I've written before about the sometimes negative impact that commercial vendors can have on open source projects.  (See Should commercial open source vendors "own" an open source community?)  Some business models and business practices of open source vendors (trying to control all committers and commits, withholding enhancements and fixes from community versions, etc) seem to turn an open source project into something that looks a lot like a proprietary software product.  Unfortunately, these practices are becoming more and more prevalent.

I'm not against commercial vendors making money from open source.  In fact, we do it at OpenLogic by selling support, services and tools around open source.  But I'm convinced that if open source vendors take this trend towards more control too far, it could backfire on them.  Communities could decide to take back control by forking or creating new competing projects. 

Here's an example of how that may be playing out.  Stephen O'Grady at RedMonk writes about this in a recent post about MySQL.  In it he describes the implications of MySQL's the dual licensing model:

 "A single entity such as MySQL is responsible for the overwhelming majority of all development on a given codebase. Anything they don’t produce themselves, they license. Very often this is practiced in conjunction with the dual-license model; because MySQL is responsible for virtually all of the development of the core code, they own or have licensed appropriately all of the involved IP. As such, they’re free to issue commercial licenses to those who would cannot or choose not to comply with the terms of the open source license - the GPL, in this case."

But according to Stephen, this model also has a significant downfall.

"Stated more simply: as long as MySQL remains committed to the dual licensing model, it will be unable to accept the same patch set that open source only versions of the code can, because they do not share the same licensing concerns. "

In the case of MySQL, the result is that other projects are popping up to offer "better versions" of MySQL that includes patches from the community or to offer alternatives to MySQL.  Although, to date, this has not had a significant impact on MySQL, I can see that it could in the future.  In their understandable search for revenue, commercial open source vendors could find that the community model they embrace could backfire. 

I personally like the idea that the open source communities (with the benefit of open source licenses) can provide checks and balances to keep commercial open source vendors true to the open source development model.

One of the most popular categories of open source software is undoubtedly application servers. JBoss, Geronimo, and Tomcat are practically household names to anyone with even a passing familiarity with open source. But like any software package, every open source application server comes with its own pros and cons. Selecting the right open source application server for your environment requires detailed functional evaluations and important technology decisions on topics like EJB2 compatibility and OSGi. Further complicating the selection process is the recent release of the SpringSource dm Server, which abandons the EJB world altogether.

With this ever-shifting landscape, it's important to stay abreast of the latest developments and ensure that your organization is using the open source application servers that best suit your current and future needs and initiatives. Get a leg up on this important topic by attending our next technical webinar, “A Comparison of Open Source Application Servers for the Enterprise,” which will be held on Thursday, December 11.

Presented by Rod Cope, our CTO and Founder, and Veljko Krunic, our Senior Consultant, this webinar will compare JBoss, Glassfish, Geronimo, Tomcat, and the new SpringSource dm Server. In addition to core features and reliability, Rod and Veljko will discuss:

• EJB3 vs. Spring
• Spring on a dm Server vs. J2EE/JEE server
• OSGi
• EJB 2 compatibility

If you're currently evaluating application servers, plan to begin an evaluation in the near future, or simply want to stay abreast of new trends in open source application servers, please be sure to join us on December 11 at 11:00 Pacific / 2:00 Eastern.

And don't forget — the webinar library on our corporate website offers free downloads of the slides and recordings from all previous OpenLogic webinars, including “A Comparison of Open Source Reporting Tools for the Enterprise” and “A Comparison of Open Source Scripting Languages for the JVM.”

I spend most of my OpenLogic attention right now on Wazi, whether it be working with writers like Grant Smith and Dru Lavigne or our terrific internal team on what they might contribute, developing my own contributions, or researching what we might want to cover. Mornings before work I spend reading poetry. Lately Zbigniew Herbert, a Polish poet (I find Alissa Valles translation gorgeous, though it's controversial.) who performs virtuoso syntactic moves with practically no punctuation. Writes complex lists and compound sentences with no commas, for instance. I'm thinking about this phenomena — the way in which what's not there creates and informs, shapes and enhances what is  — called by poets and visual artists managing whitespace. And it occurs to me that Wazi, as a project, might be understood at least in part by what it's not, by what we don't want it to be or become, by what we've chosen to leave out.

To claim that Wazi isn't ultimately a lead generation and promotional tool for OpenLogic would be disingenuous. And that's the main thing we're leaving out: any pretense of being something other than what we are. However, it's also true that we're striving to leave out covert sales pitches, and marketing speak and wishful-thinking feature lists and anything, anything that remotely resembles padding. That leaves lots of room for Wazi to become a place to find substantive articles based on user experience with open source, about participating in the open source industry and making open source work in business.

Toward this end, in October, our researchers and legal team added an article on open source licensing, and a handy comparison tool of the most common open source licenses. Our engineers contributed tips and tutorials on a range of topics including working with Firefox and installing Apache on AIX. Rod Cope reported the results of some experimentation with open source reporting tools.

