It’s available for free download from Technology Evaluation Centers. You can also do a little bit of research on how MODX Revolution’s web content management system would satisfy your requirements, using the TEC Advisor analysis and comparison tool (this link allows you to use it for two hours free).

The questions were

1. How do Canada’s copyright laws affect you? How should existing laws be modernized?
2. Based on Canadian values and interests, how should copyright changes be made in order to withstand the test of time
3. What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster innovation and creativity in Canada?
4. What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster competition and investment in Canada?
5. What kinds of changes would best position Canada as a leader in the global, digital economy?

1. Copyright and You
How do Canada’s copyright laws affect you? How should existing laws be modernized?

Canada’s copyright laws affect me by imposing a controlling framework over my participation in our society. In responding to all of these copyright discussion questions, I propose that the basis for understanding how we should treat copyright needs to be founded in day-to-day living human society. I’d say this holds by and large for our treatment and interaction with all manifestations of various intellectual creations.

I’m not going to talk about specifics. Not specific stipulations, rules, or terms on how I think the copyright laws should be written or applied. I’m sure that there are a number of suggestions for that but I would like to see some background principles in place from which the specific rules are set. If questions arise as to the specifics or proper application, then a verification against the background principles would help determine the best approach. So I’ll answer these questions, as briefly as I can, with what I think the background principles ought to be.

Canada is because Canadians are. In our everyday activities we create our own culture while apprehending it. In order to participate at even the most minute levels of creating our culture we’re constantly experiencing everything around us to inform and inspire what it is we put into our culture. Really it’s just how we live in a society with other people—I’m trying to describe a self-nourishing loop. For example, when I write a novel, I’m drawing on my lifetime of ideas which has been influenced by every experience I’ve had. My experiences include everything in the world around me that I come in contact with, physical or otherwise. Whether initially created by humans or not, the fact of the Canadian environment is as much a part of our social experience as are the ideas we convey in our culture.

I believe that when I expose any of my ideas publicly (that is, when I do not keep them to myself), whether in a manifestation like a book, music, painting, etc. or even verbally, those ideas become irrevocably a part of our society. The moment we manifest a product of our intellect in the public sphere (our commons) at least one other person has now somehow apprehended them in his or her experience. The lives of those people are influenced by their apprehension of the ideas. In turn, those people will somehow contribute them, in their own ways, into society. Maybe someone will read a book I’ve written and then recommend it to someone else; a simple example. Maybe someone will see a painting that an artist made and be inspired with an idea to compose some music, which then eventually gets performed and heard by other people. A bit more involved, but just as much a part of the loop that is a living society.

That loop is the vibrancy of a living society. Without this constant interchange of ideas and creativity to even the simplest, most banal degrees, we cease to be a society. That is, without it, everyone keeps everything to oneself, which could only be possible if one were to live entirely by oneself, isolated from all other human interaction. In other words, in the absense of human society.

Current trends in copyright discussions tend to focus too much on the economic aspects of creator’s rights or else simply the notion of “ownership”. This is a mistake because it neglects the priority of the entire background principles taking place that enable people to manifest their intellectual creations within our society in the first place. It is however mostly possible and reasonable to identify creators with proper attribution to their works. From this attribution there are plenty of ways encourage our economy without assuming restrictive ownership-style rights. But this is more for a later question. I mention it here only to say that the economic concerns (which tend to wield an overbearing influence in copyright legislation) have profoundly impact our lives in the way we apprehend and participate in our society. These economic concerns should not be mixed into the purpose of copyright law, which in my opinion is to better our society by fostering creativity in the living space for manifesting our intellectual works.

Canada’s copyright laws affect me because I want to participate in a living Canadian society. I want to experience our society and I want to continue contributing to it. I do not want our society to die, I want it to neither be excluded nor exclude the rest of human society. Finally, I do not want to live isolated from all other humans. In order for this to be my reality, the controlling framework that is copyright must, by all means, neither restrict my liberty to apprehend all the creative intellectual elements of our society and environment nor restrict my liberty to contribute in kind.

Modernizing Canadian copyright law requires a focus equally on fostering creative expession and on ensuring the possibility for everyone’s apprehension of those forms of expression. Modern Canadian copyright law should emphasize a lack of restriction on the exposure, apprehension, distribution, and redistribution of all public intellectual manifestations. Canadian copyright law should focus on strengthening the freedom of our commons and affirming that this is our cultural lifeblood. At the same time, Canadian copyright law should clarify and enforce proper attribution for all who contribute their ideas in whatever form manifested. The framework of modern Canadian copyright law should be minimal in its control of social participation.

2. Test of Time:
Based on Canadian values and interests, how should copyright changes be made in order to withstand the test of time?

I think this question is asking about the copyright rules themselves standing the test of time. Unless I’ve misunderstood, that is not the best question to ask with respect to copyright and time. A more important issue is how does copyright affect Canadian values and interest over time? To which, I think copyright has to ensure the apprehension and contribution of intellectual manifestations to Canadian society now and continuously.

Rules that prevent the apprehension or distribution of any intellectual manifestation exposed within our social milieu are hostile to the test of time. For example, rules that confer rights for the reproduction of books to individuals or companies beyond the author’s lifetime serve more to destroy that piece of our shared culture than to keep it living. Such rules severely narrow the possibility that people will be able to apprehend the book because its distribution is maintained by a single source of control that frequently does not have our common social well-being as its driving focus, but rather the increase in profit is the driving focus.

Generating wealth by means of controlling access to a book works because the book can be made scarce (when it might otherwise be freely copied). This is problematic for a number of reasons but one main reason is that preventing apprehension of the book implies the removal of a part of the living loop that is our society. It’s ultimately a hostile attack against the well-being of our society. In other words it goes contrary to our longetivity, it’s a practice that fails the test-of-time. If we want to ensure that our intellectual manifestations do stand the test of time, we must ensure the well-being of our society’s living loop.

To answer the test-of-time question as originally stated, based on Canadian values and interests, which certainly seek self-continuation (since I don’t believe all Canadian’s share a suicide wish), copyright changes should be made so that they do not result in causing our society to have many instances of individuals or companies holding rights over those of our social commons. If we someday end up with so much of our culture bottled by a few companies for apprehension by those that can pay, then we self-destruct, at which point we will be forced through extremes to re-evaluate the madness of an over-restrictive copyright policy, and thus the policy itself would be poorly adapted for the test of time.

3. Innovation and Creativity:
What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster innovation and creativity in Canada?

I think most people recognize that innovation and creativity do not take place in a vacuum. They go hand-in-hand with the living loop of our society. In order to foster more innovation and creativity, it’s essential to liberate exposure, apprehension, distribution, and redistribution of all public intellectual manifestations.

The best way to encourage innovation, which by definition builds on what exists already, is to encourage the free-flow of ideas in all their forms. Creativity likewise often flourishes as people are inspired by their apprehension of other’s creative works. Modern Canadian copyright should boldly recognize the infinite, free reproducibility of ideas as a common good, necessary for innovation and creativity. This would help ensure their apprehension.

To foster innovation and creativity modern Canadian copyright should also ensure recognition of creators. This is important for at least three reasons. First, because it identifies those participating and thus calls attention to the life that is Canadian society. Second, knowing the creator of some sort of intellectual manifestation helps enables social interaction between people. If I know who wrote a song, I can find more of her work, which might further inspire me to create something or otherwise participate in our society, or I can collaborate with her. Finally, something just feels right about being able to identify a creative work with its author. Authors feel entitled to recognition of their labours contributing to the living loop that is our society. Recognition of the elements composing our commons by our commons, encourages us to participate.

