Chrome: Google’s New Operating System With Built-in Web Browser - Larry Augustin wonders about where will Google go next.

Red Hat Escalates Hypervisor Wars - billy Marshall speculates on the last Red Hat  acquisition of Qumranet.

Intel acquires Linux distro developer - Intel acquiring the UK-based embedded Linux services company OpenHand will eventually raise more interest among developers? (via slashdot)

Google Chrome vs Opera, Firefox and IE tests - Chrome seems really fast, Google has been fast to change Chrome’s EULA. looking forward to see the mobile version, though.

I spent the last days reading ”Zenoss Core,” a book from Packt, the UK based publisher that just announced the finalists of this year Open Source CMS Award, as reported also by one of the judges.

The book has been written by Michael Badger, who is neither a Zenoss project member nor a Zenoss employee, but one of the many Zenoss community members. The author explains all, starting from installation and finishing with monitoring, and is definitely a good step-by-step for beginners.

Experienced users might find too little details about MIBs, but a whole chapter is aimed at extending Zenoss with Zenpacks and Zenoss plug-ins.

Technorati Tags: open source monitoring, commercial open source, book, packt, michaelbadger, open soure cms award, network monitoring

Updates from the Open Source Census, the survey launched in April by OpenLogic to collect quantitative data on the use of open source software.

Up today 2,181 machines have been scanned with OSS Discovery, discovering over 767 unique open source packages and nearly 300,000 open source package inm    stallations. founding on average 57 unique packages per enterprise.

Stormy Peters, now Executive Director of The GNOME Foundation, in the press release talking about how open source software compares across different operating systems says:

 As expected, Linux (an open source operating system) had the most with an average of 87 instances of open source found per scanned system. FreeBSD (also open source) was a close second at 81, but Mac wasn’t far behind with 75. Judging by the large number of Macs seen at open source conferences like OSCON and LinuxWorld, there are probably a lot of Mac users who are open source fans.

Windows, although not open source, still had a respectable amount of installed open source software, with an average of 39 instances per scanned system.

I suspect that the average Mac user is not an open source enthusiast, likely respondents belong to the OSCON and Linuxworld crowds. I would definitely be more interested in reading surveys run in broader audiences, though.

Register anonymously to the census, if interested.

Technorati Tags: open census, open source usage, StormyPeters

Matt Asay few days ago wrote an inspirational blog post about open source revenues, bringing Larry Augustin to add some salt to the conversation, concluding that customers need to be educated to the real value of open source.

Try harder! by eyelightfilms

Larry meets regularly buyers and CIOs around the world, and he definitely has a pretty unique view on the commercial open source market, so I trust him when he says that customers need to be educated to the value of an explicit and incremental cost structure.

Part of the challenge is educating customers about this different model. The Open Source company needs to explain to the customer that they can pay for consulting services to support their pilot, and then pay for the subscription service as opposed to getting the pilot for free from the proprietary vendor but now having to pay a large licensing fee when they deploy.

Open source vendors trying to convince customers of that, unfortunately are asking potential customers to share not only the opportunities (incremental investments, pay per use, etc) but also the risks. In fact they would end paying for pilots and trials, and I can hardly see many of them willing to do it.

I totally agree with Larry saying that it would be better for customers in the long run, or to better say, it could. As a matter of fact proprietary vendors are providing potential customers with a lot of value beyond the license marketing the organization and its products and services, developing partnerships with hardware or software vendors, investing in pre-sales meeting and so on.

Before experiencing dramatic savings, as Jonathan Schwartz says, potential customers need to get facts and figures about those and potential price savings, and things like the guide to lower database TCO whitepaper or the MySQL savings calculator seem just to start going in the right direction.

Red Hat learned the lesson, spending a lot in advertising, and not only.

Still need upfront money? Ask your VC, and tell them what else and how you are going to sell.

Technorati Tags: open source revenue, open source marketing, Sun, MySQL, Red Hat, JonathanSchwartz, LarryAugustin, MattAsay

OpenLogic just announced yet another webinar on open source scripting Languages for JVM.

