Starting in 2009 popular, autonomic configuration management tool, Cfengine will be commercially supported by a company formed by Cfengine author, Mark Burgess. Cfengine has a laundry list of brand names that are using their software –AT&T, Bloomberg, IBM, Nokia, and many more. I suspect that many of them would pay for commercial support:

Here’s the news from the newly formed Cfengine AS:

Following 5 years of research and development under the technical direction of its long time author Mark Burgess (a professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College), the recently formed support company Cfengine AS today released a major upgrade of the Open Source, self-repairing software cfengine based on its innovative Promise Theory technology.

Unlike would-be alternatives, cfengine is not about producing alarms and reports to notify about errors and misalignments in the Data Center: it is a fully self-repairing maintenance engine capable of fixing them without human intervention. Cfengine users know that systems are compliant and maintained even when humans are unavailable, because they have made all the important decisions in advance.

Cfengine is open-source (GPL) software for configuring, monitoring and autonomically maintaining computers. It’s been around for over 15 years and is pretty prevalent among Unix administrators with a lot of machines to manage.  The concept around CFengine involves having a centralized configuration that can propagate out to servers a common use would be to develop a template or set of templates that can be used to “build” a server.

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Technorati Tags: Cfengine, Configuration Management, JeOS, Open Source, Puppet, Red Hat, Reductive Labs, Systems Management, Thin Crust, Ubuntu

There is a funny thing about commercial open source software companies as much as they like talking about their community-driven open source heritage they end up doing a lot of things their proprietary counterparts do. Spout off about being enterprise-ready, boast, offer TCO studies, and all manner of other things that make them look like a typical proprietary software company. A lot of them neglect the transparent open source traits that makes them truly disruptive and interesting (see yesterday’s post on SourceFire).

Open source software is a disruptive technology it’s about changing the status quo. Open source is rock and roll while proprietary software is easy listening. That’s why I always admired JBoss’ Marc Fleury. Marc was and is a bad boy, a rebel, and he played the part to a successful $350 million dollar acquisition of JBoss by Red Hat. Beyond that he was a professional who built a company that was professional and respected grew his customer base and created an iconic software brand. All things that are consistent with open source software, he also seemed to have a good time doing it.

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Technorati Tags: Appcelerator, JBoss, Legacy, Loopfuse, Marc Fleury, Red Hat, Ringside Networks

This week’s Open Source Business Conference was a strange meeting of Enterprise IT users, venture capitalists, and free software entrepreneurs. The opening keynote was delivered by Red Hat’s freshly minted CEO Jim Whitehurst who gave a very modest speech noting that while Red Hat has been a leading open source company they have not necessarily been an open source leader. Whitehurst’s presentation lacked anything especially insightful or noteworthy and he has the advantage of being the new guy so he’s off the hook for anything that might have happened before he took the job.

What is apparent Red Hat’s no longer exciting. They’ve crossed over to respectable elder statesman of open source. The action is among the new batch of up-and-coming open source software companies who are not yet venture backed but are developing interesting technologies and services. Here are some of the companies that may well be the new open source superstars.

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Technorati Tags: Appcelerator, applications, Bitnami, Bitrock, Business, Conference, Enomaly, Loopfuse, MindTouch, Open Source, Red Hat, Ringside Networks, startups

There’s an irony here that is notable. Even those that hit it big once and fail miserably from that point on still have more credibility than those that continually break even:

Interestingly, we don’t call someone who exhibits all of the personal characteristics ofan entrepreneur – opportunity sens- ing, out-of-the-box thinking, and determination – yet who failed miserably in his or her venture an entrepreneur; we call him or her a business failure. Even someone like Bob Young, of Red Hat Software fame, is called a “serial entrepreneur” only after his first success; i.e., all of his prior failures are dubbed the work of a serial entrepreneur only after the occurrence of his first success. The problem with ex post definitions is that they tend to be ill defined. It’s simply harder to get your arms around what’s unproven. An entrepreneur can certainly claim to be one, but without at least one notch on the belt, the self-proclaimed will have a tough time persuading investors to place bets. Those investors, in turn, must be willing to assume greater risk as they assess the credibility of would-be entrepreneurs and the potential impact of formative ventures.

STANFORD SOCIAL INNOVATION REVIEW / spring 2007
Social Entrepreneurship: The Case for Definition, Sally Osberg and Roger Martin

Technorati Tags: Bob Young, failure, Red Hat, serial entrepreneur, success

Thanks to Tony Lawrence for inspiring today’s post. Hopefully these links don’t stink. 

