posted Jan 23, 2011 7:27 AM by Agile Source
Jan, 2011, DAVID J. CORD HELSINKI T IMES: The internet is not only changing how we work, but how work is defined. Not all workers work for pay, and not all employers need employees.
USE of electronic communications is changing the face of labour. Today, teleconferencing and telecommuting are commonplace, making geographical location much less relevant and changing the way in which many tasks are delegated and performed.
Open source-working MySQL set the standard. It was largely an open-source project, meaning that thousands of people collaborated on it and thousands of people benefi ted from it. The company made this labour-saving tool profi table through dual licensing. Its users can get the software free as long as they agree to release publicly any moderated versions they make. If they want to keep their work proprietary, they need to pay for a license. Co-founder Michael Widenius earned millions of euros when MySQL was sold. The question is immediately raised: why will people volunteer their time and expertise in such projects when the benefi ts go to someone else? The answer is not quite so simple. “There is always a payment involved; people hardly ever work without some form of compensation,” says Ville Miettinen, the CEO of Microtask. “However, the payment may be in the form of external goodwill, or the person may have an internal source of motivation such as entertainment, personal interest, or that they want to make the world a better place. It is not practical to think that people do work ‘for free’.”
Mikko Puhakka, one of Finland’s foremost experts on open-source labour, gives another example. “The guiding principle is called meritocracy, so you earn the respect of peers,” he says. “Another answer is that a growing number of companies allow their employees to participate in these projects in order for them to develop their skills in certain technology areas.”
Crowdsourcing Then there is crowdsourcing, taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee and outsourcing them through an open call to a large group of people. Amazon was one of the first practitioners of this through Mechanical Turk, which has thousands of relatively simple tasks like tagging photos open to people to perform over the internet. Miettinen’s company Microtask specialises in this new method. “There are two main important angles to crowdsourcing: motivating people, and the logistics of contributing,” explains Miettinen. “The internet itself doesn’t provide much of anything new or special on the motivational side. However, the net makes the logistics of working so much more effi cient.” By way of example, he explains the building of a firestation in a small village. Traditionally each villager would come and offer a day of labour to build the structure. “It is not practical for people to contribute just by hitting one nail into the wall,” he says. “On the internet these problems of participation disappear, in some cases entirely. In a way, it’s possible to get tens of thousands of ‘nails’ hit in a few seconds, if necessary.” Not every project can work in such a manner, but the method is adaptive. Miettinen names projects that can be meaningfully subdivided into simple tasks such as distributed proofreading and projects that can be replicated by a large number of people such as design contests. Puhakka lists pro-jects that are easily managed through networks, such as the production of digital goods.
The future Miettinen says that the whole concept of “working” will change through this new method of utilising labour. It is changing how both purchasers and providers of labour interact to complete tasks. “We will be increasingly organising tasks around global talent pools rather than local resources,” says Puhakka. “Geographical regions, where you choose to live, will be less important than your ability to work through the web. This is a huge change. Examples of a similar magnitude can be seen in the industrial revolution and the main structural changes in society can be mirrored from those experiences.”
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posted Sep 15, 2010 9:18 PM by Agile Source
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updated Sep 15, 2010 9:20 PM
]
‘’The markets are on the web, the production power is on the web, both globally available for everyone’’ Mårten Mickos, CEO, Eucalyptus Systems. Let’s do a small intellectual play: Web 2.0 services, or the current generation’s internet companies globally, are built for the most part on top of the so-called LAMP-stack. In other words their infrastructure is based on Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP – a selection of open source software programs.The ventures started today differ from the ones in the -99 era in a way that a growing number of them have managed to create very big global business in a unbelievably short amount of time. They have managed to create hundreds of millions of profitable business in a span of just a few years, and new ones seem to emerge on a daily basis.
