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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Monday’s big not-really-news was Microsoft’s acceptance of the European Commission’s 2004 antitrust ruling governing sharing of information about workgroup server protocols with third-party developers. Microsoft also agreed to lower the royalty rate for the information. It’s a big concession by Microsoft — but a big ’so what?’ from the enterprise open source community.

InformationWeek’s Open Source blog may have headlined it best: Microsoft Bows To The EU, Open Source Shrugs . The post also gives a good roundup of the issues.

But the best quote may have come in ZDNet’s Open Source blog . Citing no benefit and a change in patent licensing, OpenOffice.org marketing lead John McCreesh said: “the EU has laboured for three years to produce this particular ridiculous mouse.”

In the same ZDNet post, Optaros developer Dave Gynn made a more specific request, noting while the decision opens up internal protocols “we’re not writing code to that level. We need web service APIs, not protocol at the network transport level.”

Will Microsoft ever accept the open source agenda? Stay tuned for the next round.

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Enterpise open source solutions can show up in some unusual places. For example, take this blog item from Roberto Galoppini’s Commercial Open Source Software:

I just got back from Sarajevo, where I participated as speaker to an advanced course in web communications in the Public Administration. The course, aimed at public operators from Bosnia-Herzegovina, was designed to be an in-depth analysis on the use of Open Source in Public Administrations.

Galoppini’s seminar is part of “Project: BALKAN AREA 2 - Development and Strengthening of Local and Central Public Administrations”

“The project “Balkans 2 - Development and Strengthening central and local PA in the Balkan Region” is aimed to 6 Balkan countries (Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro) and continues the activities already started up and partly developed with the Balkans 1 project which was held from November 3rd to December 31st 2004. This is an integrated project of “Institutional and Capacity Building” aimed to civil servants and executives from central and local Balkan administrations, divided into diverse activities of technical assistance, classroom and on-the-job training, information and communications …”

Given the history in the region, it’s no surprise improved communications among public administrators might be considered an important undertaking. What better way to create a more open society than by using open source solutions?

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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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Call this the small business desktop version of enterprise open source. Novell has released a “Desktop-to-Server Software Suite” (wasn’t this once called client-server?) based on SUSE Enterprise Linux and Novell GroupWise at the server end and the OpenOffice productivity suite at the desktop. More details here.

A quick search in the EOS Directory’s Office and Client Applications category shows a number of rated desktop projects, including OpenOffice. We’ve even got a rating graphic for them:

Ratings and recommendations are one way to explore enterprise open source solutions — but trust only comes from experience. It’s my view that IT execs who are still on the fence about implementing an open source solution need to take one out for a spin. As was true back when personal computers first made their appearance on corporate desks, it was the basic desktop productivity applications that first gave IT managers proof these systems might be an improvement over their existing computing infrastructure. Take a look in the EOS Directory and see.

P.S. Turns out I wasn’t the only one thinking about this topic today. The Wall Street Journal’s Lee Gomes asks “How Far Behind Is Linux?” in today’s Portals column. He points out:

“When Google gives you a search result, a Linux machine is doing the work. At tens of thousands of other companies, computer managers take comfort in the fact that these days, no one ever gets fired for “buying” open source.”

But Gomes adds that even Linus Torvalds own family members run Windows desktop systems. Gomes notes the reduced cost and other virtues of open source alternatives, including Ubuntu. After trying it himself, he exhorts: “Everything about Ubuntu worked as billed, but don’t take my word for it. Test-drive it yourself at Ubuntu.com.”

So both the Wall Street Journal and I think you should take open source for a test drive, if you haven’t done so already. See you around the block.

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Friday’s news that Oracle is prepared to gobble up app server powerhouse BEA for a cool $6.66B could be just another enterprise software consolidation move. But as others have noted , and the BEA board’s rejection of the deal seems to signal, that price has the number of the beast all over it. Or maybe that’s just Larry Ellison’s idea of a droll joke for spooky season?

Nonetheless, commercial enterprise software consolidation is an ongoing trend, with SAP’s offer of $6.8B for Business Objects just over a week ago. Say, do you suppose Oracle’s offer price is just Larry’s way of proving he can get a better deal than SAP?

With all this high-power deal-making going on, it’s worth considering the impact enterprise open source solutions may have on enterprise software consolidation. While SAP was talking trash about enterprise open source last year, they may be changing their tune. Certainly there are plenty of projects competing with SAP’s and Oracle’s core products. Besides, Oracle and BEA have opened up — if that’s not too dangerous a term — to some open source initiatives. We’ll see what happens after the deal dust settles.

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