That's the question that kept coming to mind when I talked with Paola Lubet, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development at Solid Software, about IBM's announcement it will support mySQL on its System i platform.

The announcement was made at the mySQL user conference, which closes today in Santa Clara.

Solid has been pushing mySQL support products for some time. "mySQL is going upstream," she said. "It will be adopted in more and more mission critical applications."

She continued, "It creates the opportunity for a customer. Before they had to deal with one size fits all databases. Now depending on the workload their application can be developed on the mySQL engine and load it on whatever fits."

This may read like marketing hype, but Ms. Lubet helped direct the launch of Oracle8i while at that company. She's an industry veteran. She knows her stuff. She wouldn't say something like this if she didn't mean it.

IBM's decision to work more closely with mySQL is one of those little steps that may, in time, have an enormous impact.

What do you think? Is mySQL now a choice enterprises can place alongside Oracle, IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server? Or does it still have a long way to go?

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"For some people, (open source) is a philosophical requirement, a sign of integrity and trust in a vendor. This will close that gap and address any lingering doubts they have about our openness and commitment to community."

Jeff Whatcott, vice president for product marketing at Adobe's enterprise and developer business unit, told this to C|Net's Martin Lamonica recently, while explaining how his company will open source Flex, its tool for building Flash animations, under the Mozilla Public License. Previously the company donated its ActionScript virtual machine to the Mozilla Foundation.

There is a plaintiff quality to this quote which may not have been intended, but which resonates nonetheless. I take no special joy in seeing the demise of the proprietary model. Business is business, and what works in business works. Open source works.

For a company to remain relevant in the world of software it has to engage open source. It has to contribute to open source. It has to move toward the open source incline, and find a way down that incline while protecting its stakeholders.

This is the main challenge of the industry in our time. It's a business model problem, just as Internet journalism is a business model problem, just as the Copyright Wars represent a business model problem.

The answers to these problems aren't apparent to all. I believe they lie in the word Internet itself.

The In stands for Intimate.

You have to engage, intimately, with your target market. You have to let them into your own thinking, with arms open, let them feel the embrace of your brand, and mean it.

Mr. Marketing Executive, Mr. Record Producer, Mr. Editor, tear down this wall.

Eben Moglen (right) announced on his blog this morning he is leaving the board of the Free Software Foundation.

The decision is evidence that the third draft of the GPL v.3, which he oversaw, has drawn positive reviews, and will likely go through with few edits.

The release of Discussion Draft 3 has been greeted as warmly as I dared hope: all the recorded outrage has been emitted by Microsoft or its surrogates, which is at it should be. We had prepared Discussion Draft 3, after all, with the assumption that it was going to be the Last Call Draft, and I thought, and continue to think, that it would serve beautifully as the final GPLv3. 

Moglen plans to put more time into his day job, as a professor at Columbia University in New York, as well as the Software Freedom Law Center, which provides legal support for FOSS software developers.

If Richard Stallman was the Karl Marx of the free software movement, then Moglen should go down in history as its Engels. (That's meant as a compliment, in that both are historic figures.)

A glance at Moglen's personal Web site demonstrates this, with papers like Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture, The dotCommunist Manifesto, and Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright on his resume.

Given the capitalist nature of the work Stallman and Moglen have engaged in (GPL v.3 is a contract) I'd rather consider them the Jefferson and Adams of the movement.

Or if you insist on a Marxist analogy, Groucho and Chico. (That makes Eric Raymond Harpo, and maybe Jonathan Schwartz Gummo, the agent who made the big money.)

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A lot of folks woke up this morning thinking that CollabNet has bought Sourceforge.

But as CollabNet vp-operations Nick Bonfiglio explained to me on the phone just now, this is not exactly the case.

What CollabNet has bought is SourceForge Enterprise Edition, a version of the site's services that was being sold to enterprises. Over the next year that will be integrated with CollabNet's own offerings.

CollabNet already runs "private forges" for things like OpenOffice and Java, so the stock deal also solves a problem for Sourceforge, which was losing large projects to in-house solutions.

Bonfiglio said the Sourceforge Enterprise Edition is a nice fit for his company. "CUBiT adds the build and test portions of the product lifecycle." CollabNet also runs Subversion, the version control project, and that too will be integrated.

As to VA Software, the sellers in this case, they get to concentrate on the editorial side of the house, which in addition to Sourceforge includes community and news sites Slashdot.org, ITManagersJournal.com, NewsForge.com, Linux.com and freshmeat.net.

