Information freedom for open source users.

When the next version of Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) ships tomorrow there will be hundreds of open source applications ready for it, Canonical has announced.

LTS versions of the software ship every two years and are often aimed at software developers. A full list of companies supporting the new release is available here. In keeping with the company’s habit of alliteration the new version is known as Lucid Lynx.

In addition to claiming leadership with open source desktops, Canonical’s aim with the new release is to make it more attractive to proprietary solutions. Adobe, IBM, and VMWare are mentioned specifically in the release.

As always, we at ZDNet are all over this. Sam Diaz notes the software will have new features supporting clouds. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is asking if the new software will lure the social crowd.

I’m most interested in ease of installation for the full stack.

I have a dream (a wonderful dream) that users could go to a single page, select the applications they want added to their distro from a menu, then download a custom stick through BitTorrent they might plug in to unbrick their box.

Gaining support for such a solution from small resellers would be swell. It would be great if an Indian entrepreneur can get some used hardware, take orders, load a stick, test the results and deliver it to customers. He’d have the whole world on a plate.

Maybe starting here, starting now, everything’s coming up roses.

Novell’s SUSE Linux has beaten Red Hat to an IBM alliance in the area of software appliances.

The two companies announced today that IBM is delivering a portfolio of “software appliances” under a variety of IBM brands, powered by Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

A software appliance is a quickly-deployed software stack which uses just those elements of the operating system needed for its own operation.

“They come to the customer ready to roll. In the case of IBM and Lotus Foundations, that solution can be up and running in 30 minutes,” said Josh Dorfman, director of alliance marketing for Novell.

Since launching its software appliance business two years ago, Novell has gotten 70,000 registered users, close to 5,000 independent software vendors, and built about 312,000 appliances using SUSE Studio Online, Dorfman said.

“You can use x86 and whatever the application requires. You can boot some of this stuff right off a USB stick. Lotus Foundations is in a flash memory drive. You don’t need the whole OS. You only need what your application needs. This provides customers what they need and not more than that.”

The result is a lower-cost deployment for the software vendor, a lower price for the customer, and relevance for Novell, which is helping build effective vertical market channels.

“There’s also a multiplier effect,” Dorfman said. Black Diamond Software, for instance, is building its Presto software appliance using IBM Rational Software with SUSE Linux. The relationship is profitable all around.

Software vendors can build appliances on new equipment, on used equipment, or onto USB sticks, for installation at a customer site, Dorfman said. “This is quick to value, in that you can get to value in 30 minutes.

“We’ve been recognized for our leadership in the market. We feel like we’re leading.”

This is the “hybrid” model Bitrix claims offers the best of both the proprietary and open source worlds.

You have to pay for the software. But once you pay for it, you get the source code.

The content management software company, based in Virginia but with its developers in the Russian Federation town of Kaliningrad (just across Lithuania from the rest of Russia) is offering a white paper claiming FOSS solutions have marketing and security problems its “hybrid” model solves.

The result, it claims, is value for money, software that can become solutions for less than with either method alone.

Bitrix, which last month introduced its own D.I.G. search engine technology for corporate Intranets, has mostly flown under the radar since its founding in 1998, gathering an array of international customers. The launch of the white paper seems to indicate an interest in a higher profile.

So let’s give it to them.

Is the Bitrix effort worthwhile? While the “hybrid” model — pay for it but then see it — seems to offer advantages, it also seems to eliminate community development benefits. The only folks looking at the code are also paying customers, and dependence on the developer for fixes can be as high as with a proprietary system.

But the model is certain to draw interest from many open source entrepreneurs frustrated with low conversion rates and the retreat of venture capital.

We report, you decide. Is the Bitrix “compromise” a fair one?

After speaking with 10Gen co-founder and CEO Dwight MerriamMerriman (the picture is from his blog), it’s clear that NoSQL technology may be good for some niches, but will remain mostly a niche offering.

The 10Gen company is a commercial arm for MongoDB, an open source non-relational database launched as open source in 2007. It uses a typical open source business model — commercial support, enterprise licenses, training and consulting.

