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Eric S. Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar is a very good and often quoted paper and in the mean time book to explanation why open source works so well. Besides the good content, it is a metaphor that I like a lot.

Apple’s AppStore seems to work well currently (100m downloads in the first 60 days), but continues to receive criticism for the unpredictable banns for applications (Podcaster and also recently Mailwranlger). Apple takes the freedom to control the content and to remove applications that do not meet the requirements or that they simply do not like in THEIR STORE. Some “contributors” are seriously upset about the devaluation of their sometimes very hard work to provide a piece of software that can only be distributed through a single channel - the AppStore.

Google is yet to prove to be different, but I have good hopes for their “store”, which they call “market”. This sounds much better to me wrt to the expectation I would have for a place to distribute my software through. On the android blog it is announced as

an open content distribution system that will help end users find, purchase, download and install various types of content on their Android-powered devices. The concept is simple: leverage Google’s expertise in infrastructure, search and relevance to connect users with content created by developers like you.

We talk a lot about so called free and open source software (F/OSS). The free is well defined by R. Stallman: “When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users’ essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.” And the OSI has the detailed definition what the open character of open source software consists of. Some enterprise aspects of it are discussed in our white paper The Growth of Open Source Software in Organizations.

So, how do you make money on F/OSS? While for open source this question has been addressed in many of our white papers, the free character is discussed more often, as it excludes some of the more obvious options of commercial open source and services on free and open software. Chris Anderson, author of “The Long Tail“, has been publishing a couple of articles on the four ways to make money with free:

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

Revised: the *four* kinds of FREE

He is defining four ways of free:

Free 1: Paid products subsidizing free products (Gmail)

Free 2: Paying later subsidizing free now (your ink jet printer)

Free 3: Premium/Freemium (5 bucks for Flickr pro)

Free 4: Gift economy (people give things away for non-quantifiable reward)

I like the visualizations which are similar to what we often flip chart when explaining web 2.0 business models. Look out for his new book “free”.

Another not directly quantifiable impact of free is quoted on the article Businesses Can Win the Competition Against Open-Source Technology:

“Ultimately, from the point of view of the buyer, free products provide an important benefit. “Even if consumers do not end up adopting the free product, it can act as a credible threat to the commercial firm, forcing it to both lower prices and invest more in product innovation,” …

Did I mention our enterprise open source directory recently?

Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO announced today their intent to unite Symbian OS™, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) to create one open mobile software platform. Together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone they form the Symbian Foundation. Members will be able to use the components of this platform for free from the beginning and selected features will be open sourced over time.

This is an alternative development to Google’s Open Handset Alliance Android program, that recently was said to be delayed and then not to be delayed. WSJ also considers this an iPhone thread.

Nokia recently also acquired Plazes, a Berlin based location based social network platform operator.

The larger telecom operators have been reinventing themselves over the last couple of years again and again. They constantly look to replace voice revenue and profit lost due to competition, they fight price declines, migration and substitution effects. It’s a fine line of introducing new products as needed and demanded and at the same time not to cannibalize the own existing offering. After unbundling and specialization in the 90ties, incumbent operators today go after service bundling and multiple screen plays to tie their customers into their product and services portfolio. With a strong focus on services and entertainment, media is still big for a lot of them.
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Reading John’s post on open source, Mac OS and Freedom 0, I reflected a little my first 3 months of using a Mac for some of my work (I was not as fortunate as John, so I have to use the one at home).

I agree that most of the people you meet at camps and conferences (at least the one John and the like get to go to) have at some point or the other worked with most of the available environments and figured that a combination of OSes including OS X on a Macbook Pro is the most productive combination in a very sleek form factor with an acceptable level of evilness.

The thing that does make me think with OS X is actually not the mentioned closed SW and iTunes DRM issues you might consider that no freedom or even evil, but I don’t. I want to make sure I can buy what I want to buy (if you do not have an American credit card you have to steal your favorite soap as you can not buy it in other iTunes stores but the US one) and that I can use what I’ve payed for (where is the point to paying for Music if I then have to break the law - remove DRM - or steal it again to be able to play it in my car?) As long as the offer matches the requirement at a reasonable price point, I’m well willing to accept certain limitations, especially if the are market or even economy driven and not just made up by a monopolist for his own interest.

For me it would be the 100 missing features issue you can only partly solve through the great repository of open source or not always open source but mostly free solutions. The obviously more tricky ones leave room for just one too many 39$ smart but closed tool purchases (UI configurable firewall, use a scanner, place an .htaccess file on an FTP server,…) if do not want to solve them on a command line and do not want to switch OSes all the time for the smallest feature.

But looking at it from another angle and comparing to the Windows world, I can quickly conclude, that the combination of engaging experience and open standards foundation of the Mac platform allows for smart people to make a living by doing what they like (coding and solving problems). The fact that the tools are not available as open source is only due to the fact that the open source business models will not work for software for 20$ to 40$ that will never ever need support. So I will continue happily to load my credit card bill with small $ items for add-ons to my work environment. If Apple will manage to integrate the right ones over time into their platform without putting the developers out of business, then even better.

Alfresco today announced the completion of a $9 million Series C round of financing led by SAP Ventures, bringing total funding to $19 million. Existing investors Accel Partners and Mayfield Fund also joined the round.

Alfresco will use the proceeds to fund continued growth into the enterprise content management market, including product development and acceleration of global expansion plans, particularly in the German, US and Asian markets.

Read the full press release here.

In a recent press release IDC states that the

IT market has been reshaped by a handful of key disruptions – online delivery, community-based development, solution-oriented packaging, and emerging markets.” These disruptions, which started at the margins, gained momentum in 2007 with the rise of everything-as-a-service, Web 2.0 applications, open development communities, “free IT” funding models, and the emergence of non-traditional competitors like Google, YouTube, and Facebook. These developments set the stage for what IDC believes will become the Post-Disruption Marketplace.

This said, they predict (among others):

* Market Leaders Embrace Online Delivery Models. The IT industry’s market leaders will dramatically increase the migration of core offerings – applications, business intelligence, servers, storage, imaging, printing, etc. – to online delivery models as a key method for profitably serving high-growth markets, particularly SMBs.

* “Web Gadgets” Will Further Extend the Internet. Following in the footsteps of Apple’s iTouch and Amazon’s Kindle, a new class of devices will fill the gap between notebook PCs and smartphones. These will radically change the online marketplace, including fueling the acceleration of location-based services.

* Mobile Networks Will Open Up. Faced with mounting pressure from Web gadgets and open development efforts such as Google’s Android and the Open Handset Alliance, mobile network operators will begrudgingly begin to open up their networks to any device and any application.

* Software Will Emerge to Tame Social Networking’s “Cacophony of the Crowds.” The sudden expansion of social networking will lead to a tsunami of unstructured data. This will lead to the emergence of “Eureka 2.0″ software that combines text analytics, sentiment extraction, and related technologies to distill the “wisdom of crowds.”

What took them so long to figure that out?