They also get some stock in CollabNet, which will feel good against the headache they fornerly got trying to compete with it.

For a decade now open standards have been anathema to the copyright industries.

But lately Time Warner has gotten a clue. (The tiny image in the corner of the logo at right, by the way, is a flying pig.)

The company's cable unit made a deal with FON which lets subscribers offer 802.11 wireless bandwidth to FON users, and will let FON market its offering to Time Warner users.

This is a big turnaround from past practice. Five years ago Time Warner Cable launched a "crackdown" against cable users supporting WiFi hotspots, and its Web site still defines those with unprotected WiFi as engaging in cable theft.  

At the same time EMI, with which Warner Music has an on-again, off-again courtship, has agreed to let Apple sell DRM-free music, with higher quality than iTunes' usually offerings, and a slight mark-up for individual songs.

Warner Music itself had moved toward selling DRM-free music through Anywhere Music, then backed off, with legal papers flying on all sides.

It's a two step forward, one step back deal, sort of like watching a baby learn to walk. But eventually the baby does walk. The guess here is that Time Warner will adopt the open source walk as well, once it figures out how to make a buck off it.

The baby, of course, already knows. Look cute and smile, kid.

Palamida, which launched a reporting enhancement to its IPampflifier this week, would seem to be in a self-defining niche. (Picture from PHPPrince.)

The market for services to eliminate patented or otherwise legally suspicious code from products ia naturally limited. As is the market for finding simple bugs in code, where Coverity leads.

But what about testing code for its output?

Getting output from open source which is fully compliant with web standards like XHTML and CSS is a major challenge. Since the work of assuring such outputs is still hand-made, many projects are weak in this critical area.  

But shouldn't it be possible to identify the underlying code weaknesses using technology? Don't just tell me whether my output is compliant, tell me where I've screwed up.

And if we could do that, how about doing it with open source technology?

I was listening to an NPR report yesterday about Microsoft's plan to deep discount Windows in Asia.

Peter Brown of the FSF was offering his "give a man a fish, teach a man to fish" analogy, about how much more powerful would it be for Asian users to control their software.

Then something hit me.

How would you like these 1 billion people to pay for the 21st century benefits they get from software and networks? Microsoft says a little cash would be nice. They note that most copies of Windows in Asia are pirated, so a little money from each user is better than none at all.

But how about being repaid in kind? If the next Asian Gates builds on Windows he or she will own the resulting code. If they build on open source they'll have to give it to us.

It's said that when a doctor had a patient who couldn't afford his services, back in the day, he would take a chicken or some milk or a pie in exchange. Microsoft's offer is like that.

But what if the doctor said, when your son is grown and a doctor like me, then he treats me free when I get sick. Or he treats someone else, free. Pay it forward, in other words. I'll get my chickens from those who can afford chickens.

So my question today is, which approach offers more value? The chicken goes to Microsoft, and if Microsoft is the platform then it deserves the chicken. But if we require, as open source requires, that innovation be paid for in kind, aren't we all getting a lot more than $3 back?

When I trumpeted news that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was demanding researchers share their findings, calling this "the final proof open source works," it was one of my most popular posts so-far.

Not to say y'all agreed with me. "You are unbelievable," one critic wrote. "Open source - the new communism" wrote another. "See a doctor," suggested a third. (I did. I have high cholesterol. How did you know?)

Now, with great fanfare, Red Hat has proclaimed the era of "open source science," with plans to fund a 2,000 square foot lab in the new North Carolina Research Center at Kannapolis.

Science in our time is not open source by default. All research that's shared is copyrighted, and it's pursued by Universities with an aim of winning patents and royalties. It is, in sum, proprietary.

The aim of Red Hat's Kannapolis effort is to encourage sharing, with the hope of speeding innovation. For me it hearkens back to an old quote sometimes attributed to Robert Woodruff, chairman of The Coca-Cola Co. during its heyday. (That's Mr. Woodruff above. Hey, I live in Atlanta.)

"There is no end to what a man can do if he doesn't care who gets the credit."

Groundwork is trumpeting a Gartner report which describes a growing chorus of grumbles concerning the “big four” of IT management — HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter and BMC Patrol.

But in discussing the report with ZDNet Tony Barbagallo, vice president of product management and marketing (left), acknowledged that the “big bang” in this space has not yet occurred.

