How not to introduce open source

A recent article on Slashdot covered the topic of how to discuss open source software within the context of the a business. As most of these discussion often do, it focused on the "openness" or availability of the source code as the primary introduction point. I think at this point in the development of open source software, focusing a discussion on the availability of the source code is a waste of time. For small businesses an esoteric discussion over which open source license (GPL vs FreeBSD) is a confusing waste of time. Discuss how this meets the business needs, not the availability of the source code.

MS FUD Misses Mark Again.

Recently Martin Taylor the General Manager of platform strategy at Microsoft, was given the oppurtunity to show complete lack understanding of both the power of the LAMP platform and the power of Linux. This is yet another attempt to take some shine off the Linux apple. I usually love reading these interviews with MS as it shows how much they are missing in regard to LAMP. What's very interesting about these recent pieces here and here is what they indicate about the mind-set of Microsoft and ultimately how they just don't get it.

First off let's dissect the FUD coming from this MS talking head.

"The Linux phenomenon created this emotional hype or spike where, in some ways, people became less concerned about some of these practical issues around cost of ownership, reliability, security and so on,"

Incredible. One of the most insecure operating systems on the planet in active use is Microsoft Windows. Given the huge associated costs with Windows (viruses, spyware, and brittle development) how does anyone with a straight face claim to be the more reliable platform. The simple fact of the matter running Windows in a lab where it cannot be attacked doesn't measure the entire cost of ownership of Windows. Viruses and spyware alone make Windows not worth it.

"They're also realizing they can't migrate and evolve (open-source technology) as much as they had thought. For example, U.S. company Flyi.com handles about 90 percent of travel reservations through their online portal, which they run on Linux and Apache.

The systems were running fine until the company had a huge spike in traffic, and there were all kinds of downtime issues. So they did the upgrades, added a few servers, some hardware, some memory and new technologies around the Web site to do more customer relationship database tracking. It was all very complex, and some of the seams of the Linux architecture were beginning to show. "

Poor design decisions can happen on any platform. Not properly architected a large scale web site and the seams will show in any architecture. I did a little digging on his noted example company Flyi.com Independence Air is now a small low cost airline. The Google Page Rank of their home page is a 7 which while respectatable, is not earth shattering. Their customer story from MS is located here. In that study it's apparent that Independence Air was sold a bill of goods in development of their new system based on Linux. Their first step was to buy a BEA Application server for $75,000. They then hired 5 consultants at 150/hour for six months to customize what should have been a relatively simply project. In this particular case the real weakness of the project wasn't Linux but the Bea Application Server which caused costs to spiral out of control. That combined with grossly incompetent consultants really created the problem. Starting off with a $75,000 closed source application server is not the way to begin a project. I find it interesting that in the customer testimonial, the CIO blamed the consultants instead of his own poor decision making in the process deploying the system.

One quote I find interesting,

"Most IT professionals don't want to be in the business of maintaining system-level software,"

That's true. However businesses that are being built on the LAMP stack use their control of the system at the system level as an economic advantage. Take a look at Google. System level control of the operating system enables them to scale search in a way that has never been done before. This gives them a platform from which to launch new web products that can quickly scale up without the time-consuming

Here's the true telling quote.

"From a competitive standpoint, take Linux, for example. There's really nothing innovative today that Linux does that we can't do. There's no new feature or new design that can be done only on Linux, and not on Microsoft."

The problem is that statement can be turned around. "There's nothing really innovative today that Microsoft does that Linux cannot do." Therein lies the rub for Microsoft. Since the LAMP stack commoditizes large chunks of the software stack, it enables a small set of developers launch projects with relatively little work on the basic stack elements.

Save the Highlands University Software Development Program

I recently started working with the local university which has a software development program. Alas the new president is terminating the program which is somewhat unique. While students are taking traditional Comp Sci courses, they are also doing software development through a mentoring relationship. I find this to be a great idea as software development often benefits from a mentor. Additionally they use a variant on the XP Methodology which is really quite useful.

This sort of mentoring approach to software development lends itself well to teaching and more importantly to producing quality software engineers. Unfortunately the current administration of New Mexico Highlands University feels that the program is either too edgy or not like other programs in the area to warrant continuing it. So they have canceled the program. So like Sisyphus I am going to start an effort to save the program.

First off contact New Mexico Highlands University. Since the University is small, let's contact the Office of the President

For those of you averse to clicking - here's the information. Please note all phone are in the 505 area code and Manny Aragon is the current president of Highlands University


Manny M. Aragon
President's Office
President
Phone: 454-3269
Room: RAB-101

Laura LaCour-Johnson
President's Office
Senior Admin. Asst to the President
Phone: 454-3269
Room: RAB-101

Yvonne M. Quintana
President's Office
Senior Executive Administrative Assistant
Phone: 454-3229
Room: RAB-101

Geez this guy has too assistants? Highlands is a university with 5,000 students. That's one too many assistants.

Open Source Growing Pains

Drupal.org recently had a three day outage. Drupal is a CMS (Content Management System) written in PHP and supported by a MySQL back-end and which with I have just completed a small pilot project. These reflects the relative growing pains with Drupal as young open source project. I say young but Drupal is WILDLY popular. It's popular for several reasons. First it's written in PHP, one of the new young languages that is relatively easy to learn. Secondly it's actually a relatively secure package. Thirdly it pretty damn useful. It's literally community in a box and that's pretty cool.