Rod Cope, CTO and Founder of OpenLogic, will present this webinar, providing a comparison of key attributes for the most popular scripting languages for the JVM.

Open source scripting languages for the JVM like Groovy, JRuby, and Jython have become popular alternatives to programming languages like Java, C#, and C++ as well as traditional scripting languages like Ruby, Python, Perl, and PHP. Developers are increasingly turning to this new generation of scripting languages because code is faster and easier to write, read, and understand. Scripting languages for the JVM also provide the power of the Java platform without having to write Java code.

• Which languages are easiest (and hardest) to learn?
•  What types of development are best suited to each language?
•  How do the top languages compare in terms of ease of use?
•  What are the strengths and weaknesses of each language?
•  Which open source frameworks and other packages work best with each language?

Register now.

The GNU project yesterday celebrated the 25th anniversary by releasing “Happy Birthday to GNU,” a short film featuring the English humorist, actor, novelist and filmmaker Stephen Fry.

Happy Birthday Richard! by peribanyez

The Free Software Foundation after “Defective by Design“, the brilliant campaign launched to protect our digital freedoms, did a great move managing to bring Fry on the free software board. He generously donated his time to the cause of free software.

Well done, and happy hacking!

Technorati Tags: free software, FSF, Defective by design, happy birthday, StephenFry

The launch of the Open Source Observatory and Repository for European Public Administrations will be held in Màlaga on the 20th of October during the Open Source World Conference, one of the most important FLOSS event in Europe.

The draft agenda, available at the IDABC website, starts at 9.15 with a an hour workshop on FLOSS procurement, a very hot topic at least by Italian public administrations. Marco Battistoni, Unisys OSOR Technical Manager, will later introduce the audience to the new European repository, talking about the platform and its services.

In the afternoon a round table moderated by Karel DeVriendt, IDABC Head of Unit, will give highlights on a selection of European open source projects. Among them Wollmux and the Qualipso project.

Technorati Tags: OSOR, Open Source Repository, IDABC, MarcoBattistoni, KarelDeVriendt

Yesterday I walked through Sourceforge end-users’ needs, trying to figure out how Sourceforge might travel to accommodate their needs. Today we’ll look at what organizations and developers might want, keeping a closer eye on competitors’ offering and how to possibly stay ahead of them.

Portrait of a software developer by zakq100

Organizations.

Let’s start from local and central public administrations. Forges like the European Open Source Observatory and Repository cost a lot of money, helping IDABC and other national or regional organizations to allocate their resources to better help dissemination of practices in using open source software. To enter this market Sourceforge should likely spend some effort to provide users with projects migration tools and also to be compliant with European interoperability standards. Public administrations might well be interested in reaching Sourceforge’s audience, targeting local SMEs and PAs through specific newsletters, taking advantage of Krugle to search code, or more advanced features like a method to rate developers and contributors, etc. I think in this area Sourceforge could really make a difference. Competitors like Collabnet probably simply can’t reach 30 million of users a month, and are probably more focused on the enterprise market. All in all Sourceforge could even provide public administrations with a free service, retaining the possibility to sell advertisements or sponsorship to local IT vendors.

Fixing the “open source mediation conundrum” - namely the fact that any given customer has a component distribution that falls everywhere on the long tail - is more of an opportunity than a challenge to Sourceforge. Stormy Peters rightly says that developers involved with open source projects in the long tail are reachable by forums and email. That is just how OpenLogic maintains relationships with developers on 400 projects. Other organizations, either IT consumers or producers (system integrators included) might need help with that. Sourceforge could commercialize value added mediation services for projects not covered by OpenLogic, whose support probably doesn’t scale beyond a few hundred components, as Domic Sartorio said. Similar speculations stand for stacks not supported by SpikeSource, though. Sourceforge in order to answer the open source mediation conundrum should stretch its ears, going beyond making audience and eventually enabling users/customers collaboration through its community. Moving from group forming networks aimed at distribute software (one-to-many communications) and enabling intra-project transactions among peers to fostering inter-projects communications, creating affiliation, is a strategic decision. Exploiting the power of networks to this extent, forming and fostering inter-projects collaborations, could allow Sourceforge to compete also with organizations like the Collaborative Software Initiative.

