IT Investment Research

Did Romney Plan to Ride the Microsoft Anti-Trust Lawsuit to the White House?

In preparing my recent annual blog post correcting the record concerning Massachusetts' so-called adoption of so-called open standards by so-called "brave Massachusetts technology execs," I came across some academic research on the subject.  It is written by three Universitiy of Illinois (UI) professors and is in some unclear manner funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).  The UI professors' research depends heavily on the open standards blogosphere propaganda lie that Microsoft (MSFT) killed the open standards effort here in Massachusetts through aggresive lobbying in 2006. 

That's all Sun (JAVA)/IBM Kool Aid of course but the academic paper got me thinking: mabye this really had more to do with the Massachusetts lawsuit against Microsoft over Internet Explorer and the fact that Mitt Romeny was running in the 2008 U.S. presidential election from the minute he became Massachusetts' governor in January 2003. In reading about the role the UI academic research ascribes to former Mitt Romney aide, Eric Kriss, I decided to re-analyze my opinion. I believe that the effort to foist "open standards" on Massachusetts government was simply the misguided effort of a few low-level information technology (IT) bureaucrats in one department of one part of one branch of Massachusetts' three-branch, multiple-part, multi-departmental state government, aided and abetted by relatively low-level IBM and Sun guys. 

But maybe I should put my Massachusetts politician hat on.The Kriss connection spurred me to read some of my own contemporaenous analysis of the Massachusetts IT Commision, which met throughout 2002-2003, predating all the publicity about open standards by two years. This was also during the period when Massachusetts was the lone holdout or one of the few holdouts against settling the Microsoft anti-trust action begun years earlier by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ).  Perhaps Romney's aides thought they could run that issue--or the good-government (known as goo-goo here in Mass.) idea of openness--into a presidential campaign issue.

The "open standards" crusade had actually begun with a legitimate open source idea to preserve Massachusetts' government intellectual property (IP).  It had nothing to little to do with public records or open document formats at the beginning in 2002. But upon taking over the governorship as the IT Commission was wrapping up its work in 2003, the Romney administration twisted the obviously good idea of preserving Massachusetts' own IP into a potential mandate to acquire only open source licensed IP.  A Senate committe quickly nixed that idea for a lot of reasons (most important of which is that the Romney administration could not demonstrate a return on investment) and the open source idea slowly morphed into an open standards idea related to public records and announced in 2005. 

The problem, as explained elsewhere on this blog, is that the Governor has nothing to do with public records in Massachusetts. The rest is history as they say, albeit in this case one of the few historic records written by the losers at IBM and Sun. And of course the Romney campaign failed--if that was its intention--to light a fire with this goo-goo idea or any other and lost almost every presidential primary he entered in 2008.

By the way, I can't tell if the UI academic research is just unintentionally error-ridden or intentionally misleading.  It admittedly depends on what it calls "anecdotal" evidence when--as explained in my previous blog post--all kinds of clear, crisp Massachusetts public records, including all the material related to the 2002-2003 IT Commission noted above, are available to explain what really happened.  One of the professors told me he read the IT Commission materials but I see no mention of it in the academic paper.

I have written the professors to see if I can get some of these issues cleared up.  How I get them retracted is more of a problem. Having this bull forever out there on the web sites of already discredited media outlets is one thing.  Having it preserved forever in some NSF-sponsored official looking document is another.

-- Dennis Byron

AP Reports Open-Source-Based Software Failed to Meet Obama Team Needs

As I blogged about on October 26 on itbusinessedge, the Associated Press (AP) is providing the only independent primary-source for a report dated October 24 that whitehouse.gov has changed its underlying content management software (CMS).  This is a category of software that includes EMC Documentum, IBM Filenet, Oracle (ORCL) Stellent, OpenText (OTEX), dozens of open-source-licensed products and projects, and software sold as services associated with Microsoft (MSFT) Sharepoint. For most IT staffers, the whole subject is kind of yawner—IT shops change underlying software every day.

