Congratulations to the Dojo Toolkit for releasing 1.0 this week.

As described in the SitePen Press Release:

Dojo provides easy-to-use, high-quality UI components and JavaScript infrastructure critical for building responsive web applications without the need for proprietary plugins or single-vendor solutions. Only 25K in size, the base of Dojo delivers key support for Ajax, progressive enhancement, animations, and opens the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Opera browsers.

Also shipping with Dojo core in 1.0 is the Dijit framework for widgets (including support for accessibility and internationalization of widgets, as well as programmatic widget creation), and the DojoX set of extensions (including CometD and Dojo Offline). Finally, the Dojo packaging system and D.O.H. unit testing harness demonstrate the maturity of the project from a development management / engineering perspective - it isn’t just about adding more features but making those features usable for development projects who adopt Dojo.

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They’re even talking about “participative communities” over in the .NET universe as the alt.net movement (insurgency?) gains momentum. Martin Fowler’s Bliki summarized the AltNetConf in Austin, TX a few weeks ago. He describes key participants as “a group of long-time users of Microsoft technologies who feel that their development philosophy has been getting out of sync with the perceived orthodoxy from Redmond.”

Highlighting their shared approach to software development methods (think agile), Fowler addresses a key topic — the relationship between software providers and software users:

“A participative community is different, they don’t just want the vendor to listen and provide suitable products - they want to participate in the development of new products. It’s just such a participative community that’s taken the initiative in the Java world. JUnit, IBatis, Spring, Hibernate et al didn’t come out of the vendors, but were developed by “customers”. One of the things about the nature of the software industry is that many customers are every bit as capable of producing vital products as vendor companies, especially when combined with the community and ethos of open source.

The great question ahead for Microsoft is how to engage with a participative and opinionated community like this. Treating such a group as an opponent will result in the loss of valuable products, and more importantly the capable people connected with them. Engaging with a community like this brings great opportunity. I would argue that the participative community around enterprise Java has saved the enterprise Java platform. A big challenge for Microsoft in all this is that this means finding a way to accommodate with open source development. …

One other issue in a community like this is that it’s a community that doesn’t equate criticism with animosity. Many vendors suffer from the belief that anyone who criticizes them is their enemy. In truth often your friends are at their most valuable when they are critical.”

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft can be “open” enough to accommodate the alt.net movement. Given the caliber of the people involved, Microsoft’s loss would be open source’s gain.
 

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Just in time for Halloween, here’s a warning about scary enterprise apps and a reminder that it takes a community to build a decent solution.

Matt Asay’s Open Source blog on CNET highlighted a terrific post by Khoi Vinh, design director for NYTimes.com. Vinh’s Subtraction blog takes on the “freakish” design qualities of many enterprise applications.

“Enterprise software, it can hardly be debated, is pretty bad stuff. The high-dollar applications that businesses use to run their internal operations … are some of the least friendly, most difficult systems ever committed to code.

This is partly because enterprise software rarely gets critiqued the way even a US$30 piece of shareware will. It doesn’t benefit from the rigor of a wide and varied base of users, many of whom will freely offer merciless feedback, goading and demanding it to be better with each new release. Shielded away from the bright scrutiny of the consumer marketplace and beholden only to a relatively small coterie of information technology managers who are concerned primarily with stability, security and the continual justification of their jobs and staffs, enterprise software answers to few actual users.”

Vinh goes on to savage the latest Lotus Notes 8 ad campaign — “freakish” is too mild a term for it. Read the whole “If It Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must Be Enterprise Software” post for more. Matt Asay’s point is simple — open source enterprise applications have at least a chance of being better thanks to the community processes underlying open source development. And if IT departments began using their own community of users to shape development … who knows what might happen?

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Research and consulting organizations don’t get much attention from prospective customers by saying everything is fine — “status quo.” So a firm like Saugatuck Technology can be forgiven for a bit of headline hyperbole when talking about the impact open source will have on enterprise IT management over the next three to four years. But “Open Source as Disruptive Influence” (research notes PDF, free registration required) makes a strong case for the impact open source is having on both enterprise IT organizations and the software and services vendors that sell to them. Saugatuck says:

“Thirty-two per cent of user enterprise executives expect that by YE 2010, more than half of their key on-premise software will be open-source.