4. Competition and Investment:
What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster competition and investment in Canada?

Historical precedent repeatedly shows that when there are fewer restrictions on the exposure, apprehension, distribution, and redistribution of public intellectual manifestations, competition and investment bloom. There are multifold examples of this in Lawrence Lessig’s book “Free Culture” (http://www.free-culture.cc/).

When intellectual manifestations are understood in the context of our living society, the notion of ownership becomes entirely awkward and anti-social. To really allow the notion of ownership contained within the phrase “intellectual property” to function, we apply it as though speaking of discrete physical items. Consider that the moment an intellectual creation is manifested in our society it irrevocably enters the living loop I described. So, followed to its ultimate ends, in order for ownership of “intellectual property” to be practically implemented, we eventually would require that creators be isolated from society. The only way that what is intellectual can really be owned is to isolate its creation entirely from influence contributed by our living society and from likewise influencing our society. Once it’s loose, it propagates in idea if not physical forms. But such an implementation as isolation makes the notion of ownership useless and the concept of “intellectual property” both nonsensical and untenable.

None of that however, means that we cannot recognize, attribute, and celebrate those people who originate or otherwise manifest their ideas and creations in our society. Nor does it mean we cannot harness those manifestations and the energy behind creating them in interesting and lucrative ways. I think it’s essential to distinguish between ownership and creation, which current copyright laws do not seem to do effectively.

Competition and investment with respect to our intellectual manifestations ought to be considered as a separate issue from most of the other questions in this consultation. We have to recognize that competition and investment are wholly dependant on a living society. They require new inputs to society from creators as well as desire from those in society that would apprehend the intellectual manifestations. In order to foster competition and investment, the focus of modern copyright should ensure the well-being of the living loop of society I described previously.

5. Digital Economy:
What kinds of changes would best position Canada as a leader in the global, digital economy?

First and foremost, modern Canadian copyright needs to emphatically affirm the characteristics inherent to the digital medium. That is, it must tend strongly toward the liberty to freely reproduce that which is digital.

Creations manifested in a digital medium, similar to ideas themselves, are infinitely reproducible without degradation, and with virtually little effort or expenditure of physical resources. It is a huge disservice that copyright-oriented conversations often address creations manifested in a digital medium as though they’re apprehended the same as physical items. A shovel can be stolen (I take it from a store and it’s gone), a digital file (like an MP3 or FLAC music file) cannot. The digital file can on the other hand, be duplicated without loss of or degradation to the original. This is hugely significant in all of our attitudes toward addressing the digital economy.

Modern copyright needs to swim with both the lack of limitation and the absence of scarcity that characterize transmission of intellectual works manifested in digital media. A proper Canadian copyright policy should not include anything that enables the implementation of technologies, applications, agreements, or other methods of enforcement limiting or otherwise restricting the nature of the digital medium.

The best economic policy involving the digital medium must embrace limitless reproducibility in ways that are totally alien to physical objects. The sooner Canadian copyright law recognizes this, the sooner Canadians and Canadian businesses will be able to develop and launch modern digital-native business models that lead the global economy.

“…search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find… Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.”

This goes hand-in-hand with the idea I was calling for when I said we need to ask How do I assemble knowledge from the information I find? In Erick Schonfeld’s detailed article on TechCrunch, he shows a number of examples of how this better guided search, with a decision-oriented result can work. It seems Bing will provide a lot of smart contextual information around searches to better identify what people are looking for and deliver results that a person will find useful for taking some sort of action.

I said before that we lack intelligent authors to assemble a structured knowledge for acquisition from the content of the Internet. The search engine should morph or augment itself into something that will provide that or come close to providing that (or else be usurped by an alternate application).

Microsoft is making a lot of a statements about changing the search game. Considering the launch of Bing occurs in such close proximity to the launch of Wolfram|Alpha, I think it’s fair to say that there is a real chance people are recognizing the need to change the search game in this direction. Wolfram|Alpha calls itself a computational knowledge engine and makes a point of differentiating itself from search engines. Wolfram|Alpha explains that

“You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer. Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing…”

From what I can see in Microsoft’s Bing and Wolfram|Alpha, neither have fully accomplished the game-change that is needed. However they’re each on the path. It’s clear that Google has a wealth of apps and interconnected information, which they’re subtly making visible and more-and-more intelligent over time. If you spend any time flipping back and forth between Google’s variety of apps, you start to see some interesting connections that overlay search results. Rather than launch an entirely new system, I think Google is evolving itself in this direction. I like that Bing and Wolfram|Alpha have become quite public, I think it will push Google more and it’ll be fun to see how these companies finally deliver on CASAA.

Some of the article meshes in interesting ways with what I was thinking about in my last few posts. I enjoyed reading what he had to say, so I felt like commenting on it. For example,

“And just as the Web once emerged on top of the Internet, now something new is emerging on top of the Web: I call this the Stream. The Stream is what the Web is thinking and doing, right now. It’s our collective stream of consciousness.”

It does feel intuitively right to me that something will emerge on top of the Web but I don’t really think the Web emerged on top of the Internet in an equivalent way. I think of the Web as a conscientiously designed markup language, protocols, and interfaces (browsers) that “resided” on the Internet as their medium. The result of all that was the huge variety we see today. Whereas the stream, also residing on the Internet medium, does not have an analogue in terms of the Web programming I just mentioned. The stream seems to be a lot of different applications or meta-applications that serves various purposes. Some use common protocols or other standards but many might also be considered rivulets within larger streams. So if we want to say there is a stream as something emerging on top of the Web, I think we have to envision it wholly differently than the Web that emerged on top of the Internet. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to think of the stream is an emergent property of the Web?

I’ve been dissecting this stream idea without even saying what it is. Spivack calls out an example in microblogging, of sites like Twitter he says “…they are literally streams of thinking and conversation…” And later he points out that “The Stream is a world of even shorter attention spans, online viral sensations, instant fame, sudden trends, and intense volatility. It is also a world of extremly short-term conversations and thinking.”

That may touch on the same phenomenon I was thinking about when I claimed that people now have short attention spans by necessity. To acquire knowledge people have to pull together many shallow atoms. Spivack’s article recognizes a problem with inexorable onslaught of the stream. So many streams of information, constantly streaming away, how can we cope? The answer seems to be that we’ll need tools to aggregate, filter, and manage our streams for us. [update 14 May: after posting this I read a great post on the Emergent Chaos blog about this very issue... twitter bankruptcy]

But I wonder, we’ve had “constant now” technology for a long time in the form of a telephone. Phone conversations are essentially immediate. There are reasons that we do not stay constantly connected with the now of the phone. What is compelling us to think that we should attempt that with the Web? Just because the Internet is accessible constantly, the Web is updateable immediately, and a computer device can open access to innumerable streams, do I want to be exposed and engaged with that? Increasingly, people seem to be saying yes. I don’t know that that will continue but this is worth exploring more. Nevertheless, because we can transmit information so rapidly I don’t think it means we necessarily will start focusing on the Web for what is happening as opposed to what happened. It may be the case that all of this access, these streams are valuable to us because they keep us rapidly up-to-date with what just happened not what is happening.

“Just as the Web is not any one particular site or service, the Stream is not any one site or service — it’s the collective movement that is taking place across them all.”