“It’s generally used online for real time reads and writes,”MerriamThe most common case is operational data store of a web site infrastructure. It’s for Web software.”“It’s not for data warehousing or offline batch loaded data storage. The most common case is operational data store of a web site infrastructure.”

“We’re talking to a lot of people about Mongo who are using Oracle and want to swap it out. But one size fits all is over. There is going to be specialization. We say you shouldn’t use one tool for every problem, as you did for relational databases.”

Rather than destroying Oracle, MerriamMerriman feels, ideas like NoSQL pick off parts of its market. “The common property of NoSQL is they’re non relational and lightly transactional. Beyond that there are many places to go. Data models vary a lot. Some of the product are pure key value stores. Some are tabular. Some like Mongo are JSON databases.

What is most exciting to see, MerriamMerriman says, is the growing maturity of the idea from last year to this.

“Last year in 2009 there were a lot of NoSQL meet-ups with product introductions. This year we’ll see use cases, deep dives into this stuff, how you administer it, schema design, how you connect Ruby, C++ etc. to it. It’s serious tooling for production systems.”

Want to learn more? 10gen is hosting a Mongo Day in San Francisco April 30, an in-depth conference featuring small, hands-on workshops. Great way to get ready for the weekend.

The central question driving consumer markets is brand. What usually drives the business market is reputation.

Apple represents brand. A brand is more than a picture and a slogan. A brand is an assurance of value and protection for the customer. (Picture photoshopped by Brandon Perlow of Spidermonkey.com for Jason Perlow of ZDNet.)

The American flag is a brand. It brings with it certain values, values worth saluting. The values themselves lie in the Constitution, and the brand can fall short while maintaining its value.

Apple is the same way, just like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. Buyers choose these brands because they fulfill expectations, they deliver what they promise, they are safe choices.

Google depends on its reputation. Reputation carries some assurances of a brand, but it’s more delicate. Reputation can disappear (Tiger Woods) in a flash. Because maintaining your reputation requires credibility. It means you walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

Open source is not a democracy, it is an assurance of fair dealing and equal rights. It’s reputation. That’s a lot harder to maintain than a mere brand.

Corporate reputations mean a lot when businesses look to do business with you. Intel Inside is an ingredient brand based on reputation. You have an assurance when you align with Intel that goes beyond the co-op money. Reputation is a brand you can carry into a boardroom, that can sign contracts and stick by them.

Most of the struggle between open source and proprietary models this last decade has been about reputation and brand. Open source is about reputation. Small things that won’t bother a brand, like changing your license to demand attribution, can destroy your reputation and must be walked-back in open source.

A brand can smile in public and conduct hard dealing in private. That’s what Apple, and its branded content partners, have done with the iPhone and will do with the iPad. A brand is safe for children, meaning it follows the law rigorously, and enforces its own version to protect itself and its customers.

The question of evil is in the eye of the legal department with a brand, it’s in the eye of the PR department with a reputation.

Reputation is more adult. It’s less about value than about values. Google’s work on TVs is of a piece with its decision to walk away from China. It really had no choice. It defined the term evil, it staked its reputation on the definition, and it would have lost that reputation had it acted differently.

A brand does business, in other words, while a reputation is more of a political thing. Barack Obama and Sarah Palin may appear to be brands, but they are in fact reputations. They could disappear tomorrow while their brands, Democratic and Republican, would remain intact.

What open source and the Internet have done is force reputation to the fore, threatening the flexibility of brand with daylight. I don’t know how that struggle will play out, but it’s fascinating to watch.

I know to many readers all this may seem airy-fairy, theoretical, over your head. So apply it to your own life. Think about what your brand means, what your reputation means, and how you would respond against threats to either one. Then put them in the talkbacks.

XML co-creator Tim Bray has joined the exodus from Oracle and landed at Google, as a “developer advocate” for the Android.

Bray, who like tech titans Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, was born in 1955 (as was this humble blogger), is now expected to be a much more familiar face to reporters, contrasting what he calls Android’s open development vision with the Apple iPhone’s “sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers.”

Bray made the announcement on his popular blog, which you will find on our blogroll.

Having a public, personal face on its Android efforts will be very important to Google, which faces both marketing and legal challenges to its growth in the mobile market from Apple.

Google’s share of the smartphone market nearly tripled in the last quarter, but ComScore MobiLens still has RIM’s Blackberry in the lead, followed by Apple and Microsoft. Microsoft’s share, however, has been falling faster than Lindsay Lohan’s career.

Bray has always been known for giving good quote, and from his blog post looks ready to become the tech equivalent to James Carville, who is also known for giving good quote. Here’s a taste:

Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other.

I think they’re wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it.

This beat is about to get a lot more fun.

Meryl Streep won the Oscar for Sophie’s Choice, a film that hinges on (spoiler alert) a woman having to choose which of her children will live and which will die.

Microsoft is for that kind of choice.

In a blog post later copied to Dan Kasun lays it out.

“Choice has been one of Microsoft’s strongest messages for years,” he writes, and Microsoft loves freedom as much as anyone. Kasun is riffing here off a recent piece by Matt Asay, Software Industry’s False Choice. 

Matt now works as COO of Canonical (Ubuntu), of course, which may be why Kazun is so passionate on this score. He sees Microsoft and Ubuntu as equal competitors. In fact Microsoft is an elephant and Ubuntu just one of many mouse-sized alternatives.

In the context of the discussion, Kasun writes, Microsoft is giving users a choice on what data they want to keep and what they want in the cloud, while Google does not really offer that choice. See, choice. Choice is good. (By naming Google rather than Ubuntu, his real target, Kazun also makes this seem a choice between equals.)

Data is liberated, Kasun writes, because even though it’s stored in a proprietary format it’s “exposed” to other, more open formats and Microsoft offers an Open Specification Promise to guarantee it.

Open source is completely orthogonal to the choice discussion, Kazun writes, pointing to Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative as proof.

But here’s my problem with that, and here is why open source is not orthogonal at all, but part of the same dimension.

You get one choice. You buy Microsoft and you’re locked into Microsoft. You can’t go back.

In Microsoft’s world its formats and open source are the two children, and you get to make one choice. Then you have to move on.

You can argue that Microsoft and open source are two equally valid choices, of course, by noting that the choice has been made already. Every government is trapped, at least in part, in a world made by Microsoft. Every government, and enterprise, has already killed one of the children.

That may be true. And it may be that’s what’s orthogonal. Because only open source lets that dead kid live again. Because you can see the code, and change the code, with open source, you can recover your independence, all of your free will.

Even Microsoft’s open hand comes with a price.

Open source may become the default position of customers, but it is still not the first option when a market is new.

This is a point open source executives like Matt Asay continue to struggle with, one that closed-source advocates continue to hammer on. (Picture from the Breakthrough Institute.)

Open source is shared freeloading.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Once a software process is established, the shared freeloading of open source cuts costs for what is now “basic” to a bare minimum.

But when a market is new, like smart buildings that save energy, the source will stay closed. This is true even at open source advocates like IBM. Return on investment is what’s touted, but customers first need to return the developers’ investment.

Is there anything wrong with that? I don’t think so. Innovations that save early adopters money must get their price in order to justify investment in a small market base. Without the hope of profit, why do it?

At the same time, such profits should not become permanent, or entrenched like the monopoly rents Microsoft enjoyed (and continues to enjoy) from Windows and Office. Open source, given time, whittles away those profits. It sunsets them.

In the case of building management, there is an open source alternative called OpenLynx, but it is having trouble gaining traction because the mass of building managers are not convinced of its utility. They have yet to be sold.

IBM or Cisco can sell them. So can Johnson Controls, IBM’s partner in its building management deal. But sales and marketing cost money. That money comes from proprietary profit.

What is happening in building management is instructive to the whole open source community. In building management we are moving rapidly from the start-up phase into mass adoption, and big proprietary players are moving in to merge energy management with mainstream computing.

As this market moves through the center of the s-shaped demand curve, there will be a lot of money to be made. The optimal price will be a little higher than the market wants to pay.

But as any market approaches saturation, the optimal price drops. Proprietary vendors resist this drop. But open source provides the market pressure that can force it. The proprietary game moves on, and open source carries the day.

Open source is market evolution in action.

Microsoft is determined to be a leader of the open source movement.

It will once again be a “platinum sponsor” at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco next month and its National Technology Officer for the U.S., Stuart McKee, will deliver a keynote.

McKee, former CIO for Washington state, may be best known to open source advocates for admitting that “ODF won” the standards battle with Microsoft’s Open Office XML back in 2008.

The last year has seen Microsoft continue its charm offensive with open source, which has succeeded in winning admiration from business-oriented open source leaders.

The company has also tried to disconnect itself from CodePlex, the open source repository it launched. This is reflected in the creation of a separate foundation, under Paula Hunter. It is also reflected through things like support for Mercurial on Codeplex, in addition to its own Team Foundation Server.

Both sides have suffered from the Microsoft-open source war, with Microsoft finding its valuation stable over the last decade and many open source businesses finding the capital windows shut in the wake of the financial crisis.

To many within the open source business community this has created a new “live and let live” attitude toward Microsoft.

But is that true generally? Take our poll and let’s find out.Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

As part of its effort to find the best employees it can, Twitter has launched a directory to the open source projects it supports, with cute little icons representing the employees working on each one.

It was apparently enough to bring in former Google programmer Isaac Hepworth, although it’s also possible the cover sheet on his offer letter — with happy little birdies (right) — had something to do with it, too.

Despite high unemployment true talent remains in short supply. This is especially true in tech. Most of those without work in this downturn came from construction or manufacturing, others from office jobs squeezed out by other parts of the downturn.

Besides, we’re talking talent. People aren’t all the same. The best chefs, the best basketball players, even the very best plumbers can always find work. Employers seek them out.

Programming is the same. Critics will argue that it’s skewed, like basketball, toward those who are youngest, those with the freshest games and the latest skills. Increasingly this means folks with open source experience.

It does seem everyone has a blog, or at least a home page, and this is especially true for young, talented programmers. They maintain their course lists, collections of projects they have worked on, the names of their advisers, and (sometimes) pictures of their pets, from the time they walk on campus until they leave.

These pages may list real-world programming experience done while in school, often open source programming experience, because universities are hotbeds of open source activity, and projects outside school are always looking for help.

Corporate recruiters may hit these pages the way college recruiters do sites covering high school basketball players. But it’s not enough to identify the talent. You have to convince them to sign on your dotted line.

If you want to secure these hotshots to your start-up, or even your going concern, you have to do more than put an ad on Craigslist. You have to recruit.

How much of that pitch involves proving your open source bonafides? Any corporate talent coordinators want to tweet on this?

If this were like the last recession there would be a host of unemployed hardware and software engineers anxious to grab BugLabs’ BugBase and build something cool with it.

But this is not the last recession. Engineers are not at the front of the unemployment lines. Construction workers are.

But BugLabs’ agreement to support Android on the latest version of its hardware is still telling. It means Android is reaching out beyond the OEM and carrier communities.

For another thing this brings TI OMAP development to the Android.

BugLabs is building what we old-timers would call a HeathKit business model on the BugBase. You get hardware, you get software, you get support forums, and you get the chance to invent your own future.

It’s a great learning environment that also lets you invent something useful for yourself, which you can then build for others.

Early in the last decade, at the bottom of the last recession, I was very much interested in this kind of device. Something that always runs, that supports WiFi, would let applications live in the air, for home automation, security, inventory, and for medical applications.

This won’t have a big market impact right away, but perhaps someone will do something great with it. And when they do it will likely be based on Android.

What would you do with it?

There is power in authority.

Microsoft’s strategy against open source uses authority. It ties up institutions that are authoritative, that have power over professions, creating a benefit for the institution that ties its members to proprietary Microsoft tools.

I have covered this extensively at ZDNet Healthcare regarding products like Amalga and Healthvault, but here is an example that goes beyond medicine and is specifically about open source.

The British Library is the authority here. It’s a great library, with extensive online resources. It does a lot of outreach, too. The picture is from its business and IP centre, which targets entrepreneurs.

What Microsoft has done with the library is an open source project called the Research Information Centre Framework. It’s a virtual research framework, helping them manage the increasingly complex range of tasks involved in 21st century research.

OK, where’s the catch?

Built on top of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, the RIC extends the core MOSS functionality to meet the needs to academic researchers engaged in collaborative research projects

Gee, doc, you’re not a Microsoft shop? Even if you can connect with these resources, you’re always going to be second-class in a group project that depends on them.

Which is sort of the point. To Microsoft open source is not an end in itself. It is a marketing tool. It is a way to gain lock-in with important customer sets.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s the way of the world. But sometimes it’s nice to look behind the nice worm and see the hook embedded therein, so you don’t get caught.

The lady in the picture, by the way, is Mandy Haberman, an inventor best known for the Anywayup Cup. She is also a campaigner for patent rights.

Matt Asay compared the latest Windows and Google marketing and quickly found for Google.

Windows 7 ads are Madison Avenue at its best. “Windows 7 was my idea,” users say, and the TV ads feature them at their most heroic, as male models taking showers and being virile while they imagine features Microsoft wound up implementing.

Google ads are all Mountain View. Its Super Bowl ad was a shortened version of one of its search stories, a series of Google searches that told the story of a man who met a woman in Paris, married and had a child. In 30 seconds.

Google gets it. Microsoft does not, Matt writes. But what does Google get exactly? (They got something Scott Adams wrote about, in Dilbert, back in 1995.)

I think what they get is that people get tech. People today are comfortable around computers. Nearly all people are. So talking to us in English about features, about what your tech can do for me, is far more acceptable than it was 20 years ago.

The jargon of strips like Dilbert, in other words, is now understood by everyone. We all get the joke.

This goes well beyond TV. Take the Google comic book. It’s techies talking tech, but in simple English, and not the kind which assumes you don’t know what’s behind the words being said. It doesn’t talk down. It talks at.

It’s that, but it’s also a Manga. It’s as if Google programmers are living in a Tokyo of the mind. The pictures break up the pitch, turn the pitch into a story. I think Madison Avenue believes this kind of thing goes over peoples’ heads, and 20 years ago that might have been true.

But no more.

There is another key Google communication tool, one that relates directly to open source, but also relates to Google’s financial advantages over other open source companies like Ubuntu.

These are its Software Development Kits, its SDKs.

SDKs are often written alongside code. They’re coding documents for coders. Getting through them separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls, the Americans from the Chinese.

Google developer documents aren’t like that. Here’s a piece of one taken at random:

Content providers are activated when they’re targeted by a request from a ContentResolver. The other three components — activities, services, and broadcast receivers — are activated by asynchronous messages called intents. An intent is an Intent object that holds the content of the message.

Sounds like nonsense, but each term mentioned here is defined before it’s used. It’s easy to follow, it’s organized, it’s structured. The sentences are short. It’s thought out by people who are well paid to translate geek into English, or any other language.

In the early years of open source proprietary companies like Apple and Microsoft had a big advantage in this area. They had the revenues that let them hire the tech writers who could do this kind of thing.

Open source projects did not. Some open source advocates even prided themselves (some still do) on how poorly they communicate what they are doing.

This is changing rapidly, because Google has raised everyone’s game. Take a look at these documents for a simple open source tool called UltraDefrag. It’s got pictures, bullets, and simple language. It’s well done.

Point is that time has changed the tech community. We know more than we once did, or we have been replaced by kids who do. Google speaks to this audience, eye to eye, and has raised the game of every other open source developer in the process.

Google is taking Microsoft down with the tools of journalism.

I have a confession to make.

I’m a huge Matt Asay fan (right). Always have been.