“Linux didn’t take off until IBM recognized it and started using it,” he said. Someone needs to commit to the process before things really change.

All of which brings me back to William Hurley (right), late of Qlusters, now at BMC and blogging. His first entry seeks to find a middle ground between proprietary and free, which he calls Opensville.

Opensville is a utopia.  Everyone who lives in the adjacent cities spends their free time in Opensville.  The parks are beautiful, the shopping is amazing, and the nights are pure Vegas. Sounds like a great place, huh? One problem: no one actually wants to live there.  No one wants to pay the taxes or put in the effort it takes to keep the city running.  Welcome to Opensville, population zero.

The Gartner report says 55% of the big customers surveyed would consider moving to an open source solution. But thinking isn’t doing.

The problem, as WHurley notes, is credit. He suggests a “mooch-o-meter” to measure the real commitment of companies like Groundwork to the open source ideal.

But does this matter to customers? Are you going to choose from among Groundwork, Zenoss, Hyperic or any other project based on their contributions to the movement, or do their contributions to your own bottom line matter exclusively?

Until you’re willing to consider the former, I doubt you’ll get much help from open source on the latter.

Second Life has a lot in common with the Internet, with open source, with me. Lots of buzz, lots of fans, not a lot of money coming in. It's a classic business model problem. (That's Larry Lessig at Second Life, from News.Com.)

Will open sourcing the servers change things?

In theory there are many ways in which Linden Labs, which runs Second Life, can benefit from this move.

• Keep doing what they're doing in competition with customers.
• Consult with companies wishing to sell through Second Life.
• Support contracts for open source users.
• Custom programming for Second Life extensions.

The question is whether Linden Labs is geared up to make money at all. Despite the enormous PR buzz, the dollars have not been flying in.

So it's probably worth a shot. What do you think about it?

A decade ago, when the Web had just been spun, the computer industry learned the hard way how it needed lobbyists to keep competition alive. (Why the movie? Read on.)

Chief among these companies was Microsoft, which stepped up to the plate for the industry, hired lots of warm bodies (often with fine minds) and fought even the mighty telephone industry to a draw.

Someone in the open source community must do today what Microsoft did then, lobby government and fight the mighty to a draw. Only the mighty now is Microsoft.

The recent experience of Florida, reported by Linux.Com, illustrates the point. A legislator, prodded by his software-developer son, sought to place some language favoring open source into a bill creating a technology office for new Gov. Charlie Crist.

Rep. Ed Homan was stopped, he says, by three Microsoft lobbyists, all wearing dark suits and shades, who spun the issue in a way that would make a Washington pol proud.

An unnamed source who was in on the discussion put it this way:

"By the time those lobbyists were done talking, it sounded like ODF (Open Document Format, the free and open format used by OpenOffice.org and other free software) was proprietary and the Microsoft format was the open and free one."

Personally I want those guys, dubbed the Men in Black, working for me. (If I suggest you buy the movie a third time the lobbyists won't be on me about the picture, either.)

They will, if we can just find the money to pay them, or hire someone just like them. We'll need effective lobbyists in every state capitol, as well as Washington. Until then, the law will be tilted in favor of the proprietary folks, just as it has long been tilted toward the telecomms.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and it's high time open source squeaked.

Taken in isolation Google Apps is not that much. It's a Microsoft Office clone, delivered online, which you can rent instead of buy.

But by placing it online, and through the miracle of open source, it can quickly become much more.

Etelos is among those hoping to piggyback on Google Apps. A few months ago they announced a CRM tool that works with Google Apps, and today they delivered it. They also support Microsoft Outlook.

And they've got a version for NetVibes, which if you're European is really cool.

When you expose your code to the world, you expose yourself to all sorts of organic growth, growth which can support your own efforts even while it seems to drain away revenues in various outside niches.

Google Apps is a more powerful solution with a CRM, even if Google didn't make it. What else might you make which Google hasn't?

Extra credit question, for those over 30. How would you compare the growth of this open source enhancement ecosystem to that of, say, Microsoft in the 1990s or the IBM PC "back in the day?"

The aim of every company's open source strategy is to maximize its user base and, in the end, its revenue base.

So how much openness do you require? Sometimes, if your brand rocks, just a little is enough.