By the end of November, we'll have published an article that considers the numerous elements of what's being called 'governance' these days — scanning and open source policies and the like. We'll go in-depth laying out what a company might need to do to get a handle on the open source it uses, organize and manage their efforts and keep them organized going forward, while simultaneously meeting license obligations. Additionally, OpenLogic engineers will give you some tips on working with JBoss and Rails in both a development and production environment.

In December, we'll publish an article on getting started using open source for a Web application development project in an enterprise setting, and a comparison of all the available open source email servers. Both of these articles will include information on proprietary alternatives and pricing. January is still shaping up, but we know we'll add some information on stacks like servers and databases that play well together and expand our information on governance.

All this content is available at http://olex.openlogic.com/wazi free of charge; and most is available under a Creative Commons license, so free to use. If you like it (if you, like Mr. Cogito, believe a bird is a bird, and you adore tautologies and explanations), all we ask is that you talk about it. Subscribe to our RSS feed, Digg us, tell your friends. And, of course, if you really like it, if you like it enough to use the tools you're exposed to, keep in mind that OpenLogic keeps Wazi's lights on by selling support for open source (and much more) on hundreds of open source projects.

On a closing note, we're looking for writers and artists. If you'd like to work with us, or there's something particular you'd like to see, be impetuous and send us an email at wazi-at-openlogic.com. 

I wanted to share a fix for something that has been driving me insane on an Ubuntu Fiesty box (though don’t think it’s at all limited to that distro). This fix may be common knowledge, but, if you’re like me and you don’t know about it, then it’s not common, eh?

I have a 500G Maxtor USB drive as a backup drive for a Dell pizza box running Ubuntu Fiesty. I formatted it ext2, got it mounted, ran backup data to it, no problems. I made a daily cron job to do backups, but every morning when I’d look at my cron notifications, I would discovery that the backup failed because the file system was read-only which is not how I left it.

I would log in to my box, try to make a file on the backup drive and sure enough, couldn’t because it was read only. I’d unmount it, then remount it and it would be fine. By the next morning it was read-only again.

I reformatted the drive to ext3, reiserfs…no matter what, I had problems. Looking at log messages I would see things like this:

Nov 19 07:29:54 hurricane kernel: [724306.332761] sd 4:0:0:0: Device not ready: : Current: sense key: Not Ready
Nov 19 07:29:54 hurricane kernel: [724306.332771] Additional sense: Logical unit not ready, initializing command required
Nov 19 07:29:54 hurricane kernel: [724306.332781] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 10706
Nov 19 07:29:54 hurricane kernel: [724306.332785] printk: 4 messages suppressed.
Nov 19 07:29:54 hurricane kernel: [724306.332797] lost page write due to I/O error on sdb1

where sdb1 was my USB backup drive partition. After digging I finally found a thread:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=494673

that talked about a similar issue. Some people saw it on NTFS, FAT32, etc - it has nothing to do with the drive format as far as I can tell.

The problem is that some drives will spin down (I suppose to save energy), but that hoses up the filesystem and kernel for writing to it.

For me, the fix was similar to that suggested in the link above:

1) create a file in /etc/udev/rules.d called 85-usb-hd-fix.rules and add this line to it:

BUS==”scsi”, SYSFS{vendor}==”Maxtor”, RUN+=”/usr/bin/usbhdfix %k”

(where you modify the vendor to be appropriate)

2) in /usr/bin add a file: usbhdfix and put this content in it:

#!/bin/bash
# http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=494673

echo 1 > /sys/block/$1/device/scsi_disk:*/allow_restart

3) of course, chmod +x usbhdfix as appropriate for you.

After this, my backups never failed again due to the read-only issue.

Apparently a kernel fix is coming or is already there…I didn’t chase that down.

Hope this helps someone,

About me

I’m an independent consultant who used to do a lot of work for OpenLogic. I greatly appreciate OpenLogic and the mission they are fulfilling as well as their willingness to let me contribute to this blog. Views expressed here are not necessarily those of OpenLogic and any mistakes are 100% attributable to me. You can contact me at: landon at 360vl dot com or visit http://sawdust.see-do.org

Two weeks ago, I returned from the ApacheCon 2008 Open Source Software Convention held in New Orleans.  This was my first time attending such a conference with the Apache Software Foundation, and for me, it was a great opportunity to build both professional and personal relationships.  Looking back on this event I will certainly remember the phenomenal people who contributed to this great experience.  

Attendees are completely immersed in the Meritocracy that ApacheCon exemplifies in its culture, where, within the Apache Community, responsibilities are distributed based on demonstrated talent.  I observed first hand how the Open Source Community, built around Apache Software, comes together to innovate technology and enlighten their individual community members.  

Arriving on Sunday, I got my bearings before attending two intermediate training sessions on Monday and Tuesday.  In one session, we were fortunate enough to have Jim Jagielski present information related to the Apache HTTPD server.  Most open sourcers know Jim Jagielski as an established Open Source guru.  Jim’s ideas and enthusiasm can certainly be described as inspiring and contagious.  Compared to other presentations I attended by Jim, it was great to have him in such a small forum where we were able to ask direct technical questions.

