OpenFile set up a system in which individuals in the local area (it currently appears to be just Toronto) pitch topics. Then the OpenFile editors review the pitches and submit strong ones to a public peer review process. The pitches that pass that public peer review (I presume these would be the topics that interest the most people) get assigned to a professional reporter by the OpenFile team. The reporter researches and writes the news story, which eventually gets published on the site. The public then has the opportunity to add to the story with photos, commentary, etc. (they detail the process here). Quite a good way to make use of the professional skills of a journalist while harnessing the best elements of community participation.

I’m going to return to OpenFile in a moment, but first I’d like to point out a few other new news site experiments that I’ve been reading. I’m not suggesting that these are better or worse, but the new ways they explore using the Internet for journalism above and beyond what traditional newspapers have accomplished is significant. I think it will be clear how OpenFile continues to push these new models.

Indymedia is probably one of the older experiments in citizen journalism and has proven itself capable of delivering a lot of new content from around the world. Indymedia has various local “outlets” around the world and allows people to publish news stories from what’s going on in their region. Indymedia managed to develop a network of independent reporting, which is open to anyone. The organization was formed initially for the purpose of protesting WTO talks and to this day has specific topics that it asks for when submitting new stories. Indymedia, thus doesn’t seem to aim to be an all-purpose news organization.

AgoraVox has been growing its citizen media experiment for some time. AgoraVox feels like something between a newspaper and magazine. It publishes in French, English, and Italian. The AgoraVox system relies entirely on its citizen contributors which may or may not be professional journalists (a couple articles I wrote on my conmem.ca blog were published there). By accepting RSS feeds from volunteer authors, it then has its editorial staff review and select, through a layered voting process, the articles it wishes to publish. Eventually writers can join the editorial processes too–building its own community. AgoraVox produces interesting results from around the world with relatively consistent quality (I suspect due to its visible review process). It manages to inform while also providing opinion and public fora to discuss the content. It works very much like OpenFile except that it does not assign reporters to stories, instead it publishes the stories that have already been written by contributors.

The Mark launched fairly recently. It’s slightly different in that its focus is to publish analyses by individuals recruited for the purpose. So The Mark seeks out people that it believes are both credible and linked to Canada, to publish articles, presumably about current issues but not exactly in the form of a breaking news article. To date, The Mark’s process has produced some very insightful pieces.

NewsTilt, another newcomer, gives the impression that it hopes to develop into a large news emporium. It stresses the journalist as a brand. Stressing the journalist’s brand means NewsTilt wants its journalists (and it seems to call for professionals) to report however they think they can best acquire a good audience. The site’s goal is to aggregate a wide variety of content to attract high traffic, which it can monetize in ads, syndication, etc. This is interesting in that the site clearly doesn’t care whether the journalism presents balanced view points (though journalists can do that if that’s their style). I think the assumption is that if it has enough content it will be up to the readers to decide to read the counter-perspectives. NewsTilt also wants its journalists to maintain the articles they write through responding to commentary from readers, similar to OpenFile. Unlike OpenFile, NewsTilt doesn’t appear to rely as heavily on community participation. The community participation appears to be more of a feature augmenting the material than the impetus pushing the reporting. Indeed NewsTilt stresses that it doesn’t assign stories the way traditional companies do, it’s all up to the reporter.

Clearly, people are trying to innovate news reporting and delivery. But two things struck me about OpenFile that help differentiate it from the other citizen news sites. First, OpenFile is wedding the experience, learning, and professional component of traditional journalism with the independence, democracy, and directness new media provides everyone. Second, OpenFile makes its goals of transparency and archival explicit.

To the first point, traditional newspapers should pay attention. Stories continue to circulate about the problems traditional newspapers have had adapting themselves to the digital world, their revenues plummet but they don’t innovate. While some forge ahead, rapidly integrating modern online elements like reader commenting, social media links, searchable archives, etc. I rarely see traditional newspapers innovating in such a way that they really harness the advantages of digital media.

