opening

Covalent was one of the pioneers in commercial open source. Unfortunately, Covalent suffered through the dot-com bubble, along with the rest of the industry. Today, Covalent lives on under the guidance of Mark Brewer (as well as in Hyperic, which spun out of Covalent several years ago).

I caught up with Mark for our fifteenth installment of the Open Source CEO Series, hoping to glean some lessons from an open source company that rose, then fell, and is rising again. I met him in 2003/04 to discuss a possible investment, but Mark and team opted to bootstrap their way back to profitability, and have done exceptionally well for themselves.

Name, position, and company of executive Mark Brewer, CEO, Covalent Technologies.… Read more

Perhaps the most competitive market for commercial open source is the IT management space, where open source vendors must compete with the "Big Four" of enterprise IT management, but also with the "Little Four" of open source enterprise IT management (Hyperic, Zenoss, Groundwork, and OpenNMS).

Today, in our fourteenth installment of the Open Source CEO Series we're talking with Bill Karpovich, CEO and Co-founder of Zenoss. Each of these so-called Little Four compete in very different ways, and hence it's no surprise that their respective CEOs draw different conclusions about how to compete.

Name, position, and company of executive Bill Karpovich, CEO and Co-founder, Zenoss.… Read more

"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," apparently still has legs as a business strategy.

Intel has been trying for years to get PCs with its chips inside living rooms, trying to offset the slowing growth of the PC market by creating a new way to use PCs. That hasn't worked, as Media Center PCs and their Viiv successors have sold fairly well but few consumers are actually using them in place of their digital cable or satellite boxes at the center of their entertainment systems.

So Intel announced Monday that it will incorporate the OpenCable … Read more

It's not open source, of course, but I find the gathering momentum toward opening up APIs in Web 2.0 applications to be an interesting spin on the "offline" open source world. First it was Facebook, and now it's LinkedIn. In the web world, it's not source code that gets opened (though these properties could do this and, in my mind, should), but rather APIs.

As to why companies are opening up the web, it has nothing to do with charity. It's actually very similar to the offline software world where you can put … Read more

Most of the CEO profiles we've done have covered CEOs who serve the enterprise IT market. To an extent, Danny Windham, CEO of Digium, does the same. But Digium's market - Telecom - is broader than that. This is the company whose modest goal is to open the world of communications...from Alabama.

In fact, this is one of the things I like best about Digium: it is yet another proofpoint that in open source, anyway, it's not important to be based in the Bay Area. World domination of Telecom from Huntsville, Alabama. Who would have thought?

Name, position, and company of executive Danny Windham, CEO, Digium.… Read more

I spent some time talking with Martin Plaehn, CEO of Bungee Labs. He said something that I found deeply poignant given my current role with Alfresco:

There are no old gladiators. There are only old gladiator coaches.

His point was that you often get promoted to management because you were the best in your given role, but you don't remain the best at that role for long. There are always better people coming up through the ranks, and your job as a manager is to enable and channel their superior expertise.

Thinking about my own team today, I realize … Read more

I spent some time today reading Plato's classic, The Republic and, in particular, his famous Allegory of the Cave. I have many good friends who work for proprietary software companies, and I'm always puzzled by their inability to see how open source could benefit them. They persist in believing that maximum money derives from maximum control over their software and, hence, maximum control over their customers.

This strange insistence on seeing the world through proprietary glasses perplexes me as the software world moves online and companies like Google show that you can make huge mountains of cash by giving your core service away for free. Infatuated as they are with bits and bytes, they have completely missed the movement of software away from software, per se, to service.

Which brings me back to Plato's cave.

And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:--Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets....… Read more

Glyn Moody has quickly moved to the top of my RSS reader. He consistently writes thoughtful pieces, and this one is no different. As Glyn explains, none but the most determined persist in believing that open source is a fad that will soon die out. On the contrary, open source has taken over infrastructure software and is gathering steam in the application space.

Oddly enough, this is where the problem starts.

The manifest advantages of being open source - to say nothing of the trendiness of the label - has led to many startups adopting the term uncritically. From being an alternative way of branding free software, open source has now become a way of branding any software where the code is available - irrespective of what other restrictions are imposed. This is bad news, because it dilutes the value of the term "open source." That, in turn, could stymie corporate adoption, as companies find themselves increasingly confused about what open source really means, and what the real value is.

More is at stake than semantics. I believe, with Glyn, that the health of the movement depends on proper nomenclature.… Read more

The Open Source CEO series is still going strong, and will continue through next week. In fact, I expect to have some high-profile surprises to add to the roster next week....

However, I wanted to put readers on the alert that soon after I'll be kick-starting the "Open Source @" series. I'm fond of giving grief to traditional enterprise software companies for failing to "get" open source. Well, starting next week I'll be giving an open forum to some of the world's largest software companies to share their open source activities with the … Read more