Blue Sky On Mars

Ajaxian » Adobe announces that it will be opening Flex under Mozilla License. This is a big move on Adobe’s part, and it will be interesting to see how this shakes out against OpenLaszlo which previously could cite its open source nature as a benefit over Flex. Adobe still catches a lot of flak because the Flash player is closed source. Given their recent open source moves, I would be surprised if they aren’t seriously considering it. Adobe makes no money off of the basic Flex SDK, and the same goes for the Flash Player. If their business goal is to make their money off of the nicer development tools and environments, then open sourcing those things that they’ve been giving away may indeed make good sense.

Software Business

Ian Landsman’s Mini Site Marketing Experiment is one of the best marketing ideas (and implementations thereof) that I’ve seen in quite a while. Check out the Open Source Help Desk List site that he created. This is a genuinely useful roundup of open source help desk software, though the alphabetical listing is not as useful as listings by platform or by relative maturity/usability would be. The site is not so subtly trying to get people to consider Ian’s HelpSpot product as an alternative. You know what? There’s nothing wrong with that. The resource he’s created is useful and highlights one segment of his competition. It seems likely that people perusing his list will check out HelpSpot and, assuming they’re willing to pay at all, may indeed pony up the reasonable price for it.

Good job, Ian!

Software Business

Some very interesting tidbits about how Google runs its IT. Google Revealed: The IT Strategy That Makes It Work - Management News by InformationWeek

Linkage, Software Business

Socialtext Partners with Dan Bricklin on wikiCalc is an interesting follow up to the Google Spreadsheet news. I made the prediction that Google’s going to (someday) sell a box that you can drop onto your company network that lets you do collaborative spreadsheets and document editing. Socialtext, it would appear, can do that for you now, and using open source software if you want to manage it yourself! Or, you can get hosted services or buy their hardware/software combo (just like the GOB I was talking about).

I had heard of Socialtext previously, but I wasn’t aware of the SynchroEdit connection and wikiCalc coming into the fold certainly makes things more interesting.

Software Business

So, Google introduced a spreadsheet. It’s got cool collaboration features, and runs neatly within your browser. Of course, people are starting to be wary of Google potentially holding all of their information, which makes Google Spreadsheet a less likely holding spot for very sensitive information (and quite a few people put sensitive information in spreadsheets). That somewhat limits the number of people that will use the product.

Google currently makes almost all of their money from ads. Gmail’s ads work pretty well, but I don’t think a spreadsheet is going to fit the adword model. So, what’s the business case?

Some have surmised that Google is just drawing people in so that they spend all of their time in Google apps and hit as many ads as possible.

I think the plan is more direct than that. The great thing with blogs is that later we’ll be able to look back and see if I’m right about this.

Google has a collaborative spreadsheet, and they bought a word processor (Writely). They’ve got the beginnings of a database. Yes, they’re building an office suite.

“But”, the proverbial you asks, “who’s going to trust putting all of that data in Google’s data centers? And how do you pay for that?”

Google sells a search appliance. The IT guys buy it, stick it on their network and tell it what to crawl. Voila! Google search for your network.

That’s where I think these apps are going. Google’s going to perfect this software through the unwashed masses (the folks who work at home, like myself :). Then, they’ll release a box that you can drop on your internal network that provides the office suite capabilities for your entire office. The privacy concerns go away. They’d try to replace one half of the Microsoft tax with a more modest Google tax.

Of course, Google’s office suite will not be as powerful as Microsoft’s. But, I think they’ll meet the needs of a great many office workers, and they’ll be adding some excellent collaboration features along the way.

Google’s also good at running Linux boxes. I hear they’ve got a few. I wouldn’t be surprised if they also at some point release a box that helps you manage a bunch of Linux “web terminal” workstations. That would go after the other half of the Microsoft tax. I think that plot is a bit more distant, though, and has a lower probability than the Google Office Box (GOB) notion.

I could definitely imagine Google selling different sized GOBs, and they’d be able to give some really impressive collaboration capabilities to small offices that would otherwise be shut out of the cool stuff.

I hope I’m right about GOB, because it would be really interesting to see the directions that things go in from there.

Software Business

Stripping out nonessentials, The Worlds Shortest marketing Plan maxes out at 24 pages, whereas some templates start at 30 pages. The grid is a great distillation of everything you needs to cover.

Linkage, Software Business

Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier-Hansson spoke out against “traditional” publishers in Shaking up tech publishing. The comments were at least as interesting as the main course. Check out Tim O’Reilly’s comment as a response from an established publisher. Tim puts the whole thing into perspective and makes a good point about the way royalties are paid out for the purposes of apples-to-apples comparisons.
Mark and I chose a traditional publisher, Prentice Hall, for our TurboGears book. I was initially reluctant to write up a response to DHH’s post, because we haven’t gone through the complete process on the book yet. But, Tim O’Reilly’s post backed up what I thought based on my impressions thus far: publishers do offer a service for their cut of the book. Copy editing, support for reviewers, overall project management and guidance, international distribution and sales, cover art, translations and more.