To the second point, I’ve written about the problems with online news stories lacking history. It’s not just that articles sometimes disappear but that the newspapers reporting them forget, years (sometimes months) later about their previous reporting. In the digital medium, we link! Linking is one of the most basic activities, it’s been a huge part of what has defined the Internet. We don’t have to copy much or repeat much or rewrite much because we can link to everything. Every piece of content gets to be part of our digital memory, requiring little more than a link to bring it into the context and relevance of current news stories.

Online news ought to be one of the most link-happy types of content there is. Recording history as it happens is valuable and that value persists when records link to the continuing present recording. This is a major failing in just about all online traditional newspapers today. They lack the history, timelines, and links to prior and perfectly related stories.

I believe, or at least hope based on what I’ve read on OpenFile’s site that it will help resolve this problem. OpenFile seems to want to keep each article alive, allowing it to grow with its community’s interaction and spawn new articles. This ongoing maintenance reminds me of what we see on Wikipedia. Checking on a Wikipedia page, you can always click the discussion or history tab to find out all of the changes to the page and the reasons for those changes. Sometimes those are even more informative than the article itself.

OpenFile has a good idea. I look forward to seeing it grow, and hopefully spread to more cities.

I think it makes an important statement, in terms of offering a level, common understanding that could be used widely across society, government, and business. Early in the manifesto, it says the public domain

“. . . is the basis of our self-understanding as expressed by our shared knowledge and culture. It is the raw material from which new knowledge is derived and new cultural works are created. The Public Domain acts as a protective mechanism that ensures that this raw material is available at its cost of reproduction – close to zero – and that all members of society can build upon it. Having a healthy and thriving Public Domain is essential to the social and economic well-being of our societies.”

I think this is a particularly well-put point. I’d hoped to express a similar idea in my response to the recent Canadian copyright consultation (and other writings). The manifesto proposes principles and guidelines to foster the well-being of our public domain for the 21st century.

Many of its recommendations make sense to establish as a common global basis. Having such a basis would foster an understandable and common societal/cultural norm in the face of special interests that don’t always operate from a larger, more long-term perspective.

It recommends (I’ll paraphrase, but these are spelled out with more precision and detail in the manifesto itself)

• Reducing the term of copyright protection
• Changes to the scope of copyright protection take into account the effects on the Public Domain
• Material in the Public Domain in its country of origin, is in the Public Domain in all other countries
• Punishing false or misleading attempts to misappropriate Public Domain material
• Prohibiting other rights from reconstituting exclusivity over Public Domain material. Ensure a practical and effective path to make orphan and non-comercially available works available for re-use by society
• Make it the role of cultural heritage institutions to label and preserve Public Domain works
• Get rid of legal obstacles preventing the voluntary sharing of works
• Enabling personal non-commercial uses of protected works and looking into alternate forms of remuneration for authors/artists.

I see these as a welcome prescription for the cancers spreading through various governments’ approaches to copyright, particularly in the age of digital reproduceability,  Internet distribution, and an imbalance of corporate influence.

Setting these recommendations as a baseline would provide a common understanding from which to open up new, modern business models. We desperately need to affirm something like this manifesto to keep our culture vibrant, and our creative arts and sciences bubbling with inspiration and discovery.

Google Wave, or maybe more accurately, the open source Wave protocol could be the most important innovation to our interaction with the Internet since the development of the Web.

I say all of that in spite of being a little frustrated with Wave’s current early beta state and lack of wide-spread availability. Now that the preview version has been available for a while, I’ve read articles saying that Google Wave underwhelms or even fails. There are still some problems to work out (it’s only a preview version after all) but I think it’s off-base to trash it so I’m going to do the opposite with this post.

Don’t know what it is? Here’s a simplistic overview: with Wave you can start a conversation (instantly or sequentially) with friends, colleagues, whoever, incorporating essentially any other electronic form of media you desire. The whole history is maintained in the Wave and can be played back as it occured or glimpsed as a fait accompli.

