Open Source

Supportive Documents:

The open-source model has a lot to offer the business world. It’s a way to build open standards as actual software, rather than paper documents. It’s a way that many companies and individuals can collaborate on a product that none of them could achieve alone. It’s the rapid bug-fixes and the changes that the user asks for, done to the user’s own schedule.

The open-source model also means increased security; because code is in the public view it will be exposed to extreme scrutiny, with problems being found and fixed instead of being kept secret until the wrong person discovers them. And last but not least, it’s a way that the little guys can get together and have a good chance at beating a monopoly.

Of all these benefits, the most fundamental is increased reliability. And if that’s too abstract for you, you should think about how closed sources made the Year 2000 problem worse and why they might have very well killed your business.

The Reliability Problem

Gerald P. Weinberg once famously observed that, “If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.” He was right. Up to now, the reliability of most software has been atrociously bad.

The foundation of the business case for open-source is high reliability. Open-source software is peer-reviewed software; it is more reliable than closed, proprietary software. Mature open-source code is as bulletproof as software ever gets.

Until recently this was a radical idea to many businesspeople; many had a belief that open-source software is necessarily not “professional,” that it is shoddily made and more prone to fail than closed software.

But the Internet’s infrastructure makes the best possible refutation, and since OSI was founded in 1998 many people have been paying attention. Consider DNS, sendmail, the various open-source TCP/IP stacks and utility suites, and the open-source scripting languages such as Perl that are behind most “live” content on the Web. These are the running gears of the Internet. (Read this for a look at what would happen if they disappeared).

These open-source programs have demonstrated a level of reliability and robustness under fast-changing conditions (including a huge and rapid increase in the Internet’s size) that, considered against the performance record of even the best closed commercial software, is nothing short of astonishing.

You can read an extended technical argument for the superior reliability of general open-source software in “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”. This paper was behind Netscape’s pioneering decision to take its client software open-source. It describes a bazaar style of managing software development that depends on open source and leads to high reliability and quality.

The real-world evidence backs this up. In an independent head-to-head reliability test, open-source Unix systems and utilities were less fragile – crashed or hung less often – than their proprietary counterparts. <!– Postscript or –> <!– here –>.

The business implication of this technical case is clear. Eventually, bazaar-mode peer review will come to be considered a necessary condition for highest quality. In many market niches, software that has not been peer-reviewed simply won’t be perceived as good enough to compete.

The Payoff for Software Producers

Bazaar-mode development seems to reverse our normal expectations about software development; more programmers are better (at least, as long as the capacity of the project leader or project core group to handle integration isn’t exceeded). Even a small open-source project can muster more brains to improve a piece of software than most development shops can possibly afford.

You’ll see the following gains under the open-source model whether you’re producing software for internal use or for resale.

Advantage: Development Speed

It follows that commercial developers leveraging the bazaar mode should be able to grab, and keep, a substantial initiative advantage over those that don’t. But there’s more; the first commercial developer in a given market niche to switch to this mode may gain substantial advantages over later ones.

Why? Because the pool of talent available for bazaar recruitment is limited. The first bazaar project in a given niche is more likely to attract the best co-developers to invest time in it. Once they’ve invested the time, they’re more likely to stick with it.

Advantage: Lower Overhead

Switching to the open-source model should also be good for a significant overhead reduction in per-project software production costs.

The open-source model allows software shops to (in effect) outsource some of their work, paying for it in values less tangible than money. (But perhaps not less economically significant; the increased speed with which an outside co-developer can have a needed bug fix will often translate into a substantial opportunity gain for that customer.)

This means smaller shops will be able to handle bigger projects.

The Payoff for Software Merchants

If you produce software for sale, you’ll see two more advantages:

Advantage: Closeness to the Customer

One of the most often-repeated pieces of management advice is “Stay close to the customer.” In today’s fast-moving, short-product-cycle business climate it’s more important than ever to do that – to understand almost as soon as they do what the customers want and be able to rapidly respond to those needs.

If you sell software, what better way to do this than by co-opting your customers’ engineers to help your development?