No one would probably even write or blog about the change except for the mangled set of facts put out on the AP wire, and the difficulty trying to clear them up. Neither General Dynamics (GD), the large federal contractor that did the work according to the supplier of the new CMS software, or the supplier itself can or will say what the old CMS was or what other new CMS options were looked at by GD or the White House or even answer simple questions about how or when the contract to do the work was awarded and how much the new change cost. 

• Acquia, which is funded by North Bridge Partners, Sigma and Partners and O’Reilly Media’s venture arm, is the developer of the new CMS. But it deflects questions to its PR agency which says, we’re not “at liberty to say” in response to the above questions.
• “I will forward your question to our customer (presumably meaning the White House) as they have requested,” says the General Dynamics’ spokesperson, the prime contractor for the White House Communications Agency but better known as the tanks and submarine manufacturer that did over $12 billion in business with the U.S. government in its Fiscal 2009 just ended.  (General Dynamics got into the information technology business by acquiring Anteon in late 2005.)

GD won't even say if it has ever done a press release about the subject. Acquia won't even say how many developers it has working on the product.

So falling back on the AP report, here’s what we know--or more appropriaely don't know--with some educated-guess commentary:

• “White House opens Web site programming to public.” -- Presumably that headline, which appears hundreds of time on the web in publications that picked up the AP story, refers to the fact that the new CMS is an open source licensed project supported by Acquia, in the way that Fedora is an open source project supported by Red Hat (RHAT). It is unlikely that the White House is inviting random programmers to change its code base.
• “Security is fundamentally built into the development process because the community is made up of people from all across the world, and they look at the source code from the very start of the process until it's deployed and after." -- We don't know from the AP story what the security issue was at the Bush White House that General Dynamics had to fix.
• “It will be a much faster way to change the programming behind the Web site. When the model was owned solely by the government, federal contractors would have to work through the reams of code to troubleshoot it or upgrade it. Now, it can be done in the matter of days and free to taxpayers.” -- Presumably the revenue loss to General Dynamics will be minor as federal contractors will be replaced by thousands of volunteers.
• “It didn't let the tech-savvy Obama team build the new online platform it wanted. For instance, 60,000 watched Obama speech to a joint session of Congress on health care. One-third of those stayed online to talk with administration officials about the speech. But there are limits; the programming used to power that was built for Facebook, the popular social networking Web site.” -- As with other sections of the AP article, the antecedents of the many “its” and “thats” are hard to follow but apparently the open-source-based Facebook was not up to the challenge that the Obama team wanted or needed to tackle. (However I don’t believe the AP meant to say that Facebook was the outdated CMS technology used by the Bush administration, since the AP refers to that technology as the 'proprietary Bush technology.')
• “It comes more cheaply than computer coding designed for a single client, such as the Executive Office of the President. It gives programmers around the world a chance to offer upgrades, additions or tweaks to existing programs that the White House could - or could not - include in daily updates.” -- I am almost certain that the Obama administration does not want programmers sending upgrades or tweaks to the White House—send them to Acquia.

Other independent web sites, in particular techpresident, the Register and CNet, have taken some good educated guesses on the subject as well.

-- Dennis Byron

Spend More on IT To Save a Trillion Dollars on Open Source

In a recent headline, ComputerworldUK promises to answer the question How to Save $1 Trillion a Year with Open Source. The headline is based on a blog post using multiple dated studies about worldwide information technology (IT) spending, tortured logic, and footnotes about the logic that lead nowhere. To be fair to the author (Glyn Moody), I don’t know if the headline is his or a ComputerWorld UK editor’s.

So as a public service to the IT community I have read the actual source material cited in the blog post and figured out that the world can save a trillion dollars with open source if you in IT simply increase your IT spending 400% to 500% and migrate all your mainframe and Unix boxes to Wintel.

It’s that simple.  Why has no one thought of it before?

