What happens downstream?: Scott Mattoon's blog

No sooner had we put the wrap on an April 9 Commonwealth Club panel interview on Collaborating for Change, than PBS announced a really cool collaborative project on Nova to design the "Car of the Future".   Both of these recent productions focus on the application of open source design to social and economic needs beyond software.  The promise of open source economics is popping up everywhere.  It must be something in the water, (or the atmosphere).   Network based open source design efforts have been written about before, and there's more than a few established non-software open source design projects, but they were hardly regarded as mainstream.  And open source as a business model has been a fringe enterprise.  But all that is changing.

The upcoming Nova special, and the Commonwealth Club interview (with Amy Novogratz, Kate Stohr, Maria Giudice, and myself (video courtesy fora.tv)) serve as proof points that this phenomena has exceeded meme status and is spilling over into the broader socioeconomic graph.   But we knew this was inevitable, right?  We just needed the right conditions for humanity's collaborative tendency to come out of the proprietary deep freeze.

The substrate upon which this new culture is rising pairs flexible licensing models a'la Creative Commons with accessible technology for building collaborative online communities a'la Drupal and Wordpress,  Yahoo!groups and PBWiki.  Among the catalysts for this reaction are frustration over obscene economic inequities around the world, abuses of people and planet for profit, and utter neglect by federal governments.  As was discussed here in the video interview about the Open Architecture Network, these frustrations can be overcome by collaborating for change on the net.

Need more proof of the trend toward an open source economy?  Just check with the folks at Open Everything.  They're tracking numerous open collaboratives, which are exogenous to  the software world, but infused with many of the same principles, practices and tools as open source software projects. 

One of the most prominent tools applied to these new collaboratives is Drupal, and we discuss it's role in the Open Architecture Network in the video (at :37:30, :46:30, and :51:00).

Ten years ago who would have imagined that:

• IBM would begin opening their patent portfolio?
• Major news bureaus would sponsor citizen journalism?
• Educational curriculum would be opened and shared for free?
• The Pirate party could get on a national election ballot?
• Sun Microsystems would convert its software portfolio to open source, and it would be profitable?  (Well, that one you might have imagined.)
  

Yet these, and plenty of other examples show that collaborative culture is on the rise.  Does this signal the next generation economy in which businesses profit less from market lockout and legal protection and more from direct value delivered in open markets?  Or does it lead to a more fundamental shift wherein socioeconomic prosperity derives less through commerce than through collaborations for which the primary incentive to contribute is sociocentric good? 

More evidence that Sun's open source strategy is serving Sun's growth objectives came in my Inbox this week.  

The founder of a pre-startup company developing a specialized SaaS offering replied to my cold-contact inquiry about their business:

"We're big users of Solaris - we've standardized on Solaris 10 for our systems, and rely heavily on DTrace and ZFS - it's great that it's all open source (well, free-as-in-beer is probably our primary motivation at this stage)."

Two things about his response are strong validations of Sun's strategy.  First, no one from Sun had any prior business contact with this company, afaik.  Second, he goes on to say,

"...  We'll be considering Sun hardware, and we'll also be thinking about support contracts..."

which is precisely the market behavior Sun is trying to drive with it's open source strategy. 

It would be hard to draw any conclusions about the effectiveness of a $15B company's strategy from one such response, but this is not an isolated case.   The frequency and relevance of "pre-company" contact with Sun is sky-rocketing.  These are organizations that are incubating businesses and have yet to spend significant IT dollars.  They're looking to avoid technical debt and brace for break-away growth.  They want to embed efficiency and reliability in their architecture.  They want to get started at the least cost possible.  Sun is redesigning itself to serve these objectives, and it's working.

And today at the CommunityNext conference in L.A., the CEO of Real Time Matrix, Jeff Whitehead, repeated the theme to 200+ entrepreneurs who are launching media companies on the web:

"We started on Linux.  We hit a wall ...  Now we're on Solaris.  We use Sun's Coolthreads servers.  We saw a huge performance gain ... We needed to make this switch to succeed." 

No sooner had I captured that quote, when a message pops up in my Inbox from another startup founder here at CommunityNext:

"... I'm really looking forward to a potential relationship with Sun. Our architecture and technologies certainly seem like a good fit."

Our initial introduction was through a discussion about our open source technologies, specifically NetBeans, OpenSPARC, and OpenSolaris.  He wanted to know if he could run Erlang on these technologies.  Answer: yes, he can.

More on Sun's Open Source strategy:

• Free to Innovate
• F/OSS from Sun
• European Union study on impact of open source software in the ICT sector - highlights Sun's contribution to open source project (conclusion: more than any other single institution).
  

Back now from DrupalCon, I'm parsing all that happened last week in Boston.  For me it was a whirlwind, interrupted by a plethora of hassles, including a nasty head cold, keyboard and trackpad on my MBP crapping out, a crashed demo, and several hours separated from my Treo while it rode around in the back of a Boston cab.  All that negative energy converging on me was more than offset by the positive vibe at the four day conference.  The kindness of the cabbie who drove crosstown to return my phone helped too.

