I have been advocating my theory on Open Source as a SaaS endgame for sometime now. My recent post on the topic quoting the example of Storytlr has kcik started a round of debate in the web. Matthew Aslett of 451 Group pointed out that releasing the SaaS application as Open Source doesn’t guarantee its success. Serdar Yegulalp of Information Week agrees with Matthew’s assertion and I also agree that any open source project (for that matter, any software) needs a vibrant vendor or developer community to succeed. In response to Matthew’s post, I clarified where I am coming from. My argument is that Open Source licensing of a SaaS application going down will ensure the business continuity of the users of the application. The author and Enterprise Irregular, Nenshad Bardoliwalla, pointed out to the SaaS Bill of Rights which states that when a SaaS provider goes out of business, their customers would be to receive a virtual machine image with the software configured as they have in the multitenant instance and with their data. This is definitely a good idea but, as I pointed out to Nenshad, the customer will be left in the lurch if something goes wrong with the software installed using VM. With an open source solution, the user has the option to hire a developer to fix any issues that arises later on. (more…)

I recently revisited my “open source as a SaaS endgame” theory quoting a news about another web app releasing their code under an open source license before shutting down the shop. As I do with many of my posts here in Cloud Ave, I was wearing my evangelist hat and it resulted in the crux of the post getting hyped up a bit. It appears to have given an impression that I am predicting the SaaS app to flourish if it had an open source endgame.

Matthew Aslett, of 451 Group who writes the CAOS Theory blog, disputes this and makes a very important point.

with open source there is life after death – if there is a committed group of developers prepared to put in the effort to keep the project alive. For many open source projects that’s a pretty big “if”.

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Many societies believe in the idea of Afterlife. As far as the human life is concerned, I do not believe in this supernatural concepts. However, when it comes to software “lives”, I believe in eternity (a life without death). I believe that a software can live eternally without the death faced by the lesser mortals, by adopting open source licensing model. A proprietary software dies mostly with the company or with the ones that acquires the original company. However, open source software, even if it is tied to a particular company, does not die with the company. It is usually cloned or forked and developed by volunteers or another company interested in solving the problems for a niche group of customers. As long as there is an itch in the hands of at least a handful of users, open source software will continue to live. Even if no one is interested in a particular open source software, it will continue to live in one of the open source repositories waiting to be consumed by some soul sometime in the future. This is clearly not the case with proprietary software. In short, my argument is that if the software is released as open source, it can still be useful even after the developer(s) or company behind the software vanish in thin air. (more…)

The beauty of Open Source is that the customers are not tied or locked into a single vendor. For example, customers can use any Linux distribution and take support from third party support services companies. Plus, anyone can take the source code of any open source software, do some customizations and offer it as a clone with their own branding. CentOS is an example of such a strategy. It is also possible for companies to take a particular OS distribution and fork from it to develop their own Linux distribution and bundle services on top of it. Canonical and Ubuntu can be considered as an example for this. (more…)

Image Credit: Linode.com

Libcloud, the open source python library released by the vendor Cloudkick, has taken the first steps to be part of Apache Software Foundation by joining the ASF Incubator. Libcloud offers a single programming interface for apps to access different cloud providers including Amazon EC2, Rackspace, vCloud, Terramark, etc.. Even without any standards, Libcloud can offer interoperability between various Cloud providers. (more…)

This says it all and I don’t even have to do any explaining to emphasize the title of this post.

As the sun set over the Silicon Valley last night, Google pushed the source code for Android 2.0 to the Android Open Source Project. Within two hours, the endlessly able Android community had it up and running on the eldest Android of them all, the T-Mobile G1.

We saw how Novell played the Microsoft game for years. After staying away from Microsoft for a long time, Redhat is getting closer to the proprietary software vendor. Recently, they came together to tell the world that their hypervisors will play nice with each other promise interoperability. (more…)

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Couple of weeks back, Andrea Di Maio of Gartner wrote a blog post arguing that cloud computing is killing open source in the government. He says that the government agencies are finding cloud based alternatives to proprietary infrastructure, OS, office applications, etc. instead of the traditional open source software. According to him, this implies death for open source in the government. The arguments he offers in support of his thesis are as follows (more…)

