Italy

The Mobile Email conference in London has been great. I should have brought the entire company and a chunk of our 600k downloads there. Lots to learn. I will post about it later.

I landed in Italy last night. I am speaking at "Congresso AICA 2006" today. Very interesting event (for Italian people only...) where we will talk about research, being competitive in the market and high tech. They even have a track on open source ("risk and opportunities of open source"), which tells me something. The Italian Minister of Innovation will be there, so I better put on a tie for once :-)

London

I am flying to old Europe tonight. I will be speaking at the Informa Telecoms & Media Mobile E-mail 2006 in London on Wednesday at 14:45 (going with the European standard here ;-)

The topic is "Responding to Consumers Anxieties and Requirements in Order to Accelerate Mass Market Adoption". Are consumers really anxious about having mobile email on their devices?? I do not think so... I believe they are anxiously waiting for an easy-to-use low-cost technology... Anyway, I guess we'll find it out soon.

As usual, if you live and/or are around London, just give me a buzz.

HPL version 1.0 is here

A month ago, I proposed a new license, called the Honest Public License (HPL). It is GPL v2 with an additional paragraph, clarifying that distribution of software as a service is exactly the same as distribution of software in a floppy. Therefore, GPL applies also when the software is used to provide a service to the public.

I left the license out for review for a month. I received a ton of comments on this blog and in many blogs and articles around the net. Evidently, I touched a nerve ;-) The feedback has been universally positive (and I have to admit I have been quite surprised). The only real negative comment I heard has been "yet another license". It is true, it is yet another license. But it changes the most important element of computing that was not covered in GPL, because it was written in 1991 when software was distributed in floppies and nobody knew what SaaS meant. For everything else, GPL is just fine. SaaS is the future of computing: HPL is just another incredibly important license ;-)

Anyway, here you find HPL 1.0 and here you find the diff between HPL and GPL v2. As I wrote a month ago, our next step is to have HPL disappear within GPL v3. That process is ongoing and I have no control on, so let's wait and see.

Regarding Funambol, we have decided to leave the clients on GPL v2 (no reason to change them to HPL, since there is no SaaS on clients). HPL will clearly end up in the incompatibility list of GPL, as AGPL before it (a license that tried to fix the same issue, but in a pretty "strong" way), so we would prefer people to be able to link clients based on GPL code. On the server side, to build SyncSources, you will have to use HPL. HPL affects every SyncSource, but it does not affect the product you are connecting the SyncSource to (if you talk to it with a separate protocol). Therefore, the impact should be minimal. Because of dual licensing, Funambol could also grant a special waiver for open source projects that cannot switch the SyncSource to HPL. Just give us a buzz. More to come in the new site after the launch of v 3.0 GA (very soon!).

I want to thank Patrick, Markus, Tomasz and Kari for the precious help in the review process. I just do not know what I would do without a community of people working on the project (wait, I know, I would be doing something else like opening a restaurant in Maui, probably called Funambol Italian Restaurant. THAT would be fun :-)

CTIA - Los Angeles

For those that might be going there, I am flying tomorrow to CTIA in Los Angeles. I will be speaking at the SmartPhone Summit on Monday at 4 pm, track Mobile Messaging and Gaming. I'll be around on Tuesday, flying back on Tuesday night. My schedule is pretty much overbooked, but if you are around and you want to say hi, just drop me a note and I'll find some time. See you in the city of angels.

The road to push email goes through address book sync

It is funny how small things sometimes prevent big changes from happening. There is one that prevents the potential explosion of push email on mobile devices: the lack of address book synchronization.

If you have a cell phone, you have received and sent at least a message in your life. A short text message or SMS, but still a message. You are ready for push email. Today. You are ready to receive messages a bit longer pushed to your device and to send short messages (no, I am not a believer of a long messages typed with a keyboard installed on every phone on the planet, sorry. I like dumb phones because they look cooler and - guess what - the phone is mostly a fashion item, trust an Italian on that).

When you send a SMS today, you send it to a phone number. That's what you have in your phone address book today.

If you want to send an email, you have to send it to an email address. Would you type myfirstname.mylastname@funambol.com on your cell phone? No. Believe someone with a long first name and last name... You will not do it.

