Glen Martin (who posted this item yesterday) has also posted Free Beer Doesn't Hurt, on his own blog. It's an invitation to an open house (beer included) at SpikeSource, his employer.

Like SourceLabs, Optaros, Gluecode and OpenLogic (and probably some other companies I can't think of right now), SpikeSource belongs to a new category of independent open source company with offerings for enterprises with a need to deploy, integrate or otherwise deal with combinations of open source goods. Defining the category hasn't been easy for any of them. Stephen Walli does a good job of explaining the matter.

IBM, HP, Red Hat, Novell and Sun have offerings and services in the same space, too, of course. So does JBoss.

That makes the category sound crowded, but I don't think it is. Though still nameless, it's huge.

See, even though they don't talk about it very much in public (too many have lawyers that remain victims of SCO FUD poisoning), lots of large companies are suddenly dealing with the fact that they, too, will be building more and more of their IT on open source infrastructure. So they're like, Oh no! Our sex has changed! What do we wear?

These companies have answers. In time those answers will start getting more sharp and distinct. Meanwhile, the category bears watching.

Disclosure: I'm an advisor to SpikeSource. But my professional interest here is in making sense What's Going On.

Maybe some of the rest of ya'll can help with that.

The public radio model

Last year KSBX went on the air at 89.5fm in Santa Barbara. It was a new station, though for most listeners it seemed nothing more than a move two notches down the dial by San Luis Obispo's KCBX/90.1, which for years had served Santa Barbara with a translator (repeater) signal on 89.9. KSBX was, and remains, the first NPR affliate licensed to Santa Barbara. I may be wrong, but I believe Santa Barbara is the only upscale college town in the country without its own full-size NPR station. We've had to make do with KCBX, a tranKCLU/88.3 from Thousand Oaks does a remarkable job of filling that hole, since they do it with a 4-watt translator on 102.3. They include Santa Barbara in their station IDs, and run local news features during NPR's Morning Edition. KSBX doesn't. To KCBX, KSBX is less a sister station than a translator signal for Santa Barbara. I might be wrong but I don't believe KSBX has ever done any local programming for Santa Barbara. And it might not be fair to ask, either. KCBX's resources are limited, and So, as I was driving out of town yesterday, listening to the end of a classical piece on KSBX, the host came on to talk about the station's pledge drive, and how they listen to their listeners, and how that's one way they keep the classical programming on the air. For San Luis Obispo, 100 miles and several mountain ranges up the coast from Santa Barbara, Terry Heaton in The Devaluation of Information: The fatted calf of the mainstream media is under a severe whack attack these days. The battlefield is the World Wide Web, and beneath the surface, it's producing an ongoing economic drama of biblical proportions. In discussing issues relative to the communications revolution that was taking place on his watch, FCC Chairman Michael Powell made this remarkable statement: I have no problem if a venerable institution disappears tomorrow, as long as that value is distributed elsewhere in the economy. The idea of value being distributed elsewhere is the whacking stick in today's media revolution, and it's something that should be of concern to everybody. The value of information is the issue, because that value is being redistributed away from media companies and back into the pockets of people who used to spend it on books, newspapers, magazines, Internet subscriptions, cable and many forms of self help and education. Institutional, top-down media had their cake and could eat it too in a passive, mass marketing world. That's gone forever, and, as Sports Illustrated President John Squires told newspaper and magazine circulation types last fall, "Get over it." He concludes, Time has value, and it's high on the list for Postmoderns (Pomos). They don't want to give it away like they were forced to do in a media world of passive participation. If they don't want to give us their time, what WILL they give us? We ought to ask them. The revenue models of tomorrow will likely be quite different than they are today, and nobody has all the answers just yet. Value is value, however, and we ought to be spending more time studying what people are prepared to give us, as we attempt to meet their information and entertainment needs, rather than working overtime to raise old revenue models from the dead. The fatted calf of today is tomorrow's steak and french fries. Let's shift our thinking and enjoy the meal.

I don't know who does Entrepreneurship: Life Long Learning (subtitle: Just another WordPress weblog), but I just added the blog to the Linkbag. What caught my eye (or my aggregator's attention) was CTO Breakfast Recap - January 2005, where the author writes this:

