By Mark Hinkle Most open source luminaries are known for their code, their successful startup successes or even their outspokenness. Andre Boisvert comes to open source from a different angle. Having worked for two billionaire programmers, Larry Ellison and Jim…

Andre started out his career at IBM where he spent 13 years. At Big Blue he was fast tracked through various positions in sales, marketing and R&D as part of their executive program. He then left for a turn around at Cognos (now owned by IBM). He’s been the President and COO of the world’s largest private software company, SAS Institute Inc. and has been the SVP of Marketing at Oracle. After working for some of the largest proprietary software companies, Andre now works primarily advising open source startups using his experience in order to help them better compete with some of his former employers. Though he keeps a relatively low profile in the open source community though he’s definitely a mover and a shaker.

The Counter-Intuitiveness of Open Source

In 2002, after joining the board of VA Linux (now SourceForge) Andre got exposed to the many thousands of open source projects on SourceForge. At first a lot of things in open source software were counter-intuitive to Andre. For example, how could volunteers and distributed developers outperform a dedicated development staff? For example, at SAS he had in excess of 1,000 developers housed on SAS campus, which felt like an extension of academia. With numerous accolades as one of the best places in America to work, the employee turnover at company was virtually non-existent. As a privately held company with a virtually unlimited budget there was no pressure to partake in the unnatural acts required of publicly traded companies to appease investors.

The problem with this was with very little fresh blood flowing in there was less innovation. Beyond that even though the developers within the company reviewed each other’s code there was a downside. If the guy in the next cube evaluates your work and dings it, he has to confront you every day at work, at your kids Little League practice, the company cafeteria, etc. This makes it less likely for someone to really challenge the product. In the OSS community while some developers are sleeping others on the other side of the globe is scrutinizing your code.

To illustrate his point Andre notes the phenomenon of the typewriter tough guy:

We are all recipients of flaming emails at least once in our life’s and typically that email comes from someone we never met or at least someone that isn’t standing in front of us.” The same thing happens in a worldwide open source code review. It drives programmers to write better code because of the public nature of OSS. On the other hand if you are a good programmer and you are willing to take criticism you are able to partake in a community that can offer genuine help in near limitless supply.

Open Source Software (OSS) is very democratic. Individuals can influence the direction of software. While many talk about collaborative software contributions are generally in the form of plug-ins and add-ons but collectively the large number of users give input on the direction of the core technology. This is a huge advantage over proprietary software development where asking existing customers about your product doesn’t really help because they already bought it. Plus they aren’t going to give you a beat down after a free dinner and a round of golf.

In short what Andre learned about open source was that:

• Code quality was better through a more transparent distributed development process.
• The cycle of innovation is accelerated by a relatively larger group of users with diverse needs (carrot) and the constant threat of being forked (stick).
• The barrier to deploy open source software is lower since there is typically no perpetual license up front, just an “optional” support contract.
• Full code availability makes it easier to integrate with other systems compared to that of proprietary software for which their respective vendors offer poorly documented APIs. Additionally, open source developers tend to adhere to open standards.

In late 2007 Goldman Sachs cut their estimates on many software companies. Their sentiment was consistent with the value being provided by many open source software companies.

Concurrent with our change in coverage view, we are reducing the estimates of most of our covered companies, focusing on pure-plays that could be harmed as customers seek to purchase ‘good enough’ substitutes from larger vendors, as well as vendors who sell ‘big ticket’ items that could be delayed in a slower spending environment,” Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in the report.

According to Boisvert they also noted that, publicly traded software companies are spending between 83% to 100% of new license revenues on sales & marketing activities. Customers not only pay for their own golf outings but all the outings of all other prospects that didn’t pan out.

What’s been a challenge for a lot of open source vendors in their sales process is that there is little room for free pre-sales support, there’s no free dinner at Morton’s steak house. The economics are different because there is no perpetual license for the vendor to recoup these sales and marketing expenses. Under the open source model, customers have come to realize that they need to pay for pre-sales activities such as “proof of concept pilots” and that golf outings are not included.

The new model typically starts with a customer/prospect downloading the software and then reviewing it on their schedule and not that of the vendor. Customers can check out the programs in detail and hear unbiased views by going on project forums as opposed to listening to a yapping sales guy shoving glossy sales brochures under your nose and making promises he knows are not likely to be kept.