I get why it’s so tempting to compare the Stream to streams of consciousness. On the whole, you seem to get a constantly flowing array of stuff with all sorts of lateral connections. Maybe if we place ourselves way above the Internet, and think of it as a mind, these things taken as a whole, would indeed seem fluid like a stream of consciousness. But if we were to focus any one particular person’s Twitter stream for example, it’s much more like an archive than a fluid stream. People select bits of their thoughts and convey them to Twitter, where they appear and remain. Spivack recognizes this because he goes on to discuss the linear nature of most streamlike services. He also states that

“The transition from a slow Web to a fast-moving Stream is happening quickly. And as this happens we are shifting our attention from the past to the present, and our ‘now’ is getting shorter.”

What’s the value in an RSS feed or following a microblog? I think it may be, at least in part, the fact that it is conveying, not the now, but a constant archive of the now. It’s value is that we can look on what has passed, very easily, in a sequential or somehow ordered context and still communicate with it in our own now. Perhaps what we want from the stream is not to be engaged in the now but to be engaged at our own command, with the recently passed. That’s all very unlike a telephone. In this, I don’t see a fluid now like a stream of conscious, but something more like a conveyor of discrete selections.

I’ve often argued in the past that companies selling stuff like music on CDs should recognize that their distribution medium changed. Rather than selling content on discrete units of physical storage media (compact discs), they needed to recognize that the Internet is the medium for distribution.

The old physical delivery mechanism, CDs, mostly have no value. There’s little reason to buy a physical item that requires a lot of effort and resources to produce and deliver but provides no significant advantage (nor even quality anymore).

I was never a fan of AOL but when Time Warner and AOL announced their merge in 2000, I thought it was a sign that finally a big media company delivering all sorts of content had recognized that their delivery mechanism changed. Big media got a clue. Rather than complaining about people copying and distributing content on their own (thus losing sales of their discrete physical storage medium), Time Warner must have realized that the delivery medium they should be selling is the one that people value, Internet access. That’s how content will be delivered, so if they wanted to collect money from customers, they’d better offer the actual product (actually that product is now a service) that’s in demand. But I don’t think Time Warner ever really did get this concept. They failed to recognize their own combined strengths and offer them in an appealing way to customers.

Time Warner has been divesting its control over access to the Internet medium. It spun off its Time Warner Cable division earlier this year. They’ve been driving AOL further into the ground, as far as I can tell, since they went from providing Internet access to being largely just a consumer profiling and advertising delivery system. Thats’s the big opportunity that they missed taking advantage of. Rather than doing anything truly interesting and innovative with their merged relationship.Had Time Warner/AOL/Time Warner Cable really focused on gaining Internet access subscribers, they could have used their content to offer people all kinds of innovative, quality, unrestricted content, attempting to boost bandwidth usage (sell more of their service medium). But now Time Warner doesn’t want AOL anymore either.

In the meantime, what’s been happening with Time Warner’s core content publishing business? According to the press, it doesn’t sound fantastic. From the AFP:

“Revenue from Time Warner’s Networks unit, which includes CNN, HBO and Turner Broadcasting, rose six percent in the quarter to 2.8 billion dollars.

Filmed Entertainment unit revenue fell seven percent to 2.6 billion dollars on lower DVD sales and only moderate box office success…

Revenue for the publishing unit fell 23 percent to 806 million dollars with advertising revenue down 30 percent and subscription revenue down 16 percent.

Advertising sales at AOL… were down 20 percent while subscription revenue fell 27 percent.”

The company’s publishing, film, and advertising revenue all fell (notice the drop in DVD sales/physical delivery medium). Its television networks unit rose a bit. But essentially that’s another publishing medium that will be reproduced through the Internet. Ad and subscription revenues there, I imagine will be effected.

So Time Warner, making all kinds of content (and continuing to focus on that area of business), still faces challenges for harvesting money from the content it makes. It seems that won’t happen through owning access to the dominant distribution medium–they never put the right effort into making that successful. Perhaps they foresee problems with that model as well–free wireless community access is on the rise (though that’s an oversimplification).

Whatever it is they do with their content, I’m certain that the (movies, music, etc.) will continue to be widely replicated through the labour of individuals on the Internet and will take place quite outside of Time Warner’s control.

The other morning as I walked to work, I was puzzling over the parties’ bizarre responses to letting/not letting Elizabeth May into the televised debates. Here’s my theory: Dion’s liberals have the more likely chance of forming the next government. Dion’s strategy has nonchalently been in play over quite a few months. In spite of how the media and ads are portraying the situation, Dion and the liberals are in fact on the offensive while the conservatives have been on the defensive.

To understand that, think about the justification for, and the process that takes place upon the Governor General disolving the minority government and then what must occur after the election if the party only wins a plurality.

Side note: I am not writing this from the perspective of a Liberal fanboy (in case my little hint at the beginning of this post wasn’t clear). I’m just enjoying some interesting strategies.

Maybe my statement/prediction sounds off base at first glance–I think these are main elements at play in the strategy and I’ll explain what I see in each.

• Dion/May riding agreement
• Main Conservative campaign principle is to attack Dion’s character
• A real record now exists of Conservative deeds
• Green party popularity has been rising
• The leaders’ perspectives on letting Elizabeth May debate
• Voter intentions (polls) have shown, throughout the run of this government, a sort of political stasis

The Dion/May Riding Agreement

Back in early 2007 Dion and May worked out a deal not to run candidates in each others’ ridings. Most news organizations and pundits discussed the issues in terms of how it bolstered public perception of Dion’s green credentials and added to the feeling that he’s a different, more respectable sort of politician, while it gave May a much better chance of beating Conservative Peter MacKay for the Central Nova riding (personally, I dislike the exchange because I think it semi-disenfranchises voters). However, none of that is very important. It was a well-calculated part of the Liberal strategy for a totally different reason, and I’ll say why this was actually important at the end.

Main Conservative Campaign Principle is to Attack Dion’s Character

Recall when Dion won his position in the Liberal party, the Conservatives began their campaigns (quite effectively) to drive a negative public perception of Dion. Notable is the Conservative-inspired impression that Dion is not a strong leader. It was backed by their use of weak-looking images and especially by how they framed his lack of bringing down the government on a series of confidence votes. It worked. The repetition of the weak leader meme stuck. It made its way into all the news media and citizens continued uncritically repeating the characterization until its become a hallmark of any debate about Dion. The importance and repetition the Conservatives put on this reveals their focus on character assassination as opposed to real tangible issues, it all sunk to a new low today with the puffin poop campaign gaff.

A Real Record Now Exists of Conservative Deeds

Does Dion lack leadership because of his temporary unwillingness to force an election on Harper’s orchestrated series of confidence vote landmines? Consider the major basis for the claim–the lack of bringing down the government–it doesn’t really stand up. I’m fairly certain that every party has at some point during the last few governments, voted in a way (or abstained) to avoid bringing down a government in a confidence vote, even though the party opposed the vote in principle. Why? Because it wouldn’t have benefited the given party’s situation to engage the country in an election at that moment. Same thing with the current Liberal situation.

Considering that the Conservative party hadn’t formed a government before, most of the negative arguments opponents could make against it were hypothetical or fear-based (just consider how the meme of “what’s Harper hiding” still floats). Letting the Conservative party get to work with its agenda could only provide the Liberals (and other parties) with real tangible issues and evidence to campaign against. The longer the liberals waited (as official opposition), the more opportunity they’d garner to point out the Conservatives’ lousy policies, mismanagement, or corrupt cover-ups. For example:

1) Lousy policy –> consider the bill C-61, that has spawned enormous public demonstration against its ridiculous rules and the harmful results it would wreak on Canadian freedoms and culture. Danny Williams made dissatisfaction with the Conservative/Atlantic Accord situation quite public. What about Conservative dismantling of support for fostering Canadian culture? Conservative cuts to the court challenges program? Negligent treatment of the environmental mess, which Layton has been calling attention to? Or how about the Tories shameful lack of direction and action on Kyoto.

