Transition

Please Note: This is a personal blog post involving me (Doug Levin) and Black Duck.

The OpenSourceAdoption.com blog is the primarily public outlet for this announcement.

Today I am publicly announcing that I am transitioning out of the CEO position at Black Duck Software this month as we start the search process for my replacement. If you know me well, you know that my strengths and keen interest are in being a technology company ‘creator.' I've been able to put in place a really significant business and management foundation at Black Duck that allows me to make this transition, ultimately providing me with the freedom and time to pursue new ventures. As the founder of Black Duck I have been a member of the Board of Directors from its inception. Starting on September 1st I will continue in my role as a member of the Board of Directors and act in an advisory capacity for the company. This is not a sudden decision - quite the opposite - it has been planned since early this year. It has taken months to put into place.

I am doing this now because Black Duck is in great shape and I have the desire to investigate some promising startup opportunities. I will start those investigations after taking a nice, long vacation.

Black Duck is in excellent shape: the business is experiencing solid growth in almost every measure including record bookings, we have a very experienced executive and extended management team; engineering, sales and marketing, and other operational parts of the company are very strong, and the market for Black Duck products and services is very strong.

During this transition period I will work with Bill McQuaide, Executive VP Products and Services, and Ken Goldman, CFO, running Black Duck's Office of the Presidency. They have extensive experience as executives and will help guide the company until we find and on-board a replacement CEO. I will be actively involved with the CEO recruitment and transition processes.

You should also know that I will continue to write blog posts to this blog.

I hope to see you along the software pathways ...

Community Linux gets a seat at the corporate table

The 451 Group's CAOS report on the rise of community Linux provides a nice overview of the Linux market and discusses the healthy competition between commercial, supported Linux distributions and the do-it-yourself, community Linux crowd.

Here is a summary of their findings:

• The use of community Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu (which is based on Debian), and CentOS (a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux) are on the rise in the enterprise.
• Red Hat and Novell (SUSE) remain the dominant providers of enterprise Linux in the market, but they are not the only players.
• Cost savings opportunities and a rise in internal expertise are the main drivers for selecting a community Linux distribution.
• Community Linux distributions are having a greater impact outside of North America.
  

There are several implications from the 451 Group's point of view:

• The duopoly of Red Hat and SUSE Linux will decline as commercial and community competition gives rise to fragmentation of the market.
• Despite increased competition and market fragmentation, the 451 group expects that Red Hat and Novell will continue to lead the enterprise Linux market.
• Trends such as SaaS, cloud computing, and software appliances are putting operating system selection more and more into the hands of vendors.
• There is an opportunity for hardware vendors, system integrators, and others to sell more products and provide their own Linux support and services around community Linux distributions. 
• Public sector and NGO users are among the most likely to promote and use community Linux, but even large enterprises are considering the cost savings from community distributions.

This CAOS report concludes that there will be continued growth in both the use and commercial support of free community Linux distributions. The rise of community Linux -- while generating some price, support, and potential long-term competitive pressure on established Linux players -- is actually helping to grow the overall Linux market.

Black Duck customers know that Linux version control is a challenge in the enterprise. Distributions from Red Hat, Novell, and others have community and desktop versions in use across the many servers in the enterprise. Also, supporting Linux in the enterprise often means supporting different distributions with different features, implementations, and other support-related criteria. Finally, while the Linux kernel is licensed under the GPL 2.0, enterprise editions have additional components with different licensing approaches, including different commercial subscriptions. All these factors come into play when an enterprise considers Linux - community versions or not.

Book Review

IT/Digital Legal Companion: A Comprehensive Business Guide to Software, Internet, Media and IP Law

By Gene K. Landy; additional content by Amy Mastrobattista
Syngress/Elsevier, 1,188 pages, $59.95

From the outset I want to make clear that I have not read every word in Gene Landy's and Amy Mastrobattista's The IT/Digital Legal Companion: A Comprehensive Business Guide to Software, IT, Internet, Media and IP Law. During the last week I have browsed and read chapters in this book while sitting under the beech tree in my backyard.

I think this is a very useful book. Entrepreneurs have all kinds of legal questions and needs during the startup and emerging company phases of the company's life. Many established businesses do too. It is my experience that a lot of money is spent making phone calls to, and holding meetings with, general and outside counsel about the latest approach to various legal subject areas that otherwise cannot be retrieved from one place (a legal library, the Internet, etc.).

The IT/Digital Legal Companion is one, central place that can help you accomplish a whole range of things by using the background, explanations, and legal agreements in the book. It can help you negotiate better deals; establish more productive partnerships; exploit the Internet, mobile networks and digital media as a communications and medium for generating revenues (as opposed to generating mostly expenses); identify and manage risk; and, to use Gene's words, "benefit from and act more decisively and confidently in legal matters."

