Musings on the world of software from the sharp end of the long tail
Posted in open source on Jun 20th, 2008
Of course the real news was that Red Hat (and many others) were even given the opportunity to be part of the evolution of Java.
This was only possible because a bunch of people (like Simon Phipps), inside and outside of Sun had the clarity of vision, passion and determination to actually make it happen; and […]
Posted in open source on Jun 19th, 2008
[also read part 2]
At JavaOne in May, 2006, Sun Microsystems announced they were going to release Java as free software under the terms of the GPL. The size of the task (6.5 million lines of code) was only eclipsed by the size of the opportunity for Java as a free and open technology.
At JavaOne in […]
Posted in Business on Jun 9th, 2008
There’s been an interesting thread on the “Open Source Business’ Glass Ceiling” over the last couple of months that I’ve been meaning to comment on. I think Marten Mickos’ initial categorization of customer willingness to pay for support is perhaps a little too simplistic; or maybe too abstract.
As a recap - Marten asserts that there […]
Posted in Red Hat, Uncategorized on Jun 2nd, 2008
Have you ever been in that situation where you’ve quickly developed your cool new app using JBoss only to be told by your boss that you have to port it over to some other vendor’s dinosaur of a run-time because it’s the “corporate standard” ?
Does it frustrate you that your IT department standardized on a […]
Posted in Business, Marketing, open source on Apr 11th, 2008
In my (albeit short) experience of building a business based on Open Source; I’ve realized that demand generation is much more consumer (or individual) oriented - hence traditional marketing is no longer sufficient.
An adoption-led market needs passionate consumers. Offering great products is a start; but investing in your community and building passion for your technology […]
Posted in Business, Red Hat, open source on Mar 18th, 2008
Matt Assay provides some good reading as usual this morning. He’s tried to correlate stock prices of a few companies who base some or part of their business on Open Source with their “Open Source Business Maturity”. Essentially he’s plotted the stock price (ie. the financial market’s appraisal of the company) of Red Hat, Novell […]
Posted in Enterprise, Technology, open source on Mar 5th, 2008
If you work in the IT / software industry and unless you’ve been shipwrecked on a deserted island for the last 5 years you have probably followed the rise of JBoss. I have tracked them very closely as a competitor. Founded in 2001; JBoss proved the commercial Open Source model, disrupted the incumbents in an […]
Posted in Technology on Feb 27th, 2008
Microsoft have finally figured out that Metcalfe’s Law applies to them as much as the next software company - despite their huge footprint. To quote Microsoft’s CEO and CMM (Chief Mad-Monkey) Steve Balmer :
“In a more connected, services-oriented world…one of the greatest value-adds in some sense is what people do on the other end of […]