The past few weeks have seen a resurgence in the debate over whether or not open core is a valid open source business model or not. There has been a lot of passionate and pragmatic discourse from lots of knowledgeable people (Phipps, Ingo, Mickos, Aker, Aslett, Proffitt, O'Grady).

I add my take on the debate on the CodePlex Foundation blog.

The past few weeks have seen a resurgence in the debate over whether or not open core is a valid open source business model or not. There has been a lot of passionate and pragmatic discourse from lots of knowledgeable... Stephen Walli

The past few weeks have seen a resurgence in the debate over whether or not open core is a valid open source business model or not. There has been a lot of passionate and pragmatic discourse from lots of knowledgeable... Stephen Walli

I just posted my opening thoughts on the current debates over software freedom versus open source software as a foundation for a discussion about open core as a business model. They are over at the CodePlex Foundation blog. Please discuss there rather than here.

I just posted my opening thoughts on the current debates over software freedom versus open source software as a foundation for a discussion about open core as a business model. They are over at the CodePlex Foundation blog. Please discuss... Stephen Walli

It was brought to my attention that the FSF has re-posted its CodePlex Foundation commentary from last Fall on the day it was announced that I took the position as technical director at the Foundation. I'm not sure that anything has been added to the new commentary. Re-reading the FSF re-post, I can't but point back to my original response. I will add a couple of clarifications:

• CodePlex.com is a Microsoft owned and staffed forge that encourages the development of open source software based on Microsoft technology. The CodePlex Foundation is a separate not-for-profit software foundation to enable and encourage the development of open source software in the commercial world. Microsoft is the founding sponsor of the Foundation. There will be other sponsors. I work for the Foundation, not Microsoft.
• The naming confusion was not the most inspired move, but reflected an earlier idea for the Foundation. It will be resolved over time, and hopefully the confusion with it.
• The CodePlex Foundation is completely free and open source software license agnostic. The Foundation is also technology agnostic. If you want to use AGPL or GPLv3 or BSD or EPL, the Foundation has no opinion and will happily support your project or gallery. If you want to run on Mac OSX, Linux, Windows or all three, the Foundation likewise doesn't have an opinion.

The CodePlex Foundation has taken a while to get going, but there are already six projects across two galleries, some of them non-Microsoft. Paula Hunter joined as executive director last March, and I arrived a few short weeks ago. It's early days yet. Rome was not built in a day.

Pax.

It was brought to my attention that the FSF has re-posted its CodePlex Foundation commentary from last Fall on the day it was announced that I took the position as technical director at the Foundation. I'm not sure that anything... Stephen Walli

It was brought to my attention that the FSF has re-posted its CodePlex Foundation commentary from last Fall on the day it was announced that I took the position as technical director at the Foundation. I'm not sure that anything... Stephen Walli

I have begun to blog on the CodePlex Foundation blogs page as well as my blog here. When I believe the subject matter will have relevance to both audiences, I will cross post. Just so everyone knows that cares. (The RSS feed on the CodePlex Foundation should be up shortly.)

I have begun to blog on the CodePlex Foundation blogs page as well as my blog here. When I believe the subject matter will have relevance to both audiences, I will cross post. Just so everyone knows that cares. (The... Stephen Walli

I have begun to blog on the CodePlex Foundation blogs page as well as my blog here. When I believe the subject matter will have relevance to both audiences, I will cross post. Just so everyone knows that cares. (The... Stephen Walli

I saw from Dana Blankenhorn's blog post the other day that the Eclipse Foundation has once again published its excellent annual survey of Eclipse usage in the world. This is an annual survey that is always interesting because it shows the rise of many free and open source software projects beyond the Eclipse world and their subsequent competition with each other and the traditional products in the marketplace (e.g. Windows, Oracle). There were 1696 completed surveys this year to last year's 1365, i.e. there were almost 25% more respondents this year.

Dana caught sight of a trend noted by Ian Skerrett in his blog post announcing the survey:

Trend #7. Open source participation seems to be stalled. In the survey, we asked a question about the corporate policies towards open source participation. In 2009 48% claimed they could contribute back to OSS but in 2010 only 35.4% claim they could contribute back. Conversely, 41% in 2010 claimed they use open source software but do not contribute back but in 2009 it was 27.1%. Obviously not a trend any open source community would like to see. I am not sure the reason companies would become less restrictive in their open source policies. Any insight or feedback from the community would be appreciated.

