Planet JM

Category: Syndicated

  • From OStatic: Linux Marketing – or lack thereof

    Reading Sam Dean’s piece on the absence of linux marketing brought back memories, many of them painful, of my involvement in Linux International, back in the day. For you kids today who only know your Linux Foundation, Linux International (LI) was founded by Jon ‘maddog’ Hall as a vendor-driven organization to, among other things, protect the Linux trademark. One of LI’s initiatives that began in early 2000 was a marketing plan to be jointly funded by the vendors. You can read my call to action from that time begging and pleading for the members of LI to band together to do *something*.

    Then, as now, the problem was the cacaphony of noise from various vendors, each with their own spin on Linux. Was it a desktop thing as Eazel and Ximian proclaimed at the time? Was it an enterprise dark horse as backed by IBM? Was it a really great web server, as VA Linux and Red Hat were promoting? All of the above? While multiple Linux markets have continued to grow since then, there does not appear to be a solution to the general problem.

    Read the rest at OStatic.com

  • From OStatic: More on Open Core

    Many of the responses to my previous blog post “Open Core or Open Snore?” were in agreement, and some were not. As is often the case, the more interesting ones expressed disagreement. Some took issue with my post by pointing out open core companies that might be termed success stories: SugarCRM, Alfresco, Mindtouch. But then, I never wrote that open core cannot be successful, but rather that any success will be limited by nature of the model. Open core effectively places a cap on community development turning open source efforts into a viral marketing play, when it can be so much more.

    One critique that did resonate was how much open source dev models actually impacted the bottom line. A company’s success is impacted by a myriad of factors, including open source strategy and tactics.Seeing as how some companies will succeed with practically no open source development at all, it’s only natural to concede that an open core approach will succed in some markets. However, if I were creating an open source community strategy in a crowded, competitive market, I sure wouldn’t want to place an artificial handicap on my community development practices. I’ll use 2 case studies to illustrate my point: Red Hat / Fedora and CollabNet / Subversion

    Read the full article

  • From OStatic: Open Core or Open Snore?

    If you had asked me in 1999 if we would still be having discussions on the viability of Open Source business models in 2009, I would have looked at you incredulously. It seems like we’re taking an awfully long time to learn the lessons of what works and what doesn’t. Take, for example, the recent discussions around Open Core (see Andrew Lampitt’s original post). I have to concur with Tarus Balog at OpenNMS when he says it’s fauxpen source.

    What we should be asking ourselves is not what the VC’s want nor what makes us ideologically pure, but rather ‘what’s best for our respective communities?’ If communities are indeed the lifeblood of Open Source projects, doesn’t it make sound business sense to maximize community success?

    See full post on OStatic.com

  • From OStatic: Can You Boycott a Boycott?

    From the things-that-should-never-happen-but-you-knew-they-would-eventually department, comes more flamage in the Mono advocates vs. anti-Mono advocates vs. the now anti-anti-Mono advocates. I never like it when columnists or reporters treat all bad ideas equally, so I’ll just come out and say it – the anti-Mono crowd is comprised of a bunch of corn-fed idiots with more than a passing resemblance to the recent tea bagger protesters. However, I’m not sure that the correct response to that is to ratchet up the flame wars.- Read the rest at OStatic.com

  • Blogging at OStatic

    I’m pleased to have started blogging on OStatic.com – I’ll link those stories here, so you can see them either way. Here’s my initial blog post, “Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself…“

  • The Zen of Community

    As a follow up to my “inspiration vs. perspiration” post, I’ve written an article at linux.com entitled “The Zen of Community.”

    The point of the article is that the key to building a vibrant community is not focusing on the end product, but rather a few qualitative, squishy things, such as emotional attachment and mutually beneficial relationships. An inspired community is a by-product of that.

    Read the full article.