2) Mismanagement –> no better example than the 200 page Conservative book on how to obstruct parliament (this alone ought to have incensed every Canadian citizen). Parliament is dysfunctional, indeed.

3) Corruption cover-ups –> Between the Cadman affair and the investigation into their campaign spending.

In other words, it could be argued that Dion was letting the Conservatives get their hands dirty enough to offer real issues of shame rather than hypothetical ones for the Liberals to condemn.

Green Party Popularity Has Been Rising

Where might the votes go? Think about the last election, in which Paul Martin’s version of the Liberal party was ousted largely because of its sponsorship scandal. To which of the major parties would disaffected Liberal voters turn? I suppose any right of centre or centre ones would likely go to the Conservatives. Some centre and left of centre ones would probably consider the NDP or Greens. Of course the NDP and Greens have their own base of voters, they also probably galvanize some voters that wouldn’t vote at all. Isn’t it interesting that in all the polls that keep getting published in the major newspapers, Green support seems to be rising this time around?

The Leaders’ Perspectives on Letting Elizabeth May Debate

Now, about the televised debates. The record seems to be that Harper, Layton, and Duceppe didn’t want May in the debates but Dion did. How does this fit a superficial conventional view? Wouldn’t you think it’d be Harper that wanted May in the debates but not Dion? After all, shouldn’t the Conservatives feel that the Greens are competition for the same voters that would otherwise likely consider the Liberals (or NDP)? Shouldn’t Dion be worried about that, especially when polls show the Liberals currently chasing the Conservatives? One might think Harper worries about the environmental pounding he’ll get from all the other candidates… which he more or less admits, claiming that it’s unfair to have two parties debating on the same platform (I paraphrase his stance on the Liberals and Greens). But that doesn’t explain Dion and Layton’s positions.

Layton brought scorn on himself with his position against having May in the debates. It felt uncharacteristic and contrary to the spirit NDP supporters usually express [Update 10 Aug. Layton and Harper changed their stances, so May will debate]. And Dion’s positive support of May debating–if he was really worried about the Greens getting voters that might otherwise vote Liberal, you’d expect him to have a different position. No. Dion seems to want to help, in an indirect way, the Green party gain popularity. I think his strategy almost requires that the Greens get a few seats and if they get them at the expense of the NDP or if the Greens got prior Liberal voters that Liberals cannot woo back, so much the better.

It fits well with the Dion/May riding deal that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Dion helps May win her riding in exchange for what? What could the Liberals get from key Green wins? A coalition.

Voter Intentions (Polls) Have Shown, throughout the Run of this Government, a Sort of Political Stasis

Polls have indicated over the period of this Conservative minority government that an election will result in little difference in the distribution of MPs. The Conservatives remain in minority territory. Harper was essentially forced to call an election, cutting his losses before his opportunities (with the economy and scandals) worsened. He did this very publicly under the flimsy auspice of a dysfunctional parliament.

But if the election results in roughly the same distribution of MPs, we can’t simply go back to the exact same minority conservative government. Liberal strategy shines here. None of the parties agreed that parliament could function in that minority situation. Clearly we cannot re-elect a dysfunctional government. So we have to turn to the alternative.

A re-elected Conservative minority means Governor General Michaëlle Jean, will have to ask the leader of the opposition to form the new government or else have a fresh election (which I don’t think would be very effective). The opposition party Liberals are in this position and could form an effective coalition with the Green party (no other coalition combination makes as much sense). In other words electing Green party MPs, especially in Conservative- or NDP-contested ridings will help a Liberal/Green coalition to govern. (The other parties must have recognized that in their original stances against letting May into the debates.)

Dion’s riding swapping strategy and push to have May in the debates = shrewd. His delay in bringing down the Conservatives = useful for the campaign. The Conservatives’ only choice, if they wish to form the next government, is to get a majority, existing polls show that’s not yet likely. Besides, remember how Dion won the Liberal leadership in the first place? Similar approach. He worked out arrangements with people that were unlikely to win and obtained their base of support. The Conservatives have been on the defensive for quite some time acting like they’re on the offensive but I suspect “underdog” Dion layed his strategy and has the upper hand.

—

(16 Sep. 08 — Ok, it dawned on me that I short-cutted a bit of reasoning here. The parliamentary web site that I referenced above for why the Governor General would have to ask the opposition leader to form the new gov’t, actually includes some stuff in between. Still, I assume that if the votes tally up a Conservative minority, the opposition will immediately vote down a confidence motion and thus secure itself the governing mandate.)

“First, it does not make business sense for an analyst at a major firm to change research that displeases a vendor, even one that is a client. If an analyst developed a reputation for being that malleable they would soon have no clients as what they sell in part is objectivity and independence.”

I completely agree with this statement. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to show vendors that they’re not helping their cause when they try to undermine the objectivity of the analyst’s perspective. Occasionally a software vendor does try to unseat this balance–I’ve felt the implicit if not sometimes explicit threat of cancelled business. TEC based its model on trying to be an “impartial advocate for the end user” which is why our company has an audience that software vendors want to be in front of. That objectivity and independence is the wellspring of the audience the vendor seeks.

I tend to agree with most of the SageCircle points except I’m uneasy with the following.

“…analysts are not responsible for contract value so they don’t care if a vendor client cancels. Yes, the sales rep whose year just went down the drain will care, but the analyst just shrugs.”

But really, A cavalier attitude toward the work produced is unlikely to do anyone much good. Although the analyst may not be the one directly making the sale (in my company’s case we try to maintain a sort of church/state separation), all employees of a company do need to pull together in their work–after all the analyst’s job is every bit as much on the line as the salesperson’s. Does this imply that no analyst can be entirely objective? Well entire objectivity is a full topic in itself and covers a lot more ground than just where the money comes from.

So where am I going with that comment? Look, how could an analyst do his or her job well if s/he wasn’t attentive to a vendor’s concerns (even if they do involve threats or bullying)? There may be some underlying issue that has not been well understood or another sort of misunderstanding. The analyst, conscientious toward his or her labours, ought to critically consider these possibilities rather than shrug. I’d argue that the analyst ought to have the intellectual capacity to separate the threat from the issues so that s/he can rise above a vendors’ unsatisfactory communication skills (which, in the end, is all that a threat boils down to) in order to deal with the issue at hand.

As for the rest of the SageCircle post, it continues with a series of nicely-made other points on the topic of cancelled-business threats–I tend to agree with those and won’t comment further here. Software vendors, it’s worth a read!

“The fundamental balancing act lies in the interaction between analyst and vendor. The vendors are keen for the analysts to know and understand their products. The analysts treat briefings as occasions for relationship building and selling.”

Although the point of the post I’ve quoted differs from what I’m about to mention, I really liked that bit in relation to the title on analyst abuse. One form of analyst abuse that could be included in a taxonomy on the subject: bullying.

A few months ago, my job function changed with some corporate restructuring. I found myself taking on the management of several additional teams, including directing TEC‘s research analyst group. It’s been an interesting and busy few months where (cue an excuse for my woeful lack of posting here) I’ve identified and set the groundwork for the year and focused attention on areas that needed it.

