Daniel Chalef

Contemplating “Slow” Summer Sales Months

It’s almost the end of July and what was envisaged as a “slow” sales month has been anything but. Over the last few weeks we’ve sold KnowledgeTree to a significant number of organizations, with many of them likely to be great, high profile case studies for commercial open source: Decathlon Stores, DHL Global Mail, Bank of Scotland, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, a UK National Health Service Trust (albeit not our first), the Maldives Airport Company, amongst others.

KnowledgeTree is an easy document management sell: many organizations already utilize KnowledgeTree Open Source Edition internally, are comfortable that it works great and delivers significant value. The move to KnowledgeTree Enterprise Edition is a no-brainer for them.

Oh, and we’re seeing a 100% re-subscription rate from early adopter customers…

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New Website, Optaros EOS Directory and Packt Publishing Award Nominations

New Website and Creative Commons Licensing

We finally got our fancy new website out this week thanks to our intrepid team of engineers and designers (thanks JP, Fortunate, Philip and Wireframe & Sunday Media!). Our new website and all of our documentation and marketing materials now carry a Creative Commons Attribution Deed logo. Yes, we’ve licensed out the very great majority of our non-software IP under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

Why have we decided to do this? KnowledgeTree is all about simplicity and open source. In fact, we feel so strongly about promoting simplicity and freedom that we positively want you to copy, distribute and display all of our copyrighted works — and derivative works based upon them — provided you give us credit. Adapt our user documentation for use within your organization, utilize our marketing material to champion KnowledgeTree in your local business community or utilize our developer documentation as the basis for documentation for your own KnowledgeTree-related product.

Our new website was developed using Drupal, a sister PHP-based CMS to KnowledgeTree. This was my first experience at using Drupal and I’m extremely impressed and pleased. I got my hands (quite) dirty with much of the content generation and was very pleasantly surprised how easy Drupal was to use, how powerful it was and the great open source ecosystem that has developed around it. Talking about ecosystem, KnowledgeTree and Drupal are complimentary products: KnowledgeTree is focussed on document management and Drupal web content management. As a result of this fit, a Drupal community member has already developed a Drupal module that integrates with KnowledgeTree.

Optaros Enterprise Open Source Directory and KnowledgeTree

Optaros, an open source consulting and systems integration firm, has listed KnowledgeTree on their new Enterprise Open Source Directory (EOSD). The directory is a listing of robust, enterprise ready open source software and only 260 out of a total of 140000 known open source projects have made the grade. The directory provides the community with an opportunity to rate software, upload case studies and provides guidance on aspects of using open source software.

KnowledgeTree was included in the original “paper” Enterprise Open Source Catalogue document. At that time we started a discussion with Optaros around how commercial open source applications such as KnowledgeTree should be rated in such a guide. Stephen Walli recently launched a new Podcast and the first episode episode covers the launch of the EOSD and interviews with the Optaros guys. He also interviewed Stephen O’Grady from Red Monk and me (thankfully Stephen edited out all of my “uhms!”). The podcast is well worth a listen and I am sure Stephen will have many more quality podcasts to come.

Dave Gynn at Optaros asked me recently to comment on the EOSD’s approach to non-OSI approved open source licenses. I think the approach they’re taking with respects OSI-approved licenses is both a pragmatic and fair one. I’m sensitive to the arguments either way regarding non-OSI-approved licenses. Many of the EOSD’s visitors won’t be as sensitive to downstream freedoms and interpretations of Open Source Defintions as the folks on the OSI’s license-discuss mailing list but indicating OSI approval for a project’s license would be helpful to those that are. Raising awareness is also an important aspect.

What I think they may find difficult and contentious is attempting to describe where a particular license may be interpreted to fall foul of an OSD. There may in fact be a significant opportunity cost for their team in doing so (from a resource and marketing perspective). If OSI license-discuss as a forum is anything to go by, I certainly wouldn’t like to have to manage their discussion forums once they put this in place!

We currently have software licensed under the KnowledgeTree Public License, the GPLv2 and BSD licenses. We’re contemplating other licenses but more on this in the future… (see below)

Packt Open Source Content Management System Award
The good people at Packt Publishing contacted us about their Open Source Content Management System Award. The aware “is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) that has been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to the Packt Publishing Website.” This year they’ve included a Best Open Source PHP CMS category. If you like KnowledgeTree and want to nominate it for the award click here.

