rand($thoughts);

Networkworld is reporting:

“The leader of Microsoft’s integration efforts around open source software and its proprietary technologies is expanding his role by adding the title “general manager of Windows server marketing,” further indication that Microsoft plans to crank up the volume on its Windows/Linux story.

…

“This expanded role is a natural evolution of the work Bill has led at Microsoft over the past four years – working together with Microsoft technology-development teams and the open source community to build interoperable solutions on top of the Windows Platform, and continuing the discussion around Linux and Windows,” a company representative said.”

Anyone know if a GM of marketing trumps a GM of development/engineering at Microsoft? I guess I’m asking if this announcement means that Bill will help drive changes to the Windows server product? Or is he responsible for having fewer “get the facts” marketing campaigns?

In any case, Microsoft continues in their march towards OSS (and maybe acquiring Red Hat, a Nostradamus-ish prediction of mine).

This must have been announced previously (?) but this press release was recently emailed to us…

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), provider of pro-bono legal services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), will host a Legal Summit for Software Freedom on Friday, October 12, at Columbia Law School.

“We intend to bring together leading attorneys in the Software Freedom community to discuss matters of mutual interest and concern,” said Eben Moglen, Executive Director of SFLC and Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia Law School.

WHAT: Legal Summit for Software Freedom
WHEN: Friday, October 12, 2007, 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. EST
WHERE: Columbia Law School, William and June Warren Hall, Room 107, 1125 Amsterdam Ave., between 115th and 116th Streets, Manhattan, New York. Via subway: #1 train to 116 Street (Broadway)/Columbia University.

SPEAKERS: Eben Moglen , Dan Ravicher, Richard Fontana, Matt Norwood, Karen Sandler and James Vasile, each of whom are attorneys at SFLC. Topics include licensing, copyrights and patents, and corporate issues related to Software Freedom. Continuing Legal Education credit for New York is available to those who pre-register.

The Summit is free, but pre-registration is requested. More information, including how to register, is available at http://www.softwarefreedom.org/summit/ .

If you’re in the NY area and attend, drop us a line with your comments. Eben is an amazing public speaker (even though I sometimes disagree with some of his views).

By now, we’ve all read that Microsoft is releasing the .NET 3.5 source under the Microsoft Research License (i.e. look but don’t touch). I view this is but another step into the OSS swimming pool.

I’m willing to bet a shinny new Loonie that Microsoft will start allowing user contributions within the next year. And then we’ll see a Microsoft-led OSS project around the .NET runtime within the next 2 years. Microsoft will likely create a pseudo-GPL license (which isn’t the GPL) for this purpose. Obviously Microsoft will own the ‘official’ .NET distribution, but allowing user contributions first, and then offering the *allusion* of allowing multiple distributions, based on the original Microsoft code, is a natural progression.

I stress *allusion*, because it’s quite unlikely that we’ll see tens of .NET runtime distributions beyond the two we have today (i.e. the official MSFT distro & Mono). At most there’ll be 3 distros in the future. Microsoft will create a JCP-like committee to guide the .NET community, (following the lead from Sun in the Java world).

To me, this move is step 1 of 3 towards replicating what Sun has done with OpenJDK. Step 2 is allowing user contributions and step 3 would be launching opendotnet.org. When Microsoft gets to step 3, there will be the same allusion of “anyone can contribute and fork if they like”. But at the end of the day, there will be privileged distro from a single vendor, and that vendor gets to decide what goes into the distro. Few individual developers will waste their time trying to compete via an alternative distro in an unfair fight.

At least then, .NET will be truly open source and the masses will cheer, as they did with OpenJDK.

Somebody at Microsoft should register opendotnet.org soon….

So far the views from Dave, whurley, Matt and others have been negative to handle with caution.

After I heard that Microsoft was releasing the .NET 3.5 source under the Microsoft Research License (i.e. look but don’t touch), I tried to find what .NET users were saying. I found Scott Guthrie’s blog (of MSFT) and after reading 57 of the 85 comments listed, here’s what I found:

49 responded (very) positively to the news
3 responded (very) negatively to the news, specifically because of the MRL
6 were in a language other than English (French, German) or were pingbacks without an opinion

Here are some quotes:

“Fantastic news…next step, user check-ins :-) Kidding, but this is really amazing news!”

“Microsoft is taking one more step to the open community / world.”

“This is going to be SO helpful, esp. in WinForms and ASP.NET. I’ve spent too many hours looking at IL (well, before there were such nice decompilers) trying to figure out things in those frameworks. Thanks!”

