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Open Marketing and the Ethics of Sharing

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Zend recently decided to not call themselves the creators of PHP anymore. This change in Zend’s marketing has been long overdue. It caused friction with some PHP core developers over the past years that spread into the PHP community.

Others also make mistakes

It is not that Zend is the only company in the Open Source market that made some marketing mistakes in the past. MySQL for example had their CTO Monty Widenius talk fancier then usual in an internally conducted interview and the answers did not sound like he really said them. It made known members of the MySQL community wonder who kidnapped Monty.

Sex sells?

To some marketing experts, the Open Source community might seem like a mine-field with many traps, because there are just too many critical thinkers in the community. It is so because they don’t fully understand the ethics of sharing.

Marketing and ethics – how does that go together? Isn’t marketing based on emotions and instincts? Catching you with the “sex sells” trick? Open Marketing is different – yet still emotional.

Have a lot of fun

Open Marketing addresses the intellect, because in Open Source it’s all about transparency: transparent software (code), transparent collaboration (mailinglists), transparent deficiency (bugs), …

Open Marketing also addresses emotions, because it’s fun. After your Linux installation, you read “Have a lot of fun”. Open Source developers identify with what they do, because they believe in their skills, the good work of the team, the value of sharing. They care about their work and the results – isn’t that emotional?

Hubs and innovation

Intellect and emotions come together in the ethics of sharing. It’s supporters believe that they can still gain although sharing, or better: they gain because they share. The more you share, the more you become the center of communication flows in the Open Source community. Speaking in terms of communication theory, you become a hub in a communication network.

What does that have to do with Open Marketing? It means that the correct marketing is vital to an Open Source company because it needs to be one of the main hubs in the communication flow of the Open Source community it targets at. Otherwise, the company will slowly loose it’s innovative power and market share respectively.

Proprietary vs. Open Marketing

The ethic of sharing is not so much about naive persons longing to be good, instead it is at the heart of the Open Source business, it is egoistic as well as altruistic at once, intellectual and emotional, and the basis for making money.

To summarize: Open Marketing is just as “copyleft” to the traditional marketing, as the GPL is to proprietary software licensing. It is not about illusions, it is about realities. In that sense, Zend just fixed a bug in their marketing and move from a sometimes proprietary style marketingto a better open marketing. Welcome back to reality!

German PHP 5 Books

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My favourite German publisher is dpunkt.verlag. Recently, a book on PHP 5 was published that I have helped them with and there are two others in the pipeline written by notable authors. The three books complement each other, so depending on your skill- set, you could pick one, two or all of them. Of course, each of them is of high quality:

PHP 5 für Fortgeschrittene

In a nutshell: For experienced devs, curious to learn PHP 5.

The 380 pages are a condensed, translated, and updated version of Harry’s excellent PHP Anthology. PHP 5 für Fortgeschrittene is meant for experienced PHP 4 developers who want to learn about what’s new in PHP 5 on a very practical basis. Actually, the strength of the book is that it takes care of the nitty-gritty when migrating from PHP4 to PHP 5 with lots of real-world examples.

It was actually me who did the updates, especially dealing with the new OO features in PHP 5. While writing the updates, I realized how the evolution of the book matches with the intention of the book to guide through PHP4-to-PHP5 migration issues, because all of Harry’s source code was PHP 4. Making the book PHP 5-focused, required me to work just like someone who sould migrate his PHP 4 application.

BTW: Cornelia Boenigk did a wonderful job in translating Harry’s text to German, I regard her as one of the best technical translaters of programming books from English to German.

PHP 5 für Fortgeschrittene is available since November.

dpunkt.verlag book info

Professionelle Softwareentwicklung mit PHP 5

In a nutshell: Makes a PHP 4-pro become a PHP5-guru.

This one should be out shortly. Sebastian Bergman wrote it and it is mostly an in-depth introduction to the OO-features of PHP 5. Sebastian let me review the pre-published version and I admire his precise and clean explanation of the sometimes inevitably complex topic of objectoriented programming. Everything important is mentioned, easy to comprehend, the sample code is of high usefulness. If you’re a PHP 4-pro, get this one to become a PHP 5-guru.

dpunkt.verlag book info

The book’s Website

PHP 5

In a nutshell: Gets you started with PHP 5.