News from OSCON: An Interesting Week for Open Source Licensing

This week has also been an interesting one for commercial open source: SugarCRM has adopted the GPLv3 for their next major release and the Common Public Attribution License, developed and championed by SocialText’s Ross Mayfield was approved by the OSI. We live in interesting times! We are re-evaluating our licensing approach and so more thoughts on this in a blog post Real Soon Now(tm).

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Document Management In A Can: The KnowledgeTree Appliance

It’s a rainy and cold Sunday afternoon in Cape Town and so what better to do than put some good music on and take a good look at the new KnowledgeTree Open Source Appliance. The appliance runs on technology we’ve licensed from rPath, a bunch of ex-Red Hat guys with some remarkably cool ideas.

The appliance idea itself is quite simple and has been around a while, rPath’s execution is however really, really good. Take KnowledgeTree, place it on a cut-down Linux operating system and wrap the whole lot in a number of ways, including virtual machine images, bootable install CDs and hard-drive images. What do you end up with? A really easy to install application: “Document Management In A Can”. Couple the “easy to install” with easy to maintain (we package updates for the appliance and send them down your server via the Internet) and you’ve got a very low total cost of ownership document management application.

So, what about Software As A Service? Well, Software As A Service isn’t ideal for everybody. Many organizations positively do not want to place their documents on to a shared resource. For them, the security of an on-premise appliance coupled with ease of use and low total cost of ownership is very compelling.

The KnowledgeTree Open Source Appliance is available for download right now and we’ll be releasing a commercial appliance (i.e. commercially supported and with all of our Windows and Microsoft Office addons) over the next month or so.

We’ll also be offering the appliance to our OEM partners under our “Powered by KnowledgeTree” licensing programme. We’ve already had quite positive feedback from many of them.

So without further ado, let’s take a look:

The KnowledgeTree Open Source Appliance booted in VMWare Fusion on my MacBook. Note that there are two URLs to the appliance: an appliance management interface and the KnowledgeTree Document Management application.

Once logged in to the management interface you’re presented with a management menu and details of the server platform the appliance is running on. The KnowledgeTree menu allows you to configure elements of the KnowledgeTree application that are normally reached only by editing the config.ini file.

Configuring the user interface has never been easier…

Configuring automated updates from the KnowledgeTree update servers.

Setting up the backup mechanism on the appliance is really simple too.

We decided to ship with a pre-release version of KnowledgeTree Open Source 3.4 (note that the version number is missing and has been replaced with a build number). We’ll be sending out an update to the appliances one we have a new version of 3.4 next week (we’re moving the 3.4 DEVELOPMENT branch to STABLE!).

This is the KnowledgeTree dashboard, as viewed from Safari 3 on my MacBook. The Tag Cloud is showing the tags of some sample documents I uploaded and I’m displaying BBC World News on the RSS Feed widget (it would probably make more sense to display some KnowledgeTree RSS feeds there rather!). The Dashboard looks quite pretty in Safari and the AJAX works nicely!

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OSBC and the Microsoft Open Source ISV NXT Forum

I’ve recently returned from the Open Source Business Conference 2007 held in San Francisco. This year’s event was impressively organized, with great speakers, panels and the like. Well done to Matt Asay and co. for a great event.

A day prior to the conference, Microsoft held a forum for American Open Source ISVs. I managed to wangle an invite for KnowledgeTree and found the event extremely valuable, but not necessarily due to the speakers but more the opportunity to network with a smaller, more focussed group of ISVs and Microsoft guys than at other larger events. One of the great things about these smaller Microsoft events is that the Microsoft execs tend to speak somewhat more candidly. The timing of the forum was both good and bad. A week prior to the event Fortune Magazine published the now infamous article wherein they quoted Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith and licensing chief Horacio Gutierrez as saying Linux and Open Source projects violated 235 Microsoft patents. Fabrizio and the Funambol team captured the moment nicely in a cheeky t-shirt which was distributed at the Forum and OSBC.

Microsoft’s Sam Ramji and co. certainly had their work cut out responding to the many queries, concerns and bafflement. Many of the ISVs present want to work more closely with Microsoft. More than 60% of KnowledgeTree’s approximately 12000-15000 monthly open source downloads are our Windows stack installer. One of the primary differentiators of our commercial offering is its tight integration with the Windows desktop and Microsoft Office. Our customers and open source users are running on Windows, like Windows and intend on staying on it. A strong relationship with Microsoft is therefore important for us to be able to continue delivering to our users. Building that strong relationship with Microsoft, which is currently exhibiting many faces is difficult for open source ISVs. Will a deeper relationship with Microsoft alienate our open source communities? Will we become targets for patent claims? Will we be caught in an FSF-sponsored license quagmire?