The book has three parts: A big portion has general and practical deals and agreements for most businesses, a second part addresses specialized but important business and legal issues, and a third part has specialized but practical legal information and agreements.

In the first part of the book there are five chapters on intellectual property in digital business (copyrights, trademarks, domain names, patents, trade secrets, and nondisclosure agreements); a chapter on digital licensing and contracting fundamentals; one chapter on Open Source Software licensing and business models; a chapter on development and consulting with a guide for the deal making process (including RFPs and other agreements); four chapters on business IT and software, including licensing and distribution, including the all important beta test agreements and other key licenses, distribution and partnering agreements (including Software as a Service agreements); and two chapters on Web and Internet Agreements (including the all important clickwrap and browsewrap agreements).

The Companion then has three standalone chapters on privacy, standards, and clearance of content. In the privacy chapter, the rules on privacy and acceptable use of personal data in the digital world including privacy law are laid out, as are other privacy policies and issues. The following chapter provides an overview of media assets licensing.

The remaining part of the Companion addresses specialized topics, a legal affairs management primer, and sample agreements. The topics include Web and mobile deals, video game deals, and international distribution. In the legal affairs management, Landy provides some practical suggestions on how to manage your legal affairs. Lastly, there is a very valuable appendix with 38 sample form agreements that are related to the deals and transactions described in the book.

Two glaring omissions are the Creative Commons and GNU Affero General Public (AGPL) licenses. In future editions I would also like to see a more complete explanation of the origins of the legal distinctions and philosophical underpinnings related to Free and Open Source Software, an overhaul of the perceived advantages and disadvantages of OSS, and more meat in the "Which Version {of the GPL} Should You Use?" section. Let me note, however, that the implied patent and dual licensing sections were very good additions to these topic areas.

Despite the highly insular analysis immediately above, I would recommend purchasing this book. But don't forget to bring your forklift when you pick it up.

Disclosure: I've known Gene for many years but never retained him or Ruberto, Israel & Weiner of Boston, MA as counsel.

Open Source provides Literacy Bridge

One of my favorite journalists, Darryl Taft, has written a wonderful article entitled "Bridging the Literacy Divide with Open Source".

In it he highlight a $5 iPod-like device developed by Cliff Schmidt for places where there is little to no electricity and, by extension, no Internet. This is where the poorest of the poor in the world live. Schmidt is the president of Literacy Bridge, a nonprofit with a mission according to the organization's Web site "to empower children and adults with tools for knowledge sharing and literacy learning, as an effective means towards advancing education, health, economic development, democracy and human rights." (Another interesting background point about Schmidt is that he worked a strategy consultant in the open-source community helping enterprises adopt open-source software.)

Literary Bridge's $5 device is a "Talking Book" that gives children and adults an interactive way to access locally recorded readings of existing and newly created reading books. According to Darryl, "as an information system, the Talking Book System offers inexpensive distribution to large numbers of people, enabling individuals to determine what information they want and when they want it."

Further, "The idea for this came up about a year ago and has evolved from there," Schmidt said. "I was working with One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and I was looking at how we could use laptops to help improve literacy. And when I left to go to Ghana I took a few laptops, but I realized then that laptops weren't the solution because of their price point. They are a solution for a specific set of problems, and can be a strategic bet for a developing country over the long term. But for an individual to be able to buy a device that could help them improve the quality of their life ... I said, Could a $5 device be built to help instead of a $200 or $100 laptop?"

Open source software obviously plays a major role in the overall architecture and engineering of this device.

This is a very cool idea and shows the versatility of small devices, like iPod and cell phone, transforming the world of communications, social life and education with open source.

Interview with Linus Torvalds

Richard Morris interviewed Linus Torvalds and produced an article with a particularly interesting quote that readers of this blog will find relevant:

Richard asked: "Many significant projects such as Apache, PHP etc do not use the GPL license. Do you think this damages the free software source community or do you think the heterogeneity of open source licenses has allowed more people to contribute to the overall effort?"

Linus responded: "I think heterogeneity is good. People don't agree on their goals and their motivations, and they shouldn't. There's no real reason why everybody should agree on a single license - it's not only unreasonable to expect people to all agree to begin with, but different areas of endeavor may simply have fundamental reasons why they want to do things in different ways. For example, I obviously believe that the GPL (and v2 in particular) is a great model for working together - letting everybody share the code, but also making sure that nobody can then try to take advantage of other peoples work - you 'pay' for the source code by giving source code back. I call it the 'tit-for-tat' model, and it works well not only in the software world, but is fairly well known in economics and game theory too.

