Matt Asay makes a great point. When you are using a cloud software licenses don’t matter much. (Picture from NASA via Visible Earth.) This has always been true, of course. Ever since the Web was spun, users of Web services have remained blissfully ignorant of disputes over software licenses. Licenses, we don’t need no steenkin’ licenses. What is changing today is ... [
In the latest Black Duck analysis of open source licensing trends, it appears on the surface that the GPL has lost significant market share. That is, until you look inside the numbers. Versions of the GPL are currently being used by 65% of all projects, down from about 70% a year ago, with V3 licensing now on track to become the ... [
Richard Stallman (right) of the Free Software Foundation sees C# and Mono as a Microsoft conspiracy and is warning developers away from it. Stallman’s fear is that Microsoft will use its software patents to force open source C# implementations, and applications, underground. Any move toward bringing C#, which Microsoft developed and Mono, which Microsoft supports, into the center of the Linux ... [
In a highly-recommended post on Friday, our Matt Asay asks a key question. How do we build innovation into open source? (The picture is from Wikipedia. Guess who it is, then click to get the full post.) Taking his title from Eric Raymond’s book, Matt suggests that the proprietary model may be the best way to go here, and suggests that ... [
The recent rumors of Oracle buying Red Hat are false, but are a good indication that business conditions are becoming normal again. (Picture from League City, Texas.) The source of the rumor, according to our own Matt Asay, is Katherine Egbert, an analyst at Jefferies & Co. She’s trying to scare up some merger work, create some action in a slow ... [
I have long argued, here and elsewhere, that open source and the Internet values on which it is based has a political dimension. They make it possible for great changes to occur from the bottom up, organically, transparently. They enable collaboration across continents. It has lately become fashionable to believe my spiel. The Obama election and the Iranian “Twitter” revolution seem ... [
Every industry goes through life stages, just like people. At what stage is open source at, now, in the middle of 2009? Matt Asay says we’re at the growth stage. He is cheered by Red Hat’s latest earnings. So am I. But there is another way to look at this news. Is it possible we have already reached the consolidation phase? ... [
Zoho, which offers Office-compatible applications as services, is now offering a version of Sharepoint, aimed at extending Microsoft’s lock-in of customers. Last year Alfresco began offering support for the Sharepoint protocol, essentially a lock-in key. With Zoho Office for Microsoft® SharePoint® customers have a viable alternative for sharing files, under Microsoft standards, even if they’re not currently paying Microsoft server licenses. ... [
Whatever Nokia and Intel focus on it will be open source. That’s the key takeaway from today’s announcement between the chipmaker and the mobile phone company to develop new devices to compete with the Apple iPhone, RIM Blackberry and Google Android. Software development will be centered on two open source projects: Moblin, originally an Intel project but now run by the ... [
Quite friendly, but also quite serious. The right to fork is the second most-controversial aspect of the open source ideal. Just as some people call the responsibility to share code a rip-off of intellectual property, they are liable to see forks as treason against the parent project. But not always. Josh Lowenson’s introduction to Melody, a fork of open source Movable ... [
The lesson I drew from CompuTex is that open source, by its nature, limits what you can do in the channel by eliminating the marketing dollars needed to do anything. The same may also be true in terms of the law. When the Free Software Foundation wants to go after some deep-pocketed outfit over GPL violations they can do so, knowing ... [
The creative destruction fostered by the Internet and open source struck Canada hard over the weekend. Nortel, once one of the Big Three in telecom equipment (Lucent, now part of Alcatel and Siemens were the others) is being broken up for pennies on the dollar. Its stock is now officially worthless. The end became obvious this weekend in the $650 million ... [
Dietrich H. Schmitz Dietrich T. Schmitz has posted to Groklaw a piece quoting my CompuTex coverage and claiming a dark conspiracy. I hate to disagree, especially with someone boasting such a fine German name as Dietrich H. Schmitz Dietrich T. Schmitz(next to which Dana Blankenhorn sounds almost Irish*), but what happened at CompuTex was no conspiracy. (Note: Cut and paste, Dana. ... [
Do desktops matter? Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation insists they don’t. (The picture is from Terry Jones’ wonderful “flying penguins” ad for the BBC.) As he explained to me during CompuTex, people are more focused today on connectivity and applications. Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop no longer gives it control over whether or not you run open source, and it ... [
Amazon’s release of Kindle source code, coming alongside its complaints about Google Books’ legal agreement, brings up the interesting question of where the power lies in the ebook market. Is it in the look-and-feel of the device? Is it in the content? Is it in the standard? (Picture by David Carnoy for CNET.) While all these are important, I have another ... [We’re entering a recession now or perhaps we’ve been in one since 07, depending who you listen too these days. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective.
During any economic cycle you have companies or industries that are going up and those which are going down. This recession is no different, so I thought I’d point out a couple of bright spots.
SaaS [Software as a Service] seems to do very well in a downturn. This business model has been growing year over year for some time now, but there is nothing like a downturn to cause people to revisit the approach. As costs go up and cash becomes king, companies try to conserve and limit capital expenditures. SaaS is a great alternative to capital expenditures as it takes fix costs that would normally be capital expenditures for systems and software and moves them into a variable cost bucket. This is why we see companies like SalesForce.com showing huge revenue growth during recessions as they did in the 2001 downturn. These company solutions have come a long way over the years and continue to do so.
Having implemented a number of these systems for clients over the years, I have to point out that these are generally true enterprise solutions and as such are not trivial regarding implementation and integration. If your solution goals are similar to an onsite enterprise class solution you should anticipate a similar level of effort in the integration side to achieve full functionality. Once done however, if thought out well, the company should be in a much better position to scale , integrate, or adopt new technologies when the time comes.
“What do they mean our training program is outdated?
We all went through it!”
Training is another area that tends to experience growth during a recession. Companies facing fewer resources opt for training solutions to drive productivity, process, projects, efficiency, and consistency throughout their organizations. Training enriches companies & employees and helps with retention during a downturn. If you look at publicly traded training companies you will find their stock price increasing right now.
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