I just finished to review the final draft of this one and got the impression that it is just what is needed to get PHP novices started. The authors are well-known members of the German PHP community: Hakan Kücükyilmaz, Alexander Merz, Thomas Haas. Throughout the book, they explain the important aspects of PHP 5 with patience, accuracy, and the knowledge of how a novice should be guided. Saying that, it comes with no surprise that the book is the result of several PHP training courses.

This book is out in March.

dpunkt.verlag book info

Some might argue, that these books are late as PHP 5 is already out for some time, but the strategy of dpunkt.verlag is to publish high-quality books – and they simply take time. This is what I experienced myself when writing for dpunkt.verlag: unless your text is perfect, they are not satisfied with the results and they will push you to make it perfect. A sometimes painfull, but in the long-run successfull strategy: educative for the authors, beneficial for the readers.

New Weblog

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

My new Weblog is now up and running on a new domain: www.sandrozic.de/weblog. It is powered by eZ publish. I will gradually add new functionality to the site, first of all RSS, trackback and pingback.

In fact, I have set up a portal on www.sandrozic.de that should serve as my personal knowledge management system in the long run, of course based on eZ publish. There’s a white paper with some ideas available online, which I plan to implement over time.

BTW: The portrait of mine shown in the Website’s header has been shot by Baard Farstad.

Ah, it’s so good to be back in the world of blogging!

New Job at eZ

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I will be working for eZ systems, the Norwegian company behind the eZ publish CMS and CMF written in PHP. eZ will open a German office in January, this is why they hired me. My tasks are mainly to augment the community of eZ publish users in Germany, furthermore to serve customers in Southern Germany. The job profile comprises developers relations management, consulting, training, support, programming.

To get trained on eZ publish, I will be in Norway at the eZ headquarters in Skien until March for the 3.6 development cycle. I am very much looking forward to working closely with the team and to gain an intimate knowledge about the software. After the trainee period, I will work from my home office in Southern Germany.

There are several reasons why I feel very happy and confident with this job opportunity:

  • eZ is a great company: I have already met some of the ez crew and they are all classy folks. They are not following any hype, they care about a good team spirit, a solid product. I have to admit, that eZ gained my full attention after they hired Derick. Hiring someone who is a highly skilled expert in a certain field, shows that the company is of good health, that there is no paranoia about individual insufficiency, that everyone’s able to learn from each other, and that useless politics play no role in technological discussions.
  • eZ publish is a great piece of software: The CMS has been developed over years, the code quality is reasonably well and with the forthcoming 3.6. release, the CMS will be optimised for developers. eZ publish is a mature software and you can tell from the code, that the developers are highly skilled and motivated.
  • eZ has a solid business model: Just like MySQL, eZ publish is dual licensed. This business model has proven to work out pretty well as the success of MySQL or Qt demonstrates, and the growth of eZ suggests. Of course, there are differences between MySQL’s and eZ’s products: A database server is a basic element of many Web applications, thus the market penetration is higher compared to a CMS which is a more specific product. On the other side, a CMS needs more customization, thus a CMS company like eZ gets more money from customers to extend their product. Another point is that the MySQL database has only one Open Source opponent (PostgreSQL), while there are many more Open Source CMS out there. Nevertheless, the high quality of eZ publish makes it one of the best Open Source CMS on the market.
  • eZ is Open Source: I am advocating and programming Open Source for about 4 years now, and this special way of living, working, and business has become an important part of my personality – I would never want to miss it.

BTW: eZ is looking for personnel at their German office in Dortmund – no home office!

A Jakarta for PHP

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Yes, Sebastian is right, it would be great to have something like Apache Maven. It was really impressive to see how useful it is for rapid prototyping in Java at a related OSCOM session some weeks ago.

But I would not say “let’s clone Maven and port it to PHP 5” – that would not take into account PEAR, especially it’s installer, which is like the little sister of Maven, seen from a conceptual perspective. Just like the PEAR installer’s online repository, the maven CLI allows to donwload Java packages from an ibiblio package repository. The definitive plus of Maven is that it is not library-centric, but application-focused: It also creates a default application directory structure and performs pre- and post-installation processes based on a plugin interface.

