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.

Open Source for the masses

The goal of Funambol is to create a platform that will bring mobile applications to the masses, starting with push email. Obviously, via open source.

Bringing open source to the masses requires a bit of explanation. If you work in this space, I know you tried to tell your mom what you do for a living and failed. She does not understand what open source is. In my experience, the problem started with her not understanding with "source" means.

Some time ago, I have been asked to hold a seminar around mobile open source and dual licensing to college students. The crowd was a mix of people with engineering and economic backgrounds. The first group, techies enough. The second group, a bit more techies than my mom (with all due respect) but still not enough.

The key is that you have to explain "source" first: non techies do not understand the concept of source and binaries, let alone compiling. We grew up with that. It looks simple but it is not an easy concept to grasp for the masses.

Hence, here is how I explained open source to them:

- how does Coke produce its final product (the beverage you like)? They start from a very secret recipe (the "source"). Based on that, they produce your Coke. The recipe is not available to anybody, it is totally proprietary. Nobody can improve it, but Coke. That's what Microsoft does with Excel.

- if you want to make Tiramisu, the recipe is public. It is not proprietary. The "source" is open, available out there on the Internet. Anybody can improve it and make a better Tiramisu than the person who first invented it (which I trust is not my wife, though her Tiramisu is great). Many today share their modified recipes on the Internet. Most do not and keep their changes secret (proprietary) to impress new boyfriends. Wouldn't be great if anybody who improved the Tiramisu recipe would be forced to share it on the Internet?

- THAT is what is behind Open Source. The recipe is public and open and available on the Internet. Everyone that changes it must share it with the world. The concept is called copyleft, which is something different than copyright (yep, engineers might love compiling source code into binary code, but are also funny people). Copyleft is the basis of the GPL, the most used open source license. You change something in the source, or bundle the source to distribute it with your code, and you have to open source everything. That is what makes open source software incredibly better than proprietary software.

- if you do not like the idea of open sourcing your code (you want to create the uber-Tiramisu) and behind the project there is a company with a dual licensing model, then you can license the code (in exchange for cash) and get rid of the copyleft requirement. That's how Funambol makes money and puts it back into the community to improve the product even more.

Lately, I found out that this explanations brings my point home. My mom knows what I do (and still calls me every time there is a problem with her computer). I am not sure if it will work for you as well, but if you try, it works and you are grateful, I accept Tiramisu as a gift.

Open Source and the Mobile Market (InfoWorld post)

This is a recent post that appeared on the InfoWorld blog "Open Sources by Dave Rosenberg and Matt Asay".

 

--- cut here --- cut here --- cut here --- cut here ---

 

We recently had the pleasure of hearing Dave rant about his mobile phone and BlackBerry death-spiral. Fortunately, he won't have to start rubbing sticks together to send out smoke signals any time soon - I promise.

RIM is starting to target the consumer space by inking deals with operators. The latest: Cingular in the U.S. In theory, this should make email easily integrated with cell phones... and RIM does have a pretty good email solution. Problem is, RIM's solution -- and their business model -- has depended on their proprietary hardware. They are stretching a device built just for the enterprise to adapt it to consumers. So far, only lowering the cost... That is not the way to do it. Consumers need a different type of device. Do you believe my father will ever use a QWERTY phone? I do not think so. However, he uses SMS today. And he receives emails on his desktop. One life, two separate worlds (mobile and web). I does not have to be that way. Good news: it is already changing.

How are RIM going to make their business work with all the phones from dozens of vendors in the consumer market? How do they extend functionality and interoperability to address this myriad of devices with proprietary software? They're smart enough to know that email is the killer app for mobile... reaching the mass market handsets (like your Razr) with email (or SmartSMS ;-) has nothing to do with being smart and everything to do with open source and open standards.

Open source software can do more for the mobile market than any other market it's disrupted to date. Why? Because there are 750 million phones in the world that are compatible with an open standard for PIM and, soon, mobile email (it is called SyncML). And because the only way to test all those phones (with the variations of software builds and network operators) is to harness the power of an open source community. The lousy customer service you were getting from the operators? Open source communities provide better support than that because of natural incentives for cooperation -- look how fast Linux fixes happen and the Linux device drivers history.

The trick is making sure operators "get" the idea of open source software as a real business value both on the cost and revenue side. It's not a religion or philosophy. We have some work to do but I know Dave can hang in there. Hold on -- we're nearly there. With open source and open standard your mobile life will change (and it will be finally integrated with your web life).

Is SyncML slow? Who cares ;-)

Last week another person asked me: "is SyncML slow?". This is a question I get often, due to a campaign launched by some that claim to have a proprietary protocol 20% faster than SyncML.

Let me start answering the question with a couple of questions:

1. Is HTML the best language to design pages? I do not think so... It is actually pretty bad and it was even worst at the beginning. Though, it is easy to read, and learn. And it is a standard. It created the Internet phenomenon that changed our lives. AJAX has been invented to go around it and kick off Web 2.0 (not sure what it is, but it appears to be a cool thing).

2. Is HTTP the best protocol to transmit data? I do not think so... It is actually fairly limited, not fast but easy to read and learn. And it is a standard. Millions of users use it every day.