It’s worth pointing out that the open-source, bazaar method resembles the way many successful Japanese companies have done consumer product development; get a product to market that works but is not perfect, and iterate quickly based upon customer feedback to reach the combination of features that the customers need and want. This has turned out to be especially valuable for high technology products (laptops, personal assistants, cellphones, etc) that people don’t know they need, or what features they need.

Advantage: Broader Market

An important side-effect of the open-source model will be a much wider platform range for your product. Open-source authors frequently find themselves receving, for free, port changes for operating systems and environments they barely know exist and can’t afford developers to support. Each such port, of course, widens the market appeal of the product.

The Payoff for Entrepreneurs

For an entrepreneur or start-up software producer, going open-source is a way to grab mind-share. The best new concept in the world won’t make money unless people know it’s interesting.

Whether this makes sense as a strategy depends on whether you think your main value proposition is in the software itself or in service and the expertise associated with the software. More often than one might think, the value is actually in service and integration.

This, to give one recent example, the startup Digital Creations open-sourced its flagship project Zope on the advice of its venture capitalists. The VCs projected that going open-source would actually increase the value of the company.

For full discussion see Paul Everitt’s business decision essay. It makes an eloquent case.

You can also read Wired magazine’s tour of open-source startups..

Four Ways To Win

Now for a higher-level, investor’s point of view. There are at least four known business models for making money with open source:

1. Support Sellers (otherwise known as “Give Away the Recipe, Open A Restaurant”): In this model, you (effectively) give away the software product, but sell distribution, branding, and after-sale service. This is what (for example) Red Hat does.
2. Loss Leader: In this model, you give away open-source as a loss-leader and market positioner for closed software. This is what Netscape is doing.
3. : In this model, a hardware company (for which software is a necessary adjunct but strictly a cost rather than profit center) goes open-source in order to get better drivers and interface tools cheaper. Silicon Graphics, for example, supports and ships Samba.
4. Accessorizing: Selling accessories – books, compatible hardware, complete systems with open-source software pre-installed. It’s easy to trivialize this (open-source T-shirts, coffee mugs, Linux penguin dolls) but at least the books and hardware underly some clear successes: O’Reilly Associates, and SSC are among them.

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As the world continues to sulk under the threat of imminent armageddon, hope comes to us from the most unexpected place, kites!

Apparently if kites are flown high enough for long enough we can generate enuff energy to power huge cities. This is certainely an innovative solution to fighting the problem of global warming. Me suggests that we get all them kids off nintendo wii, xbox 360 and get them to fly them kites all day.

Seriously! watch this video of Saul Griffith and learn how kites can power your home today.

The second part is about a fellow  called  William Kamkwamba from Malawi who built a windmill from scratch to power his radio. Watch his green solution and see what potential Africa has to offer.

Kenneth Ngetha

I rarely excited about start ups in Kenya because like many of mine they dont seem to get enough support from industry players and government. However just when you think innovation is dead someone somewhere unleashes a stunning and brilliant idea. This someone is Kenneth Ngetha 22, a 4th year student at the prestigious Strathmore University(i went there too!!!) in Nairobi, who has come up with an online gateway for making payment transfers to Kenya.

The system suitably named TULIPE solves the basic problem which is that in East Africa, (and Africa in general); E-Commerce Payments on the web are not well developed because of a low penetration of banking services (which means credit cards are not sufficient). However, there have been developments in the Mobile Money sphere and it serves the long tail of the unbanked. Tulipe aims to use this Mobile Money & Existing Bank accounts for online payments, as is the case with credit cards.

This brilliant idea is modelled on the US based PAYPAL.com which currently transacts billions of dollars every year in this way. Tulipe still on beta release has caught the eye of Kenyan investors who see in Tulipe a business model and solution that will help reduce the cost of transfering money to and from Kenya. This cost mostly brought about by thefts, delays and official corruption have been a major obstacle to doing business in Kenya.

Jomo Kenyatta Benevolent Dictator

This is an article written by my friend Kennedy Oduor. In it he gives his reasons why Kenya needs a dictator. I have some sympathy for what he says because if you look at the progress of Rwanda under President Kagame or Uganda under President Museveni it has been relatively more dramatic and more smooth than that of Kenya.

However i would add we need a benevolent dictator in Kenya and we do not really need an authoritarian regime as Ken proposes. However one can see where he is coming from as democracy has not delivered to Kenyans any substantial gains yet.

Odour also tackles the question of AID from the west and here we are in agreement we need to enable our people to stop becoming more dependent on AID and turn them into entrepreneurs.

This is why we have formed the STOP AID MOVEMENT join us at http://stopaid.org

Without further a do here is the explosive and thought provoking article from Ken. Feel free to comment and lets have a discussion on this.

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Kenya does not need democracy. Kenya does not need a new constitution. Kenya does not need a judicial reform or police reforms.

Kenya needs a dictator.

To me democracy is embargoed by God, democracy is the opiate of NGOs, and other groups that thrive best in calling press conferences and telling the evils in governments. Democracy is the wishful thinking of the USA that keeps bombing civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s the blabber of the fangless UN and NATO that stood when 10,000 people were being killed per day in Rwanda.

Democracy is the day-dreaming of Martha Karua that forgot about the same when her tribesman took over the leadership of this country and a click of them decided to sweep it into an abyss. It is the wallow of Raila Odinga that cannot point a finger at Museveni the warlord when he directly insults his people.

Democracy is your jealousy when you can’t get the job coz your uncle is not the employer. It is the slow, backward thinking that all Luos will gain visas when Obama became President of USA. Democracy is an fantasy of the West that keep pouring aid into Africa when that money is channeled into secret kitties.

Democracy is the invention of God. Handed over to man. And which man said, “Sorry we don’t like what it sounds like. Please give it to NGOs. They can better make noise that we won’t listen to!”
That is why KENYA NEEDS A RUTHLESS DICTATOR. Not for five years but for 15 to 30 years. There are two sides of head, the right and left cheek. One side can be scarred while the other is smooth like the thigh of a geisha girl. A good example is Saddam Hussein. He was good to the extreme and bad to the extreme. He made sure Iraq was economically strong, even with the gothic hand of Bush constantly poking him.

He built first class highways, universities, hospitals, and sewerage systems. But sorry that he gassed his own people, massacred his opponents. There are two sides of the coin. And am talking about the good side of a dictator.

We need an economic dictator to be precise.

Look at Chavez the Venezuelan Kingpin. His country is so rich he once gave free oil to USA. How about Gaddafi? He doesn’t want people telling him to go home. Why? Because he knows that people like Kibaki will take over from him and mess his hard earned economic strength? He crashes the opponents with a huge punch. He throws belligerents into the red sea. Why? Because he knows that should he leave, the rats will invade the treasury and start dragging out sacks of maize even though they know that you cannot cart away more than 10 billion without being seen.

Ohh and look at Cuba. The brothers have proved good shepherds of the Cuban flock. They don’t have those fuel-guzzling cars. They don’t own golf resorts. They are angels sent by God to tell Americans that you cannot assume the position of God. You cannot scatter armies across the world in the pretence of keeping world peace!

That is God’s prerogative, which even a big and tall Hussein Obama, cannot assume.
Kenya needs a dictator to take over this country. Raila can be a good dictator but lack the balls to take over land grabbed by people that were handsomely rewarded by the colonial masters. He cannot tell Moi to hand over the loot. He cannot tell the Kenyatta family to let go of the loot and the land.
Kenya needs a dictator so ruthless the thieves will start giving out stolen property without being asked. a dictator that will cut the ministries to ten or five. Call a press conference and announce:

“Today marks the true independence of this country from the dogs and the fat cats. It is sad but by the powers given to me by the constitution of the republic of Kenya, I hereby order the reduction of MPs’ salaries from 800,000 to 150,000. I further direct that all the ministries shall from today henceforth be given Toyota 110 and…and if they deem so unfit, they should be allowed to use their salary to acquire Mercedes E-Class”.