So... you will not use push email unless you have my email address on your phone. Since you are not going to type it, it must get on your phone from somewhere else (your Outlook, your Yahoo address book, your Skype address book and so on). You need address book synchronization, possibly pushed on your device when something changes.

Without address book sync, there is no push email. It is a small thing, but it is small blocking thing.

Thankfully, SyncML solves that, if paired with the right solution on the server side that actually works with your phone (warning: small advertisement here ;-)

The road to push email goes through address book sync.

The Community Code Sniper Program

Jason, our smart and creative Community Manager, just launched a new great program, called Community Code Sniper.

The idea is pretty simple: we asked the community which clients or connectors they wanted with a survey, then we looked at our resources and we realized we could do only some internally. Others would be left out waiting for us to get more resources. Or we could ask the community to contribute to the effort. The tightrope walker in us suggested we should contribute back with cash, giving back to the community something we received because of them (thanks). All the code developed with the bounties will go back in open source for everyone to share, which will be very cool.

Some people picked up the news, and I really liked Dana blog on ZDNet (in particular, because Funambol comes before Red Hat :-)

Anyway, this is a great opportunity for all the people out there that are sending us resumes: if you think you are good, just prove it. You will even make money. And it will be fun. Having your address book synched between your Nokia or RAZR phone, your iPod, your Gmail or Yahoo address, Skype will be very interesting for millions of people (not just you). If you have a Mac, just take our client API and build an iSync plug-in, so we finally can sync our cell phones over-the-air with our Mac (and yes, I believe Steve Jobs will announce the iPod phone on Tuesday...).

 

(yep, I know, we are having fun at Funambol... "Code Sniper"... What a name... It shows we have a new VP Marketing :-))

Off topic On vacation

I am writing this post from beautiful Maui, Hawaii. Mobile and Open Source are not really on my radar, these days... I am just enjoying the beaches and the great people. Vacation is the only thing I care about...

When it comes to vacation, I am in an interesting position: I run a company with a third of the people in Silicon Valley and two thirds in old Europe. That's the two extremes... 

For those not living in the USA, you would be surprised to know that people joining a company here normally get two (2) weeks of vacation a year. For a European moving to Silicon Valley, it is a shock. You have to take the two weeks to visit home for Christmas and then you have the other 50 weeks ahead of you... It is even more shocking that paying for receiving calls or SMS on a mobile phone, from someone who dialed the wrong number. American employers - I believe - are convinced that having you work for 50 weeks in a row keeps productivity high. What US employees do is working for two/three years in a company, then take two months off to recharge. They even have a word ("burnout") to describe how you can get exhausted, physically and emotionally. It happens to everybody in Silicon Valley, working for a startup. It is just stupid: the productivity of your employees is 100% the first six months, then goes to 70% the second year, then 40% the third. What's the benefit of having employees with low productivity??

In Europe, I never understood how people could take four weeks of vacation in a row without totally destroying what they did before. If you work for a startup, you come back after a month and the company is totally different ;-) It is just insane, from an employer standpoint. If I am out of the office for more than a week, when I get back I feel the stress of the work which piled up...

"In medio stat virtus" said the Latin: I believe you should take a week off every quarter. You actually must take a week off every quarter. I kinda enforce that on our tightrope walkers (and my wife enforces it on me...). Funambol gives four weeks of vacation to every employee, which is unheard off in the Valley... For me, it is just necessary to keep productivity levels at 100% all the time (and walk in an office where people are in a good mood most of the time, remembering that Funambol starts with Fun). I might be someone who generally does not like to swim in the mainstream (is snorkeling the mainstream?) but I am convinced to be right - at least on this one.

Now let me go back to vacation :-)

Italy Wins World Cup Of Programming

Today I received a link to an article describing how Italy won the World Cup of Programming. I am not surprised, but I am certainly very glad :-) Maybe I will not be the only one in the world saying that "Italians do IT better". By the way, the t-shirt is about ready, if you want one just let me know. You just have to prove me to have Italian heritage and be somehow related to Information Technology...

Got DSL?

