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New Application Helps Recover Lost Laptops

Savio Rodrigues — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:31:04 +0000

Very cool OSS project for tracking and recovering your lost or stolen laptop. It’s a project from the University of Washington. This app sounds like a great way to address the 12,000 laptops lost per week at US airports.

The UW website states:

“Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there’s no need to rely on a single third party. What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop. “

A very cool feature is using the iSight camera to take pics of the “user” after your laptop has been lost/stolen. This feature is for Mac OS X, but Adeona is useful for laptops of all kinds. The team is looking at Adeona for mobile devices.

Linux, OS X and XP/Vista are supported.

Btw kudos to: Ph.D. students Gabriel Maganis and Thomas Ristenpart, working with UW faculty members Tadayoshi Kohno and Arvind Krishnamurthy.

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MySQL and the Google MacGyver Connection

Savio Rodrigues — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 02:02:50 +0000

A reader commented that MySQL isn’t “enterprise ready”, to which another reader wrote:

“I hate it when snobby DBAs or managers scoff at MySQL as if it isn’t ready to play with the big boys. Google called, they’d like to loan you a clue.”

Valid point. But, I’m fairly certain that Google engineers could run a highly scalable computing system (whatever that is) using nothing more than OS/2, a paper clip, duct tape and maple syrup. I am not bashing MySQL in any way (I’m a happy user). I am however suggesting that the skills level inside an average IT shop are different than skills you’ll find at Google. And yet, we all use things that Google, Amazon, etc. are doing as ‘proof’ that other customers should follow suit. In many cases it’s valid advice that ignores two things: the skills and legacy code/apps/infrastructure at the company.

Many developers have deep skills with alternative products, and for better or worse, are more productive with said products than a new OSS product. (Somewhat related…I’m always surprised that EnterpriseDB hasn’t been more successful vs. Oracle, considering EnterpriseDB’s goal to ensure compatibility with Oracle.)

The Google’s of the world didn’t have ‘legacy’ to deal with in their Greenfield environments. The overwhelmingly majority of customers aren’t as fortunate. So, maybe the legacy ’stuff’ running ends up being more important (from a CYA standpoint) than taking a risk by deploying ’something new’? And hey, let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that customers, in their ever ending bid to cut costs, are happily paying enterprise software license fees without receiving value from these products.

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MySQL Not Big Enough to Offer Enterprise Support?

Savio Rodrigues — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 16:28:57 +0000

Jonathan has a nice post with additional explanations on the MySQL deal, seeing as one or two folks have questioned it. (Note that the second link is for your amusement via Sun’s Simon Phipps blog).

Jonathan writes:

“Where are the revenue synergies?

The more interesting question is “where aren’t the synergies?” Wherever MySQL is deployed, whether the user is paying for software support or not, a server will be purchased, along with a storage device, networking infrastructure – and over time, support services on high value open platforms. Last I checked, we have products in almost all those categories.

In addition, the single biggest impediment to MySQL’s growth wasn’t the feature set of their technology – which is perfectly married to planetary scale in the on-line/web world. The biggest impediment was that some traditional enterprises wanted a Fortune 500 vendor (”someone in a Gartner magic quadrant”) to provide enterprise support. Good news, we can augment MySQL’s great service team with an extraordinary set of service professionals across the planet – and provide global mission critical support to the biggest businesses on earth.”

I can understand the part about synergies for Sun. But I’m confused that Sun, and/or MySQL believe that the major impediment to MySQL growth was that MySQL wasn’t a big enough vendor to offer enterprise support.

Huh? I guess Red Hat didn’t get that memo. Could something other than vendor size be relevant to a customer’s willingness to pay for enterprise support once an OSS product gets as ubiquitous as MySQL?

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Rethinking the OSS Business Model

Savio Rodrigues — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:58:43 +0000

Fleury and Rodrigues Separated at Birth?

Come on, you have to admit, the resemblance is uncanny. I’m obviously kidding. I’m much better looking. His sizable bank account and ability to keep a beat probably balances the score though

Marc gave me a heads up on his recent post, in which he comments on Matt’s post. If you don’t already subscribe to Marc’s blog, I’d suggest you read his post today. Here are some key points that reinforce my OSS views of late.

