We're happy to announce that we have some new members of the Open Sources team of masked banditos. Zack Urlocker of MySQL Savio Rodrigues from IBM Dave Dargo, man of mystery and intrigue Zack started the ball rolling with a post on his recent trip to China.... READ MORE

People are always surprised to find out just how distributed Alfresco is as an organization. Aside from a small hive in London, it's hard to find more than two Alfrescans in the same city. The same is largely true of MySQL and a number of new open source companies (MuleSource comes to mind). At Alfresco in the US, we have people in Austin, Boston, San Francisco, Denver, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, and New York City. Even where we have people in the same cities (there are now four of us in Salt Lake City), we don't have offices and only... READ MORE

I just went through the attendee list for the Open Source Business Conference and loved what I saw. For the first time, OSBC is truly drawing a deep bench of IT buyers. It's something that we have strived for since the first show (well, the second, since the first show was intended to be a vendor strategy event), and which has finally happened. We have CIOs/VPs/Directors from the following companies (and I won't even bother to go into all the CXOs/VPs we have from Red Hat, MySQL, Alfresco, Microsoft, MuleSource, JasperSoft, SugarCRM, OpenBravo, Loopfuse, Zmanda, XenSource, etc. etc. - this... READ MORE

The UK government yesterday re-affirmed its position on software patents: it doesn't like them, and won't enforce them.

The Government remains committed to its policy that no patents should exist for inventions which make advances lying solely in the field of software. Although certain jurisdictions, such as the US, allow more liberal patenting of software-based inventions, these patents cannot be enforced in the UK....

The Government will...continue to exclude patents from areas where they may hinder innovation: including patents which are too broad, speculative, or obvious, or where the advance they make lies in an excluded area such as software.

Stiff upper lift wins out in the end. Silliness continues to reign supreme here in the US regarding software patents.

I've suggested before that open source companies need not migrate to Silicon Valley. It's not really an open source question, though, so much as it is a persistent belief that to be big/important you must live in a big/important city.

The WSJ took on this topic in yesterday's Journal in an op-ed piece called "The Myth of 'Superstar' Cities." It begins:

These seem the best of times for America's elite cities. Wall Street's 2006 megabonuses created thousands of instant millionaires, and, with their venture-fund soulmates in places like San Francisco, Boston and Greenwich, the best people are prowling for Ferraris, planes, multimillion-dollar condos, the newest $200 lunch place and the latest in high fashion. In some markets, office …

From Paul Kedrosky:

Does this mean you should move to the Bay Area? Maybe. Plenty of open source companies have successfully grown outside the Valley (actually, the most successful ones - Red Hat, JBoss, MySQL), but it's certainly the case that there's more venture money in the Bay Area than anywhere else.

Of course, the primary VC complaint is having to get on a plane for board meetings, so maybe it's enough to do what Zend, MySQL, etc. have done: move management to the Bay Area. They may well be the only ones who can afford it. :-)

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Josh Greenbaum at ZDNet suggests that the war of the ecosystems is on, and that Oracle is looking weak. I don't agree, but think Josh's commentary is interesting:

The partner front is the new flash point in the battle of the ecosystem. When it comes to IBM vs. Microsoft vs. SAP vs. Oracle, it turns out that a large coterie of happy, incented, and otherwise engaged partners that are out legitmizing an ecosystem vendor's ecosystem -? and selling the products and services they develop that fill in that ecosystem's white spaces - has become a major competitive weapon. And SAP is absolutely committed to making the most of this weapon in their four-way fight against their partner/competitors IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft.True enough, though I think each of the big ecosystem vendors is missing out on the most important partner for the future: open source.

Oracle is in a …

I'm still reading through BusinessWeek's interview with Steve Ballmer, and still fascinated. Love him or hate him, Ballmer is a smart guy.

Ballmer refused to call the YouTube valuation ($1.65B) overvalued. He rightly said that it depends on a lot of factors (factors, incidentally, that I don't personally think add up, but I'm willing to be wrong):

You're clear as a bell on the YouTube valuation…
No. I'm not saying it is overvalued. I'm not trying to say that. It depends on a set of factors. I'm not saying I wouldn't write a check for that amount of money. I might.

Really, even though there's no identifiable business model?
It is one of those things where you have to think. You can't punt either way. If you're asking me if I would …

In case you missed its mention on Slashdot, the Financial Times has a funny (and telling) column today by James Boyle (Professor, Duke Law School) on the dark underbelly of the "long tail. You remember the long tail, right? It's manna from heaven - a chance for the Internet to enable a wider variety of sellers to find the wider variety of buyers than our previous markets have allowed.

Well, maybe life under the long tail isn't as rosy as life pontificating about the long tail, as Boyle discovers:

The academic in me has been very interested by the much hyped arrival of the “long tail” economy – the idea that the future lies in using the efficiency of the internet to sell smaller quantities of more goods (think of the astounding …

Following on my "the winning mentality" post, here's a nice little image that Paul Kedrosky clued me into. It shows where the Forbes 400 richest Americans live - the billionaires, that is....

Soon enough, I'm expecting to see one dot in Alabama (Digium....), another few in California (SugarCRM, MySQL, etc.), and heck, let's give North Carolina a few more dollars, too.

Open source will crack the billion-dollar barrier, and a lot of people and companies will see the benefit of it. Fortunately, the difference between wealth in open source and wealth in …