Sam’s candid answers went a long way to allaying my fears:

• I’m no longer entirely anti- the Novell deal: indemnifying ones customers and the parties to a strategic partnership from each other’s patent claims is business. It happens all the time and is not publicized. Working on Linux/Windows interoperability is good, patent indemnification at this level is unremarkable, bar for the newsworthiness of the participants. Sitting on an OSBC panel, Alison Randal from O’Reilly felt that the deal would have a neutral effect on open source. Perhaps.
• Microsoft is a very large organization. There are many intelligent, articulate people with different opinions working for the company and they tend to voice these opinions. It appears Bill Hilf, Sam Ramji and co. have one stance and Brad Smith and co. have another. I guess this is healthy internal to an organization but external communication needs to be unified and clear and speak to the concerns of all stakeholders (shareholders, partners, customers, employees). I’m still not entirely sure which camp will win out. And so on to more about corporate messaging and patents…

I do still feel strongly that software patents have a significant chilling effect on entrepreneurial innovation. I’ve purposefully used this term: the arguments for software patents have centered around corporate innovation and how investment in such requires patent protection. I’m not entirely convinced of this. There is far too much prior art and obviousness in much of software and software development itself is too fluid in many respects to be captured in a formal patent (an argument for another time). Back to entrepreneurial innovation: great leaps in innovation happen at the fringes of economic activity. Entrepreneurs are the drivers of this innovation but they are by their very nature not capitalized as heavily as corporates. They most certainly do not have the money, the skills or the time to do extensive investigations in to whether the mechanism they are using to achieve their aim is infringing on somebody’s patents. The fear of infringement has a chilling effect on this entrepreneurial activity.

In the case of VC-backed software startups, management of these companies appear to only register patents for (a) defensive reasons and (b) so that investors get a warm fuzzy feeling (which is wound up with perception of value and also the risk management approach of (a)). If you ask any economist, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on defensive patents is not an appropriate allocation of resources (unless you’re an attorney!).

At the Microsoft ISV Forum I was struck by how my clearly more Eurocentric perspective on IPR and software patents (I’m South African and KnowledgeTree is based in Cape Town) differed with those of the Americans sitting around me. KnowledgeTree was the only non-American ISV present (apart from our friends at BitRock) and I was evidently coming from a world where software patents were not a fait accompli. The war to capture the minds of the European Parliament is still on the go. Many a battle has been won but the war is certainly not over.

When pressed, Sam and co. felt that US patent reform was perhaps necessary.

So, given that the US PTO’s approach to software patents is broken and that it is costly to Microsoft and the other majors, why is Microsoft still pressuring the EU for software patents modeled on the US? At the Forum, I put this to the Microsoft guys. Stephen Walli picked up on this in his excellent blog on this same topic.

Microsoft: if you’re serious about reforming the US patent regime, stop pressuring the EU to implement a broken system and get on with helping fix it!

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300 000!

A bit belated but worthy of a blog post none-the-less! We hit 300 000 downloads of KnowledgeTree Open Source from SourceForge.Net two weeks ago. To celebrate, we issued a press release and went for lunch at Showroom to celebrate (all the while salivating at the Ferraris, Lambos and the like next door). Good fun was had by all and we’re looking forward to 500k!

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Welcome to the team, Oracle Enterprise Linux, new rPath goodness

As I mentioned in a previous post, until two weeks ago, I had been out of the office for almost a month. In my absence, the KnowledgeTree team was led by my colleague, John Thorne (JamWarehouse’s CEO). John, along with Kevin, Conrad, Phil, Brandon and the rest of the team, did a great job of pushing KnowledgeTree forward. In fact, in March we had our single highest month of bookings (non-GAAP revenues) to date.

During March we also had quite a few new people join the team. Welcome to Monique Chavda (joining support), Martin Kirsten (joining engineering) and Jacqui Woolfson (our new Director of Marketing). We’re excited to be working with you and hope that you have a successful, stimulating and fun time on the KnowledgeTree team!