Matt said:

“…It may mean that Benchmark knows something that the rest of the industry seems determined to ignore: services-based businesses may well be the future of the software industry. “

Marc responded:

“FALSE: the future of the software industry (as a whole) is services. I always enjoy it when in debate people mention the case of VMWare to evangelical OSS zealots. Here is a company that is creating vasts amount of technological innovation and money with a classic licensing model of software. When asked why they didn’t go OSS, the CEO responded “why would I do that?” …. What? my ideology is not perfect? the good old model is still kicking arse? by orders of magnitude in terms of technology and, it goes without saying, financial value creation?…”

“The proprietary model is alive and kicking. The existence of OSS models DO NOT negate the proprietary models. GET OVER IT, both models will co-exist and thrive sometimes at the expense of each other, sometimes independently of each other. It is not a zero-sum gain, there is value being created in both.”

“In fact, witness the RUSH of OSS companies to emulate the proprietary licensing models to monetize their bases. The VC’s may have invested in service based companies but they are all becoming product license companies…The proprietary licensing model is still top dog and the OSS guys are falling all over themselves to emulate it. BTW, on this topic, I find that Savio Rodrigues, the “community blogger” from IBM is a more enlightened read. Maybe because he is from IBM and they literally wrote the book over the past 50 years?”

I respect Marc’s willingness to speak/write with his unique sense of candor about OSS business. Whether you agree or disagree with Marc, be happy that his ($300M of) OSS credibility forces us to rethink the OSS business model, if only for a few seconds. Marc’s willingness to evolve his thinking around OSS and, gasp, learn a thing or two from the commercial vendors is refreshing. It’s a good thing for us commercial vendors that he’s retired…

All truths are challenged over time. It may well be time to challenge the belief that OSS growth will come at the expense of commercial software. As Marc so eloquently put it, there is value being created in both the OSS and proprietary markets. One plus one could actually equal two and a half. Take that Ramy (my accounting prof)!

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Where is OSS Heading?

Savio Rodrigues — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:12:29 +0000

Okay, so not everyone agrees about my claim that the support-based OSS business model does not scale.

Matt said:

“The open source doubters continue to underestimate the power of open source as a business model tool. And Savio, though normally I wouldn’t characterize you as anti-open source, you seem to want, like many at IBM, to keep open source nicely contained in a package that is easy to leverage but doesn’t impact your license business.”

I am not anti-OSS by any means. But, I do question where it’s all heading. I’ve long believed that the future is a hybrid model. Twenty years from now, I believe that leading software vendors will offer a mix of OSS & commercial products. I believe this because I’ve seen this model work already. When I do the math, it’s very difficult to envision commercial software vendors throwing away the business model that is driving a $200 billion software industry today. I am not trying to be condescending in any way, I’m just looking at the data.

I don’t question that substitution is going on, especially from startups. I am 100% sure that substitution is going on for certain uses. There are some projects/uses that OSS is the better answer. And there are other projects/uses that commercial products are the better answer. Until recently, customers didn’t have much choice and used commercial products for both types of projects/uses. OSS changes that decision, and tips the scales in favor of the customer. All software vendors recognize this and some are acting on it.

The future isn’t OSS – sorry to rain on the parade. The future is recognizing that customers have varying project needs and neither OSS, nor commercial products are the best solutions for all these project needs.

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Red Hat and Hyperic Finally Made Me Happy

Savio Rodrigues — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:55:44 +0000

I previously questioned Red Hat’s apparent lack of love for Hyperic. Today, Stacey Schneider, Senior Director of Marketing at Hyperic, tipped me off to a joint Hyperic & Red Hat announcement.

Stacey writes:

“Finally today we announced that Red Hat and Hyperic will be working together on the development of a common systems management platform.

……
As you know, back in 2005 was originally OEMed to create JON before the Red Hat acquisition. At the time, the software licensed was still closed and the software has not been upgraded since, rather JBoss and now Red Hat has been updating the software privately. The new project will update the software contributions from Hyperic to its latest software, contribute the additional code written by the JON team, and work jointly to create a roadmap of future features. And of course make it all open source! (GPL v2)

…….

This new open source project is meant to create a repository of common services to be used in future versions of Red Hat and Hyperic products. Both companies will work to maintain, govern and extend management capabilities within the new open source systems management platform project.”

