What's In Your Code?

I want one!

I've been following this car in the news for a while - funny but right on target article and great photos...

0 to 60 in 4 seconds - 250 mile range

Can't wait to plug it into my solar panel and fly past the gas station

new website

We've got a new website...its a ton of work, so thanks to theresa and sandra on our team who put it together. We've had a lot of feedback during the past months, and they have done a terrific job of getting the info our customers and partners have suggested on to the site. I'm particularly proud to be able to show the names of some of our customers and partners - our business is based on our relationships with them, and its great to be able to feature them.

There is a lot to comment on at the moment - the google announcement about opening up a repository for OSS, the release of a new draft of GPL 3, some copyright news regarding youtube etc. so should be a bit more to blog about.

I spoke (briefly) at the always on conference last week. well attended - saw lots of friends and former colleagues - lots of interest in what we're doing here. I was glad to see Vinod using his speech to talk about alternative energy. I think the opportunity for entrepeneurs to step in with innovative ideas has never been better.

So Long Merc

The deal to sell Knight Ridder closed today. So the San Jose Mercury News is officially on its way to its new owner - it actually has to get sold twice before its over. Its too bad. As a longtime reader, I can see the energy and quality leaking out. The editorial page is a fraction of what it used to be. Its a case of shareholder value and editorial value in conflict. I'm more than a little worried about newspapers these days...we need them, but they don't seem to be able to find the new formula for life in the online world.

Palamida Announces New Funding

We just announced a new investor and a new round of funding for Palamida. The new investor is Mitsui Venture Partners. They, along with our current investors – Hummer Winblad and Walden VC – invested $8M in our second round of funding.

It is a big milestone for us, and I’m very pleased. It’s a tribute to the dedication and hard work of our team at Palamida. So thanks to everyone on the Palamida team…it’s been quite a year.

I’m pleased to welcome Richard See and Dave Takeuchi from Mitsui to our team. Dave has already hosted a trip to Japan for us, and I’m very excited by Mitsui’s reputation and network. They will be a great partner and investor as we expand internationally.

We closed the investment almost exactly on my one year anniversary with Palamida – sort of a nice anniversary present. But more than that, it’s a vote of confidence for our team and for the opportunity in the new market that we serve.

During my recent trip to Japan, I had the opportunity to speak at the New Industry Leaders Conference. There I talked about the two themes that are driving the software industry today – Web 2.0 and open source. Just as Web 2.0 is moving the Web experience from publishing to participation, open source is changing software development and software business models in the same way. The community of registered users on SourceForge is now 1.3 million – up 30% from a year ago. The number of projects during the same time is up 17%. A Forrester report from 2005 suggests that 75% of the companies surveyed either use or plan to use open source – I bet that is 85% or greater this year. And major companies continue to contribute important projects: Eclipse from IBM for example – and soon I hear, even Java from Sun.

There is clearly a new supply chain emerging for software, one that blends software from many sources. The question “what’s in your code?” has never been more relevant. Companies that embrace the new supply chain will be more competitive. And that’s where we come in. Whether it’s for a merger/acquisition (I bet there will be 1800 software M&A events this year btw), part of on-going development, or for compliance and governance purposes, there is an important new application area emerging to leverage the new software supply chain – and bring transparency to the software world. We’re working on some terrific new ideas with some of the best software companies in the business as customers. You can’t ask for much better than that.



 

The Internet Debate

Back to the blog...after a few weeks of travel.

Following the debate on the question of internet regulations. the house voted yesterday as reported here. The OK news...the house bill would allow telcos to use the internet for delivery of video - putting them even more in competition with cable. The bad - the house rejected a provision that would give oversight on the "first come-first served" nature of the net to the FCC. Unless modified, this may lead to classes of service which would inevitably push out new and innovative services in favor of services which deliver reliable profits to the telcos. It would be a shame if the internet became just another way to watch the Sopranos, and services like flkr were so slow that they ultimately went away. Telcos deserve to benefit from their investment in the infrastructure for internet delivery, but not at the price of  throttling net innovation...

Sun Promises to Open Source Java

Its Java One time just down the street, and I saw a few minutes ago that Sun execs made the statement something like "its not a question of if..." regarding open source java. I think thats a terrific idea. The java community has been waiting for this message. And some have not - based on the range of other alternatives. Nothing would insure that Java remains an critical technology more than making it open source. I hope it happens promptly.

ISO and Software Asset Management

ISO is the international standards organization – most well known I suspect for the ISO 9000 quality certification, but active in lots of other areas as well. I noticed today an article in which ISO announced that they are preparing a standard for software asset management. Their web site does not have a lot of detail at this point, but the fact that they are actively pursuing this area is important. My reading of this is that they are addressing the acquisition and license management of commercial software – i.e. “How many copies of Microsoft Office do I have and did I pay for all of them?” Obviously this is an important question to vendors of commercial software.

But there is a larger impact as well – done properly, this may lead to a more standardized way to identify software – and not just commercial software. Most organizations today are already in the “mixed code” zone. In other words, they use software from many sources – some commercial, some open source. And there are many motivations to answer the question, “What's in my code?” – IP, security, vulnerability, etc.

We proposed last year the concept of IP Ingredients – a way to label the ingredients of software that is analogous to food labeling. Admittedly this is not exactly what the ISO initiative seems to be about at this point. But as the industry progresses toward a view that software is an asset, and needs to be acquired, maintained and used much like other assets, having some standards to assist would be welcome.

x-boxes for support

Just read this article, and can't help but comment. Open Logic has announced a plan to build a support service for open source software. The interesting point is that they propose to do it by enlisting members of the open source community who will then be compensated for the issues they resolve. One of the more memorable points is that you can have your choice of money or swag like x-boxes in return for resolving an issue.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a stunt - and clearly it won't fit all support situations by any means. But wait - there is probably a space somewhere between a cry for help, and a big (and expensive) support contract.

The analogy might be with the people who make a living selling on ebay. They need to be pretty good at what they do to survive. If you are a world expert in an open source project - maybe you could make a living by taking support calls. It could even lead to an online auction, with qualifications, customer satisfaction and other metrics as part of how you set your price.

Maybe this is already happening somewhere, but if not...good luck open logic

Multisourcing Your Code

I am hearing the word "multisourcing" more often lately. It was part of a recent Gartner conference, among others. While the word in itself doesn't mean much - there is a nuance here that helps a little to explain what's going on in software development today. It's not simply sending your development task off to someone else to do for you (outsourcing), it's more about using the best source for appropriate code - and probably several. So today's software projects almost certainly use some open source code, they may have commercially licensed code, probably some written in house, as well as some developed elsewhere under contract. All targeted to a single architecture. When done successfully, the result should be better code, sooner - and potentially at lower cost. All of which makes the question "what's in your code?" more important than ever.

Change at Sun

The rumors were right - scott mcnealy has turned over his 22 year ceo job to jonathan schwartz. As I've written about before, I spent about 10 years at sun, some of that time working directly for scott. He is a smart, personable guy - I wish him well in this next phase of his career. The story of Sun can be written by others, but as I often thought during my 10 years, the computer industry is better with Sun in it. There are a lot of hardworking, dedicated people there - and I hope this change works out well for them.