I think of a Wave as a discrete encapsulation of both content and the live processes of the people engaging with each other, engaging with that content. It can easily be distributed, shared, or otherwise punctured.

Google Wave makes it easy to embed games, business applications (SAP’s Gravity prototype is an impressive example; I don’t understand why they’re bothering with 12sprints Streamwork–they’d be better off building functionality on Wave *), text documents, video meetings, the possibilities go on and on; all of these things operate under real time collaboration. Even a plain wave let’s you see other people’s typing as it occurs. This is neat, it’s valuable, sweet utility that will draw people to Google Wave but it’s not what makes Wave so important or really differentiates it.

I think Wave has two crucial things going for it. First, it gives you control over whether waves are public or not and second, perhaps more importantly, it’s based on a free and open-source protocol.

My first point: the publicness.

Waves can be embedded in Web sites. Imagine browsing your favourite site and seeing a link for a public wave. You join it. Instantly you’re part of a community around a specific topic. This is nothing like embedding Twitter feeds or structure-heavy LinkedIn and Facebook stuff.

Let’s say you’re an enthusiast of Czech tramcars (that almost happened to me). You take photos of vintage cars rusting in far out rural locations. You participate in message boards reminiscing over the merits of the Tatra T6B5, somehow you secured a video of trams rumbling through a bygone communist city.

Then one day you find a Web site of like-minded enthusiasts and you see that they’ve put a link to their public wave. So you join it and find that a number of people have been debating the specs of the T6B5. You notice that scans of old documentation appear in the wave and someone has drawn diagrams around certain areas linking them to the related conversation. You remember that old video you had of one in action, so you insert it to the wave too. Oh, but wait you’re the only one looking at that moment–if the others were there you’d be chatting with them live. No problem. Even if someone isn’t typing directly back to you, they’ll see the update next time they open their Wave application and they’ll be able to reply.

Although my example above is not so serious, the point I’m making is that yes Google Wave lets you collaborate privately with those you invite but it also lets you open things up to the public in a way that didn’t exist previously. And you can make this happen just by clicking the “New Wave” button. Where else can you do that sort of thing? Traditional Web sites? Yes. Discussion forums? Yes. Video sharing sites? Yes. But you can’t do them all at once, seamlessly. I could keep listing things but you get the point, don’t you? Those will be challenged with this new disruption, and they’re not the only things.

I don’t even have to collaborate with people. I use Waves as my personal note-keeping medium. To-do lists, boring things like that. I could even publish my own personal Waves, like statuses on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, or blog posts (indeed I think I’ll try it on this site, stay tuned). Perhaps it has my likes and contact information as well. Public versions. Shared versions. Private versions.

Here’s another example. Wave has tremendous potential for “content producers.” Take a media/analyst company like the one I work for (TEC), where we send our subscribers e-mail newsletters, publish reports online, help companies through their software selections, host podcasts, etc. all based around enterprise software topics. We could be hosting waves around selected subjects with our analysts, writers, consultants, all participating whenever new issues arise. It would effectively subjugate (or augment if you prefer to see it that way) our other media initiatives. People that would normally subscribe to an e-mail newsletter, could join a wave instead and begin interacting at their leisure with whatever has occurred and become aware when something new occurs, and contribute their own input.

Waves may offer new promise for newspapers, musicians, all sorts of “content producers” if they harness the concept well.

My second point: the free and open-sourceness (wave protocol).

Social media mechanisms tend to decentralize Web content sources. They make it easy to spread articles, music, video, conversation, games, etc. beyond the boundaries of the originating Web sites. Facebook, for example, has taken over as one of the dominant destinations on the Web. I can go to facebook and communicate much as I would through e-mail, but I get potentially more out of Facebook because of the ways it sucks in the activities and interests of my selected peer group. That makes Facebook appealing and oh so sticky. But it is a single site, I do have to play within its boundaries, and not everyone that I can reach through e-mail is available, or even appropriate to reach through Facebook. Nor will they ever be because of two things: the rigidity inherent to its closed (single controlling company) structure and the domineering way it mediates my person-to-person communication.