Today, for instance, we learn that AutoDesk's MapGuide Open Source has been adopted as a fully endorsed project within the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

This is cool, but is it making a real market impact? Google's new MyMaps feature, based on its Google Maps API, claims to make custom mapping so easy "a caveman could do it." (Attention GEICO legal team.) Microsoft offers similar features at Live Search Maps.

Which announcement will result in more growth, more money, more profit? I suspect it's Google's. And it might be Microsoft's.

The point is that merely releasing code does not guarantee you a whole lot. Delivering tools which make that code easy to use may be more important. Using a brand name (as Exadel did with JBOSS) may also bring faster growth.

The stakes have really been raised. It's not enough to be open source, even to be at the bottom of the open source incline. Now it's ease of use, branding, and business basics that count.

Which I consider a very good thing.

My last piece, on Stuart Cohen and the CSI, held light. Be forewarned the following is pure heat. We'll see which you prefer.

It seems our friends at the Software Freedom Law Center have a little tax time advice for you. When you use open source, you avoid the "patent tax."

The SFLC estimates that every copy of Windows includes a $20 charge for patents Microsoft licenses in order to produce it.

The estimate comes from published descriptions of Microsoft's recent patent suit losses. Since April 2004 there have been $1.25 billion to Sun Microsystems, $536 million to Novell, $440 million to InterTrust and (in the biggest one of all) $1.52 billion to Alcatel-Lucent over patents allegedly infringed by Microsoft's software.

The SFLC estimates Microsoft has paid out $4.3 billion for patents the last three years (including legal fees), then notes that Linux has never had a successful patent suit.

While this is being spun here as a big win for Linux, it also helps explain why Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (above) might like to claim the patent rights he has paid so dearly for must also be infringed by open source — just leveling the playing field.

What the SFLC really wants to do, however, is explain again why software patents are bad. If the industry's largest company, with its immense patent portfolio, and its many fine patent attorneys, finds patents to be a bad business, shouldn't the rest of the industry take a hint?

Whatever happened to Stuart Cohen, former head of the OSDL, now part of the Linux Foundation?

He sent out a press release today, and it seems he's launched an effort called the Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI). The initials are cute, but the intent is to build open source application stacks for vertical markets, attracting more Value Added Resellers (VARs) to the space.

HP, IBM and Novell are all working with CSI, according to the press release.

While open source is big among large enterprises, it's not so big in the small business space, which lacks IT staff. Doctors, lawyers, and indian chiefs (non-casino) depend on re-sellers for their systems.

These re-sellers lie at the heart of Microsoft's market dominance. Along with small developers they form an ecosystem that can deliver specialized systems for small dollars which do what customers want, at a fraction of the cost of, say, IBM.

It has taken this field 25 years to mature. To call it "the channel" is to damn with faint praise. There is a whole lot more to it than that. We are talking here about industry knowledge, customer knowledge, and knowledge of government regulations, all tied together with software, hardware, networks and support.

This is the business that got Charles Simonyi into space. It has brought tens of thousands of others their own Moon Shots, namely paying to get the kids through college.

Linux has yet to develop such an infrastructure. The low-hanging fruit still lies with the big enterprises, and in the mass market. To use another space analogy, Cohen is still at the Sputnik stage. It will take many people many years to gain open source real market share in this tough segment.

But at least now the first steps are being taken.

This blog has some things in common with every open source business out there. (This happy scrivener works at Chang Ruthenberg & Long, employee benefits lawyers.)

Metrics.

When I talk with open source entrepreneurs, they will talk about their download numbers, or their community sign-ups.

I know they’ve reached a new level of success when they share their subscription counts. When they tell me their conversion rates, I know they are doing very well indeed.

I also have metrics here, but most are subjective. Reputation, story ideas in my in-basket, calls from PR folk. Estimates of audience size. Private e-mails. These are like download numbers to me.

The numbers which pay are page views and talkback numbers. These are like subscription counts (and the latter feels like tips to a waiter). They don’t bring in as much as a subscription contract, but the bosses can turn them into money, and some of that comes back to me.

Unfortunately these seem to be a fraction of my readership numbers. If you’re reading this blog through an outside mailing list or re-posted to another site, ZDNet can’t monetize it. You’re like the downloader who didn’t buy a support subscription. (Click here and show me some love.)

So let me leave this week with some hard questions. What can we at ZDNet do to get you reading, and responding, to what we write here, instead of elsewhere? How can we get our page views and talkback numbers closer to our reputation and audience size?

