This may sound like heresy to acolytes of Silicon Valley economics. After all, the new economics of software go something like this: Give great stuff away, then charge for advanced features for the few who need them. In open source we call it “Open Core.” For Silicon Valley Web entrepreneurs, it’s “freemium.”

In both cases, it’s sub-optimal.

Read more at GigaOm.

All without a penny spent by Apple on marketing to the enterprise.

Well, that’s not quite true….

Read the rest at GigaOm.

Nimbula emerged from stealth mode in June and in fact has remained somewhat stealthy. The basic premise of the software is to provide private-cloud infrastructure similar to Amazon Web Services EC2 platform–an approach quite similar to the open-source Eucalyptus project.

Read the rest at CNET.

There’s a lot of money to be made with open source, but first we need to stop fetishing antiquated notions of open source. Open-source licensing never deserved the single-minded devotion so many of us paid to it. It’s a starting point — a means — but not the end goal.

Read more at GigaOm.

By selling proprietary software and/or services.

I kid you not.

It was always going to happen this way, and for financial reasons that have nothing to do with peace, love, and bug fixes. It has everything to do with companies sifting through the financial possibilities of open source, and coming to the right conclusions. To wit: there is little money in selling open-source software, as Marten Mickos recently riffed, but still lots of value in doing so.

The 451 Group’s Matt Aslett correctly points to this “stage 4.0″ shift, a period of “increased emphasis on collaborative development for non-differentiating code.” We’ve been seeing this shift for some time, evidenced by increased adoption of Apache-style licenses, which Glyn Moody highlights, and which I’ve been advocating for some time.

Why this shift? Because the world has sorted out where competitive advantage lies (e.g., data), and is therefore willing to collaborate on non-differentiating code while keeping everything else firmly proprietary.

In other words, the world has returned to almost exactly where it used to be.

The odd thing is that the free software crowd hails this as progress. We are absolutely not veering toward an open-source future, where all software is released under an OSI-approved license. Far from it. Instead we’re simply seeing companies figure out that they don’t need to compete on distributed database management systems like Cassandra, because they have plenty of proprietary value elsewhere.

OSI director Simon Phipps gets this. He emphasizes again and again in this blog post that this “new” model is simply a rediscovery of an old model:

That anomalous decade [of profiting directly from open source] is just about over. The new projects on the block are once again collaborative, seeded by companies whose business does not depend on selling the software or its direct derivatives. They involve synchronizing fragments of the interests of many, diverse participants rather than having the whole of a single party’s interests at their core. Every participant comes to them paying their own way rather than expecting the project to pay them.

I don’t think of this as “progress” or “evolution” or anything else. It just strikes me as smart business. But why would Phipps, who skews toward the free software side of the open-source world, be so excited about the entrenchment of proprietary software?

For as much as he and others my decry the Open Core “mudbloodization” of “pure” open source, it’s much closer to open-source ideals than this new/old system they deplore. Why? Because at least with Open Core there’s constant internal pressure to write more open-source software, and to release hitherto proprietary software as open source. The entire model depends upon fast-moving innovation, which innovation increasingly requires one’s proprietary advantage today be open sourced tomorrow.

I don’t think the anti-Open Core has ever truly understood this, because not a single one of them has ever had to try making money that way.

I have, and that’s why I’ve become a fan of the new/old model Phipps celebrates. It’s easier. But it’s definitely not more pro-open source. Quite the contrary. It defines one’s proprietary, core value, and is then willing (if one has the time) to look to open source everything else. But there is precious little incentive (and certainly not internal pressure) to open up that proprietary advantage.

Sure, there’s external pressure through competition, but that has always been the case.

So what, exactly, are we celebrating here?

Clearly, we need to expand our vision of what open source means, as I argue in GigaOm. We also need to stop pretending that proprietary software models that embrace open source are somehow morally superior to Open Core models. They may work better, but they’re not any less mudblood than Open Core. And guess what? Customers don’t care either way.

Forrester analyst Andrew Jaquith rightly points out that “Intel’s track record with deals further up the stack are patchy at best,” but that’s the point. This must change if Intel is going to rev its business to the next level.

Read the rest on GigaOm.

Some suggest that Google Wave displays Google’s willingness to innovate at the risk of failure, which likely gives the search giant warm fuzzies. Instead, I believe it reveals the ways in which Google can improve its third-party developer engagement.

In 2008 Google began reaching out to open-source developers in earnest. As part of that outreach, Google has fixated on the mantra of “speed to build and deploy” applications on its infrastructure, without forcing developers to become mired in the details of that infrastructure.

This is where Google Wave went wrong. It didn’t abide by Google’s developer playbook.

Read more at The Register.

Read more on CNET.

Lunascape, with its “iLunascape” browser for the iPad, focused specifically on how people use the tablet device. It reconfigured the browser UI, taking into account how people hold and interact with the device. For example, since you often hold it from the bottom, it has moved most actions down to the bottom of the screen.

Read more on CNET.

For example, ask a gaggle of IT executives, as Accenture recently did, why they’re heavily adopting open-source software — and adopting heavily, they are: 50 per cent of those surveyed are “fully committed” to open source, while 69 per cent plan to up their investment in open source, and a full 38 per cent plan to migrate mission-critical software to open-source alternatives in 2010.

Their responses?

Improved code quality (76 per cent), better reliability (71 per cent), and lower software maintenance costs (71 per cent). These figures are corroborated by Forrester’s own survey data.

Great numbers, right? Well, yes — until we add in one additional data point: 29 per cent are unwilling to contribute back their code modifications to the relevant communities.

Read more on The Register.