So Facebook has some problems. In spite of all the various forms of access third parties can successfully take advantage of on top of the Facebook API, Facebook is a single company, with closed control. It’s essentially the same with Twitter, LinkedIn, and of most other social media sites (there are some possible exceptions like status.net/identi.ca).

Communication/collaboration mediums like e-mail on the other hand, owe much of their success to the fact that the platform isn’t controlled by a single company. Anyone can develop and proliferate e-mail servers and applications (desktop, web-based, smartphone apps, etc.). They work together by adhering to an open standard. It’s worked so well that e-mail has been one of the longest standing, most pervasive, and still highly relevant Internet applications. Unlike say, the social network MySpace: the fad that’s fading fast.

Social media innovated or reintroduced popular mechanisms for communicating-with other people via the Internet. Whereas most traditional Web sites had got themselves into the habit of communicating-to other people (which is fine, it serves a certain purpose–presenting or disseminating that which is authored, as it is authored). The Web site proper became the focal point. With social media mechanisms the web site is itself not so much the focal point as it is an aggregator and conveyor from other sites and between people (not the company operating it).

Social media sites generally lack user-facing content to communicate-to (except stuff developed by users themselves) but at the same time social media sites haven’t developed the full extent of communicating-with. The more the Web site itself fades from the focus and simply conveys person-to-person, the better it enables communicating-with as opposed to communicating-to. Facebook type companies are still too central to the communication they enable. On the other hand, Wave concocts a balance between the two, which is a disruptive innovation made possible because of the open source protocol. Wave wrests control from social networks by giving anyone the opportunity to form them, ad hoc,without a central overseer; like e-mail.

If Facebook or LinkedIn undergo a downward trend in popularity (Internet users’ have notoriously fickle tastes) or outright collapse, it will trigger a collapse in communication, data, the interactions within their communities. They thrive on critical mass and uptime. How about the proliferation of online office productivity applications? Those may allow users to collaborate in real time but they suffer the same problem as Facebook and LinkedIn, they’re a single entity conveying the communication.

The effort users have put into building their profiles, collecting the histories and online memories of their peers, attaching themselves to special interest groups, etc. will eventually be lost when sites like Facebook decline. Unlike e-mail, you can’t easily take Facebook with you. Some people have recognized this and have been working toward ways to get info out of online services. It doesn’t change the fact that we’ll never see a proliferation of Facebook servers offered by other companies.

This is fundamental: Google Wave is an implementation of an application that uses the open source Wave protocol but it’s not the only one, there will be others many of which might be quite different from Google Wave itself.

Wave, inherently made for live communication and collaboration, doesn’t risk hobbling its users through the fault of a single company or sag of popularity. Wave has every possibility of becoming popular the way e-mail did, since anyone can develop wave servers, clients, bots and extensions for the platform, etc. Other social media and work collaboration platforms cannot make a claim like that.

One more thing to consider. Building the Web on the Internet was an order of magnitude different from the rise of Web 2.0 apps. Web 2.0 sites are still, at heart, Web sites, they just do more. Wave on the other hand, is an order of magnitude different from the Web, since it’s emerging from it. Google Wave can do a better, more flexible, and more useful job subjugating portions of the “Web site proper” than any existing social media Web site.

If you’ve played with Google Wave and don’t get it yet, I strongly recommend reading the unofficial Complete Guide to Google Wave written by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash. I found it very helpful. Read the section on making waves public to find public waves or also see this directory of public waves. There’s also Google’s discussion site. For a quick though far less informative overview try Lifehacker’s Google Wave 101 or The Shiny Wave’s cheatsheet. Also, some interesting extensions and prototypes.

* Update 20 May 2010: SAP’s Streamwork now supports Google’s Wave protocol. I’m glad they realized the wisdom in adopting wave rather than trying to make an isolated version of their own.