We have recently certified KnowledgeTree on Oracle Enterprise Linux. If you are an Oracle customer and want to run KnowledgeTree we are now very happy to, and capable of, supporting you.

rPath have updated their KnowledgeTree Virtual Appliance to KnowledgeTree Open Source 3.3.1. If you are looking to evaluate KnowledgeTree Open Source and couldn’t be bothered to prepare a test server, why not download the rPath Virtual Appliance and give it a spin? The appliance is available in VMWare, Xen, Virtual Iron and Microsoft Virtual Server formats. rPath have also got in to bed with Amazon and come up with a very cool rBuilder/Amazon EC2 mashup: cook your Virtual Appliance and deploy to the EC2 cloud, all with a single click in rPath’s rBuilder tool. Very cool…

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Belated update on 2007 Open Source Think Tank, MIT “Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software”

I’ve been back home for a few weeks after an extremely busy trip to Sydney, San Francisco and London, and haven’t been blogging as often as I would like. The trip was busy but productive and I’ll hopefully be able to talk more over the next few weeks about what I got up to.

An important part of my trip was attending the 2007 Open Source Think Tank. Fabrizio Capobianco at Funambol, a far more prolific blogger than I am, wrote a nice round-up of what went down at the Think Tank. It was good to catch up with colleagues from across the open source industry, network and be present in a thoroughly stimulating environment - kudos to Andrew Aitken (Olliance) and Mark Radcliffe (DLA Piper) for putting the event together.

With the publication of the 2007 edition of the MIT Press publication, “Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software”, the 2005 edition is now available as a free PDF download. The publication is an excellent collection of papers covering Free and Open Source development methodologies, business models, licensing discussions etc. Definitely worthwhile downloading and reading (and perhaps worth purchasing the 2007 edition in hardback!).

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2007 Open Source Think Tank

I’ve just landed in San Francisco and am on my way to attending the 2007 Open Source Think Tank organized by DLA Piper and the Olliance Group. We were fortunate to be invited and will be joining a very interesting bunch of other open source start-ups and large services businesses. I’m not allowed to blog about specifics of what is said but will be noting some of the more prevalent themes in later blogs.

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Optaros, Gartner and the meaning of commercial open source

I mentioned recently that KnowledgeTree has been listed in the 2007 Optaros Open Source Catalogue and how I was interested in the mechanisms used by Optaros to rate open source projects. Through an introduction made by Stephen Walli, I got chatting to Dave Gynn from Optaros. Dave and I had a great chat about the catalogue and the challenges Optaros faced in putting it together. The catalogue itself is an enormous undertaking: SourceForge.Net has over 140 000 registered projects and many open source projects exist outside of the SourceForge.Net family, adding to that number.

As Dave mentions on his blog, Optaros grappled with how to represent commercial open source vendors in the catalogue. One of the ideas they mooted was to present the commercial edition of the software separate to the open source edition, but with the commercial edition showing a significantly lower community scoring. [I’ve mentioned open source and commercial editions here: you may find this primer on commercial open source business models put together by Dave’s colleague, Seth Gottlieb, useful in understanding this.]

I think rating the two elements of a commercial open source product separately would be a mistake: divorcing the community from commercial editions of commercial open source software doesn’t reflect the reality of how community and customer benefit from each other:

• With tiered-functionality business models, the community is a driver of stability and innovation for both the open source and the commercial editions of the software.
• Commercial customers provide a means of investing in some of the less sexy functionality that business applications require: functionality that is least likely to see community investment.
• Commercial customers are also a strong force for product leadership, with larger commercial entities investing in providing best practice which is captured within the application. Even if some of these features are only available in the commercial edition to begin with, vendors often “commoditize” these features in to the open source edition of their software as new functionality to the commercial edition is added. Smaller organizations or those disinterested in moving from community or open source relationship to a supported one thus benefit from the commercial customer’s investment.

Many analysts and organizations evaluating commercial open source software (and the open source community at large) are grappling with what commercial open source means to them. How may they license the application? What organization (and support) backs the product? What do they pay for? The Optaros catalogue is designed to provide guidance to business decision makers on these issues. I’m hoping that as the catalogue becomes somewhat “richer” in content that the depth of coverage around commercial open source will increase. Commercial open source business models are proving that they have traction (and not just in the investor community!). Optaros has made a good go at it first time round and I look forward to future revisions.

Allied to this topic, a recently published Gartner paper, “Commercial Open Source: Is All That Glitters Usually Sold?”, covers commercial open source from a purchasing perspective. The guys at Gartner polled our thinking around tiering KnowledgeTree functionality and the business model behind the KnowledgeTree product. Whilst I don’t entirely agree with the conclusions made about what commercial open source means to a CIO it is an interesting read.

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KnowledgeTree is recruiting again

We’re recruiting again and looking for everybody from marketing, sales, support professionals to engineering wunderkinds. Full details on our current openings and how to apply may be found on our website.

Some of the positions are located at our Cape Town, South Africa headquarters whilst others may be fulfilled remotely. Check the job specs on our website for further detail.

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