This is something which is missing in the PEAR installer, I would even go so far that something like the Jakarta project in total is mssing for PHP. Maybe it is now a good point to start something like this as an official PHP community effort, given the recent discussons on Enterprise PHP.

One more point about the Maven/PEAR issue: The ZZ/OSS Installer tries to overcome the deficiencies of the PEAR Installer when it comes to applications. Unfortunately, the interest has yet been low and the main problem I see is that PHP developers don’t want to drop the benefits of a scripting language (edit the script -> execute it in the browser -> fix bugs) in favour of a more flexible application design which has a source2built tree installation process. In fact, it seems like a trade-off: either you have a rather monolithic application that allows for quick fixes or your application is modeled with packages that need to be edited in the source and installed to the built tree (as PEAR does). Due to these problems, simply porting Maven would not help PHP application developers – it would need some more thought and education on the source/built tree issue.

"Open Innovation" Retro- and Prospect

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Some days have past since the Open Innovation discussion panel which got me to reflect more upon the case. There have been some participants already writing about the panel: Josh, Chalu, Ugo, Bertrand. I received all kinds of feedbacks at the conference like “That was the best event at OSCOM conference” or “I left the discussion because I thought it’s about earning money with Open Source and it was not”.

First of all: Such an open discussion can never deal with all aspects of innovation in Open Source. Not if it’s 2 hours, not if it’s simply brainstorming. All I wanted to achieve was to sensitize the participants. Of course, there are those coders who don’t care for the whole issue, they just want to create good software. On the other side, there are those highly intellectual geeks who throw in everything they ever heard of from economics to philosophy and back again.

As the moderator of the event, I had to take care to hide myself in the background, to not interrupt the natural flow of the discussion if not necessary. This included that the invited experts (Danese Cooper, BÃ¥rd Farstad, Roy T. Fielding, David Heath, Chalu Kim, Eric Pugh) sometimes had to step back as well to invite the other participants to join the discussion. Many thanks to all of you who actively participated!

What I liked most about the event were those insights and formulations that only those with experience can tell. Still echoing in my head is the idea that innovation is closely related to the fact that you take care. Combined with the notion of a participant that innovations solve actual problems, this makes me think that Open Source’s reward model is very much about feeling responsible for your own code, for taking care of what you produce. Thus, Open Source is a futile ground for innovation, because problems can only be identified if the programmer takes care of the software he contributes to.

Unfortunately, as Ugo points out in his blog, we did not talk about whether Open Source really is innovative or not compared to proprietary software. This question has been on my list, but there was not enough time. Let me pick up this point: Open Source could be described as a market environment that only allows for the creation of commodity products. The success of MySQL could well supports this point of view. On the other side, the MySQL database is itself an example for incremental innovation, because it allows to integrate different table engines within one database. Hence, maybe the more concrete question would be: does Open Source lead to “big” or “small” innovation?

Then again, isn’t the Apache Webserver itself a “big” innovation? Or look at the Apache Software Foundation: isn’t that kind of organizational model a highly innovative form of collaborative work? Seen from that perspecitve, Open Source has at least to aspects of innovation: that of product-related and the organizational innovation.

There are so many questions that still need to be addressed in the Open Source community to make it more aware of its powers and deficiencies that I wish there were more open discussion panels at Open Source conferences. Especially if representatives from other social fields (economics, science, politics, …) join, then cross-pollination outside, not only within the Open Source community can take place. Some examples:

– Open Companies
– Open Universities
– Open …

Let me know if you would like to organize an “Open *” discussion and I will gladly help you.

Battle of the Books: We Won!

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Contrary to other believes, Harry and me have certainly won the Battle of the Books. It was clear after some serious analyzation over a couple of swiss beer, that our book PHP für Fortgeschrittene is so much better compared to PHP de Luxe. Christian and Hannes had some good marketing strategy, but in the end, quality always wins 😉

The location and event was really cool – thanks to Christian, Hannes and etoy for making this possible!

"PHP 5 Enterprise Edition?" – Slides Online

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Just put up the slides of my talk PHP 5 Enterprise Edition? at OSCOM 4. The session was well attended, equally by PHP and Java developers. The discussion after my talk suggests that there’s a growing interest on both sides: The PHP devs want to learn more about Java approaches to the enterprise market, like J2EE. On the other side, Java-devs are curious about this rapid development scripting language called PHP. Seems like OSCOM’s conference topic “cross-pollination” just works out fine.

