dev2ops

Identi.ca: a bellweather for new open source models?

Damon Edwards / August 15th, 2008

Twitter’s legendary outages have driven a significant number of influential bloggers and pundit types to the new indenti.ca service. Indenti.ca is interesting not just because it’s a Twitter clone but because it’s an Open Software Service.

An Open Software Service is defined as a service:

1) Whose data is open as defined by the open knowledge definition with the exception that where the data is personal in nature the data need only be made available to the user (i.e. the owner of that account).

2) Whose source code is:
   1. Free/Open Source Software
   2. Made publicly available.

For the majority of users of consumer services like Twitter, Facebook, or GMail, whether or not the service is open probably seems inconsequential. However, when it comes to enterprise web services this could be a very interesting trend. The open data part is likely a non-starter, but the open source aspect opens some interesting doors.

Run it yourself, have someone run it for you, or even more interesting… some combination of the two. The opportunities for real innovation under this model are fascinating. In traditional open source software, “adding value” generally meant you added special features or provided timely code updates for a fee. Under this new model, “adding value” is all about the managed services and network effects that you can provide to end users.

I’ll be eagerly watching indenti.ca to see if they can make a going concern out of being a service provider when anyone can run the service for themselves.

If a CDM, SMI-S, CMDB, DASH, CMI falls in Santa Clara… will anyone hear it?

Damon Edwards / August 13th, 2008

I’ve been asked a number of times lately if I’m going to the Management Developers Conference taking place this November in Santa Clara. The title sure sounds like something right up my alley. Well, at least it did until I checked out the agenda. In a nutshell, this is a conference of vendors talking about the latest in management standards efforts.

I’ve commented before on how the vendor-backed standards efforts are out of touch with what is going on in the IT trenches. This is yet another example. What happened to concept that standards started with consensus on the ground and then matured from there? The ivory tower approach has been a historical failure in our space, why not surprise us all and try a different approach this time?

In every enterprise that contends with more than a handful of servers and applications you’ll find that there’s a “management developer” of some sort. Amazingly, software vendors and standards bodies appear to have little regard for those developers opinions when they meet in their ivory towers to dictate the next round of vendor sports standards. How many of of those real management developers would feel that this conference or these standards efforts (or any of the previous failed efforts that these current efforts are repeating) are relevant to their day to day lives?