The competition of free

Currently the Mozilla Foundation has 12 full time developers and IE has 100. This probably does not include support staff, marketing etc. In the case of Mozilla these numbers are probably small.

All these smart people are chasing the opportunity to dominate a market that is defined by standards, products are rated how well they adhere to standards, and consumers expect the product to be free. Making rough estimates of salaries etc. Microsoft is spending around $15M/yr to compete in a market that brings in no revenue and is a constant public relations problem. Their competition is a not for profit foundation that is releasing products faster and if not better at least comparable to the majority of users.

Solution, Microsoft gives $5M/yr to Mozilla and ships Firefox branded as IE, they pocket $10M and bask in glow of supporting Open Source and the ability to point fingers at someone else for Browser security problems. Consumers win by having the best browser based on standards, trade press looses though as they can no longer write about the "Browser Wars".

Of course there is a small problem of Avalon.....

DB40 goes open source

Browsing Freshmeat this morning and I noticed that DB40 has gone open source. I have used this in a couple of little projects and it has been a pleasure to work with. Also I have had the pleasure of meeting the creator of DB40 Carl Rosenberger who is not only very smart but also a real nice guy.

The product info is here db4objects - native Java and .NET open source object database engine and is well worth a look. Nice to see another powerful tool being added to the open source world

The Rise of the Platforms

A small announcement from Amazon in my e-mail in box that they have included queuing in their web service API's is starting to make things very interesting. It was also noted by Phil Windley.

From a simplistic view gmail is just another queuing system uses mail protocols and text rather than SOAP/Rest and XML but not a great stretch for the Google platform to start offering a gig of message queues to developers.

Amazon's first out of the gate but all the other service platforms will follow, Google, EBay, SalesForce, etc and suddenly there is a new distributed platform infrastructure to create applications in, that is totally removed from the platform wars of the last century.

The ability to build data centric loosely coupled applications that live in the network is where the next wave of innovation is going to come from, so think open services rather than open source.