But the fact that I like it for the kind of endeavor I'm involved with doesn't mean that others can't have other goals. For example, if you're a standards body, and you want to use open source as a way to distribute a reference model, you may not be interested in the 'tit-for-tat' part, but you want to just spread the reference code as widely as possible so that people start out with a certain basic proficiency, but you also want to make that reference the base for proprietary code-bases. So in that second situation, you might want to do an Apache or BSD license.

So even from a purely rational standpoint it makes sense to have different licenses. And no, I'm not claiming that programmers are always purely rational. There's a lot of ego involved, and a lot of personal quirks, which may explain exactly why there are so many subtly different licenses to try out.

But hey, choice is good! And there really isn't a lot of confusion, since there really are just a handful of very popular and common licenses."

I couldn't agree more. Bravo Linus for being a consistent supporter of GPL 2.0, adhering to your principicals of choice and supporting diversity.

Open Source in the Enterprise

O'Reilly Research and Bernard Golden published a report today that identifies a list of reasons for open source's steady, expansive adoption:

• Agility and Scale: The ability to quickly grow and modify software systems to respond rapidly changing business conditions
• Breaking Vendor Lock-in: Reducing proprietary vendor dependence and controlling enterprise IT architectures
• Quality and Security: Improving the operations of enterprise infrastructure by leveraging open source characteristics of transparency and rapid improvement
• Cost: Reducing overall IT operational costs by implementing
  free or low-cost open source software
• Sovereignty: Reducing dependence upon U.S.-based software companies for local economic development and national sovereignty reasons
• Innovation: Using open source to create new business offerings or creating open source products to reduce operational costs and make new offerings less expensive to bring to marke

Clearly different audiences will read variously into this study but reduced lock-in, according to the authors, "explain much of {OSS'} benefits". Developers will recognize their motivations as will outsourcers and others located outside the US. Also, interestingly, cost is simply among the reasons as opposed to being the major driver. (A conclusion rendered by large research companies such as Forrester, Gartner and the 451 Group.)

Check it out. It's worth reading.

Black Duck Expands Koders Code Search Engine

Today we announced that Black Duck Software Adds C/C++ Open Source Software to Koders.com Code Search Engine.

In short, we have expanded Koders.com ("Koders") code search engine by 15 percent or 100 million lines of code, adding more C and C++ code governed by open source and other licenses. This additional code expands Koders' pool of reusable open source code, methods, examples and algorithms.

You will remember that Black Duck acquired Koders in April 2008. This new code comes from the acquisition of the assets and site of csourcesearch.net.

With these acquisitions, Koders and Black Duck product offerings - especially Code Center - will have the most complete solution for finding, tracking and selecting open source code.

Thinking Prospectively

With the amazing sales of the iPhone 3G since its introduction last week (1 million in the first 3 days after its release), high interest in Google's Android, Nokia's recent purchase of Symbian, and other developments in the mobile computing, cell phone and communications markets, I wanted to look forward 10 to 12 years to 2018 and 2020 and render a view of what things may be like:

• Mobile computing will be the dominant platform, and new high-bandwidth applications will be available over mobile devices. I think that Dick Tracy watches will be available that have real-time videoconferencing capabilities. Desktop PCs will be considered quaint, old fixtures of the bygone PC computing era. Laptops will be seen an interim step between the client-server era and the new era totally mobile computing. Large scale applications, such as Microsoft Office, will become increasingly less used. Smaller Windows applets will store files on servers located in Internet clouds but accessible anywhere. Also there will be a proliferation of individual Internet devices like Chumby.

• The presentation layer will change dramatically. The iPhone presages the way multiple, simple-to-access applications will propagate. The switch to lighter-and-lighter weight applications will necessitate application-level functionality and Web-based services that will enable easy but powerful application reconfiguration, application sharing and other essentially rearchitected elements. Security will be different as well as, especially, access control. SaaS will be much more standard way of interacting with applications.

• Driving this transformation will be open source software and an evolved service oriented architecture (SOA) and web services infrastructure sitting on a semantic Internet. Open source will be rampant at the subterranean level of applications, and many more solutions will be available in the future than today.

• The future will be hybrid of open source, web services, SaaS and proprietary software. In addition to open source software, SaaS applications and solutions will also proliferate. Proprietary applications and solutions will remain popular, though there will be more commoditization of proprietary software. The future will not be open.

• Time-to-market pressures will not abate; they will increase. An agile-like approach to software development will be common, but with more quality consciousness because of the requirements of end-users in the mobile telecommunications system.

