Defining the 'open' in open source

Coming out of a London Underground station these days means getting bombarded with a deluge of freebies ranging from drink samples to a couple of months of free gym memberships.

We've become accustomed to free samples given to us by marketers, even when (in the case of the free gym membership) we know this act of benevolence has nothing in the slightest to do with improving the health of society. Anyone's who's tried to cancel a gym membership post-trial will know exactly what I mean. No organization that cares for your mental health and well-being would treat you like that when attempting to terminate a contract!

But staying on the good side of marketing, there are similar patterns in the software industry: demos, trial accounts, free and "freemium" products.

We're all beneficiaries of this method of marketing -- but more importantly, we know what's going on: I use your product for free in return for being targeted by your ads and then pay you when I use more than a certain limit or want to activate features. In exchange, I enrich your database with my usage patterns, and if I grow to love your product, I probably increase your sales by referring you to my friends.

It's all fair play. No one claims altruism, no higher moral ground. It's just transactional business.

However things aren't as straightforward in the open source world. The fact that many vendors boldly profess their love for "community" and "giving back" onstage at trade shows, while every other bit of their business is just as profit-driven as the burger joint next door, is hypocritical to say the least.

Frankly I have no issue with using open source as a way of getting more software users, letting them experiment with it before buying. I don't even have much trouble sifting through the marketing BS behind a vendor's altruistic motives. It's all fine. We're a sophisticated enough bunch to get it after all.

Yet I do think we need to stop seeing all open source as the same. We need to start differentiating between open source that has a higher aim of making everyone's life better, giving back or building communities, from the type of open source that's purely there to be used as a marketing tool.

Not all open source is created equally. I'm even going to suggest calling them by different names. We can simply refer to them as Open Source and Open Trial to make sure no value is attached to either one or has negative connotations. Just clear labeling.

Open source is something that's built, governed, and run by a community of people with no single vendor sponsoring the project. Open Trial is a project with almost all of its contributors on a single company's payroll, where the sponsoring vendor makes money by selling support (read: compensation for bad documentation) or the "enterprise" (read: usable) version of the software.

But why should we care what it's called? The reality is, when you look around, no new startup cuts checks to Oracle or EMC anymore. Facebook runs on MySQL and PHP, not Oracle and ASP (or whatever closed source web development framework is still around), and this doesn't paint a rosy future for these giant companies of our industry.

Decisions about fundamental tools used in a stack are made by developers during the early days of a company's evolution and most are stuck with those choices -- be it good or bad. This is great news for us software developers. We get to make our decisions purely on technical merit. The question I'd like to ask is, Are we equipped with making the right business decisions when it comes to our choice of tools? Knowing what we're dealing with when using open source can only make answering this question easier.

The importance of how we answer this question becomes clearer when you think about how an open source project is governed? How is it building, keeping, and distributing IP within its product and community? What levers does it use to move you from the community edition to the enterprise one? Calling them for what they are (open trial or open source) makes things easier.

An open source project is about community. I'm happy to use it, fix it, contribute to it, and benefit from its openness. On the other hand, my approach toward an open trial project is going to be different. If the main IP is going to be kept closed and paid for, my contribution to the project is going to have different beneficiaries and therefore might affect my decisions.

Same goes with understanding where a project is heading (i.e. its road map). Open source projects have transparent governing bodies for the most part. An open trial project is usually completely different: the commercial decisions dictate its future. Sometimes these decisions are made behind a pretense of transparency and multi-vendor governing bodies, but the reality is often very different. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with this either. As I said, it's all about knowing the score so we can make more informed decisions.

There's danger in misrepresenting open trial as open source. I believe it can lead to bad business decisions by the consumer (developers), which in the long run will hurt not only developers but the vendors themselves.

"Our product is open source" is often exploited by vendors seeking to create positive sentiment. Exploiting open source for commercial reasons without offering full disclosure, transparency and complete understanding by its intended audience has the potential to get shrouded in negativity. So lets just call a spade a spade and help move the conversation forward.

This post was published first here

Why tech journalism needs more tech experience

On last count, Jeremy Clarkson, the infamous creator and presenter of "Top Gear," the world's most famous car show owned a Ford GT, a Mercedes SL55 AMG, a Ferrari F355, a Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, a Jaguar XJR, a Volvo XC90 SUV, a Toyota Land Cruiser SUV, and an ex-military Land Rover Defender. Richard Hammond his co-presenter, drives a classic Morgan, a Porsche 911 GTS, a 1965 Open Kadett plus 2 Land Rovers, while the other "Top Gear" presenter, James May has a pilot license and drives a Bentley T2, Fiat Panda, Jaguar XJS, Mini Cooper, Porsche Boxter S, Porsche 911 and a Range Rover. That's 21 cars!