Building Open Source Companies

Andre was anxious to put the lessons learned at VA software to use and in October 2004, he co-founded an open source business intelligence company , Pentaho. Since the company had no install base, they had the luxury of the creating the next generation Business Intelligence (BI) platform. This was a feat the “popriatary” industry leaders could have never achieved, as migration issues from massive legacy customer bases would have placed too many limitations on the product.

The Pentaho crew knew that having a vibrant community was key to their success and unlike many companies that labor over building communities over a long period of time, they acquired the IP rights and hired the key developers of three projects: Jfree Reports, Kettle, Mondrian. On their own they were all good pieces of software but combined into a BI platform, the sum was much greater than the parts. The communities had similar interests and they came together rather quickly offering even more synergy.
Andre’s appetite for open source didn’t stop at Pentaho, he was soon the first outside investor in Compiere. Compiere founder Jorg Janke, a former Oracle colleague, had spent two years building an ERP platform from scratch. Jorg understood the problem with the then current proprietary ERP systems which drove him to build the next generation ERP platform.

Andre shared that view with Jorg since as head of Oracle’s worldwide marketing function he remembers Larry Ellison would evaluate feature requests by saying, “If we had the features that this specific customer is asking for, how big would the check be?” Depending on the size of the check, Oracle would build out features which in many cases was only applicable to one customer. Being the marketing guy Andre would spin the features as designed for specific “vertical markets” but at the end of the day it was a feature used only by a single customer. Other customers ended up paying for the additional overhead to run this code (MIPS, storage, etc) and to add insult to injury, paid for it every year on their maintenance bill.

Jorg knew that every customer had a common need, financials. Jorg built a financials package that supported multi-currencies, multi-nationals, multi-divisions, etc. His data dictionary approach allowed customers to only generate the code the user needed. Unlike many open source projects there was not one outside code contributor and his partner Kathy Pink did all the QA and documentation. Janke could have released Compiere as proprietary software but after a long conversation with JBoss’ Marc Fleury, Jorg decided to release the code to the OSS community. In parallel Andre and Larry Augustin both then sitting on the board of VA Software saw the market opportunity for the software and subsequently helped fund the company.

While Compiere’s product was entirely built internally, Pentaho chose to combine both internally developed code and acquiring a handful of complimentary open source projects. This allowed Pentaho to deliver an end to end BI platform which includes things like ETL, Analytics, and reporting that formed. Both open source companies are the leaders in their respective spaces but they each took a very different approach in getting there.

Having been an investor and chairman in a pure applications company like Compiere, and a company that straddled application and infrastructure, like Pentaho, Boisvert, driven by curiosity and a desire to spread his investment across the software spectrum looked at systems management. He soon became an investor and the chairman of the board of an open source monitoring vendor, Zenoss.

Andre was intrigued by how much open source software was being used in larger enterprises, especially by the open source companies that he was associated with, therefore Andre joined the board of Palamida. Palamida is a company that helps mitigate IP risk in open source software. Being on the board of Palamida, Andre gained valuable insight into which applications are being used in the enterprise and the required attributes for OSS offerings to be adopted in the enterprise.

Playing Both Sides of the Fence

Boisvert is also frequently asked to speak to buy side analysts at large investment banks. Not to sell them open source stock, or at least anytime soon. He actually shows them how to hedge their bets on proprietary software companies who might be losing ground to open source challengers.

Similarly Andre still participates on the boards of proprietary software companies like UBmatrix Inc. the creators of XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language), Odessey Technologies Financials Inc. a Swiss-based leader in wealth management software and more recently joining as the chairman of the board of Infobright, a proprietary analytic data warehouse provider. However, one reason he’s attractive to these companies beyond his proprietary experience is to advise them on the potential use of open source software within their own respective software stack and therefore lowering their R&D costs.

