Colin Charles Agenda

Its exciting to see Zimbra being purchased for USD$350 million, by Yahoo!. Exciting because its a great product, exciting because I use it daily, and I guess Satish & team (of over 100 employees) deserve a big pat on the back. The other exciting thing to note is that its got MySQL in its core, and if they’re pushing it out farther and wider now thanks to the Yahoo! purchase, all the better.

There are a few things that are unclear, though, even from their FAQ:

• They mention commitment to Zimbra 5, but I’m still waiting for 4.5.7 :P (My Series 60 phone still hates IMAP via Zimbra).
• Will we see, say the AdSense Zimlet (only available in network, at the moment), disappear?
• Will they hurt the community by attempting to over-commercialise Zimbra? Compiling Zimbra from source control isn’t the easiest process, because of the dependency list, so I do hope they don’t run away from their amazing “easy” install process

I guess its good to know that they’re in the Communications & Community team. Yahoo! has a tendency to buy things and kill it in the past as well. Anyone remember Geocities? They were a better MySpace, any day. Lets hope Brad Garlinghouse ensures Zimbra stays committed to delivering their product, and remain relevant (today, I don’t see any better software for ease-of-use and integration available out there in the open source world). Again, congratulations to Yahoo! on acquiring a great company, and here’s me tipping my hat for their betterment in the future.

– a loyal Zimbra fan.

Technorati Tags: zimbra yahoo! acquisition

Vertical advertising. I just stumbled upon The Problogger Job Board. They advertise it as such: post a job ad, for 30 days, at only $50.

People that visit the Problogger website, or job board, are definitely bloggers. Visiting the latter, means they’ve bought the hype that they can be a professional blogger, and make a living out of it. So what better way to hire journalists. Professional bloggers are no different to writers in a newspaper, magazine, and so forth. Turnaround times are quicker, the idea of formatting is probably a plus, but generally you’re a writer.

The FAQ lists the 37signals Job Board - $300 for 30 days. They’re a company that came to popularity thanks to a good blog, and Ruby on Rails. People that read the 37signals blog are probably programmers and developers that have an interest in cutting edge technology, are ready to improve, and possibly the cream of the crop. Or at least thats what they want you to believe. 37signals also does the ultimate geek thing: their job board has an RSS feed. And an amazing live search. And if you’re a contract killer just up for a contract, there’s always the Gig Board.

All this made me want to check out Joel on Software’s Jobs page. After all, thats another popular blog, and when you read the RSS feed, you get thrown ads about job offers. Joel’s demands are greater - USD$350 for 21 days. There’s even a rationale as to why 21 days, and he makes The Fog Creek Promise - unsatisfied with applicants, get a refund. The Jobs page also has an RSS feed. And they require the company name - talent have a right to know whom they’re going to work for.

So if its not been obvious, here’s the pattern - write amazing content for your readership, get them hooked, and tell advertisers only the best read your writing. Then, sell advertising (in the form of job ads). Joel/Fog Creek are bold - they even offer a refund.

MySQL have had a jobs forum for ages. It is advertised as a “forum for companies looking to hire MySQL talent”. It contains a hodgepodge of people looking for work, and people offering work. Nothing ever expires, there is no barrier to entry (its completely free to make a posting), there is an RSS feed, and the job ad itself, has “no format”. Do you think the MySQL Jobs forum should change? Should there be a barrier to entry - a simple charge, but a guarantee of better applicants? Requirements can be made clearer, there could be better search, and it probably should not be a forum, per se. Would you pay, to have an ad for 21-30 days, to hire top MySQL talent?

Technorati Tags: jobs, job boards, gig board, mysql jobs forum, online job boards

Rod Johnson, author of the Spring framework, thinks open source is hot right now, but its a “bubble” ready to burst, according to an article titled What Makes An Open Source Project Successful? by Charles Babcock.

Most open source projects are supported by an army of volunteers who buy into the hype, but “capitalism will inevitably reassert itself” and developers will find they need to put more effort into steady jobs and private lives, leaving “open source zombies”–unsupported, unmaintained projects–he predicts.

This is true, with many a project, that hasn’t built a successful ecosystem. Keep in mind that with the gazillion text editors out there, not all stand the test of time, like Emacs and vim do. Capitalism is always going to win hands down, because money in its essence is important to survival. Go back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and realize that open source developers too, need to drive a car, have a roof over their head, start a family, and put food on the table[1].

So how does open source fund itself? Venture capitalists are active in the market (apparently $160 million has been pumped into OSS companies in the last 12 months), but they always want a return on investment, usually within 2-5 years. If customers alone can’t offshoot the ROI, there’s always going public.

Its great to note that MySQL and JBoss are mentioned, all of which are company backed, thanks to the selling of services, or added value. They help hire people working on the project, and of course, fund them for doing such work.

What caught me was the fact that JasperForge had 30,000 registered developers. As someone actively involved in MySQL Forge, I was a little shocked, so I had to mosey over, and double check. As of this writing, 30,735 registered users exist on JasperForge, but these include forum posters! I breathed a sigh of relief (go journalistic inaccuracies!).

