To many this might come as a shock, and I have troubles believing it myself: after all, I founded the company five years ago, so my departure has special meaning and lots of emotional baggage. It was not an easy decision by any means, yet a number of factors made me realize the time had come to move on and start looking for my next endeavor. And, in the meantime, enjoy my newly enlarged family: I am now a quasi-full-time dad, looking forward to spending the summer with my beloved ones, and I have never been happier. Sourcesense remains a cool company to work with and for: it is now in the capable hands of Marco Abis and you should definitely get in touch if you are looking for kick-ass consultants or a great place to work.

What’s next for me, then? Truth is, I don’t know and, in fairness, I haven’t been hunting for jobs in any serious fashion thus far: I do have a few very interesting talks, and I’m expecting some of them to turn into actual offers, and I am also toying with a few ideas to start something afresh (gotta love that new startup smell). But I do intend to take my time, and some rest as well. And yes, I will keep this blog posted with my progress: in the meantime, please update your addressbooks and know that g.rabellino@sourcesense.com isn’t going to last, so if you need to get in touch the safest bet will be gianugo@rabellino.it. More to come!

The good news, my press clipping database just got bigger, my mom will be happy. The bad news, I have been seriously misrepresented.

The good news take an email interview at face value and just copies what I said, as in (it’s in Italian, but I’m trying to translate it as literally as possible – all emphasis are mine):

Q: Since when have you been using Linux [...]?
A: [...] After my first Slackware I moved to Debian (I have to admit having some casual affairs with Ubuntu) and I never looked back. Although it breaks my heart to admit that my computer is actually a Mac: life is too short to configure a Bluetooth connection or scramble with a projector.

Q: What about Linux on the desktop, do you think it’s ready for prime time? Any advice to make things better?
A: I use a Mac, and you will have to take it from my dead cold hands. I have always been skeptical on Linux as a general purpose desktop system, although I have better feelings for focused installs (such as cash registers) or devices such as phones, netbooks and media players.

The bad news decide they knows better and turn it into:

A: [...] After my first Slackware I moved to Debian (I have to admit having some casual affairs with Ubuntu) and I never looked back.

A: I always strongly believed in GNU/Linux as a server OS, but I think it works just fine on general-purpose desktop systems. Personally, I tend to trust it more for focused installs (such as cash registers) or devices such as phones, netbooks and media players.

So much for a magazine claiming to be the most reputable source of Linux news in Italy. I don’t care enough to ask for an official statement/amendment/rectification, but I thought to give my few readers a chance to get the good news. By the way, Ted, if you are reading this, know that it wasn’t me pointing them to the picture they used for their article (I suggested this one): I hope they sent you a cheque!

While at it, more good news: Alessandra is a darling, Laura (yay, it’s a girl!) is growing fast, and we can’t wait to get into sleepless night mode again!

It’s good to see Matt, a long time GPL die-hard, considering switching sides. I can’t resist, however, noting how I happen to disagree. Or, actually, to just partially and conditionally agree.

I contend (and teach, and consult) that a license is only a tool and, as a former colleague of mine (and now Matt’s) likes to say, “a fool with a tool is still a fool”. As a tool, a license serves an ultimate purpose which might or might not be what the original creator designed it for. In the past few years, the so-called Commercial Open Source has butchered the GPL spirit, forgetting about how it was originally meant to set the software free forever and using it to ensure the biggest possible grasp and control over IP that Open Source could provide. As such, the GPL has become the ultimate stronghold against appropriation from third parties – something to make VCs happy, or a way to guarantee that the “vendor” was to remain in the driving seat.

Guess what? The GPL works fine, but with notable side effects that are ultimately business-unfriendly. Back to the tool metaphor, you can definitely turn a screw with a pocket knife, yet that would be suboptimal at best and dangerous at worst: using the GPL as a protection mechanism kinda works at the beginning, yet falls short in the long run. My few faithful readers already know where I’m getting to: there is little to no point in open source without a Community (note the capital C, which means a community of committed people who feel ownership and pride in a project), and you don’t build a community with a license that is actually used to disallow collaboration, as people know they are playing with a ball which isn’t theirs and could be taken away any minute (yes, there is the right to fork: point noted, yet mostly as irrelevant as vTiger and Unbreakable Linux).