An update for all the people that were so kind to share my pain about my DSL: it took me exactly 26 days, but I finally have DSL at home. It does not download big files (not sure why) and they have been charging me for the service for the entire month, but I am so happy to be back in the broadband world ;-)

Mobile Ajax?

For my entire life, the word Ajax meant for me either a cleaning product my mom used or a pretty good soccer team in the Netherlands. Nowadays, it means Asynchronous Javascript and XML.

As Wikipedia would describe it: "intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, and usability".

This week I hosted a panel at LinuxWorld, called "Got mobile?" and I invited Scott Dietzen, the CTO of Zimbra (and formerly of BEA). Zimbra is the poster child of Ajax and Web 2.0. Scott is the best person on the planet to talk about it.

When I was writing alpha Java code at HP Labs in 1995, I thought Java was going to be the language to make the browser more interactive, going beyond the concept of hypertext navigation. It did not happen, partially because Microsoft killed it (and Netscape) and partially because Sun never made true the statement "write once, run everywhere".

Many years later, DHTML and Ajax might be the way to make it happen. I still have doubts it make sense, because with Ajax you destroy the concept of hypertext navigation and the Back and Forward buttons on your browser become meaningless. However, the browser is an ubiquitous way to distribute software, people know how to use it... so I guess I can take it the drawbacks (I am a pragmatic individual).

During the panel, I asked the a couple of questions:

 - Where do you see mobile apps go, towards stored application and data with push capabilities or browser-based dynamic apps?
 - How much data would you store on the device? Is storage going to be always cheaper and bandwidth always more expensive or the trend will change?

The questions were targeted at understanding the future paradigm for mobile applications. Will we have stored apps on the device with local data or will we move the browser paradigm on devices?

I wrote time ago that I believe in the concept of mobile widgets. Maybe mobile Ajax could be the tool to make it happen. You could have applications cached on your device, that use asynchronous calls to the web, using the same tools developers utilize on desktops. Opera is already working on it. It might be what kills Java once again...

Scott did not seem much convinced we are close to mobile Ajax. He said we are not even at Web 1.0 on mobile, that the experience sucks when browsing on a device, that the devices are not powerful enough for the Ajax engine... Let alone thinking about Web 2.0 on mobile. However, he seemed quite sure it will be the way to go, eventually.

I have a doubt, which I expressed during the panel. The paradigm of browsing is user-initiated. You open the browser, you click. That works on PCs.  Your monitor is in front of you, turned on. You interact.

On mobile, it is different. In most cases, you just react. The phone is idle, then it rings: you answer. It beeps: you check the SMS your received.

You do not leave your monitor idle, but you do it with a cell phone. Actually, I would guess 90% of the time your phone is with you, it is in stand-by. Apart from people spending 4 hours a day on a train (which are the vast minority of people on the planet, let's not forget it), we use the phone to react to events. That's when it is useful. When I get off my car, I need that information right there. I turn the phone on, I read it, I do something about it (maybe just curse, if Ajax scored against Juventus).

Now, what is different? That's push. Push technology is the key for mobile applications to be useful. You need information to be pushed to you. Not just email. Everything. From weather updates to purchase orders to tickets to news to stock prices and exchange rates. You need push on devices that are mostly idle. You might not need it on your PC (remember Marimba?) because you are in front of it all the time. You react sometimes (e.g. when you get an email) but that's about it. You NEED push for mobile.

Scott, if we can mix together push and Ajax, we might be golden. Local data storage and apps plus a simple async mechanism to get updates, triggered via push. Push Ajax? PAjax? p-Ajax? Pajax? I am ready ;-)

 

 

The Honest Public License

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about my way of doing dual licensing, keeping myself honest with the open source community. Today, I would like to turn the table and ask the community to be honest with itself.

The problem I am addressing is the famous "ASP loophole" of the GPL v2. Famous because everybody in the industry talks about it, but nobody has ever done anything about it ;-) The loophole is easy to explain: GPL v2 talks about distribution of software and includes a copyleft clause that triggers when you distribute your code (that is, everything around the code becomes GPL as well). In 1991, we used floppies to distribute software. I still remember booting Linux with the boot and root floppies and getting the network piece of the OS with N1, N2, etc. Nowadays, the world of software is seeing a shift to distributing software as a service (SaaS). I believe 90% of the software will be distributed as SaaS in the coming years.