Too many of us suffer from a condition that is going to leave our grandchildren bereft. I call it personal digital disorder. Think of those thousands of digital photographs that lie hidden on our computers. Few store them, so those who come after us will not be able to look at them… it’s my job to ensure that this does not extend to our national memory.

She takes the personal analogue and raises it to a national level. Her article goes on to cite examples of the ephemeral nature of whatever is present on the Web, and explains the loss inflicted when this web material disappears.

Brindley identifies the issue as an important responsibility for libraries and archives, which of course reminds me of the 2007 Canadian Digital Information Strategy draft from Library and Archives Canada. (I wrote some thoughts on that as well).

Although I’ll continue to blog here at pundit.ca, I’ll be addressing FOSS, software selection issues, and TEC’s services, research, and products on the TEC blog.

The TEC blog is actually a multi-blogging site. We’ve begun by publishing in English and Spanish, with additional blogs to come in other languages, including French and perhaps Chinese. We’re starting small at the moment and will then look at expanding it into more blogs. I expect we’ll have fun working out a number of kinks over the coming weeks. I hope the blog will make it much easier to have an open line of communication with our regular users and other visitors.

TEC has published articles and other research on the IT/enterprise software front since the early 90s. For the majority of that time we haven’t asked our visitors to pay for much of this research. I often compare what we offer (rightly and wrongly) to things available from other analyst companies like Gartner. Gartner, for example, has just about everything locked behind its e-walls. It’s almost all for sale over there. If you go to Gartner for a report or some other research, you won’t see commentary posted under the report by regular visitors debating/debasing that report. Should you? Haven’t we all seen that some of the most significant cultural, business, political, and other developments are based on the new communication and collaboration means enabled by Internet technologies?

Back to TEC, I pushed for a while to have a simple comment system on our site. Something that our visitors could use to post thoughts about our articles, podcasts, reports, etc. It was implemented and people began using it. There were a mixture of comments. As you’d expect some were nice, some were not, some were well-thought out, others not so well. C’est la vie.

We didn’t implement an community moderation system like, say, Slashdot does. This then is where potential problems enter. I happen to be opposed to any electronic forum censorship (note: I don’t view a community moderation system as censorship, rather it’s a peer reviewed ranking device). Wading through online censorship experiences first-hand (dating all the way back to the days of BBSs) I’ve seen how censoring comments tends to destroy online communities or at least ultimately drives their quality down (I’d make an exception for things like spam, which aren’t comments in the first place). But that’s another debate.

A portion of TEC vehemently opposed displaying negative or poorly written comments, and with well-intentioned reasons. “Imagine if all analyst firms allowed such comments, they figured” (I’m paraphrasing the ideas). “Would they still be able to sell their research?” I think it’s a good question. Will people see commentary by other visitors and lose trust in what you have to publish? Does it detract from the professional image of the site? After all, sites like my Slashdot example, never portray themselves as analyst firms–they aim for a different impression entirely. Can an analyst firm, often sought out as subject matter experts, survive while fostering its own public criticism?

I think it could. A well-considered approach could enable that firm to take the reins and harness that criticism to improve. I think if you really are a subject matter expert, or even if you’re not an expert (I’m more of a generalist) but practice well-refined analysis and synthesis skills, you have nothing to hide and would welcome the opportunity to discuss your research publicly.

I would like to see greater online visitor participation. I think there is a lot of potential in getting all the different people related to aspects of the IT industry involved in voicing their activities, concerns, ideas, etc. around a specific body of research. It would probably make that research more valuable rather than detract from it. It could even give the firm totally new ideas for improving their products/services, just the way participation in FOSS development can.

Of course right now, we can all do this to some degree using blogs, but then aren’t we all just circling around the research, rather than assaulting it directly, in its home, where everyone else gets a chance to form some perspective. Maybe it’d be in an analyst firm’s interest to maintain that home? I’ve seen several peer reviewed journals on the Web, like First Monday. A few sites, such as ITerating, seem to be making some sort of effort to approach certain forms of IT research from this angle. RedMonk is interesting in that they espouse a similar idea through blogging. As I mentioned at the start however, the potential for reader participation is inherent to blogging; it’s not the same as offering a particular piece of research or report (or the methodology of developing it) to be ripped to shreads, lauded, or critically enhanced by its community of software users, consultants, vendors, developers, etc.