• Certifications of individual software components will lead to small exchanges supporting sales in micromarkets. The tools space will continue to be fractured with lots of Ruby, Scrum and Java in equal proportion to ASP, .NET and Windows applets. There will new high-level languages that will be object oriented for non-programmers, spurring the creation of more fleet vendors and individual developers who offer new applets.

The 3g and original iPhones have transformed mobile computing and communications markets in the short term. Taken in conjunction with these other developments in open source and software software it's easy to see that we are at the precipice of a lot of changes.

What do you think? Please let me know your thoughts.

Black Duck Software On the Path to 'Enlightenment'

No, I'm not talking about anything mystical here. I mean enlightenment as in the Slope of Enlightenment that the Gartner Group uses for its annual open source software (OSS) Hype Cycle. The report looks at the entire OSS ecosystem to show which OSS segments have reached enterprise-level maturity - and which are floundering.

Spoiler alert: Black Duck came off smelling like a rose.

In its new report, Hype Cycle for Open-Source Software, 2008, Gartner put Black Duck in the category called "IT Services for Open Source Software," and that category is in the ideal spot on their Hype Cycle, just entering the Slope of Enlightenment. This demonstrates that our offering is maturing and ready for rapid adoption. Last year this segment was on the way down into the Trough of Disillusionment (something like the secular version of Bunyan's Slough of Despond).

Here's the money quote from the Gartner report:

Open source solutions are being deployed in increasingly mission-critical scenarios where the service level must be equal to or better than closed-source alternatives, and open-source solutions are being adopted by increasingly conservative IT organizations that regard cost and risk mitigation s their primary concerns. The vendor positions in this Hype Cycle reflect these patterns, because technologies emerging from the Trough of Disillusionment are best-suited to both challenges.

These are exciting times for OSS.

Black Duck will continue to help our clients understand the origins and licensing obligations of the open source-licensed code they use in their software. As we continue to seek "enlightenment" by leading the market, we'll make sure our clients attain a sense of inner peace -- at least as far as their code is concerned.

U.S. broadband: Getting so much better all the time?

It's not exactly a secret that I believe broadband in U.S. is pitiful. Here's what I wrote in April:

• Last month there came the news that eight countries beat the U.S. in broadband penetration. Now there's another new report, this time from the Economic Policy Institute, confirming that the United States is pulling up the middle when it comes to "high-speed internet penetration." Out of 30 countries surveyed, the U.S. ranks 15th with 22 high-speed connections per 100 residents. By contrast, Denmark tops the list with 34 high-speed connections per 100 residents, followed by the Netherlands, Switzerland, Korea, and Norway.

• It gets worse when you look at new broadband technologies. For example, 35% of Japan's broadband connections are fiber optic, versus just 3% for the U.S. Average download speeds in Japan are 61-megabits per second, while the average U.S. broadband user has to make due with 1.9-megabits per second. It isn't a pretty picture, to say the least.

But Kyle McSlarrow, CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, which represents the big cable operators, is having none of it. In a video interview posted at FastCompany.tv, he explains why he believes people like me are just plain wrong. Or at least impatient. The good stuff starts 12:15 into the video and ends around 15:00.

Why is a country like South Korea ahead of the U.S. in broadband? McSlarrow: "The simple answer to the question is because they're ahead, but it's actually more complicated."

How so? McSlarrow gives three reasons:

 Don't believe the hype: First, he says he was told by network operators in South Korea or Hong Kong (he doesn't specific which) that their 100Mbps broadband claims were "just marketing." Translation: It ain't as bad in the U.S. as you think.

 Asians (and others) are just too dense: Then, a few seconds later, he blamed population density in Asia and in the other leading broadband countries. "You've got so many people in apartment buildings" in Asia, he said. Where a node in Asia serves one apartment building with 50,000 residents, in America one node serves "a couple hundred houses." These nations don't have to deal with rural broadband the way the United States does, he added, because they're smaller, more urban countries.

 It's Washington's fault: "Government policy unduly slowed us down with the rollout of boradband," McSlarrow said. He argues that it was only with "full deregulation" in 1999 that the cable companies could really get rolling with broadband. Now "we're building more capacity, the speeds are getting greater," he said. McSlarrow believes that greater competition will continue to drive this trend.

So the takeaway from McSlarrow and the cable companies is simple: Just chill. We're on the job.

Are you prepared to take his word for it and the cable industry's promises? Better still, are we as a nation prepared to stake the future economic competitiveness of the United States on the benevolence of the cable companies? Or even the Verizons of the world, for that matter?

If past experience is any guide, such questions seem to answer themselves.