Waugh Partners just released the The Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report. The report was commissioned and executed by Waugh Partners, with the financial support of sponsors, NICTA, IBM and Fujitsu. The data was collected by online surveys conducted from October to December 2007. The industry survey was aimed at “companies that sell, support or service Open Source related technologies in the Australian market.”

Jeff Waugh has street cred in the open source community as a GNOME developer and former community manager for Ubuntu. His partner and wife Pia Waugh is a open source advocate and President of Software Freedom International which sponsors the annual open source conscience raising event – Software Freedom Day.

Read the full story

Technorati Tags: Australia, opensource, research, Waugh

• Collaborative Thinking: Microsoft Continues To Fill SharePoint Social Gaps – Microsoft fills in the gaps of Sharepoint with NewsGator and Atlassian Confluence but is that good enough?
• Wired: How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong – One Infinite Loop, Apple’s street address, is a programming in-joke — it refers to a routine that never ends. But it is also an apt description of the travails of parking at the Cupertino, California, campus.
• How to be an Authority Maven: 21 Tips for Keeping Up to Date in Your Niche @ chrisg.com – Keeping abreast of news in your niche can be tough. Chris G’s productivity tips..
• zAgile – About Us – New open source collaboration company for distributed development.
• Launchpad Blog: Austin Coworking – An interview with Alex Hillman who discusses coworking in Austin.
• eWeek: Open-Source Business Influencers – Odd list but some good picks. Had lunch with Tim Golden last week, he’s a hoot.
• The Best Linux Marketing Tip: Don’t Mention Linux – The VAR Guy talks about the AsusEee at CostCo.
• Marketing Pilgrim: Buzz Monitoring: 26 Free Buzz Tracking Tools – Interesting ways to gather buzz and intelligence on your industry.
• openqabal: OpenQabal: Open Source Social Networking & Collaboration Suite – Open source Java-based open source social networking thanks to Phillip for pointing it out in my comments this week.
• stevenf.com: The First, The Free, and the Good – Steven Frank on free software, Apple and open source. Nice thought piece.
• 8 common lies told by enterprise software sales people | IT Project Failures | ZDNet.com – You know how an enterprise sales guy is lying? His lips are moving.
• Why You’ve Got to Dig Digg to Get Dugg – The thought of making the front page of Digg is something that divides most content-creators into three camps: those who want it and strive for it, those who want it but feel they don’t have a chance, and those who don’t want it at all.
• First look at Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” beta | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com – First impressions by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes shows Ubuntu to be much easier to test drive then ever before.
• Micro Persuasion: Three Internet Careers That Soon Won’t Exist – Everyone will be expected to know how to navigate the online landscape if they want to have a thriving career and there will no longer need to be specific to Internet or Social Media it will be a much broader requirement.
• What Is Marketers’ Biggest Challenge When It Comes to Social Networks? – Advertising Age – Digital – Social networking is all about relationship building, and while that may be in the DNA of the public-relations industry, it has done a poor job of claiming that birthright.
• Conversation Targeting: Find the Influencers in Social Media and Blogs with BuzzLogic – Tools to identify social media influencers and buzz.

Technorati Tags: AsusEEE, coworking, marketing, openqabal, opensource, Ubuntu

And on goes my fascination with open source companies and their valuations…

I was reading Stephen O’Grady’s commentary on open source companies and their valuations prompted by the recent acquisition of MySQL by Sun for $1 billion. He quotes Jeff Gould who logically questions whether Sun can make the acquisition pay-off.

Stephen also quotes a piece from Knowledge@Wharton on the myth of market share.

It is a common practice of many companies to focus their attention on grabbing market share from their competitors. But such efforts can actually be detrimental to the firm’s profitability, according to Wharton marketing professor J. Scott Armstrong.

[From The 'Myth of Market Share': Can Focusing Too Much on the Competition Harm Profitability? - Knowledge@Wharton]

Another logical and thoughtful piece by much smarter people than I. Part of their support was came from analyzing companies that operating in a pre-Internet market. These companies didn’t benefit from the ability to market and distribute their products over the Internet: GE, Dupont, Union Carbide, and Alcoa. They didn’t have digital products an open source licensing and blocking strategy either. The end result of profitability is still valid but I believe the route to profitability may be different for open source companies.  

Read the full story

Technorati Tags: Competition, Downloads, MySQL, opensource, Oracle, Profitability, Red Hat, Valuations

Today Nokia announced their intention to acquire an open source tools manufacturer, Trolltech.

Trolltech is an open source company by virtue of their dual-licensing of the QT tool kit that is used by a number of products but probably most notably the KDE desktop. Though they do dual license and sell commercial proprietary products as well.

The Nokia deal was reported in kroners (NOK) at 843 million making the purchase worth about $154.4 million in US dollars. 

2006 revenue for TrollTech was 174.1 Million kroners or $38.8 million. I wish I could find final data for 2007 but as it stands the revenue for last quarter and 2006 and the first three quarters of 2007 Trolltech had revenues of 213.8 NOK. 

Barring a blowout fourth quarter that makes the purchase price of Trolltech about 4 times revenue which is a much lower multiple than the recent MySQL, Xensource, and Zimbra acquisitions. Though it does validate the appetite proprietary companies have for open source. 

Technorati Tags: acquisitions, Nokia, opensource, QT, Trolltech