Wednesday October 27, 2004 Redeeming Open Source
In its round-up of office suites this month, the UK magazine PC Pro gave six stars to OpenOffice.org:
Verdict: The best all-round office suite is also the cheapest. With excellent Microsoft compatibility, a consistent interface and a good network of ad-hoc support, this is the king of the business tools.
This is both a ringing endorsement of the OpenOffice.org community, and a sign of the times. As someone pointed out on a mailing list today, you no longer have to be a thief to get the best software free.
This leads me to my pet peeve of the moment - people assuming that the phrase "open source" automatically implies a switch to Linux. There's no need to make people take the big switch in their personal space to get the benefits they need. Most of the relatives and friends I speak to need solutions to problems, not a big technical upheaval. They need a browser that doesn't suffer from pop-ups and spyware. They need e-mail that doesn't let in viruses and spyware. They need something for writing letters and doing home budgeting. And they need to stick with Windows for whatever else they bought their PC for (usually games or photo editing with Photoshop Elements).
The solutions to those problems all run on Windows as well as Linux - Firefox for browsing, Thunderbird for e-mail, OpenOffice.org for documents and spreadsheets. Each of those meets the need, removes the pain and is loaded with extra easy features like tabbed browsing. So that's what I've been recommending. So far they have all accepted those recommendations - they wouldn't have listened if I had recommended Linux. That's not to say that business users don't need it on the desktop - the remarkable uptake of JDS proves the need exists - just that my friends and relatives need a different "editorial view" to that.
It's time to redeem the phrase "open source" or, if the pedants won't let us, find another. We've allowed vendor messages to make it mean just "Linux" for too long. My relatives and friends don't need Linux yet (next year...) - they need real, free solutions to the things that ail them. Let's equate "open source" with "solving people's real problems" and not with uber-geek technology. That's the first step to winning the bigger battle.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 27 2004, 11:03:10 AM PDT )
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Thursday October 21, 2004 Bricking Up Windows
Reflecting on Microsoft's apparently canny decision to continue to treat multiple processors as one if they happen to be in the same package, Tim Bray asserts what I have been saying for a while in my keynotes, that pricing software per-CPU is doomed. In a massively connected world (where "the network is the computer"), why should pricing be based on an arbitrary element from the ephemera of implementation? Pricing per-CPU is as relevant as pricing per-Mb-memory or per-square-foot-of-machine-room or per-watt-consumed. The closest historical analogue is the Window Tax, which merely led to people bricking up their windows or using shutters.
Reading around I notice Jeff Nolan of SAP commenting on Tim's view and getting the wrong end of the stick about the idea behind Sun's pricing model. He says:
Of course, this doesn't work very well when you don't know who is using your software, as may be the case with many enterprise apps that aspire to deploy throughout the supply chain and have occasional users (trading partners?). This also doesn't work when your application is a service without an end-user client application
On the contrary, it's exactly the way to handle both sets of circumstances. Why should a software vendor have the right to get inside your business, instrument it and then monitor its activity? Sun's model for both Java Desktop System and for Java Enterprise System is to charge a fee based on the number of employees in the company or unit deploying the software, without reference to the purpose it's being applied to. Once you've paid you have an infinite right-to-use any and all the elements of the software package.
Stephen O'Grady at RedMonk says that licensing today is far more complicated than it needs to be, and goes on to hint that open source is another pressure on software pricing. I'd point out that per-employee pricing and publishing-style packaging are the perfect way to price the value-added delivery of open source - that's why Sun is pioneering it. I expect to see plenty of people copying the idea over time. It's a good job someone committed to defensive use of patents rather than a patent aggressor has patented it...
Posted by webmink
( Oct 21 2004, 09:01:40 AM PDT )
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Saturday October 09, 2004 We've been framed
How did the company that created Unix workstations using BSD, released NFS to community freedom, created OpenOffice.org and is building the most viable Linux desktop distribution manage to get painted as an "enemy of open source"? How did the Java platform, which has created a market of true choice and freedom for tens of millions of deployers and which has evolved the most successful open standards community in the history of computing come to a place where it is described as "proprietary"? I think I've found the answer, and I've written about it in my personal blog... Posted by webmink
( Oct 09 2004, 06:34:58 AM PDT )
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Wednesday October 06, 2004 More open source from Sun
Sun makes things open source so often that it tends to pass without comment, especially by those whose view has been framed to see Sun as hostile to open source, but it's still good to see that SLAMD is open source now - that's a load-testing tool initially aimed at LDAP but which has grown to be generally applicable to network testing. Posted by webmink
( Oct 06 2004, 03:01:05 PM PDT )
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Tuesday October 05, 2004 Torrents
Great to see that OpenOffice.org has finally seen the value of using P2P networking to get their software distributed. There's now a beta test of using BitTorrent to download OpenOffice.org 1.1.3, one of many positive and non-IP-violating uses for peer-to-peer. Do give it a try, and become part of the voice of reason in the ongoing P2P battles.
Posted by webmink
( Oct 05 2004, 01:34:44 PM PDT )
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