Developers.

Launching a “Geek for hire” program would be a great thing. Starting by asking developers to opt in to the service, collaborating locally with employment service providers like Manpower, and finally taking advantage of the deep knowledge about Sourceforge users’ skills. Sourceforge today has access to likely the largest global network of talent, and could deliver a pretty unique permanent or temporary recruitment service. Ohloh is already providing information about Sourceforge’s developers, and it is time to offer similar or better services. Now.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, business models, ohloh, sourceforge, manpower, spikesource, openlogic, collabnet, dominicsartorio, idabc, osor, forge

InitMarketing teamed up with Olliance Group and we’ll present a workshop entitled Building an Effective Commercial Open Source Strategy at Open Source in Mobile (OSiM) conference, Berlin, September 19th. My fellow Roberto already posted some details about the OSiM workshop.

I got some 25% discount vouchers for the conference (valid until Friday, Sept 5th) - shoot me an email or leave a comment and I’ll get one to you.

Five years ago, on 24 September 2003, the European Parliament adopted some amendments to limit the scope of software patentability, listening to many European SMEs and associations. Today A global coalition of more than 80 software companies, associations and developers has declared the 24th of September to be the “World Day Against Software Patents“.

On 24 September 2008, the World Day Against Software Patents will provide volunteers with the opportunity to express the growing concerns of users, businesses and developers. The granting of software patents by patent offices around the world affects their freedom to innovate. The organisers expect 24h of activities across the globe. Volunteers will gather in front of patent offices to inform the general public of the problems underlying software patenting.

A global petition demanding to effectively stop software patents worldwide will be launched on the same day. In some regions of the world such as Europe, the United States, or India, dedicated campaigns are being prepared by local supporters. The organisers intend to celebrate the World Day on an annual basis unless substantive clarifications are adopted in national laws that stop software patenting along with their effects on the digital economy.

Sign the petition.

Read FFII press release and go to the  Stop Software Patents website for further information.

Technorati Tags: software patents, FFII, Stop Software Patents

Understanding Sourceforge stakeholders’ expectations might help Sourceforge to better exploit opportunities and manage challenges ahead, considering also actual and future scenarios in terms of competition.

Focusing the camera on end-users by Pete Ashton

Thinking of mechanisms to capture the value of FOSS Group Forming Networks, Sourceforge today is largely taking advantage of the opportunity to sell advertisements and sponsorships, it is experimenting with transactions through its SF marketplace and sells on demand collaborative development resources. Sourceforge don’t sell individual subscriptions, neither sells information or other value added services for collaborative software production.

Advertising has increased in recent years, and advertisers and sponsors - ubiquitous stakeholders in the internet era - might be interested to persuade potential customers to buy some services Sourceforge is not selling today. I could go into deeper detail on that, but I will leave that for another post later. Now let’s focus on some stakeholders’ needs.

End users.

End-users want just software meeting their needs. Easy to say, harder to put in practice. For example, considering users looking for a CMS. They can step by cmsmatrix and get a clue by searching a CMS for the many available criteria. Unfortunately there are few similar resources on the net, and Sourceforge is definitely in the position to know which are the more frequent searches. Specific whitepapers to help people to make decisions could be sold for a fee or funded by a sponsor.

Sourceforge top downloads pages could be enriched with rollovers shortly describing the programs, links to pages containing tips&tricks, and a “users who downloaded this program also downloaded” list, as Amazon does.

Q&A like Yahoo answers or Linkedin questions could really help to effectively build the SF.net community. Despite Google answer failed to accomplish the task to create a knowledge market, the idea to make it only for questions about FOSS could worth some speculations.

Peer to peer network users.

In Europe we feel the urgency to take action against the European lobby trying to criminalize P2P usage, and I totally understand this is not Sourceforge’s battle. But I think Sourceforge could find ways to highlight legitimate, professional uses for that technology. Someone from the Sourceforge crew told me that it could be achieve by offering BitTorrent as an alternate download mechanism for SourceForge.net and reporting on Sourceforge editorial sites that Blizzard uses BitTorrent legitimately for World of Warcraft downloads and patches.