It is no secret that these guys love cars and know a thing or two about driving them. Clarkson, Hammond, and May are lucky, rich, and influential because they have made "Top Gear" an extremely successful TV show about cars. Car companies fall over themselves to get a slot on the program for a review of their latest supercars and the commentary provided by the program has a great influence on serious car buyers' decision.

Watching an episode of "Top Gear," you cannot help but to feel the presenters' passion about cars and admire their expertise on the subject. I think that passion and expertise is an integral part of the global influence and success of "Top Gear" and the respect it rightly deserves.

Now let's imagine a car show where the presenters don't know how to drive a car, have no driving license, and never have owned a car in their lives. It is hard to see how a program like that is going to be successful, influential, or predict the next big thing in the automotive industry.

The sad reality of software journalism is that the number of journalists writing about the software business who can code or have written a line of code in their lives is less than the number of fingers on your left hand.

As someone who's developed software and read about software for more than 20 years, I still cannot comprehend how a software columnist can comment on success and failure of a product without having the skill-set to try it before forming his or her opinion on the matter. Read the writings of Joel Spolsky, a developer and creator of Stack Overflow and Trello and compare it with the commentaries you read about Docker or cloud computing on the tech media, and the difference becomes clear.

Examples of tech media missing the trend and trying to jump on the bandwagon after the horse has bolted is far too many to count. Github, Docker, and AWS are all examples of companies that made some existing technology easy to use by developers and there was no way for a non-developer to understand how they add value and why they are going to be successful. It's just impossible for someone who hasn't used Linux containers to predict Docker is going to be huge. 

It is interesting to see how Paul Graham writes about how you should build a successful company: Build something for yourself, he insists. As software developers, we are naturally going to build thing we use as software developers. Being our own first users enables us to build great tools and improve them every day. This is the story of Slack.

Slack was built by software developers to be used in software developer teams. That's what makes using it so great for everyone. First and foremost, it's the experience that made it great. As a software development team, we couldn't wait to get an invite for Slack so we can start using it. Two years later, many of my non-developer friends still don't get Slack. How can I ever expect them to have seen it coming before it was old news if they are not users of the product?

Open source is becoming more important in the enterprise and large companies are trying to court developers to have a place at the table for the next generation of the big companies. But tech journalists are still following the tired patterns about "the next big thing" -- the amount of money raised by the company or the moves of the largest players in the market -- instead of finding out what actually makes a product so successful in the developer space.

Let me be up front about this: I have nothing against tech journalists. However, I think we as a community will benefit from informed commentary on trends of our industry. A commentary fueled by knowledge, experience, and passion about technology in general and software in particular. After all, if software is eating the world, we developers of this world, should become better at writing about what we do, where we are taking software, and what the world can expect from the fruits of our labor.

That's why I accepted the offer of writing for InfoWorld: I am a developer. My work is eating the world, and I am best positioned to tell you about it. Let's talk!


This post was originally published here

Europe’s Startup Groupies

If you are starting a “startup” you have seen many startup groupies.

You know the type: you see them all the time at events, meet ups and drink ups, hanging around all the time. They are not part of a startup, they are not investors and they haven’t started a company before, but they are always there. I call them Startup Groupies.

Most startup groupies are harmless. They like hanging around with innovative, active and sometimes down right crazy people who work at startups. They don’t have the money to invest in startups or if they do have some money to invest, they lack the balls required. The same lack of balls (or abundant sensibilities) also stops them from jumping from their ‘consultancy’ roles at large companies to start or join a startup. So they just come for a drink, hangout with cool people and dream about the day they are going to turn their amazing idea into a killer company. Nothing wrong with that.

There is a secondary type of startup groupie that is harmful however. They waste your time, your most precious asset.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about consultants trying to sell you their service: lawyers, accountants, office space brokers, SEO experts or social marketing ‘gurus’. Those guys will also often waste your time, but there is always exceptions. Just like cold-callers who mostly waste your time but sometimes albeit very rarely, have something you actually want to buy. And let’s not forget, they usually have started their own one-man-band businesses so they are mostly on your side.

Here I’m talking about the ‘community’ guys, ‘ecosystem’ builders, ‘initiative’ people. You can find them mostly in Europe sucking government and European grants to push self-defined vague metrics and make a living out of that. Not only these guys waste your time, they also hurt the economy in a greater way.

Let’s try and see how they operate:

How be a startup groupie?