What's the ASP loophole? Some people interpret distribution of software as a service not as distribution of software (because GPL v2 was created before web services were on the horizon and therefore did not address them in the license). They believe that they can use open source software to offer services to the public, without returning anything to the community. That's taking open source software as free beer. It is just not being honest with the community, to the people who sweat to write the code to see someone running away with it and not contributing anything back. That's totally against the spirit of free software and the GPL. You have the freedom to use it for yourself or internally in your organization, but when you distribute it to the public, you have to give back to the community. It is that simple. That's the spirit of GPL. That's why open source will take over the world of software: it creates great software and phenomenal support.

I have always included distribution of software as a service in my interpretation of the GPL, but I am not a lawyer. And lawyers always find a way around something, if it is not spelled out in a clear way (I am talking about my brother, mostly ;-) Therefore, for my interpretation to be valid, a brief clarification of the GPL v2 is needed.

That's why we created the first draft of the Honest Public License, a slight modification of GPL v2 with just an additional paragraph (here you can see the diff between HPL and GPL v2). We took that paragraph from the latest draft of GPL v3, relaxing it a bit (what's in GPL v3 was taken from AGPL, but I feel it to be too strong, since it is not based on trust -> I trust my community, I do not need to force them to open a service for me to suck up their code). The goal is to make HPL upward compatible with GPL v3 as much as possible (one note: the FSF is thinking about the ASP loophole, not just Affero or me ;-) We sent it to the FSF for review (I would love to keep the preamble, if they allow me to do it), to lots of open source luminaries (that gave it the thumbs up) and intend to submit it to the OSI.

The goal of HPL is to keep the community honest with itself. The use of the name "Honest" is ABSOLUTELY not intended to mean that GPL or any other licenses are dishonest. It is quite the opposite, actually. But some people are taking advantage of a GPL legal loophole and are defeating the spirit of the GPL. HPL is just GPL extended to cover the distribution of software as a service to the public. It does not take away any freedom (i.e. you can use it internally in your corporation), it just covers when someone distributes the code to the public (whether with a floppy or as a service). It is meant to keep people honest with their community.

What motivated this new license now? We have a general availability version of Funambol coming out in September. I already know there are commercial companies that are live with our code and do not return anything. More than two years ago, we did something similar, switching Sync4j from BSD to GPL. There were companies taking our code and running away with it, without returning anything. One even managed to get public with software based on our code, and our community never saw a line of their modifications. Now is no different. On top of this, I followed a discussion on Matt's blog, which made me think that nobody has ever done anything about the loophole because large interests are at stake (I really would love to see the improvements to the Linux file system that have been made, I could use them for my open source project ;-)

In any case, this is a battle for open source, not against anyone in particular. It is a fight to keep the spirit of open source alive, more than anything else. We'll keep the license open for comments for thirty days (please click on comments below to leave your opinion) and then we will finalize it. My hope is that HPL one day will disappear because GPL v3 will supersede it. I plan to work hard to make it happen in the upcoming months.

The mobile time warp

I spoke at a very nice event in San Francisco on Thursday, organized by BAIA at Adobe. The title was "Mobile Platforms: The New Frontier for Software and Services". It was organized as a panel. Great attendance, lots of smart people, phenomenal gelato (you must trust an Italian when you hear good things about pizza and gelato ;-)

We all talked about the new frontier of mobile and - at times - I felt we were trapped in the mobile time warp. It is an interesting phenomenon that I observed in the last six years. Time is frozen in mobile.

We talked about m-commerce and people buying books with their phone, the phone as a wallet and paying for parking with your cell, the third screen and TV coming to your mobile device, the "look at how they use it in Japan" thing. I was on the same panel six years ago and I heard the same exact statements. Maybe the gelato was different, but everything else was exactly the same. That's the mobile time warp.

I tried to get out of the mobile time warp, saying that I feel the phone is mostly a messaging device (that's voice and text), that Japanese people spend four hours a day on a train with their phone in their hands (and I am lucky if I have 30 seconds when I get out of my car before entering the office) and that I need my couch to watch TV, that the phone will be perfect to receive tickets and get you in the opera and the stadium and on the train or even buy coke at the vending machine, because its value is the location and the fact you always carry with you. I even said that any uptake will simply be based on how carriers bill the services (it usually helps to get people out of the warp).

