Closing the blog, opening a new one

So, this is it, I arrived to the end of this blog. It’s been almost four years since I opened “Embracing Open Sources” and now after 100 posts this is going to be my last writing here. It has been a great experience and I have learned a lot. Keeping a blog open has forced me to think deeply about the matters I was going to write about. It has also taught me what a blog really is and how to work with it. And it has helped me to keep and create professional contacts. I just hope it has also been useful to somebody else

I have made a selection of the top 10 posts of this blog. Most of them are summaries and comments on other people’s articles or presentations but, anyway, for me that’s already valuable

Untangle tangling with eBox
The MySQL model
Web 2.0 is dead
The art of negotiation
Chris Anderson talking about “Free” (as in free beer)
From “Internet Traffic” to “Open Source Community”
The Wapit story
Launching a virtual company
Phases of maturity of OSS ecosystems
Sun’s open source business strategy

At this very moment I am opening a new blog, Learning to Fly, where I will be reflecting my experiences and the lessons I learn during my new professional challenges launching eBox as a sustainable company. See you there!

New professional challenges

129 days since my last post in this blog. The earth has completed one third of a circle around the sun. 44 million people have been born and 20 million people have died on earth. Around 18.000 species have disappeared on the planet. And there is a new president at the White House. All of this and much more happened since my last post.

But what could keep me so long for posting? Work, it couldn’t be otherwise. Over a year ago we considered that eBox had already enough entity to become a company by itself, so we span it out from Warp, creating eBox Technologies S.L., getting some seed funding and starting to develop its own business model. Well, the whole past twelve months have been focused mostly on building the new organization and hiring the right people. By December, when I wrote my last post, we had already an excellent technical team (lead by our beloved CTO, Javier Uruen) and we started the enormous task of forming the management team, which until then consisted basically on I, me and myself. Now, it is up and running, and it looks really promising, with Javi Vázquez as our operations officer, Heidi as our marketing officer, Koke as our IT officer and (last but not least) Esther as our happiness officer.

However, that was not the only professional challenge I have been facing. By the same time when we founded eBox Technologies, the companies in the region decided to join and founded an association of open source businesses, where I was chosen the president. It sounds very glamorous but I can assure that being the president of a just born association means a lot of work and no glamor at all. So, we created CESLA, defined a strategic plan during 2008 and in the last few months we have been putting this plan into practice, launching the first projects and organizing the first CESLA event.

Moreover, being the main responsible for CESLA included also a site on the board of AEIA, the regional IT association. During the last few months AEIA has suffered a full renovation, including board, strategy, management, statute and even name and logo. It will be all presented in ten days, so stay tuned

And finally, right after its foundation CESLA got integrated in Asolif, the federation of open source businesses in Spain, which guarantees a site on the board for the president of each regional association. Asolif was founded around the same time as CESLA, so it needed a similar effort to be launched. Now it is finally organized and with a growing activity, thanks to the actions taken by its president Dani and its new manager Agustín.

So many things have happened in the past months. I have learned a lot and met a bunch of interesting people. My context, goals and responsibilities have changed. My points of view have evolved. I think this is a good moment to start a new stage as a blogger, close this blog and start a new one with a different approach, lined up with the new challenges I am currently facing. More information in my next (and last) post in this blog

eBox among the top 8 general security solutions

Masters in Criminal Justice recently posted an article with the 100 Best Open Source security tools, and eBox was included among the top 8 general security tools. It seems a pretty broad list, including a very wide range of solutions from monitoring to email, encryption or even my favorite Internet browser, and most of the tools that I would propose for a top 100 are actually included.

We were very gladly surprised to find our product listed here and it proves that eBox is gaining ground as a serious option. And I can endorse this, as during the last months I have been barely able to reply to all the request for proposals and partnership applications that we have received

Presenting Innovate!Europe 2008

Last Monday, the new, reviewed format of Innovate!Europe was presented at Instituto de Empresa. You might already know that the Innovate!Europe is the European version of the hugely successful Demo event, the launchpad for emerging technologies in America, and that it has been organised yearly in Zaragoza since 2005. The past three editions seemed like a copy of the American version brought to this side of the Atlantic (we participated in the 2006 edition and know it from inside). I do believe it was an excellent event, worth participating, but there was something that did not quite fit in. Well, now the organizers have learned the lessons and are trying a new approach.

