To boldly muse about Open Source
So I heard about CMIS (no link as I have no idea of what the authoritative source is). I went to look at the spec. I searched. And browsed. And downloaded. And it wasn’t the right stuff, so I browsed again. And downloaded again. And unzipped. And finally I (think) found them. And I was excited in discovering the Internet equivalent of “the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’“.
Not exactly a good start, methinks.
A few months ago I was sipping a drink with friends, and I was asked what would I do should I ever leave Sourcesense. I answered that I would hope I’d make enough money by then but assuming it wasn’t the case, I would most likely start a new company or, failing that, I would contemplate moving to Sidney and send my CV to Atlassian.
There is more than surfing Australian waves in my admiration for that company: I’m watching with great amusement the debate on Open Source sustainability, how making money is tied to proprietary extensions, how Open Source is not a business model, and all the yadda-yadda that regularly pops in when someone dares to comment how, really, the Emperor is not wearing any clothes. Such commentaries are being filed in the “Firm grasp of the obvious” category, but they make for a fun read anyways: meanwhile, as the Commercial Open Source world is out there frantically looking for the Holy Grail of software sustainability in an open and collaborative ecosystem, it seems to me that a happy bunch of Aussies are filling it with Foster’s and passing it along.
While most Open Source companies try to make money by providing a free all-you-can-eat Sunday roast buffet, as long as you carve it yourself and bring your own gravvy, Atlassian is showing the beef by providing great food at reasonable prices, all the gravvy you want and a tab with no hidden charges, surprises or discretionary service fees attached. Not to mention a recipe book and access to the grill to cook to your own taste. Can you really argue with that?
I know, I know: it’s not Open Source, you need to pay to play and the ball is theirs. Yet their model is so upfront and clear that it feels like a breath of fresh air when compared to the amazing lot of commercial Open Source/crippleware in disguise out there:
Can your Open Source vendor do this? I will need a few more fingers (and toes!) than I have access to if I wanted to count how many quote-Open Source-end-quote companies out there are doing their best to play the baitware game, providing astonishly little value for amazingly high prices and playing hardball with customers. While the Commercial Open Source world is talking about hybrid revenue models, here comes a pragmatic shop that just nails it. May I suggest analysts to pick up the phone and give Mike Cannon-Brookes a call?
Everyone and his dog his talking about Chrome. I’m probably not going to try it anytime soon: there is no Mac version for the time being, and Chromium is supported on spotted Macs only (yours truly is still striped and happy about it), but I can see exciting times ahead.
What I find pretty odd is how no one on my radar bothered to comment about how Chrome is a poor choice for a name, given how the same term has been used extensively for a key part of XUL, the UI toolkit behind Mozilla/Firefox. Chrome is so relevant to Mozilla that it even became a URL scheme, and I find hard to believe no one at Google was aware of potential name clashes.
I guess the humongous amount of money the Mozilla Foundation are getting through Google is going to make things easier, but I can’t see how that can be a good name that doesn’t piss Mozilla fans off. Does anyone remember how Firefox had to change name twice due to trademark issues and general brouhaha from the Firebird open source database community? History repeating itself, methinks, but it would be fun to see the Mozilla Foundation sending a Cease & Desist letter to Google, footing the bill with Google’s own money.
On an unrelated note, however, I’m just flabbergasted about big G’s marketing technique and tactics. I won’t believe even for a split second in the leaked email story, but I can definitely see how using comics was pure genius. I couldn’t say it any better than Bertrand:
Using graphics to explain stuff is obviously the best way, but the dynamics of the cartoon format (varying image sizes to emphasize importance, repetition of similar patterns and shapes to create a familiar universe in small steps) go much further than just combining images and descriptions. Not to mention the fun factor in reading it – everybody knows that people learn better when fun is involved.
I’m convinced – we need more of this to explain our often complex software systems.