I failed, I got trapped in the mobile time warp. We have heavily marketed this thing for six years and people are still waiting for the dream to materialize. The reality is that the phone will be used by many different people to do million different things (but the killer app will boringly be messaging, anything else will be a niche). The phone won't replace my PC, my TV, and probably not even my iPod nano (which is the perfect specialized device). When will be able to get out of pure marketing, segment the market based on age and location, understand usability patterns (I bet all I had that launching 3G for videocalls in Italy would not have worked, and they actually made it thanks to lower voice tariffs) and listen to the users?

Will we ever break the mobile time warp?

Got Mobile? LinuxWorld Panel coming up next week...

If you are going to LinuxWorld in San Francisco next week, you can't miss this one (you could, but the three panelist I invited are really cool people that you should listen to...).

What: LinuxWorld Conference & Expo Panel
Got Mobile: Extending your project's mobile capabilities

Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco will moderate a panel of other
open source leaders about their projects' mobile strategies.

To register for the event, please visit
http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/live/12/register .

When: Thursday, August 17, 2006
11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Where: Moscone Convention Center North
800 Howard Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Room # 305

Why: Open source applications are increasingly being deployed in the
enterprise, but many lack the mobility that is demanded in today's
business environment. Executives from companies Funambol,
Motorola, SugarCRM and Zimbra will share how they are giving
customers the flexibility to access and use applications anywhere,
anytime. Attendees will get new information that will help them to
easily and quickly extend the mobile capabilities of their
projects.

Who: Panel moderator
-- Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol

Panelists
-- Scott Dietzen, CTO of Zimbra
-- William Maggs, director, Technology and Developer Ecosystem, at
Motorola
-- John Roberts, CEO and cofounder of SugarCRM

See you next week at LinuxWorld!

My AT&T DSL nightmare

I am not sure how related this is to mobile open source, but it is pissing me off, so I would like to write about it (that's the beauty of having a blog, I guess). This blog is getting quite popular (I do not know why, but the stats are astonishing), therefore it might help solving my problem :-)

Few years ago, I moved from Silicon Valley back to Italy. In the new house, I requested phone and DSL to Telecom Italia. It was just after Christmas. It took them 2 weeks (two) to connect my phone line (it had the dialtone since day one) and over a month to get DSL. I thought "welcome back to the third world of technology". I moved back to the US quite fast, after setting up the development office in Pavia and the business office in Milan.

Last week, I moved from my house in Menlo Park to a bigger house in Menlo Park (I needed a family room all for myself to accommodate my SlingBox). I called AT&T to move phone line and DSL (AT&T Yahoo). The phone moved overnight, with the same number. I was amazed. At 7 am sharp, it ringed to tell me it was ready (it actually woke me up, but who cares?). Wow. That's great technology at work. See ya Telecom Italia.

The same night, AT&T called saying they had some issues with the DSL. I replied that it was strange, since I had DSL two miles away and the guy in the house had DSL up to the day before I moved in. They said "yep, we know, but...".

After a week of looking at my DSL router with the blinking red light, I called. The lady said that it was not their fault, it was the fault of the "phone company". Who the hell is the phone company, when I am calling AT&T? Telecom Italia?? Anyway, apparently they do not have enough capacity for my DSL. Once it was disconnected, they gave it to someone else. Now I just have to wait, but they sort of assure me it is going to be connected by August 25th (that's three weeks from now...).

I am checking email in the morning and night with dial-up. It is a step forward since Italy, because there I could not even do that for two weeks (I was going berserk). But this is Silicon Valley. Menlo Park is the center of capital for every technology company in the world. I live at the border with Atherton, where the rich people are. This is supposed to be the first world. It is not. I should have guessed looking at the poles carrying electricity, phone and DSL, falling down at the first rain. Does anybody else find that bizarre? I guess we removed our last electricity pole in the fifties in Italy :-)

 

Welcome back to the third world of technology, Silicon Valley.