Andre’s thoughts on open source can be summed up with this:

As the US and Europe have an economic slowdown, IT is the weapon of choice for improved efficiency. Open source is the needed ammunition which can be had at disruptive price points, not just incremental. Additionally, the economies of the BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India, China] are growing at a staggering rate and they have been raised on being cost conscience, a perfect play for open source. As such, this is the best time to be in the open source business.

photo credit: Brenda Annerl

[Disclosure: Mr. Boisvert is the Chairman of the Board at Zenoss where I am on the executive team]

Even though I consider myself a fairly advanced Linux user, there are some things in Linux I haven’t gotten around to yet.This isn’t usually through inability to do something; it’s usually a matter of not seeing the need for it….
The reason for my very tardy entry into the world of enhanced desktops is simple: none of my machines had the RAM to handle Compiz. My work box had a mere 512 MB, and thanks to a leaky aRTS instance, could barely handle Swiftweasel and Gnumeric running at the same time.

Then two things happened to change my somewhat apathetic behavior. I got off my butt and ran top to see what was what and located the malfunctioning program. After killing aRTS (who needs sound, anyway?), things ran much more smoothly. (I’ll reinstall it later; right now my Ubuntu laptop is sitting nearby generating music from Amarok.) The second thing was the death of my daughter’s PC, caused by another dead power supply. I cannibalized a 512-MB DDR chip and stuck it into my work machine on Monday while I awaited a new power supply and more RAM from my online supplier.

After the RAM upgrade, I fired up the “Desktop Effects” command in Kubuntu and clicked the Install button. apt-get ran, pulled the right files down, installed them, and… nothing. No fancy special effects. No configuration settings. Nothing.

First off, it should be noted that there’s some additional steps you need to take in *buntu to get Compiz running, not the least of which is running compiz –replace in the terminal, to actually put Compiz in the role of window manager. There are other steps too, which are well categorized in this excellent German blog post I found. Whether you are just starting out or have been around the Compiz block a few times, it’s a nice resource.

After a few commands and setting changes, Compiz is now up and running on my work machine. As a geek, I totally love it. The wobbling windows, and the burning fire are very neat effects (the latter being very satisfactory when I point the mouse-as-firestarter at certain pundits’ bylines), and the cube desktop switcher, I have to say, is suh-weet.

But here’s my thing: other than eye candy, is any of this stuff really useful? Granted, the accessibility tools are solid and very needed. You get no argument from me there. But the pragmatist in me was wondering if these eye-catchers were going to do anything for me to get my work done.

And the answer is (so far): no, they’re not. But the rest of the answer is: who cares?

Many of the Compiz tools are simply there for fun; to expect otherwise is silly. If something productive can be done with them, then great. But sometimes we all need a little distraction, something to keep our minds fresh and our morale up.

It reminded me of the earlier days of Linux, when things used to be done for the sheer joy of it. I remember my first installation of Linux (Caldera OpenLinux, if you can believe the irony) and being giddy and amazed that during the installation you could actually play a Tetris-like game instead of waiting for the installer to finish churning. It was unique, and it served no real purpose, other than to entertain.

So when someone says, that stuff is just a waste of time, tell them (like I have told myself) to lighten up and learn to play a little.

By Mark Hinkle I love Twitter but when I use my Linux laptop (Ubuntu running Hardy Heron) I don’t have many native options for Twitter clients. The preferred native client appears to be Twitux. Though the nascent client is a…

On Mac OS X I prefer Twhirl which allows me to send tweets to separate accounts from individual windows. So I can send tweets for my @zenoss and @mrhinkle accounts. Twhirl is an Adobe Air application which now is available for Linux as an alpha. Thanks to Seth Yates I now have Twhirl running as an AIR application with Adobe Air running natively on Ubuntu. the only downside seems to be that the notification windows are a little “flutterly” I really don’t care for them anyhow so I turned them off and everything seems to run well.

By Mark Hinkle Ryan Bagueros, sent me a note a few weeks back about North-by-South his open source development firm….

North-by-South is a network of open source developers from all over the Americas. We work with companies to ramp up any software project–starting from scratch or helping with your existing website or application, specializing in open source solutions and rapid timetables. We manage geographically-distributed development with programmers from near-by Latin America, where an incredible free software movement is being shaped by a new generation of open source developers.

His company has gives San Francisco companies professional project management locally while the code is written in San Palou Brazil. Even the Indian outsourcers are moving their operations to central and south america as costs in their country are rising.

There’s an incredible free software movement happening in Latin America. Led by Brazil, who is migrating all of its public systems and state-owned IT firms to open source software, many more Latin American governments are introducing similar decrees (Ecuador, Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay and more). Out of this movement is an entire generation of open source programmers
who exhibit all the best qualities of free software developers: passion for code, meticulous attention to detail, etc.