Yes, it’s an exciting time full of creative possibilities but when you take on a new job, role, or responsibility you quickly learn it comes ready to share its treasure trove of frustrations too. For example, analyst/vendor communications sometimes feel like an uplifting meeting of intelligent people, ready to help each other learn and spread useful information. Other times, communications go awry and it seems that one person after another dumps their grey matter onto a buzzing heap of rotting political motivation.

I think that Robin says a key thing in calling attention to the analyst and vendor interaction. Something important transpires (or ought to) between analyst and vendor, which involves building a relationship. That relationship (fundamentally if it’s good) requires understanding of the vendor’s product, direction, motivations, etc. Personally, if I don’t have a good relationship with someone, I find it more challenging to understand the person. Why? Pragmatically speaking, a poor relationship likely signifies that the people involved are not communicating well. Not communicating well certainly doesn’t improve understanding.

So, back to my frustations… there I was, sitting with one of my analysts on a briefing. The briefing resulted from a third party that provides some sort marketing/publicity/AR type of function for the software vendor. Ok, that’s fine, a nice briefing facilitated through this person’s efforts. However, the underside of this is that the third party only facilitated the briefing after falsely accusing the TEC analyst of having erred by excluding the vendor from an article we published. We agreed to the briefing under the assumption that it was a good opportunity to find out more and get to know this vendor better–after all, what harm could learning more do? Sadly, it seems the third party presented it to the vendor in a rather different light, one in which the vendor was inaccurately lead to believe we’d slighted them and owed them a fix.

The briefing was fine. Later however, the third party began a strangely vehement and tentacled campaign to charge us with further, (false) wrongdoings. The third party bestowed its unfounded opinions to a host of people including the vendor’s president–curiously shaping attitudes around a neglectful mythology. Coinciding with this, were the third party’s demands that we publish new research about this particular vendor or include mention of it in unmerited ways.

To me, this is a case of bullying. Here, the third party muddied rather than fostered good interactions between a vendor and an analyst. I suspect this particular third party has an odd sort of motivation to appear as an important source for garnering publicity (thereby securing its position with the vendor). Of course this is just an example, not necessarily the norm.

I don’t know whether bullying works on many analysts but it doesn’t impress me. At best, it cannot influence an analysis of the vendor, at worst, provided I have to continue dealing with the marketing/publicity/AR third party, it doesn’t compell me to reach out more than required to do my job properly and certainly raises some questions about that vendor’s interactions with its customers, partners, etc. I mean, is that part of its corporate culture?

It’s striking that a person hired to facilitate understanding with analysts, instead permeated vendor/analyst communications with misunderstanding. Bullying is analyst abuse, it fouls the relationship.

In explaining why we need a strategy the report says

“Digital content will be more and more in the form of conversations between people, using many different media types.”

This requires a more solid understanding of what constitutes conversation. The different media are one issue but within the use of those media the constructs of a conversation vary hugely. From blog posts to instant messages, even the selection of hyperlinks you choose to place in your web page.

The report offers a grid (p. 10) categorizing content by its source, motivation, audience, and characteristics. I believe there is a miscategorization here in that one source is the public domain and civil society whereas other sources are the business world or academic community. The report notes there may be some overlap but I think this categorization could be reconsidered and improved. The overlap seems too great to make the existing categories meaningful. In particular, I don’t see why the public domain is held separate from the rest, since it is not the same sort of a category at all. Every other category can include the public domain.

A key assumption in the proposed strategy is that

“Information access and use supports Canada’s societal goals-In society, equitable information access fosters equal opportunity for learning, creative and commercial enterprise.”

I think this is a wonderful base assumption, not simply for recognizing the need to have equitable access but also because I think it requires recognition of the integral role that this access plays for learning, creative, and commercial enterprise. And because information access leads to what enables people to access it-so if you read the report you’ll see various (welcome) mentions of open standards and sources.

An outcome the strategy seeks is that Canada’s information assets and knowledge are preserved in digital form. There is the point that we and future generations ought to have ongoing access to our digital knowledge and information assets, especially with regard to the intellectual, scientific, and creative accomplishments. I’m glad this point is in the forefront because it is a big problem. I touched on this in a post previously, commenting on our political motivation in terms of our heritage.

Unfortunately, I feel that the strategy doesn’t outline a sufficient method for ensuring the storage techniques to make this digital preservation clearly the right choice. Not that I’m saying it isn’t, but we have many flaws to deal with in terms of digital preservation and I think those must be worked out much more completely. The plan does cover some ground in this regard.

For example, in the objectives for ensuring preservation, it states

“We are confronted with the need to choose what will be preserved and what will not.”

It calls for a reasoned framework to do so. The strategy notes that we’re incapable (presently) of storing all the information we create. But haven’t we always had this problem? We’ve never been able to store everything (digital or not) and what we do keep in museums and archives, is not necessarily placed there because of a reasoned framework. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have such a framework however, but I’m questioning what it should be used to accomplish.

For all the digital information we create, how do we determine what will be significant to the future? Nobody’s ever thought it was an important idea to record every phone conversation for eternity. However, now that we’re looking at conversations in digital mediums, weblogs for example, and we feel like they’ve got to be preserved. Is the impetus for this the digital medium? I think the more difficult part of the preservation task is determining the “what” rather than the “how”and I suppose that’s the purpose of the framework. Any framework though is going to be developed within our present context so I wonder how it will be able to account for the rapid changes that take place in digital mediums? When hyperlinks constitute conversations do they cease to be preservation worthy in the same way as day-to-day phone conversations? Interesting problem.

To continue on the “how” side of the digital preservation thread, the strategy addresses trusted digital networks (TDRs), which cover the “policy, process, standards, and technology framework for digital preservation.”So TDRs address the “how” for making digital information accessible to future generations. I think two things are lacking here. One is the specifications for what constitutes a TDR but maybe that is better off in another document. The second is a thorough discussion of what we need to do to train future generations so that they’re able to understand and access these TDRs. We cannot just assume that the work we put into creating them will easily carry on to the next generation. I would expect that a digital TDR is a complex system, relying on current technologies that may be so obsolete that they’re not even comprehensible to future generations. That’s an ongoing concern that I posted a bit about in mass replicability.

Furthermore-the TDR idea, while not completely articulated yet (and as the strategy mentions, a proper TDR does not exist in Canada yet) does promote

“…common attributes and open standards; provision of guidance and training; and development and sharing of open source tools.”

Great that it is being couched in open standards and open source.

One potential risk of TDRs is that they might concievably be used as official checkplaces for “intellectual property” rights. I think this stands a great chance of being detrimental to the assumptions of the document for equitable access and the nurturing of digital assets. I may have a pessimistic view, but current IP trends, as controlled by short-term commercial enterprise, suggest that my pessimistic view for such a rights repository would be a likely consideration for misuse or abuse.

On developing an effective TDR, the strategy promotes the idea that “Effective R&D will enable the technical foresight and constant vigilance required to manage and preserve digital information” which is nice thinking but I still think this calls for a more deliberate outline.

Switching gears, an idea the strategy introduces, which really fascinated me was

“creating new competencies and positions such as ‘digital curators‘ who would have stewardship responsibility for digital information.”

The strategy recommends raising

“the profile of digital preservation needs and challenges within creator communities…”

This is important because the changes digital media have provoked are barely audible in public discourse. As a whole, we should make these issues commonly understood by the greater population so that they can be acted on with political will. Information is within our environment and ought to be considered intimitely.

The Library and Archives Canada draft strategy covers a lot of ground and raises important points for further discussion. I loved seeing that it was introduced to the public for commentary too (I suppose I wouldn’t be writing this post otherwise).

