Free Internet conference Wednesday

Santa Clara U and its High Tech Law Institute are hosting another free conference on technology policy topics, in this case the West Coast edition of the annual State of the Net conference. The conference —hosted by a 501c3 advisory board — features 3 members of the Congressional Internet Caucus (2 D, 1 R) plus the administration’s CTO and various scholars and other luminaries. Among the academics will be Tim Bresnahan, Michael Katz and AnnaLee Saxenian.

The conference will be held Wed Aug. 5 from 9am-2pm at the Santa Clara law school. For more information or to sign up, see the conference website.

Web 2.0 conference model: free!

Stanford MS&E professor Bob Sutton posted an interesting update on his blog last week, announcing a social networking mini-conference this Thursday afternoon at the Stanford d.school:

With speakers from Facebook and LinkedIn, the business model for the workshop is as expected: free! (Other speakers are from Apple, Netflix, Ning and Stanford’s own Huggy Rao). Reservations are via email or Facebook. This the fourth year of the mini-conference and I imagine it will be an overflow crowd again this year.

I’d really like to go, but I’ve long committed to spending the entire day at another free (and overflowing) conference, this one co-sponsored by the Santa Clara and Berkeley law schools on the 100th anniversary of the 1909 Copyright Act. I only recognize a few of the speakers: Berkeley copyright guru Pam Samuelson and Google copyright council (a former copyright blogger) William Patry. Still, as an IP researcher (who in industry used to write copyright licensing contracts), this conference provides a no-miss opportunity to broaden my understanding of key issues in IP law.

Mobile LinuxWorld: Accessing the other Palm story

If Palm Inc. (née Palm Computing) is trying to find life after the PDA, its former alter ego (PalmSource) is trying to run to the front of the parade of adapting Linux to mobile platforms.

Of course, PalmSource was purchased in fall 2005 by Access of Japan, outbidding Palm (Inc.) and Motorola. This was only about six months after PalmSource started shifting towards an embedded Linux strategy with its money-saving strategy of buying China MobileSoft, a Nanjing-based Linux developer.

Today, the business cards in the booth say Access Systems Americas, but the address show the same Sunnyvale address of the former PalmSource.

“How did they hope to make money off of Linux?” is what I asked myself after the original sale, rebranding, and abandonment of ongoing Palm OS revenues. Actually, after visiting the booth (and doing some background research), I realized I already had the answer. What ASA (PalmSource) is doing is exactly what I would have recommended from my 7 years of studying “how do firms make money from open source” — and they didn’t have to pay me a dime.

The most obvious point was the Access Linux Platform (ALP) architecture diagram — which is a mixture of off-the-shelf open source (shown here in blue), technology developed by ASA released as open source (purple), and the proprietary code licensed by ASA (gray).

As I understand it, ASA’s open source contribution is mostly found in the “Hiker” project, which is intended to supply many of the key APIs missing from GTK/GNOME but necessary for writing real native Linux mobile applications. (Hiker is described in a PDF white paper and now has a downloadable tarball). The Hiker part was originally MPL (because it’s a better license) but OSS guru “Lefty” Schlessinger said it will be available Real Soon Now dual-licensed in LGPL(v2) to make the GPL-centric GNOME community happy.

As befitting all the ex-Apple people at ASA, its decision to give away some (but not all) technology parallels the early Apple Computer open source strategy, which I described in a 2003 research paper as “opening parts.” It also fits the general pattern I found in my subsequent larger study of open source business models, where firms sell some parts and give away others.

In addition to the opening parts, the other key point was that (as Bill Lee of ASA developer relations told me) “On this side [of the Pacific], we’re a services company.” Services (despite lower margins) are also common with open source companies. Services have historically been big in the embedded market because no two devices are identical. Unlike the PC industry (where commonality is sought to reduce costs), embedded device makers relish differences (and differentiation) as they seek to push the envelope. There are lots of reasons why hardware companies need help with embedded software, which is why there are companies like MontaVista.

In fact, (today) ASA doesn’t sell a Linux distribution, but assumes that most of its customers have an existing distribution from MontaVista or Wind River (which just won Palm Inc.’s business). This was probably the part that made the least sense: once upon a time PalmSource sold an entire operating system, so the dependency on MontaVista or Wind River doesn’t make sense in the long run. That seems easily fixed: four years ago, WindRiver was a proprietary embedded OS company and the ultimate anti-Linux — and then they got into Linux. So Access could buy (or sell to) an existing Linux distro, or build it from scratch.

ASA is evangelizing developers (using the process perfected by Apple in the 1980s) to support its new Access Linux Platform. (To run the installed base of 25,000 old Palm OS apps, the ALP has a Palm OS compatibility layer). I’m sorry I couldn’t make Tuesday’s developer event but they wanted money and besides I was out of town. In addition to courting ISVs, ASA has also won support as the preferred Linux provider to Orange, the large French mobile phone operator.

There was one more surprise as I riffled through the various ALP white papers, i.e. marketing brochures (in the dead tree version handed out at the booth but also available online.) To put it starkly, Access wants to be the Symbian of mobile Linux.