Of course, open source terms and conditions (Ts&Cs) do not relate directly to most IT spending (personnel costs, overhead, systems, storage, training, IT or professional services spending, etc.) that make up the bulk of the costs noted in the 18-month-old Standish’s report cited in the ComputerWorld UK blog post. In my experience there might be the following indirect relationship:

• open source Ts&Cs might reduce your software license spending by a small amount (the Standish research confirms that)

• but will probably increase your personnel or IT services by at least the same amount, creating a wash

I admit that I have not confirmed that opinion in any statistically significant research.

All I needed to answer the headline’s question was to consult the recent release of worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) numbers by the World Bank and the previously mentioned Standish Report, called "Trends in Open Source." A subscription is required to read Standish’s research but the report was widely distributed to press and analysts at the time of publication. The arithmetic is simple especially compared to the arithmetic in ComputerWorld UK:

• Standish says users can derive 6% savings from using open source, both in initial and ongoing costs (I am just reading the report, not verifying its conclusion)
• The World Bank says the total of all countries’ GDPs is $60 trillion (other sources such as the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency publish similar numbers)
• If IT users spend 27% of revenue on IT (using aggregate worldwide GDP as a proxy for aggregate worldwide corporate revenue), use open source in the way Standish recommends (“running open source using commodity hardware”), the 6% savings will be a trillion dollars

Forget the fact that most IT users spend 5% or less of revenue on IT according to Gartner, not 27%. This is an open-source-related blog post. I can make any outrageously misleading claims I choose.

-- Dennis Byron

Enterprise Software One Worlders Sing "God Bless (Open Source for) America"

All the usual suspects except IBM (IBM) rounded themselves up on July 22, 2009 and started something called Open Source for America. Here we have Sun (JAVA) and Oracle (ORCL), there we have Red Hat (RHAT), and in this corner are Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) working together. From the moutains to the praries, sea to shining sea, so to speak.

A number of companies in this same group has specialized in starting and funding innocuous sounding front groups in the European Union (EU) for years. There is also a long list of these information-technology (IT) suppliers' camp followers saluting the stars and stripes along with Google, IBM, Oracle, Sun and Yahoo. The group must feel that now that a Democratic government has taken over in the United States, a government that is more like European governments according to some political pundits, the front-group marketing technique will be effective in Washington.

The front includes some of the same propagandists that brought you Meritalk back in March 2009 but apparently that did not work out so well. The lead quote in the Open Source for America press release is not from an information technologist but from a PR person employed by lobbyists called Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti Inc. (MVC). MVC’s website is under construction (maybe waiting for stimulus money :) ) but a web site called Political Base says MVC

“is a government affairs lobbyist company that focuses on clients' strategic planning, message development, coalition management and corporate positioning.”

Similarly Meritalk used or is using a Washington PR firm named O’Keefe & Company.

I am not sure what all the belt-way BS even means but why can’t these IT companies speak for themselves?  Why do they need a front group? Apparently Scott McNealy’s white paper about open source to President Obama got lost in the inbox of the Department of Justice anti-trust lawyer investigating the Sun-Oracle-Java-license whatever.

Make no mistake; this is bunch of enterprise software marketing guys and related software intellectual-property attornies and magazine salesmen trying to make a buck off the government. I have no problem with that but it’s jingo patriotism for them to use such a bogus name when all they are doing is just angling to get a piece of the stimulus pie.

At least there is no waving American (or EU) flag on Open Source for America’s web site.

-- Dennis Byron

Software Developers Debate the Restrictive Nature of the GNU General Public License (GPL)

In a June 30 blog post, I described how the restrictions in the GNU General Public License (GPL) may be the sticking point for the Department of Justice relative to Oracle's (ORCL) acquisition of Sun (JAVA).  The restrictions could be interpreted as anti-competitive in the same way the European Union (EU) appears to interpret Microsoft's (MSFT) bundling of Internet Explorer into Windows as anti-competitive.  Both positions are real stretches of enterprise software market dynamics but legally arguable (that is, a lawyer wouldn't be reprimanded for wasting the court's and a judge's time).

As I said in the post linked to above, I am not qualified to explain the GPL's restrictions any further than the one sentence I included.  But a large group of enterprise software developers have an interesting debate of the subject going on at the blog of the Red Sweater software company.  The intitial blog post, "Getting Pretty Lonely," goes into much more detail than I could; the responses are civil and to the extent I read them (there are scores) and pretty rational and informative.

Here are two excerpts that I liked:

"In my opinion, all the legal mumbo jumbo ceases to matter once the original author’s intentions are made clear. So if the author of GPL-licensed code clarifies to me that it cannot be run on Sundays, then their GPL means it cannot be run on Sundays. But this is one of the problems with the GPL: its terms are not often understood, even by the authors of GPL-licensed code."

"I do know that the GPL stuff was deliberately created in angry reaction to the collossal cockup that was commercial unixes (sic) in the 80s. Windows won, because all of those commercial clones of unix (sic) were fundamentally incompatible with each other."

Simultaneously there is a similar recurring debate ongoing at the Open Source Initiative (OSI) license-review list about the advantages/disadvantages of GPL and the proliferation of open source licenses (there are two separate threads so it gets confusing and much easier to just get on its mailing list. 

You might ask why this matters to IT investors?  If you do, don't invest in IT companies.

-- Dennis Byron

Does Obama CIO Advocate Open Source Enterprise Software?

My Google alert on open source went into overdrive on June 5/6 with the “news” that Vivek Kundra, the United States’ (U.S.’s) new and I think first chief information officer (CIO), “advocates open source.”  Red Hat (RHAT) vice president Michael Tiemann says it’s so in a blog post.  Ostatic and the 451 Group’s CAOS Theory echoed it. And the ‘usual-suspects’ list of open source blogoblatherers piled on with posts and tweets. 

European-Union (EU)-like advocacy against open technology choice by the new U.S. government certainly does not surprise me. It would be consistent with the Obama administration also following through on decades-old U.S.-Democratic-party plans to “Europeanize” the U.S.’s positions in favor of nuclear arms proliferation, against the security of the State of Israel, in favor of nationalized industries, against private choice of health-care providers, in favor of labor-union goon squads, against the Second Amendment, and so forth. So be it! To the winner go the spoils.

But I would at least like to see what Mr. Kundra said in his advocacy of open source, both out of due diligence as an information technology (IT) analyst and as a U.S. taxpayer who is likely to get his pockets picked if his government does not support choice in technology procurement.  The trouble is that I can’t find that Mr. Kundra said anything I would consider in any way seminal to all this June 5/6 excitement in the source cited by the blogoblatherers, a  Federal Computer Week (FCW) article headlined “Kundra Advocates Open Source.”

In fact, without a little work I cannot even find the article (which is why above I only link to the Google search I used). The FCW web site says the “page is no longer available.”  If I go to the Google cache of the FCW article, the only reference to Mr. Kundra that I find (other than in the headline) is this:

“So when Vivek Kundra, the federal government’s new chief information officer, includes open source as one of the technologies he supports using to make government work better and more cheaply, you would think open source is primed for a surge in support.”

But where does Mr. Kundra “include open source” in this way?  Also based on Google I follow a pointer to Mr. Kundra’s introductory conference call as CIO. In that interview, the only thing I can find Mr. Kundra saying about open source is as follows:

“I think you look at open source, as a technology, whether it's mediawiki, for example... with Wikipedia what we did in the District of Columbia was that we had a wikipedia solution that allowed every single employee to collaborate and have access to information. I think there is also a place for specialized (Byron note: apparently meaning non-open-source) software, you look at the FAA (Byron note: Federal Aviation Administration) or if you are looking at DHS (Byron note: Department of Homeland Security), there are some mission critical systems that you can't apply an open source solution to. We need to have a very pragmatic, balanced approach in terms of software.”