Whether or not it can be purchased is relevant to the business model, but not so much to the greater issue of what’s more useful–what can be done better? If you could derive a certain edge from opening up all your analyst research to public commentary, I think you might discover some very interesting competitive advantages. I’ve got ideas–but that’s for another time. I don’t know that I made a strong enough argument for the value of uncensored commentary and had to ask the dev team to remove the comment capability altogether. Maybe the implementation was too basic. Perhaps down the road we’ll find a way to make it more productive by implementing it differently. In any case, in the meantime, I’m happy to say that although our comment system died today, we simultaneously launched an official TEC blog. And that will be the subject of my next post.

This is an exciting step because all the work everyone put into determining and designing the RFI criteria is finalized so there is a “tangible” accomplishment complete. Although we regularly send our standard RFIs to various companies for the research areas we cover, when we embark on custom projects like this we amass a lot of new information very quickly. It always amazes me, the variety of companies from countries around the world that take an interest in a call for an RFI. Often times we discover successful software companies that simply don’t turn up in regular (North American) IT publications. I end up talking with a lot of people about the RFI. It’s not always a good fit for their products but then it turns out such companies sometimes fit nicely with other projects. My point is, I like the discovery process.

The next big step will take place in a month when we receive the responses to the RFIs. That’s when it really starts to get interesting because we import the data to our evaluation system and start analyzing the different vendors support capabilities.

I’d argue the FSF has a track record of considering important issues like these, with foresight and the creative will to develop strong, practical solutions, staving off potential damage to our freedoms. Damage that would otherwise be carried out by imaginary legal entities armed with human bullets, which fly toward profit so quickly they miss all other practical and ethical issues. The solutions have also enabled a huge amount of innovation and positive change.

But some of the most visible contrarians to this draft of the next GPL–opinions which are getting hyped, are mostly irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. I’m talking about the recent HP issues that were circulated around numerous web sites. To quote Christine Martino, vice president of Open Source And Linux with HP from the Internetnews.com article linked above,

“HP had hoped that the second draft would clarify the patent provision such as to ease concern that mere distribution of a single copy of GPL-licensed software might have significant adverse IP impact on a company…”

What does that mean, “significant adverse IP impact”? It’s removed from its context so I can’t be sure, but it sounds to me like the HP folks are taking issue with something the new GPL would prevent them from doing with their patent portfolio. Furthermore, referring to HP’s commentary, the Internetnews.com article states

“The second draft of the GPL version 3 license is not even a day old and already one of the largest Linux vendors in the world is taking issue with its content.”

So what? The FSF is interested in freedom, and its foresight in ensuring and encouraging that was the ultimate basis of practicality giving rise to the IT business shifts underway because of FOSS. Although the Open Source Initiative fairly claims the pragmatic approach under its rubric (as that is its stated goal), it doesn’t imply an either/or stance. Freedom doesn’t preclude pragmatism. Unfortunately too many articles treat these notions as mutually exclusive.

While the previous GPL versions were produced with a goal of promoting freedom in a software development basis, they also triggered important business and social developments. Why were they so successful? Because many many many individuals adopted these licenses. The freedom and collaboration they enabled for masses of individuals in free software development is key. A recent ZDNet blog post states

“But that’s not where the debate will really play out. It will really play out in the market. Will GPL companies switch to GPL v3, or explicitly demand retention of V2, which is frankly vague on the DRM question.”

Does it matter if major business entities like HP object to certain freedom promoting aspects of the license? Does their wanting to switch really signify whether the third version will be successful in getting adopted? I don’t think it matters much at all. HP is a player in the free software community, it is not the player. And that is true of everyone else. So HP commentary should be considered for what it’s worth–nothing more.