Matt is the Anthony Bourdain (below) of open source. By that I mean he cooks better than most cooks, writes better than most writers, and he has made himself a big time brand. He’s also hungry for more.

One might compare his move to Canonical, the parent of Ubuntu, with Bourdain’s move to The Travel Channel. It means he now has a palette big enough for his talents.

This should not be taken as a knock against Alfresco. A content management system is an important thing.

But it’s a bit like Food Network. It’s about software, like Food Network is about food. And while Matt Asay can program, while he knows software, he has always shown — especially through his writing at C|Net — that he is about something more than that.

I believe what Matt is about is selling transformation. He’s also about putting things together, and then executing on that understanding.

This is what Canonical, and Ubuntu need. They have a great story to tell. Ubuntu is a big success. But it is a limited one.

Ubuntu sells itself as a desktop, but its money comes from servers. Ubuntu sells itself as universal, but its success comes from localization. Ubuntu is a wonderful dream, but a prosaic reality. It sells itself as the shining city on the hill, when it’s really just a small attractive village.

Matt Asay can change that. His new title is chief operating officer.

“As COO, I am tasked with aligning the company’s strategic goals and operational activities, the optimization of day-to-day operations, and leadership of Canonical marketing and back-office functions.”

Matt is going to try and make the trains in London run on time from his base in Utah. A neat trick.

But I think he’ll pull it off. He can give Ubuntu strategic, practical directions, and he has the operational experience to know when goals are being met and when they aren’t.

In other words he now has his own show, which he can take anywhere in the world he wants to go. No reservations.

With the tech press queuing up at its equivalent of Super Bowl Sunday — an Apple launch — it’s a good time to ask again why open source marketing is so bad.

Open source offers great value, it has tons of developers, it has dedicated followers, even political support. But its marketing, and thus its mind share, still lag behind.

In this Ubuntu is Exhibit A. You can sell a server operating system like Red Hat through speeds and feeds, facts and features. This is not true in the mass market.

Ubuntu’s continued failures at cracking the mass market — Canonical’s failures on Ubuntu’s behalf — make one worry if open source has a chance.

Over at TechRepublic, Jack Wallen says they’re at it again. Ubuntu Version 10.4 is going to have something like iTunes in it, he writes. “When this boxed operating system is placed on the same shelf (selling at $19.99 or $29.99) as Apple OSX and Windows 7, people are going to give Ubuntu a look and many people will purchase Ubuntu.”

Sorry, but I’m getting that Wile E. Coyote feeling again. One reason is the price — you don’t know what it is? Another reason is further down in Wallen’s piece, where he talks at length about depending on “the community” for marketing.

This has fail written all over it. Marketing is not just a creative, inherently proprietary process. It requires money and a coherent strategy to work. By its very nature it’s top-down, not bottom-up.

Open source fails this test because, as I’ve written here many times, there is a price lower than free. The best price includes cash to push the product through the channel — identifying prospects, delivering them the message, supporting the retailer with collateral, and front-line support.

All these things take a coherent strategy. Everything you do must sing the same song in the same key. People want to know that if they’re putting their hard-earned money and time into something new, that there’s not a bunch of cats being herded just behind the curtain.

Steve Jobs mastered this art over three decades ago, while I was still in college. I compared him to Springsteen in another blog post because, like The Boss, he’s still working, it’s still the same act, yet it’s better than ever.

Marketing a device or operating system is an exercise with a lot of moving parts to it. There are lots of publics you need to relate to — the press, the developers, the retailers, the buyers. All of them are taking a risk. All must be convinced it’s a risk worth taking, that it’s not really a risk at all.

This requires centralized budgeting, it requires a big, scaled investment up-front. You have to build an army, a bandwagon, everyone moving forward as one. When it works, no matter the industry, it’s a beautiful thing.

It’s something open source has yet to master.

I wonder if Google can do it?

Developers are looking to today’s launch of the Apple tablet the way kids look toward Christmas.