 

A nice Red Herring article

This week, Red Herring has a nice article on Funambol in the print edition. Unfortunately, the online version of the article is missing the most important piece, the picture of the Sync4j Bug ("the only Sync4j bug you can't catch"). I have no idea how the photographer managed to make it look so shiny, but I guess he is a magician. My bug really could use a car wash...

My Honest Dual Licensing

I have been an open source person for as long as I remember, at least since I met Alessandro Rubini in the late eighties. He was writing the mouse device driver for Linux and I had the fortune to spend a good amount of years in the same dorm and then lab, where he was going around with a Linux PC in a wooden box.

In the last five years, I spent almost every day thinking about a business model that could allow open source to become a viable alternative to proprietary software. I do not believe the Linux model can be replicable. You cannot build a project hoping it will get big and some IBM or HP will throw in a ton of money. If you want to get a salary doing what you love, you need to come up with a better model. A sustainable model for open source. A honest way to create value for your community, while generating enough cash to make it work. With Alberto Onetti, I wrote a paper some time ago on how it works for Funambol.

The guiding principle for me has always been "Just be honest" with your open source community.

My epiphany with dual licensing happened in London some years ago. I met Marten Mickos and I decided that was the way to go. I loved the "quid pro quo" concept (albeit it means "a misunderstanding" in Italy... We would use "do ut des"): you either give back code to the project or you give back cash, so we can put it back in the project itself. That's being honest.

The problem with dual licensing starts when your product is not meant to be embedded. There, the trigger to open source everything around your code is clear. When you have an application, it gets tricky. Therefore, many open source companies decided to split open source from commercial based on features. That is, you get an open source product that does 70% of what you need. If you need the other 30%, you have to pay. The risk is that your product manager will have to think where to put every new single feature, with your investors and sales people telling him/her "close" and the community shouting "open". It creates tension in the community ("why did you put THAT feature in the commercial product? We need it! We'll build it ourselves"). When Marc Fleury says that who adds commercial extensions to open source code is not really open source, I believe he goes overboard (he likes to be controversial, I guess ;-) But he is not totally off base. Dual licensing with commercial extensions targeted to the open source crowd (all enterprises, for example) will aways create tension. In the long run, I believe it won't be sustainable for us. Many have noticed it, such as Alfresco and others, switching to a 100% service-based model and sort of giving up dual licensing (maybe because it was not working for them as it does for others ;-)

Now, how do I build My Honest Dual Licensing? How do I keep the concept of quid pro quo, without creating a gigantic bait and switch? How can I be honest to your open source community, while generating cash to sustain the project via licenses?

It is quite simple, actually: we will not segment your product based on features, we will segment our user base. On one side, we build a phenomenal open source product targeted to your open source community, pure and honest. On the other side, we build a commercial product based on the same core BUT targeted to someone else. If "someone else" is not in your open source community, you are golden. Your community grows happy giving back the code to the project, your "someone else" pays for it and gets back what it needs (quid pro quo).

Ok, now the issue is finding that someone else ;-) In the Funambol case, the community is everybody in the world, including individuals, universities AND enterprises. "Someone else" is the carriers. The carriers have totally different needs than enterprises. They target millions of users. They target consumers. It is the same core but with some different features (probably still 70% vs. 30%). Features, though, that the open source community does not care about. That's the trick. No tension when adding features. Clear separation between open source and commercial. Segmentation based on your user base, no bait and switch. My Honest Dual Licensing.

Just be honest.

Middleware can protect your company's e-mail

Last week I wrote an article for CommsDesign around mobile security and how using a middleware would solve some of the issues. I hope you will find it interesting.

Podcast about Funambol

Mobile Computing Authority interviewed me just an hour after the last penalty kick on Sunday. I was almost out of voice but they were nice enough to listen.

If you are interested, here you have the podcast.