So, I’d argue against Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’s point that the GPLv3 will be dead on arrival. As he mentions the HP issue, he also mentions Linus Torvalds’s objections. This is fair, from what I’ve read it sounds like Torvalds has some clearly thought-out opinions. From what I’ve read, some of these sound quite reasonable. As I said at the beginning, I like the debate this drafting process is raising, Torvalds and HP included. Nevertheless, from what I’ve read of Torvalds’s arguments, I have the impression he is single-mindedly focusing on technical issues and intentionally excluding debate on all else. I just don’t believe that’s ok. There are too many important, non-technical ramifications interconnected with information technology to ignore. It doesn’t mean everyone must think about these things, but how does it help to intentionally excise them from the debate?

——
Addendum

A new story covering the feedback issue in this debate was just published at NewsForge. This is a useful balance to the different sides involved.

I thought there were a few interesting points that seemed to jive with a recent Strategy+Business magazine article I read concerning evidence-based management (I appear to be quoting them a lot lately). In the Strategy+Business article, Why Managing by Facts Works, the authors point out

“…we are convinced that when companies base decisions on evidence, they enjoy a competitive advantage. And even when little or no data is available, there are things executives can do that allow them to rely more on evidence and logic and less on guesswork, fear, faith, or hope. For example, qualitative data, such as that gathered on field trips to retail sites for the purpose of testing existing assumptions, can be an extremely powerful form of useful evidence for quick analysis.”

If a committee of people is going to be involved in a big selection project, it can analyze all of the business processes and software functionality possible, it can see scripted vendor demonstrations, but it seems like it would still be pretty difficult to envision just how the system works out in the world, in actual production situations.

So if the steering committee of the selection project visits a few sites in their own industry, which have implemented the ERP system, they get the opportunity to see how unexpected issues arose and got resolved. They might witness benefits or problems that they didn’t expect or even consider beforehand. Finally, they have a chance to see how the system affects the people working with it. Because those issues would be important considerations for making a critical business and technical decision like selecting an ERP system, the site visit is a clear way to vaporize assumptions with real evidence.

“Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based on it.”

This may sound abstract to some but Bob Frankston wrote an entertaining piece that illustrates the unsavoury results of losing such freedom. For a thorough and technical analysis, I find Daniel Weitzner’s text on The Neutral Internet: An Information Architecture for Open Societies interesting.

The thing is, whatever starts taking place, technologically or in government policy now is going to be around for a while. People will adapt, install, and use software that is based on or otherwise enforces such technologies and policies. That means we have to imagine the consequences of a future saddled with the legacies we’re creating now. I hope we act to keep our liberty intact.

More than half of all survey respondents indicated that their respective companies had either already deployed an open source database or were more likely to deploy an open source database than any other open source application, including CRM, desktop productivity, and ERP. The survey was sponsored and administered by EnterpriseDB.

Gartner too published some stats on database growth, though of a slightly different nature.

The combined category of open source database management systems vendors, which includes MySQL and Ingres, showed the strongest growth, although it was one of the smallest revenue bases,” said Colleen Graham, principal analyst at Gartner.

These are all interesting so I thought I’d post a few stats TEC tracks about enterprise end user demand. We find out what companies are looking for as requirements for implementing different enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, SCM, etc.). It might be valuable to compare these different sources and types of stats for an overall picture.

According to our tracking of about 3,000 different users, the following numbers signify the percent of those users that selected each of these platforms as a technology requirement for their enterprise software selections (such as an ERP, CRM, SCM, etc. system). Note that we ask about some other platforms too but I’ve omitted those stats–they account for very small percentages.

It’s pretty clear that we have not seen great changes in demand for Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM systems, but MySQL certainly has increased in 2006 over 2005 and PostgreSQL has been working its way up. I happen to know that so far for Q2 2006, the open source systems are set to surpass the previous quarters’ demand.

So while Gartner is calling attention to strong growth but small revenue bases, perhaps one could look at the direction the demand is moving in (based on the Enterprise DB survey and TEC’s stats) and guess that the revenue base may be ready to change.