Well that certainly does not sound like advocacy of or preference for open source. But I am not relieved by his apparent balance either. I don’t agree with Mr. Kundra’s attempt (in the report on the conference call) to contrast open source and proprietary terms and conditions (Ts&Cs) in terms of functionality.  I don’t think there is any application where license Ts&Cs, which is basically what open source is all about in this context, should dictate technology decisions. 

And I guess I need to find some way to fine tune my Google alert.

-- Dennis Byron

 

March from UNIX to Linux Servers Relates to Virtualization

Research conducted by IDC in February 2009 confirms the continued replacement of Unix by Linux on servers. That is a trend we have been seeing for 10 years but there is one methodology caution in the survey: the 'n' uses only respondents that deploy Windows along with Unix and/or Linux and other operating software. It appears to exclude the very substantial demographic that uses only Windows as its server operating software.

A complementary summary of the research is available from Novell (NVLL).  It is full of good statistics on general IT budget planning and industry trends as well.

Interestingly, IDC said:

"Nearly half of the survey participants stated that moving to virtualization is accelerating their adoption of Linux. Eighty-eight percent of respondents plan to evaluate, deploy, or increase their use of virtualization software within Linux operating  systems over the next 12-24 months."

This indicates to me the limited support of virtualization among older Unix products rather than any particular Linux accelerant.  Of course, I believe Linux is UNIX--but that's another blog post.

IDC also surveyed about adoption plans related to Linux as a single-user operating system. The top factors among the sample are security/reliability, usability/familiarity, and application and peripheral support. Given that the sample surveyed is made up of open choice adherents and not the extremes of either Microsoft or open-source bigotry  (see Methodology note above), this is probably a good indicator of what will drive the emerging netbook market.

-- Dennis Byron

Sorry to Say, Red Hat Involved Up to Its Fedora Brim in U.S. Government Research Deception

When I came across the misleading, disjointed MeriTalk BIg Lie progaganda press release about saving the U.S. Federal government billions by using open source, virutalization and SaaS/cloud computing, I said

• This must be some kind of front-group

• I hoped that Red Hat (RHAT) was only casually involved (through sponsorship of a related trade show).

 But it turns out enterprise-software analyst Frank Scavo dug deeper than I had and found more than a casual relationship: 

"Mystery solved. This is definitely a PR stunt. The domain name meritalk.com is registered to Liz Vandendriessche, the same person as named on the press release. A Google search on her name finds her LinkedIn profile, which lists her as a Public Relations Assistant at O'Keeffe & Company, a public relations firm.

"The website for that firm (http://www.okco.com/about-clients.asp) shows a client list with the Federal Open Source Alliance listed. "The Federal Open Source Alliance is comprised of representatives from Hewlett-Packard Corp., Intel Corp., and Red Hat, Inc."

"From the about page at http://www.federalopensourcealliance.com/#About

"The Alliance is focused on leveraging its members’ joint experiences to help Federal agencies deploy open source to meet their technology and business objectives, as well as derive the maximum value from their open source migration initiatives."

 

Thanks Frank. 

It appears Red Hat is going to try to import some European-Union-style front-group propaganda techniques into the U.S.  U.S. taxpayers, hold on to your wallets.  IT users in the U.S. government, like your father always told you, don't believe everything you read in the newspaper.

-- Dennis Byron

Misleading Non-Report Says Feds Could Save Billions on Open Source, SaaS, Virtualization

A front group of some type called MeriTalk has issued a press release claiming the U.S. government could save more than $20 billion over three years by using open source software, SaaS/cloud computing and virtualization.

Actually MeriTalk released 14 .pdf slides that it calls a “report.”  The “report” is one of the weakest pieces of research ever foisted on the public.  In fact, the group admits that the claim is unadulterated cow manure by slyly putting a two-point-type footnote on the savings claim. The footnote says  

“… the Federal government cannot realize the total aggregated savings from the three approaches as, in some cases, they reduce overlapping costs.”