Our BI analyst refined the research so that we now model, on the one hand, business intelligence systems, and on the other hand business performance management systems. It seems like those two areas were not previously well-distinguished, in part because the applications share a lot of common functionality. Hopefully these new BI & BPM evaluation centers will help users better understand how to select and employ these applications. We have evaluation data for a number of well-known vendors such as Oracle | Hyperion and Applix, but I’d like to include some open source apps, like Pentaho, in our knowledge bases.

In addition, our CRM analysts not only improved our model of CRM applications but also branched out a new model of sales force automation (SFA) systems. We already let users analyze their requirements for SugarCRM. Perhaps as demand for open source CRM products increases, other FOSS vendors will want a chance to be introduced in a fair way alongside their proprietary competitors.

My colleagues and I research different sorts of enterprise software. We’re constantly revising analysis models that we use in obtaining and reviewing data about software functionality. Typically we ask vendors to respond to an RFI as though it were a real customer’s. Once we have that information we review it for completion and accuracy. The important part of the review takes place when the analyst provides a scenario, from the RFI response, for the vendor to demonstrate.

As an actual customer, asking for a demonstration per your script is your chance to see if your impression of what the vendor says it provides, will hold true to its claims and if the reality of those claims will be of a satisfactory quality for the needs you’ve outlined. This is not to imply something nefarious might otherwise occur, one never knows how the wording of a certain criterion might be interpreted or misunderstood.

If you request a demonstration from several vendors and do not provide a script to follow, there’s no guarantee that the vendors will show you parallel functionality to compare. They may show you what they think are the most impressive features. But those might not cover the requirements that are most important to you in terms of getting the job done or better, improving how its done. Several of my colleagues wrote a much more detailed article on this subject a few years ago, How Some ERP Vendors Demonstrated – Warts and All.

Back to OpenPro. Looking at the company’s web site today, it doesn’t appear very different from how I remember. In just about every possible instance, the company writes about its relationship with open source but if we examine it in more depth, where is the project page? How do you get access to the code? What is its license? I apologize in advance if I’ve missed this information. It’s just that I’ve come to expect these things from companies offering open source solutions. Often, it’s easy to try open source apps before getting involved in a more sophisticated purchase, so perhaps an argument could be made that, in general, there is less necessity to get a scripted vendor demo. It’s certainly not so in this case.

Although it promotes the impression that it’s an open source product, when I talked to the company some time ago, I came to understand that the ERP system itself wasn’t open source, but rather it ran on top of open source software and was programmed using open source languages. Maybe this status is different now, admittedly it’s been a while since I’ve had contact with anyone at the company. The point is, I don’t think the first impression given by the company is necessarily the reality and indeed, this became a pattern when pressed for demonstrations.

I’d received one demonstration from the vendor on a scripted scenario for some of its ERP functionality. It wasn’t spot on but I’d rather give the benefit of the doubt and assume that perhaps questions in the script weren’t as understandable as possible, which requires some more clarification work. Upon requesting further review and suggesting ways to clarify responses the vendor was, at best, not forthcoming with its revisions.

Had I or my colleagues been an actual customer, we would have had the impression that OpenPro does far more than any existing major ERP, SCM, and CRM vendor combined. Consider that even well-known open source ERP solutions like Compiere, OFbiz, opentaps, and Openbravo don’t offer that extensive a range of functionality.

We wanted our demonstration of a scripted scenario based on our RFIs. If the company simply misunderstood a thousand criteria or so, well, that would be a good opportunity to clarify and find out what the product really could do. Unfortunately that never came to pass.

To sum it up, notice how you get one impression from the marketing of a web site (that OpenPro appears like an open source ERP system), which upon seeking details, no longer seems accurate (it relies on open source systems and languages)? Did the company’s marketing personnel not fully understand what they were projecting (an honest mistake) or is something else going on? Does that even matter if you’re the customer?

You ought to get what you think you’re getting. When it comes to the system’s capabilities finding out whether the vendor understood your RFI and can actually provide what it said it can, makes a difference in how you evaluate your options.

“Novell tried to put a brave face on things, even claiming that its chief executive, Ron Hovsepian, had initiated the talks with Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft’s lawyers have been quietly pressuring open-source companies like Novell for more than a year and warning their customers that they could be vulnerable to patent infringement claims because they’re using Linux.”

I like that quote because it feeds the suspicion I raised in my previous post on the topic, in which I said that I felt their constant affirming not to sue each other over patents, yet to pay weird licensing fees was some sort of red herring for something not being said publicly.

The Forbes article also notes

“But Novell also is admitting it cannot compete on its own against Red Hat. After two years of struggling, Novell holds only 20% market share of commercial Linux shipments; Red Hat commands virtually all of the rest.”

So this is curious motivation. Consider the 451 Group’s idea that Red Hat is becoming “The Poland of Software Vendors.” Is Red Hat sitting between Microsoft and Oracle initiatives, which may drive it into the ground (not that I’d characterize Poland that way–all analogies are only designed to go so far)? If Forbes’s stats indicate some of the motivation behind Novell’s deal with Microsoft, it will be interesting to see how many inroads it really will get from the Microsoft side.

The 451 article quotes Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical saying their strategy is unchanged. Canonical seems to have local partners spread-out in different geographies, which makes their service model feel like it may drive down a subtly different road than Red Hat’s or Novell’s. There is also the the issue of the other companies competing in the enterprise service/support game. Mandriva is an example. Mandriva has a bevy of service offerings for enterprise customers, including migration, business performance analysis, and certain enterprise app consulting services with its partners (Compiere would be the example here). I’m not sure what this all should entail in terms of Novell and Red Hat and their gargantuan neighbours, except maybe it’s too soon to see anyone off via a nebulous nepenthe.

Back to Sun. CRN is reporting that Sun is likely to choose the GPL to open source Java. Although I wouldn’t think this is necessarily related to the Novell/Microsoft news, there is a lateral connection. If, as some people have theorized, the Microsoft/Novell deal will help increase .NET adoption via embracing Mono improvements and popularization, then Sun has more to worry about in terms of its Java agenda. Many have argued for a long time that Java’s lack of real FOSS status has prevented it from exploding in greater popularity. I suspect that may be at least partially true, so let’s see what comes to bear as it gets GPLed.

I refer to an idea I put forward some time ago for what needs to happen with the Linux desktop to catapult it to widespread adoption. I was asserting that there needs to be a Linux vendor changing the entire OS market game by offering: A full computing solution should come from a company that pre-bundles everything its customers want, consistently supporting it, for the duration of ownership. It should not require anxious intervention from the owner when the owner desires a new component or new system, and the new system should have all data and applications from the old system installed, setup, and accessible upon delivery. I would expect this to apply just as well to business software systems as individual user systems. I further believe that such a solution is only possible to fulfill, in all its complete glory, within a FOSS ecosystem (read that idea link at the beginning of this paragraph for details on why). This latter point can play to Red Hat’s favour. How does this relate to Oracle’s Linux move? Well, let me clear the threats that have been proposed already, which I mentioned were passing around the blogosphere/news article space.

First, if Oracle intends to eventually fork Red Hat’s distribution, so what? It’s been done more than once before. Mandriva is such an example. The GPL licensing mechanism has proven over and over that FOSS forks do not necessitate a negative outcome. Often they lead to a spread of improvements in the ecosystem as a whole and all the companies that continue to participate in that spread tend to benefit. I mean, Red Hat is still around, and strong. Forking in the open source world ought to have earned a default view as growth rather than as problematic division. The freedom of the licensing schemes makes a FOSS fork wholly different than one in which the prongs are proprietary.