Now excuse me while I go find a designer to write our next pitches as comic books…
Back at work after some "virtual" vacation (where virtual equals being at sea, yet nailed to a phone for most of the day… busy times over here), I have been confronted with what seemed to be a brain dead issue, that is sending a sizable number of emails to a lot of recipients. I'm not fond of Bcc: lists, so I thought there would have been an easy way to do some sort of mail merge in Apple Mail.
Unless I'm seriously missing something, that's not the case: there is no built-in functionality I could find, and all I manage to scavenge on the Net were dubious crippleware packages. There is a remote possibility using Automator, but it seems to depend from addressbook entries, while all I had was a text file with a list of email addresses.
I thought that would make for a good chance to finally have a look at AppleScript and, to my surprise, it was way easier than I thought. I'm sure there are much better ways of coding this (I particularly hate how I had to build the From: address by hand, yet apparently there is no easy way to grab that from the AppleScript dictionary), but if all you have is a text file with your e-mail in it and another file with a list of email addresses, you might find this script useful. Or not. It floats my boat, so I thought I'd share it.
Enjoy!(or just download it)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 | tell application "Mail" to set allAccounts to name of every account choose from list allAccounts with title "Choose the Mail account to use..." set theAccount to result as string set subjectDialog to display dialog ¬ "Enter the subject of the email to send" default answer "no subject" set theSubject to text returned of subjectDialog set sendOrPreview to the button returned of ¬ (display dialog ¬ "Send the messages right away or preview and send manually?" with title ¬ "Send or Preview?" with icon caution ¬ buttons {"Preview", "Send"} ¬ default button 1) set theText to (choose file with prompt "Pick a text file containing the email text") set theContent to read theText tell application "Finder" set addresses to paragraphs of ¬ (read (choose file with prompt "Pick a text file containing email addresses, one by line")) end tell tell application "Mail" activate set activeAccount to account theAccount repeat with i from 1 to (the length of addresses) set newMessage to make new outgoing message ¬ with properties {account:activeAccount, subject:theSubject, content:theContent} tell newMessage set sender to ¬ ((full name of activeAccount & " < " & email addresses of activeAccount as string) & ">") make new to recipient at end of to recipients ¬ with properties {address:(a reference to item i of addresses)} set visible to true end tell if sendOrPreview is equal to "Send" then send newMessage end if end repeat end tell |
In no particular order:
Apparently Microsoft is in for some big news today. See www.opensourcehero.com. All we have now is the "{Forge} New Powers" tagline which seems to suggest (yet) another Open Source repository/community. If that's the case, I will have a gripe on the name itself, as it seems to focus heavily on the individual rather than on the community. Or maybe "Hero" will be the codename for Open Source Vista/Office.
I will be playing with acronyms, speculate on alternatives and listen to the wire for the news: interesting times.
Good news from Matt. IDC reports:
"IDC believes that if open source software is to continue its penetration into mainstream and enterprise environments, the ecosystem must evolve to include many service providers that are knowledgeable about open source software and can handle the integration, implementation, and training needs of end users in particular."
Gee, just slightly change the wording and that could well be Sourcesense's elevator pitch. Matt comments:
"Would the industry be better off with more and better-qualified consultants? Absolutely. Actually, a better way to ask this might be, would the industry be better off with more consulting companies actually owning up to how much open source they're already implementing? The answer to this is a resounding "Yes!" Accenture, SAIC, Cap Gemini, etc. are all using a tremendous amount of open-source software, but generally aren't working with the project leads/maintainers to do so (and I suspect aren't telling their clients about it, either)."
Given the sheer number of projects we participate and give back to (among which a whole bunch of Apache stuff, Spring, Ruby, Terracotta), not to mention the ever growing list of partners we help in their market penetration exercise, that fits my bill as well. Still not convinced? Read what Marc Fleury has to say:
"Those who build the 'Mc Kinsey' of Open Source software, with the legitimacy of the heads of projects, will control the internet's infrastructure."