Now, this is very cool news, and a great endorsement for Hyperic technology. The deal appears to position Hyperic as the de facto systems management provider for Red Hat customers. Choice is great, but it can sometimes work against OSS in the CIO’s mind.

The deal is also an endorsement of Red Hat’s community. Long-time readers may remember that I questioned the “endorsement of the JBoss community” when Exadel decided to move their development into the JBoss community. I questioned the endorsement because there had been funds exchanged, making this an acquisition rather than an endorsement of community A vs. community B.

This agreement, may lead to an acquisition in the future, but today, it’s about one independent company agreeing to join forces and communities with another independent company.

Kudos to Hyperic & Red Hat for making this happen.

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OSS Venture Capital & M&A

Savio Rodrigues — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:38:34 +0000

Many of you may have heard that Matthew Aslett is over at The 451 Group now.

Matthew has been tracking VC funding to OSS vendors for quite some time now. Matthew reports that VC funding to OSS vendors in 3Q07 decreased 42% to $78M from $133M in 3Q06. To the end of 3Q, $267M has been invested vs. $339M last year. However, 2006 was a banner year for OSS firms receiving VC funding. As the OSS market matures, we’ll surely see VC funding decline as the VCs find the next new thing. Matthew explains that while the total investments may be declining, Series A investments in OSS are up and mature OSS vendors are getting acquired:

“The level of investment via seed and Series A funding rounds actually increased for the second quarter in succession, while the big money for established vendors went on M&A activity rather than venture funding.”

Few could argue that we seem to be moving into the OSS vendor consolidation stage of the lifecycle (for most oss markets). I wonder how many OSS vendors will remain ‘oss vendors’ by October 2009. At the end of the day, the large OSS vendors that can acquire smaller OSS vendors number in the handful. And, Oracle could buy all the large OSS vendors in an afternoon….sigh.

It’ll be interesting to see how much Citrix or Yahoo! have to write off (a la Skype) in a few years to account for the premiums they paid for XenSource & Zimbra respectively. I’m thinking that Citrix won’t as they’ll be acquired by Microsoft. Yahoo! on the other hand…

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Microsoft Buying Yahoo? OSS Implications

Savio Rodrigues — Fri, 04 May 2007 21:12:16 +0000

Just read news about Microsoft potentially buying or merging with Yahoo. These are just rumours, and lots of analysis will discuss why the deal may or may not make sense.

I’m more curious about the OSS usage impact if this deal goes through. Everyone knows that Yahoo is a heavy user of OSS. Heck, it’s hard to think about PHP without Yahoo coming to mind. With this deal, Microsoft could become one of the biggest users of OSS overnight. Just think about that for a second.

Hotmail used to run on BSD when Microsoft bought it, and now Hotmail is on Windows and uses .NET stuff. If you haven’t played with Hotmail Live, give it another look, because it rocks. I still use Gmail (works better with Firefox and there’s too much peer pressure around using Gmail), but hope that Google borrows some ideas from Hotmail Live (or Windows Live Hotmail as it seems to be called).

If the deal goes through, I think Microsoft will leave the OSS usage within Yahoo at a fairly high level for a fairly long period of time. Things may get replaced with Microsoft technology over time, but even Microsoft has bean counters that are going to ask “why do we need to spend time & resources on that?” The deal could also be impetus for Microsoft to take a leap forward with its OSS strategy.

Will be interesting to see what we hear from the Microsoft folks over at Port 25…

Interesting times!

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Top 5 OSS Action Leaders

Savio Rodrigues — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 13:38:34 +0000

I know that the original question was “Who are the top 5 OSS thought leaders”, and that’s been covered by several folks already. I’m going to ask a similar, but different question.

Who are the top 5 entities that have brought OSS into everyday (enterprise & commercial) use? This is less a list of Thought Leaders than it is a list of Action Leaders. I don’t usually read the blogs of “people” on this list, but their efforts have changed the IT marketplace. Although you could argue that a thought leader is someone who was preciously an Action Leader.anywho.

< drumRoll >In no specific order:

1. PHP guys (Rasmus Lerdorf, Zeev Suraski & Andi Gutmans): How many websites you use today are running PHP? PHP enabled a whole class of “non-techies” to become techie enough to throw up a website with dynamic content or modify existing templates and a legion of startups to get stuff done quickly and on the cheap.