Only World of Warcraft reached 10 million users, so educating communities of gamers to open source software usage seems important to me, considering their average age and social network skills.

Next I will cover the enterprise side, either from developers’ and organizations’ points of view.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, sourceforge, business models, Q&A, market knowledge, yahoo answers, google answer, linkedin questions, world of warcraft, group forming networks, peer to peer

Focusing on iPhone - Raven after 2.5 years as the Open Source Research Director for The 451 Group is now focusing on the iPhone. I knew about his passion for the iPhone (he is the founder of iPhoneDevCamp) and I wish him all the best as iPhone advisor.

Google Code reverses open-source licence ban -  Google changes its mind about MPL and EPL, reversing the decision to not host programs released with those licenses on google site. Chris Di Bona explains why, AGPL remains banded.

Open Hack 2008 - Hack is back, September 12-13 at Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale. Over 30 web services and APIs. Search, geo, music, mobile, and more. If interested request an invite at: hackday.org.

Paris Capitale du Libre - FNILL, the French National Federation of Open Source Software Industry, is organizing the third edition on September 24-25.  During the event on the 24th will be held the first European Opensource Lawyers Event.

The Open Source World Conference - Malaga will be hosting from October 20 to 22 the sixth edition of OSWC.. I will attend to give a speech on open standards compliance.

Having a seat on the Sourceforge advisory board, lately I have been thinking about who are the stakeholders of world’s most famous open source repository, and how Sourceforge might travel to accommodate their changing needs.

A possible taxonomy by recursion sees recursion

Searching for Sourceforge on Google the first three different results summarize different aspects of how people look at it (bold emphasis is mine):

The world’s largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications
(source: sourceforge.net).

A media, services and e-commerce network that provides and promotes Open Source software downloads, development, discussion and news. (source: sourceforge Inc., NASDAQ LNUX).

SourceForge.net is a source code repository and acts as a centralized location for software developers to control and manage open source software development. SourceForge.net is operated by Sourceforge, Inc. (formerly VA Software) and runs a version of the SourceForge software, forked from the last open-source version available. As of August 2008, SourceForge.net hosts more than 180,000 projects and more than 1.9 million registered users, although it does contain many dormant or single-user projects
(source: wikipedia).

Some stakeholders’ point of views in regards to what Sourceforge is are implicitly represented by those definitions, a taxonomization of all Sourceforge’s stakeholders is probably needed to better define how better support all of them.

Let’s start from the developers.

There are three different subcategories of developers interested in Sourceforge: newbies, experienced and professionals.

Newbies can’t access any resource to easily jump start a development project. SF.net is definitely not aimed at them.

Experienced developers’ needs are well matched by SF.net, offering them an integrated web platform to build software, centralizing development management for no cost and helping project visibility.

Professionals, people making a living of it, needing to accurately track donwloads or willing to have full control of their repositories, today can’t easily migrate their projects in and out of SF.net, and they often choose to run their own forge.

But if it is true that they don’t need a software development platform, many of them are happy with an high ranked page referring to their project. Guerilla marketing’s fans maybe also interested in selling services through the SF marketplace, but the presence of competitors at (less than) a click away could be a problem.

Peer-to-peer network users.

All they need is an easy access to downloading their favorite file-sharing tool. Even if they can hardly seen as part of the SF developers community, since they pay little (if any) interest in free software, they are a very significant part of the whole users base.

Public and Private Organizations.

Organizations using SF facilities to build communities, are open and interested to a wide collaboration, probably going beyond the peer production of code, maybe willing to find an answer to the open source conundrum. Public administrations willing to share open source code are likely interested in sharing also solutions and experiences.

End users.

End users look for software to fulfill their idiosyncratic needs. Often their ability to conduct an effective software selection process is little, as is scarce the probability to find a solution to their unique problems in few clicks.