Specifically, their white paper “Mobile Linux - Going Native” contains arguments that could have been ripped from a Symbian brochure. For users of “smartphones” (a term practically invented by Symbian), it extols the importance of making full native applications (as with a PDA or PC) rather than using lightweight application frameworks like Java or BREW. One excerpt:

Applications that run in a “sandbox” are nice, but future users of smartphones will come to expect the performance and capabilities of applications designed to run in native mode.

So Symbian and Access are predicting a world in which native applications continue to matter, while Google and thus far Apple expect mobile devices to use device-independent rich internet apps (based on things like Ajax) to be the wave of the future. The jury is still out.

Technorati Tags: business models, conferences, embedded Linux, GNOME, mobile phones, open source, Palm

LinuxWorld is dying

In between teaching and the big annual conference of management professors, Thursday I was able to squeeze in a day at LinuxWorld Expo San Francisco. I don’t particularly like going to SF, but it’s relatively painless with the Caltrain “Baby Bullet” (a misnomer — it’s just a limited stop train).

LinuxWorld Expo was first offered in February 1999 in San José. The show later provided the backdrop for that “most excellent” (80s surfer-speak) Linux documentary, Revolution OS. When there’s time, I show excerpts of the movie to my technology strategy students, particular the LinuxWorld clip involving the Linus Torvalds-Richard Stallman interaction, as well as the interviews showing the conflicting ideologies between “free software” (i.e. Stallman) and “open source” (almost everyone else).

This is my 3rd LinuxWorld, having come in 2003 and 2004 after moving to Northern California. As in the previous shows, it was held in Moscone Center (once filled each year by Macworld Expo), but this year it was only at the comparatively small Moscone North hall. As with previous LinuxWorld and MacWorld shows, the show was managed by IDG with (if past habits hold true to form) extortionate rental rates and onerous big city union rules.

Even allowing for arriving on the third day, it’s quite clear that the excitement has faded from previous years. The show was empty when it opened Thursday, even if attendance picked up after a while. The show didn’t even fill the 4 acres of Moscone North; it was eerie to see the normally bustling (6-acre) Moscone South empty and dark.

If you didn't stop and have a deep conversation at various booths, you could easily do the whole hall in 3 hours — a far cry from LinuxWorld (or MacWorld) at its peak, when you needed to allot multiple days. In fact, it reminded me of Macworld Expo in the late 90s when Apple and its ecosystem were collapsing. Today, the Macworld shows are bigger, but they are padded with schlocky little companies selling iPod cases or speakers.

The speakers were also 2nd tier. In 1999, it was Linus Torvalds. In 2003, I missed my train and thus missed Irving Wladawsky-Berger, then the IBM vice president in charge of open source strategies and the corporate America‘s most powerful open source advocate. This year, it was a bunch of CTOs, someone passed over (twice) for CEO of HP, and the CEO of Novell. (Andrew Morton, number two on the Linux project, would have been worth hearing Monday but I was still in Philadelphia).

I would be surprised if LinuxWorld Expo survives to 2010, although canceling the East Coast show (formerly Boston, now in NYC) might keep the franchise alive a little longer. Since Linux and open source use continue to grow (a statement of fact, not of advocacy) there must be some other explanation. I have two guesses.

One guess is that such tradeshows do their gangbuster business when a technology is new and an industry is rapidly changing and thus people need to gather information in a rapidly-changing, exciting, ambiguous period. Macworld Expo brought a lot of traffic to Moscone in January, originally to see AppleTV but later to see the iPhone once it was announced.

The other guess is that tradeshows are going the way of the retail store, printed newspaper, and other artifacts of our tangible, physical, industrial legacy era. Yes we needed face-to-face markets 20 or 200 or 2000 years ago to sell produce or haggle over rug prices, but today we do our information search on the Internet. The exorbitant prices charged by convention halls, promoters and featherbedding unions make the proposition less attractive every year. Linux isn’t dying, but LinuxWorld Expo is, being killed by LinuxWorld.com, CNET, Ars Technica and their ilk.

If that’s the future, I’ll be sorry to see the trade show go. I found them a very handy way to gather market intelligence, first as an entrepreneur, then as an academic researcher and teacher. With a good trade show, in day you can go from knowing little to having a very good sense of the state of the market. (I learned a lot this trip). You can also collect a lot of business cards and meet a lot of people — I’d be sorry to lose that, and even more sorry if my daughter’s era does not include that.

I used to enjoy a day trip to see COMDEX, for decades the PC industry’s mother-of-all-shows. When I last went in 2003, the show was clearly in decline, but still its termination (2003 was the end) came as a shock. COMDEX has been largely replaced by CES (both as a convergence play and also under better management), so I guess I need to start going again despite the schedule conflict (usually with my HICSS obligations).

More importantly, I need to go back to CeBIT, the massive German trade show combining COMDEX with a mobile phone and electrical appliance show. Once I assumed that the Berlin Wall would always be there — and then it was gone — so I should assume that CeBIT will also someday join COMDEX without prior notice.