Some similarities between HP and Novell where discussed. Both companies seem to be struggling to know who they are. Both at one time had a very clear idea. Novell was a networking company that should have become the next Cisco, according to some present. HP likewise lost their position and market to Dell. Novell may be finding some identity in being a Linux company, but I believe it is too soon to tell. One interesting comment was that Novell had a business strategy of destroying their competition, Microsoft. Irregardless of success or failure, Novell didnŐt have a post game plan for their match with Microsoft. As a result their market share has dwindled. Phil commented that this idea, is often referred to as Vendor Sports by Doc Searls. Vendor Sports exists largely as a revenue stream for the tech press. Several attendees agreed that Customers donŐt care about Vendor Sports. I agree that many customers disregard the vendor sport commentary, but I bet that customers waste more time and resources following vendor sports than we or they would like to admit. Item to note, Attempting to annihilate your competition is not a good business plan. Customers DONŐT CARE.
First, it's gratifying to see that I'm saying things that make sense to customers. Second, this post brings to mind something Guy Kawasaki said in a speech several years ago. He said his investment company, Garage.com, liked to have women review potential investee's business plans, because men too often wrote plans that were about "killing other companies". Third, I remember, when Craig Burton was a leading light at Novell (back during its best years, in the 1980s), how smoothly the company both competed with and complemented Microsoft. I also remember how, many years later, he used the expression "resistance created existence" to describe how fighting something is often the best way to cause its success. One example was Novell's quixotic head-on attacks on Microsoft (ludicrously positioning NetWare as a straight-up competitor to NT, among other dumb moves). Another example was Sun's fighting of Linux for many years. Another is Microsoft's similar strategy today, against Linux and open source. By fighting something, rather than by accommodating it, or at least adapting to it, you force partners and customers to make a sharp OR choice, rather than an AND choice. Meanwhile, most markets, and most customers, work by AND logic, not OR. But hey: OR logic does make for better stories. Unfortunately, it's easier to run a business on nonfiction rather than fiction.

Jack handy gave the IBM press conference. Bored my as off.

Martin Fink.

for linux the value shift... snore...

It's such a stgruggle not to fall asleep.

Back in the 1950s, McGraw-Hill ran a famous ad with this copy:

I don't know who you are.
I don't know your company.
I don't know your company's product.
I don't know what your company stands for.
I don't know your company's customers.
I don't know your company's record.
I don't know your company's reputation.
Now - what was it you wanted to sell me?"

This was a business-to-business ad.

Sean Bonner reports,
In a totally bad ass move Councilmembers Eric Garcetti, Wendy Greuel and Jack Weiss introduced a motion today to divert millions of dollars spent on potentially unnecessary software expenditures into a fund dedicated to the long-sought-after expansion of Los Angeles' police force. Anyone with half a brain knows this is a good idea, unfortunatly it's been a long time since anyone with half a brain was making those decisions.

The press release says,

Councilmembers Eric Garcetti, Wendy Greuel and Jack Weiss introduced a motion today to divert millions of dollars spent on potentially unnecessary software expenditures into a fund dedicated to the long-sought-after expansion of Los Angeles' police force.

The motion asks the Information Technology Agency to report on how the city could forgo paying for proprietary software licenses and instead transition to open source platforms and programs. "Open source" means that any programmer can see the software code and propose changes; a community of users creates, supports, and freely distributes applications. Some users pay a fee for technical support, but free support is available on internet message boards. The city spent $5.8 million on proprietary software licenses in FY2003-4.

"For taxpayers, this is a no-brainer," said Councilmember Eric Garcetti, member of the Information Technology and General Services committee. "By engaging this online community, we can make our own communities safer. Free open source software can be as capable and more secure than products that cost the city millions."

In the comments, Jim

Open the Pod(casting) bay doors, Steve.

Don't believe Apple is the Microsoft of music? I tune, You Tune (PITA subscription required), by Chana R. Schoenberger, is a feature in the latest Forbes with the subhead A youthful duo wants to merge Wi-Fi with portable music. Nice idea, except for something called Apple. The duo has a company, MusicGremlin Inc., that "hopes to launch this year what they say is the first mobile music subscription service". It's proprietary and full of DRM; But that's not the issue here. It's who gets to play Microsoft (or Wal-Mart, or any other Market Dominator) in stories the trade press tells. In music players (which constitute radio's replacement), it's Apple. Witness the final paragraph:

One little problem: Have these guys ever heard of Apple? With 84% of the market for hard-drive-based players, according to NPD Group, and 200 million iTunes songs sold, it could easily take its iPods wireless (it's not commenting now). Plus, a handheld MusicGremlin player sucks up battery power. And its wireless chip, at $40, is "a pretty expensive component to put into something you're trying to sell for $200 to $300," says Forrester analyst Ted Schadler.

Forenote to folks who say I don't "understand" Apple: 1) I do; and 2) This isn't about Apple.

This is about a marketplace that needs to be free. Apple doesn't just dominate the music playing marketplace; it has a silo so huge and comfortable (so long as you don't leave) that it works like a Truman Show for millions.

Which is fine, if you like living inside the silo.

Podcasting will best thrive in a free markeplace that includes but is not limited to Apple's (or Microsoft's, or Sony's, or MusicGremlin's) platforms and the silos built on them.

Here are a few links (courtesy of Jim Thompson) that provide hope for free market expansion in podcasting:

Plus, of course, Ogg Vorbis.

Got any more? Put 'em in the comment section below.

DIY -- Do It Yourself -- is still more the exception than the rule inside IT organizations. "IT shops want vendor-independence, more than ever before" says Phil Windley, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University (but still best known as the former CIO of Utah). He adds, "But IT shops still get most of their technology from vendors. Because they have to. And because that's a big part of How They Do Things."

