Open Source

It is with some regret I read of the emergence of good old Olde Worlde economics into the Open Source bubbleworld. From Computing:

Officials at Sun Microsystems Inc., which acquired MySQL in February, confirmed that new online backup capabilities now under development will be offered only to MySQL Enterprise customers — not to the much larger number of users of the free MySQL Community edition.

The plan was detailed during meetings at MySQL's annual user conference in Santa Clara, Calif., during which Sun also delayed until late June the release of a MySQL 5.1 upgrade in order to iron out some remaining bugs.

This is the second dust-up between MySQL and its users in the past eight months. Last August, an earlier decision to stop making the MySQL Enterprise source code openly available to users without paid subscriptions drew criticism from some members of the MySQL community.

In other words, so long and thanks for all the long free hours, guys, but its our toy now.......... I bet that makes all those contrbutors over the years want to really get up and help tomorrow morning.

Not that this wasn't all predictable of course (here we are predicting it for example), just sad to see it happen. The real lesson of these collaborative work projects is that too often, eventually a small cadre of people seem to grab the project, grab all the loot, and run off with it - and the dispersed, disorganised and dispossessed "community" can do little about it.

However, the risk Sun takes in messing with the LAMP architecture stack is that it misunderstands not the mood of the community, but the impact of a kickback:

....user Paul Saduauskas threatened to abandon MySQL in favor of rival open-source databases in response to the hoarding of features for the enterprise version. For instance, Saduauskas said that the PostgreSQL database is "fast enough these days" and is "much more standards-compliant" than MySQL is....

...."Free software developers (including myself) are a fickle bunch, and can jump ship or fork a project with startling speed."

A lot of those free installations out there are driven by sentimental, not contractual, value - replacing MySQL with a new OS system would be a labour of love if Sun p*ssed all these people off - or even worse, if the companies using it felt that they would have to pay for support in the future, or be held over a barrel.

And the impact is more subtle than Sun may be expecting, as there is a system dynamic going on here - if people no longer love MySQL, it means collaborative community support goes away, which means more risk for any one user, which means a need to de-risk, which, allied to (i) a righteous indignation plus (ii) an opportunity to play with cool new stuff, could lead to a -ve cycle for MySQL quite rapidly.

And once its out the LAMP stack, w(h)ither then?

Jus' Saying......

Update - it appears Slashdot's finest, me and Computerworld woz wrong re Sun's intentions, or at least Sun has clarified matters here ...and here .... and here ....457 comments later and counting

Well, one way is to write a report on it and charge $1,000 a throw for the report

"Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market. It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies," said Jim Johnson, Chairman, The Standish Group International"

I'd have been more comfortable with a range of values though......I can't believe that at this stage this isn't a hugely SWAG game

Thanks for link to Simon Wardley

There is an article in Wired Magazine on the newly emerging trend for Open Source Millionaires.

In 2007, some 30 open source software companies were purchased for more than $1 billion — double the number of sales in 2005, according to consulting firm 451 Group. And 2008 is proving to be even more frenetic. In January alone, Sun Microsystems announced the purchase of open source pioneer MySQL for $1 billion

The key line to me, though, is at the end of the article, about how this monetisation impacts the Open Source collaboration model:

More important, software makers depend on the goodwill of outside developers, whom they rely on to keep updating their products. So the new open source billionaires might want to think twice about going 767 for 767 with the Google guys. For the coder drones, accustomed to being paid in warm feelings, such displays might make them take their coding skills elsewhere.

I'd call this the Billy Bragg Offset Economics Experience - the software creators dedicate their labour for free in the belief that they are creating a Brave New World, just to find that its Animal Farm and they're just the code-monkeys - and a very small number of people have potentially managed to get into a position to walk away with all the created common wealth at the monetisation event.

Now it can be a bit hard to follow, because the Open Source model relies not so much on the economics of "free" as the economics of "offset" (ie paying for it in some other way, including coder time subsidised by their actual employers), and, like in a game of 3-cup shuffle, the money is being moved around in new ways so that its harder to follow it - until someone walks off with it, of course.

There is, at the end of the day, no such thing as a free lunch, even in the "everything is free" internet.

And here's a tip - if you ain't eating at the table, you're doing the paying......while you maybe wait at it too,

So Caveat coder...

Rationality seems to be dawning in the Social Networking space.....it has occurred to quite a few people in the past (most recently Google) that an Open Social Network, built from Open Source software, is a perfectly viable approach.

A SocNet is typically built of a few main functions:

- A User ID page - stuff about you
- A search routine to find users that are similar to you
- Some form of friending system that allows you to track your actual networked friends, and gives them an inside track to talking to you
- A tool to allow you a bit of voyeuristic perving of their friends etc.
- Tools for people to interact with each other - comment, throw dead sheep etc....
- Silly applications for the masses to waste time with

Now clearly you can fairly easily build this with Blogs, a Search Engine (Technorati), and a directory of your friends on IM (or Twitter, or Jaiku, or even Groupware for that matter), and various tools to make people visible (blogroll for eg). What would still be good is if everyone had some standard script that allowed metadata to be standardised at a certain level to make Tim Berners Lee's GGG a reality.