The question as asked in the survey reads differently to me: What best describes your organization's policy towards the use of open source software? (Choose one.) Possible answers were:

• Does not allow the use of any open source software (1.4%)
• Uses open source software, but does not interact with open source project communities in any way (35.6%)
• Uses open source software and contributes back (through bug reports, code, resources) to at least one open source project community to help improve the quality of the projects we consume (30.7%)
• Contributes significant development resources (contributors, committers and/or maintainers, project leaders) to at least one open source project community in order to help influence the evolution of the projects we consume (7.7%)
• Has a business model that relies on open source software for its success (11.4%)
• Individual, not affiliated with an organization (9.2%)
• Don't know (4.1%)

There hasn't necessarily been an increase in participants that say they can't contribute, but rather that they don't contribute back. Dana and Ian both ask why this might be the case. Looking to the demographics, there may be a number of reasons.

There's an increase in the percentage of financial services participants over the years (6% to 6.8% to 8.4%). This is a group that has historically been careful in how they contribute and where. The IT crowd is also interesting because using FOSS means that they don't need to figure out how to talk with the accounting department to create a PO for a software trial to solve a problem, but turning it around to the contribution side of the equation, they also don't need to figure out how to find a lawyer to ensure they're giving back in an appropriate manner.

There's an increase in the number of students over the last two reports (8.6% in 2007 down to 8.1% then to 9.8%). This number may be the more interesting set of numbers because the fewer students, the higher the contribution status it seems in the graph (p. 27 in the 2010 report). There are absolutely students that contribute and whose contributions are deeply valued by a number of open source communities, but as a rule, they would be less experience developers and are faced with the learning curves of the project, the technology, and the growth of their own programming skills. This has significance in terms of things that are accepted by the community. They also may simply not know how to contribute as many FOSS repositories do a poor job of delivering the guidance to develop a vibrant community that encourages new developers to join.

All in all, the survey is always a great piece of work and the other trends it finds in it's developer community are always interesting.

I saw from Dana Blankenhorn's blog post the other day that the Eclipse Foundation has once again published its excellent annual survey of Eclipse usage in the world. This is an annual survey that is always interesting because it shows... Stephen Walli

The Free Software Foundation commented on the CodePlex Foundation existence on Monday. Presumably it was a slow news day at the FSF. Richard well describes his concerns and brings it all down to the standard list of concerns on software freedom, gently extending it out to all the additional freedoms that must be in place to say you truly completely support free software. He makes some conjectures based on his concerns and definitions, and finishes by rolling it back to warn people to stay focused on the FSF mandate on software freedom and avoiding Microsoft traps.

Sam Ramji (acting president of the CodePlex Foundation) posted commentary on Tuesday to correct a couple of FSF opinions, demonstrating he does understand that commercial software companies can thrive on free software and that the while some members of the board of directors and board of advisors may be Microsoft employees or ex-Microsoft (me), there remains breadth and depth in the bench of people participating initially that have real experience in the commercial free software world.

Once again we're having the Democracy versus Capitalism debate. Really, we need to move on. This is not a helpful debate. It started in the mid-1990s in the broader FOSS community itself. It unfortunately informed and fuelled Microsoft's messaging around Shared Source through the early part of this decade as they tried positioning everything on a linear spectrum with words like "free", "open", "commercial", and "proprietary". It doesn't work that way. It's the precursor to the Free and Open Source Software Business Model debate. It's about as useful.

The one nit I would pick with the FSF debate with respect to the CodePlex Foundation is when it opines about their definition of "proprietary software". The OED gives us a slightly better definition. Proprietary as an adjective means:

b. Of a product, esp. a drug or medicine: of which the manufacture or sale is restricted to a particular person or persons; (in later use) spec. marketed under and protected by patent or registered trade name.

It's about property. All our free and open source software licensing works because the software is someone's property covered by copyright. Proprietary software, however, actually would mean protected by patents and trademarks. So, Fedora, Linux, MySQL, Apache, and so too I believe "GNU Emacs". We need to get beyond the debate.

Stallman does say:

Someday we will be able to judge the organization by its actions (including its public relations).

I'm fairly sure the CodePlex Foundation will never live up to the FSF definition of software freedom purity, but I am looking forward to getting more organizations to contribute software and collaborate on development using free and open source licenses. And that's a pretty good thing.

All: I've joined the CodePlex Foundation starting Monday, 17 May as the Technical Director reporting to the executive director. My responsibility is to set the strategic technical direction of the Foundation, and work with the gallery managers and project leaders on a day-to-day basis. I'm excited about this. I believe the CodePlex Foundation has a great role to play as we continue to see more and more commercial organizations participate in open collaborative software development.

The CodePlex Foundation exists to encourage and support the creation of more open source software, specifically working with commercial organizations. People have shared software since we started programming computers. The sharing bandwidth used to be mag tape sized packets and conference schedule delivery rates. Now we have the Internet which changed the dynamics and economics dramatically. Historically, software foundations tied to free and open source software grew to support a particular licensing scheme or project technology community. I think the CodePlex Foundation complements existing organizations quite nicely. The Foundation is an excellent opportunity to broaden the contribution base from commercial organizations and I want to ensure processes and education are in place to enable those contributions.

