ITGumbo: spicing IT up

After posting my original thoughts on industry analysts and open source my initial inclination was to leave the subject at that.  However, Joe Niski from Burton Group left a thoughtful comment which motivated me to add further commentary. Even after responding to Joe's comment on the post I considered a particular statement of his worth exploring in a separate post. Joe mentioned that:

"...unless you're talking about a really well-established best-of-breed product, it's a lot harder to get useful information on OSS projects *unless you're in a position to download, install, and evaluate them first-hand*. i suspect that makes them inaccessible to some analysts."

Savio Rodrigues' post on open source and IT analyst firms got me thinking about how the disruptive nature of open source is affecting not only the business of software but also the industry analyst community. It's well documented that proprietary software companies must begin to evolve alongside the paradigm shift represented by open source but there's less talk about what IT analysts must do to adapt. James McGovern is a big proponent for including open source in the same research as proprietary products a la an open source friendly Magic Quadrant and this is a valid point.

One of the best things about blogs is the conversations they enable. Each blog has its own purpose and reach, but if the conversations could be chained together in the form of trackbacks, comments, response posts et. al they form the makings of a marketplace where the ideas, facts, viewpoints, and even perceptions drive what is an integrated, global bazaar.

Monday's official announcement that Yahoo! would be acquiring Zimbra, a leading open source collaboration and messaging provider, for $350M was (to me) quasi-inevitable and part surprising. I had been keyed off about talks between the two companies sometime back but nothing terribly specific. So when news hit the wire and I scoped the purchase price for Zimbra, my eyebrows raised. Matt Asay already produced commentary on Zimbra's valuation, and I'll only add that I had the company's 2006 revenue pegged at a shade under the $3M mark he has. However, I will attempt to provide some a picture of how Yahoo is going to recoup its $350M as a microcosm of the overall strategic value to be found in purchasing commercial open source software vendors.

Last week, personal technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Walter Mossberg, authored a review of the new Dell-Ubuntu system. The piece came across as honest and objective, but more importantly it I took it as a working outline of how the average (see: mainstream) user views Ubuntu. For those of us 'within the open source house' the classification of Ubuntu as one of, if not the, most polished, end-user oriented Linux distribution is hardly cause for debate. Yet Mr. Mossberg provides an angle that puts the excitement generated by the recent advances towards pre-loaded Linux PC's for the masses, into its proper perspective.

Len DiMaggio's post about his experiences within three different communities is essentially a tale of why those of the open source variety have come to represent a successful form of technology-centric commonwealth. Still, a vision for the next generation of the commons isn't unique to the realm of technology, just as my observation of it isn't groundbreaking. So even if all open source communities aren't created equal, there are several characteristics that stand out amongst those which flourish. Qualities and tendencies which are often taken as a given within the context of open source but can and do go missing within other types of communities.

As Savio pointed out, information veracity and transparency drives markets -- when they're hard to come by markets suffer accordingly. He also noted how transparency in the software acquisition process is what allows open source software to derive value even in the dropping of costs of accretion...a statement with which I'm in total agreement. Savio goes on to question which way a vendor can produce more revenue:

1. Distributing 10 million copies of an OSS product and then trying to convert 0.001%-0.01% of the user base into paying support customers
   
2. Marketing & selling a commercial (non-OSS) product which
   is able to attract 10,000 paying customers (maybe using a SaaS model?)

Several notable announcements were released today in conjunction with LinuxWorld 2007. I suspect that more are in the pipeline waiting to coincide with certain sessions throughout the week.

JasperSoft and MySQL release Business Intelligence ISV/OEM upgrade. The general availability of JasperSoft for MySQL 2.0 offers to ease the prospect of embedding B.I. functionality into products and solutions for the ISV/OEM market. JasperSoft did well to recognize the opportunity for continued growth that MySQL's developer base offers as well as the importance of (in this case) association with the increasingly strong MySQL brand. My only question is why MySQL hasn't joined the Open Solutions Alliance??? JasperSoft CTO Barry Klawans even heads the OSA's interoperability working group...maybe it has something to do with EnterpriseDB's presence? Whatever the case, it seems like a mutually beneficial move both over the short and long term.

Dr. Ari Jaaski, Nokia's director of open source, recently authored a paper titled "Building consumer products with open source," (pdf here, article here) which after reviewing, I consider to be a noteworthy piece about the process of integrating open source software into the consumer product engineering life cycle.

I just got through looking at IT Wire's list of top five most active open source projects on SourceForge, one which portrays an entirely different view of open source software than is typically painted by members of the press and analyst community (of which I happen to be a member). Each of the five projects on the list says something about the current state of open source as a productive force of and movement towards software assets generated for/by the commons. Below is a breakdown of the list: