Open Source entrepreneur

With virtualization technology and services like EC2 (aws.amazon.com) the cost of building clusters is going down.

In the past 3 months we have put serious R&D work to find a solution for startups and SMB that need very reliable hosting.

The concept is to get the 5 nines (99.999) availability for any web application at an affordable price.

A 99.999% availability would cost about $250,000 for a dozen servers, a solid storage array dual load balancers, software and a lot of hard work.

To handle high load pick additional servers are needed but most of the time unused increasing again the operating cost.

This can't work for a small business or a startup.

So we will offer for a monthly fee to do all the setup and maintenance work using Amazon EC2 and S3 platforms.

We will take our customers' web applications load them in a database cluster and a web server cluster.

This product is perfect for SME or SMB that needs (5 nines) %99.999 availability or a young startup waiting to take off.

If your interested contact us.

This is a big step for the Open Source business model.

MySQL was the first software company to make money with an Open Source application.
They have set the rules for building a business with Open Source software.

When we started partnering with MySQL in early 2002, I remember their US operation was an answering machine in an empty office.
Once the business model of giving away the Open Source version in GPL and charging a fee for any other licensing was set, a big sales force and marketing team was hired and MySQL took off in the business world.

This is what got the Venture Capitalists interested in Open Source. The model was working in terms of rapid growth and revenue.

It all started with the JBoss purchase and is continuing with the purchase of Troll tech by Nokia.

The Open Source startup's time is now gone and it's time for consolidation.

They are merging with the existing business model and making a place in the software and business world.

All this consolidation shows that the Open Source model is here to stay for good and has prevailed in reshaping the software industry.

Now lets hope that the MySQL purchase by Sun will not slow down its development and follow other Sun Open Source products to stagnation (Open Office, netbean...).
Probably this is also a turn for Sun where it will accelerate its open source development and community building.

Any case this is great news and it will open great opportunities for open source developers, projects and businesses.

The PHP community is pushing everybody to move to PHP5.
PHP4 support will stop at the end 2007 in a cry to increase PHP5 adoption.
The GoPHP5.org was recently started to help.
On a language point of view it make no sens to keep using PHP4 today. PHP 5 and specially 5.2 is much better.

Now the reality is that 80% of the PHP web sites are running php4.

July 2007 stats from Nexen

Blame the Web Host ?
Blame the php developers ?
Well its a simple chicken / egg situation: WebHost offer PHP4 because more applications are available in PHP4, developer create PHP4 applications because they want their customer to run their application on regular web hosting accounts.

When I was a developer I started with PHP/FI and I have some of my customer that are still running PHP3 and PHP4 sites or applications.
The applications runs great and maintenance cost are low.
Its hard to justify the cost to upgrade to PHP5 without creating animosity against PHP and its community.

Its like a proprietary vendor forcing you to upgrade by threatening an end of life of your current product.

My message to the PHP core developer team:
You are doing an amazing job with PHP the language is strong, rich, powerful, fast and has evolved in the right direction.
PHP developers loves PHP5 (at least the one I know) its great and so much better than PHP4.
But a couple of things would make a huge difference in new versions adoption.

• Stop creating backward incompatibility: Like removing the register global option in PHP6, you have all the good reason to do it, but just don't. For PHP6 adoption its key that PHP5 code run without errors out of the box on PHP6. (notice are fine). Add environment or configuration flag/variables to make PHP5 code to run on PHP6.
• Incentive for Web Host: Improved apache module shared hosting security with better jail function like open_base_dir or a suexec compatibility, dynamic block of PHP function from Virtual hosts..... Maximum security without hurting performances. Even if it sounds more like an Apache problem, Web Host don't care. If you give them a reason that make sens to them: security improvement, increase performance, less customer support requests (upward incompatibility) you will get a better adoptions rate.

Good luck, this is just my 2c after working more than 10 years with PHP and over 400 customers running PHP applications.

Yesterday one of our customer, Del-Jen was participating on a Panel about Demystifying Open Source.

Paul, Del-jen's CTO, demonstrated very well how his use of Open Source technology saved them a lot of money in licensing cost and consulting cost.

What was surprising to me is the long term cost.
Over a period of 4 years the cost of open source software did go down. The more they use it the less it costs.
On the other end the cost of commercial software increased constantly during the same period.
The cost includes licensing and consulting.

We started working with Del-Jen 4 years ago with a MySQL training and experimentation. After a year they started implementating Open Source Fusion Enterprise in a mission critical middleware.
This custom middleware interconnect and process time-sheets, forms, documents and payroll information to its 4000 employes all over the world.

The fact that total cost of ownership (TCO) of open source software is lower then commercial software is good.
But that this cost goes down over time is very good news.

Del-Jen is a Fluor company.

Drupal has annonced 4 security vulnerabilities last week affecting every version of Drupal.
New Open Source Fusion patched packages are available from our package repositories and from http://www.opensourcefusion.com

Drupal is one of the most popular content management system (CMS).

We have also created a new b2evolution package based on the Phoenix Alpha version.
This new version contains a much improved antispam filter and allows local media files uploads for images and movies. This new version also introduces nice statistics graphs in flash (using http://www.maani.us/charts/index.php)
This is an alpha version, which means it contains bugs and should be used by experienced users.

It's available from our package repositories for Open Source Fusion Community and Enterprise.