Also of interest, Chris Messina has blogged about The relative value of open source to open services, in where he analysis activeCollab. This software is the open source Basecamp equivalent, with a promise that it will always be free, but apparently is changing the tune of the song. What especially moved me was this comment (that I can’t find on the blog post): “Build a community for the free software during early development and testing, then close it up just as the project matures.” Nasty, I wonder how many open source projects have done this? Its always good to note that forking the project, is also just as easy, but doesn’t promote ubiquity. It also paints the picture to those selling proprietary solutions that the open source ones really cannot be trusted, as they die or have a frequent rate of change.

Jason, the professional brand strategist who commented also has an interesting nugget: “While you’re the driving source behind the project – NOBODY fully owns their own brand. A brand is owned by the community that are a part of it. Without customers, a brand is nothing.”

He’s completely right. Red Hat Linux was a brand, but during the split, they created RHEL and Fedora. Even though there were no community contributions per se, to Red Hat Linux, it was probably the most widely supported commercial distribution that existed in its time; and there was a bloody large community around it. Of course, we won’t get into trademarks now…

What do we take away from all this?

1. Don’t make promises that you’re going to break (Ubuntu has a promise to always be free, just like Red Hat Linux was, and I hope they keep it)
2. Build the ecosystem up (Community, is key)
3. Customers are important (Both to keep your brand alive, and to help you run a successful company)
4. VC money won’t last forever
5. Developers are human, and have needs like everyone else (hire them, pay them, feed them, and keep them happy)
6. Forking is bad, and should be avoided at all costs
7. Don’t abuse (or misuse) your community (eventhough they don’t pay you, they’re not second class citizens)

[1] - yes, IPO money hasn’t been around for a long time now, I’m sure… The tech industry is still getting out of the previous dot-com burst.

Technorati Tags: bubble, burst, capitalism, vc, value of open source, community, brand management

Its interesting to note some happenings in the MySQL world of late, that might be of interest to people in the database world, and those following open source software development and business models.

40% of developers say they use MySQL, according to the Evans Data Group. This is not including pilot projects, but real production use in corporate environments. A lot of MySQL’s popularity is generally attributed to the LAMP stack, though I see a change. Look at all the Ruby on Rails projects out there. They most definitely run on a MySQL backend. A good example are the products from 37signals, makers of the rather new, and cool tool, Highrise - they’re Ruby on Rails, and MySQL powered.

Is this 40% statistic prevelant to customers moving away from closed-sourced databases, or the traditional behemoths? I’m not privy to say (in fact, I generally don’t know how many migrations to MySQL there are), but I’m of the understanding that MySQL is probably hitting new markets, with all these web-based companies these days (ahem, Web 2.0 if you must). There are probably a large amount of migrations, but not significant enough to be a whopping large portion of the 40%.

Then, via James Governor: MySQL signs its first ever $1m+ deal. Keywords to take away include European telco, EUR$1m+, and helping the IPO momentum. This is obviously not something that there have been press releases about (yet?), but its great news, especially since its the first ever. This clearly gives the database some real bragging rights, I think. While MySQL’s planned IPO is not the first OSS IPO, its been quite a while since we last had one. Probably first open source database to IPO. And now, with a very large customer, this clearly rocks!

Technorati Tags: mysql, developers, production, lamp, ruby, RoR, ruby on rails, $1 million, million dollar, million dollar deal, european telco, IPO

The 2.6.19-1.2911 kernel that just got released makes my Dell 640m very happy. It can now sleep (suspend) without any problems and wake up just as well. Marked improvement over the previous kernel, so I’m actually getting laptop mileage out of this.

It still has outstanding issues. The ACPI video driver (video.ko) needs to be unloaded, as it does cause a crash with the Fn+Up Arrow key. External displaying doesn’t work unless the video.ko module is loaded. And volume control is still dead via the hardware keys as well as the Fn combinations.

With the amount of folk actually using Dell’s from the Smolt statistics, I’m surprised that the Dell laptop support isn’t phenomenal. Yes, Fedora has opt-in statistics, which are great, but causing a row on fedora-devel-list recently - I personally don’t see it as wrong, as it is opt-in, and the Ubuntu (with their hardware database) folk do it too, its not something that’s forced. And eventually, this could be useful when it comes to saying “foo laptop is 100% supported” and so on. People like to know these things, and people like to buy things that “just work”.

As more and more people end up buying a laptop, or even a desktop with some snazzy video card, you’d want to know if it just works. I see smolt as being further extended to mine the data, and with a sensible API, a company like Dell could allow you to create custom open source capable machines. I know, thats something I would like dearly. System76 and the rest, will follow suit. I’m surprised this has not already happened.

Many people ditch the rat race, to start anything from a one-man show right up to a medium-sized business these days. Globally, computers are being accepted everywhere, and its always been touted to help the business owner, improve business processes. From an open source perspective, how do we help the small business owner?

