More on Open Source Ecosystems

There are other sites out there discussing the phrase 'open source ecosystems'. Here are a few interesting ones:

• An interesting post by one of the guys who helped develop Ruby on Rails, which is a great new OSS language for Web 2.0.


• A news article about the importance of third parties such as Pervasive to form an ecosystem around open source projects (in this case around PostgreSQL.


• A 2005 research article by IBM stating (among other things) that an open source project "needs to build an ecosystem" in order to reach a critical mass for viability.


• What looks like a wiki-evolving definition (or is that 'wikivolving'- is that a word yet? should I TM it?) of an open source business ecosystem on ObjectWeb.


• A blog from a guy whose job is Director of Ecosystem Development for the Eclipse Foundation. (I ought to try to ring him up sometime just for a chat)


• A presentation on Collaboratively Evolving Ecosystems in the context of government-sponsored open source projects, essentially laying out the case for moving from "N*build to 1*build + N*improve" (an interesting way to look at the benefits of OSS.

All this to suggest that I am certainly not the originator of the term nor the only one interested in it. Here's hoping I can add to the conversation in a truly meaningful way.

Linux Ecosystem to be worth $40B, per IDG

According to this report by IDG, the Linux ecosystem will be worth $40B by the year 2010. The actual figure is not as interesting as the fact that they used the term 'ecosystem', which is pretty cool.

My favorite Wikipedia page

OK, it is not related to my dissertation (at least not directly), but I like this Wikipedia page very much. Especially the quote from Dr. Frankfurt's book:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Classic. Reminds me of what most scholars do (whether they know it or not) when they write.

Oops...perhaps that's bullshit.

Marc Fleury has left the building

Its official - Marc no longer works for Red Hat. After selling his company for $420M in 2006, what else was there for him to do? He has long despised the role of middle manager, which in many respects he would have become - albeit a very high position in that middle. He would no longer really be 'the man', but only 'the man sitting next to the man'. I could not see Marc going out like that.

Besides, some reports have him personally getting as much as $150M out of the deal, which is pretty darn good after he started the company in 1999. I would love to be so lucky, but I cannot think on that scale. Kudos to Marc, but I can't wait to see what he comes up with next - in addition to his techno DJ career, that is.

Security Breaches and compensation

The University of Georgia had a security breach recently, which was very lightly covered by the media. In response to the breach, you get the standard fare of apologies and news releases (just like we saw in the Ohio University breach last year...but no remuneration for credit report freezes or any other incurred expense by the people whose information was compromised. Why not?

Help! We're under attack!

Posted on CNN and elsewhere, 3 of the 13 'key Internet computers' were were under attack by a massive hack attack. According to the CERT center,

At approximately 0001 GMT on 6 Feb 2007, several root-level DNS servers began receiving a large volume of malformed DNS queries. This initial attack appears to have been a warm-up for a much larger attack that began at 1000 GMT.

DNS servers G (U.S. DOD Network Information Center), L (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), and M (WIDE Project) appear to have been the most severely impacted although none were ever unreachable. The servers were operational and reachable even with the high volume of traffic.

Fortunately, we internet users did not know what was hitting us. Unfortunately, this is becoming more and more likely. Buckle up.

Successful OSS firms

Interesting read from Information Week on How To Tell The Open Source Winners From The Losers. Don't miss the sidebars.