And as for their status as a “traditional” publisher: our book is written in text files stored in SVN, we have a Trac site for it, camera-ready pages will be done in inDesign, Prentice Hall is supportive of us posting parts of the book for public review and they’ve also been known to publish entirely open books (like the Bruce Perens series). And our book will likely be available in some kind of electronic form before it’s available in print. Does that sound “traditional” to you?

One last bit: while I believe our book will be a success and the TurboGears community continues to grow at a good clip, Prentice Hall is taking a calculated risk on our book. Back in December when we signed up with PH, the TurboGears mailing list had under 1,000 members and there aren’t that many useful stats available to predict the total size of the TurboGears community and market for the book. With all of the services they provide, PH has to sell a fair number of books to reach breakeven. To be able to take risks like this, PH needs to have a balance of riskier ventures and less-risky ventures. That kind of portfolio allows them to cover all kinds of technology, but it costs a bit more to do it.

From my experience with Prentice Hall, they’re not at all a dinosaur that’s just waiting for extinction. The moves they’re making seem far bolder than the moves of the music and movie industries. There are lots of publishing options available today, and publishers like Prentice Hall seem well aware of it.

Software Business

Mark Ramm writes about the approach we’re taking to our TurboGears book in “Leanâ€? Book Publication. Mark set up all of the tools and classes, so he deserves all the credit here. It’s a good setup that I think will ultimately result in a stronger book.

Software Business

Last week, it was a Python template engine. This week, it’s JavaScript tabs library. It seems to be a fairly common occurrence that people release developer-oriented open source packages that come with a GPL license. Unless you intend to create a business selling your software with a different license to business (the Sleepycat model), this just seems like a way to severely restrict use of your library. The only people likely to use libraries like those that are licensed under the GPL license are people that are writing open source (GPL) applications. If that’s what you want, fine… but, I think it’s better to aim higher. (In case you read no further, those two packages have since relicensed under MIT style licenses.)
I understand the allure of the GPL. “I’ve put this thing out there for free, and so I should benefit from the changes other people made!” (I’m ignoring the “software should be free” philosophical argument for now.) I think it’s a mistake to think that just because something is released under a liberal license, like the MIT license which is what I use, that companies won’t contribute their changes back to the project.

Creating a fork of a project is a pain. You have to reintegrate changes every time there are improvements in the core project that you want to take. For a company to maintain their own internal version of your project effectively means that they have their own fork of it. That just doesn’t make good business sense. A company could choose to take your project and produce some spiffy commercial version. Odds are, though, that they’d still release changes to the core system back to the project, rather than maintaining a private fork.

I think that most people who choose the GPL for a library do so because it’s a license they’re familiar with. That’s the point of this post: hopefully, more people creating libraries will recognize that a very liberal license like MIT or BSD is the way to win users. The authors of both of the projects that I mention above have agreed to relicense under MIT-style licenses!

I should also point out that the LGPL is somewhat ambiguous when it comes to dynamic languages. If you really want a license that requires the open source release of changes on a library that you’re releasing, you should think about the Mozilla Public License. (Update: The CDDL appears to be a version of the MPL that is designed to be more easily reused. That’s a good one to consider.) That license is not vague: only the files in your distribution are required to remain under the MPL. So, the code is free to use for commercial purposes, but any changes to the files that you distributed also need to be released under the MPL. I’d still recommend going with an MIT license in general, but at least the MPL is clear in its effects.

By the way, I have no problem with using the GPL for applications. Applications released under the GPL can be used for all kinds of purposes, and it’s reasonable to want changes to the application to be similarly licensed.

Update: I eliminated the use of the word “viral” above, because I didn’t intend to make a negative point on the use of licenses that impose restrictions on distributed versions of software. My point is that many choose these licenses without being fully aware of the ramifications.

It is also clear from the comments that I never got back to the “software should be Free” (software libre) argument.

As mentioned in the comments, not everyone is looking for the broadest possible adoption of their code. Some people specifically have the belief that all software should be free to use, upgrade and share. People are certainly free to have and exercise that belief by licensing their software under the GPL. If I asked someone to relicense and they told me that they chose GPL to ensure freedom of the software, I wouldn’t argue any further. Those people have chosen the GPL for the right reasons.

The fact that I have spoken with two people in the past two weeks who relicensed their software shows that there are people out there choosing the GPL for reasons other than support of software libre.

Software Business

Camtasia Studio is the ultimate screencasting tool. For those of us using a Mac, we’re stuck with Snapz Pro X. Snapz is a fine screen capture tool, to be sure… but take a look at the features you get from Camtasia, and you’ll see that there’s really no comparison. Camtasia’s number one problem is that it’s Windows-only.

I’ve seen quite a few people out there using Macs to produce screencasts. TechSmith has had a hard time justifying the effort to make a Mac version of Camtasia. But, Mac users often seem to be more willing to pony up for a good piece of software. That, and there are quite a few developers running on Macs now. Maybe the market for Camtasia on the Mac is bigger than what TechSmith thinks it may be?

If you’d like to see Camtasia for the Mac, consider sending them a feature request.

Software Business