Content Log

Adobe embeds Alfresco Repository

It's been quite a while in the making, but I am very pleased with the news today that Adobe will be embedding Alfresco technology as part of its LiveCycle Suite. A while ago, I wrote a blog about embeddable content repositories. It was clear then and more clear now that the old generation of content repositories is not really designed to be embedded as part of content-oriented applications. Yet, we all know that there is more information in content than there is in databases. Why can't applications use a set of services for managing content the way they manage data in embedded databases?

On this particular news, ComputerWorld reports Raja Hammond, Group Manager for Adobe LiveCycle, as saying, "Alfresco has a fantastic lightweight installation. It is J2EE server-based, so it is very much aligned with our architecture. We're able with this release to totally embed it. We've done extensive customization to the UIs to add additional capabilities to them. We've integrated them tightly with the various solution components within LiveCycle."

At InfoWorld, Brian Wick, Director of Product Marketing at Adobe said, "It's much easier, much quicker for our customers to build LiveCycle apps with the content services piece built in." This should be the sentiment of any product manager whose product handles content. This clearly the case of LiveCycle which handles potentially huge numbers of PDFs and forms.

Over at CMS Watch, Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a long-time ECM observer, blogged on the announcement that, "It's been a while since there was a big product announcement in the ECM world, but today's announcement by Adobe that they will be embedding Alfresco into their LiveCycle Enterprise Suite will doubtless garner a few headlines. Alfresco, the UK-based open source ECM company, has certainly done a great job of marketing themselves since their launch a couple of years back, stealing some limelight from more established and much bigger vendors such as Interwoven, Vignette, and OpenText. The question we have to ask is whether this announcement is another marketing   triumph, or whether it suggests something more substantial. First off is the fact that it is a real OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) deal, and the technology will actually get embedded into the Adobe offering, so it is more than simply a paper partnership."

It is also significant that the Alfresco platform is open source. Open source allowed Adobe and our dozens of other OEMs to try out Alfresco before even approaching us. Open source also provides a level of comfort and confidence in a platform for services like content services and content repository. It is much better than providing code in escrow. it actually provides a community as well to ensure the long-term success of the platform.

We look forward to a fruitful and simbiotic relationship with Adobe. We believe that this is the beginning of looking at content management as a peer of database management of an essential component of any enterprise-class application. Congratulations to Adobe on all the hard work and the new release.

MySQL Acquisition and Enterprise Software

In a software industry that had little innovation and created obstacles for the next class of rising companies, open source is turning enterprise software on its head. Xen Source, Zimbra and JBoss are now part of larger companies acquiring new technologies and new distribution models by leveraging the power of open source. Now we see that MySQL has been acquired by Sun for $1 billion. Sun has been embracing open source more and more under Jonathan Schwartz's watch as CEO and this can be seen as a logical next step in that strategy.

Marten Mickos, a happy man and a really nice guy.

When we started Alfresco, we came in with the assumption that one of the only things that is working in enterprise software is open source. The past year or so have proven this prediction right. Although it wasn't really my prediction. A meeting with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL in 2002, helped me understand that, yes, open source really could work. Up to that point, I was of the same opinion as Bill Gates, that open source is equivalent to communism. MySQL helped me understand the power of huge numbers of people using software and the value that support can provide to fund the development of professional software. The fact that the model works means that small open source companies can thrive in an environment of behemoths consolidating stacks and actually create an environment of innovation.

David Axmark and Monty Widenius, founders of MySQL

When a category has been around long enough that customers know what they want, then open source works really well. MySQL provided a simple, cost-effective database system that meant that you didn't have to install a big, hulking Oracle, DB2 or SQL Server and more importantly, you didn't even have to pay for it. You just pay for support. JBoss did the same thing for app servers, Xen Source for virtualization systems and Zimbra for email. Some people question whether MySQL was really innovating, after all the set of SQL is the same as Oracle had in the early 90's. In reality, there wouldn't be a Web 2.0 or possibly even a Web 1.0 without MySQL. MySQL pioneered the model of Scale Out rather than Scale Up to provide web properties like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc. to scale to levels that were unthinkable in Oracle back in the 90s. JBoss, Xen and Zimbra were doing the same to their respective industries and bigger companies were willing to pay for that.

