Daily Links - 3-21-07

MIT Gets It

I’m going to piss some geeks off with the following statement, and part of this is because way too many people in the technology industry wrongly equate Marketing with Spin, but alas, this is a topic for another time and place.  Here’s the statement:  Open Source has as much to do with marketing as it does with development. Making something that is useful freely available is one of the most powerful ways to build awareness and goodwill that exists. It builds a bond based on trust between the consumers of the good, be it software, information or consumer good, and the supplier. So, MIT Press was totally smart to make freely available their book titled “Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software.” With this, they will gain an advantage over their competition and become more widely recognized as one of the leading centers of thought, if not the leading center of thought, on the topic of open source business and technology.

Sun, Open Source and Religion

Any one of the above three terms might be sufficient to stir a heated debate. Being one to never shy away from controversy, I figure, let’s combine them. I’ve argued for close to a year now that Sun is a changed company that has internalized Open Source to its core and that this metamorphasis will lead to success. Recently I’ve noted, with some guilty pleasure, that the company’s positive financial results support this position, a position that was not widely shared when I first took it. As further evidence of the extent to which Sun has embraced Open Source, this week they anounced that they have released most of the previously proprietary app server features to the beta of the second version of the Open Source GlassFish application server. Ok, so if you’re paying attention, then you’re thinking “so that covers Sun and Open Source, but what about religion?” Well, here you go. This move, and much of Open Source, reminds me of Ecclesiastes 11:1, which says “cast your bread upon the water and you will find it again.” According to people who study this stuff, this scripture has its roots in the agrarian society of ancient Israel, when peasants would toss seeds from their boats into the flooded river, knowing that the surging water would kill the weeds on the flood plain and, when the waters receeded, the seeds would settle into the fertile soil and grow. So, the point is that you’ve got to have faith and take some risks with your valuable goods. If you hoard your seeds, too freightened to toss them into a raging torrent, you’ll miss the chance to turn them into a bumper crop. But if you have a little faith, and you spread your seeds in the swollen river, you’ll reap a great crop. This seems very analagous to Open Source, and especially to previously closed source companies like Sun that have gotten religion. Sun could have kept Solaris, Java and now their numerous app server technologies, proprietary and closed source. Had they chosen this route, they surely would have survived for a while on these seeds. But they would not have prospered the way they are now. And just as Ecclesiastes warns us to know what we can and cannot control, in today’s world of empowered prosumers, as the authors of Wikinomics put it, technology suppliers need to accept that the raging river of users has a will of its own and that the best that can be done is to understand how the river works and harness its power for their own benefit.  The worst one can do is try to fight it.

Music Industry Struggles to Deal with Web 2.0

The WSJ today highlights an entire industry that has so far totally failed to come to grips with peer to peer, web 2.0 and open source - the music industry.  As they cling to their proprietary ways and attempt to sue their customers into turning back the clock, their sales sink.  I wonder which big music label will get religion first and choose to embrace the inevitable instead of fight it.