Planet Enterprise 2.0

Acquia has finally taken the wraps off its commercially supported Drupal distribution, and it looks like the wait was worth it. Drupal was already a great web content management publishing system, but Acquia's spin on it should make it even better:

The release is essentially a hardened distribution of

Dennis Howlett writes a thought-provoking piece on proprietary maintenance revenue, challenging the value that software vendors provide or, rather, the generic way in which it is provided. Howlett proposes a way to customize maintenance fees to the actual value provided by a vendor:

In software terms, we already know that [differentiation for customers] happens through software implementation, configurations and customizations that are a core part of delivering to customer needs. There is no reason why the same principles cannot be applied to the maintenance element of the business relationship. If you stand back and put aside the notions of the last 30+ years, it is blindingly obvious.

It is obvious for example that in the early stages, customers will consume a considerable amount of resource as they learn and become familiar with the product. They should therefore pay an economic price that reflects the services they consume. However, the software vendors need do three things in order to soften the impact and reduce the long term burden....

I'll leave it to you to read Howlett's post to discover the three things, but even in the short blurb above Howlett unwittingly calls out a fundamental difficulty in open-source software revenue models, one that Savio Rodrigues has been banging on for awhile, and one that NBC iVillage CTO Jon Williams has also called out:

Open-source vendors start making money from their customer base precisely at the point that the customer base is least likely to renew.

Dave Rosenberg thought that this press release was a spoof on my affection for Red Hat. Yes, it's true that I'm a fan of Red Hat's - I think it does a lot of good for open source - but this goes too far.... :-)

I really ...

If you needed any further testament to the colossal failure that is Microsoft Windows Vista, just read this Wall Street Journal article detailing PC manufacturers attempts to design around Vista's shortcomings, shortcomings that no amount of marketing are going to fix.

...[S]ome PC makers are trying to improve ...

I don't think there's much of a mainstream future for the Wiz, a new open-source gaming unit from GamePark Holdings, but that may be the point:

...[T]he question of whether or not the device can truly challenge the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable is liable to

Have you always wanted to be the antagonist in Pink Floyd's "Have a Cigar"? Now's your chance.

A new U.K. venture, Bandstocks, is making mini-moguls of the music masses, allowing people to invest in up-and-coming bands and share in the proceeds. Bandstocks joins a small but growing group of related companies . ...

There's more than a whiff of truth to The VAR Guy's suggestion that Google's Android antics make it seem like the Microsoft of yore: heavy on marketing and light on substance. In particular, I'm equally dismayed by Google's "vaporware" announcements:

Throughout the 1990s and even

As The Register reports Wednesday, Linux servers are increasingly under attack from Phalanx2, a "self-injecting kernel rootkit designed for the Linux 2.6 branch that hides files, processes and sockets and includes tools for sniffing a tty program and connecting to it with a backdoor."

According to The Register:

The

Adium makes the Gooner in me happy

If you're a Mac user and are still slumming with iChat, it's time that you used Adium. Let's just say that God was busy creating Adium on the eighth day....

For those who have been using open-source Adium, it just got even better. ...

I received an interesting email today from the Eclipse Foundation, interesting because it cut against an experience I had at work, and against Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst's evangelism to convince more enterprises to contribute to open-source software projects.

I'm aware of a number of mission-critical applications happily ...

I was reading this OStatic interview with Ken Drachnik, marketing manager for open source software infrastructure products at Sun and a co-founder of GlassFish (Sun's open-source application server), and it made me wonder if it's time for some consolidation in the open-source stack. Yes, I'm the one ...

Citing cost and ease of use considerations, the State of Pahang in Malaysia has officially moved to OpenOffice. I wrote yesterday about how emerging economies may prove to be the best source of growth for desktop Linux. Here is one more proofpoint:

The driving force for this migration seems to ...

I found this Bruce Byfield article deeply intriguing...and sad at the same time. Intriguing because I think Byfield uncovers a nerve in the open-source business community, and sad for the very same reason.

While I believe Byfield is wrong to suppose that money trumps ideals in all cases--many of us actually set up our licensing to curb our worst intentions while still allowing us to serve financial interests--he is absolutely right that the tension between code freedom and cash freedom will sometimes, and perhaps often, favor the latter. Here is an excerpt that makes reference to FOSS, or free and open-source software:

...(T)he fact that business is friendly to FOSS does not mean that it has adopted its values. The free software camp's concern with philosophical and political freedom has almost certainly not been adopted by most FOSS-friendly companies, while the open source camp's emphasis on increased software quality is probably shared by middle-management at best. Business--gasp!--is interested in FOSS to improve the bottom line, and often no other reason.

...(S)ooner or later, an open-source business is going to act more like a business and less like a citizen of the FOSS community (although the wise ones will try to stay on good terms with the community in a sort of specialized marketing effort). Often, the laws that restrict the behavior of companies, especially ones that are publicly traded, leave no choice.

Perhaps. But I think Byfield's larger point--that open source is a business decision, but one among many--is more telling and need not lead to the self-contradiction that he points to in the quote above. Used wisely, open source is a way to free up customers from proprietary lock-in, which is a key selling point.

Roy Schestowitz pointed to this post about the Kindle's operating system today: Linux. I didn't know that. Somehow I missed the memo last year when Robert Love wrote about his discovery of Linux at the heart of the Kindle.

I had written about how the Kindle's content strategy reminded me of open source, ...

Well, that didn't take long. As soon as people started to get excited about open-source OpenClip, and its ability to bring copy-and-paste functionality to the iPhone, Apple found a way to shut it down with its 2.1 firmware.

Of course, OpenClip is open source, and perhaps enterprising developers ...

A person close to Vignette and OpenText management told me two interesting tidbits today:

1. Vignette has been going through a round of layoffs recently, packaging itself up for sale, and
2. OpenText just retained Goldman Sachs to help it with some M&A work.

Will we be seeing "OpenVignette" soon? I ...

While I'm not much of a desktop Linux cheerleader, I found this news that the Philippines has rolled out 23,000 Linux desktops to schools very interesting, particularly when read in conjunction with commentary from Malaysia.

The net? Microsoft is heavily subsidizing Windows and Office to keep Linux out, but Linux is proving cheaper ("Microsoft matched the price by offering Windows XP for $US20 a copy and throwing in Office for $US30, but we still came out cheaper") and at least as easy as Windows to use.

In fact, the cost savings from Linux have been so substantial that the Philippines is rolling out its Linux desktop program beyond the 30,000 existing seats, and was even able to purchase an additional 3,000 seats for government use. The rationale is clear:

For those that may be more visually inclined, looking at a few pictures may prove instructive in Linux (and Apache) vs. Windows (and IIS) web server security. The more convoluted the system, the more opportunities to exploit its security:

The basic argument goes like this. In its long evolution, Windows

Firefox is already plenty fast. In one test, it comes in just behind Safari in speed, but in this case, "slightly slower" still means "blazingly fast."

Thanks to Mozilla's pioneering work with TraceMonkey, however, Firefox is about to become even faster. Think massive performance boost.

CNET's Stephen Shankland has already covered the story in detail, ...

Correction at 8:00 a.m. PDT: As a reader pointed out, Red Hat's R&D center is in Westford, Mass.

Even though the data is apparently a bit screwy, I was still really proud to see Utah emerge as the top state for "Linux" searches on Google. ...