"Open source, in other words, is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end, and that end is collaborative innovation’’ Matt Asay, COO of Canonical The other differating factor is that using open source and collaborative work methods has made possible an extremely cost-efficient way of testing new ideas and concepts. If "it" does not work, a different approach is tried right away. Unlike in the days before when writing a business plan might take a year (literally).Most of the building blocks are from the Nordics Linux (Linus Torvalds) and MySQL (Monty Widenius) are Finnish born ventures (while Swedish David Axmark played a key role in MySQL as well). PHP, on the other hand, originates from Denmark (Rasmus Lerdorf). So half of the building blocks are from Finland, with a quarter from Denmark, meaning 75% comes from the Nordics. But Finland’s and Finns' accomplishments don’t end here. As I was sharing the observation with my former colleague Tere Vaden, he reminded me that the discussions around the open source development more or less all happen online and more specifically in IRC (Internet Relay Chat). And you guessed right, IRC was developed in Finland by Jarkko Oikarinen out of Oulu, around 1988. One explaining factor for this success could be contributed to the way Nordic society has been structured as several proofreaders of this article duly noted. Nordics are a safe, neutral place to try out new things without (too much) having to fear someone will take advantage of you but rather you will be recognized by principle of meritocracy.  China’s and other emerging, or rather growth, countries' efforts around open source have made a lot of headlines in recent years. But how did, for example, Linux make its way to China? The story that should be told more often is that Helsinki University’s doctoral student Dr. Gong Min upon returning to China in 1996 had 20 diskettes in his luggage containing that moment’s version of Linux. Shortly after that first Linux distro (collection of software) was available in China.
A new, higher ambition-level is needed Now that even Venture Capitalists have seen the proof of making money around open source, both revenue-wise and exit wise (I was fortunate enough to be part of a team that made the seed investment into MySQL ten years ago and enjoy the 1 Billion USD exit in 2008) as seen in all parts of the globe, it is time to think of next steps. We need to take steps where, for instance, entrepreneurial open innovation and the practices of the open source world would be embraced. We should operate and create both cooperation and collaboration possibilities utilizing international talent networks in a global market place. One way could be a new type of an investment vehicle, which through active ‘open innovation’ guidance (freedom to test and fail easily and quickly) would capture value by retaining part of the ownership in new companies. At the same time it would work as a network serving both industrial and academic worlds. This kind of new and higher ambition-level is needed. Otherwise the Finnish and Nordic innovation activities especially the kind that is looking for high growth internationally via Venture Capital will wither in our too small home markets and will endanger our future competitiveness. Big opportunities must be embraced Open source and its way of working and building community built and driven businesses must be one of the biggest things to impact software and software based businesses in decades. The disruption is not limited, however, only to open source software but to the growing amounts to open content, open data and open substance. Based on our history I dare to predict we have yet again in the next few years a big opportunity in front of us. The global markets are waiting for our leadership just as Nokia did in the mobile business – we must not let this opportunity pass us by. Thank you for proofreading and comments to Valto Loikkanen, Jouko Ahvenainen, Peter Kelly, Aape Pohjavirta, Ossi Pöllänen, Karri Hautanen, and Peter Cheng. About the Author: Mikko Puhakka: I am Amateur consultant and investor rather than a professional. What? – You may ask. With more than 15 years of noted track record, why an Amateur?
Amateurs in sports are - or at least used to be - in highest regard. Amateurs do what they do because of love, inspiration and passion for their specialty. Amateurs don’t do their business for quick and easy money. Instead of living my life from paycheck to pay check or project to project, I live from adventure to adventure. As Hugh McLeod states ‘treat it like and adventure. An adventure worth sharing’ If this thinking strikes a chord, get in touch and share your thoughts and initiatives. In return, I promise at least an opinion, sometimes a good discussion or possibly even a new business relationship.
Amateur career specialties:
Start-ups, Venture Capital, community driven businesses, mainly in Europe and China. I am available as a mentor, advisor or a board member.
Connect to me on LinkedIn, or follow me on Twitter |
posted Jul 15, 2010 6:19 AM by Agile Source
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updated Jul 15, 2010 6:21 AM
]
By Stephen R.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 people (Phipps,
Ingo,
Mickos,
Aker, Aslett,
Proffitt,
O'Grady).
I
believe part of the confusion is between the FOSS projects with their
attendant communities, and products in the market that incorporate the
project. One doesn't know when the governance discussion stops and the
market discussion begins. Community development and governance are
interesting edges around which to have the discussion.
- There
are FOSS projects around which individuals and companies participate as
equals (e.g. Linux, Apache). The economics of shared collaborative
development are well understood and compelling regardless of the size of
the participating organization (all the way down to the individual).
Companies still happily include the project in their products and
services (e.g. Red Hat, Novell, Google, and Nokia with Linux or IBM with
Apache) but no single company defines nor controls the governance
structure. The governance and ownership may be as formal as a foundation
(e.g. Apache, Linux) or as informal as the project leader (e.g. all the
scripting languages).
