Author: JP

10 reasons for enterprises to use opensource

I don’t really understand why it happens, but for some reason far too many people think opensource is free as in gratis rather than free as in freedom. As a result, when I ask people why they would use opensource, the answers are framed in the context of cost. The three commonest answers I get are:

(a) cheaper to “buy”

(b) cheaper to run

(c) cheaper to fix

This not-so-subtle positioning of opensource as “free” somehow translates to the enterprise equivalent of pinko communist left-handed tree-hugging vegetarian, and that’s all she wrote. End of story.

So I thought it was time to provide ten reasons of a different sort….

1. Opensource makes you responsible. When you choose the components yourself, you don’t have a vendor to scream at. Or, as is often the case, a whole heap of vendors to scream at, each merrily pointing all known fingers (and a few unknown ones) at everyone else. While you fume and stew.

2. Opensource makes it easier for you to get married. When your architecture is primarily based on opensource components, software and data integration costs stay low and the process works.

3. Opensource makes you more attractive. To graduates and first-jobbers, members of Generation M, opensource has an iPod-like halo. And they know how to use the tools as well.

4. Opensource keeps your tail in shape. Scarcity models are by definition not scale-free; a hit culture prevails. Opensource, given the lower barriers to entry, allows someone to build a left-handed credit derivatives juicer because he felt like it. There’s a long-tail effect. You are more likely to find esoteric tools in an opensource world than in a closed source one. Opensource people don’t go around asking “Is there a market for this?” They solve problems and see if others have similar problems to solve.

5. Opensource makes you look younger. There’s an elixir-0f-youth effect, a future-proofing that comes from using opensource. You cannot be blackmailed at the altar of Forced Upgrade. You have optionality. That is the Free that is Opensource. The implied optionality.

6. Opensource makes you cleverer. You innovate faster because you have access to faster innovation. Whenever you look at an opensource ecosystem, try and compare it with a closed-source version. Compare it in terms of the time taken for launching in different countries, languages, whatever. I should say “try to compare it in terms of….”. There is no comparison.

7. Opensource makes you a man/woman of the world. Globalisation is about global markets and global resources and global communications. When you use opensource components, you are more likely to find people all over the world with the right knowledge and skills; proprietary skills require proprietary investment.

8. Opensource makes you fitter. Most opensource components are seen as infrastructure, as commodity, and people often say that opensource is therefore about commodity. I’ve made that mistake as well. I think we’ve got cause and effect mixed up here. Opensource commoditises, and therefore creates commodity. When you get commoditised, you tend to look for other things to differentiate you, make you stand out. You get “fitter” as a result, with the two prongs of commoditisation and looking-for-fresh-differentiation.

9. Opensource makes you more famous. At least one of the essences of opensource is Given Enough Eyeballs. Linus’s Law. The opensource model attracts eyeballs.

10. Opensource makes you safer. When code is open to inspection it is harder to create backdoors; harder to exploit weaknesses because the weaknesses get fixed faster; harder to make monoculture threats because there is a form of natural selection taking place.

And yes, the first three standard reasons are true as well. Opensource does make you richer.

Tiptoeing Through the Tulips

Nice to see friend and erstwhile colleague Nigel start blogging externally, gently wondering about the markets that are mushrooming around the Global Warming theme. Welcome, Nigel.

Getting Confused about Search

Over the last few months, I’ve been hearing this term quite a bit: “search fatigue”. Since I had absolutely no idea what it meant, I thought I’d check. So I Googled it.

Until I saw what came up, if I’d been asked to guess what it meant, I’d have tried some variant on information overload or infoglut. Instead, what I got as search result number one was this article, suitably headlined Search Fatigue.

I read it. And I didn’t understand it. I quote from the article (which itself quotes from an article by Jeffrey Beall in a magazine called American Libraries):

Search fatigue, according to Beall, is a feeling of dissatisfaction when search results do not return the desired information.

“The root cause of search fatigue,” Beall told me, “is a lack of rich metadata and a system that can exploit the metadata.”

