I have been seeing quite a few Earth Day technology news stories and blogs over the past few days encouraging people to recycle old electronic equipment. An even better solution is when computer equipment can be reused to help the “needy get nerdy” (Free Geek). Free Geek will take donated computers and other electronic equipment and reuse as much as possible to create computers for those who need them. Materials that cannot be used again are sent only to recycling companies that handle them in an environmentally responsible manner.

The refurbished computers are loaded with open source software (Linux, OpenOffice.org, and more). To become eligible to receive one of these computers along with training on how to use it, a person must spend 24 hours volunteering at Free Geek. The original Free Geek is located in my adopted home town on Portland, OR, and additional Free Geeks have started sprouting up in other locations including my original home state of Ohio (Columbus); Chicago, Illinois; South Bend, Indiana; Olympia, WA; and Ephrata, PA.

Please consider contributing to these organizations by donating equipment or volunteering your time to support both the environment and open source software.

Open source bounties are not a new concept, but I had not heard much about bounties lately, so I wanted to bring it up on this blog. Bounties are designed as a way to encourage development of a particular feature within an open source project. In most open source projects, developers contribute to those areas that are of greatest interest; Eric S. Raymond refers to this as “scratching a developer’s personal itch.” To encourage development of a particular feature, organizations and other individuals can offer a bounty usually in the form of a specified amount of money for the addition of a feature meeting certain criteria. As just one example, Novell offered a series of bounties for GNOME a few years ago and others have initiated similar bounties with other projects with mixed success. There are even companies like Bounty Source that provide tools to help facilitate this process. Lately, I have been hearing more about companies funding developers directly. For example, many large software companies, IBM, Intel, and many others, have people on their payroll who are responsible for contributing to open source projects like the Linux kernel.

I suspect that having people on staff to do open source development as a full time job is probably a slightly better solution for most companies. For smaller companies or companies that only want a few features, bounties might be a better option. Please feel free to add a comment to this blog if you have experience using either of these options and want to share the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

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I have discussed the difficulties of getting wide adoption for Linux on the desktop in quite a few blog entries (here and here). In short, we have a chicken and the egg problem: there are not enough Linux desktop users for application vendors to justify the port to Linux on the desktop; however, users are not willing to move to desktop Linux until it supports the applications they require. I have also talked about the lack of vendor driver support that would allow users to plug and play with any device they happen to buy at the local electronics store (scanners, printers, digital cameras, MP3 players, etc.) The human tendency to resist change is another factor slowing the growth of the Linux desktop.

Apple, on the other hand, has done a better job of getting vendor and driver support for OS X. Cranky Geek, John C. Dvorak has suggested that Apple release OS X into open source, which is not as radical as it seems at first glance, since OS X is built on BSD.

“A cloud is rising over Mac OS X and its future unless Apple makes its boldest move ever: turning OS X into an open-source project. That would make the battle between OS X and Linux the most interesting one on the computer scene. With all attention turned in that direction, there would be nothing Microsoft could do to stem a reversal of its fortunes.” (Dvorak)

Dvorak takes this idea in a different direction than what I am about to do; however, I found the idea of an open source operating system from Apple intriguing. Setting business issues about whether or not Apple would ever really do this and whether this would make good business sense for Apple aside for the time being, this idea is worth exploring. By building on Apple’s current success with consumers and adding a solution that would be supported by the open source purists, Apple might be able to more effectively increase market segment share on the desktop. Under open source distribution licenses, it could also be used as a low cost alternative to Windows, particularly in emerging geographies. This makes the gigantic assumption that an open source OS X would also run on mainstream (not Apple-specific) hardware. Getting back to the business side of the equation, Apple would need to find an appropriate business model for open sourcing OS X, which could include a basic open source version with an up-sell to a premium version or a support and services model.

Taken to the extreme, we could position Linux as a server operating system and open source OS X as the open source desktop solution; however, I think that this is a bit extreme. A more likely case is that we could get consumers to start embracing an open source OS X desktop solution, which might also drive increased demand for Linux on the desktop helping to resolve the chicken and egg issue.

In reality, an open source OS X is probably a highly unlikely scenario, but it would make for a very interesting environment.

Larry Ellison recently suggested that Oracle might consider acquiring Novell as a way to expand into the Linux operating system business and to increase Oracle’s presence in the rapidly growing open source software market. In the past year, Oracle purchased open source database companies Sleepycat and Innobase and was rumored to have been in acquisition talks with MySQL, JBoss, and Zend. MySQL’s CEO Marten Mickos has been quoted in the press as saying that MySQL turned down offers from Oracle. On the other hand, JBoss did decide to be acquired; however, it was Red Hat, not Oracle, who made the purchase.

