In today's increasingly corporate-intensive society, the argument can be made that you as a consumer wield more influence with your € or $ vote than with your political vote.

When you vote for a politician and that politician turns around and kills someone's puppy, that makes you culpable.

When you give your money to companies like Apple and Microsoft, you are also culpable.

Introduction

I have been using trac now to run a software aintenance and development project for a public sector client for over 2 years now. I work in one of the big Danish providers of IT and it's an area where this kind of job is normally done either by leviathans like HP Quality Center or BMC Remedy, or that other popular software lifecycle management suite, Microsoft Office.

It's a little atypical to be using trac in this environment. It doesn't cost 6 digits and it doesn't require several gigabytes of disk space, which probably disqualifies it from serious consideration more often than one would hope or believe. As mentioned above, other more "enterprisey" systems are prevalent in this area.

I chose trac for several reasons. The big one is that I know trac has such a huge userbase and community that the risk of serious problems is virtually non-existent. I also know python; this makes tacking any issues more feasible. trac is quite light and runs happily on a laptop; a third reason.

I'm clocking in eleven years of working with open source this year. Despite coming a long way in those years, it still appears to defy reason that the (often and not always) astronomically higher price/performance proposition of open source has not made it ubiquitous and the default choice. I don't believe in an open source software monoculture, but there is still too many examples of organisations acquiring expensive and inferior non-open source software when the technical and financial characteristics of the open source option were superior.

Better late than never, I discovered that the video of my speech from the OSSIDO conference in November 2010 was posted online. The speech is in Danish and the topic was the project I had been working on for the National IT and Telecom Agency on establishing a public sector open source community centered around the OpenLayers-derived VisKort web GIS component.

Looking from my admittedly narrow vantage point over European public IT procurement, I see today a structural and very fundamental incompatibility between how enterprise IT is expected to be transacted and how open source lends itself to commercial activity.

The symptoms are easy to spot. Take the recent example of the Hungarian government allocating over €40 million to open source. Part of the reason they were forced to such a drastic gesture was that the value of the contract they were putting out to tender was above the threshold set forth in the European directives (in Denmark, I think this is roughly around DKK 1,400,000 or roughly €200,000). Think about that, two hundred thousand euros. With proprietary licensing models, it isn't too difficult to hit that kind of threshold. The threshold is in fact set that high because it has been geared to traditional software procurement, which has been proprietary and expensive enough to suggest a threshold of €200,000.

Towards the end of last year, I was advisory solution architect on a project where I assessed that Alfresco was the right base product to build on. This was a very large project for the Danish public sector (high 8 digits at the very least in Danish kroner), and the bid team understandably wanted commercial technical recourse. Making a long story short, I got in touch with Matt Asay who got us on the phone with the European representatives (one of whom was actually on vacation), and pretty soon we had technical and economic estimates from Alfresco. All within 120 minutes, at 8 in the evening. I think that anecdote obviates the need for any superlatives; if I ever have my own company, that will be my benchmark for responsiveness.

I must confess, I'm writing this as part of a conspiracy with Roberto Galoppini. Alfresco is on our maps, enterprise open source is on our maps, and public sector open source is also. I have not seen much Alfresco in the European public sector and none in the Danish public sector, and this is an unfortunate misrepresentation of what Alfresco could represent.

I was privileged to be invited to speak on open source at Videnskabsministeriets IT Arkitekturkonference (The Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation) this last Thursday in Århus. Those who attended my speech at Open Source Days 2008 will know that I have some points but my delivery can be lacking; I managed to overcome that this time with a bit of preparation. A video of the speech is embedded after the jump.

I see you're firing up to 6,000 people. Analysts say you're in more trouble than a pregnant cheerleader, and that you've been that way for a lot longer than nine months. Analysts think you should spin off your hardware business (but then, they thought you should spin off Java back in 2003...) And those are your small problems.

I just got back from day 1 of the Open Source Days 2008 conference where I gave a speech entitled "Free Software in the Enterprise: from Use to Community Membership". At this point, I have slept 4 hours in the last 72 so this won't be a long post. I'll just say that the conference organizers have done a brilliant job and I'm glad to have helped fill the speakers roster.

I am also very very happy with the content of my speech (presentation deck uploaded here in this post), but I dread seeing the uploaded video; my delivery was very far below standard. Still, I am happy not to have clogged the conference with yet another generic "business open source" rehash; I think the ideas in mine are solid and quite new.

Again, a pat on the back to the organizers and conference staff. Embedded slideshow after the jump.

I was listening to Josh Berkus speak to Laporte and Schwartz about PostgreSQL versus Oracle on FLOSS Weekly, and a real bona fide gem emerged.

Josh relates the difference in product offering between a Sun supported PostgreSQL and a typical Oracle offering, and it isn't the price difference (significant though it may be) which is the real issue, it is the difference in expectation between Sun and Oracle.

Oracle need to sell the database as it is their primary product. At Sun, if the PostgreSQL business breaks even that is well enough since it wasn't the primary business: the platform is. PostgreSQL is just part of a stack making the whole platform look more appealing.

So as a commercial database consumer, you have a choice there, and the choice goes to the heart of vendor relations quality (upon which most other cost and performance factors can be demonstrated to depend). One of the vendors will want you to use the product because it will create a direct revenue stream for them, and the other has no direct commercial interest in you using the system, though they wouldn't mind it if you ended up liking it and looking at their other products.

Of course, this is over-simplifying matters a little. But when you're talking vendor relations management strategy, you're talking long term and when you talk long term, it's the broad brush that paints the clearest target.