First define a bullshit word: “digital skill” is a good one. “social economy” is another candidate. “social enterprise” perhaps? Just make sure it doesn’t mean anything and is vague enough.

Now start an outfit with a big name: “Startup Europe” sounds good. How about “National Association of British Entrepreneurs”?

Remember: You have to call yourself an entrepreneur. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t built a company in your life, you can always make up those stories later.

Now, armed with your bullshit word and big-sounding outfit, go around looking for likeminded people. (Pro tip: You will have a much better chance in the PR industry).
Your likeminded people probably already have their own bullshit word and big-sounding outfit made up. That’s actually better since it helps you congratulate each other publicly, become part of a larger “initiative” or “group” and sound even bigger than you actually are.

The next step is grant hunting. There are plenty of those around: the UK government has some, so does the European Union and most of the European governments. Set a goal for your bullshit word and go for it. Say it in your mission statement: “Startup Europe’s mission is to progress digital skills within social enterprise”. Who can measure progress of that?

Keep at it. Tweet pictures of yourself at the doorsteps of Number 10 or shaking hands with HRH Duke of Never-Done-A-Day-Of-Work-In-His-Life or some other VIP. Make sure your LinkedIn profile mentions Davos, Office of Prime Minister, European Parliament and other important sounding places. Again, it doesn’t matter if that’s true or not, if those outfits have anything to do with starting businesses or what you’ve actually done there: Just mention their names. Again, bonus points for pictures.

Now you have a job, money and get to hangout with cool people.
Moreover, if you play this game long enough, you will be recognised by the same establishments and hopefully you will get an OBE or some other ancient badge of honour for your services to progress of modern technology.

Sad as it is, I have seen many of these people and their outfits. The truth is the real progress is not made by these charlatans.

I personally have little issue with people making up bullshit words or organisations and getting OBEs, MBEs or WTFs for it. I am happy to have drinks with them and fake amazement at their ‘achievements’ and breadth of their networks. Let them namedrop until they are blue in the face.

But they usually do more than that. They might waste your time, but have control over that. What you don’t have control over is the fact that they take up and waste resources that are allocated to help small businesses at a large scale. They usually become the gatekeepers to who gets those resources and they are not qualified by any standard to be in that position. They are trusted by establishment policy makers because of their association with you, the real entrepreneur, and that is what I have an issue with.

So the next time you see a startup groupie, you know why they are wasting their time with you, the unwashed, overworked, crazy startup person instead of drinking Campari with the Prime Minister at Davos!



Focus

Don’t read the TechCrunch.
Don’t obsess with the latest story on the HackerNews.
Don’t worry about growth hacking.
Don’t waste your time ‘measuring the opportunity size’ for your next VC meeting.
Don’t obsess with the competition.

Just build a fucking awesome product.

Build something for yourself. That is the only way you can tell if you have done the right thing. Listen to your customers and be your own customer. Obsess with product. Make it perfect. Don’t compromise on quality. You know if you have when you are using it every day.

VCs want you to tell them about the customer acquisition routes, market size, pricing strategy, distribution channels, competitive landscape, funding roadmap, growth strategy and a lot more.

They ask detailed questions that no one knows the answer to that early in the business. They never ask you, how you’re going to make your product perfect? No one knows the answer to that either. But they just don’t ask that.

The problem is, when a company like WhatsApp is acquired for $19B the first things VCs do is to check their email boxes to see if they said no to WhatsApp before. What they don’t do is to ask is how did WhatsApp grow to be so big to be so valuable to someone like Facebook? And if they do ask or answer that question, it’s all retrospective analysis. Hindsight.

The reality is that no one knows why Candy Crush is so popular? No one knows how Angry Birds got to be so big?
No one knows this including the companies behind them. If they did, they would have reproduced the success. Where is OMGPop? Do you know any other games from King, the makers of Candy Crush? Have you seen anything else making money for Rovio apart from Angry Birds merchandise?

But all you hear is “How are you going to be the next King, Rovio, Facebook or WhatsApp?” when neither side of the conversation knows how they got to be what they are. Your ansswer might as well be “I’m going to use black magic. I know an old witch”.

You can waste your limited resources in trying to answer those questions. The reality is that you might have to do that. If you don’ have money to carry on and need an investment, then you will have to try and answer questions like that. Leave the old witch out of it and try your best, but remember: don’t confuse the answers to those questions with anything real. Don’t believe for a second they mean anything when you don’t have a great product. Don’t lose your focus on your product.

The only thing that matters, the only thing that is guaranteed to help with making a business is a laser-sharp focus on product. You might not build a WhatsApp by only focusing on product, but no one knows any other way.

Focus.