I do not think that Oracle is likely to acquire Novell at least not at in the immediate future. This looks more like posturing aimed at Red Hat, which now competes more directly with Oracle as a result of the JBoss acquisition. I also think that Novell is still assimilating SUSE and other open source acquisitions making them a difficult company to acquire.

In reality, who knows what will happen in this unpredictable M&A environment. If my years of experience in the technology industry have taught me anything, it is that Larry Ellison is not predictable.

Dana Blankenhorn blogged about a recent Evans Data report that described the open source market as fragmented. He goes on to say, “The whole premise of the study shows just how little most analysts know about open source as a concept.” (Blankenhorn). He ends the article with these questions, “Who are the leaders? I have no idea. The game has just started. Who do you think the leaders are?” (Blankenhorn). If I am reading this right, he is saying that open source is not fragmented, but that it is too early to tell who the leaders are.

Interesting. I suspect that he might be misunderstanding some of the terminology used in the study. A fragmented market or industry is defined as an environment where “no firm has a significant market share … usually fragmented industries are populated by a large number of small- and medium-sized companies” (Michael Porter, Competitive Strategy, p. 191). In other words, a market where there are no clear leaders.

In some cases, the market will eventually consolidate and in other cases it will not. This does not in any way reflect poorly on open source or imply that the open source communities themselves are fragmented. By most definitions, open source is a fragmented market with many smaller organizations providing a wealth of products, but with few clear market leaders. Fragmentation within a market is common when the market has diverse needs and when it is new (Porter), and open source seems to align with both of these ideas. I do agree with Dana that it is too early to identify any clear leaders, and over time we will see how open source software evolves.

The Microsoft Open Source Software Lab’s new Port 25 site has generated quite a bit of discussion over the past week. The site asks people to “Send us your feedback and ideas. We want to hear from you.” (Port 25). In the case of public forums, especially at a company as visible as Microsoft, people may just take you up on the offer.

As GM found with their ‘Write Your Own Ad’ campaign, you will get some feedback that you want and some that you do not want. In Microsoft’s case, “There have been hundreds of blog posts and hundreds of emails sent – both through the feedback aliases and many that you have sent directly to me. There have been rants, demands, questions, encouragement, suspicion, affirmation, ideas, pontifications and guidance.” (Bill Hilf, Microsoft)

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I am excited that Portland, OR will be getting free wireless access starting with a few test areas downtown this summer and citywide access in one to two years. This project has been in the works for a while, and the contract was awarded to MetroFi yesterday.

Since this is an open source blog, I did some digging and found out that they use open source squid proxy server systems, Linux, PHP, and other open source technologies. They are also hiring.

Thanks to Todd for sending me the link!

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Only three days left to submit your Firefox Flicks.

For those who want to see the flicks that have already been submitted, the new Firefox Flicks web site just went live with the first three videos, and they plan on adding a few new ones each day.

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Austan Goolsbee wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times about how Americans face an overwhelming burden every year spending time and money to file tax forms. Much of the information entered onto the tax forms is information that has already been sent to the IRS leading Goolsbee to suggest that the IRS could aggregate this information and send each of us a form with this information already pre-filled meeting the needs of the majority of taxpayers with fairly simple returns. This idea led Tim O’Reilly to comment, “Web 2.0 you say? Well yes. If Google were running the IRS, it’s what they’d do.”

This started me thinking …

What if the IRS was run by open source? Would we have collaborative tax returns? I could opt-in to the “open source taxes” program on the IRS site to start my return, which could be populated with the information that the IRS already has on file. Other organizations could collaboratively add information to my return (charitable deductions, etc.) I could collaborate with other tax preparers for free help and advice or pay someone like a traditional tax preparation company to provide this type of support and service (the Red Hat business model). Some savvy programmers would create nifty open source tools that allow me to simplify my tax return for certain obscure, long-tail scenarios that I share with only 25 other people in the world.

“If I ran the zoo, I’d make a few changes. That’s just what I’d do.” Dr. Seuss.

We knew that JBoss was shopping around, and it looks like Red Hat made the acquisition today. It sounds like a pretty good match. They have similar business models, and Red Hat is intimately familiar with the tools and infrastructure market (Cygnus / GCC, for example). It will be interesting to see how the two corporate cultures come together.

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