This person has the exciting responsibility in leading the Church’s efforts to establish community software development efforts. The Community Development Program Manager will work with key stakeholders to identify opportunities to leverage community resources to design, develop and maintain software applications that can be made generally available. Success in these endeavors will greatly accelerate the development and proliferation of technology that can be used by church members and local leaders.

Open source has clearly gone mainstream when religions start requiring it on employment applications.

commentary

Additionally, this person will lead efforts to establish the development community. This will require initiative and creativity to identify and coordinate volunteer developers who are willing and able to contribute to Church software development initiatives.

So, if I were you, given that you’ll be much happier if you code for open-source projects, as Jon Williams of Kaplan Test told the OSBC audience earlier this week, and you’ll be much better paid as an open-source developer, put down that C++ manual and start writing some open-source code. I’m happy to be tithed to pay you.

Go to the LDS Church’s employment site and type “open source” into the search box. You’ll find several requirements for open-source savvy engineers (including someone familiar with Hyperic - got something to tell me, Javier? Is my tithing paying for your
Wii addiction?), but this is the one that I find fascinating (and encouraging):

You may not want those missionaries knocking on your door, but you’ve got to admit that every religion needs at least one Linus Torvalds.

Technical Program Manager - Community Development

I’d hazard a guess that many already are. If they’re not, they soon will.

The person filling this position must be a self-starter, and willing and excited to pioneer the use of volunteer developers in the creation of Church software applications. The job will be challenging — but the potential impact is enormous.

Description:

The Community Program Manager will work very closely with executive and senior leadership throughout the Church to identify opportunities suitable for community development. This person will also work with internal developers to identify, design and develop tools that can be leveraged by community developers. These tools may include APIs, Web Services, publishing or hosting platforms and documentation.

You bet it is. As just one example, I’m a genealogy enthusiast. Think of how cool it would be if genealogy worked upon open-source principles rather than the klugey, time-intensive way that it currently does? (I’m not just talking about the research side of it, but also the LDS Church’s old-fashioned database architecture it uses, i.e., a big Oracle server rather than clusters of MySQL servers. Stop wasting my tithing on Larry Ellison’s jets when Google et al. have demonstrated that clustered MySQL can spank Oracle.)

It does my heart good to see my church putting its tithing dollars to work in an inspired cause: open source. A friend just sent me a job posting on the LDS Church’s website calling for a Linus Torvalds-like figure to lead open-source development efforts for the LDS Church and its IT projects.

“This move will permanently signal the end of the music business as it was once known,” McQuivey wrote. “From that point on, more music will be sold digitally than on CD, reducing CD sales to just $3.8 billion in 2012.”

The analyst also sent a message to ad-supported music services, such as SpiralFrog and Qtrax. The ad-supported model should stay “on the radio where it belongs,” he said in his report. Social networks are better places for selling ads against music, and they also allow users to share songs virally.

McQuivey, a former professor at Boston University, tells record executives to cheer up because there are ways to rise from the ashes. He says first, the industry should quit fooling around with music subscriptions and ad-supported models. People want to own their music and downloads have won. Only 7 percent of adults on the Web say they have ever tried a subscription service, according to the report.

“The gold medal for 2007 (in music discovery) should have gone to Slacker,” McQuivey wrote. “(The) portable device provides instant access to radio-formatted music that can easily convert to a digital download with the click of a button. This model combines the simplicity of the radio experience with the power of music ownership.”

In a final note, McQuivey suggests that music artists, who have historically looked down their noses at advertising, had better change. He says the industry should rip a page out of NASCAR’s playbook.

That’s a fitting title because the report reads like an obituary. Tower Records, a music mecca for decades, has already closed but McQuivey argues the real deathblow to the industry will come when Wal-Mart Stores, Best Buy, and other large retailers begin scaling back shelf space for CDs.

When it comes to artists, the labels should focus more broadly on a musician’s career, including merchandise and concerts, as well as recordings. He said it’s the artists, not the CDs that are the music industry’s true product.

Hey, Mr. Music Executive: scrap your preoccupation with CD sales and start looking for ways to help people share, yes share music; focus more on developing and profiting from artists; and forget about subscription services and ad-supported music.