We start by studying what a small business owner requires:

• contact management - the business is in the network. Without contacts, there’s no exchange of services, and definitely no exchange of money.
• document management - businesses, no matter how large or small, end up with lots of documents. Moving to the e-society that we’re all aiming for, we should aim to manage documents well, right up to the backups of these crucial business data.
• accounting - taxation, income, expense, credit, debit, etc. are what make the business world work. You need to keep track of absolutely every last cent.
• collaboration/whiteboard - this is where a Wiki tends to shine (or some form of CMS).
• weblog - these seem to be the promotional tools of the 21st century.
• e-mail client - long gone are the days of telex, faxes, and postal services. A lot of people live life out of their e-mail clients in business, so one that makes life easier and more productive is very important.
• office suite - just as typewriters, accounting books and transparencies (slides) go out of fashion, a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation suite are very significant in how modern business are run.
• server software - you need a domain, email, web hosting, and possibly some of these applications should be online, in a secure location, (say https://intranet.mybusiness.com/), that requires a login.

I haven’t mentioned a database, because I presume most of the above requirements do tend to use a database of sorts (usually MySQL). I haven’t even mentioned an operating system, because without a doubt, as a small to medium sized business, you will want to be running an open source variant - BSD or Linux is a war we shall not get into, neither is a war such that we go down the road of Fedora vs. Ubuntu or something similar.

Now, dear Interweb, what else do you think a small business owner needs to have? I’m just after the software processes that make a business happen. In fact, if it currently involves something Windows, OS X or (God forbid) DOS based, I’d still like to know.

Why? Things like the NGO-in-a-box project make a lot of sense. In fact, for open source to become more mainstream, we need to provide usable, workable, and reliable systems. With the launch of Vista, and the ease-of-use for business folk, combined with Office 2007 and all the stack they have to offer (which are surprisingly becoming less costly than before), the open source world needs to have the same, if not greater strength.

Oh, and because, all the cool kids are playing with virtualization, today. Tomorrow’s cool kids will be thinking about appliances.

A recent edition of Business 2.0 had the cover story titled Blogging for Dollars. It seemed to highlight how advertising dollars was bringing in money for bloggers. I’ve known people say that they’ve become “full-time bloggers” just by writing product reviews (of products they don’t even own/touch - so they just lift off Gizmodo, etc. and add opinions), and say that AdSense (or similar) pay-offs is all you need to survive.

This is what led me to try ReviewMe. It calculates a blog’s worthiness by a mix of Technorati rankings, Alexa ratings, and estimated RSS feed subscribers (probably taken via the Technorati rankings? Or maybe blogs that have a FeedBurner ranking might help?). Once its given you a ranking (via stars), it gives you a price tag as to what your blog is worth.

Assuming your blog is worth $250, the moment an advertiser decides to “hire you”, ReviewMe gets to keep 50% of the earnings, and you, the blogger, get to take the remaining 50%. Thats $125 richer you can be, just for writing a review. All for anything over 200 words.

Thats a range of 10-62.5 cents per word! Way more than struggling newspaper writers are expected to get. But that’s not what interests me. I’m interested in if this entire idea itself can work.

So I took a gander to find the rather (once-famous) Ubuntu Blog. Its got high Technorati rankings, not so high Alexa rankings, and the ReviewMe algorithm decides its worth $250. However, this blog in itself, has not been updated since the end of September 2006!

How does an outdated blog get such high rankings? What about potential advertisers that don’t perform sufficient due diligence, and trust ReviewMe’s ratings? The Ubuntu Blog is a clear example that its statistics might be a bit skewed, as blogs tend to lose readership if they’re not updated frequently.

And Googling for information about increasing one’s Alexa rankings are suspect at best. Everyone that has something to say about it, says you need to install the Alexa toolbar. Which ironically, only runs on Internet Explorer. Why doesn’t the Google PageRank play into getting a higher blog rating, then?

This world of search engine optimization (SEO) is an interesting one. More interesting, its great to see people getting to sit at home in their underwear and blog, podcast, videocast, and experiment with new media, and get paid for it.

And the ReviewMe way is very much like how Zooomr tried to get customers - by giving away 2.5gb account to bloggers. Who wins the game? Its hard to say, but I’m still a Flickr user. This ends my paid experimentation for now; more thoughts to come, I’m sure. (yes, ReviewMe are paying people who have blogs to review them.)

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, media, newmedia, reviewme, seo

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) has decided that by December, next year mobile number portability will be available in Malaysia. This has been available in Australia since September, and more importantly in Singapore since 1997! (read more on mobile number portability).

A proposal has been floating around since 2004, and its going to take them another year to implement it. Three years to conduct research. Datuk Dr Halim Shafie, heading the Commission and all their research has decided that Maxis, Celcom and DiGi are receptive to the idea - so what’s the reason for the deferment?

Healthy competition between three providers is hard to do. Opening that limit up in itself will encourage more competition (even for service reselling, like how B resells Optus). Of course in Malaysia, its all about protecting the connected companies.

“Telcos in those countries have improved their delivery services since MNP was implemented,” he added.

It seems like Halim Shafie knows what MNP will mean for the consumer. Yet, its been dished about for the last couple of years. Let’s hail the day a consumer rights group in Malaysia will actually be taken seriously or perform useful actions.

Technorati Tags: malaysia, mcmc, MNP, mobile, number, portability