Or, more specifically:
"[...] there is a viable niche in the future of OSS software in services. Note the 2 qualifiers to Matt's blanket statement. 1/ niche 2/OSS not 1/all 2/of software. The services models will scale. I always find myself amused when people broadly claim that 'Services don't scale, everyone knows that'. Because you know, IBM GS, McKinsey, Bain, Accenture, Atos Origin, CapGemini, you name it, these are all 2 bit little shitty companies, right?"
If you do the math, it's easy to understand why I'm having a great time. Ours is the place to be: our sustainable services-based business model fits hand in glove with the Open Source paradigm and ecosystem, we are growing our international presence, we met or (more often) exceeded our targets so far, we are expanding our partner network and we are constantly getting new customers and upselling existing ones. Our team is growing at an impressive scale, and I'm thrilled to see so many bright minds sitting in our offices, with a long queue of people alike willing to join us.
As we finalize plans for our next fiscal year, the numbers in front of me are just mind boggling and make me wonder about how far we went since two years ago, when Sourcesense was me, a desk and a small cheque from a few savvy investors. Add lots of fun (and FF miles!) on top of this, and you will easily understand why I have this big smile on my face: I just love my job.
Exactly ten years ago, on Valentine's Day 1998, I moved to Milan from a small town on the Ligurian seaside. I was busy setting up my own house, struggling with a new stove and generally scared at the idea of having just turned a milestone in my career and my lifetime. While having my first dinner in Milan with my soon to be wife, I couldn't help but thinking about what I left behind on one hand, and the vast opportunity and thrill on what was ahead of me.
Ten years have passed: I enjoyed every minute of them. If I look back, it has been a bumpy yet fantastic ride: I met (and married) the best person ever, I had lots of fun at various places of work, I co-founded my own company, I did my share of Open Source software, I traveled the world speaking about IT, Open Source and business, I hanged out with old and new friends. It's been a blast, but all the good things have to come to an end.
In a few weeks we will be moving to London, where I will be heading Sourcesense operations from the other side of the Channel, while boosting our UK presence to cater for the impressive business demand we are getting from there. As I'm writing this, I'm pestering my UK connections for housing hints and frantically browsing the web to get myself organized: I'm also overly excited by this opportunity, and I have my share of shivers when I think that I will be once again leaving a lot behind while opening up new and powerful scenarios.
If you live in London, I would love to hear from you. Drop me a mail, catch me on your choice of IM, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, or just drop me a call. I'm eager to join the London scene, meet with old friends and make new ones, and of course build business connections. As you might expect, I have lots of questions (and beers to share). Also, consider yourself invited for the house crash party, whenever it will be: I promise my best performance ever in Italian food.
While I was happily missing flights and losing bags, something major was happening in Sourcesense-land, as Sergio was busy releasing the 1.0RC1 version of Scarlet. Link-hovering people with a good memory might have noticed that the home page has changed, as our Open Source Jira clustering solution is now hosted on Sourceforge. A full bag of goodies is included in this release, among which you will find an upgrade to the latest and greatest Jira and Terracotta versions, as well as major performance enhancements and the usual bug fixes.
With 1.0 just down the road, this is your latest chance to try and test Scarlet, provide feedback and ask for new stuff before feature-freeze, so don't miss the opportunity and head for the download page!
The Open Source Think Tank has been a blast. I was planning to write a few comments but then I was stuck in one of my most horrifying travel nightmares. As much as nothing beats Alitalia, I have to say it's now a close call after British Airways tried their best to lose a customer. Long story short:
I'll leave to readers imagination figuring out how frustrated, tired and pissed off I am. Especially when I consider that in six hours from now I will have to scavenge some clothes and head to the office, while trying to figure out where my luggage is. Time to give Lufthansa a shot?
I'm Gianugo Rabellino, Open Source enthusiast, passionate golfer, foodie and geek at heart.
I'm the founder and CEO of Sourcesense, a European Open Source consultancy and systems integrator, a member of the Apache Software Foundation and a guy who's been paying his bills with Open Source for more than 15 years now. Did I mention I'm a lawyer?