McQuivey’s finding here was particularly timely. Over the weekend, PaidContent reported that MySpace is in talks with the four top labels about launching a jointly operated, ad-supported music service.

These are the conclusions of James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst, according to a report titled “The End Of The Music Industry As We Know It,” issued on Tuesday.

“Artists who used to pretend that their platinum album success was really about their “art” will no longer have that luxurious pretense because labels won’t sign them unless they agree to a barrage of sponsorship opportunities,” McQuivey wrote. “There will eventually come a day when Chips Ahoy will contend with the Keebler Elves over who can be the official cookie of the Taylor Swift world tour.”

Sharing is vital, according to McQuivey, because it makes new music discovery easier, which the Web was supposed to help with but so far has tanked. In this effort, he sends a special shout out to Slacker, a personal online-radio service.

That’s good company to be in.

It’s also something that has worked for some of the industry’s most successful companies, a fact pointed out by Zack Urlocker, vice president of Lifecycle Marketing at Sun Microsystems:

Open source, in many ways, is doing to Microsoft and the rest of the proprietary software industry what Acer is doing to the personal computer industry, as highlighted recently in BusinessWeek:

(Acer CEO Gianfranco) Lanci’s strategy? He has used Acer’s bare-bones cost structure to get extremely aggressive on price. He moved faster than HP and Dell in marketing a broad selection of the inexpensive portable computers known as netbooks. By selling basic machines for $300 to $600, Acer swiped chunks of market share while the rest of the PC business tanked…”To run a business with lower costs is good when the market is growing,” he says. “It’s even better when the market is not growing.”

Gartner recently reported that:

Microsoft may not like that but, well, this is competition, not charity.

Lower TCO and flexibility to launch and develop cost-prohibitive projects continue to be top reasons for using OSS (as open source helps) organizations cater to new opportunities for improving productivity while maintaining costs.

Now Microsoft is being out-Microsoft’d by open source and doesn’t much like the feeling. I weep for it.

No, price isn’t everything: it’s simply a fruitful way to start a conversation. The reason that commercial open-source companies are thriving in the downturn is precisely because they can make healthy profits while charging a lot less.

Microsoft must really love open source and want to see it succeed. Recently, Microsoft’s open-source team lead, Sam Ramji, urged open-source vendors not to compete with Microsoft on price, but instead focus on “value.”

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

…(Acer’s move into higher-end machines at low price points) may be good news for penny-pinching shoppers, but it will create new challenges for Lanci’s competitors. HP and Dell will have to face down Acer not just at the low end of the portable market but with higher-end products too…”They’re changing customers’ perception of what you should pay for a computer,” says Richard Shim, an analyst with the research firm IDC.

While competing on price isn’t the only way to run a business, it’s worked well for Intel, Dell, Wal-Mart, Salesforce, JetBlue, et al.

Why shouldn’t the open-source companies competing for market share trumpet their lower-cost offerings?

That’s a perfect way to describe what open source is doing to the industry, and, yes, price is a big component of that. Open source can lower the price of running e-mail (Zimbra, Open x-Change), CRM (SugarCRM), ECM (Alfresco, Drupal/Acquia, Joomla, KnowledgeTree), ERP (Openbravo, Compiere), IT management (Puppet, Hyperic, Zenoss), and other systems to $0.00.

While I’m sure Ramji meant well, I’m equally certain that Microsoft would like nothing more than to not be reminded of how expensive its products can be compared with open-source solutions. After all, Microsoft was the company that turned the software industry on its head by introducing lower-cost solutions years ago to undermine the Unix businesses of IBM and Hewlett-Packard, and the database businesses of Oracle and IBM.

If anyone knows the importance of pitching the market on low-cost, high-value software, it’s Microsoft. And if anyone knows how to stick its finger in the eye of more expensive rivals, it’s Microsoft, too, which has recently been blaring a “We’re cheaper! Buy from us!!” message to combat Apple’s in-roads against its Windows dominance.

This is something to be heavily marketed, not hidden.

The future historians of the nerd ascendancy will likely note that the great empowerment phase began in the 1980s with the rise of Microsoft and the digital economy. Nerds began making large amounts of money and acquired economic credibility, the seedbed of social prestige. The information revolution produced a parade of highly confident nerd moguls–Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin and so on.