  • Inspiration vs. Perspiration

    (this was initially posted on the blog On CollabNet)

    I recently had the pleasure of attending the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in San Jose, and it gave me the opportunity to listen to 2 very contrasting approaches to what amounted to the same thing: university outreach. On one side was Jean Elliott, discussing how Sun was going to approach (reach? eclipse? fall just short of?) 900,000 university program members by this summer. In that session, she discussed the various ways Sun had put themselves in that position – it was a tour de force of grassroots outreach featuring open source communities that target life-long academics and students. On the other side was Bruce Carney from Nokia, who delved into a myriad of metrics and measurables in an attempt to define success and track how far along they were towards reaching it. During this session, an inch-thick booklet of tiny font statistics was passed around the room.

    It was grassroots outreach vs. statistical analysis. Really, it was inspiration vs. perspiration. Of course, this is not to say that Sun doesn’t expend significant energy planning these programs and measuring their success, or that Nokia doesn’t engage at a grassroots level, but it was clear which parts each company emphasized, and I started to think about the role of inspiration in online communities.

    It comes down to the age-old question, “Why does anyone participate in your community?” There’s nothing to force someone to come to any community or make them stick around. Ultimately, someone sticks around because it’s in their own self-interest to do so, but there’s something “squishy” about how community members self-select, and I can’t honestly say that it’s 100% about the product or technology that forms the basis of the community. In fact, I’m pretty sure that in addition to a community’s core offering, there’s an element of culture or “soft” product, if you will. If you run a community and want to engage with your community, how much have you invested in your soft product?

    This post introduces the series, which I’ll continue for a few days. Tomorrow, I’ll continue with a post about “zen and the art of community development” – it’s about the engagement, not the direct ROI. It’s about the conversation, not simply providing an answer.

  • auto post jm.org (weekly)

    Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

  • auto post jm.org (weekly)

    Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

  • Things I Learned in High School: Critical Thinking

    There were many things I heard in high school which have long exited my brain, seemingly never to return, but some things have managed to stick. Like the time in 10th (11th?) grade honors English class, when our teacher, Ms. Hutchison, had us read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. We came to a point in the reading where Ms. Hutchison pointed out to us that Shakespeare wasn’t actually writing about ancient Rome and the age of Caesar. Well, he kind of was, but only as an allegory for Elizabethan England. Shakespeare was delivering a message to his contemporaries encoded in the form of a historical play. That “Aha!” moment has remained etched in my memory. It had never occurred to me before then, being not very well read, to search for the hidden truth lying behind an author’s slight-of-hand designed to force the reader to look at an issue from a new perspective.

    Thinking in that way forced me to go through the process of trying to understand just what message Shakespeare was actually trying to deliver to his fellow inhabitants of Elizabethan England. And so began my introduction to literary criticism and critical thought in general. From there, it becomes a fun exercise to deconstruct old Westerns and understand them in their proper context – that of commentary on the times, ie. the cold war period, with an implicit yearning for simpler times and depictions of an obvious enemy in a black hat. In this context, it’s easy to understand the messages about racism intended by the creators of “Planet of the Apes.” In the midst of the civil rights struggle, depicting apes fightings against oppressed humans was a clear allegory to our own civil rights struggle. There are several other examples – Idiocracy comes to mind. And everyone knows that futuristic sci-fi is really about us and our worship of technology, but not so much about the science of the future… right?

    Once accustomed to understanding criticism and critical thinking, it’s a subtle logical shift towards decoding messages from public figures, parsing statements and realizing what is left unsaid is every bit as important, if not more, than what is stated.

    I bring this up because we’re still dealing with the aftermath of what happens when you don’t think critically and understand the “meaning behind the meaning.” How hard did we really try to understand the motivation behind the invasion of Iraq? Did we honestly believe that the Patriot Act and looser torture regulations would make us safer? I think about this often, because I sometimes wonder if I’m one of a rare few who attempt to decipher the code of messages we receive. That’s an arrogant thing to say, but I can’t help but think that far too many don’t bother, or that there aren’t enough teachers who bother to make this point to their students. I often wish we had a few more Ms. Hutchisons, because that might save us from a lot of unnecessary effort spent fixing mistakes which could have been foreseen. Now that we’re living through The Greatest Economic Crisis of Our Lifetimes(TM), it might be a good time to remember this lesson.