Next I will cover the competitive landscape and opportunities in front of Sourceforge.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, long tail, sourceforge, open source mediation, open source marketplace, commons peer production

DNI Open Source Conference 2008, September 11-12, 2008 in Ronald Reagan Building in Washington DC - The Office of the Director of National Intelligence announces that the “DNI Open Source Conference 2008″ will be held on 11-12 September in Washington DC. Read also their blog (via Kent’s blog). Agenda and break-out sessions are on line.

Linux Plumbers Conference -  16-19 September, Portland, Oregon. Have a look at the program.

Openmind 2008 - COSS, the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions, organizes the 5th Openmind conference in association with the MindTrek conference, on Tuesday October 7th, in Tampere, Finland. I will moderate the Open source - fully integrated with business? session. I am looking forward to talk again with Martin Michlmayr and all the others.

Groundwork, the provider of the open source based IT management and network monitoring solution, is getting momentum in financial services environments.

Mary Knox of Gartner Research, says that the adoption of OSS is most notable in the financial sector because “they are impacted by escalating transaction volumes and data processing requirements as well as cost pressures”.

I asked David Dennis, senior director of product marketing at Groundwork, to tell me if his experience confirms Mary’s ideas on why adoption is arising in the financial sector.

Earlier this year, GroundWork conducted a survey of the GroundWork Monitor user community, including both users of the free, Community Edition and the subscription-based Professional and Enterprise versions. There were 361 completed surveys, a large enough sample size to be statistically significant.

One of the questions asked was “Please indicate the importance of the following attributes of open source software when evaluating systems management technologies.” In order of ranking, the top answers were:

1. Continuity of technology support over time
2. Access to a wide community of experts
3. Ability to combine OSS tools together more easily
4. Less expensive
5. Higher quality product
6. Easier to customize
7. Avoiding vendor lock-in
8. More secure code
9. Access to the source code
10. Compliance with organizational mandates to use OSS

I agree with Davids saying that the cost savings doesn’t appear to be the most important factor, since commercial and extensive support sounds definitely more interesting to customers (along with integrating different OSS tools together).

How about the percentage of your subscriber base upgrading (nearly 30%)?

While GroundWork does have an increasing number of customers who use GroundWork Monitor Enterprise from the very beginning, the upgrade percentage is a reflection of customers who have moved from either GroundWork Monitor Community Edition or GroundWork Monitor Professional to GroundWork Monitor Enterprise. These are deployments that are expanding their use of GroundWork Monitor, looking to add some of the capabilities GroundWork Monitor Enterprise can offer. Namely, support for distributed topologies, standby servers for high availability, or extended network management functions. GroundWork’s largest deployments are now above 10,000 managed servers, split across multiple geographic locations.

Thank you David, I see the increase include also customers upgrading from GroundWork Monitor Professional to GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, and not only users becoming customers. Even if you didn’t find yet the philosopher’s stone I believe that running similar surveys can help Groundowork and other open source firms to better understand your market.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, groundwork, open source monitoring

Sixty days ago, Nokia announced it was buying the rest of Symbian Corp., and would then open source SymbianOS using the Eclipse Public License through a newly created Symbian Foundation. This is a great announcement. Stephen O'Grady did an excellent Redmonk Q&A analysis at the time. Nat Torkington also had cogent analysis on what it may mean with respect to Android. There was lots of other commentary, however, that wanted to portray this as a last ditch effort against Android, Linux and LiMo, and the coming wave of the iPhone. Let's step back for a moment.

This is a fantastic exit for Symbian. They're celebrating their 10th anniversary at the peak of their game with enormous market share, but there was going to be trouble on the horizon. If you saw the Symbian presentations of a couple of years ago, they all looked to China, India, and the other developing economies and assumed a proportionate claim of market share. But here's the rub — when you start talking a few dollars royalty per handset then royalties quickly fall into the billions of dollars when you consider "handsets for [India | China]". For a billion dollars, I can start thinking about other alternative operating systems and indeed that's what Symbian's primary shareholders began doing.

