SunMink

Simon Phipps's other Weblog
(a WebMink in the Sun)

Adoption-Led is not Shareware

In response to my article last week on the emerging adoption-led market, IBM's Savio Rodrigues suggests this is just a description of Shareware and asks why anyone would ever pay for what they got free.

I can't say I agree. Of course, there are similarities between the two - in fact, I was closely associated with a successful shareware business at the start of the 90s, so I have a fair insight into how that works. We actually had close to 10% of estimated users registering our software. But what I am describing is not the same model.

First, what I am describing is a change in the software lifecycle which is facilitated by open source, rather than a business model which is initiated by vendors. Software deployers will switch from procurement-driven to adoption-led patterns without any intervention from vendors; it's a natural consequence of software freedom. The question really is not whether or not this market will come, but how vendors will remain relevant in it.

Second, this is not a support-only model. The model assumes that enterprise users will want the value-added content of a "subscription" (the model most closely associated with Sun to date) or "enterprise version" (such as the RHAT model). Value-add can include patch management, performance tuning, additional utilities and more. Corporate governance regulations may make enterprises using software for a mission-critical purpose require a service contract, or seek a warranty for their software infrastructure. Those who are embedding software in their own product may require indemnity. Finally, many businesses are reluctant (for whatever reason) to use open source licenses and so want commercial licenses for their production systems.

So I think people are more than willing to pay if what they are paying for reduces costs or adds value. It's the software that's free of charge, not the people who work on it. They benefit from the freedom Free software brings, and their employers or customers benefit from the choices that freedom brings.

[Previous: The Adoption-led Market | Next: A Force Of Nature]

BSC Is Miscellaneous

Judging by the statistics I watch for my blog, the majority of my readers may well never visit the home page for Sun's bloggers. But it may be worth a visit today becuase we've just introduced two features that help you benefit from the miscellaneousness of the site.

One is the tag cloud. We've had tagging as an option on blogs.sun.com for quite a while now, but today the team has turned on a master tag cloud for the whole site. Use it to look for themes and trends across the whole corpus of Sun bloggers.

The other is the New Bloggers list (over in the right-hand column). We have thousands of bloggers here and when new ones emerge they often have trouble getting noticed. They'll now be featured for a while so they can be spotted.

These are both features that make use of the "miscellaneousness" of the site, to use a term from David Weinberger's excellent book Everything Is Miscellaneous. He argues that in the participation age, it is best to impose order as late as possible rather than to try to include a pre-conceived notion of order in the structure of the data. The book is well worth adding to your reading list.

Update: Spooky. Seems Tim was recommending the book the same instant I was...

Now With Added Comments

Just a note to say that SunMink blog now offers comment feeds in both RSS and Atom formats.

Edited Out of History

Now here's an interesting difference in corporate styles. I remember when I left IBM in 2000, the (extensive) mentions of me on IBM's web pages were gradually edited away until today, six years later, there seems to be only one or two left that date from my pre-Sun days (doubtless they will also get expunged now). This one's interesting - my job title has been changed to Sun even though I was still at IBM on the date I gave the talk (7 months before I gave my notice in fact).

When we started blogs.sun.com, we had a long discussion about what we should do when employees left. The conclusion we all reached, supported strongly by Jonathan Schwartz who attended the meeting, was that they should simply be left in place, merely closed for further changes. Our view was that, if the blog text had been acceptable when it was published, there was no reason a change of employment status should vary that. Not to mention the desire by Tim to preserve URIs. Interestingly, one of Jonathan's motivations for this was also so that people could pick up where they left off when they rejoined Sun! Going one step further, Sun now has a blog aggregator for alumni.

So it's with some surprise that I see IBM's former Fellow, "Father of Websphere" Don Ferguson, is already in the process of being airbrushed out of history. His blog already redirects to the home page for IBM's dW bloggers (he's still listed as I type this) despite the cached version showing no signs of being any less defensible than it was a month ago. You can see an older version in WayBackMachine. It seems that, now he works for Microsoft, his views are retrospectively unacceptable. Or is there another explanation?

Update: IBM has responded to this controversy by re-instating Don's blog, with the addition of a comment to say he no longer works at IBM. Jolly good, hope it's now a policy since URL-rot is a problem we all hate!

Blogger Downgrade

If you're a subscriber to my Daily Mink aggregator you may notice that stuff from my personal blog is not showing up. The reason is that I foolishly accepted Google's offer to "upgrade" to the new version of Blogger, which I use to maintain that blog. The change invovled associating my GMail account with my Blogger account, and the opening screen assured me that "nothing will change" in my blogs. Except, of course, they have dropped legacy RSS support, and even the cute workaround (a parameter on the feed URI) doesn't seem to work for blogs published via FTP.

Now, it wouldn't be so bad that they only had Atom support - after all, that's a modern and progressing standard - if it wasn't for the fact that the version of Planet Roller that I'm using believes there's an XML error in the feed. That makes it skip the Webmink feed altogether when building Daily Mink. I have no idea what the problem is right now - Dave is kindly building a fresh version of Planet Roller for me - but the effect is that my aggregator is missing entries. Apologies.