The Apache License is definitely better yet it’s still just a tool: there is little point in giving your software away in the most liberal possible way if you are not ready to reap the rewards by building a successful ecosystem around it, which requires much more than a change of license. Moving to the Apache License (or anything in between – I happen to think that the EPL works almost just as fine) is a great first step towards greater adoption and an extended and sustainable ecosystem based on Open Development, but it requires some serious follow up in terms of community building. Take the license alone, and all you have is a different piece of legal gibberish.

Whenever customers confront me with the issue of choosing a license, I feel obligated to enter lawyer mode and start my answer with “it depends”. Neither the GPL, the EPL or the AL are jacks of all trades: what kind of screw do you want to turn?

My sympathy goes to all of them who fell into (yet another) Commercial Open Source trap: the lesson is potentially hard indeed, but it could be argued it’s well deserved. Companies are bought and sold all the time, and it would have been nothing short of myopic to ignore that Sun (and henceforth MySQL) was ripe for acquisition, with Oracle being a potential buyer. All of a sudden, corporate eggs are likely to need the same old, worn-out and horrendously expensive data basket anyways, and that will not feel good to many out there. Yet, they could and should have seen it coming or at least account for it.

I’m sure someone will note that even in the worst case scenario of Oracle ditching MySQL, there is still the right to fork and all the Free Software mumbo-jumbo (MySQL will always remain free, anyone can innovate on top of it, yadda-yadda). The sad truth is that forking is an extreme measure, and extreme measures are, well, extremes and difficult to undertake. And let’s not forget how the GPL in this cases tends to turn into Saturn’s child-eating mode, as it makes extremely hard to gather a successful and diverse community: when there is no motivation to contribute except from freedom for freedom sake, there is no way to build a community that cares for something more than freedom itself. Also, I can hardly imagine anyone building a real commercial alternative to now-Oracle’s MySQL: with Larry Ellison owning and controlling the IP in such a strict way, why should anyone but long-tailish small shops take such a huge risk with very little reward? It’s likely that the answer is “no one”, unless some big guy wants to return Oracle the “Unbreakable Linux” favor – and fail at it, of course.

As I pointed out in the past (ironically, in a conversation with MySQL), diversity matters: if MySQL was a project governed by a neutral and diverse community, with a liberal license taking commercial interests into account, we might have seen a different story today. Maybe this is an opportunity for more open (and sustainable!) alternatives such as PostgreSQL to shine despite being constantly ignored by analysts and press? Maybe next time corporate buyers will take sustainability and open development into account instead than focusing on Open Source smoke and mirrors? Or, at a very least, understand that the Open Source vendor they are dealing with is on the market and likely to be ripe for an acquisition by God knows who, and plan accordingly? Maybe analysts will finally understand that the Open Core module is just a remix on stuff companies around established communities such as Apache have been doing for ages, but without the sustainable bit coming from healthy communities? Or will we just chug along, waiting for the next rude awakening?

Unfortunately, I’m afraid I know the answer.

I took the liberty to set up a session to talk about Open Source and Agility, which was actually a lame excuse to drag Marco to the stage and see if we could make sense of what seems to be a conundrum where Agilists and Open Source developers share the same values of openness, transparency and technical merit, yet we don’t seem to be able to come up with a way of working together (as in running Open Source communities with Agile practices, or opening up Agile teams to Open Development processes).

I used to blame Agilists for that, as their strong position on classical unities seems to be one of the major blockers: as long as the team has to be co-located, there goes your clash with any Open Source development model. Co-location has also been a major pet peeve of yours truly, as I believe it’s a model that doesn’t scale and is not fit to today’s work environments who are clearly moving towards asynchronous and disperse teamwork. Thanks Marco for reminding me how I was just being the classical fool that looks at the finger pointing to the moon. In Marco’s words:

I see little value in mapping exercises (being it mapping XP or Scrum practices to CMMi or Open Development or whatnot). I see value in discussing commonalities and differences in values and principles and drive everything else from there.