Motorola delivered the Ming phone into China on a cut-down Linux base. This was almost a year before the iPhone "happened" and for the Chinese market was arguably a much more useful "phone". (Full stylus input for Chinese characters — think about that and texting.) The Ming was the first 2MP pixel camera (with business-card-to-contacts-database software that worked with the camera), a media player, and came in a sleek package. This was likely just the beginning of the shift away from SymbianOS in emerging markets, especially considering there are Chinese companies working on cut-down Linux-for-mobile platforms as well.

The announcement was a great acquisition for Nokia. For on the order of two years of royalty payments to Symbian, they now own the whole asset, regardless of whether they share it. But Nokia too was considering how to best work in the open source community and using Linux as a base for around the N770/N800 series Internet tablets.

Let's look at the competitive landscape for a moment before looking at the enormous opportunity in front of Nokia and the Symbian Foundation.

The "Competitors"
The iPhone isn't competition for SymbianOS. The iPhone, true to Apple's history of profitability over market share and its cult of design and usability, is an amazing consumer experience. The complete Apple experience depends upon controlling the entire technology stack in a tightly integrated fashion. In Christensen economic models, the iPhone is a new class of product and will deliver more value to its customer target over the coming years through tight control and integration than can be delivered through standardized interfaces and components, and Apple will reap the margin benefits. That same focus on function and design also means Apple will never own 65% of the global market — it won't be producing $25 iPhones for Africa anytime soon. What Apple has demonstrated to the mobile industry with the iPhone is what the mobile web experience can be. They may have "only" sold a couple million units in their first year, but they are driving 65% of the web's mobile traffic on iPhones/iTouch devices (stat from Jason Grigsby's excellent OSCON presentation). The iPhone is an innovation example for Symbian, not a competitive threat.

Google's Android is interesting. Google wants to drive application development with Android that uses Google services to find ways to grow their ad revenue as the mobile web comes into its own. They are discovering the difficulties of delivering a handset OS — something around which the Symbian engineering team has a lot of experience. Since Google isn't actually a device company, this feels like an opportunity for each of them to explore their complementary spaces. Google application services running on a Symbian base would seem to be a win for Google and application developers trying to settle on a model while allowing Symbian to do what it does best and focus on developing a strong developer community. Since the Symbian Foundation will not be under a market competitive revenue gun, profit-centric competitive decisions are removed that might have historically put co-operating with Google at risk. Android should be an opportunity, and not a competitive threat.

LiMo was created to provide a common Linux fork for mobile. The mobile handset manufacturers have shared technology through Symbian Inc. for ten years. As the industry changed and the royalty became a problem, they all wrestled with Linux. They need a royalty free OS, but trying to integrate into the Linux community has been a source of frustration for quite some time. Things that are critically important to handset manufacturers aren't necessarily even interesting to the mainstream Linux community. Each handset manufacturer was forced to fork their own. Before Android (a company-centric platform from a non-device company) and before Symbian became open source, LiMo was likely the best opportunity for a shared royalty-free platform. The most damning thing for LiMo pre-Symbian was probably Nokia's proven ability to work in the open source community to develop the N770 without a fork. The Symbian Foundation use of the Eclipse Public License will also likely make handset manufacturers much more comfortable — the EPL IBM-lineage ensured that the hardware patent clause was still intact. So LiMo is not a competitive threat for Symbian, but the reverse is not so true.

Windows Mobile is not interesting. Microsoft has seen mobile computing coming for sometime, but there are several problems. First there's the royalty problem. Second there's the open source culture versus IP protection problem, both internally and from an external partner perspective. Lastly, there's a very subtle cultural problem. In the early days of mainframes and minicomputers, users thought in terms of a data record/transaction metaphor. The PC introduced users to a document metaphor for computing. The mobile phone space uses a communications metaphor. Microsoft thinks of the mobile phone space as a small powerful PC used to read Word documents to drive data revenues for the mobile network operators, and that's not the sort of mindset the handset manufacturers have. (Another startling statistic from Jason Grigsby's excellent OSCON presentation: 2007 SMS revenues were $100B, which is more than the Hollywood box office, DVD sales and rentals, the music industry, and video game sales combined.) So while Windows Mobile was interesting in a pre-Symbian Foundation world, it still only had a quarter of the deployment of SymbianOS, and now Symbian will be royalty free. So Windows Mobile is not a competitive threat for Symbian, but the new Symbian Foundation done right will definitely threaten Windows Mobile.