Doc

Just read your great Linux Journal article re: Technorati and some of the open source tech/tools they are using. Great to see ink on stuff like memcache, spread etc

Keep writing about it; there are so many more great open source tools/frameworks available (we are heavily into Struts, OJB, Axis, etc)

Dave
Dave Hodson
CTO
MessageCast Inc
[email protected]
http://www.messagecast.net

I've been mostly lurking in a small email conversation between three alpha geeks whose opinions on technical matters are far more qualified than mine: Phil Hughes, Linux Journal's founder and publisher; Don Marti, our Editor in Chief; and Jim Thompson, who's one of the reasons Wi-Fi is so widely deployed today.

independent it really intersting development. quite aside from novell and sun, on grander scale.

when you're a cio, having support is how most compnies work. when youbuy sap you don't buy a cd and puti t in the omcpute config script. hire somebody like Cedar to come in and make it owrk.

systems integration

that's how it shops work. with that kind of help from the outside. having that sprin =gup around open source. imp developement.

go to the contractor who konws how to do what you do.

cedar won the bid to put in SAPs payroll system. By taking the cedar bid, they

ecosystem where it shops depend on ext sys integs to do heavy lifting. don't have the people on staff to change out the payroll system. need system integrators who work with open source to even have that possiboility.

Jonathan Schwartz makes a good case for why PCs will be as free as give-away cell phones. What he doesn't visit is the question of what operating system they'll be running.

Rex Hammock writes about Why iPod/iTunes won't be killed anytime soon. It's a long and interesting post, from an admitted 'phile of all things Apple, Macintosh and iPod. In the post he defends the iPod against "technology writers who spend thousands of words explaining how some feature-set or subscription model or, perhaps adding video or a cell-phone, will help another company unseat the iPod". He adds, > I wish for an editor's red pen when I see them displaying a degree of cluelessness that allows them to totally miss the forest as they describe the trees.

I agree with most of what Rex says — about the iPod's peerless aesthetics, about the substance of its style, and especially about what he calls "the design of the iTunes platform".

DIY phone code environment?

Digital Squeeze has a brief and helpfully linky write-up on the Gillmor Gang podcast on identity. Other nice follow-ups from Marc Canter, Phil Windley, Craig Burton (posted just in time for the show, actually), Kim Cameron (also here and here), Simon Grice (who couldn't make it, and was missed)

Jim Thompson just pointed me to Phonetasia,

Ten quesitons for CES

Apple and the Open Source conversation

I've never been big on speculating about what Big Vendors are up to, since mostly I cover what IT folks do for themselves. But since Apple has made it clear that they're planning a big new release ("Panther") for OS X, with a rejuvenated Safari browser, I'll be interested to see if Steve Jobs and company still thinks open source is great, which steve said (and I reported on) two Macworld/San Franciscos ago.

So, some questions:

Over at IT Conversations, Doug Kaye has a Wiki section called That Business-Model Thing, with the subhead "How Should I make IT Conversations Self-Susttaining? He begins, The one question I'm asked about IT Conversations more than any other is, "What's your business model?" After 18 months, nearly 300 programs and now with the New Year looming, the time has come to answer that question.

He's looking at two revenue sources: 1) advertisers and sponsors; and 2) listeners. Obviously, he can do either or both. There are lots of approaches on both sides. The more interesting, however, are on the listener side. Nearly all the responses so far have supported listener-side models like tip jars, per-download charges and membership fees. More importantly, they express a market — a demand — for Doug's excellent product.

I think the basic problem, for Doug and the rest of us who want to be in the same business, is technical. Tip jars, memberships, even PayPal-facilitated transactions... are all too lame, too complicated, or both.

We're planning on doing podcasting here too (in fact, we already have one sponsor lined up). But what I want to see, in the long run, for the business of peer-to-peer 'casting that doesn't exist yet, is a simple system by which anybody can pay, on a volutary basis, for everything.

I would like, for example, when I listen to anything I download on the Web, to be able to pay automatically for it. Usually the amount would be small. But the important part is, it would also be volutary. Like we have now in public radio and television, but efficient.

And I think we need technology for that. Maybe it's nothing more than a standard that already exists and hasn't been implemented. Maybe it's more complicated. Whatever it is, it needs to address the willingness, which we see among comments on Doug's wiki, of listeners to be customers.

Think about how a simple tag <enclosure> in RSS 2.0 uncorked podcasting. I'd like to see a similar standard supporting a whole new listener-driven economy in podcasting. And perhaps in other categories as well.

keynote on Tuesday, Wil Wheaton talked up blogs, and was at his most eloquent when reading (very well) from his book. He's a terrific writer. Especially moving was his story of a friend who recovered from cancer with the encouragement of countless concerned bloggers.

He even quoted me at one point, which surprised me. Ken Coar later said "his talk picked up for you right after he mentioned your name, right?" Guilty as charged.