So I contributed to the project about 80 EUs to help buy the new cluster of servers this project needed. They had long out grown their shared hosting environment but it took a crisis to make the change. They raised over $10,000 for equipment in less than 48 hours. This tells you how popular this project is. So I am encouraging everyone to give Drupal a try. If you like it, support Drupal with a donation.

Dogs and Cats Living Together!

Well this is a welcome change. It appears that Microsoft after an initial reaction of toxic shock to the open source community is beginning to learn to live with it. That's good because the open source community has been around for years and isn't going anywhere.

This accomodation is to be expected and in a way is quite telling. When LAMP first appeared on the Microsoft radar the initial reaction was to spread as much FUD as possible about the free software movement as possible. This resulted in the cancer comment and numerous other child like attacks. When the that didn't really work MS tried their more subtle, yet still wrong approach, the "Get the Facts Campaign" in 2003 . This also appeared to fail in the market as many of the facts were less than factual. MS has got to realize when the users experience tells them something completely different than a Microsoft test, they are going to believe their own eyes.

One thing the dot com boom did was create a huge number of developers familar with the LAMP stack. These developers have been using using this software for years now and are quite familar with it's capabilities. In many regards the dot com crash will help with the long term acceptance of the LAMP stack. Many of these developers either had to find jobs in the corporate world or if they were lucky enough they walked out of the Dot Com crash with some cash. As the developers who were part of the Revolution OS continue moving up the corporate ladder, further acceptance of the LAMP stack is going to continue.

Open Source Innovation

Over at the Microsoft Developers Network there is interview with Steve Ballmer who briefly talks about innovation. Ballmer largely dismisses innovation from the industry leaders such as IBM, Oracle and Apple (all leading innovators in their own right). He briefly lumps the open source movement into this same group. However I think it's important to point out the important innovation of the open source movement is the commoditization of basic software protocals. Because of this commoditization it becomes an innovation engine for business allowing businesses and individuals to launch and develop new business models relatively cheaply.

Take a look at all the innovation that is happening in the web space such as wikis, blogging, geo blogging etc. These all are happening on the open source software stack of MySQL, Apache, PHP, PERL, and Linux. These allows a small shop of developers roll out a site without the added expense of licenses and additional development costs.

I am quite excited about the continually developed tool set that is available to developers today. The type of innovation is web based business models is going to continue for years.

Nightstalker returns?

I have to admit. I don't watch a lot of television. So when ABC announced they were redoing the Night Stalker I totally missed it. So I happened to be wandering over to the ABC website (in search of information on another show "Dancing with C List Celebs"), I noticed the ad for the upcoming show. I naturally clicked on it and read about it. I was a huge fan of the original and totally dug Darrin McGavin. Why? He is a classic proto geek. He dressed poorly even for the early seventies. He wore his hat long after wearing hats was out of style. He carried around a really sweet portable tape recorder which looking back on it was probably more expensive than his car. I really wanted that tape recorder. He believed odd things and suffered through a horrible boss (Tony Vincenzo) and worked in a third tier wire service based out of Chicago.

The newer version has a strong "24" influence based on the rough video clips on the ABC web site. Only one scene begins to capture the flavor of the original, the third clipped where Carl Kolchak is discussing the case with the sexy skeptic. Covering his walls are notes and photographs of the case. Only in that scene do you get a sense of that the Carl Kolchak can become obsessed by strange things. Instead of a actor like Darren McGavin, they have cast Stuart Townsend (you remember him as Dorian Gray in League of Extraordinary Gentleman and the Vamprie Lestat in Queen of the Damned). So we get a young, good looking Carl Kolchak. The question is whether or not Townsend can act through his attractivenews and protray his true geekiness. David Duchovny was able to do so in X-Files. Based on the clips I have seen thus far I would say no. The scenes are far too brightly light. (Remember X-Files guys even daylight didn't seem too bright on that show.) When showing the other worldly on television, darken things. It somehow makes it more believable. Additionally the night stalker was a solo guy. It was just Carl. For this show it looks like they are going with the team approach. There's the sexy skeptic (another reporter), and her camera guy and of course Vincenzo is no longer an over weight Italian guy but a good looking older thin editor. What's wrong with casting real looking people in shows? With reality TV you think people would be used to it by now.

I will probably TIVO the damn show. I hope it doesn't suck. Otherwise it may go into the memory hole that Highlander 2 went too.

Light of Day

The founder of Go Computers is suing MS for largely killing Go's pen computing efforts. Due to the fact that the information on the internet is so sparse before the last ten years, most people wouldn't remember Go. Go was at the time a pretty promising idea in pen computing. While the technology was relatively under developed, and probably to immature, Microsoft decided to kill the technology by making a pen computing division and then spreading enough FUD and strong armed ISVs to make sure that development partners didn't do any development for Go's platform. Eventually they killed Go and then promptly closed their pen computing division. Sound familar? It should as it's exactly what they did with IE & Netscape.

Well with some many facts coming out during the MS anti-trust trial, it shouldn't be surprising that more light of day lawsuits are coming about.

Happy Comet Smashing Day

Bruce Willis would be proud.