*Disclosure: I am an advisor to TargetSource see: TargetSource Official Launch

1. How did you get started?

After 7 years effort on open source community and 3 years business practice on open source services in China, we think it is a right time for us to start up TargetSource. More and more companies always ask us to help them to solve problems when they use open source, sometime if you are just a individual, it is not a long term strategy for company to get support on open source software. That’s why we started TargetSouce, an open source service company which delivers to end customers by a global collaboration network with partners base on the open source software.

2. What is your product?

TargetSource strategy is not building a single open source component or product such as JBoss, hibernate, Spring or so. From our …

People reading this blog & friends have certainly noted my excitement about China in the last year.

Therefore I am pleased to disclose that I have been invited and I have joined advisory board of TargetSource, a newly formed Open Source company based in Beijing.

For more info see TargetSource Official Launch

I will soon interview Peter Cheng, the founder of the company, to share some of his ideas and vision for building Open Source business out of China.

Earlier this week at OSBC in San Francisco a new advisory board was announced for Continuent, the leading provider of commercial open source middleware solutions for database high-availability and scalability. I feel priviledged to be able to be part of this group:

Tim Golden, Senior Vice-President, Bank of America. Tim has 20 years IT management experience designing and implementing major infrastructure projects, both as a consultant working for IBM® and currently as a senior vice president at Bank of America working exclusively with Linux® and open source software technologies. He was also named as one of the 15 most influential open source business people recently by eweek story here

Douglas S. Tracy, the EVP for IT (North America) and Chief Technology Officer, Global IT, Rolls-Royce. Doug has over 25 years of management experience in the private …

I have previously written couple of posts about OSS and China. You can find the posts here and here .

Now, however I have undertaken a challenge to take the understanding of the emerging opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors in the OSS space in China to the next level.

In January Technology Agency of Finland, TEKES and Ministry of Science and Technology from China discussed about undertaking a study tentatively titled Acceleration of Open Source Software Deployment in China, later Linux Foundation also promised its support. Press release of the undertaking can be found from here .

The report will be made freely available both in English and Chinese …

The biggest open source news so far this year has been that MySQL was bought by Sun Microsystems for a Billion dollars (disclaimer: I was a seed investor in to MySQL). For good analysis check e.g. Stephen O’Grady’s post as well as Stephen Walli’s thougths and for the inside scoop in Jonathan’s post and Zack Urlocker’s post about the process.

Some reactions have surprised me a quite a bit. I have received questions and comments such as that ‘’we lost yet another European high-tech company to the US’’, ‘’does this destroy the promise of …

There is a going trend among companies not just supporting and appreciating open source, but also ‘’going open’’ by releasing their new development efforts as open source or converting their formerly proprietary offerings open source by releasing the source code under some open source license such as GPL.

I believe there are many misconceptions among organizations as to what can be gained by this and even more misconceptions as to how to manage the process.

Some Myths:

- Open Source is hostile to intellectual property.
- If I give away my software to the Open Source community, thousands of developers will suddenly start working for me for nothing.
- The Open Source movement isn’t sustainable, since people will stop developing free software once they see others making lots of money from their efforts.

(Free/Libre Open Source Software: a guide for SMEs 2007)

Some reasons why select …

I am heading back to Zaragoza to speak and attend at the 2nd Open Innovation event on the 20th, and I certainly am excited about it for a number of reasons, not least because of the great entrepreneurship the country currently is providing.

Secondly Spain seems to have disproportionate amount of open source developers compared to many other countries.

I don’t quite understand the reason for this, but I hope to find out, as well as very thriving entrepreneurship scene as Ignacio has already noted and good number of young Open Source businesses as Stephen has commented on. I am looking forward to talking to as many of them as possible.

Disclaimer: I am on the board of Ebox & …

There has been quite a bit of talk about emergence of Open Source in China, but the numbers are still very small, as they are for the overall software industry, highlighted by the numbers with Linux (smaller yet for other OSS).

‘’Linux has been riding on a wave in China, topping the growth of all operating systems in the first quarter of 2007, says an industry analyst.

According to CCID Consulting, which specializes in China research, Linux sales posted a 30.9 percent year-on-year growth to reach 31 million yuan (US$4 million). Windows and Unix growth rates were 11.6 percent and 9.6 percent, respectively.’’

‘’Q1 market share Linux (2.5 percent), Windows (41.8 percent), Unix (53.9 percent)’’

More in a ZDNet Asia article

Some key issues to consider in my view are:

1) …

China is becoming more and more important as a market for software; both proprietary and open source software. Still knowledge as to what is really taking place is quite limited with both language and cultural barriers making it difficult to understand for many westerners at least, to what is the Chinese opportunity for software developers and vendors globally.

Some good coverage in the last year from the blogspace can be found e.g. from especially Stephen Walli , but also from Amy Jiang of Canonical/Ubuntu , Zack Urlocher of MySQL and Matt Asay of Alfresco . However, this is …

Matt Asay recently interviewed Eero Teerikorpi, CEO of Continuent in his Open Source CEO series and despite of the great interview, I wanted to take it a step further and asked Eero elaborate on some issues. In one way this is also a continuation of my Open Source Business Meme from some weeks ago.

Some key advice Eero pointed out in the article was the importance of partners and channels:

‘’Another surprise is partner networking, or actually the lack of it. Maybe this is result of open source companies’ natural tendency to focus on services and, for the most part, on a direct sales model. Open source companies have created tight-knit partner communities, which are excellent vehicles …