- There are FOSS projects that are owned
and controlled by a single company in the marketplace (e.g. MySQL,
Alfresco, SugarCRM) and who completely define the project's community
governance. I think this is where much confusion reigns.
- Publishing
software under a FOSS license provides one set of benefits to a
company. N.B. I said publishing software — I haven't yet said what
software.
- Developing a community requires an investment
providing different benefits.
For a moment,
let's talk about business. Customers buy solutions to problems.
Typically they're buying time (possibly as expertise), convenience
(ability to do something previously undone), security (the removal of
risk), or some combination of the three. They will always pay for value.
It's a simple economic decision based on how they use/exchange their
own time and skills. It doesn't matter whether you're discussing
individuals or corporations with staff and budgets. It's why markets
form and as Drucker best observed: companies don't exist to make money,
but to create markets — money is simply a yardstick for measuring
success. Software isn't what customers are buying. This is the
old (but invaluable) observation from Theodore Levitt that "a customer
didn't want to buy a 1/4 inch drill, they needed a 1/4 inch hole."
Customers buy solutions. As Geoffrey Moore observed, the more complete a
solution one appears to be, the more likely one is to succeed. It's the
"whole product" idea he espoused. The solution the customer is buying
means more to the customer than the "software". (This also explains why
some customers are very unimpressed with all the hard work a vendor put
into their next release — the new software release didn't solve a new
problem or better solve the old one.) If you look at the sum of the
costs of the parts a company sells providing a solution to a customer
versus the sum of the revenues they receive, as long as they spend less
than they earn they're profitable and different industries cluster
around different margins. FOSS projects make great buckets of
technology out of which to assemble new solutions. As Christensen
observed, disruptive business models come from companies that assemble
off-the-shelf parts to satisfy new needs, that then evolve themselves
into existing markets with very different margins. No company, new
or otherwise, lasts long if they treat their customers or channel badly
or fail to execute on the making-more-than-they-spend equation.
Bait-and-switch generally doesn't go down well. Customers complain. In
an Internet age complaints have a way of travelling. Indeed there are
lots of ways a company can fail in its execution. So rather than
having a discussion about whether open core is or isn't a good open
source business model, let's talk about how the company runs it's FOSS
community. Remember we're not discussing FOSS projects with external
governance. We're discussing companies that (i.) promote FOSS, (ii.)
build a community around their own FOSS project, and (iii.) use their
own FOSS project as a basis of their product solution they sell to
customers. It's easy to judge if they publish a FOSS project.
We have the free
software definition and the open source definition.
The software license either meets the definition and enables users
around the project or not. That's the simple bit. Let's talk about
the FOSS community development. The company needs to invest to reap the
benefits a community brings. I wrote at length (with
pictures) on the differences between communities engaged with
projects and customers engaged with products in early May. The simple
idea that applies nicely to open core is that customers have money,
community members have time but no money, and the
community can't be "converted" in any simple way into customers.
Communities are incredibly valuable. Communities bring innovation and
real world usage, entrench a technology against competition, create
experience and expertise (needed for the whole product), evangelism and
advocacy (needed to get the word out), and provide a much needed litmus
test for potential customers of your product. But community members must
get a solution to their problems in community or there's no
reason for them to participate. There are many ways a company can fail
to develop a FOSS community: - Some companies don't invest in
community at all, taking an "if we publish it, they will come" attitude.
They think curious downloads must be "leads" in "community" and try to
chase them down. This is a failure to execute. At best it's an old
school try-before-you-buy strategy and probably won't be particularly
successful. It conflicts with the "we like FOSS" message. Throwing
source code over the wall under a FOSS license without build and test
harnesses and no binaries doesn't encourage clever programmers to share
their ideas. No community forms to fall for a bait-and-switch. There is
no community.
- If you don't provide a viable solution to your
community that meets their needs, they won't participate. That's a
failure to execute. It's not because you were practicing "open core",
but rather your open core provided no value to attract a community.
- If you spend a lot of time "selling" your community, you'll upset
them and they will leave. That's a failure to execute. Bait-and-switch
will certainly destroy a company's reputation with its customers (i.e.
people that paid money), but trying to sell people that don't want to be
sold just upsets them. For everyone complaining about "open core"
bait-and-switch tactics, I would respectfully ask you to name names of
companies that sold you one thing, then provided you something else.