Anyway, Chris Messina of Citizen Agency has taken the bull by the horns here (tip of hat to Anne Zelenka for the link)

To put my … time? … where my mouth is (I haven’t got a whole lot of money to put there) … Steve Ivy and I have embarked on a prototype project to build a social network with its skin inside out. We’re calling it DiSo, or “Distributed Social Networking applications”. The emphasis here is on “distributed”.

Bravo....my only grumble is that he has kicked off with a semi-closed blognet, Wordpress, to start off - but it is Open Source at least, and you have to start somewhere, and it already has a structured "About" metadata set.

Of course, Chris has also single handedly potentially removed a lot of Facebook's valuation, as this meme is the beginning of the end of the "AOL Walled Garden" approach to Social Networking, and post Beacon the argument for shifting to this approach looks a lot more attractive.

Update...on a related matter, Bebo decides to Do a Facebook and announces that Closed Open-ness is indeed the New Black for SocNets. Clearly Beacon beckoned for a SocNet dressing up for sale.......can;t help but think though that this hors ehas run its course.

Sez the Register - Ashley Highfield noted that:

"We have 17.1 million users of bbc.co.uk in the UK and, as far as our server logs can make out, 5 per cent of those [use Macs] and around 400 to 600 are Linux users."

A study of BBC server logs in 2005 showed that 0.41 per cent of visitors to the BBC homepage were running Linux.

Wails of woe and gnashing of teeth by the digerati follows, but I looked at our logs and we get about 0.7% Linux and 2.7% Macs (ytd 2007).

So, either (i) there are less of the True Digerati* out there than usually assumed, (ii), they're all there but read neither us or Beeb, or (iii) they are doing other wholesome stuff like playing World of Warcraft or (horrors) are not even on the net.

* as is well known, only us Digipeasants use Windows

The title is a play on the Blue Monster story. I have been reading Henry Chesbrough's Open Business Models over the last few days, and this passage (on p190) caught my eye. Its about IBM in 1992, but if you replace the word "IBM" with "Microsoft" it seemed very, very relevant.

In 1992 (read 2008?) Microsoft's type 3 (closed system) business model reached a financial crisis: the mainframe market (read PC OS) market had matured. Microsoft's PC market share were in terminal decline: the server and workstation businesses were far behind the market leaders; and the software business was in disarray. In December 1992 (2008?) Microsoft announced its first major layoffs in its corporate history, and what was then the largest loss in US corporate history: $5 bn (1). Soon after this announcement, Microsoft fired its CEO and brought in the first outsude CEO the company had ever had, Lou Gerstner.

Gerstner's arrival at Microsoft, and the subsequent changes to Microsoft's business model, have been widely studied(2). However, the process that Microsoft went through to get to its new business model has not been widely reported.

In the beginning of the transformation, Microsoft decided that it's overhead structure was too bloated for the amount of revenue coming into the company, As noted earlier, this led to an extraordinary layoff and the writing off of many corporate assets, which were the principal elements nof the $5bn quarterly loss.

However, Microsoft has already changed captain, so is Blue Monster a sign of a transformation occurring - or does it need a shock to the system the size that IBM had to really change course?

Thoughts?

(1) Of course, the bar has since been lifted somewhat

(2) Our report was published in 2009.....

I was at the Linux Expo today, it was still small compared to the Mac Expo next door, but some interesting stuff for us digital media-heads.

The BBC did an interesting talk on their experience deploying OS in their systems, and on the various OS licences - but even more interesting were comments about the Kamaelia code being put up within the next few weeks. One can whinge about the Beeb putting up free new media services (like Podcasting for eg) that hinder startup commercial services, but if they can give back this sort of technology that can only be good news.

The MythTV proposition is also interesting...essentially an open source client to make your PC behave like a PVR - this plays to our views on MyPCTV ie the use of the ordinary PC as the device of choice for TV over IP consumption.

Apart from that I was struck by the Trexy beta...its an added value search engine that remembers where you've been for next time so you go straight there, and as users grow will also match new requests to where other people have gone. But that was not the interesting thing, nor was it the free (toy) goat I got - it was that the person I spoke to said they were already funding a team on the ad revenues they generated from their website. Even if its not break even yet (I don't know if it is or not) in early beta, New Search companies gettting in front of older search engines with their advertising are clearly going to be a feature of the Search battle going forward.

And besides, if I'm not allowed to say I Google anymore, Trexing something sounds OK to me

And finally, seeing the Drupal team there was great - we wrote our website ourselves in Drupal, its a big system so its good to meet some faces we can call on - this stuff matters for Open Source to really succeed I think.