Scott Denne writes on WSJ blog has an interesting article about Peter Fenton, the venture capitalist with Benchmark Capital and previously Accel Partners, who had four open source investments exit through a successful sale. His investments include the recently sold SpringSource (sold to VMWare), JBoss (sold to Redhat), Zimbra (sold to Yahoo) and XenSource (sold to Citrix). (more…)

From time to time, I am going to recommend an open source software/service in this space. This is not going to be a random set of recommendations but something I really like and want to succeed. My ego wanted me to call it “Krish Recommends” and hence going to stick with it for the series. If you have any experience with the software I am recommending, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section. (more…)

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Yesterday, tech blogosphere was buzzing about the Belgian Open Source developer Bruno Lowagie of Ghent’s plans to restrict certain users from using the software he developed. The gist of the story is as follows. The developer of iText, an open source Java library which helps manipulate PDF, RDF, HTML, etc. on the fly. The developer has some personal problem with the Belgian Government and he now wants to restrict the Belgian government agencies from using the software by adding a term in the license. The software is released under Mozilla Public License and LGPL right now.

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I wrote this post at a time when Readburner was crucified and before its current resurrection. In that post, I had suggested that companies entering deadpool should consider releasing their code under one of the opensource licenses. I made this argument to emphasize that it will build trust among the customers in this era of apps residing on the web rather than on the user’s computers. It was my argument that if the web app is also released as open source (as the in case of apps like wordpress and some wikis we have talked about in the previous posts), users will not be left in the lurch (in the event of a company shutting its doors). (more…)

Few people have asked me about a reliable hosted wiki platform. I thought I will put my thoughts in the form of a post in this blog. Before I discuss about hosted wiki platforms, I want to make sure that I convey my bias towards Mediawiki as the Wiki platform. In my opinion, it is the most powerful of all the wiki platforms. However, Mediawiki has a reasonably steep learning curve and I cannot recommend it to newbies. Also, Wikimedia foundation, the home of Mediawiki, doesn’t offer a hosted version of MediaWiki. Many people prefer to have a hosted version instead of going through a geeky installation process. There are many third party MediaWiki hosts but they are not from the original developers and hence people’s (especially business community’s) reluctance to go with them. (more…)

I posted this comment in one of the ReadWriteWeb posts. Since the topic fits well into the theme of this blog, the concept of open web, I thought I will also post it in my blog.

The death of Readburner brings into focus a very important question. How can we rely on a web service offered by a small startups whose longevity cannot be ascertained. Readburner is a different kinda web service where we do not upload huge amounts of data. What about those two people web services where we invest our time and upload all our data? How can we rely on such companies with our valuable data? Should we wait for some big companies like Google to acquire the service before we start investing our time? (more…)

The so called virtual reality Guru, Jaron Lanier, long known for his criticism of “Wisdom of Crowds” attitude of Open Source development model and the Internet Collectivism (so called Web 2.0), recently wrote an article called Long Live Closed Source Software. I call his article as “Ignorance of an Individual”. In his article, he argues against open source process and calls upon the scientific community to not fall into the trap of the open source development model. I don’t know much about this dude but he comes out as someone who thinks that he can talk about science just because he attended a scifoo camp (a meeting where most of the participants are from the fringes of science. They do invite some hardcore scientists but mostly can be classified as a fringe group of geeks and people with experience in science. Well, such a meeting is important because it helps drive discussion about the interface between science and technology. But, my argument is that attending a scifoo meeting alone doesn’t make an individual a scientist). He uses Martha Stewart and Science in the same sentence and I am sure it talks about how much science he knows. (more…)

Today Google announced their new project, Google Knol. Their idea is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. My first take on Google Knol is

If it is done correctly, it might kick the butt of Mahalo and if it is done wrong, it will add splog kinda pages messing up the search results

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When Google announced Open Handset Alliance and the release of Android SDK under open source license, I was pretty excited. In fact, few people like Robert Scoble even questioned my excitement during a twitter conversation. Some of the arguments put forward by pundits against my excitement towards Google’s strategy were

• Android is boring and the phone features are not enthralling
• The device is not out. It is just a PR blitz
• It is Google’s attempt to get monopoly
• Certain ridiculous assertions like it is a security nightmare
• Certain sensible apprehensions like “Android is not released under GPL but Apache software license and network carriers can still maintain their walled gardens”

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