My first order of business will be to meet with the existing gallery managers and project leads to begin to put in place any process and services they urgently need. From that point forward it will be to help define and shape the rest of the project and IP management processes that are needed to make the Foundation's value proposition a reality for new sponsors and contributors.

A few friends and colleagues have asked what it means for Microsoft's open source initiatives. I don't know. I certainly don't speak for Microsoft. The CodePlex Foundation has a very straightforward mission and I work for the Foundation. Microsoft is the first and founding sponsor, essentially putting their money where their mouth is with respect to managing their own contributions. I expect there will be more sponsors and participants over the coming year and my goal is to enable them all.

All: I've joined the CodePlex Foundation starting Monday, 17 May as the Technical Director reporting to the executive director. My responsibility is to set the strategic technical direction of the Foundation, and work with the gallery managers and project leaders... Stephen Walli

[Update (11-May-2010, 10:37): Matt Aslett posted commentary on this post at the 451 Group CAOS blog.]

Debate continues on whether open core business models are a winning strategy with a capital "w" or not, and whether customers care. Matt Aslett's recent excellent posts continue the discussion. The big concern for those that criticize or express concerns is that customers are mis-lead, essentially that there's a bait-and-switch free-versus-product or a deliberate lack of clarity in the marketing around the product value.

I want to take a different approach to the discussion here. Before we had Internet-sized bandwidth on which to collaborate around software, traditional software business looked something like the first diagram. R&D delivered product. Marketing delivered messages. Sales and marketing managed and qualified leads through a pipeline and if the product solved a customer problem properly, a market was made and you could measure the profits.

The Internet happened, dramatically removing friction from the process of collaborative software development and delivery. Developers could share the economic cost of software creation (innovation and construction) and large repositories of useful building blocks were born and made available through these project-focused communities. The Web accelerated the early Internet trend.

Companies began to form around some of the projects and for the past decade and a half there's been confusion as people debated how to make money when you give away the software, or the other side of the economic equation around variations on why people work for free. This has unfortunately led to the idea of community and customer interaction akin to the following diagram. The community is jammed into the middle of the customer pipeline. The community gives stuff to R&D which still delivers product. Marketing now messages to customers AND [worse] the community, and the company tries to "convert" the community into customers.

This probably started around the time that MySQL AB observed they had a paying customer for every thousand downloads. This mis-set expectations in a fundamental way. People assumed causality. It created false metrics around driving downloads and improving conversion rates. (We'll come back to this ....)

Marten Mickos (while CEO at MySQL) observed that the early community has time but no money while the later community has money but no time, and that his customers are in the latter bucket. This is the start of a better model for understanding community and customer. Let's use the "time is money" line as the division between community and customers because by forcing the separation of the two groups we can add clarity to both and the things a business would need to do differently with each.

Instead lets treat the community (time but no money) as a completely separate entity from the customer pipeline (money but no time). The community members engage with R&D over the project. They engage with marketing in a conversation about project direction, and ancillary things like translations in other markets. Customers are qualified through the pipeline based upon the product.

Indeed you can start to see how to think about these different groups of people using different well understood and documented processes for community development and sales channel management.

This allows you to clearly address each groups's selfish needs.

Community Customers They have time but NO money They have money and no time They want a problem solved and look to the project They want a problem solved and look to the product They can’t be converted Your Community is the litmus test of solution viability. They can contribute time, so:
What do you want them to do?
What do you need to enable?
What do you need to let them know? You manage leads through the qualification pipeline and conversion process like any other customer-focused sales process They will not waste time, so the project needs to solve a problem for them before they will invest themselves in it

Product for customers is clearly differentiated from project and community. How the product is differentiated depends upon the company and the value proposition to customers. At it's simplest, the product may be a supportable and maintained collection of software, certified to run on specific supported platforms and with particular applications, and trivially installable. The product may be the support and maintenance itself. Some companies pack more "enterprise ready" marketable differentiated features or attributes into the product. Others (e.g. Red Hat, JBoss, MySQL) develop a valuable network offering that includes support, maintenance, certifications, additional warranties, monitoring, indemnifications, and the like into a single subscription model. Regardless, there is well-defined value that solves a customer's problems.

Companies like Alfresco and Hyperic and JBoss all saw conversions in the pipeline because potential customers came to the web site, learned what they needed to learn, downloaded the appropriate things to try, and used the community as a litmus test of the solution before returning (self-qualified) to buy product.

This visualization also clears up debate about "open source" and "community". Some companies publish their product source code under open source licenses and never try to develop a real community. There's nothing wrong here if indeed they're running a more traditional software business model and don't care specifically about enabling the community to directly engage with the project. Publishing the software is a sign of strength and confidence in their product and their ability as a company to satisfy customers with a valuable solution that is more than just the software.