2. IBM & HP: It’s unlikely that Linux would have received enterprise acceptance from CIOs without the backing of major IT vendors such as IBM & HP. The growth of Linux no longer relies on the blessing of major IT vendors, but without the early investments and advertising from IBM & HP, it’s hard to say we’d see Linux adoption where it is today. And both have continued to support OSS by their participation in OSS projects, contributing code, paying key OSS developers to work on their respective OSS projects, and driving revenue from hardware, support and services around OSS. (Note: I’d say IBM has done more around OSS than HP, but that’s because I’m more familiar with IBM’s efforts.) Oh yeah, IBM & HP benefited nicely from their backing of Linux & OSS.nothing wrong with that

3. Stallman/Linus: Hard to have an OSS list of any kind, especially a list that deals with action & results, without Stallman & Linus on it.

4. Marc Fleury: Like him or not, he woke up the middleware market. While many vendors were happy to watch Linux eat into Solaris & Windows accounts (although the latter didn’t happen as much as it is believed), the thought of OSS moving up the stack was really an afterthought. Fleury helped change that view. He made it easier for other OSS vendors to get funding, and forced software vendors (middleware or otherwise) to build strategies that used OSS in order to increase customer choice.

5. Google & Yahoo: How much of Yahoo’s and Google’s infrastructure runs on OSS? We’ll never really know for sure (although many reports indicate it’s a lot), but millions of users get to benefit from their use of OSS to deliver useful tools like GMail, Search, Yahoo Finance, del.icio.us, etc.

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I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

More Open Source Funding – What Does it Mean?

Savio Rodrigues — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 22:25:17 +0000

Matthew Aslett, Matt Asay & Alex Fletcher are all writing about the increased funding that open source companies have received in 2006. Good news indeed. (Picture from robinicus919)

I got to thinking about what this all means. What’s the impact of giving investors (who expect big returns) a larger say in OSS vendor operations? Is this good for the open source market, or just a step along the path towards a joint OSS & traditional software business model? So, I called up a friend in venture capital and something he said made me think. He said:

“Everyone’s hoping to either become the next Red Hat or get sold to IBM or Oracle.”

I think his view of “everyone” is more indicative of OSS (open source software) investors, rather than OSS company founders. Although, founders probably do want to become the next Red Hat.

Now, if we believe that the world only needs 5 computers, then does the world only need 10 software companies? Okay, maybe 10 is a ridiculous number. But the software market is definitely consolidating.

How long can the Red Hats of the world remain independent? Up until now, the traditional software vendors have all benefited from an independent Red Hat. Let Red Hat make its money on Linux with “our” help in driving the acceptance of Linux. Along the way we’ll sell a lot more hardware and related software and services. Everyone wins. But as Red Hat and others begin to expand up and across the software stack, there’s more talk about traditional software vendors acquiring pure play OSS vendors. For instance, there have been rumours of Red Hat & Zend being acquired by Oracle, and Oracle did try to buy JBoss.

Next, several OSS vendors out there today are really developing features, not stand-alone products. For the most part, these vendors will either be acquired by pure play OSS software vendors (a la Red Hat), acquired by a traditional software vendor or go under.

I’m beginning to think:

1. Consolidation in the traditional software market is in full swing and will only continue.

2. The pure play OSS vendor market will face a similar degree of consolidation.

3. As #2 happens, investors in OSS vendors will (strongly) direct OSS vendors to seek a buyout from a traditional software vendor. Just think about how many traditional software companies have been able to make it on their own vs. how many have been acquired.

4. A large portion of pure play OSS vendors will find new homes within a traditional software vendor.

5. As #4 happens, traditional software vendors will have to adjust their business models to include the OSS business model as another choice, or in some cases, the only choice, for delivering high quality software at the lowest total cost of ownership.

When this happens, will we say that open source won or that the traditional software model won? Ummm. Yes? As I’ve mentioned before, this is why I’m not a big fan of the “us vs. them” approach. The open source business model is great, and I support it. But it won’t replace the traditional software business model anytime soon or wholesale. An evolution as the two models blur together is much more likely. So, let’s focus on “us and them”.

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