Open source and its changing role in the enterprise with Stormy Peters

2 p.m. – 3 p.m. ET, Thursday, May 15.

Peters can answer your questions about the open-source movement, reality versus hype, managing open source tools and anything else about the software world you want to discuss. Peters is co-founder of the non-profit GNOME Foundation and director of community and partner programs for OpenLogic. OpenLogic offers management tools for enterprise-class open source software. Prior to her role at OpenLogic, Peters founded and managed HP's Open Source Program Office and helped establish its Linux division. "I'm someone who thinks open source software is changing the way software works - bringing better technology solutions to us all faster," she writes in her blog.

No registration necessary. Just show up at http://www.networkworld.com/chat/ and login. Chat room opens one hour before the chat.

Syndicated 2008-05-06 15:19:08 from dmarti's blog

Friday links...Thursday!

Working on a new incarnation of a basic idea I've been kicking around for a while: a Perl script to snarf the links from Planet sites and tell me what people are linking to. So far it likes this one by Joel Spolsky and this one by Ben Collins-Sussman, an announcement from Adobe and this interview with Khoi Vinh of the New York Times. Not bad. Here's the discussion of that Adobe thing at LWN.

Another good one, from an earlier test of the same script. Marc Andreessen explains the Microsoft/Yahoo deal. "This is significant because historically hostile takeovers practically never happened in technology. Potential hostile acquirors assumed that hostile takeovers wouldn't work because the target company's employees would bail and the target company's business would collapse." (That's what I thought. Are there really people who are smart enough to build a whole new version of Microsoft, but too dumb to type "microsoft.com/jobs"?

Cause Caller is a VoIP application for telemarketing, I mean phone banking for advocacy groups. (Via Interprete)

Candlelight vigil against the use of proprietary software—that takes dedication.

COIN without a model for Community Resilience is Futile. How much of your ability to defeat terists depends on a trustworthy local police force? NGOs such as the Red Cross? The repair crews for electrical, gas, and communications utilities?

Matt Cutts explains Google Charts, including the Google-O-Meter.

Robert Love points out the basic economic reason that a "gas tax holiday" is a dumb idea. Since the amount that refineries can produce doesn't go up during the "holiday," the price without the tax tends to come up to where it was with the tax—only the money goes to oil company profits instead of the tax-funded projects.

Yay, 30 years of spam.

Syndicated 2008-05-01 22:03:27 from dmarti's blog

How do online social networks survive the end of Bubble 2.0?

Bernard Lunn writes, "Consumer media depends on advertising and advertising gets cut in a recession." So what happens to all those social networking sites that are already having trouble "monetizing" the users? If you're connecting the trend of advertising moving online to the trend of social networks gaining users, and expecting the ad money to make the sites pay, you're probably in for a surprise. Making big money from social networking online is an old idea, and it doesn't work. See theGlobe.com and Friendster. So Lunn poses a good question: what happens to all those places to have conversations online when Bubble 2.0 pops?

First of all, compared to journalism, retail or search, a well-designed social network site is cheap to run. Look at Livejournal or Slashdot. Those sites got stared when web costs were an order of magnitude higher than they are now, and broke-ass hackers could afford to do them then. So the question isn't how can a social network site make New York Times, Google, or Amazon money. It's how can a social network site make a few bucks per user, enough to keep the webmasters fed and the servers on? Easier problem.

And here's one possible solution. Obama's 'Gigantic' Database May Make Him Party's Power Broker. Christopher Stern at Bloomberg News writes, "When supporters join mybarackobama.com, they become part of the campaign, gaining access to phone bank lists, local events and the ability to contact like-minded people or recruit new ones. Mybarackobama.com is also a sophisticated data network that allows the campaign to home in on detailed information such as whether a supporter is more concerned about civil liberties, foreign policy, education or energy policy."

The mybarackobama.com site is a full-scale social network, with a built-in business model: getting the Senator elected President. Tony Steidler-Dennison explains (podcast, 24:05) how social networking tools work as part of the campaign. The Obama campaign is saving money on conventional database marketing, the same way that campaigns and advocacy groups saved money on mass media when they discovered databases.

The power behind the "Reagan Revolution" of 1980 was Richard Viguerie, who borrowed database marketing techniques from the direct mail business. When Reagan appointed James G. Watt as Secretary of the Interior, the US environmental movement caught on to database marketing, too. Every word out of Watt's mouth was a money quote for a direct mail envelope, and environmental groups became direct mail machines.

Today, if you're running a political campaign or advocacy group, you're already blowing huge amounts of money on direct mail. If you're CIO of an advocacy group, online social networking is looking like a major bargain. Right now, the ACLU and Amnesty International use the web top-down. Even the online-focused EFF is behind the Obama campaign, which draws on ideas from the 2004 Dean and Clark campaigns and Facebook. Stern writes, "Chris Hughes, a 24-year-old Facebook co-founder, has been a fulltime Obama campaign worker for more than a year and helped develop the candidate's site."

All this is good news for the developers who are working on solving the social network portability problem. Advocacy groups often form shifting coalitions, and being able to draw on "social graph" data from other groups could be a potent webmaster weapon against the troll problem. And, if you're looking to make money from a for-profit social network, the advocacy groups could be in a position to undercut you.

Syndicated 2008-04-29 18:31:46 from dmarti's blog

Breaking into the enterprise server market

The big Linux story of the week is Ubuntu Linux takes on enterprise server market with new OS. Looks like a slick job of integration. Hooray—pulseaudio out of the box.

But are the other distributions a bunch of fools for spending so much time on all those complicated upstream kernel changes? Canonical doesn't make the Linux Foundation's list of the top companies supporting kernel development. Oracle, which rebuilds Red Hat Enterprise Linux and resells it under its own name, at least contributes substantially to the upstream kernel. LF has Oracle at number 11, with 1.3% of changes. Where's Canonical?

Canonical has "a fast-moving team of 5+ individuals" working on the kernel, so they're not freeloading, but "enterprise server market?" Last I knew, some of the large-scale Linux customers weren't just getting warm fuzzies from supporting big-name kernel hackers—some of those hackers were working on particularly tough kernel bugs that customer workloads happened to smoke out. Will Canonical's kernel team start to make the list of top contributors?

Syndicated 2008-04-22 23:22:17 from dmarti's blog

QoTD: Ali al-Naimi

"This is not the time to panic and grasp for exotic, unproven solutions."

-- Ali al-Naimi, Petroleum Minister, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Earth Day, 2008

Syndicated 2008-04-22 18:21:38 from dmarti's blog