Writing about the ascent of the “alpha geek”–a contradiction in terms?–Brooks cobbles together a series of easy generalizations regularly tossed around as shorthand to explain more complex developments. Call it cliche as socio-economic analysis. To wit:

(Credit:
http://www.pocketprotectors.com )

At last he didn’t peddle past the idea of the techno-elite as a tribe of bad-smelling, social losers with barely enough sense to wipe the snot off their faces. But Brooks’ assignment of a present-at-the-creation date for the “nerd ascendency” to Microsoft and the digital economy in the 1980s is subjective. He could just have easily moved the time line back to around the birth of Fairchild Semiconductor and the myriad successful tech companies later founded by its alumni.

The news that being a geek is cool has apparently not permeated either junior high schools or the Republican Party. George Bush plays an interesting role in the tale of nerd ascent. With his professed disdain for intellectual things, he’s energized and alienated the entire geek cohort, and with it most college-educated Americans under 30. Newly militant, geeks are more coherent and active than they might otherwise be.

Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the
iPhone hordes. They honor him with videos and posters that combine aesthetic mastery with unabashed hero-worship. People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.

Over the years, I’ve become inured to David Brooks’ predictable platitudes about politics and culture. He’s been wrong so often on the big story of our times–the war–that I automatically tune out his musings on contemporary culture. But after stewing all weekend about his most recent New York Times column, I’ve got to get this off my chest.

The iPhone hordes! Hide the women and children before they get “i-mashed.” Hoo boy. Brooks must have received special dispensation from The New York Times copy desk because this is rhetorical overkill to the point of being ridiculous. If there’s a political darling among the nerd set these days, it’s probably Ron Paul (though Obama definitely has the coolness factor). But defining a generation by the popularity of a commercial product is a Madison Avenue cliche waiting to be born. Maybe the ghost of Lionel Trilling will get so worked up about the cacophony of the blogosphere it will soon haunt the ramparts of Columbia’s Morningside Heights.

If anyone has the address of this “geek cohort,” please pass it along. Until then, I think that’s utter hogwash. I’ve watched several generations of college-educated Americans under 30 and beyond and, truth be told, there’s nothing in that history to suggest the current crop’s presumed group sensibility is going to last into middle age. And the only “newly militant geeks” I can point to usually surface when Twitter goes haywire during another of its prolonged brown-outs.

So, in a relatively short period of time, the social structure has flipped. For as it is written, the last shall be first and the geek shall inherit the earth.

Um, sure David. On the basis of the most flimsy evidence, we’re expected to believe that a fundamental societal transformation is under way. I suppose that’s not as over the top as your Candyland declarations cheerleading our way into Iraq. But it’s as equally rooted in unreality.

This is a good day for EnterpriseDB. PostgreSQL, with EnterpriseDB firmly behind it, now has a chance to make some noise. And with IBM backing EnterpriseDB (and, by extension, PostgreSQL), things look set to become very, very interesting in the open-source database market.

Postgres Plus is an open source distribution of the PostgreSQL database and includes significant performance benefits and important ease-of-use capabilities for developers and DBAs. Bundled into a one-click, cross-platform installer, Postgres Plus is targeted at developers of next-generation applications and sets a new standard for commercial distributions of open source databases.

In other words, EnterpriseDB deploys the same hybrid model as Zimbra, SugarCRM, Funambol, and others. While I’m not a big fan of hybrid models, the reality is that it’s an accepted, successful model within commercial open source. If it means that EnterpriseDB and these others also contribute ever growing mountains of open-source code, which it does, then I can accept that.

Additionally, the company has reintroduced its software under the Postgres Plus brand. This isn’t a big change, but it does highlight just how big of a role open source plays in EnterpriseDB’s plans:

That just changed.

Postgres Plus Advanced Server is a commercially licensed product that adds advanced capabilities to Postgres Plus, including robust Oracle compatibility, dynamic performance tuning, and sophisticated management and monitoring. The company also announced the availability of free tools, tutorials, and Web-based services for developers.

Today EnterpriseDB announced that it is open sourcing its GridSQL business intelligence and data warehousing engine under the GNU General Public License Version 2. Previously proprietary, this move demonstrates a stronger commitment to open source.