Now, what about SyncML? Well, it is based on XML. It has some overhead. That makes it easy to read and learn, exactly as HTML and HTTP. Is it a standard? You bet. It is installed today on some 700 millions devices.

Just because of it, I am starting to feel better about that 20% difference. I would go with an open standard over a proprietary standard any day. I would bet Stefano could write a protocol 20% faster than HTTP overnight. Unfortunately, it would not be likely that 700M people would use it. So we stick with the standard as we did in 1994, when we decided to go with HTML and HTTP.

One more thing about SyncML and, in particular, version 1.2 with push email: this is not browsing. You are not waiting for a page to download. You hear beep when your email is already on your device. The 20% difference means you will hear beep a few milliseconds before me. Big deal. SyncML might be slower than a proprietary protocol, but it is easy to read and learn, it is a standard available on almost every device on the planet and you do not even notice the difference in speed. Who cares about proprietary protocols? I certainly don't.

 

500,000 downloads

This morning I checked on the ObjectWeb website the official number of downloads of the Funambol project and I saw we passed 500,000. Wow. Half a million downloads. Sometimes it is hard to believe even for me. In particular, when I see that more than half of them came in this year alone (and we have been alive and kicking since 2001...). The power of the community, a sign of good timing and a testament of mobile open source being the next big thing: I really believe we'll be the engine of the mobile Internet. Scary ;-)

ActiveSync, SyncML and the evil empire

I have always admired Microsoft. I guess I am one of the few open source people with sincere admiration for Microsoft. Not really for the quality of their software (you need open source for that), but because they have been able to hold on a cash cow while they could afford to make a lot of mistakes to find the new revenue stream. When they have been successful, they have made it with a Trojan horse.

What is the last success of Microsoft? I would say Internet Explorer. It was ten years ago. And it was free (as in beer) software. Mediocre quality, never improved for lack of competition (now it is coming, so they are moving again). But it was its Trojan horse to control the web. And they still control it (even if Google is putting up a good fight).

The cash cow are Windows, Office and Exchange. Period. Enough to create a monopoly of insane magnitude.

What's next? Mobile, of course. There is a paradigm shift to mobile, they cannot miss it.

What is their Trojan horse there? ActiveSync. Forget about Windows Mobile, they know they will not be able to control the mobile OS market, as they did with the desktop market. They tried with the server market and failed. Nobody will allow them to succeed in it. I heard a nice story once: "I told my daughter not to use the hammer because she could get hurt. She used anyway. She got hurt. She cried. She came back and said she won't do it again. I know she won't." Mobile device manufacturer will not allow Microsoft to do what they did to PC manufacturers.

So... why ActiveSync? Because it is the link between the mobile and the fixed world. It is the glue that ties the two worlds, which cannot live separately. Because data synchronization is for mobile what the browser is for the Internet.

On ActiveSync, you move your PIM data (contacts, calendar, etc.), you do messaging (Pocket Outlook), you move files, you move applications, you develop the new crop of mobile software. Applications will be resident on devices. ActiveSync is the trick that Microsoft is using to power the mobile Internet, based on mobile widgets.

ActiveSync is not only on Windows Mobile devices. They are licensing it around like crazy. Symbian has licensed it. Nokia has licensed it. It is on Palm. They are playing with the hammer in their hands...

How good is ActiveSync? Mediocre, as usual. It has been built for desktop synchronization over serial and USB. They extended it to over-the-air synchronization but it was not built for it. It is ugly. The Microsoft Direct Push technology is even worse. It drains the battery on the device and requires an IT Manager to expose Exchange on the Internet. Though, it is getting everywhere. Monopolies have some power.

Now, who is fighting ActiveSync? Is Sun doing it? Is Google doing it? Is IBM doing it? Is Red Hat doing it? Is Oracle doing it? Nope. They haven't seen it coming. The only alternative in the market is SyncML, an open standard by the Open Mobile Alliance. It is installed on 700 million phones, 80% of the devices sold last year. It does what ActiveSync does and much better (built for over-the-air sync from day one). It is a grass root movement, probably also because of Funambol with our huge community and our 500,000 downloads. It is a phenomenal success. We are fighting the evil empire on its new battle. We discovered the Trojan horse. We are pointing to it. However, we do not have the marketing power of Microsoft... I guess we could use some help ;-)

Do not let ActiveSync get into your network...It is the new Trojan horse of the evil empire. Go with SyncML. Do not let them lock you in once again. Man, they are good!!

Funambol named a Red Herring 100 company

Pretty cool news today. We have been named one of the top "100 Private North American Firms Driving the Future of Technology" by Red Herring. Looking at the list, I am very glad to be in with Sling Media, Zimbra, Jajah and Mozilla. Red Herring claims they picked Google and eBay in the past and they are good at this: let's hope they are right :-)

One thing I noticed on the list: there is a pretty good amount of companies building solution around open source. Together wth Funambol, there is Zimbra, Pentaho, EnterpriseDB, Mozilla, BlackDuck, Collabnet. Probably even more that I never heard about. Or at least, I would guess that 99 out of 100 are using open source software. I should put a prize up for the person who finds the one not using open source...