Welcome to another day on a bus tour of OSCON, seated at the back uncomfortably close to the voices in my head. I’m currently in the Rumsey keynote, and I’m not writing notes about it, because you really have to sit and watch these maps and see what David Rumsey has done with it. Kidnap someone with a fast broadband connection, go to the David Rumsey Collection and click around like a mad thing. Note to self: we have to drag this speaker to the next NotCon. It’s the most inspiring thing I’ve seen in some time.
Okay, now it’s David Patrick who is CP at Novell.
Not going to talk much about Novell (boo!), but what’s going on in Open Source from the POV of business. (I’m pretty sure this is Patrick’s standard speech to businesses, which is usually a very bad sign, but it’s actually quite a good insight into what businesses are worried about with open source). David Patrick was CEO of XImian, working with Miguel. They put it together commercially five years ago. They went out to CEOs and IT people at Fortune 500 companies and pestered them with questions. Five years ago, very few people knew about open source. Now they do.
If you’re over 35, you probably know something about Novell. They’ve been around a long time. Novell bought Ximian, S.U.S.E.; we went from a proprietary company to an open source company. We’ve also started marketing. We’re not known for marketing. (“Freedom to choose Linux or any other software you damn well please” is the ad he has up on the screen.
Novell was a Windows shop. On March 31st of this year, they cancelled our Windows licenses. They’re no longer an active licensee. They say they’re their own case study. The steps are: moving to OpenOffice, then they’re moving to a Linux desktop. Two thousand out of six thousand have already moved. When Novell Desktop ships, the rest will be moved. They’ll be documenting all of this on the Web
The concern from companies is that there’s no money to be made out of open source. What you see is the evolution of new business models: MySQL good example. Licensing, maintenance, support, training is the usual business model. In open source, less emphasis on licensing, more emphasis on the other three. It’s a good fit with how the industry is changing. We’re becoming a more mature industry — less about finding new customers, more about looking after your existing clients.
We need to educate everyone – customers, businesses, and each other about the nature of free licenses. That’s very critical, he says.
What are the myths that we deal with when we talk to enterprise customers about open source.
Myth 1: Open source will destroy the software industry. Open source doesn’t spell the end of proprietary software.
Myth 2: “Open source isw a have for purple-mohawked hackers who write sub-standard code” – quote from CTO. Really, sixty percent are software professionals with >6 years of experience. And he says that I don’t care what colour hair they have. The code quality is really high.
Myth 3: Open source is a fad. Yeah, right.
Myth 4: Open source is “The Right Way” to develop software. It’s a great way, but it’s not the silver bullet. “Buddha wasn’t meditating on open source software”
Myth 5: There’s no money in open source. We’ve invested $260 million in Open Source. (Rather notably, didn’t actually explain how to make money. Just talked about how much has been invested in it. But you know…)
Myth 6: Open Source is free. Sure, downloading is free, but it’s not free to the enterprise.
How do you succeed? You need very precise focus. You need to understand complements and substitutes. Does open source complement what I’m doing? Substitute what I’m doing? Is there something out there that’s already doing what I need?
Now he’s talking about licenses. You can tell this is really his talk that he gives to businesses, but that’s not as bad as it might be. He’s saying how funny it was that the Ximian coders knew more about the subtleties of licensing than their corporate attorneys, and that knowledge needs to be spread.
Something that’s really helped is more universal computer literacy. Nice anecdote about his fifteen-year old daughter and how she hassled him every day over the problems she had with her Windows machine, so in the end he moved her to SUSE, and now she looks at him like he’s an idiot when he asks if its working okay.
The Internet was vital to open source. Most of the early Ximian engineers were hired off of IRC.
What else drove open source? Needs not being met by proprietary software. Especially the “one size fits all” idea – you have to change your company to fit our software. CEOs say they’re tired of being held hostage by the vendor.
Ton of money being invested in Linux – billions by IBM, Novell, RedHat.
Linux is a substitute to Windows. We have to make decisions constantly about whether we’re going to implement something like JBoss, or just use our engineers to improve JBoss.
We’re a cooler company since we adopted open source; we’re not ashamed any more. My kids aren’t embarassed to wear the t-shirts.
We think the desktop is very close to on par with Windows. We believe in the next generation will be on par, and we can beat Windows at a $50 price point.
How do companies move over? Look at complements or substitutes — do you add open source stuff, or replace proprietary stuff. What relationship do they want with vendors? Do you need 24/7 support? Or are you pretty self-contained? Tying oneself to open source solutions isn’t something he believes will happen. It’s going to be a long time before a customer can switch entirely to open source. Seeing it creep up the stack – low level, up to desktop, CRM. He doesn’t see anyone using a free software tax product evarrr.