This massive growth in adoption is one reason why open source software is rapidly becoming one of the most disruptive influences seen on IT and business – for users and for vendors. Open source is changing the way user enterprises perceive, buy, and use software. And as a result, open source is changing the way IT vendors and service providers develop, license and support software …

Open source is first and foremost a development methodology, not a product, a technology, a single license scheme, or a business model. Open source’s key advantages for users and vendors derive from its community-driven development model. The greatest benefits will go to those who understand this and use it to their advantage.”

I’ve been thinking about “community-driven” development for awhile now. Far too many organizations simply don’t trust their customers or their employees enough to let them truly collaborate on creating new products, despite ample anecdotal evidence that this makes better products and more loyal customers. Ask any developer pursuing an agile development methodology what their user collaborators say about the process and the outcomes.

This thinking applies to more than software. “When Rebuilding Confidence Becomes the Priority” (subscription required) in Monday’s Wall Street Journal highlights the need to involve the community in the product to survive a near-disaster.

When development delays of the giant Airbus A380 superjumbo drove launch customers to revolt, A380 program executive Mario Heinen “threw open Airbus factories and invited customers into planning sessions. “We shared details I can’t imagine other companies presenting,” he says.” While his moves helped restore confidence in the project, how much better would it have been if Airbus had more closely involved those customers all along?

So here’s a question for the IT execs in the audience: does using open source mean involving more than a community of developers? Can the larger user community within an organizations be a trusted part of the open source process?

Please post your responses and comments below.

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South Africa-based open source document management project KnowledgeTree released KnowledgeTree Open Source Edition 3.5 under the OSI-approved GPL v3 license Wednesday, replacing the prior “KnowledgeTree Public License” for this and future versions.

In his in-depth blog post about the license change, KnowledgeTree COO Daniel Chalef explains the thinking behind adopting GPLv3. Some key elements include:

“Firstly, we wanted a license that would be widely accepted by our community and the open source community at large. We did not want to risk the license we were using to be, over time, relegated to the peripheries of the open source world. We wanted to use a license that would have wide acceptance and momentum behind it. What this would mean is that our community would fully understand their rights and obligations around utilizing the software and would not be dissuaded from doing so because they felt they would need to undertake a lengthy and costly legal exercise to determine if they could use our code …

We’ve also matured our thinking, built out our community, learnt a lot more about our business and now believe that a strong copyleft license is more appropriate for us: it is far more friendly to an open source community and far more likely to dissuade commercial use of the code in circumstances where profit is involved.”

I was struck by this forward-looking and common-sense approach. Speaking for the “customer” side, IT managers considering an enterprise-class open source solution for use inside the company firewall find the intricacies of some open source licensing terms can turn a simple product selection decision based on features and cost into a mind-numbing analysis of dense and often ambiguous licensing legalese.

Acknowledging that easily understood terms for using open source applications benefit both the “customer” and the “contributor” communities demonstrates a clear vision of what’s important for the advancement of open source and the success of enterprise projects. Congrats to KnowledgeTree.

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Here are the most recent updates and additions to listed projects on the EOS Directory:

• eZ publish — Widely used and functionally rich content, e-commerce and document management system implemented in PHP.
• Amanda network backup and recovery — Amanda is the most popular open source backup and recovery software in the world. Amanda protects more that half a million of servers and desktops running various versions of Linux, UNIX, Mac OS-X and Microsoft Windows operating systems worldwide.
• Drupal Enterprise Content Management — Content Management System ( CMS ) implemented in PHP, with a strong focus on community, social networking, and media features. There’s a large repository of add-ons and extension modules available.

And here are the most recent candidate projects submitted:

• IX Workflow Framework — The Imixs Open Source Project (imixs.org) was created to promote the development of workflow technologies based on open software standards.
• GROUP-E – GROUP-E is collaboration software which integrates groupware, project management, and business server on one platform. The solution is based on a LAMP architecture (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). GROUP-E offers project management, transparent Samba (file server) integration, integration of Cyrus IMAP server with administration and personal SIEVE filters, support for SyncML 1.0, LDAP-based user management with single sign-on authentication, and LDAP contact databases.
• ZRM for MySQL backup — Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL simplifies the life of a Database Administrator who needs an easy-to-use yet flexible and robust backup and recovery solution for MySQL server.

Be sure to go in and offer your ratings and comments on new and existing projects. Plus — keep an eye out for the candidates. They’ll be published after they receive their EOS ratings from Optaros.

Got a project you think is enterprise-ready and not listed in the directory? Submit your project to the EOS Directory.

Got comments about the directory and the project listings? Feel free to add them below.