Anthony Lawrence: Reasons I Don’t Like Social Media

Tools that once were valuable for pointing out the best of the web often become obsolete or spammy (you might say this about Digg). Tony’s example is StumbleUpon, a link sharing site that I love.  He contends that the social networking site has become clogged with junk or at least doesn’t provide consistent "quality" links. [Updated: Actually check the post comments for clarification.] Not all sites and tools stand the test of time even the spark that started the blogosphere Jorn Borger’s Robot Wisdom (now supplemented by his Auxilliary) is no were near as popular as moneymakers like TechCrunch and the Huffington Post. I wonder if ten years what sites will stand the test of time will the millions of MySpace and Facebook users have moved on to the next best thing or not. 

Stephen O’Grady: BitRock: Application Installation in a Networked World

I think Bitrock..rocks. Having point and click installation options for applications hosted on Linux and other non-Windows platforms is critical for adoption. Stephen has his usual insightful commentary. 

The basic value proposition, then, to an ISV is that Bitrock can package your application such that it’s suitable for cross-platform deployment, thus freeing application vendors from the burden of delivering multiple builds themselves. 

You an check out Bitrock’s handiwork at Bitnami.  

Matt Asay: Google: The New SourceForge?

Matt points us to this post from Google’s Brian Fitzpatrick that Google Code now hosts over 80,000 projects. I was surprised by their numbers so I took a look around and created a project to see what tools were available. I like the clean interface but it’s still got a long way to go to match SourceForge.net. I think there is value in a lot of their tools including their stats but Brett may beg to differ.

Why use downloads as an indicator of OSS success?

Brett Shoemaker at Microsoft’s Port25 riffs on the download metric for OSS software.

I continue to be surprised by the amount of weight given to downloads as a metric for OSS success. A topic Matt Asay also touched on recently over at The Open Road. Like Matt, I’m talking OSS at the product or company level (i.e., not OSS projects) and by success I mean sales.

I think the advantage is that the open source project offers full transparency unlike Brett’s examples. The implication is that successful open source business require success open source projects that include downloads as one of many metrics of success (I like forum activity, and code/documentation contributions as supporting indicators).  To his point there is not necessarily a direct correlation between downloads and profits and there are plenty of open source companies trying to figure out how to capitalize on the projects they sponsor. 

ComputerWorld’s Todd Weis: Q&A: New Red Hat CEO on JBoss, open source and the future

ComputerWorld’s Todd Weiss sits down with new Linux chief,James Whitehurst about the future of Red Hat and specifically JBoss. The best part about being the new CEO he doesn’t have to take responsibility for anything before his time.

Since being acquired by Linux vendor Red Hat Inc. in mid-2006, open-source middleware vendor JBoss Inc.has been a company in transition. It was well-known for its open-source middleware line that could be used by large businesses to better tie together their divergent applications. 

Entiva’s Alex Fletcher: Open source ecosystems and collaboration as the currency of innovation

Alex has some great commentary on disruption and open source.  

After attempting to portray how open source ecosystems can double as platforms, I think its logical to assert that they also serve as organic collaboration networks.Where the more open, flatter structural composition of these ecosystems creates a hotbed for the brand of collaboration that is required to scale in an increasingly "globalized" world. Interestingly, at the core of the seemingly generic term, collaboration, is the seeds for disruptive innovation.

CNET: Open-source software: It’s the free coffee cup of today

I had the opportunity to hear Chris Anderson (the Long Tail, Wired Mag) speak Friday night about how we are moving towards a "free" economy or more specifically businesses based on a free giveaway. I am anxious for the next version of Wired to see more on the topic. For now he’s got some good "free news". I think open source software illustrates his point. 

Companies used to give away pens, squishy balls and coffee cups to worm their ways into the hearts of customers. Now, they pass out database software.

John M. Willis: Cloud Computing and the Enterprise

Not exactly open source but I think the ability to build computing clouds is often built on open source infrastructure. Check out Enomaly’s Enomalism for open source management for elastic computing. 

Google’s New Open Source Blog

Because we love to marvel at all things Google.  

(via Glynn Moody)  

Technorati Tags: Bitnami, Bitrock, Chris Anderson, cloud computing, free, Google Code, JBoss, Red Hat, Social Media, SourceForge, StumbleUpon