From our perspective at Alfresco, Sun is a great company to acquire MySQL. Sun has proven their alliance and cooperation with open source. And this doesn't change our plans to become a public company. We have created public companies in the past and we intend to in the future. Our sales of support and development of our community have exceeded our expectations and events like this make us even more determined that IPO can be successful for the development of the Alfresco system and the Alfresco community.

Congratulations to Marten and team and good luck in the future. We are looking forward to more successful collaborations and joint deployments of Alfresco and MySQL.

Open Source IPOs in 2008

Matthew Aslett at the 451 Group blogged on a Fortune article on IPOs in 2008 noting that 3 of the top 5 are open source including MySQL, Ingres and SugarCRM, all of which are partners of Alfresco and good friends. The 4th is an open source project sponsor, Parallels. The Fortune noted that even if a recession is coming that doesn't mean that business still don't need to innovate or cut costs.

On MySQL, the company most likely to go first, Matt says:

"MySQL has been talking up its IPO credentials for some time, and a 2008 offering was always more likely than 2007. The plan has not changed as far as The 451 Group is aware. What has changed is that the company has stopped being so open about its financial performance, which is typical of a company preparing to go public. Previously the company publicly claimed revenue of $50m in 2006 and $34m in 2005. Expect an IPO sooner rather than later."

The disruptive nature of open source and its low cost development and distribution model will ultimately thrive in a recessionary environment. The result could be very similar to previous recessions that created much bigger markets for mini-computers, relational databases, PCS, client/server and web-based technologies that ultimately cut costs of using older technology and made people more productive. The same will be true for the current generation of open source tools, applications and technologies. Companies just won't be able to afford using the old technology just because it is there.

A Manifesto for Social Computing in the Enterprise

Investment in the infrastructure of the internet has dramatically increased bandwidth to everyone in the developing world and created home computers that are not only inexpensive, but very powerful. This change has expanded the usage of the internet exponentially and introduced new demographics and generations of users that had not used computing prior to the expansion of the internet. These users have themselves created the content and applications that feed the internet and have set expectations of the applications that we use in web browsers and new mobile devices. The increased bandwidth has made this experience much more interactive and visual experience encompassing video and visual elements. Web properties such as YouTube, Google, Amazon, Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr have set the benchmark for expression, accessibility and social interaction of computing systems.

Dubbed Web 2.0, this revolution in computing has shifted the face of software from a logical, linear, and introverted science to an expressive, graphical and social art. New designers of web sites, unschooled in traditional software techniques, are nonetheless able to create software that scales to millions of users and billions of objects of information and still meld those users into an artistically aware community. The next generation of enterprise employees who started using the internet in their early teens have only known this evolving culture of free and creative development of the internet and now demand better of the enterprise software that they meet. Older employees also know that that the software that they use on a day to day basis can be better. Enterprise 2.0 seeks to emulate the success of Web 2.0 in the creation of new software for the enterprise.

Social Computing

The shift of computing power from business logic and calculation to socialization and people-orientation has been dubbed by some as Social Computing. The term Social Computing has been used interchangeably with Enterprise 2.0 or Enterprise Social Applications, however, IBM and Microsoft have created Social Computing research centers and Forrester has started to use the term in describing next generation enterprise collaboration. Social Computing is the use of technology to support sharing of information and enabling collaboration through social networks and to tap into the value of the “Wisdom of Crowds”, a concept made famous by James Surowiecki in 2004 to explain how many people are smarter than individual experts. Social Computing exploits software oriented toward people and Social Networks, the extended relationships of individuals, to connect to more people and access the Wisdom of Crowds.