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Don Marti at LinuxWorld has done a nice thing — transcribing podcasts into text articles. I’m old-fashioned and read faster than I can listen. So had he not turned audio into text I might not have found this recent interview with enterprise open source investor Gary Little of Morgenthaler Ventures.

Marti asked Little about his approach to investing in enterprise open source organizations like JapserSoft and MuleSource. Little’s responses don’t sound like your typical venture capitalist. For example, he thinks the community-based approach used by open source has “lessons … for the traditional enterprise software company.” Little goes on to say:

“One of the things that customers really like from an open source company is this free flow of ideas between them, between other community users and, frankly, with the actual developers of the software at the open source company. There is a dialogue and a discussion where customers are actually talking to the developers that develop it and often developers will say, “Oh gee, people really want this feature I can just cut that in.

At a typical enterprise software company, the product marketing person goes out and talks to different customers, finds out what they need, then they build a product requirement document that then gets pared down and vetted and then gets handed over to engineering, and maybe two years later that feature may or may not end up in a product. And it is a very opaque process, and even large customers don’t really know whether their needs are going to be met.”

Here at the EOS Directory, we are building a community around the interests and needs of individuals and organizations seeking enterprise open source software solutions. Feel free to share your questions, suggestions, comments or musing in the comments area here or in our forums.

Also … in a followup to Wednesday’s “just try it” posts about using open source — both here and in Lee Gomes’ Portals column in the Wall Street Journal — you can find more info about Linus Torvalds, free choice, Microsoft and Google in this WSJ Q&A. Be sure to read the original column, which highlights the Linux creator’s problems getting his own family members to run Linux at home.

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Dries Buytaert, founder and lead of the Drupal project (EOS Directory entry), is featured in an interview on the Australian edition of PC World: “Drupal: from a drop in the ocean to a big fish in the CMS world”

The title plays off the fact that the name Drupal is derived from the Dutch word “druppel” which mean water droplet (this also explains the druplicon).

The interview talks about the evolutions of Drupal and it’s somewhat meteoric rise from a simple student project to a foremost option for community-based lightweight CMS sites. Along the way, Dries touches on the importance of the community, both as a philosophical orientation of the Drupal project and in terms of the impact community contributions have had.

(more…)

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Alex Russell, president of the Dojo Foundation and Project Lead of the Dojo project, posted to his blog last week an essay “On Licensing” which is worthy of its Emersonian title.

It’s the kind of explanation I wish everyone thinking about creating an open source project read. He comes at the question of “How do I choose a license for my open source project” from the point of view of real practical hands on experience. The short version:

If your goal is to get your code into the most people’s hands with the least fuss, go BSD/MIT/Apache-ish. If you care about software freedom at the expense of potential users, or if you want to be able to sell your code later without real competition, go (L)GPL-ish. Those are gross oversimplifications of the choices involved, but as we’ll see they largely line up on-side because they imply that you sort of have an idea of who you want your users to be.

OK, so maybe the “at the expense of potential users” is a bit polemic - I might say something like “if you care about software freedom over the abililty to achieve the broadest possible adoption” - but in the context of the article as a whole, Russell is very even handed about the pros and cons of various approaches.

In addition to taking up the question of which license to choose, he walks through the impact of those choices and the different ways in which license-choice has practical impacts on project success (I’ve picked out key phrases from a number of paragraphs below):

First, you’re going to need to consider the cultural impact of licensing. . . . Ensuring that your code can be mixed with other code that you care about is often down to licensing, so look around and see what others are doing before you pick.

Secondly, consider commercial use. Big Open Source companies like IBM and Sun have a strong preference for clean BSD-ish code. . . .

Next, remember that your project isn’t just trying to court new users, it’s also trying (hopefully) to find new developers to pitch in and make it even more awesome. . . .

Lastly, remember that licensing may be a no-op. Even if you throw all the right flags with your licensing, your code may still suck or your UI may be totally unusable. . . .

Finally, Russell also walks through the importance of contributor agreements, the value of foundations, and the potential for dual-licensing.

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Mark Twain reportedly once said “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

Mindquarry, an open source collaboration platform, has announced that they will stop supporting the commercial versions of their products, effective October 1st: “Mindquarry’s commercial offerings end.”

However, as an open source platform, the decision to stop offering commercial products doesn’t mean the project has to end.

Lars Trieloff quickly noted:

. . . this is not the end of Mindquarry as an open source project. As long as there is a community that cares for Mindquarry I will continue to invest my time in Mindquarry.

It will be interesting to see how the community around the project reacts - whether community activity waxes or wanes as a result of the decision to stop offering commercial versions.

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