My basic impressions from the discussion are the following:
– The PHP and Java world still reside on two different planets, there’s yet only little, but growing contact between both dev communities.
– PHP and Java form two different paradigms of problem solving, mainly comming down to “getting things done” (PHP) and “doing things right” (Java).

I will write an article on this topic for the forthcoming issue of the International PHP Magazine, trying to compose a kind of PHP 5 Enterprise Edition software stack and comparing the pros and cons with J2EE.

Announcing the Experts of Open Innovation Discussion Panel

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Announcing the Experts of Open Innovation Discussion Panel

These are the experts I will welcome at the Open Innovation discussion panel which I moderate at OSCOM 4 conference:

BÃ¥rd Farstad

BÃ¥rd Farstad is the Software Development Manager of eZ systems [http://www.ez.no]. He has been working professionally with CMS development since 1999 and have written many general purpose libraries like XML parser, SOAP library (client/server), XML-RPC library (client/server). He is also one of the main developers in the eZ publish CMS. In his spare time he likes to play with his daughter, play the guitar and is also into aquascaping.

Roy T. Fielding

Roy T. Fielding is chief scientist at Day Software [http://www.day.com/], a leading provider of enterprise content management software. Dr. Fielding is best known for his work in developing and defining the modern World Wide Web infrastructure. He is the primary architect of the current Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1), co-author of the Internet standards for HTTP and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI), and a founder of several open-source software projects, including the Apache HTTP Server Project that produces the software for over 64% of public Internet web sites. Dr. Fielding received his Ph.D. degree in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine.

David Heath

David Heath is Web Application Developer at OneWorld International [http://www.oneworld.net] in London. The portal oneworld.net brings together the latest news and views from over 1,600 organizations promoting human rights awareness and fighting poverty worldwide.

Chalu Kim

Chalu Kim began his career as a research engineer â?? starting with real-time coding of the Evans and Sutherland PS300 and mission rehearsal to nuclear imaging. For the next decade, Chalu Kim was responsible for developing new technology and took executive roles at companies such as IBM and a number of start-ups. In 2000, Chalu Kim founded eGenius [http://www.egenius.com], a technology cooperative to help organizations benefit from the use of technology, especially open-source. He is actively involved in Zope and Lenya and Squid and other open-source projects. Mr. Kim lives in New York with his wife and a house cat from Chinatown.

Eric Pugh

Eric Pugh [http://www.opensourceconnections.com/] is a member of the Turbine and Maven development teams and an experienced Java enterprise developer specializing in leveraging open source software. Eric has built several Java based websites using Jetspeed, Turbine, and WebWork MVC frameworks. In addition to coding, Eric has written for OnJava and contributed to an upcoming book on Hibernate.

Informatik 2004: Managing Internet platforms with predominant P2P traffic

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Conference Minutes

Conference: Informatik 2004
Workshop: Algorithms and Protocols for Efficient Peer-to-Peer Applications
Talk: Managing Internet platforms wit predominant P2P traffic
Presenter: Gerhard HaÃ?linger, Deutsche Telekom, T-Systems, Darmstadt/Germany

– 50-80% of traffic is caused by peer-to-peer data exchange, 5-20% account to HTTP access (peek values occure during day, low values during night).
– On Slyck, statistics about file-sharing protocols in use can be found.
– eDonkey protocol is dominating in Germany (>80%), U.S.: FastTrack (>70%)
– Caches for P2P traffic are problematic due to techical reasons, but also due to copyright problems with data in the cache. A participant pointed out that actually every cachy can potentially contain illegal data, it’s just that concerning p2p, the assumption is always that it transfers illegal data per se.
– Portions of P2P traffic in the access regions are larger then in the backbones and even smaller on international links
– P2P traffic characteristics over time is favourable for ISPs due to the smoothing effect on the daily traffic profile (e.g. video transfer of several Gbyte may last for days). But those characteristics make the increase in traffic volumen hardly predictable with high risk for planning & extension process in internet provider networks