To tap into the wisdom and awareness of social networks and empower people to collaborate at any time or place, Social Computing platforms need the following capabilities:

• People - Support information about people, their preferred communications, their relationships and affiliations, since social networking is all about people rather than just systems, data and objects. The more information available about other users, the more likely they can be found as a source of knowledge.
• Context of Networks - Social networks organized around projects, teams and departments provide the context of work and relevance of information as it spreads from creation to the people that need that information. Social networks, especially networks extended beyond the enterprise, provide the greatest differentiation of social computing from previous generations of collaboration.
• Social Collaboration - Provide an environment where people can share ideas, contribute knowledge and solve problems in creative, unstructured socialization as opposed to rigorous workflows that are required for control of information. Next generation tools use techniques developed by Web 2.0, particularly those tools that empower social knowledge, such as social tagging, integration of communication and awareness of changes in social networks.
• Content as a Service - Content is the container of knowledge and information and is core to the socialization of information. Content needs to be accessible everywhere, not just in large, monolithic applications. Content capabilities need to be accessible as reusable service components. Social computing can happen inside the enterprise or outside and a channel can be a web site, web application, mobile device or even external web platforms such as Facebook or Google applications. Mashups can occur inside the enterprise or outside and the channel will require content as a service that can securely be accessed wherever it is needed or wherever it is contributed.
• People-centric Tools - As Web 2.0 has spread new paradigms of user interaction, the consumerization of software has created expectations that enterprise software becomes easier and empowers user to contribute, correct and classify content and information within the context of social networks. AJAX and next generation rich internet application interfaces such as Adobe Flex will provide users with a much richer, more intuitive user experience and the ability to scan much more social knowledge to find ideas and solutions. These tools should themselves be componentized and accessible as a service so that they may be mashed up with other sources of social knowledge.

This does not mean that the need for traditional enterprise content technologies such as document and records management goes away. They are still repositories of the truth and verifiable information and thus play an important role in sharing knowledge within social networks. However, these traditional technologies lack the usability, empowerment, and breadth of reach that Web 2.0 sites provide. They lack the collaborative nature that invites in people without barriers and restrictions to contribute to the sharing of knowledge and information. Web content management for creating a richer Web 2.0-style user interface becomes even more important to this collaboration to provide a compelling face to the interaction and to simplify the access and navigation of shared information. Enterprise Content Management cannot become one of the principle platforms of Social Computing unless it addresses the requirements of Social Applications.

Use of Social Computing

The balance is shifting from contained and controlled companies to engaged and empowered collaborative enterprises driven by Web 2.0-inspired social computing. At the center of the shift from old models of computing in the enterprise to new social models are companies that are inspired to innovate or to engage more with their customers. This includes companies not just using their internet or intranet web sites, but engaging in social networking channels such as Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace. Those using social computing are interested in engaging people, such as customers, employees or partners. They are using new people-centric tools and facilitate creating or extending existing social networks.

Major ECM vendors are all planning their Social Computing efforts and to a large extent are being dragged in this direction by their more forward-looking customers. Enterprises that have discovered the value of Social Computing are:

• Consumer-oriented companies that particularly address a younger demographic must engage their customers as part of both the marketing process as well as the development of new products. For example, games and film companies that engage their viewers in plot and scene development do much better than those that keep everything under wraps until the game or film is ready.
• Enterprises hiring a new generation of knowledge workers who grew up on the internet must provide tools as empowering as those available from Web 2.0. Turning these tools off forces these workers to seek employment elsewhere and forcing them to use tools that do not meet their expectations of usability and engagement.
• Financial Services firms are leading the shift in usage of these technologies. Financial Services have always been innovators in developing new technologies and investing in providing better service for their clients. Speed in innovation in these services becomes a major competitive advantage where churn of clients can be very high in turbulent times. Internally, competition for talent is intense and providing better support is important for attracting and retaining employees. In particular, young and ambitious brokers and managers are more likely to be sociable themselves and seek out Social Computing inside and outside the enterprise.
• Government and Non-Profit organizations that provide services and citizen feedback online find increasing their IT budgets much easier than those that merely arbitrated by a front-line service. It is now inconceivable for an American politician to run for office without an extended internet presence such as Facebook or YouTube.
• Enterprises that have faster cycles of product innovation, especially high tech, are looking to their customers and partners to participate in the development of new products and services. In previous generations, the field acted as a filtering mechanism of new customer requirements and ideas. However, today technology can provide a frictionless way of getting the entire enterprise to exchange ideas and improvements with the customer communities.