Or, to put it differently, there is little point in arguing practices and processes, which should always be means to an end. He conceded that I’m actually in good company, though, as a large majority of Agile/XP die-hards have long since been sticking to practices for the sake of practices (“no pair, no party”, anyone?), ignoring the tenets of Shuhari, where practices are considered drills you should adopt and rehearse so that you can pick, choose and evolve on what works best for you. With this in mind, it might be a good time to see what are the commonalities in the “ends” and if there are incompatible differences.

Marco points out how the biggest problem might be the lack of a customer to satisfy in Open Source communities, something I could subscribe to but only if I’m allowed to note how there are usually many customers around a successful Open Source project, with every member of the community reporting to a different patron – herself included – with different needs and different priorities. The standard Open Development response to what could potentially be a serious stopgap in terms of different interests acting in the same project and pushing in different directions is clear, though: on one hand, do-ocracy and his French-speaking twin JFDI does the trick, and on the other keeping discussions and basing decisions solely on technical matters help tremendously as well. At the end of the day, this means that the customer is there – it just happens to coincide with the community as a whole.

Is that enough? Not sure, but I subscribe to what Ross Gardler writes on slide 26 of his thorough Agile and Open Development wrap-up. There just has to be a way to make Agile and Open Development sing in harmony: Agile has enormous potential to deliver, and Open Development can provide amazing peer review and long-term sustainability. Losing either would be just foolish: as long as there is room for middle-ground, openness and flexibility, I’m sure we can make it happen. More to come.

Rod Johnson: “Anyone who refuses to compile an open source project under any circumstances doesn’t really believe in open source: they believe in other people working for them for free.”

I couldn’t agree more, but that’s not the heart of the problem. I actually happened to agree with Mark Brewer when he was explaining me the new SpringSource policy in Paris, yet I’m afraid they completely lost me if it’s true – as Steve notes – that they are keeping SCM build tags secret. What’s the next step? Taking the build files away? Introducing a voluntary typo in the code so that you actually have to fix it manually to recompile? I can somewhat understand software packaging as value you might sell a customer into, but Rod and friends are just about to cross the line with this decision.

SpringSource is running the serious risk of making some aggregators very happy or – worse – to see their code undergoing a community fork. For sure, community love is going down the drain, then we’ll see. All this to secure what, in the end?

• Europe tends to consider dual licensing as “fake Open Source”. That quote alone, coming from a prominent guy from the French Public IT sector, made my day.
• The sales model in Europe is heavily driven by VARs and SIs. Yours truly is not surprised, as that’s the very reason for giving birth to Sourcesense, but it was good to see our business model validated and blessed throughout the event.

Fabrizio, a true European despite his brand new US passport, adds some interesting comments, noting how you need to be in the US if you want to create a successful software company, so much that a number of Europeans actually crossed the Ocean and went to the valley. Can’t argue with that, but at least now we know the reasons why, and it’s probably a good time to ask ourselves if software companies are the way to go anyways. It has been pointed out at the event how the VC model helps building product-oriented businesses in the US, yet what I’m questioning with my European hat on is whether the venture attitude is building value for customers: yes, it’s a rhetoric question as you should know by now that my answer is no. Finally, I won’t miss to address in a future post the objection from Fabrizio about the “services don’t scale” mantra (should you unsubscribe now, know that the answer is they do scale, and they scale sustainably).

This Think Tank wrap-up wouldn’t be complete without noting how I had a wonderful time in Paris, and how it’s hard to give enough kudos points to Andrew Aitken of Olliance and Alexandre and Celine Zapolsky from our fellow colleagues of Linagora. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to meet all the Think Tank folks in Napa next year. And you should be there as well.

Making money on software alone is going to be increasingly hard as real world economics kick in. Open Source keeps on gaining momentum per se, yet Commercial Open Source doesn’t seem to go beyond mimicking traditional license-based business models with some Open Source frosting, proving it is not sustainable in the long run. Commercial Open Source is an accidental oxymoron.

When I was a student I did my share of summer jobs, mostly by helping a bookshop with a summer booth by the beach. On a very hot summer my employers thought they had the great idea of selling books by the kilogram: I was given a huge kiosk with lots of remainders, a scale and a couple of banners prominently showing we were going nuts.

