October 23, 2003
Enabling Everything
Four developments frame this week's lesson about Linux in Business.
The first item is a simple and powerful statistic from the huge stack maintained at ePay News: <http://www.epaynews.com/statistics/transactions.html#1>. The item is "Business-to-Business Transactions 1998-2004". The numbers are $billions, listed in reverse chronological order:
During the same period, "Web sales" rise from $50 billlion to $1.4 trillion.
In other words, the Internet has been a fantastic environment for business, regardless of the dot-com boom & crash that made nothing but news through the first half of the period. When we wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999, Chris Locke said "Networked markets get smarter faster than most suppliers." Note that the term "market" is an inclusive term that embraces both supply and demand. Few suppliers are impenetrable monoliths any more, or they can't adapt. Which means there are intelligent operators on the supply side that may not be in charge of their companies but are highly networked to demand in the marketplace anyway. They're just doing what needs to be done. That's how the Internet gets implemented, whether or not Management considers it "strategic".
The second item is the latest Netcraft Web Server Survey (October 2003): <http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/10/01/october_2003_web_server_survey.html>.
Looking across 43,700,759 sites, Netcraft <http://news.netcraft.com> again lists Apache as the number one developer, serving up 67.35% of all the Net's active sites. Microsoft is #2 at 24.50%. Apache's numbers have been going up rather steadily since early 2002, both in relative and absolute values. Microsoft has been climbing in absolute numbers, but in relative numbers it's been losing ground, generally, to Apache. A huge percentage of those servers run on Linux, of course, but the more important fact is that the Net is primarily constructed out of open source building materials and methods.
The third item is an October 19 Associated Press story by Justin Pope. <http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/144617_source20.html> It's about the growing number of governments that are making open source and open standards a policy for purchase and implementation of new technology. Making current news is Eric Kriss, Massachusetts' administration and finance secretary, who told the state's CTO to adopt exactly that policy when spending the state's $80 million annual technology budget.
And Massachusetts isn't alone. According to the story, the Initiative for Software Choice "has tracked 70 different open-source reference proposals in 24 countries." And that organization <http://softwarechoice.org> is hardly friendly to open source. According to the Asian Open Source Centre <http://www.asiaosc.org/enwiki/page/Initiative_for_Software_Choice.html>,
The so called Initiative for Software Choice is an organisation funded by a large international group of (typically proprietary) software companies. These companies typically have a vested interest in the continuation of the proprietary software model. The organisation's strategy is to put pressure on any Government body which proposes that open source or free software is used in preference to proprietary software.
The 'Software Choice' part of the name can be considered to mean 'we don't mind if you have the choice between proprietary and free or open source software, but your Government should never try to influence you away from proprietary software'.
The Software Choice "Policy Tracker" link is broken, as are about half the links on the front page of its site. One that isn't broken brings up a .pdf version of a letter addressed to Mitt Romney, Governor of Massachusetts. It begins,
The Initiative for Software Choice (ISC, www.softwarechoice.org) -- a global coalition with over 260 software companies and associations -- is writing to express our concern that the open source software mandate recently announced by Secretary of Administration and Finance, Eric Kriss would incalculably harm Massachusetts public administration, its citizens, and its information technology (IT) industry and worker because it will eviscerate software choice presently available to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. As a result, the ISC -- which is managed by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA, which represents 13,350 member companies including over 175 IT companies in Massachusetts) -- requests a meeting with your (sic) or your designee at your earliest convenience so that we may learn more about this policy and provide our input.
The ISC strongly supports the development and adoption of all kinds of software: be it open source software (OSS), hybrid or proprietary. For this reason, we believe that mandatory government regulations, which give preference to certain kinds of software, weaken the overall software marketplace, biasing the choice of viable software options available to public authorities. Only when all software options are available can the specific needs of each IT project be met, driven by a flexible range of factors such as cost, reliability, security, functionality and availability. The ISC is aware of no barriers to unfettered software choice in Massachusetts. In fact, at this present time, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts can rightfully choose any type of software/platform it wants for its IT needs. As such, no legal obstacles stop its public administrators from going into the market and getting the best solution for a given challenge.
The ISC is laying out a bit of a red herring here. That's because in many states technology is often, by law or standard practice, officially obtainable only through a procurement process that respects vendors as the only legitimate technology sources. In other words, you can only *buy* software, and then only from vendors. As Tom Adelstein explained in his Linux Access in State and Local Government series at the Linux Journal site <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6990>, work needs to be done at several different levels to open government to open source procurement, whether or not the goods have any costs, or come from vendors. A list of virtues involved in this process is provided by Bruce Perens through his Sincere Choice effort <http://www.sincerechoice.org>, which was created in response to the Software Choice initiative.