Integrating Social Computing

Because Social Computing is unlikely to come from a single source, especially because of the diversity of sources of knowledge and social networks available on Web 2.0, it is extremely important for the enterprise infrastructure for Social Computing to be integrated with those sources. This means bring these sources into the enterprise and bring the enterprise sources out to Web 2.0. No matter where the people collaborating are, the tools they want should be available. To facilitate this, the Social Computing should be:

• Open Source - Through being developed through social computing paradigms and sharing best of breed components with the open source community, open source systems have evolved rapidly and encompass social computing capabilities developed by the open source community. Social tools such as MediaWiki, the wiki that powers Wikipedia, and WordPress, the most popular blogging software were developed using open source.
• Integrating the Inside Out - By providing content as a service and enabling light-weight, Web-Oriented scripting development, the Social Computing platform should quickly integrate content services into external channels and web sites, such as Facebook and iGoogle, to allow enterprises to engage customers, partners and home workers.
• Integrating the Outside In - If the Social Computing platform is modular and supports a Web 2.0-style mashup-oriented architecture, it enables users and teams to integrate external open source tools and social networking web services, such as Facebook, LinkedIn or other Open Social-enabled properties, to tap into the wisdom of crowds available on the internet and to make customers and partners part of team collaboration.
• REST-style Architecture - A Web 2.0-style or REST-style of architecture using easy, light-weight scripting languages and integrated through internet standards-based APIs can easily mash-up content services into any web-oriented application or web site. These architectures should be scalable, fault-tolerant and high performance to meet any enterprise or internet requirement.
• Choice - The Social Computing platform should be based upon open interfaces developed by the open source community to provide choice of operating system, database, application server, content authoring tools or APIs.

Over the past year and continuing into the coming year, Alfresco is dedicated to expanding its architecture and applications to enable this vision of Social Computing. We will work with partners and open source community to provide best of breed open source tools for enabling this architecture. We will integrate with external Social Computing properties such as Facebook and the Open Social alliance to expand the breadth of social networks and the ability to collaborate through those networks. We will be expanding the Alfresco system’s understanding of users as people and facilitate sharing of information and content through their networks. We will be open in the process and seek and encourage your feedback and participation.

Open Source and Business Pleasure vs. Business Pain

A European PR firm was pitching my company for business last week and putting out a few ideas on how to generate demand in different countries across Europe. One of the ideas that they presented was a “business pain barometer” to indicate how much pain companies might be feeling using existing enterprise systems. This didn’t exactly resonate as a value proposition for open source, but it is a tried and true campaign strategy for traditional enterprise systems. Selling pain relief has worked for the last three decades to sell enterprise software, but has it run its course?

Read the rest of this entry »

IT Conversations - An Open Source Convert

About a week ago, I participated in a podcast for IT Conversations to discuss Alfresco, open source and content management. It was part of Phil Windley's Technometria series where Phil is an amiable host talking about IT experiences with people involved in the industry. It's really informal and I practically ended up talking about my life history with Phil, Scott Lemon and Ben Galbraith. I hope I don't bore you, but I also discuss what enterprise content management is and where Alfresco is heading.

Phil Windley

I guess the thing that struck Phil was that I once didn't believe in open source. Like Bill Gates, I thought open source was Communism. It took a conversation with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL, back in 2001 to convince me otherwise.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Where Have All the Einsteins Gone?

And where are the Mozarts and Shakespeares? And how might this be related to open source? I think about the Einstein question every time I see Steven Hawking, such as news reports about his recent zero G flight, or whenever I see a program on Cosmology such as on the BBC's Horizon (the original source of a lot of PBS Nova programs) last night.

 

"You can't catch me!"