Off topic: a-la-matt

My friend Matt writes an off-topic post on soccer once in a while. He is a real soccer fan, who grew up in the wrong country. Therefore, he chose to root for an English team (Arsenal) and France (where he spent some of his life) as his national team. He often writes analogies between open source companies (mainly Alfresco lately ;-) and soccer.
Matt was the reason for me to start this blog and I like him. Unfortunately for him, he is just bad at picking soccer teams. His Arsenal was crashed in the Champions League final (nobody remembers who you beat to get there, people just remember the winner), France was crashed today in the World Cup final by Italy.
This is a day for some analogy for me as well, I guess. Italy won showing passion, creativity and talent. A phenomenal defense, beat only by a penalty kick and an own goal. Lots of goals, still. What I would call smart playing. Fabio Grosso is the image of this team. A not-so-young guy who played for Perugia and Palermo (not really top teams) so far, but who was instrumental for us to get to the semifinal with a great run on the left that ended in a penalty kick, who scored in the semifinal against Germany and shot the last penalty kick today. Heart and talent, but mostly passion and a never-give-up attitude.
I guess you know which open source company I feel looks like Italy... so I will leave the analogy for Matt's next post.

How do you create a successful open source company?

This is a question I hear quite often: how did you manage to bring Funambol to profitability, push the open source project to 500,000 downloads and get your company included in the Red Herring 100? I have no clue, really, so my standard answer is: "I am a lucky guy"...

Since my answer usually ignites another question ("no, really...") and I usually look stupid, I decided to put together a few ideas on what I would do if I had to start an open source company from scratch. Here they are.

1. Think BIG: open source is a game of volumes. You need a BIG community for all the positive effects to show (quality, support, contribution, viral marketing, quick sales cycles, international reach, ...). The only way to get a big community is to attack a large market. If you build an open source project for a niche, your community will never get really big and your company will always stay small. I know I am killing half of the open source companies that VCs have funded in the last year or so, but ...

2. Think STANDARDS: standards have been key for a lot of successful open source projects. HTTP for Apache, SQL for MySQL, J2EE for JBoss, SyncML for Funambol (not in that league yet, but we are working on it...). I am not saying that being the open source implementation of an open standard is the only way to create a big open source project (I feel SugarCRM might make it without it), but it certainly helps. A lot. In particular, if the standard is successful.

3. Think COMMODITY: this goes with the BIG argument above. Open source is the winning strategy for commodity markets. It is a game of volumes. Price is key in commodity markets. If you choose something that will become a commodity, at the end you will come on top because nobody can compete with open source companies on price. Not because it is free (it is not), but because our companies are built on different cost structures than proprietary companies. Our marketing, sales, business development and QA costs are a fraction of those of proprietary companies. In a commodity market, it really matters.

4. Think PRICE CUSHION: if you want to create a big open source project, you do not need it. If you want to create a big open source company, you need a price cushion. You have to go after some big proprietary company which set a very high price. Being open source, the price for your product will always be perceived as a little bit more than zero. How much over zero makes all the difference. If you have someone big that set a high price, you'll crash that price slowly until the market becomes a commodity and volumes are there. If you are thinking about attacking a large market where there is no price cushion and no big player charging a ton, you are going to create a big open source project but zero dollars for your shareholders. Think MySQL with Oracle, JBoss with BEA, SugarCRM with Salesforce.com, Funambol with RIM (that's $50/user/month...). Once again, I know I am killing the other half of the open source companies that VCs have funded in the last year or so, but ...

5. Think IRONMAN: most people that went public with a proprietary company will tell you "it was a marathon". Open source companies are in the Ironman category. That is "SWIM 2.4 MILES! BIKE 112 MILES! RUN 26.2 MILES". The race ends with a marathon, but you have to swim a lot and bike a ton before you even start the marathon. Aggregating a large community takes years, there is nothing money can do to accelerate the process. It is a natural long process with phenomenal fruits at the end. But you have to be patient. MySQL was first released internally on May 23, 1995... That's eleven years ago and they might go public this year or next (go Marten!). Do not think starting an open source company will be a quick race, gear up for the long long haul. The Funambol project was started in 2001 as Sync4j, and we reached 500,000 downloads in 2006. The Ironman cap was the first company gift we ever produced. One of our key employee is an Ironman competitor (just won the 12 hours of Cesate, go Daniele!). When people ask me where do you think your company is in its life, I answer "we just got out of the water after the swim fraction, we are biking downhill, but I am bit worried about the marathon that we'll have to start in a few years".

 

I hope I finally answered the question: it is really tough and I AM a lucky guy.