Second, I don’t see why this should be viewed as Oracle just trying to hijack just Red Hat’s support business. Maybe I’m missing something but that’s only one aspect of what is at play. The fact is that Oracle offers products that run on Linux. Red Hat offers products that run on Linux. Some of these compete (application servers, database servers, etc.). Furthermore, competitor Microsoft offers enterprise solutions and the OS. These companies are getting their tentacles around more comprehensive offerings for their customers. At least that’s what the advertising is always promising. So what is going to be the easiest, most painfree choice for a customer? Getting pieces of a solution from a combination of vendors? Or getting something from start to finish that eliminates

• further evaluation time and effort
• additional sales points-of-contact
• extraneous support sources when trying to solve problems
• integration woes

It seems to me that all of these eliminations would result in a much more attractive choice for the customer. It would save a lot of time and cut down on the efforts required to get well-designed and supported enterprise systems. Consider how Oracle has positioned this move, reiterating its “unbreakable” theme and stating that

“Oracle validated configurations provide easier, faster, and lower-cost deployment of Linux solutions in the enterprise with pre-tested, validated architectures–including software, hardware, storage, and network components–along with documented best practices.”

If this support move is Oracle’s warning shot, then I think it’s a shot of the lean and comprehensive solution nature. Their phrase, which I quoted above, is spot-on with the model I outlined for a real year of the Linux desktop, it’s just focused on the enterprise software space instead.

Considering Oracle, Microsoft, and Red Hat, who can actually do this? The all-proprietary vendor, Microsoft? The mixed proprietary/open source vendor, Oracle? Or the all open source vendor, Red Hat? Based on those three options, only Red Hat is actually in the position to fulfill this comprehensive model because it’s the only one that operates entirely in the FOSS ecosystem and for that, again I refer to the comprehensive and lean model, which I outlined previously.

I’ll leave this post with a question. Where is Canonical in this? Every blog and article talking about Oracle/Red Hat seems to ask or fantasize about Canonical and Oracle teaming up. Thus far Canonical is publicly touting only support services. Will it catch up on the OS market game change to offer the sort of solution Red Hat currently has the potential to? That Oracle seems to want to do? That Microsoft tries to do but limits itself under pounds of proprietary rope?

In some ways this may help the customers and AMR lists the reasons but there are also many problems this presents for customers. According to the AMR article, the strategy is likely concerned with packaging large customer bases (for future sale) rather than rounding out product functionality.

…this type of consolidation comes at a price that, unfortunately, customers must pay. By acquiring many competing products, aggregators tend to reduce competition within a market and cast the pall of acquisition over the remaining players. Because it is very expensive for customers to switch their enterprise applications, most companies have little choice but to stay put, pay maintenance, and hope for the best. While they may have had great leverage with the small vendor that originally sold them their software, they have little with their aggregator today.

So if the majority of a company’s IT budget is going to old projects I suppose this could be quite a concern. Unfortunately, and this may have been beyond the scope of the article, AMR did not really comment on how this affects innovation in the products.

“The traditional model of contacting a vendor, arranging a demo/sales pitch, wading through marketing fodder, etc. has been replaced with a model that shifts the balance of power from the vendor to the end user/customer.”

A point on this balance of power that I’m not sure surfaced in the article, is that sometimes a potential customer to an open source software firm has already downloaded, installed, and sampled the software before contacting the vendor for support or other services or products. (This is likely to be true, less frequently, when addressing totally proprietary software.) It means that the customer, on contacting a FOSS vendor, is doing so from a potentially more informed stance about what it requires from the vendor. This could also make it easier for the vendor to understand what is most valuable to provide the client. In other words, I’m not completely sure that this change in model necessarily shifts the balance of power. Perhaps instead, it shifts the needs assessment and provision processed in a way that might benefit both sides.

Fletcher makes a point that this “…paradigm requires a more prepared and motivated end user/customer…” which I appreciate though I also think, in some ways, it also aids that end. Another couple points that I thought were well-put and would like to address are Fletcher’s statements:

“It is a high priority to understand the exact support terms for a given piece of software, in line with any anticipated needs as revealed during the evaluation phase.” and “If the evaluation layer is done haphazardly the according adoption and integration layers will lack the proper support to be of any value.”

I believe this leads right into one of the greater points on evaluating an open source solution, which is how to ensure ongoing, stable, professional support. It seems to be a fear raised repeatedly by potential adopters of open source software. Yet that is the basis for many, if not the majority, of the vendors building their businesses around open source software. The support options are available so the customer must make sure it identifies the proper ones, which may not be that simple. I think, like other software evaluation practices, it is important to systematically identify business requirements from the different stakeholders within the company. Once those are well-understood the customer should thoroughly evaluate how potential vendors compare on all of the requirements.

A resource for evaluating open source IT and Linux service providers is the FOSS Evaluation Center. It offers about a thousand criteria addressing different support requirements a customer might have of a vendor, and it lets people compare vendors on each point. I designed those criteria, so it’s a bit of a plug, but it can be accessed for free, and I hope it’s useful. Another resource that might be useful toward the evaluation end (though I don’t have any experience with it) is a site called Find Open Source Support.

Certainly, Microsoft and SAP have put effort and money into spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), and both have publicly made, sometimes very strange statements about or against FOSS. Yet recently, both are putting some effort into releasing bits in an open source method or else funding some open source development. Rosenberg and Asay seem to think there is an ulterior motive,

“Any outreach attempts from vendors who have worked for years to destroy open source should be taken with a grain of salt and a sharp eye cast on motivating factors.”

Or could this mean, as Schneider suggests, that these companies are beginning to join the community’s stance that open source “…is simply a better way to create and distribute software.”? Rosenberg and Asay seem to take that into account by acknowledging the project leaders for the open source initiatives within these companies probably are working in earnest–I can’t help but lean toward a bigger picture that, as a whole, there is something else, more involved, taking place.

It makes perfect sense, if you’re a proprietary vendor, to delve deeply into your FOSS competitors, and for several reasons. I believe there are serious reasons to be wary of such proprietary vendors’ forays into FOSS and at the same time to embrace that. Here is why.

First, any vendor has to know what it’s competing against. This is just standard good business practice, there are even industries devoted to supporting this idea–competitive intelligence. What better way to understand the new models undoing your traditional strategy than to emulate them and find out how they work. The more you understand, the better can you build your products to compete and win. If the FOSS community innovates new technology, Microsoft wins by learning it and improving upon it for their own products, just like any good open source vendor would want to do (of course an open source vendor would participate by feeding the community with those improvements as well).

Second, what about that often referred to Machiavellian notion of keeping your friends close and enemies closer? If Microsoft can successfully attract an open source development community into its fold (so-to-speak) it gains a very powerful tool, a foothold into the “enemy’s” camp, which allows it to anticipate and prepare its proprietary strategies.

Third, does it hurt the proprietary vendor in any way? They’ve got all their proprietary business and propaganda in full swing, everyone already knows about that. On the other hand FOSS and Linux are gaining recognition. I’ll make an educated guess that FOSS and Linux are still not as well understood, in concept, by the majority of business decision-makers, much less the public in general. I think they still lack the massive public feeling of acceptance that most software vendors currently enjoy with their traditional proprietary business models. However, as that understanding and recognition grows in positive ways, it can only help companies like Microsoft and SAP to be able to show they’re just as much involved in the leading edge of technology practices. It’s simply good PR. If Microsoft and SAP can manage this while maintaining their proprietary side, so much the better for them (from their perspective).