It’s not because Steve Jobs has made himself a one-man Springsteen concert. It’s because he makes developers money like no one else in business.

Appcelerator has conducted a survey among its 18,000 developers and found 90% plan to do something for the new Apple tablet within a year.

Appcelerator’s flagship product is Titanium, a cross-platform open source development tool, so they have a stake in this. They want developers to know they can produce tablet apps with its open source tool.

But the trend is overwhelming, they write. The tablet is already the third-leading platform among their developers, even before its launch, following the iPhone and Android. They’re especially looking forward to bundling their existing iPhone apps with programs for the tablet to increase sales.

Generally they look at the new device as an all-in-one PC, entertainment and communication device, the biggest thing since the IBM PC. Everything they have done for other devices can be re-purposed to the new platform, and re-sold, they figure, so bless Steve Jobs.

What is most interesting beyond that is how the tablet is seen as a serious business tool. The feature they are most anxious to get their hands on is the database, not the rumored new features like multi-touch gestures and the user interface.

Maybe Appcelerator should call itself Applecelerator? It does seem clear the tablet is going to have developers, developers, developers, developers.

Red Hat has opened a discussion community at Opensource.com.

The site has been pre-loaded with comments from CEO Jim Whitehurst and other Red Hat employees.

The most important is probably Venkatesh Hariharan (right), who goes by the screen name Venky and is listed as head of open source affairs at Red Hat. I see him as key because Venky is a journalist, thus I assume the editor here.

He has already done grand work bringing a South Asian perspective to the open source community through his own blog. He is co-founder of IndLinux, the team that localized both GNOME and KDE for the Indian Linux community and has been a Knight science journalism fellow at MIT.

His first contribution to the new site since the launch is a story entitled “Is IP another bubble about to burst.” In it, he argues yes, that it’s like the term “horseless carriage,” hampering innovation when its intent was to encourage it. This a follow-on to an argument against software patents.

Are there more at home like you, Venky? I know there are, and I want to hear their perspectives.

One weakness of American-built community sites, including this one, is a lack of cross-fertilization among software cultures. I write this knowing that ZDNet has sites in England, in Singapore, and elsewhere. But I don’t really know those people, we don’t have a shared perspective, and I regret that.

As of 3 PM Eastern, the only non-employee on the new site’s home page is Chris Grams, a former Red Hat employee who now hangs his shingle at New Kind, where he writes a blog called Dark Matter Matters.

Unfortunately you can’t review a site like this in the way you would a movie or a show. It’s a process. The look-and-feel may be attractive, the first few stories interesting, but what matters is how much feedback such an enterprise generates, how much traffic it wins, and how much mindshare it can gather among people already in the field.

Staying power matters. How will Opensource.com handle trolls, and online disagreements? What will it bring of value to the discussion? Time will tell. Nothing else can.

But since we have a talkback thread, how much buzz do you think Red Hat’s new site will generate?

Acquia, the commercial arm of Drupal, is looking to capitalize on one of the software’s big “gets” of 2009 — the Obama Administration.

The White House famously switched its site to Drupal last year, following its initial use at Recovery.gov. A Community Management Service package like Drupal makes great sense for any organization that updates its site a lot, and that wants to empower managers to do their own updating.

I wrote several years ago that Howard Dean might have become President had he switched to a scaled CMS. Instead he stayed with Movable Type and failed to scale the intimacy of his early run. I even offered detailed advice on this at my personal blog. Someone was listening because the Obama campaign made heavy use of scaled CMS tools, not just blog platforms.

So now Acquia is out with a press release, launching a jump start program for government customers, along with a seminar series and a white paper.

Even more important, I think, is the hiring of Tim Bertrand as a vice president of business development, and bringing in Carahsoft as a reseller. If you want to sell to government, get someone with government selling experience. This will even help in Gullyvornia.

I don’t know whether this will make Drupal a standard for government Web sites, but it does steal a march on rivals like WordPress’ Automattic. (Of course, Automattic still has cooler corporate titles. ZDNet runs on WordPress.)