- If
you dabble in open source, then close the project and essentially leave
with the open source contributed work, you are angering the very people
you want to get the word out and provide the experience around and
entrench your technology. That's a failure to execute. Indeed to escape
this perception, some companies have created and evolved external
foundations (Eclipse, Mozilla, and the CodePlex Foundation are all
variations on this theme) to get away from the perception of a land grab
on externally contributed work, opting instead to share asset
development in an externally governed organization to everyone's
benefit.
- Of course one can always upset one's community badly
enough that they fork the FOSS project and move on.
None of
these failures to execute are because the company used an "open core"
business model. These are all failures to understand the community's
value versus its needs, how to develop a community, or what customers
want and how to sell it to them in the Internet age. In the first case
of externally governed FOSS projects described above, every participant
is very clear on why they participate to their own selfish economic
needs and why the collaboration is greater than the sum of its parts. In
the second case, where a company publishes a FOSS project, develops the
community and controls the governance, and then sells a product based
on the FOSS project, the onus is very much on the company to clarify
what's in it for the community and the role of FOSS licensing. |
posted Jul 10, 2010 8:27 AM by Agile Source
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updated Jul 10, 2010 8:30 AM
]
By Chris Foresman Apple's App Store attracted thousands of developers and boasts
hundreds of thousands of apps. While most other platforms have been less
successful with central app repositories, Android is the only other
platform really vying for the attention of developers. Several recent
reports suggest interest in Android among developers is growing
significantly, while interest in BlackBerry, Palm, Symbian, and Windows
Mobile continues to erode.
In a recent report from VisionMobile, analyst Andreas Constantinou
notes that while smartphone platforms like Symbian and BlackBerry have
more market share by units sold, both iOS and Android are commanding the most mindshare. "For example,"
wrote Constantinou, "the Symbian operating system is deployed in around
390 million handsets (Q2 2010), and claims over 6,000 apps, while
Apple's iPhone has seen 30x more applications while being deployed at
just 60 million units over the same period."
This same conclusion is supported by the results
of a mobile
developer survey last month from Appcelerator. iOS and Android
development attracts the attention of a majority of mobile developers by
a wide margin. All the while, interest in Windows Mobile and BlackBerry
platforms is dropping, despite both platforms having a strong share
among business users.
Besides the hype that both platforms generate, the incentive for most
developers is money. Apple and Android consistently show sizable growth
via a variety of metrics, including unit sales and online use.
Both platforms have app stores that offer quicker time to market and
quicker time to payment. VisionMobile reports that app stores (i.e.,
Apple, Android) generally make apps available in about 22 days as
opposed to 68 days for mobile operators, and offer the first payment in
about a month versus two or more months compared to offering apps via
mobile operators.
And just as important, both platforms have growing user bases that
frequently use their respective app stores and spend money on apps.
While Apple often boasts of the number of apps sold through the App
Store—the most recent count last month was 5 billion
apps downloaded in just two years—VisionMobile says that just 10
percent of Windows Mobile users use its Windows Marketplace for Mobile
to get apps. Appcelerator also says that a large majority of developers
see Apple's App Store as offering the best commerce capability, best app
discoverability, and largest addressable market for consumer and
business apps.
Appcelerator's report offers some interesting insight that shows
developers favoring iOS in the short term, but leaning towards Android
for long-term development prospects. Developers overall feel that the
best devices run iOS, and along with its App Store advantage, 78 percent
of developers said iOS offers the "best near-term outlook." However,
developers see Android as having the most capabilities and being more
open. A 54 percent majority believe Google offers the "best long-term
outlook."
Recent analysis by AppStore HQ also shows many developers, especially
larger ones with more resources available for porting existing iPhone
apps, increasingly adding Android
apps to their stable. While AppStore HQ's numbers still show a large
majority of developers favoring iOS over Android (about four to one),
nearly 1,500 of those registered developers have both iPhone and Android
apps. These are mostly larger media companies and developers, such as
Facebook, Gameloft, Amazon, Intuit, and others, but as Android rises in
popularity, the economics will begin to favor smaller developers as
well.
The iOS platform is well established and has attracted tons of
developer attention. The launch of the iPad has fueled further interest,
but the iPad's early success is also garnering more interest in
Android-based tablets. Along with the maturing feature set available in
Android 2.2, and hints of future improvement in 3.0, there's a lot for
developers to like. With Nokia fragmenting its approach between Symbian
and MeeGo, Microsoft scurrying to get Windows Phone 7 to market, RIM
having offered little new with BlackBerry OS, and HP and Palm having
little to say about webOS, that leaves the door wide open for iOS and
Android to dominate.
HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript are beginning to be used to make
cross-platform Web apps that can supplant the capabilities of native apps.
However, until there is a foolproof way for developers to monetize
them—a Web app store, perhaps—expect developers to continue to pursue
native development for the foreseeable future. |
posted Apr 27, 2010 1:49 AM by Target Source
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updated Apr 27, 2010 1:54 AM by Agile Source
]
By Matthew Aslet, April 26, 2010 The 451 Group’s Information Management practice I have recently initiated coverage on the various “NoSQL” databases, which are providing a fresh challenge to conventional relational databases (clients can get a good introduction to our coverage here, while non-clients can also see some of my thinking aloud over at our Too Much Information blog). The rise of the NoSQL movement is also highly relevant in the context of open source software, however, especially in relation to two key issues related to open source software. 1/ The (lack of) corporate user contributions
2/ Open source as a source of innovation (as opposed to disruption) NoSQL is very much a user-led phenomenon and has occurred as the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have created their own distributed data management technologies to overcome the fact that traditional database products were not able to match their performance and scalability requirements. No all NoSQL databases are the product of companies that we would traditionally think of as users rather than developers, and not all NoSQL databases are open source, but there are a large number of projects that fulfill both criteria: such as Apache Cassandra (which originated at Facebook), Apache Hbase (Yahoo), Hypertable(Zvents), Voldemort (LinkedIn) and FlockDB (Twitter). Meanwhile there are a number of vendors and projects focused on adding persistence, replication, index and query capabilities to memcached, which was originally created by Danga Interactive to solve its database scalability issues. This is also (mostly) not a matter of businesses creating projects in house and then simply throwing the code over the wall. At last week’s NoSQL EU event in London, Twitter’s analytics lead, Kevin Weill, discussed how Twitter is working with Digg to create real-time analytics for Cassandra. Kevin also recently Tweeted (naturally enough) about Hadoop-LZO, a project to bring splittable LZO compression to Hadoop, on which Twitter is collaborating with Cloudera and Facebook. There are plenty of other examples of contributions being made by Twitter, Facebook, Digg and LinkedIn on their own open source pages, but in many ways the biggest thing here is not the individual contributions but the commitment to the overall culture of contribution and collaboration. It is often said that open source developers begin by scratching their own itch, and that is most definitely true when we look at the motivations behind the creation of projects by the companies above, but there is also a culture and clear understanding that there is much to gain from collaboration. The NoSQL technologies also undermine the suggestion that while open source can be used to commoditize established markets it is not good an innovation. While the likes of Cassandra and Voldemort – not to mentionNeo4J, Redis, CouchDB, Riak and MongoDB – are undoubtedly operating within a larger established market, the longer we look at NoSQL the clearer it is that far from commoditizing an established market these technologies are being used to innovate beyond the realms of the established relational database and establish new database market segments. |
posted Apr 19, 2010 9:56 AM by Target Source
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updated Apr 19, 2010 9:57 AM by Agile Source
]
BEIJING – April 1, 2010 – TargetSource, the Collaborative Company, today announced it has new subsidiary -- AgileSource, a collaborative delivery company , who focus on help organizations that require high quality, on-time and within budget open source based application deployments.
"Open source, in other words, is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end, and that end .is collaborative innovation." Matt Asay said in this blog. With years of deep experience Open Source Community involovement and development, AgileSource has the strong experience and expertise in Java, open source, and agile methodology to ensure customer's application will meet their requirements. By working together, we believe that customer's innovation will driven more success. Before AgileSource operation, the former team achieved good results in 2009, growing revenues and nearly doubling new customers and organizations such as Koolearn, ZTE, ChinaMobile, France Telecom etc. "Open source is no longer considered the wild underdog, but it will need more new companies making money off the trend" said Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL stressed at the EclipseCon 2010 conference. With the new wave of Open Source movement, AgileSource is already build it's business model based on Open Source , it had been at the forefront of that movement.
About AgileSource AgileSource is the collaborative delivery company for our business partners. For organizations that require high quality, on-time and within budget open source based application deployments, AgileSource has the strong experience and expertise in Java, Open Source, and agile methodology to ensure your application will meet your requirements. By working together, we believe that your success is our success. |
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