What gets lost here, on both sides of the argument, is that the terms "proprietary" and "open source" are neither opposite nor mutually exclusive. Take MySQL for example. <http://www.mysql.com/> The company fact sheet makes the matter plain:
MySQL’s company values and business strategy hinge on the open source software philosophy that software should be free and available to all. MySQL owns all rights to the MySQL server source code, the MySQL trademark and the mysql.com domain worldwide. Through this copyright, the company protects MySQL’s integrity and reputation as a fully open source, superior database....
MySQL’s business strategy leverages the MySQL name and copyright as well as the company’s deep expertise in the MySQL database software. The company’s revenues are driven by the sale of commercial licenses, as well as strategic partnerships, consulting, customer support and other services. Commercial Licenses: MySQL employs a dual-licensing business model. The MySQL database is available at no cost under the GPL free software/open source license, and MySQL also provides commercial, non-GPL licenses to organizations that don't want to be bound by the GPL.
With the availability of the commercial license option, leading companies are now using the high-performance MySQL database without the limitations of the GPL in the enterprise, as well as embedding MySQL with major software, hardware and other electronic devices.
MySQL’s dual-licensing structure supports its open source user community with a sustainable business model, and this community, in turn, is the engine behind the company’s commercial business.
In other words, it's free as in beer AND speech, under the GPL; and yet it is completely owned -- and therefore proprietary. Which means the company is also free to charge you for a license if you want the goods and services that also come with that license, and as long as what you do with those goods and services remain private and outside the scope of the GPL. This covers a lot of possibilities.
MySQL's explosive success completely invalidates the belief that ownership and freedom are mutually exclusive, and that you need restrictive licenses if you hope to make something valuable enough to sell. Scarcity and value are not tied to each other after all. Why make matters complicated for everybody? Expose your code, turn it free, let the world improve on it, and sell the results in the form of software SKUs and paid relationships with customers of all sizes. Have it both ways, and then some.
The fourth and final news item comes to us from Motorola, which yesterday announced a deal with Real Networks to put the RealOne streaming multimedia player in cell phones. Both Motorola and Real have been working lately (actually for some time, but publicly only for this last year) to take advantage of Linux and Open Source in every possible way. <http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5094912.html> RealPlayers of various kinds are already available in some Nokia phones and Palm PDAs. And they're the product of an open source effort that Real began in the summer of 2002, in a spirit similar (though not idential) to MySQL's.
Of course a streaming player doesn't make much sense without a broadband source. We're already seeing broadband of various sorts showing up in cell phones. At a conference last week, Blake Stone, CTO of Borland, showed me how he gets on the Net pretty much everywhere with a laptop connecting via bluetooth over a Net-native T-Mobile cell phone. "The bandwidth isn't T-1, but it's a lot better than dial-up", he said. With that phone in mind (it was a Sony Ericsson of some kind), the new Moto-Real deal began to look to me like an invention that could seriously mother some new necessities.
Internet radio in cars, for example. Just put a stereo headphone jack on a RealPlayer-equipped broadband cell phone, and it's not a big leap to imagine every Internet radio station suddenly showing up on your car radio via an iRock transmitter or one of those cassettes on a wire.
Of course Real has the same problem in this regard as does Apple with iTunes: The company is seriously tied up with Big Boys that will want to control the distribution of digital "content" with DRM technology.
Yet here's a perfect opportunity to use economic rather than digital DRM. Leave the pipes open and as free as possible from DRM throttles (which only annoy), and simply pass along an additional charge for the use of the service. In other words, copy the subscription model of Sirius and XM satellite radio. Charge a monthly fee. And then kick satellite radio's butt on the content side by offering everything that's up on the Net, whether it radiates in Real, Windows Media Player, Ogg, MP3 or whatever. As I understand it, the RealPlayer is designed to be codec-independent at its base. So why not take advantage of that fact. Put in tiered charges if you like for 'premium' content, but make the deal simple and straightforward.
Hey, I'd pay good money, every month, to have every station on the Internet come into may car through my cell phone. That's thousands of stations, vs. a mere hundred or so apiece on Sirius and XM. As a nice bonus I'd be happy knowing that, once again, Linux helped make it possible.
Doc Searls is senior editor of Linux Journal.