When Appcelerator moved to California, Matt Quinlan was one of those who said no to California.

He is now vice president of field operations for LoopFuse, a SaaS sales support company that has made its bones serving such open source firms as Acquia, Zimbra, and MuleSoft.

(Full disclosure. C|Net’s Matt Asay is an advisor to LoopFuse.)

With all that open source heritage, Quinlan admits the resulting product is sort of Big Brotherish.

LoopFuse’s OneView automates the lead management process by taking all the data that even anonymous visitors give to your site and delivering a “360 degree view” on each prospect.

If you send someone an e-mail and they respond, LoopFuse collects the clickstream. If they just visit the site, it collects the clickstream. If a number of different people from the same IP address click to the site it compiles the clickstream.

This can be combined with other data available on the Web. Linkedin profiles, Hoovers reports, the prospect’s own Web site. The dossier can be quite complete.

When the product being sold is open source software this is straightforward. You are looking to turn your users into buyers. Their first entry to the site might be to download code, and if you can trace their path through your support forums then your sales call is a service.

The challenge has been to take what was learned in converting open source users into customers, and apply it to other industries.

Quinlan explains.

“We let our customers create a series of rules. Determining what makes a qualified prospect is different from business to business.

“We score based partly on activities but also on the meta data the company provides. If your product is suited to five vertical industries, you can create rules that set scores based on that. Or you can target a title.

“This helps create scoring rules which interface with the content information and activities.

“I can define URLs, for the demo page, the pricing page, etc. – whatever my key buying signals are – I can identify them and assign a number of points to them, based on someone visiting that page.”

I can even do negative rules. One customer assigns a negative scoring if you hit the recruitment page. Job seekers aren’t good prospects.

Points are assigned based on the clickstream data, and the sales staff calls the people with the highest scores.

The idea is that your telephone salesmen will call on their best prospects, armed with  knowledge to answer pointed questions.

You’re speeding prospects down the sales funnel, focusing your time on your best prospects, and speeding the sales process as well.

All this makes sense for both sides of a business-to-business transaction. Such users can understand the service of being tracked. They might want to track visitors themselves and become more efficient.

But what happens when this goes into consumer markets?

Quinlan doesn’t know. But he recently hired an expert in real estate sales, so next year he will probably find out.

Open source has been the coming thing for years.

For 2010 it’s the thing.

Even Microsoft is touting open source capabilities in Microsoft Office and Windows 7, notes Siteworx founder Tim McLaughlin. (This is actually a skateboard ramp design from the GOPED Message Board.)

Those claims may be easy to dismiss or laugh off, but if Microsoft is  trying to get some open source street cred then everyone else is too. And there are now thousands of programs where elements of open and closed source are mixed.

For years makers of closed source programs have sought to at least connect with open source standards, through plug-ins or APIs. More recently we have seen elements of major programs, like Adobe’s PDF format, go open source. This is often followed by a flood of open source alternatives to the main package.

It goes the other way too. The whole idea of Eclipse is to give vendors an open source shared store from which proprietary programs can be built. BSD-type licenses explicitly allow closed source to be built with open, and many open source companies have debated closing some “secret source” in order to maintain cash flow.

When there’s an open source “community” version and a paid “enterprise” version of the same software, what is the difference between writing a check for enterprise support and just buying a closed source license?

As open source increasingly becomes an enterprise mandate, you can expect such questions to gain new relevancy. How open do you have to be? How closed must you be?

These questions have been a feature of leading-edge open source commentary all year, as illustrated by our own Matt Asay. Once a staunch GPL advocate, he no longer reflexively condemns Microsoft’s open source efforts. Baby indeed needs a new pair of shoes.

Who knows, maybe O’Reilly will do a book on this, with some strange beastie on the cover. What would an OSINO look like? (Open Source In Name Only.)

What thought leaders talk about one year often becomes common currency the next. Many claims of openness are going to be challenged next year, and my only prediction is that the identity of the attacker may sometimes surprise you.

I may have to update my famous open source incline, maybe adding a third dimension. Or even a fourth.

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