How can we raise our conversion rate?

Thanks and have a great weekend.

I call it the "One Guy Problem."

Every small to medium sized business has one guy who acts as the system gatekeeper. Often it's a re-seller. Sometimes it's an insider, the one-man IT department. Sometimes, worst case scenario, it's the boss himself. (Yes, sometimes it's a woman, but not usually.)

This one guy has their own trips and dramas, their own preferences and prejudices. They are ingrained over time, hard to change.

I faced this problem myself for a time. My one guy had a prejudice for old stuff. Change was bad, upgrades were too. He was using Telnet for his e-mail until the ISP forced him to change.

Having a virtual store where people buy subscriptions to several applications does not solve this problem. You either find the time and effort needed to turn the One Guy around, or you go around him, maybe get him fired.

And the only way you do that is with Another Guy. This other guy has a completely new solution set, something that does a lot more for a lot less. This other guy also needs a personality that can turn the boss around, in other words, sales ability. If he (or she) has some cool hardware, that can get them in the door.

What Red Hat Exchange needs is meat space reality. That means training, re-seller recruitment, and feet on the street. If all the companies working with Red Hat on Red Hat Exchange can pool their resources, and put real bodies behind this effort, it will make serious headway. If Red Hat's profits have fallen because it's gearing up to meet this challenge, I can be an optimist.

Otherwise, I'm afraid, not so much.

I'm accustomed to seeing software companies acquired so the acquirer can build a system out of pieces. I have long wondered if this could work in the open source space.

IONA is trying, in the name of building a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) suite.

The company was founded in 1991, in Ireland, to build CORBA objects. Over time it transitioned into Web objects, and it now bills itself as an open source SOA company. This week it bought LogicBlaze, which had some good tools, and is integrating the company.

IONA's best known evangelist may be blogger Debbie Moynihan, who writes the company will continue selling subscriptions to LogicBlaze's ActiveMQ and ServiceMix.

But what did IONA buy, actually? Was it software, a book of business, or the team which created both, headed by Hiram Chirino, Rob Davies and James Strachan.

Reading the blog of IONA CTO Eric Newcomer, I think it's the last. Building SOA from pieces is not nearly so interesting as building a global team to support it, in the open source world.

Jimmy Wales and Tim O’Reilly have begun an interesting experiment.(Picture from TheAllINeed.)

They want to create a bloggers code of conduct, through Wikia, aimed at drawing a line against abuse and flame wars.

While they insist this is voluntary, in fact it can easily become mandatory, once blog hosts like Typepad and ISPs adopt this code in their terms of service.

Robert Scoble calls himself uneasy over the code, noting he has violated its precepts many times, but he feels enormous pressure to “get on board,” because O’Reilly has power within the industry.

This blog is not impacted by the code. We have a much stricter code here at ZDNet, one which is not written down, nor needs to be. Stay (roughly) on topic (this post may be close to the border), stay professional at all times, don’t cost ZDNet any credibility, be transparent.

This is a code I endorse, one I try to follow in my personal blog and everywhere else. I’m the only Dana Blankenhorn there is, anywhere, so if I screw up I’m easy to find.

But should such a code, should any code, be mandated, through contracts, and should those who violate such a code risk losing their “blogging privileges?”

I don’t think so.

It seems to me that having our stupidity stored, available for later use against us, is all the sanction we should need. What you write online, whether in a comment thread, an e-mail, a blog, or a news piece, can be found. If there is legal reason to unmask you, your supposedly anonymous comments will be unmasked.

We’re all walking on eggshells already. It’s just that some of us don’t know it.

Palm Computing, which defined a whole new category with the PDA and then saw it shrivel, is attempting a comeback based on Linux. (Picture from the PalmInfoCenter.)

A new version of the Palm Treo, due out by the end of the year, will run on a version of Linux. This news comes just two months after Access, which supplies the current PalmOS, said it had sent out product development kits and launched a global partner program for a mobile Linux.

Current versions of the Treo run Windows. So will Linux save the category? Does anyone want a PDA anymore? Will U.S. cellular carriers support it?

Over the last few years the PDA category has been squeezed on both sides, with newer phones and smaller laptops both making inroads. The idea of a computer (that's not a computer) which fits in your suit pocket sounds cool, and for a long time our family used them, but in recent times we've abandoned our Palms, and I suspect you have to.

So can this category be saved? And is Linux the penguin to do it?

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