Fourth, let’s suppose there truly is an ulterior motive to subvert FOSS communities. In the shoes of a company like Microsoft, it makes sense to blur the lines of differentiation between your proprietary approach and real FOSS approaches (hence the shared-source initiative). The harder it is for critics, detractors, or enemies to clearly differentiate your approach from their own, the harder it will be for them spotlight your weaknesses and their strengths, thus the customer cannot act on clear information for his or her software selection decisions. Furthermore, if you actually do participate in some ways with the FOSS community, you may gain some supporters that will defend, in good conscience, your motives, and possibly even turn a blind eye toward some of your other, less savoury practices (this not only blurs more boundaries but it again helps with grassroots PR, which is oh-so important on the Internet).

Finally, I’d like to say that already there is no clear side-versus-side here, we have to pay attention to the grey to really comprehend the situation. While I think we can see companies like Microsoft and SAP employing some intruiging strategies for subversion, and there are battles between models and methodologies, to a degree there is also some learning and the adoption of new and better practices. Because of the co-opetitive nature of FOSS models, the gradual adoption by the likes of proprietary vendors may even, unexpectedly, end up subverting those vendors’ models. We’re not too jaded to be constantly wary and suspect these companies of efforts to undermine FOSS, but we should, at the same time, cheer them on when they actually do participate in real FOSS processes.

The consulting firm was asking me about the data accuracy (in our KB) regarding the functionality of some of the vendors they’d shortlisted. TEC researches and provides immense amounts of information on software products so it is an incredibly tricky task for us to ensure that the data is accurate and timely. Considering the number of clients using our evaluation services for their projects, as well as the consultants using the same services for their clients, it amazes me when a software vendor either isn’t amenable to providing updated information about their products, or in a few cases, is less than truthful about their products’ capabilities. That’s what I want to talk about in this post because I had to answer this consultant honestly, without bias, and what I explained to him about the way one abnormally naughty vendor treated the RFI response process, seemed to slightly sour him toward its product.

First, usually vendors respond in earnest to our RFI inquiries, it’s in their best interest. I wonder though, if a few vendors respond dishonestly while knowing TEC exposes its analysis data to thousands of customers (who may very well become sales for the vendor), how well are these vendors responding to the inquiries they receive from individual clients that don’t have many resources for vetting information? I mean to say, if you’re working on a project to select some kind of enterprise software system, design your own custom RFI, and send it out to a bunch of vendors, how are you going to be sure that the responses are truly accurate? Even consultants won’t have expertise on every product out there.

It seems to me that until you get to a stage where you’ve already selected a few vendors to give scripted demonstrations, there isn’t much of a way to verify the accuracy of the responses; and how much time will have elapsed just to get to that point? I’m not suggesting that vendors are likely to act in bad faith, criteria are also commonly misunderstood. Even with a focussed team of subject matter experts, editors, and translators, we get inquiries from very knowledgeable and intelligent people that don’t understand criteria we use for our data collection.

Here’s a way that fails. I once worked for a company that had a slick on-line decision support/analysis tool called Compariscope. Our analyst team would actually get copies of the software from the vendors and set up test environments. This ensured accuracy in the data but it also meant the scope of the analyses was extremely limited and because of the significant time required, we were always playing catch-up to the latest software releases. Perhaps, it could have worked if we’d had hundreds of analysts, vast supplies of equipment, and the vendors were all willing to give us copies of their software (often they responded to requests for software as though we’d handed them a cleaver and asked them to cut off their left leg for lunch). That business model quickly evaporated. So installing and testing every type of enterprise software application is not a feasible methodology for an anlyst firm, much less the end user company.

When I started working with TEC, we only covered discrete and process ERP systems, and at that point, we only provided data for about ten vendors. Our ERP analyst, PJ, could check out the information and have a decent idea if the vendor understood the RFI and made an earnest response. But a single person cannot verify every one of over 3,000 criteria and as we grew and started providing information on more software vendors and on more subject areas (SCM, CRM, etc.) it became quite difficult to make sure all of the data were accurate. Even with additional analysts, nobody in the world really knows what every product is capable of.

I’m curious to know if, anyone that might read this (consultants, people that have worked on their own selection projects, etc) has come up with some good methodologies to verify data after gathering your own RFI processes before spending serious time in product demonstrations. Please respond with your thoughts. Here is what we came up with.

TEC demands RFI responses from an official of the vendor that is responsible for replying to client RFIs. Then we take a few steps to vet the vendor’s data…

1) Once we retrieve a completed RFI, we have a team of people give it a quick review, checking for obvious errors and such, if it passes that test, it moves on, if not, it goes back to the vendor for revision.

2) Our analysts start reviewing the information based on their own knowledge and experience of course, but also things like the RFI being internally consistent with itself (if you’re careful there are some ways to structure an RFI like this). Benchmarks, using TEC decision analysis tools. Analysts also have to constantly be aware of what’s going on in the field so that they can see consistency with known customer results, peer findings, news, conference announcements, and vendor sources such as collateral, other products, services, and initiatives.

3) I came up with a veridical comparison method that aggregates all our existing vendor responses to the criteria in a knowledge area (ERP for example) and defines what the likely level of support would be for each criterion. This lets analysts flag criteria where a particulare vendor deviates far from an expected range and understand what the next most likely levels of support are. For example:

If we know that only two in thirty ERP vendors (at any tier) natively support a standard interface to CAD systems for direct data access, and we see a start-up vendor telling us this criterion is fully supported, our analysts know they’ve got to see the vendor demonstrate that. The reverse is true as well. Sometimes a vendor says it doesn’t support criteria “out-of-the-box” but when we talk to the vendor, or it demonstrates how its system works, we realize the vendor simply misunderstood the criterion. That’s a great opportunity for us to learn how to clarify the criterion’s wording.

4) As I hinted above–the demonstration. All of these checks can go only so far. When an analyst actually sees the vendor demonstrate its capabilities, he or she can definitely verify the accuracy of an RFI.

Finally, even with the checking, benchmarking, and reviewing, sometimes, within the thousands of criteria, an error falls through the cracks. Sometimes, admittedly, even we are not quite fast enough. On occasion a consultant or VAR, intimately familiar with a product, alerts us to an error. Other times a customer is already using some product and tells us about an error in its ratings on our system.

Perhaps it would have been best if we’d discovered these errors first. But, in my opinion, this is one of the great strengths of having information like this being accessed by so many people with different perspectives via the Internet. As FOSS communities and other collaborative projects like Wikipedia has demonstrated–a little effort from many people can go a long way to improve a common goal. In our case, making sure we maintain accurate information on enterprise software products. I’ll admit this cross-checking process is probably not very transparent to the public. Perhaps a more transparent and collaborative cross-checking process would be a method to further improve data accuracy.

Use of this template does not mean that you do not need to perform a thorough analysis of your organization’s learning management requirements. Each organization will have a unique set of requirements and you should ensure that any additional requirements identified are added to the template.

That’s exactly it too. Templates like those can be helpful to research functional requirements/support requirements, and ultimately toward soliciting proposals, but any spreadsheet-esque comparison grid will only do so much when it comes to analysis.

In any case, I wanted to respond by pointing out another inexpensive tool a potential LMS purchaser could use, which is TEC’s online LMS evaluation tool. It has the same hierarchy of criteria as the spreadsheet, except it lets you prioritize those criteria based on your organization’s learning requirements (and can include additional custom criteria). Then it analyzes your priorities to figure out which vendors match your requirements (of course it uses rated vendor responses to all those criteria to do this). I think this supports, at least in part, Niall’s recommendation for a thorough analysis.