I read that, and re-read it. So search fatigue is an academic-sounding term for Google rage. Okay, I got that. And the next sentence was also fine; the richer the metadata, the richer one can make the search experience. So far so good. But soon after that I got confused. Beall went on:

For example, metadata-enabled searching, as you find in a library when it searches through its databases for resources, “allows for precise author, title, and subject searches,” Beall says. In other words, it looks only in the fields you request, rather than searching through the entire document. If you name the author, it looks only in the author field of each document, thus returning only relevant hits.

If Beall is being quoted correctly, he is asserting that deterministic search actually improves the search experience.

Everything I have learnt about search points the other way. Formal data structures, key fields, primary keys, these are all the ways we lost information in the first place. In fact tree structures were probably more responsible for losing things than everything else put together; have you ever tried looking for archived mail or files you Saved rather than Saved As on your PC?

I thought we were moving away from deterministic search to probabilistic models. I thought people at Google and Technorati and wherever else were finding ways to raise the relevance of amorphous poorly-filed information, using a variety of artifices to reflect the value of links and references. I thought we would be heading towards the next generation of collaborative filtering, where I can “pass” my search bias to someone else, or for that matter perform Boolean operations on search bias.

The problem that needs solving is not to do with finding things that have been well labelled and well filed. That we have always been able to do. What we haven’t been able to do is to find the messy stuff, partially named, partially remembered, often misfiled, often misclassified.

Valuing opensource

It’s getting more and more fashionable to buy an opensource company. Quite often, the buyer is a closed-source company.

For about a decade I earned a living as a salesman, selling software services. And when I started, I remember being told “a salesman is only as good as his next sale”.

I think that something similar needs to be said about opensource companies. Their value is not in the IP they produced in the past; instead, it vests in the IP they will produce in the future. Which is why the community is important. I am aware that a very small number of people really contribute to an opensource project, any opensource project; but what they contribute becomes valuable because of the community.

No community, no value. Caveat emptor.

More random musings on opensource: States and Transitions

I said I would revert to the theme with which Dan Farber ended his opensource post: the inevitability of hybrids.

Why are hybrids inevitable? I think it all boils down to what Stephen Smoliar and Gordon Cook have been talking about recently, both in the shape of comments here as well as in their own blogs. [Blogs overlap and underlap all over the place, like real conversations….].

States and Transitions.

Many of us know where we want to go, but the path is not yet clear. We know what today represents. We know what tomorrow should look like. But we struggle with the in-between.

That in-between, the transition, tends to have three characteristics

1. Everyone’s Entitled to My Opinion

Polarisation: Opinions get polarised. Everything is about Big Ends versus Little Ends. Blefuscu Redux. Proprietary versus open. Petrol versus electric. VHS versus Betamax.

2. You say Tomahto, I say Tomayto

Meme battles: The battle switches to ideas and terms as we strive to make sense of it all. The language gets less civil, more intense, as passions move past simmering point. When words are the only weapons the air tends to get its own tinge of blue.

3. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose

While 1 and 2 are going on, with each side battling in glorious technicolor, the world carries on. And pragmatic people build pragmatic business models and exchange pragmatic value.

We’re all part of this ecosystem. It is said that each plant has its own specific parasite and its own specific pest, that famines were caused by people who carried plants to far-off lands without the apposite pest-parasite pairing. It’s not always clear what our roles are, who the pest is, who the parasite is. Maybe some of us who blog are pests. Maybe the media that feeds on our doings are parasites. Whatever it is, the outcome can and should be a healthy plant.

Hybrids represent transition. And some process of natural selection, as different hybrid strains battle it out for top slot; some atrophy and die, some adapt and survive.

So we have hybrids.

An aside. Hugh Macleod had this to say in a recent post. Over 95% of all Microsoft revenues come from their partners.

Think about it. What keeps the ecosystem going? Who is the pest? Who is the parasite? And is the plant healthy as a result?

Distribution channels are partners. Ecosystem members are partners. Customers are partners.

As we move from proprietary to open worlds, we are seeing another transition. The customer is becoming the partner. And not a day too soon.