Update: With huge thanks to Dave Johnson, the Daily Mink is now working properly again using the new BlogApps.

Update 2: Dave provides details in a posting about proposed new features to the Planet tool.

Bray Comments

Yep, it's finally happened. Tim Bray has turned on his hand-crafted comments system over on Ongoing, which I am sure will evolve at a steady pace (threaded comments, maybe?). Great move (I hope), Tim, congratulations.

Browsers of Power?

Now here's interesting. I've just been reviewing my log files and for once I looked at the browser version list. No surprise to find that two-thirds of my visitors are using Mozilla browsers, but one entry caught my eye because I'd not seen it before. It said "NSA Power-Browser,gzip". I have spotted "gzip" as a browser before but nothing that said "NSA".

I've done the obvious and googled for obvious hits - nothing. Is someone playing a prank, or should I expect a special interview next time I pass through a US port of entry?

Ego Graph

Is this the ultimate tool for the blogging egomaniac?

Posts that contain "Simon Phipps" per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Gone but not forgotten

It's hard to see colleagues move on for any reason, but one of the good things about Sun is that we often find people returning later - indeed, some of our key leadership right now are re-hires. Sun has always had a policy of not re-allocating employee serial numbers so that people can come back.

There's a radical new step emerging though. Sun alumni can now apply to have their blogs aggregated at the new community.sun.com aggregator page by filling out a form, staying part of Sun's extended family. I hope we'll see a broad spread of blogs syndicated there - there are so many people I want to stay in touch with, Geoff Arnold included. No reason why turning in your badge means I have to stop respecting your considered opinion (assuming I did before!).

Blog Family

This is a periodic pointer to the blogs that I run. Apologies if this is all familiar (but I know I have some regulars who aren't aware of this...).

This blog, SunMink, is where I write on technology topics related to my job at Sun as Chief Open Source Officer. Things written here do not necessarily represent Sun's (or any other entity's) official position, and have not necessarily been checked by anyone else at Sun.

Over at WebMink I write on other topics of personal interest, especially music, photography, reading, politics and metaphysics.

At The Mink Dimension, I aggregate both of these blogs together with my Flickr photos, del.icio.us links and other stuff into a single, chronological stream.

All of the above have syndication feeds so you can subscribe to as little or as much as you wish in your syndication tool of choice.

Comment Symmetry

For the record, I do not believe that a blog has to have comments to be a "real blog", no matter what people say. The whole point of blogging is that one gets a space to say things the way they are, personally and in the same "voice" as anything said privately, in a place that has a unique and permanent URL so it can be referenced. The right way to comment on a blog at any length other than the passing comment is to write it on your own blog and link.

Having said that, there's a certain delicious symmetry (and rumour-related timeliness?) to seeing on the same day JBoss closing down comments on its blogs and Jonathan Schwartz opening his blog up for comments...

Blogging breaks

Note to conference organisers: Stephanie Booth has a great idea here:

The audience is in the real-time information business if you have lots of bloggers in the room, so if you don’t want them to spend half the talk time uploading photos, chatting, and writing up blog posts. So, how about give us blogging breaks, and plan post-sized talks? Wouldn’t that be neat?

Those people paying all their attention to their laptops during the talks are actually your friends...

Start the stopwatch

OK, start the clock - let's see how long it takes The Register to acknowledge and correct the egregious error they made in the article Software patents loom large again. In that article, the anonymous writer asserts that

The bill had been supported by the European pro-patent lobby, which included corporations such as Microsoft and Sun, who claimed that the directive would encourage investment in research and development in Europe.

What rubbish! Microsoft was indeed a prominent proponent of software patents. On the other hand, as was well documented, Sun and Red Hat were the core of a small but significant industry group lobbying around the position that the directive would be harmful because it threatened the freedom to create interoperable free/open source software. Anyone who had been paying the slightest attention to the issue, or did more than the most cursory research, would know this was the case.

[Click! Corrected at 2pm PST Jan 18. Thanks, Drew.]

Back to BlogEd

Rumours of my death...

Flattery abounds, it seems - I am flattered by David Berlind's concern for my health and sanity (and have forwarded it to my manager to act on as I head out to the Java User Group in Stockholm for tonight's meeting...). And I completely agree with him about Jim Grisanzio as an excellent commentator. But I have to say that one of the reasons I feel at liberty to leave my blog untouched for 20 days while I go to speak in Japan and Brazil (and, I admit, take it easy over Thanksgiving) is the fact that I've already multiplied the workers at the harvest by the very creation (with many others) of blogs.sun.com and by its uptake by 3,000 or so Sun employees.

Having said that, one of the things I've not quite come to terms with is how to keep up a stream of worthwhile blogging while I am engaged in confidential activity. I find my thought processes consumed by it and my ability to keep hints of it out of my serious writing very hard. Consequently, I tend to stick to del.icio.us postings and personal comment over on Webmink during such periods. I'm back now, though, and I have plenty to say on both open source governance and on open document format standards...