One of the highlights for sure was spending time with a new Sun colleague, Brian Aker from MySQL.  We had breakfast at Henrietta's near Harvard Square before his keynote on Wednesday.   I asked him about the merger with Sun, what's next for MySQL, and how he'd like to see our field organizations work together.   He said the merger has been pretty well received and there was a general appreciation at MySQL for Sun's commitment to open source (something I hope will rub off on Brian's Slashdot amigo Chris Dibona, who conspicuously left Sun off of his Tuesday keynote list of companies that "get" open source).  There is a tradition of collaboration between Sun and MySQL too, which Brian indicated ought to help smooth the integration.   Lot's of his work is going into memcached these days, particularly in the libmemcached client.  He cleared up a misconception for me regarding Innodb: since Innodb is GPL'd, the risk of Oracle smothering it is nil - the community is driving it, and it's not the dead end many had feared.   What's next?  Don't expect to see MySQL 5.1 until 2009; do expect a maturing and further specializing application of the MySQL engines MyISAM, Innodb, BDB, and Archive; and plan for an adoption ramp for DRBD.  Brian had some great advice for Sun's field engineers: get familiar with MySQL technology by taking advantage of the many training resource available at MySQL.com.  MySQL University is a great place to start, (be sure to catch Brian's talk on EC2 March 29).  I also caught some good audio one-on-one with Brian after his keynote which I will post separately, along with his advice on scaling up your database.

RDF and Semantic Web were topics of much conversation and at least one BoF session.  With the addition of RDF modules in Drupal 6, developers can mashup data from multiple sites in very interesting ways.  If Web3.0 is massively distributed data mining, indexing, and mashing it all up, then Drupal is positioned to be the portal for this convergence, as Dries Buytaert resolutely declared in his Monday keynote

I gave a talk on running Drupal on Sun, with some help from Chris Cheetham from Project Caroline, at the end of the day on Wednesday (slides at right).  As luck would have it, my demo froze up, but I did manage to show Drupal running in a Solaris Zone, and DTrace to count function calls from Drupal.  Chris's demo of Drupal deployment to Project Caroline went much smoother.

Another highlight was awarding the grandprize Sun Fire T1000 server to the winners of the Showcase Site competition.  PingVision won it for their work on Popular Science Magazine.  Congratulations to Kevin Bridges and the rest of the crew at PingVision.

There was a lot of support for the next DrupalCon to be held in Hungary this fall.  It will be hard to top the Boston event, but I know this community will do their best to have the best one yet.

• DrupalCon Boston 2008 on flickr
• Recordings of DrupalCon Boston 2008 sessions
  

Sun's annual Customer Engineering Conference wrapped up yesterday.  Officially, the conference themes were Green Computing and "Redshift" - the Internet growth trajectory that is under-served by Moore's law.  There was plenty of great content on these themes, but the overwhelming message I walked away with after three days was that Sun has finally risen above the Not_Invented_Here syndrome that has plagued it's market growth for years.

Todd Fast said it best in a post There is no chicken. There is no egg:

"To most people at Sun, "community" is a walled garden cut off from the real conversation, a case of we know better, shut up and listen. Sun is hardly alone in holding this attitude, but particularly prone to it because of its technology-centric perspective. From that perspective, community is not something that is self-modifying nor self-sustaining, rather it is something to be moderated, controlled, and ultimately held at arm's length. We talk about gathering community in order to drive usage, but we're actually grasping at a shadow of the thing we should want instead—culture."

Courageous and controversial for a circa August 2007 assessment, but accurate to my mind.  Less than two months and a few tipping-point innovations later it appears that Sun has truly transcended (ascended?) this navel gazing mindset. Phew.

The transcendence was no more evident than in Tim Bray's talk, "Web 2.0: The Nitty Gritty".  He wasted no time getting to the point: Sun underestimated the priority of Time to Market for the Web 2.0 developer.  He cited Time to Market as one of four hot developer issues:

• Scalability
• Time to Market
• Maintainability
• Integration

Of the four, Sun placed disproportionate emphasis on Scalability.  But new scaling models were emerging and acceptance of perpetual beta service levels was increasing, both of which served to disrupt the market dynamics that propelled Sun to precarious heights in 1999 and 2000.  Tim went on to espouse all the advantages and adoption patterns of Ruby on Rails and PHP, which play well in a Time to Market driven business model, while Java was akward for a Test First style of programming.   He then went on to say "SOA is bad," sending gasps through the audience.  But his statements were really not that controversial to this crowd, whose collective experience suggests the developer marketplace will not wait for Sun.  People were smart enough to not take Tim too literally on this latter point, but everyone can make sense of Atom and RSS, while not so for SOA - how many developers have the time or will to wade through WS-* specifications in order to integrate a handful of apps?  

The working definition of Choice for Sun engineers of yore (and I count myself among them,) was, "noun, Any color you want as long as it's Indigo".  Tim bid this notion goodbye brilliantly.

We're getting on with the business of competing on merit and mindshare.  Evidence of transcendence is popping all over the place;  heard on an internal conference call today from a software product lead, "We should not constrain ourselves for religious reasons." 

You want to do Flash, Flex, AJAX, JavaFX.  No problem.  You write code in PHP, Ruby, Java?  No Problem.  You deploy on Linux, Windows, Solaris?  No problem.  Choice is the new mantra at Sun.  There's no more room for NIH fussing anymore.

As Jonathan Schwartz said in his keynote on Tuesday,  "Revenue is a lagging indicator of how well you're driving adoption." Given recent growth in Sun's revenue, especially the double digits in software revenue, I'd say we're finally on track with this adoption thing.  No factor has been more crucial to the upward trend than the embrace of technologies that did not originate at Sun.