The main differences from the previous versions are:

• A three stage program, instead of a one-time event
• A national first stage followed by a pan-European second and third stages. In my opinion this is a wise move, and it shows that the organizers have assessed the fact that Europe is not a single and unified entity but a loose union of different markets
• A focus on training and mentoring, instead of showcasing, Another wise move in my opinion. From my past experience in this event, the best you could get was the reviews from experts; showcasing was only the completion of the training
• The first stage is free of charge. Again, another wise decision. When you are a startup and want to participate here you want to spend as few as possible. Paying 2-3K€ upfront is not an easy decision. If you find the first stage worth the time, then you can consider paying for the second stage
• Now there is a prize: the most promising company among the 100 participants from the whole Europe will have the opportunity to spend three months of mentored stay in Silicon Valley

There are still a few things that remain to prove to be the right approach but so far it looks really promising. As soon as I find some time I will apply to participate again (this time as eBox instead of Warp). Let’s see what happens…

Back from the OSWC2008 at Malaga

Last week in Malaga we had the opportunity to attend the 5th Open Source World Conference, a Spanish-centric (despite its name), politics-driven event of megalomaniac proportions with 8,000 visitors. I consider this conference to be the yearly meeting of everyone working on open source in Spain and it is an opportunity of doing a great networking during three days in a row from dawn till dusk and beyond. It was great to meet old and new friends and get updates of everyone’s status. I also felt very flattered with all the good feedback I heard about eBox and our approach

I had the chance to meet most of the people at Cenatic, the National Reference Centre for the Application of Open Source Information and Communication Technologies, which is a relatively new public initiative to orchestrate and promote the national policies around open source software. After talking with them in different contexts and attending some of the events they organized during the conference I am pretty optimistic about Cenatic’s success. I think they have created a group of good professionals who understand and really support open source and know how to collaborate with people from other organizations.

I also had the chance to attend an interesting session by Raven Zachary from The 451 Group who showed a brilliant analysis on the situation of open source business today and some perspectives of its evolution for the next years.

The next open source world conference will be in one year in Caceres, Extremadura. See you there!

And eBox 1.0(rc1) was presented

As I announced previously, eBox 1.0 (the first release candidate of 1.0, to be more accurate) was publicly presented last Tuesday in an event hosted at the Aragon Institute of Technology in front of some 120 managers and professionals of the IT industry in the region. During the event we unveiled the commercial strategy and the business development plan that we are following with eBox. We also explained how and why we have separated eBox from Warp, founding a new spin-off to get to the market and continue its development. From the feedback that I heard at the end of the event, people were surprised and impressed about eBox, both because of the level of its innovation and because of the business approach and results that we are having already now. It was also quite impressive (and emotional) to hear the representatives of the Government of Aragon and the City of Zaragoza praising both Warp and eBox as two great show cases

The event has had a lot of media coverage in the printed regional papers and on the online sites, such as europapress, aragoninvestiga, cenatic, opensourceworldconference or somoslibres.org among many others.

But this was not the only interesting activity on the week: on Saturday the City of Zaragoza organized (with the support from Warp) the Day of Free Software, an event combining a didactic conference with an install party. It was a great success and some 3,000 CDs of Ubuntu were given for free. It was quite a new sensation to see people queuing with their computers waiting for help to install Ubuntu in their machines.

And now I am at Malaga at the Open Source World Conference which very probably is going to be a very interesting event

Releasing eBox 1.0

In less than two weeks we will be releasing eBox 1.0. It was about time to have a 1.0, after four years of development (three since we opened up the source code of eBox). Well, this is understandable as eBox is a complex technology and we needed to invest a lot of effort before we could have something useful. And there is still plenty of work to do, new modules to code and a tighter integration to implement. But now we have reached the functionality we planned in the start and it is time to celebrate

We are organizing an event to present eBox publicly and invite attendants for a few drinks. We are getting an important support from all the main local and regional public institutions, such as the Government of Aragon, the City of Zaragoza and the Institute of Technology, who will explain how open source is helping to foster innovation.

The event will be held on 14th October at 6 p.m. at the Institute of Technology’s Auditorium. The attendance is free (as in free beer) and open to anyone interested (of course). The official programme of the event is publicly available for download (in Spanish). See you there!

Back from the first OSTTEurope

During the past 21st – 23rd September there was the first European edition of the Open Source Think Tank at Paris Hilton (I mean the hotel at Paris, not the public female-buffoon). I had heard so many good comments about its past editions at Napa Valley, CA, that I wanted to see it with my own eyes. And I was not disappointed.

I loved the format. It was an invitation-only conference gathering a relatively small group of 60-70 business people who belonged to companies strongly related to open source (vendors, system integrators, investors, end customers, etc). We were divided in groups of 6-10 people and had several brainstorming sessions during which we had to discuss a subject and to present our conclusions. It was an excellent way to learn and get everyone involved in generating the knowledge instead of sitting and getting a lecture. Moreover, the networking was much more effective, as during the brainstorming sessions you already had a glimpse on the other people’s ideas.