This, however, has not been EnterpriseDB’s primary problem. It’s not cash that it has lacked, but open-source cachet. Its story of “Oracle performance and interoperability at a fraction of the cost” is a winner, but it was muted by its lack of a compelling open-source story.

commentary

If you’ll remember, the Xperia X1, which was first introduced in February at GSMA, features a interactive panel interface that allows user to customize their Today screen. Given that capability, the SDK is an opportunity for content makers to develop such panels for various apps, such as videos, e-mail, games, and music.

(Credit:
Sony Ericsson)

It’s not exactly the announcement we were looking for, but we’ll take it as a sign that the launch of the highly anticipated Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 is that much closer. On Wednesday, Sony Ericsson released its Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows Mobile 6.1 that will allow developers to create Web and native panels for the Xperia X1 smartphone.

The SDK is available as a free download from Sony Ericsson’s developer site, and the kit includes such things as Microsoft Visual Studio templates, developer guidelines, sample code, and an Xperia X1 emulator. In addition, developers can submit their applications and panels for the Sony Ericsson Content Awards, where there will be a category dedicated to the Xperia X1. When ready, Sony Ericsson will offer a download service that will showcase all the available panels from partners and developers, and allow you to download them directly to the smartphone.

To learn more, check out this video by Sony Ericsson’s Ramanath Bhat, who is in charge of application and product planning for the Xperia X1.

Exactly. And open source is critical to guarantee that “open” standards are just that. Sorry, BSA, your intellectual monopoly is waning.

Interoperability is a critical issue for the Commission, and usage of well-established open standards is a key factor to achieve and endorse it.

This is a clever shift of the argument, trying to preserve the status quo while it’s clear that the European Commission is looking forward to improve interoperability, rather than backward to defend the type of interoperability we’ve had for far too long. You know, the kind where everyone is forced to interoperate with Microsoft because it controls 95 percent of a market, and can only integrate with closed, poorly documented APIs and protocols.

The European Commission is increasingly realizing that open standards without safeguards like open source are a hollow promise. Interoperability, in turn, depends on such open standards, as Red Hat, for one, has long argued:

They [the European Commission] define open standards inconsistent with the common understanding of the term in what we believe is a dogmatic approach. It fails to recognise that almost all standards that help interoperability and that governments should indeed use to promote the very objectives of the EIF do have intellectual property.

Leave it to the Business Software Alliance (BSA) to distort the definition of “open standard” in order to serve the interests of Microsoft and its other members. The BSA doesn’t like the European Commission’s increasing interest in open source and open standards to deliver software interoperability.

As the BSA’s European software policy director declared,

Not that Microsoft doesn’t have troubles of its own. The data shows users keeping the Windows XP (63 percent) faith on their desktops and Windows 2003 (28 percent) on their servers, with only 2 percent using Vista. Like attracts like - open source is a magnet for other open source. Vista is a magnet for…not much of anything.

I’ve written before about the data collected from Alfresco’s Open Source Barometer survey. While originally a survey of 10,000 members of Alfresco’s “content community” (i.e., those who register with Alfresco to download white papers, documentation, etc.), the survey now includes a swelling population of the community, with 35,000+ members.

Regardless, with a pool of 25,000 more people to enrich the Open Source Barometer survey findings, some things haven’t changed:

The data becomes even more significant when you consider Alfresco’s customer base: a high percentage include the world’s leading financial services, media, publishing, government, and educational institutions.

I wrote yesterday about MySQL’s continued dominance and the dire consequences of coming in second place, but this same principle makes me worry about JBoss. With Tomcat at 70 percent of application server usage in the survey and JBoss Application Server at 18 percent, Red Hat may have an uphill battle on its hands.

commentary

It’s a great time to be in open source. I’d like to have similar data from SugarCRM, Mulesource, JasperSoft, etc. I’m willing to bet their data would be similar.

Enterprises are more likely to use open-source infrastructure with open-source applications, including in mission-critical environments (and yes, managing the websites that churn out billions of dollars each year for Alfresco’s customers counts as mission critical);
Enterprises use Windows for evaluation but Linux for deployment. Windows provides the training wheels; Linux provides the robust, scalable, trusted server operating environment;
Ubuntu is quickly proving itself to be a serious contender in the enterprise;
Open source is on the rise, across the board.