It was interesting to see almost no discussion over the past couple of months around Ubuntu Mobile Internet Device (MID) Edition or Intel's Mobile Linux project (moblin.org). Each of them are carefully not targeting the mobile phone space but are forward looking to "the mobile internet" using in-vehicle devices and netbooks as their examples. It will be interesting to see how this space evolves as the mobile phone grows up into the space, and the laptop/notebook space shrinks down.

Next we'll look at the opportunity in front of the Symbian Foundation: Nokia and the Symbian Foundation Opportunity - Part II

The previous post looked at the Nokia acquisition of Symbian from the competitive perspective. Let's now look at the opportunities and challenges for Nokia and the new Symbian Foundation. Remember that assuming successful regulatory approval, there will be no Symbian Ltd. anymore. Nokia will need to manage the challenges that come with any acquisition. When you buy a company, you essentially acquire the assets (in this case the software), the intellectual capital of the employees, and the customers.

This acquisition is particularly interesting as key Symbian Ltd. shareholders and customers have banded together to deliver the primary software assets into a not-for-profit organization. There's a great white paper outlining the initial strategy on the currently minimalist Symbian Foundation site.

Essentially:

• Nokia will acquire the remaining shares of Symbian Ltd. that it doesn't already own.
• Symbian Ltd. employees become Nokia employees.
• Fujitsu, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DOCOMO, and Sony Ericsson (all Symbian Foundation board members with the exception of Fujitsu) will contribute SymbianOS, S60, UIQ, MOAP and related software and documentation assets to the newly formed foundation.
• The initial board directors will be AT&T, LG, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung Electronics, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.
• The foundation launches (expected in early 2009) and all the assets will be available to members under a royalty-free license.
• A new platform will be developed from SymbianOS and S60 with selected components of UIQ and MOAP. The first release of the unified Symbian Foundation platform is expected to be available during 2009. The platform will offer the means to build a complete mobile device while providing the tools to differentiate devices through tailoring of the user experience, applications and services.
• The new platform is to be backwards compatible with SymbianOS v9 and S60 3rd Edition.
• Platform assets will be made available as open source gradually over the next 2 years, with the intent to use the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0, making the platform code available to all for free.

Most of this is fantastic news. The economics of code sharing, value preservation of the intellectual asset, and innovation capture will be delivered through the foundation with the primary stakeholders sharing the costs. This is a perfect example of the economics of shared development in this particular market space and "why open source software."

Organization and governance of the new Foundation will be key. The foundation is open to all and membership will cost US$1500. The primary board members will share all the operational costs. This seems a reasonable way to manage the cost — it's likely much cheaper than historical royalty payments and it scales well versus a fixed premium membership fee structure seen in other places. The white paper describes the functioning of the foundation based on the following structure.

As a side observation, it would behoove Intel to get involved early on, conceivably as a primary board member and share the costs. As the mobile world of phones and laptops converge, they should be investing beyond moblin.org. That is NOT to say that the mobile world will be a single class of devices in the future, but rather the space will overlap for some time and I would think Intel would want to participate as widely as possible.

So where are the edges that need to be carefully considered in the new Symbian Foundation?