“I further direct the removal of the Anti-corruption Commission and order them to be redeployed into a new Ministry of Social Welfare for Orphans and widows. I disband the institution of both the Prime Minister and Vice President. I further direct that no one should masquerade as an assistant minister as I will not appoint any, but will bestow my trust in Permanent Secretaries and the Ministers whose positions will be advertised and every Kenyan with the relevant qualifications shall fill”

“With powers conferred to me as the only one above the law, I order no Presidential elections until after 30 years. This order is only subject to change should I die. I bar all persons against talking politics in the press, but to personally write to me should they have an idea or complaints. Alternatively call me on 000001009000111. I order that only journalists without blood to write columns that cast doubt on my type of leadership!”

“I scrap all entertainment and sitting allowance for both the Ministers and MPs. How can you deliberate on the issues of your country while standing?”

“This now means that the tax payer has been saved. Not by me, but by The Almighty God. This means that the Kenyans shall have crossed to the Promised Land. The land that was promised by the past three presidents but none did give, instead they left you at the gates of hell”.

“I order the reduction of all taxes by 50%. I order that water and electricity shall be free of charge. The basic prices of commodities such as sugar, flour, and oil shall be one in all shops, supermarkets and village markets”

“Given that Kenya has not been involved in any cross border war since independence, we shall disband the corrupt City and Country Councils, and the Armed Forces, the Army will from now on constitute the same. They shall be trained on the psychology of parking and receipting”.

“And now I cut my own salary from 2 million to 500,000”.

“And now to my opponents that will call themselves opposition in parliament, be advised that you shall have nothing to oppose as we shall be giving to the people and not taking. I advise you against sabotage as this plot will be met with excessive force that it deserves. We are prepared to kill you for the sake of the country. We rather one head than thousands killed by drought and diseases”.

“We are messengers of God sent to set an example in Africa. To refuse blood aid from America, Germany, France and United Kingdom. We are the men and women sent to bring glory to the black continent – to give color to it”.

“We are sent to save the wounds between the legs of girls in Darfur, Turkana, and Northern Uganda”
“With this trend Gaddafi and I, through the help of Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Ahmed Abnijaad shall annex Africa…shall transform Africa into the true jungle it once was. The jungle without guns and aid workers”
“Let me take this chance to warn Museveni. I understand your crave for blood, Mr. Kaguta. It’s long since you pillaged in mass. I know that killing the Nilotes has been your obsession. In fact, let me be clear by saying that the Northen Ugandans have been reduced to ashes. You now are looking for more. Your appetite for blood is so high when you see the Kenyan Nilotes. But, I have news for you, Amin Destroyer! That the Kenyan Nilotes are under my wings. And should you try my patience again, I will push you over to the Congo basin where your soldiers are stealing gold!”

“God bless Kenya, God bless Africa, God punish the blood aid pretenders of the West!”

—-

Kennedy Odour is the Editor of Apprentice Life Magazine in Kenya.

Movie Scene

The Kenyan government was so scared by a Kenyan made horror movie they decided to ban it.  When producer Joseph Kinuthia created his movie he only wanted to give people a taste of horror Kenyan Style.

His movie titled Otto the blood bath is a story about an Old man who comes back to haunt his children after they do not honour his death bed wishes. Watch a snippet here.

The question is with the government allowing literary hundreds of Movies (including horror ones) to enter the country from Hollywood and Nollywood why should it stifle its own homegrown industry.

Perhaps because the censorship board which banned the movie must have been completely horrified by Kinuthia’s production, which may have felt more closer to home than the normal western movies which exaggarate horror to unbelievable extremes.

This is my theory. What is yours?

Hi Folks,

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Here is the presentation by Roy Gould & Curtis Wong on the WorldWide Telescope.

Visit the website at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org

Do the virtual universe tour at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/webclient/

Ever since the dawn of man. Man has always wanted to fly. This is what led to the imaginative drawings of Genius Leonardo Davinci and the experiments of the Wright brothers which gave birth to the airplane as we now know it.

However Dutchman Ueli Gegenschatz seeks to fulfill the dream of flight in a high-tech wingsuit. Check out this video and see closer we are getting to achieve this dream.