The more than $20 billion would amount to 33% of the Federal infrastructure spending budget for the period. In addition to the absurd footnote that leads off the MeriTalk "report," the finding is based on the absurd assumption that the Federal government currently makes no use of open source software, SaaS/cloud computing and virtualization. I would guess that the U.S. Federal government is the leading user of all three (simply because it is the leading spender on information technology). The logic that gets the “report’s” authors to the $20 billion is tortured at best, a total purposeful fabrication at worst.  The sources for the assumptions are disjointed and based on press reports about press releases about research findings unrelated to the Federal government.
 
A Yahoo Tech News article about the “report” claims that the report was sponsored by Red Hat (RHAT) but the only connection I see is that Red Hat will sponsor a May exhibition, run by MeriTalk, where some of these mind-numbing statistics will be discussed. I am never hesitant to call out Red Hat when they are involved with propaganda front groups promoting so-called Open Standards. But in this case I hope Yahoo did Red Hat wrong by associating it with the “report.”

But MeriTalk must be some kind of propaganda front group because no organization without an agenda—and no press person with a conscience—would release such incredibly misleading data.  It is disturbing—1930s' Nazi-propaganda-like, in fact—to see people being used in this way while jobs are being cut and people are losing their homes.

-- Dennis Byron

Should Obama Mandate Enteprise Software Socialism in U.S.?

Apparently Scott McNealy of Sun (JAVA), not sensing the Obama administration’s urgency on the matter, is late with his white paper on open source software in government. Or perhaps other information technology (IT) executives who were not asked to submit a white paper felt they needed to play catch-up.  Either way, in these troubled economic times with people losing jobs and homes, it is disturbing to see some software-company executives try to manipulate both the U.S. government and the open source culture with an “Open Letter to Obama” that is really just incomplete and unsubstantiated advertising.

I don’t believe enterprise or open source software has a nationality. But it is a fact that IT users worldwide and particularly in the U.S. are for open choice in software, not open source, in the good old fashioned red-white-blue sense of the words. And the developers of all types of software we use in the U.S. are as diverse ethnically and in terms of national heritage as the USA is.

To a very small extent some American and worldwide IT users will only deploy open-source-licensed software just the way some people will only drink French wine or wear Italian shoes. That’s their right. But overwhelmingly IT in U.S. enterprises chooses whatever technology it takes to get the job done most cost effectively. Private-sector IT in the U.S. has not needed government mandates like the ones suggested by these software-company executives.  The U.S. government does not need mandates either. Such mandates would be a prescription for more economic problems.

IT chose Linux over proprietary versions of UNIX developed by IBM (IBM), Sun and others because Linux did a better job (and IBM—but not Sun—quickly figured out this was a good way to hold down R&D expenses). IT chose the Apache HTTP web server over the Netscape server at the beginning of the Internet revolution because Apache did a better job (and IBM, Oracle (ORCL) and others gave it away with their middleware). Similarly IT chose IBM transaction processing software from the UK, SAP R/3 software from Germany, Business Objects business intelligence software from France, Microsoft Office software from Washington state, Oracle database software from California—all leaders in their categories and all developed by companies based all over the world—because the products get the job done, not because of their license restrictions or software-engineering organizational structure or manipulation of the political system. 

All of these products have good user interfaces, well implemented data structures and are platform independent (depending on what the authors of the open letter to Obama mean by that paragraph).  How they were licensed has made no difference to how they help businesses be more cost effective and be better suppliers to consumers and other businesses.

IT has embraced open source-developed software for its functionality not its politics. There is no place for political posturing in the software market. It would be catastrophic to see the U.S. fall into European style IT development where governments dictate what developers work on, and preordain who will buy the product, by mandating that the government will only buy certain types of products, however that “typing” is done.

Obama has taken "Buy America" out of the stimulus package.  Let's hope he doesn't put "Buy advertising slogans" into it.

-- Dennis Byron