Application Server Adoption

So when I see Ubuntu at 23 percent of Alfresco’s Linux user base (second only to Red Hat at 35 percent), with 51.3 percent of Alfresco’s users choosing to deploy on Linux (with a scant 26.5 percent opting to deploy on Windows), I take notice.

Ubuntu is the fastest-growing Linux distribution

When I see Red Hat and Ubuntu pulling away from the rest of the Linux pack (Debian, SUSE, etc.), it gives me pause. It makes me think that maybe, just maybe, customers actually care about freedom. Maybe they don’t think about it in Richard Stallman terms, but they think about it.

Alfresco Content Community Growth in 2007

That said, it’s likely that the ones who really need to worry are BEA and IBM, but probably more BEA, as JBoss usage continues to grow. IBM, on the other hand, is a strange beast. While Alfresco actively sells into IBM, Oracle, etc. accounts, we don’t actually often come across IBM technology. We’re asked to support SQL Server or Oracle databases much more often than IBM’s DB2. We rarely see Websphere, too. I still don’t understand how we can bump into every major software company except IBM in accounts….

Availability details were slim at the time of this writing. The EM30 will go on sale first in Taiwan for an undisclosed price. It will expand to other markets later in the year along with the EM28 and EM25.

Motorola expanded its music phone lineup Tuesday with three new Rokr cell phones. The handsets offer a wide range of designs and features, though all put music squarely at the center.

Inside the EM25 you’ll find the Rokr music player, an FM radio, a speakerphone, a 3.5mm headset jack, a microSD card slot, a 1.3-megapixel camera, full Bluetooth, USB mass storage, and Moto’s CrystalTalk feature. Of course, like its new siblings, the EM25 also makes calls.

For slider phone fans or callers who need only the basics, there’s the EM25. The handset has a slider design that’s vaguely Sony Ericsson in appearance. The phone includes support for just two bands (GSM 850/1900 and GSM 900/1800) with data speeds maxing out at GPRS.

The mid-range EM28 is a flip phone that comes in two triband versions (GSM 850/1800/1900 and GSM 900/1800/1900). Both models support GPRS and EDGE networks. The music player on the EM28 offers 3D sound effects, spatial audio with bass boost, and an equalizer. Other features include an FM radio, a 1.3-megapixel camera, text and multimedia messaging, Moto’s CrystalTalk feature, an airplane mode, external music controls, full Bluetooth, USB mass storage, a memory card slot, and a speakerphone.

The EM30 is the most high-end model of the trio. It offers a traditional candy bar design in an appealing black and red color scheme. The keypad offers the same ModeShift keypad that we saw on the Motorola Rokr E8. As you move between different functions, the backlighting on the keypad changes to illuminate only the relevant buttons.

(Credit:
Motorola)

Rokr EM25

Rokr EM30

(Credit:
Motorola)

Rokr EM28

(Credit:
Motorola)

You’ll also have the option in December to purchase the NEC Spectraview kit which purportedly includes an optimized calibration sensor based on X-Rite iOne Display v2 for a price of $374.99.

All of the monitors I’ve reviewed at CNET are consumer-level designs. One of the reasons for this is that professional-level monitors have a limited audience because of their expense.

The monitor includes a three-year limited warranty and will be available in December.

NEC is seeking to change that, somewhat. On Friday, NEC announced the 22-inch P221W LCD monitor. This is being targeted at professionals who need to work in color-critical environments, but don’t want to break the bank. You’ll have to be the judge–for now–on whether $637 is “breaking the bank”.

(Credit:
NEC)

1,680×1,050-pixel native resolution
Wide color gamut that achieves 96 percent coverage of AdobeRGB
Internal 10-bit programmable lookup tables (LUTs)
S-PVA LCD technology that provides for the widest viewing angles available with minimal off-angle color shift
AmbiBright automatic brightness adjustment
1,000:1 typical contrast ratio
16ms response time
300 cd/m2 typical brightness
XtraView+ 178 degree (88 degree/88 degree/88 degree/88 degree) viewing angle
ECO Mode and carbon footprint reduction
Analog and digital input signal
Four-way ergonomic stand (tilt/swivel/pivot/height-adjust)
Optional soundbar