There are three answers that I have been pondering. The first is that there are so many Einsteins, Mozarts and Shakespeares that they seem commonplace and un-extraordinary. Perhaps we are being bombarded by so many General Theories of Relativity that it fills us with boredom rather than wonder.

The second answer is that they are too busy making their next million. This is certainly the case in the field of computer science. Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and now Google are too busy snapping up the next great mind rather than that person going into public research. After my professors at Berkeley started Ingres and it was successful, all the other professors at Berkeley enviously pursued a similar university/corporate path, probably to the detriment of the research. Physics PhD students are being snapped up at huge salaries to work on quant products for the financial services industry.

The third answer came after reading (well really listening to an audio book in the car) of Wikinomics, a book that I came across recently. The authors point out that the tightening of intellectual property laws over the last 30 years and the awarding of patents to research institutions in universities. Rather than encouraging innovation, this strengthening of intellectual property and its relative worth has diminished the collaboration that has created the breakthrough discoveries of the past. Their solution is to introduce open source processes that will unleash the creativity of many times the number of people looking at the same data and eliminate the duplication that is caused by closing off processes to protect them.

Einstein, Mozart and Shakespeare lived in very different times when it was alright to copy and be influenced by other people. The line of plagiarism was much further out and just like pornography - you know it when you see it. The sharing of ideas and the university paradigm of competitive cooperation to the benefit of all can breed a new generation of breakthrough discoveries. According to Wikinomics, we are on verge of a new era based upon such collaboration and participation.

Whether this will create new Einsteins depends on which cause has decimated their numbers. Are there too many? Are they too busy? Or are they too stymied by the bureaucracy of IP protection? Or it could be that we are all dumber because of television.

Adobe to Open Source Flex

I was flabbergasted when Adobe wrote me earlier this week to ask me for a quote for their move to open source Flex. Flex is a platform for building rich internet applications in Flash through an application description language MXML and Javascript-variant called ActionScript and a set of server side classes to support the creation of these along with access to various data sources. Adobe is open sourcing the SDK, compilers and documentation. To see how powerful the Flex platform is, take a look on the Flex web site. These screenshots don't do justice to the interactivity that Flex provides over an AJAX application.

You can drag and drop paint on a wall in this Flex-enabled Sherwin-Williams paint site.

I like to think that Alfresco had something to do with Adobe going open source with Flex. As long as Flex was not open source, we couldn't really incorporate it into our solutions or Web Content Management framework. We made the argument to Adobe's management that if Flex were open source, not only could we use it, but it could take off as fast as other open source web projects and perhaps define the next generation of the web.

The Alfresco developers definitely wanted to use it to build applications. Since it uses Flash, Flex eliminates a lot of the idiosyncrasies of the various web browsers. But look at the capabilities that Flex adds to SAP's dashboards. That is the real reason that the developers wanted to use it.

This SAP process designer provides you with all interactivity of fat client, but can also be used in a web page.

The Adobe/Macromedia web products such as ColdFusion have lost ground to all the PHP solutions out there. This move by Adobe, along with their new Apollo platform, could revolutionize how we use the web. Things that couldn't really be done is a web application can now be done - or at least now in open source. This will have a profound impact on business intelligence, charting, real-time monitoring, rich graphical navigation, dynamic content, any sort of drill down, mashed up video and a host of other capabilities that we have really only seen in fat clients. Now that Flex is open source, it releases the creativity of an exponentially larger set of developers to explore and innovate.

Yahoo Maps can provide a higher level of capabilities and interactivity using Flex than Google Maps.

Convergence of Content and Data Management?

Tony Byrne announced that he is hosting a panel on convergence between enterprise data and content management and poses it as a question - will structured and unstructured information management converge? My short answer is no, but that answer has a complicated reason behind it. Much of it has to do with the fact that the larger stack of enterprise software is consolidating around it. Here are some of Apoorv Durga's comments on convergence as well.

"Oh really?"