Some companies also develop large successful communities without ever publishing their product software. This is why community building is so important for your company and why community development is an essential ingredient in your solution pitch to customers. Communities historically anchored your customers. Communities create knowledge, expertise and experience, all necessary to provide a complete solution for your technology pitch to the customer. Communities create advocates and evangelists to spread awareness about your solution. Communities create enormous inertia in the status quo around your technology. This is why companies like Microsoft invested millions in developing the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN). It has taken more than a decade for other Internet communities around interesting open source projects to wear down the inertia inherent in MSDN. Likewise, IBM has invested enormous amounts of money in the IBM Developer Network, incorporating free and open source software to meet their solution needs and value propositions to their customers. With open source projects relating to your company, the community is anchoring your solution.

This is the real "conversion". The community enables customers. It is correlative not causative. Community members that have solved their problems using your technology base will carry their excitement, knowledge, and commitment into new places where customers exist. With well organized open source communities, the community now fronts your technology to new customers as well as later anchoring customers once they exist.

[Update (11-May-2010, 10:37): Matt Aslett posted commentary on this post at the 451 Group CAOS blog.] Debate continues on whether open core business models are a winning strategy with a capital "w" or not, and whether customers care. Matt Aslett's... Stephen Walli

I was dismayed this morning to see Andy Updegrove's write-up on Alex Brown's post on Microsoft failing it's own Office Open XML (OOXML) standard (formally known as ISO/IEC 29500). It is the second anniversary of the ballot resolution and approval of the standard. While Andy was reporting from the trenches through the final ballot resolution, Alex was responsible for the negotiations that allowed the standard to pass. Essentially Microsoft seems to be breaking the promises it made to the international standards community to get the standard through the process.

If Microsoft ship Office 2010 to handle only the Transitional variant of ISO/IEC 29500 they should expect to be roundly condemned for breaking faith with the International Standards community. This is not the format “approved by ISO/IEC”, it is the format that was rejected.

Unfortunately it's unclear what condemnation will bring. Even were the EU Commission to involve itself as Alex later suggests, it is unlikely that this would effect shareholder value in any meaningful way.

Alex also wonders at how such bad implementation can be allowed to happen:

So why — given the awareness Microsoft has at the top, at the bottom, and round the edges [for standards] — does it still manage to behave as it does? Something, perhaps, is wrong at the centre — some kind of corporate dysfunction caused by a failure of executive oversight.

It's nothing sinister I suspect. Cynically — it was nobody's job, and by that I mean no development manager or program management manager (or test manager for that matter) of any reasonable authority or seniority likely had it as a primary rewardable objective on their annual review. If the bugs were even filed, they were likely never deemed sufficiently important to fix during bug triage on the road to release-to-manufacturing. I saw bug triage meetings circa 1999 on the road to Windows 2000 where non-critical bugs that were effecting 10,000 beta customers were ignored because there were other bugs effecting 100,000 users. When you ship a product that has a consumer base of tens of millions, you learn different skills in the triage process. I suspect it's similar on the Office side of the company.

And Alex is completely correct, there would be no executive oversight pushing down from above on the Office development organization. The vice-president that published the open letter two-years ago making the promises has probably either (a.) moved on to other responsibilities, or (b.) assumed he had made the promise and someone else was to carry it out. It won't be on his review objectives either so he's still being well paid. So too with any other exec in the pipeline two-years ago. Even the standards team that worked so hard to get it through the ECMA and ISO processes will have moved on to other standards (and certainly wouldn't be so naive in the product-centricity of Microsoft to have accepted such an objective so far out of their control). The marketing team got its talking points two years ago. This is a cultural problem. The development teams within the company (i.e. the revenue generation engine) with a few exceptions in a few Web-related product teams just aren't tuned to deal with standards in a serious manner the way certain other vendors do.

Until there are serious lost sales to do with non-conformance from large government organizations, and the field organization starts to seriously yell, there will be no understanding in Redmond that it really mattered and that certain government officials may even have bet their careers on such promises. Even then, the first question in Redmond will [cynically] be, "How much do we sell to the Ministry of [Big Issues] in [Name-of-small-northern-European-country]?"

Alex finishes with the quote:

In short, we find ourselves at a crossroads, and it seems to me that without a change of direction the entire OOXML project is now surely heading for failure.

Failure indeed. I used the photograph at the top of the post two-years ago when I cynically predicted how this was going to go down over time. I summarized my opinions on the battle between ODF and OOXML and how Microsoft should have played the war as one of the examples in a standards primer I wrote around the same time. It will be interesting to watch how Microsoft responds to Alex's post. The world is indeed watching.

I was dismayed this morning to see Andy Updegrove's write-up on Alex Brown's post on Microsoft failing it's own Office Open XML (OOXML) standard (formally known as ISO/IEC 29500). It is the second anniversary of the ballot resolution and approval... Stephen Walli