The first week, we were novelty, I had serious problems keeping up with the frenzy and the owner was walking on sunshine. A week later the business dried up, we barely survived the summer season and my employer was spending revenues on anti-acid: customers realized that it was still just books, and we didn’t consider how motivating people to buy bulk quantities didn’t quite fit with tourists looking for the casual book and not exactly fancying heavy shopping bags on their evening stroll. People found out they were getting a better deal from the booth next to ours who was still going old school, who happened to have a better choice of titles and who consistently kicked our backside night after night: can you say fundamentals?

The important lesson I learnt is that marketing can only get you this far. It is not that hard to come up with a nifty idea to attract customers, but if you forget that at the end of the day it’s all about converting visitors to customers, which in turns requires proving you have something valuable to offer, you’re just building on sand. The sizzle is just not enough.

Commercial Open Source reminds me of my summer on a beach. Sure enough, it still manages to line up a number of interested prospects, enticed by the idea of a new way to distribute software liberating from proprietary clamps: unfortunately interest typically lasts until the salesman comes to visit. Chances are the guy has been building a career in proprietary software, and all he knows about his product is that it has something to do with computers, and what is still missing to nail the quarter. In or about slide number 10 the prospect wakes up and understand that the if you filter out “Open Source” from the pitch, the whole yadda-yaddas and blah-blahs are just the same old proprietary kool-aid he’s been through for ages: he still has to pay per CPU, he still doesn’t get any flexibility and he’s still going to be locked in. Ahyeah, the Open Source pixie dust is there but what gives in the end?

I’m sorry folks, you don’t build an industry with this. Unless you manage to prove your worth, budget owners are not going to pick up the tab, and your worth is seriously challenged if a free alternative is up for grabs somewhere. You can concentrate as much as you want in adding hoops to entice your customer to buy the proprietary version of your code, but you should also be aware that you will be pushing a boulder up the hill the moment your prospect understands that he has really been tricked to think he would have been in a different position, whilst that’s not really the case.

I want to be optimistic, in the end, and this is why I believe that there might be a sustainable model for Commercial Open Source, even though it will require a serious rethinking of what we have seen so far. My 2 eurocents would be:

• Ditch the traditional proprietary approach for your paid-for alternative. Realize you just can’t take any Open Source advantage away from the customer, unless you’re fine in being on a level field with proprietary predators. A first, yet important, step in this direction would be abandoning pricing strategies bases on something that’s not really tied to a production cost for you, such as servers, CPUs or users: a key advantage of Open Source is the flexibility you get the moment you need an additional server – taking a key differentiator away is not going to help.
• Be a blockbuster and work on volumes. If you get to be a leader in your space, you are going to be the strongest incumbent ever. If you manage to get that far, and you have a clear, upfront and value-driven commercial proposition, there is no need for hard sells. Just resist the temptation of being greedy, and then you can just sit back, relax and wait for your fax machine to be clogged by purchase orders from those who really don’t feel like being without official support.
• Don’t be shy of value added services. Training, development support and consultancy are not exactly swear words and it’s something customers really value. All the big product guys are making sizable revenues for services, why should you be different?

Finally, a humble request. Please stop clogging my reader with stupid whines about users not paying your subscription and getting a free ride, making your software unsustainable as you can’t foot the developers bill. The market couldn’t care less about your developers’ kids in need of new sneakers or your VC craving about his next Lambo: the argument that someone has to pay for software development is one of the biggest straw man of Open Source – the market pays for value, and if you build very little, guess what, you won’t get more than peanuts. If your production model can’t leverage the community, if your marketing model can’t make the best out of the enormous free ride Open Source is providing and if your business model can’t stand the market and has to beg for charity, you will be shown the door pretty soon (unless you screw up real bad, in which case you can always resort to the US Treasury of course). We won’t miss you.

Sustainability is a serious issue: do not pollute it with empty rhetoric, let’s talk business instead. Let’s get back to basics and analyze why Open Source is the absolute best way to produce software, and a great money making machine if used appropriately. Food for another post (or two).