Yes.  That's a harsh statement — but deserved. Andy Updegrove has a great blog post on the latest marketing ineptness from Corel with regards to their support of Open Document Format.  It's stunning.  I saw the eWeek article to which Andy refers when it came out.  I was horrified.  There is no other feature that would get WordPerfect off the mark again.  I wouldn't care if they're half way to the greatest release of WordPerfect in the history of the product, and wanted to finish it as is.  Deliver the ODF feature patched on the current release immediately.  It's worth doing twice, if indeed that's their concern. 

If they delay, they will be buried by IBM.  (Sun will likely try to turn it into a hardware thin-client sale and worry the customer away from deployment.) This is the one shot they have with WordPerfect.  There will be a period when customers want ODF but are worried about installing "open source" or think it means they would need to switch to Linux.  OpenOffice 2.0 went gold this week.  The project to enable OpenOffice to read WordPerfect files has begun.  If Corel doesn't act now, they won't be a distant second, as they seem to want to be.  WordPerfect will rapidly become irrelevant. Their Board should be asking some pretty hard questions about now.  Shame on Corel indeed.

ConsortiumInfo.org and the Massachusetts Decision on Open Document Formats

Andy Updegrove creates the ConsortiumInfo.org web site to track all things standards related.  There is a regular bulletin as well as the blog and daily news collecting.  September's issue is all about the Commonwealth of Massachusetts's decision to move to Open Document Format standard.  It includes a comprehensive write-up after he interviewed the key players.  Enjoy.