I have lived in both worlds having worked with relational databases since 1977, being one of the founding engineers at Ingres and then co-founding Documentum with Howard Shao. While at Documentum, we explored what content was and how it was different from databases. Over the years my early bigotry in favor of a purely relational view of the world has given way toward a more relaxed view of how content is structure, indexed and managed. While starting Alfresco, we had the opportunity to start from scratch but still used some of the concepts that have proven effective in capturing and delivering information to users.

The relationship between relational databases and content management is like nuclear physics and organic chemistry. Relational database provides the mechanics to make data and information happen and content management builds upon that. Relational databases provide the transaction controls to ensure data integrity, the back-up tools to make sure that information is recoverable, replication to move data from one location to another, and the query, data manipulation and relationship tools to handle much more complex structures. Content management is more like the organic chemistry of information, combining information and relating it to human beings to make it more usable and consumable. The structures, processes, and models of content are different from other classes of information management. However, just like organic chemistry, content management may combine with other classes of application just as relational databases have. We are just missing the standardization and theoretical foundations of content management that have supported relational constructs.

What makes content management different from data management is how close it is to people. To make content useful, the people who create the information need to understand how it will be used. Content needs to be compelling, original, concise and understandable. Content has context that only humans can provide and only humans can use. This means that the services around content are more about change than integrity. Integrity is important, but that’s why the database is there. There is a whole rich set of services there to deal with transformation, change process, classification, publishing, versioning, content to content relationships, links and a whole bunch of other things that databases just don’t "think" about. Search may be yet another system that has no relational database at all, but should use the concepts that have been built up by the content management system. That’s why content management systems are separate systems built upon relational databases and integrated with separate search systems.

Since the inception of content management, the content management vendors have by and large continued to support the notion of a repository sitting on top of a relational database and integrated with a separate search system. Interestingly, many of the main vendors of ECM are now the database management companies - IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. This should not be surprising since content management is now one of the fastest growing segments of database applications. Even so, these companies have chosen to layer their content management software on top of their relational database systems. The database groups are then free to focus on data management as their core competency. Databases support not just content management, but transactional systems and analytical business intelligence systems. Internal to these companies, the database groups have not really subsumed the content groups. Microsoft flirted with the idea of combining everything into one server group, but unwound that decision to have Sharepoint in the Office group. IBM’s content group reported into the DB2 group, but remained independent and it remains to be seen where it ends up after the FileNet acquisition. Oracle’s content group has wandered all over the organization since Oracle first attempted to build content systems in the late 1980s.

The non-database vendors of content management - EMC, OpenText, Interwoven, Vignette and Alfresco - still use relational databases in the management of content and layer their services above a database. Interwoven tried to not use databases to improve performance in the early days and took a very XML-based approach to managing, categorizing and controlling content, but this ended up being a losing proposition to companies worried about integrity. EMC sees a future that is independent of all these stack war issues in that people will always need storage and that content management is really about managing storage. They are essentially above (or below) the stack wars, but don’t be surprised to see them try to architect the database out of the equation. OpenText, Interwoven and Vignette look to either get acquired or get out of the way. At Alfresco, we believe that open source is the open alternative to the stack wars, which I will speak about later. The motivation of each is not the convergence of content and data, but the consolidation of the ECM stack at one level and the entire enterprise software stack at another with fewer and fewer players.

From Kathy Sierra's blog

What is happening at the macro business layer is that entire application stacks are consolidating to manage the data of record. IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and SAP are all vying to own the data and make themselves as sticky as possible. Each has Service-Oriented Architecture to make it possible to surround that data and to integrate it with other stacks when necessary. Data in the case of content management is simply the data about the content and is not a whole lot different than customer data as far as these stacks are concerned. These stacks need the checklist of the big items that enterprise customers are buying in order to build or integrate applications. This includes relational database, content management, business intelligence, build and test environment, system administration, and all sorts of XML stuff. Most of these, with the exception of IBM, have gobbled up the top application layer including CRM and ERP. SAP flirted with the database layer in alliance with MySQL, but seems to have abandoned this strategy. It could be though content management may be a common stack component if SAP goes out and purchases an ECM vendor. Content has become an important part of the data being managed and these SOA stacks will just link it like any other data.