• While the foundation is open to all, and the list of membership benefits is well defined today (in the white paper), one of the benefits reads: Right to access and modify foundation source code, and contribute code to the foundation. This needs to be rethought along the lines of how the Eclipse Foundation manages committers and contributors. The Symbian Foundation is deliberately cutting off unknown sources of contribution if they make it a membership benefit. There is no loss of control in encouraging (and vetting) contributions from as wide a population as possible. Putting gates around the community early, or discouraging contributors looks arrogant and risks the community's participation and growth at precisely the time when it is most needed. Microsoft certainly demonstrated how fast you could pour cold water on a community with the Rotor project. Motorola had its early Linux community vanish. Heavy-handed control and "we know best" attitudes hampered the early critical growth of the OpenSolaris community. Who knows what sources of innovation will be cut off (and will defect to other projects) with this gate in place.
• "Backwards compatibility" as an absolute goal. This is not a bad thing per se, but it feels like the backwards compatibility requirement exists to deal with a long delivery cycle — essentially asking developers to begin developing today for the open source platform delivery in two years and the promise that the investment will be protected. All complex dynamic software hits a point in its evolution where a re-write is required. (The Linux kernel rewrote the entire VM and scheduler after about 10 years of evolution with modern architectures.) Backwards compatibility becomes the challenge. But the opportunity forward MUST be bigger than the backwards compatibility option. It needs to be managed in the community, i.e. this is a community issue and a delivery time-line issue. Think of the opportunity that Microsoft took moving from the Windows world of the late nineties to the new world enabled by NT. Think of the enormous opportunity Apple took moving from Mac OS9 to Mac OSX. Think of developing a community of innovation forward like the Mozilla world and Eclipse.
• The whole two-year process feels like a traditional corporate engineering culture trying to manage change around a well established product space. This would be great if this was what Symbian Ltd. was to remain (but even then it risks being a dead-end overtaken by other solutions with the coming mobile Internet wave). When IBM began the Eclipse Project, they put safe IP structures around a software base, some simple governance and a road map in place, and got on with the work. Later, the Eclipse Foundation was created as a better way to manage the inbound innovation and growth under a well defined IP regime. Now, the Eclipse Foundation and Mozilla Corp. provide excellent blueprints for what the Symbian Foundation needs to be. Nokia already has the inhouse experience to build from those blueprints. Engineering cultural change is difficult but essential here. While one wouldn't expect Symbian Ltd. to release its core assets while awaiting regulatory approval, there have to be other complementary software assets internally available that could be released as early experiments to begin to get the IT structure in place and begin the cultural learning. Two years gives Android and LiMo and even Windows Mobile too much time to erode a community that should rightly be coming to the Symbian Foundation.

These are all key issues. Cultural change is hard in any acquisition. In this case it is doubly so for an engineering team used to delivering to a particular set of customer requirements now dropped into an open source world and needing to understand how open source works and customers and users differ, as well as for a business team used to driving platform revenue and profitability that need to consider now driving platform adoption as an end goal unto itself.

The Symbian Foundation is an opportunity not to simply re-invent the mobile phone platform, but to build the most innovative shared platform forward for the coming mobile Internet. Working with peer organizations like the Eclipse and Mozilla foundations, and arguably the Android project, a stable dynamic open source platform can be created that best suits the needs of customers and consumers for some time to come. Nokia's vision and foresight open up amazing possibilities. Here's wishing them speedy success.

InitMarketing is now a member of Open Source Business Foundation (OSBF). OSBF is a European-wide Open Source network founded by Richard Seibt of SUSE fame. The activities of the network focus on the business benefits of Open Source software. The members of OSBF are companies, institutions, VCs and persons inspired by open source software - all together over 120 to date.

There are plenty of useful working groups within OSBF, such as:

• With the Open Source Business Award, OSBF annually awards innovative ideas, concepts and promising business plans.
• The Campus Coaches provide member companies their diverse professional experience free of charge.
• The COSAD working group develops best practice guidelines for OSS.
• The OSBF Embedded project fosters the use of OSS, especially Linux in embedded systems.
• Just recently, OSBF started a sales and marketing project that InitMarketing is a core member of.

In only two years since OSBF’s birth, it has established itself as probably the most important interest group for OSS businesses with a strong footprint in Germany and a growing attraction all over Europe.

Nokia and the Symbian Foundation Opportunity - Part I - Stephen Walli first part of his analysis of what the Symbian Foundation can represent for the mobile market. A must read.

An open-source approach to tracking stolen laptops - an open source approach to the problem.

On the Culture of Free Software - an interesting interview with Cristopher Kelty, I need to read his Two Bits, The Cultural Significance of Free Software book.