Ryan has worked with a core group of about 30 Latin American programmers for 10+ years. He decided to form a developers network that would allow Latin American programmers to work on projects from the San Francisco Bay Area. For them, they’re making more money than they ever could locally.

NorthbySouth is also doing some good work to support the San Francisco developer community as the founders of the San Francisco Community Colocation project that helps non-profits collectively purchase data center services.

Ryan also adds:

We believe strongly that the Latin American model of open source adoption is something that
can be replicated all over the globe and already that’s starting to happen in South Africa, India, parts of Europe and more

By Mark HinkleThere is a funny thing about commercial open source software companies as much as they like talking about their community-driven open source heritage they end up doing a lot of things their proprietary counterparts do. Spout off…

Open source software is a disruptive technology it’s about changing the status quo. Open source is rock and roll while proprietary software is easy listening. That’s why I always admired JBoss’ Marc Fleury. Marc was and is a bad boy, a rebel, and he played the part to a successful $350 million dollar acquisition of JBoss by Red Hat. Beyond that he was a professional who built a company that was professional and respected grew his customer base and created an iconic software brand. All things that are consistent with open source software, he also seemed to have a good time doing it.

Earlier this spring Ben Sabrin (a JBoss alum) from Appcelerator told me a story about Marc. Apparently Ben was ribbing Marc because Larry Augustin had made this list of the Who’s Who of Open Source that I had put together for LinuxWorld. Marc wasn’t on the list, simply because he had retired. I guess they gave him a hard time of about being forgotten and he got Marc pretty fired up. Larry Augustin piled on and they all had a good laugh at Marc’s expense. Ironically I always thought Marc Fleury was a great open source leader because you never had to wonder what he was thinking he was always quick with a colorful quote and the Java community loved him. He was smart and really nailed what it meant to do Professional Open Source (this was/is the JBoss tagline). Anyhow maybe Marc isn’t really my hero but here’s why I admire him and belongs on the all-time Who’s Who of Open Source list.

1. He Built a Community and then Built A Company
   There’s a huge lesson to be learned here for open source companies. Before JBoss took any venture capital they had over 6 million downloads and a thriving community which helped him grow his company quickly.
2. He Didn’t Do It in the Valley
   I have nothing against Silicon Valley but there are so many talented people all over the world it amazes me how much credibility people get from being in that small overcrowded strip of northern California. Fleury built JBoss in Hotlanta, the city the damn yankees burnt down, the home of the world’s most sugar-laden sweet tea, a NASCAR hotbed and the home of the three syllable Ya’aa’llll.
3. Returned Value to his Stakeholders
   As an entrepreneur the sign of success is return value to his shareholders. When JBoss was acquired by Red Hat for $350 million investors and employees a like made money.
4. He Fostered a Legacy I think one of the biggest contributions Marc made to open source was that he infected a bunch of guys with the bug to go make it on their own. Many of them walked away with more than a little pocket cash and they started their own open source companies. Here’s a list of JBoss alumns and what they are up to now.
   Appcelerator - Rich Internet Applications
   JBoss alumni: Jeff Haynie, Ben Sabrin, Matt Quinlin
   LoopFuse - Marketing and Sales Automation
   JBoss Alumni - Roy Russo, Tom Elrod
   RingSide Networks - Social Networking Server
   Jboss Alumni - Bob Bickel, Rich Friedman, Mark Lugert, Shaun Connolly

   Besides the people the JBoss brand continues to grow.

5. Marc Fleury is was and will always be a Rockstar
   More so than any other open source leader Marc Fleury has been colorful and had fun. He was probably one of the most quotable open source leaders of all time. Here’s the proof. At JavaPolis 2006 he showed up dressed as Public Enemy’s Flava Flav and gave a great professional intelligent speech on professional open source.

I only met Marc once at Red Hat Summit in Nashville a few years back when Rich Friedman introduced us. We only talked a few minutes but I was happy to see you could be a company executive without being a stuffed shirt, in fact he was wearing camouflage cargo pants and a beret at the time. Bottom line I’ll party with Marc anytime, maybe he’ll even given me ride in his new Tesla someday.