I learned a lot of business practices of other open source vendors and many opinions about the current situation and where we are heading to. The attendants were a mixture of Europeans and Americans so the variety of opinions was pretty rich, but anyway there were clear patterns and differences between both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe open source has a strong ideological meaning and it is seen as a way to avoid vendor lock-in and to foster local innovation; its adoption is lead mainly by the public sector; OSS vendors look for service-based models and have a channel approach to market. On the other hand, in America the open source adoption is lead by businesses wanting to cut costs; there is an obsession with license compliance and copyright issues; vendors have a product-centric approach to market and dual license is the de facto business model for open source. You can see an excellent summary of these differences in Larry Augustin’s blog, who was also in the think tank.

It was a good conference, one of the few where you can be sure to learn new things and make valuable contacts. I think I can already start booking for the next edition

Blog and webs back from the underworld

You might have realized that we had some issues concerning the availability of our webs, at Warp and eBox, and our blogs. You might also realize that the theme of the blog has changed to the wordpress default. You might also wonder where have all those nice pictures on the right side gone. First, let me apologize for any trouble we might have caused. We hope you did not choose last week-end to try to impress your girlfriend by downloading and installing the very latest version of eBox but found the server down. If that was the case, we are sorry and we are really doing our best to avoid it happening again. You can try again this week-end; I am sure she will be impressed this time

Let’s say we have had some problems with our (ex) hosting providers, who stopped providing service without notice. I will leave the pleasure of explaining the details for those who have been in the front line fighting to recover our data and get our pages back from the underworld. Now everything seems to be working and we can get our lives back to normal, with a different provider of course

Linux finding its place in the desktop

It feels weird not to have written anything in the blog for a whole month. Well, the August holidays (which I used to take a tour around a bunch of beaches: Northern Portugal, Vigo – where Javi was an excellent host -, Zaragoza – yes, we too have a nice little beach! -, Barcelona and Peñiscola) together with some business trips and hectic time before and after the holidays explain mostly this inactivity.

As usual, my return to work was focused on answering emails and reading news, a lot of them regarding Chrome, Google’s last novelty. Although I believe it is good to have another browser in the market and that Chrome has some nice innovations, I do think there is way too much hype with it, as with almost anything coming from the Googleplex.

However, I found some news that went almost unnoticed during August: according to Gartner Linux market share is now 4% of the desktop and it has a fast-grow opportunity in the netbooks (also known as ultra-low-cost notebooks). This should be terrifying news for Redmond. Last year we witnessed how Mac was winning the high-end of the desktop market and this year Linux seems to have good chances to succeed in the low-end. That would leave Windows with the never-attractive middle position: not good enough to compete in differentiation, not efficient enough to compete in costs. By the moment Windows is by far the dominant player of the market and it has lots of financial resources to compete, but its future looks gloomier every day.

Linux has been around for many years and it has managed to reach a first-class position in the server market but, though there have been continuous efforts to push it in the desktop, it has never really succeeded there. The question popping up to our minds is “why now?”. In my opinion there are four major trends converging right now that are lowering or eliminating the main barriers for Linux in the desktop:

1. Linux easiness and usability has improved enormously since Ubuntu entered the game and focused on desktop users. For an average user it is theoretically much easier to work on Ubuntu now than on Windows Vista. But usability alone does not make users to switch massively, right?
2. Desktop applications are moving to the Internet and the operative system is becoming just the platform to run our browser. Window’s greatest value (and the highest barrier for competitors) has always been the ecosystem of applications compatible with its environment, but this value is shrinking fast and moving to the web.
3. The use of Firefox is spreading like wildfire, becoming the #1 browser in some countries. This is forcing web developers to comply with the standards and not create web sites only for Internet Explorer, removing thus another serious barrier for Linux.
4. These trends have allowed hardware vendors to seriously drop prices in their desktop offerings, as users do not require the state-of-the-art in hardware but just an easy and economic way to access the Internet. The results are extremely cheap small laptops designed with connectivity in mind and with a relatively low computer power, which are given even for free by some distributors! The natural choice of the operative system is definitely Linux. Windows Vista is not an option, firstly because it does not allow distributors to create their own brands and customize the look-and-feel of the desktop; secondly, because it would increase the costs of netbooks in some 25%; and thirdly and more important because it would not run properly on such “underequipped” hardware. Moreover, the current economic crisis is going to help this trend and make users more price sensitive.

Interesting times for the desktop market, which in a relatively short time might leave its monopolistic structure and become a more complex environment with very different players.