It seems that the news is being well received by developers currently in the Microsoft camp. Yes, this is like preaching to the choir, but at least the choir is happy…

Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way to track comments across blogs and discussion sites such as slashdot or TSS? Maybe this capability exists, and if so, PLEASE enlighten me. If not, I am happy to take credit for the idea that someone will implement and become a hundred thousandaire.

Here’s the problem:

We all have 100s or feeds that we follow in our trusty RSS reader of choice. If you’re like me, and read about 10% of the feeds that are tracked, you quickly realize that there are a handful of people on the Interweb whose opinions you respect and want to follow daily. Following their blogs via RSS does the trick 75% of the time. I’m beginning to think that the other 25% is just as important. For example, I follow what Roy Russo says on his Loopfuse blog. But I almost missed when he posted the following comment on Marc Fleury’s blog:

In response to a user who posted a comment in Chinese (which, for the most part, few of us in North America would be able to understand).

Roy Russo said…
I agree with the chinese guy.
September 28, 2007 7:12:00 AM PDT

ROTFL….I fear that I’m missing witty comments like this all the time.

Actually, a better example is Bill Burke’s comments during a TSS discussion on the bind that Interface21 & SpikeSource are in. Bill made some great points and I almost missed them because he made them on TSS (which I seldom read on a daily basis) versus his blog.

I used to tag all my comments with a del.icio.us “comment-SavioRodrigues” tag, but that became cumbersome very quickly. I want the ability to automagically attribute all my comments on the Interweb, regardless of website or username, to some comprehensive pile in the sky. If you have a wordpress.com username, this is possible, but only on wordpress.com blogs. I’m looking for this capability to be extended across domains and online properties. I know I’d use this feature to keep better tabs on what folks like Bill, Matt, Roberto, Alex or the Redmonk guys are saying.

I can’t be alone here…

Maybe someone in OSS land can help? (I can write the hello world portion of the code in BASIC to get us started!)

Many of you may have heard that Matthew Aslett is over at The 451 Group now.

Matthew has been tracking VC funding to OSS vendors for quite some time now. Matthew reports that VC funding to OSS vendors in 3Q07 decreased 42% to $78M from $133M in 3Q06. To the end of 3Q, $267M has been invested vs. $339M last year. However, 2006 was a banner year for OSS firms receiving VC funding. As the OSS market matures, we’ll surely see VC funding decline as the VCs find the next new thing. Matthew explains that while the total investments may be declining, Series A investments in OSS are up and mature OSS vendors are getting acquired:

“The level of investment via seed and Series A funding rounds actually increased for the second quarter in succession, while the big money for established vendors went on M&A activity rather than venture funding.”

Few could argue that we seem to be moving into the OSS vendor consolidation stage of the lifecycle (for most oss markets). I wonder how many OSS vendors will remain ‘oss vendors’ by October 2009. At the end of the day, the large OSS vendors that can acquire smaller OSS vendors number in the handful. And, Oracle could buy all the large OSS vendors in an afternoon….sigh.

It’ll be interesting to see how much Citrix or Yahoo! have to write off (a la Skype) in a few years to account for the premiums they paid for XenSource & Zimbra respectively. I’m thinking that Citrix won’t as they’ll be acquired by Microsoft. Yahoo! on the other hand…

There are 50 people in a room. Each is asked to pick a number from 0 to 99. The winning number will be calculated by taking two-thirds of the average of the numbers picked by the 50 people. What number would you pick in order to win?

Scroll down.

Scroll down a little more.

Some common answers:

• 33: All things equal, in a random, normally distributed sample, the average would be 50. So, taking 2/3 of 50 = 33.
• 0: As above, but, since everyone “should” follow the above line of thinking, take 2/3 of 33. But wait, everyone should do this also, so take 2/3 of 2/3 of 33. Continue until you’ve multiplied by two-thirds all the way to nearly 0.

From a statistics standpoint, 33 is the “right” answer. But, this answer undervalues the level of thinking that others will apply to the problem.

From a game theory standpoint, 0 is the “right” answer. But, this answer presupposes that everyone “will think through the problem to the same degree as you”.

To win, you really want to balance between the above two approaches. If you expect that most will pick 33, then taking 2/3 of 33 = 22 will be a “good” pick with a “good” chance of winning.

When this test was administered to 5 different classes with ~50 students in each class, the average number picked was 34.72, meaning that the winning number would be ~23.

I bring this up because the professor went on to explain that most companies make business decisions that resemble picking “33″ in this scenario. Companies typically tend to ignore the thinking of others (competitors or customers) when making a business / technical decision.

I’m sure OSS vendors & enterprise software vendors are equally guilty of this.