Despite the relentless consolidation of these stacks, sucking in the ECM market with it, total integration of all systems into a single stack is impossible. At best, these stacks are fighting for a bigger piece of the enterprise pie by displacing smaller players. Enterprises are trying to go from a choice of 25 different systems to 3, but not down to one. Microsoft building Sharepoint organically can exclude other databases other than SQL Server, but lose a chunk of the market in the process. Will IBM really limit FileNet to only DB2? Will Oracle lock Stellent only to its database? Well maybe, but a totally integrated stack does not solve all problems of enterprise process or control. Likewise, SOA has not delivered on the promise of interoperability, despite the billions of dollars spent by IBM, Microsoft and major enterprises. Nor does it move far outside of back-office systems and into the front-office systems and web sites where most of the value is presented to an enterprise’s customers. It does not deliver the conversation with its customers that enterprises are increasingly demanding.

From Kathy Sierra's blog

There is a lot happening out in the world of the Internet that is making this whole notion of data versus content irrelevant. Web 2.0 has moved the conversation from the whole notion of bits and bytes into what matters is the content, people and the relationships between people and content. Web 2.0 says that people don’t care about data and structure, but in communicating with each other and building closer relationships. This notion is seeping into the enterprise software space with the class of software known as Enterprise 2.0. It is still early days, but billions of dollars of value have already been built upon the foundations of Web 2.0 and those foundations are at least 90% open source.

Open source has provided an alternative view of the vertical stacks that are being created by IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and SAP. In this view, open source is the stack and dominated by no one vendor. Each layer of the stack can be substituted with a best of breed open source component. These layers have been constantly rising from the operating system to the database to the app server and now the application layers. These application layers look a lot different than the enterprise stacks though. Rather than integrating at the depths of the infrastructure in a structured SOA, they are “mashing up” near the user and making it much easier for more providers to create new services and applications not depending on any particular stack. In fact, the stack is irrelevant as long as it is freely available. How many people really know what is behind Amazon, Google, Yahoo or Saleforce.com? The answer is a lot of open source, but which open source doesn’t matter a bit to the end users of those systems. At Alfresco, we are one layer in that open source stack and the user is free to choose that component or any other in the open source stack.

I plan on attending this session and seeing what others think.

Theory X, Theory Y and Theory O

I was speaking to a friend the other week about his relationship with his boss and how he always tells him what to do. This made me think about my first management courses back at Ingres. Because we had so many people straight out of Berkeley, few people were trained as managers and most had no role models to emulate.

In this first course, we were presented the concepts of Theory X and Theory Y. Although we weren’t told the history behind these theories, they were developed in the 1960’s and based upon Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Theory X is about taking a pessimistic view of employees and don’t trust them. Theory X managers generally take an authoritarian stance with their employees and work better in control-oriented organizations. Theory Y states that employees may be striving for the higher level of Maslow’s hierarchy and searching for creativity and problem solving. Theory Y managers provide encouragement and trust for employees fulfilment. The end of the management course suggested that we as new managers should seek to balance between the two. Apparently, this is now considered a very old fashioned view of management and has been incorporated into other theories.

Maslow's Hierarchies of Needs

What dawned on me after my conversation with my friend was that this describes the difference in attitudes between closed and open source. Control over the source code and intellectual property is very Theory X. I constantly get questions about how can you trust giving out the source code. Theory Y describes very much the motivations behind open source and those that contribute code and make their code openly available to others. I have read that what motivates most contributors is not any zealotry, but a desire to be recognized by their peers and to express themselves creatively in communal problem solving. This fits neatly into the higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy.

The open source process is becoming more mainstream in the economy as a whole. Open collaboration between employees, customers and partners yields more results when you are not worried about holding back information. In fact, I have found the whole process incredibly liberating. Perhaps it is worth looking at these theories again and recognize that we are shifting to Theory Y just as we are shift to more right-brain approaches. Maybe we need a Theory O for Open Source.