The rest of my week was spent attending other sessions, attending the Expo and simply processing all of the great information available at such a huge event.  In a very short time, I observed first hand how the wheels of innovation are greased with the ingenuity and individual contributions of each and every member.  It is incredible to see so many voluntary contributors from such a diverse range of experience come together for a common interest.

I am looking forward to attending my next Apache Conference in 2009…

Open source governance is critical, but it doesn't have to be hard. 

The Industry Standard summarized a recent survey by Gartner as follows.

"According to the study, 85 per cent of companies surveyed are currently using OSS in their enterprises and the remaining 15 per cent are expecting to in the next 12 months."

According to The Industry Standard, the Gartner survey identifies governance as the biggest inhibitor to using open source.

"Governance, or the lack of it, was the No 1 challenge for OSS users in the survey, followed by conflicting terms and conditions and the availability of too many license types and forms."

And Gartner tells companies to start with a policy and follow that with a governance process.

"Just because something is free doesn't mean that it has no cost," said Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner. "Companies must have a policy for procuring OSS, deciding which applications will be supported by OSS, and identifying the intellectual property risk or supportability risk associated with using OSS. Once a policy is in place, then there must be a governance process to enforce it."

The good news is that creating or refining your open source policy doesn't need to be hard.  At OpenLogic, we've worked with many companies to create or review their open source policy.  Our Policy JumpStart Workshop takes a commitment of 1 day from representative stakeholders in the company to formulate a policy, followed by a review and approval process.  Companies that participate in the workshop will typically have a draft policy within 1 week and a final policy within  2-4 weeks.  In the Workshop, we cover best practices and experience from working with a wide variety of companies on open source governance.

Companies that already have a policy can proceed straight to implementing a governance process to enforce the policy.  OpenLogic's SaaS-based system for open source governance — called OLEX Enterprise Edition – provides a complete cradle-to-grave solution to govern the use of open source.  Because it's SaaS, you can be ready to go in a matter of hours with a minimal investment.  You can start with a free trial to evaluate OLEX Enterprise Edition.

In a very short time you can establish an open source policy and governance process and start to realize the cost savings associated with using open source software.

Our latest marketing metrics show a 61% increase in inbound leads from Q2 to Q3 of this year. Q4 looks to be on track to continue this strong growth.

Inbound leads come from prospects that ask for a quote from OpenLogic for support services or our open source governance solution. So these numbers typically represent companies that are looking to buy — not just download. We believe that this large increase is due to the economic downturn for several reasons:

• In a poll we did as part of a recent webinar on Cost Cutting with Open Source, over 69% of the attendees said that they plan to use more open source or are considering using more open source in response to the economic downturn.
• We've had huge interest in our "open source comparison webinars" where we compare multiple open source options within a particular category. These webinars typically attract people who are evaluating open source.
• Our sales team has seen a huge increase in interest in our open source governance solution, which typically is an early indicator of companies wanting to use more open source software. They want to make sure that they have the appropriate policies and processes in place to manage open source before they open the floodgates to a lot more open source usage.

Early data shows us that the economic downturn will accelerate the adoption of open source software in the enterprise.

A little over a week ago we launched an updated version of the OpenLogic corporate website. The basic page layout is largely the same, but there are some significant changes to the content, organization, and style.

First and foremost, we refocused the content to better reflect our primary open source solutions—commercial-grade support for open source, open source governance, and open source provisioning. We also updated information on our open source services and OpenLogic Exchange (OLEX), our Software-as-a-Service platform for comprehensive sourcing and governance of open source software in the enterprise. Organizational improvements allow visitors to browse our offerings by solution type or by product name, and our library of webinars and other downloads is now easier to navigate.

From a style standpoint we tried to give the site a softer, more “web 2.0” look and feel without going through a start-from-scratch redesign. We tackled this by rounding off hard edges and adding subtle gradients to sidebars, and we also increased the page width to improve readability and get more content above the fold.

Overall, I'm really pleased with the redesign.  Check it out and let me know what you think!

As many of you know, I'm now working full time as the GNOME Foundation's Executive Director. From now on, I'll be blogging primarily on Stormy's Corner. Thanks for following me - I hope to see you at Stormy's Corner.

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Every company should have an open source strategy and policy - or at least cover open source in their company's policy. Even if they don't use open source software, they should have a policy saying whether or not they could use open source or who would have to decide. Otherwise they'll end up wasting developer time.

And yet survey after survey shows that companies do not have open source software policies. Mark Radcliffe reports that the DLA Piper 2008 Technology Leaders Forecast Survey found that only 48% of companies* have an open source software strategy and:

Larger companies, those with more than 5,000 employees, reported use of open source software in only 9% of their products and 65% do not have open source use policies.

I bet even fewer would have an open source strategy. (My argument for a strategy, which I will repeat endlessly, is that if you don't state why you are using open source, you won't set up the right policies.)

* Disclaimer: the study wasn't included and I wasn't sure what "these companies" referred to.