Untangle tangling with eBox

A few days ago Isaac posted about Untangle’s new marketing strategy, which is to aim for the words ‘ebox’ and ‘ebox-platform’ with Google ads (nothing new so far) and expressly mention eBox in the ad’s headline (Wow! That’s new!). Here is a sample:

Well, tactically there is nothing wrong with it, though in my opinion it is a major strategical error for several reasons:

1. eBox and Untangle are not direct competitors. Untangle is a network access and security software, carefully packaged to be easy to deploy and targeting small organizations. On the other hand, eBox covers many more features such as user, resources, communication and infrastructure management. It is not only carefully packaged but it also implements a very tight integration of different services, automating most of the tasks and avoiding the possibility of misconfiguring the network. It has a development framework and a web services interface to easily extend its functionality and connect with other applications. Finally, current eBox users range from home offices (eBox in a single installation) to large organizations with several thousands of users (eBox installed in several machines optimized for different tasks). In short, Untangle is a niche product, eBox is a multi-niche technology.
2. Efforts should be aimed to compete with close source solutions, already focused in rich segments of the market. There is a load of competitors with a similar market target than Untangle, such as SonicWall, Fortinet, Watchguard or Juniper, and being their open source alternative could be easy to position and a good long-term move.
3. Untangle is a California-based company with almost 20 M$ funds in series A and B. eBox is a self-funded startup in Spain. With such ads Untangle is positioning itself at a similar level than eBox from a market point of view. Technically there is no doubt that eBox is superior in most aspects, but Untangle has way more funds to develop a more established market position than eBox. However, they choose to show to the market that we are at a similar level. I have nothing against it but I do not think it is very clever to do so. In fact, I feel flattered and they have given us a good story to tell investors, like “Hey! Without any external funds we made a 20 M$ backed, California-based company feel threatened. Don’t you think we might be a good investment opportunity?”. Thanks, dudes!

Famously Wrong Predictions

Surfing the Internet I found an extremely interesting post about famously wrong predictions. The article made me think about how easily people give opinions of matters they don’t fully understand. Then I started making some research on my own to try to find other similarly wrong predictions and I got to this quote by our old friend Bill Gates:

“… there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with … nobody can ever improve the software.” Bill Gates, 2008

I found it very worrying that at this time, Mr Gates’ ignorance is still so huge, and even more worrying when I thought about how easily people believe so called experts, like him, with no hesitation. So I decided to gather together some more wrong predictions and add them to the previous list in a futile attempt to help increasing critical thinking. I found quite a lot of them in wikiquotes and a comprehensive list about the 1929 crack, very appropriate for the current crisis time. I hope you enjoy the reading as much as I enjoyed the research

Technology

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

“I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.” The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

“But what … is it good for?” Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

“So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.’” Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak’s personal computer.

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.” Bill Gates, 1981

“I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.” Bill Gates, 1987

“Spam will be a thing of the past in two years’ time.” Bill Gates, 2004

“When we have the information highway, I’ll put [information about himself] out there. Everybody who wants to pay, I don’t know, one cent, can see what movies I’m watching and what books I’m reading and certain other information. If I’m still interesting, I’ll rack up dollars as people access that part of the highway.” Bill Gates, 1994

Science

“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

“Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” 1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard’s revolutionary rocket work.

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.” Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

“The energy produced by breaking down the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformations of these atoms is talking moonshine.” Lord Ernest Rutherford

“It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes [nuclear generated] electrical energy too cheap to meter.” Lewis Strauss, Chairman, US Atomic Energy Commission, 1954.

“You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across all of your muscles? It can’t be done. It’s just a fact of life. You just have to accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable condition of weight training.” Response to Arthur Jones, who solved the “unsolvable” problem by inventing Nautilus.

“Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction”. Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872

“The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon”. Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873.

Business

“The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C,’ the idea must be feasible.” A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)

“A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make.” Response to Debbi Fields‘ idea of starting Mrs. Fields’ Cookies.

“If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can’t do this.” Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M “Post-It” Notepads.

“Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.” Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859.

“$100 million dollars is way too much to pay for Microsoft.” IBM, 1982

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” Western Union internal memo, 1876.

“The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?” David Sarnoff’s associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

Arts

“I’m just glad it’ll be Clark Gable who’s falling on his face not Gary Cooper.” Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in “Gone With The Wind.”

“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

“Who the h_ll wants to hear actors talk?” H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.

Warfare

“Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.” Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre.

“I believe there is sincerity and good will on both sides… Now that we have got past [the question of Czechoslovakia] I feel that it may be possible to make further progress along the road to sanity.” Prime Minister Chamberlain, defending his actions