Picture credit: Photo of Tim O’Reilly and Richard Stallman from the O’Reilly Network, © 2002 Julian Cash

Technorati Tags: conferences, Linux

Finally home

My hectic month of conference traveling is over, and I’m back in San José. I just finished my 14th trip to Europe since the first one in 1980; there’s been almost one a year since 1996, and two in the past five weeks. I’ve also done 3 conferences in that time, and 4 in the past 3 months.

Some random observations: the Danes are as bicycle-mad as the Dutch, but the other countries I visited are not. I still think flat has something to do with it; we love bikes here in California, too, but so little of the state is flat (or compact) enough to make them useful to the average citizen.

Europe seems more smoking addicted than the US, but (at least in Northern Europe) is marginalizing smokers the same way while leaving it legal enough to collect the tax revenues. In the summer it’s not so bad, but being forced to smoke outside in December in Denmark seems like a more severe punishment than doing so in California. I’ll be curious to see how the British smoking ban on July 1 goes.

European airports are even worse than US airports (if that is possible) in not having power outlets at the gates. In one airport (I think Schipol) I used the Coke machine outlet, which I wouldn’t have known was possible except someone else had left it unplugged. Heathrow will gladly sell you Wi-Fi access but don’t expect coverage at the gate. (In San José, I can usually get a signal on the plane.).

And hopefully the next time I’m back at Heathrow the insipid HSBC airport ad campaign will be long gone. It was cute for about 5 minutes, but after that the implication is that the people who would manage your personal fortune at HSBC are about as deep and insightful as to the drivers of global business as the editors of Vanity Fair or Esquire.

Picture: European Academy of Management opening reception, May 16.

Technorati Tags: conferences, Europe

The Grand Tour

I will be doing only a limited amount of blogging these next two weeks while I’m traveling in Europe — mainly catching up on stories on my hard disk rather than researching new stories. Meanwhile, here is a supremely off topic and self-indulgent reflection on what I’ll be doing.

Once upon a time, when it took a week or more to steam to Europe, Americans visited the Continent in a “Grand Tour,” of the sort ridiculed by the movie “If Today’s Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium.” (I don’t know if it’s that different when Europeans want to cram into one trip the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument, Yellowstone and the Golden Gate Bridge.)

When I was 22, I conned my employer into relocating me to its Dublin office for two months. After that, I took my InterRail pass, one suitcase and a wad of various currencies to visit 5 countries in two weeks. (The trip was was cut short when my spending went over budget, and fortunately I could catch an earlier PanAm flight back to my apartment in L.A.) That was my first trip to Europe, but since then nearly all of my visits have been single-city jaunts, popping off the plane to visit a trade show in Hannover, or a conference in Paris, Helsinki (twice), Aachen, Copenhagen or Geneva. (We won’t count the time my mom broke her arm in Rome and needed someone to fly over to carry her bags so she could enjoy her first and last trip to Italy).

Nearly 27 years later, over the next two weeks I’m doing my 2nd Grand Tour of the Continent. This week I’m in Paris, both keynoting and presenting a paper at one of two open innovation tracks at the European Academy of Management conference. The invitation to keynote at an academic conference is a great honor, not one that I thought I’d enjoy this early in my career. (To be honest, there are many tracks, each with its own keynote speaker(s)).

Next week, I’m presenting invited papers at the business schools of Switzerland’s two technical universities — EPFL and ETH — which at their request will be two chapters from our in-progress book. In addition to a nice dinner and a chance to make new friends, I’ll be around a larger audience for my work than I’m likely to find at home. In between, I’m also visiting two co-authors to work on papers.

This is my longest and most logistically complex trip this year, with 5 planes and 7 trains (not counting intracity trips). But then it’s a very busy year, with plans (thus far) to present at seven academic conferences and invited papers at five universities — all between January to October.

Before I got tenure, I thought tenure meant “take a sabbatical and work on what you think is important.” In my case, that meant the book. But I now realize tenure also means “take as many trips as you can afford” and “present as much as you want without regards to the tenure committee.”

Technorati Tags: open innovation

Busy month of traveling

I’m just catching up on my blogging after last week, which marked the beginning of a period when I will be traveling three weeks out of five.

Last week I was in Boston, giving three talks in four days. On Tuesday I started with Chapter 2 from the MIT to Qualcomm book, while on Wednesday I presented one of the iPhone papers. On Thursday, I presented an update to my HICSS paper on open source business models, plus helped my co-author at a “poster” session for Chapter 5 of the aforementioned book.

Next month I’m traveling to Europe for two weeks, to present at the European Academy of Management, to give a couple of guest seminars, and to work with a co-author.

EURAM is interesting this year because of a strong Open Innovation theme. Over at the Open Innovation blog, I’ve posted the schedule for the two tracks, along with an overview. I’ll be presenting a keynote (not yet written) linking OI to other types of openness, as well as an update to the OSS community research jointly authored with Siobhán O’Mahony.

Technorati Tags: conferences, open innovation, open source