All posts by Dawn

Open Source Software Revolutionizes US Patent System

This is great news, not just for open source, but for the entire software industry as a way to improve the quality of patents.

First of all, this initiative establishes open source software as prior art. It means that innovations used in open source cannot be patented by another party:

OSDL, IBM, Novell, Red Hat and SourceForge.net are developing a searchable database of open source code so patent examiners and the general public can search for prior art from the open source community when considering a patent application. Such a storage system would satisfy legal requirements for the code to qualify as prior art, IBM said.

Second, the public will be encouraged to review and provide feedback on software patents.

Finally, a patent quality index will be introduced to rate the quality of the patents.

This is a great step in the right direction for the open source ecosystem. Quite a bit of the effort from the open source community has been focused on arguing against the existence of software patents, and this initiative helps to make improvements within the existing patent system. I’m not going to get into the debate about whether or not software patents are a good idea; they do exist, and this initiative might help improve patent quality. I see this as a good thing for the software industry as a whole.

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Open Source in China

The BBC article linked below mentions that China’s biggest resource is its people. This gives China, and other countries with vibrant, emerging information technology industries, an opportunity to grow their local software ecosystem through the use of open source software. Because the source code is open for anyone to view, modify, and redistribute, China could focus on forming local, Chinese support and services organizations for open source software. Businesses in China could use MySQL, JBoss, Apache, and other software while getting updates, services and support for those applications locally. The open source communities can benefit when enhancements are contributed back to the community.

This is not just an opportunity for China. Many emerging countries could use open source software in this manner to create local jobs and nurture the local software industry.

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More on Women in Open Source

In an earlier blog post about women in open source, I talked about the huge disparity between the numbers of men vs. women involved in open source. While there are relatively few women in open source, communities are forming to bring these women together in a supportive environment. LinuxChix.org is one community “for women who like Linux and for supporting women in computing” and membership “ranges from novices to experienced users, and includes professional and amateur programmers, system administrators and technical writers.”

The beauty of online communities is that they can be easily formed to bring people with a common interest together across the globe. A few hundred years ago, we were essentially limited to local communities of people living in the same geographic area where we might be the only person in a particular occupation or with a certain interest. Due to the “magic” of the Internet, we can now collaborate with and support others with similar interests across the globe.

LinuxChix.org is just one of several online communities that exist to support other women in open source.

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Again, Open Source Innovates Ahead of a Proprietary App

As Firefox becomes more popular, Microsoft has to respond in an effort to slow their market share loss to Firefox (see my previous blog entry about Firefox nearing 10% market share). In IE7, being shown this week at CES, Microsoft has implemented a few of the features that make Firefox so popular (tabbed browsing, RSS button, etc.) While it is great to see Microsoft adding additional features to IE, it is interesting to note that Firefox is innovating ahead of Microsoft in this area. In this case the propriety, corporate application is following in the footsteps of the open source community. Now, if Microsoft could only cultivate an open community of people dedicated to writing Firefox style extensions for IE …

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Firefox Nearing 10% Browser Market Share

According to NetApplications, Firefox hit 9.6% market share at the end of 2005 gaining nearly a point over the November numbers. This is an amazing feat for the one year old browser against a formidable competitor that has owned the browser market for the past few years.

From my perspective Firefox has a couple of key advantages:
• The Firefox community is more responsive and tends to address vulnerabilities more quickly than the leading commercial browser (see previous blog post on Fidelity).
• Firefox was designed from the ground up with today’s technologies in mind, rather than retrofitting modern technologies onto an older browser infrastructure.

Here is my New Year’s prediction:
Firefox will have 15% of the browser market share by the end of 2006 (secretly, I hope that it will be closer to 20%).

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Fidelity "gets" open source

Fidelity plans to consider more open source solutions and will now give open source and proprietary applications equal weight when selecting software. What tipped them over the edge? Speed. This is the beauty of open source. The community behind popular open source products tends to respond more quickly than most traditional companies. For example, Fidelity evaluated both Firefox and IE to find that both had similar vulnerabilities; however, the Firefox community responded more quickly to fix issues.

