Bickel Blog

To borrow & adapt a line from the Supreme Court, "You know Karma when you see it". Clearly, the Hudson project has had bad Karma hanging over it due to Oracle's moves that forced the re-creation of the project as Jenkins - http://jenkins-ci.org/content/hudsons-future . The idea of forcing most of the community out did not sit well with people, and the resulting fast adoption of Jenkins as the default best open source CI offering in the market followed. See KK's slides for the rapid adoption of Jenkins – http://www.slideshare.net/kohsuke/current-state-of-jenkins . What is surprising to me is that Eclipse has seemingly backed the proposal already (see comments from the Eclipse Foundation leads Mike Milinkovich and Ian Skerrett in the threads quoted below defending the proposal and trying to educate others on open source). It surprises me on two levels. First, Eclipse has a deservedly sterling reputation. Maybe Karma does not transfer, but it seems to me that th...

To date there have been several ways to monetize open source projects: - Don't. Just donate your time and code. - S ugardaddy. Get a job at a big company that embeds your open source project in other products that make money. - Services. Do consulting or training. - "Pro" version. This is where most of the scalable open source businesses have gone like Red Hat, MySQL, JBoss, Spring, etc. This is typically some combination of support, packaging of bits, and enhanced features like the Red Hat or JBoss Network. For those open source projects looking to expand, there was often frustration that only a few percent of the users who were all gaining value form the project would actually pay anything. This has limited growth. Look at RedHat being a $1B company and VMWare being a $2B+ (much younger) company. The reason is quite simple - there are free ways to get Red Hat's technology and you have to pay VMWare to get their technology. Well, the Cloud has opened up a...

I just got a call from Ami Vora of Facebook, who has corrected me on following the advice of this other article - http://ostatic.com/163756-blog/cpalss-whats-thatss#rss . Apparently the CPAL only applies to open sourcing the files that are changed. So if a class is extended, or the database access logic is put into an API call, then that gets open sourced under the CPAL as well. Facebook’s use of the CPAL open source license is a step in the right direction. We love the fact that the community is required to donate changes back to the open source project. This is the reason we use the LGPL at Ringside. The downside of the CPAL is the requirement to give attribution. This means a little Facebook badge comes up on all websites that use the Facebook software. This makes sense from a Facebook perspective because it helps them to build their brand in return for donating their software. On the other hand, if every open source project required this, then there would be nothing on web p...

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch posted that Facebook will be open sourcing their platform . This is fantastic news for the Social Web. Facebook started this whole process a year ago when they launched the Facebook Platform – a set of API’s that application developers could use to develop social applications that work with Facebook. Google and others responded with Open Social, and took the extra step of providing an open source implementation. So far that implementation is mostly useful to the big social networks so they can open up to application developers like Facebook had done a year ago. Having been in the open source business for over 16 years (anyone remember OSF Motif?) and more recently JBoss, we understand the many, many benefits of open source. Facebook had taken the position that others just had to rewrite the implementation based on their API. That is what Bebo and Ringside have done. But what a waste of time! One of the things that drew me to open source is being...

I’ve just gotten back from our announcement of Ringside Networks at OSBC and SNAP in San Francisco. The feedback and encouragement was very nice, and it seems we may have hit a need in the market. We are only at Beta level right now, but will be in production by June. Hopefully we will have a couple of sites up and running our software in the next week or two. Our team worked very hard – a big thank you to Rich Friedman, Jason Kinner, Mark Lugert, Mike Schachter, Bill Reichert, Brian Robinson, Jeff Kiesel, Rich Frisbie and the dozen or so “Friends of Ringside” who helped us get so much done. I’ve always believed that killer teams can produce a lot in a short period of time – and this team has delivered. Try out the software today by downloading it here. Here are some of the highlights from the press and blogosphere: “This sounds incredibly cool. It means that existing corporate websites can be made socially aware.” http://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9900858-16.html “Ringside Netw...

Today we launch the Beta version of our Ringside Networks Social Application Server. This is the first open source platform that enables businesses to weave social capabilities directly into their existing websites while seamlessly integrating with social networks such as Facebook. The open source software is available for immediate download at www.ringsidenetworks.com and www.ringsidenetworks.org , the corresponding open source community website. Companies have spent far too much time and effort building their brands, websites, content and applications to hand over social networking to some third party. Ringside Networks gives them a way to get control over this important new way of interacting with their users and customers, while still being able to tie into the big social networks. By integrating social networking as an integral part of the user experience of corporate websites, companies will be able to directly engage their global communities, enabling them to interact and com...

Next week we will bring open source to the Social Networking market. I was questioned about the choice of this by a friend who said something along the lines of open source being good for markets that were already established – referring to Red Hat, JBoss and MySQL as examples where the open source project was a business driven way to undercut the pricing of larger vendors in $Billion markets. He was implying that open source was not good for new markets or for innovation. Obviously, I don’t see it quite that way. We at Ringside Networks view Open Source as a way to not only bring innovation to the market, but as a way to enable others to unlock the power of social networking in new and innovative applications. Open source has proven to do this in the past (remembering these is the only advantage I can think of being old). I figured that I would share some examples… UNIX was the first big example. When AT&T first developed the initial versions in 1969, there were certainly e...