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Chasing a product dream Companies should fund open source projects. It will help sponsors, consumers and reduce development costs, says Dr Anil Seth When we look at successful software companies, we think of products. We think of MS Office, Oracle database and SAP�s ERP system. We long to see an Indian company in that list. The fact that an Indian company is not a part of this list is often taken as criticism of the Indian software industry. We feel convinced that the quality of work being done by us is not something to write about. We will examine the history of two companies in the recent past. This will help us appreciate the fact that when we chase a dream, we understand the framework on which our dream rests. It was over three years ago when we first came across the concepts of Web services. We felt that J2EE was definitely an idea we needed to explore and learn what we could do with it. Our pockets being shallow and the plausible opportunities vapourware, our hope was similar to those of start-up techies�search the Net and hunt for an open source or free-to-use implementation. We discovered Enhydra. The mailing list was vibrant. A majority of the discussions went over my head. We needed to install it and check the possibilities. Manpower crunch and the caution necessitated by the IT downturn, prevented us from following up on our conviction. We could not allocate people for investigating the capabilities of Enhydra though we continued to follow its progress. Enhydra was rated as one of the three leading application servers along with IBM�s Websphere and BEA�s Weblogic by IDC in 2001. It was a product from a company called Lutris Technologies. There was an announcement in September 2001 that Enterprise Enhydra was being converted into a restricted licence product and was no longer available for downloading. The mailing list disappeared and we forgot all about Enhydra. We did not blame Lutris. It was their product and they had the right to decide its future. Our need for learning J2EE had not disappeared. We still wanted to keep monitoring it. We hoped to assign a project to final year computer engineering students if we could find a product soon. We now started noticing references to JBoss. We couldn�t convince students to work with it, there was too little documentation and we were also unclear. It had to wait another year till I joined the faculty of an engineering college. Meanwhile, every time I came across references to JBoss, it seemed to be moving from strength to strength. It was an open source product. The business model was intriguing. It was a loosely formed group of consultants and revenues were shared with the company. We decided to create our College MIS project using JBoss and assigned it to two groups of students. Currently our College MIS system is in the process of implementation and another group of students has a project to enhance its functionality. JBoss has become a fairly successful company. It has received funding to fund other open source initiatives. Its product is well known today but it does not make any money selling the product! Whatever happened to Enhydra and Lutris? About a year ago, I saw an announcement about the release of the new version of Enhydra and the license was open source. Lutris as a company does not seem to exist at least not in the same business. Customers who had taken this product were in a soup. My interpretation of the events based on some mailing list announcements is as follows. The open source version of Enhydra was rescued in 2002 by an Austrian company Together Teamlosung, which was offering solutions and services based on Enhydra. The company negotiated with Lutris Corporation and acquired the rights to Enhydra in November 2003 after nearly two years of efforts. The source of Enhydra was released to the public under the LGPL licence. My efforts to search for Lutris or its version of Enterprise Enhydra using Google led nowhere. Enhydra in its new life resides on ObjectWeb.org sponsored by Bull, French Telecom R&D and INRIA. It shares the J2EE space with JOnAS, another open source application from Bull. Enhydra is positioned as a Java/XML application server. The next version of Enhydra is expected to integrate well with JOnAS. Incidentally, ObjectWeb has another product Lomboz which is an intriguing J2EE IDE plugin for Eclipse and includes support of JBoss. Open source organisations seem to support each other even when competing. Products, especially blockbusters, are definitely needed. The Internet has changed the rules. Can one create a new product, market it at a price competitive enough to sell required number of copies to cover sales and development costs? It is doubtful if one can compete with the overall impact of individual efforts of many developers. Just try to calculate what it would have cost a company to create the Gnome or KDE desktops in the closed source environment. Or can a company hope to meet the pace of change of these desktops or Mozilla in recent times? Once an open source product reaches a certain level of maturity, the enhancements and improvements speed up phenomenally. Just examine the pace of change of Mozilla (Firefox/Thunderbird included) in the last year or two. The inevitable conclusion is that the revenue model for products has to be on services, unless, of course, a rich uncle or company is funding the development. This definitely opens up the possibility of someone else making money from the same effort and quite possibly that original developers not succeeding in selling their services. This is still a far less risky proposition than incurring large marketing expenses to promote a closed product and finding that it has bombed in the market place. Who could be the potential rich uncles in India ready to fund open source products? Come to think of it, why are Bull and French Telecom promoting open source middleware? Who benefits from the increased use of Internet? What if BSNL funds Indianisation of Linux and mirrors many open source software locally? How much would this altruism cost BSNL? How much would BSNL save by the reduced demand for international bandwidth? Who knows an application funded by BSNL may become indispensable for all Indians communicating in local languages regardless of where we are or whose bandwidth we use. ----- Dr Anil Seth is currently with the PC College of Engineering in Verna, Goa. He has a keen interest in open-source software and the free software movement, on which he also offers consulting. He can be contacted at [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Forwarded by AlmeidaG(ji), www.goa-world.com