Fidelity is also taking a more enlightened approach to open source than some other companies by showing a strong interest in community involvement. For open source software that is used extensively, they plan to have Fidelity developers work closely with the open source community to contribute enhancements and do their part to maintain community health and longevity of the product.

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Open Source Goes Mainstream

In The open source story of the year, ZDNet‘s Dana Blankenhorn talks about how the 2005 success of companies like JBoss & Covalent is driving open source into the enterprise with an even bigger impact expected in 2006.

While I agree with Dana and believe that companies like JBoss are driving open source into the mainstream, the use of open source in corporate IT shops is not a new phenomenon. The new part is that management now knows and recognizes the use of open source software. As those of us with system admin backgrounds know, much of the IT infrastructure software (DNS/Bind, etc.) and many of the utilities and programs used by system administrators and developers over the years have been open source software.

The difference now is that open source is moving into applications that have the attention of IT managers / CIOs. Applications like JBoss, MySQL, Apache, Linux and others are helping to bring open source software into the mainstream through their use in more IT organizations and mission critical applications. Interesting piece of trivia: What open source software powers Sabre’s mission critical Travelocity service?

Microsoft Follows Firefox

Too many people tend to think of open source software as free copies of other applications with the open source application lagging behind proprietary ones. The operative word here being copy; the proprietary application with millions of dollars of corporate R&D budgets behind it is portrayed as the innovator while the little open source project struggles to keep up.

Actually, this is not the case for many open source projects, and Firefox provides just one recent example of where the open source application is leading in innovation while proprietary applications follow. Microsoft’s adoption of Firefox’s little orange RSS icon as an industry standard has been the most public example of this phenomenon (reported below in Forbes). I would argue that Firefox is innovating ahead of IE in a number of areas including tabbed browsing, security, and user customization. Because of the active user / developer communities for open source projects, innovation is a natural outcome. For more information on user innovations, I recommend reading Democratizing Innovation by Eric von Hippel.

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Digg: A community built on open source software

A snippet from the interview with Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson of Digg.com:

MadPenguin: So here you are, challenging media giants, they’re calling you up as soon as two months or so after your birthday, and what role does open source and the open Internet play in your success?

KR: From a cost point of view, they played a huge role. Community played a huge role. Open source software gave us an extremely low barrier to entry. I didn’t have to go out and license any of expensive technologies. I didn’t have the money for that. We’re talking generic boxes. We use Penguin Computing now, but back then, it was self-built, home brew boxes running Debian Linux, Apache, MySQL, etc. The LAMP architecture is our base. It was at EV1Servers.net, and they provide you with vanilla boxes for 100 bucks or so per month. That’s all you need to get things off the ground.

JA: The open Internet was also an enabling technology, because by the time that Digg started, the Internet mass audience had become more accustomed to Web 2.0 kinds of technologies. You know, things like RSS, for example, and the notion of the Internet being a two-directional medium. They “got” it that Rather than just going to a website and reading information, they were participating in that data. So Digg was following in the footsteps of Napster, KazAa, Orkut, MySpace, and so forth who had taught that Internet audience to participate. By the time that Digg started, that barrier to entry has been overcome. We had an audience that was ready for this experience. So from an infrastructure point of view, we could afford to do it, and from an audience standpoint, they were ready for it because of these revolutions that had already happened out on the Internet.

This is a community where the users get to decide which stories are important and relevant enough to make front page news, and it is built on open source software. Thanks Einfeldt for a great interview!

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Dell May Try Mozilla Firefox on PCs

Rumor has it that Dell may begin shipping PCs in the UK with Mozilla Firefox preinstalled.

The Firefox phenomenon is pretty amazing (see my earlier blog entry). If this rumor is true, it raises a few questions. Would Dell expand this program outside of the UK? My experience with Firefox is that most people (even non-techies) are fast fans of this browser quickly becoming addicted to the tabbed browsing, easy to install extensions for anything you can think of, and even to the themes that allow them to customize Firefox for any mood or holiday.

What impact would this have on the market share of Firefox? This could have a significant impact on the market share of Firefox, which has currently grown to about 9% without much more than a grassroots marketing effort. Preinstallation on a leading OEM configuration could quickly bump this number up significantly.

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