Business & Technology Nexus

Glancing through the Handbrake website I noticed an “Ohloh widget” and got curious. So I went over to ohloh.net to see what they did. This was their tagline:

Explore Open Source – Mapping the open source world by collecting objective information on open source projects.

I wanted to see how ohloh worked.. So I went ahead and loaded up Coupa eProcurement Express, my startup’s open source purchasing system. Ohloh scanned Coupa’s subversion repository and generated some stats. Of course, it’s only as good as the data – and since our repository has been moved and regenerated a few times the data wasn’t that great. But it was still very, very cool. I think the site is a nice way for developers to get some detail on open source projects.

You might be wondering what ohloh does with all this project-specific data – and that’s where it gets even more fun. They can look and report on cross-project trends in open source.

For exmaple, here’s a report comparing programming language popularity: C++ vs. Java vs. PHP vs. Ruby.

Cool beans…

A fellow WordPress blogger commented on my recent post about DVD’s aging and becoming un-readable with a link to some software you can buy that legally rips your DVDs to MPEG-4. So I thought I’d do a quick search and see if there were any open source options out there.

Yep. One’s called Handbrake. It works great. But I found out my “Matrix” DVD was too far gone to rip, so I’m happy and sad at the same time. :)

iasta has launched a nice online content aggregation hub for all things sourcing-related – the eSourcingWiki. Thanks to Mr. David Bush for being kind enough to give me a spot to load some “Best Of’s” from Procurement Central, which I finally began to do yesterday.

If you’re “cool” you’ll check it out. If you’re “cooler” you’ll contribute content – after all, by sharing ideas and best practices we all get a little smarter..

Kudos to my Oracle brothers over in Redwood Shores for a nice Q3. I was talking to a reporter about Oracle’s performance yesterday and the discussion turned to organic growth. He had an interesting observation – after 30 acquisitions the whole question around organic growth becomes uninteresting – who cares anymore? So, if you’re Oracle you just throw a big Hyperion log on the fire, turn up the music, and keep the “let’s kick SAP’s tail” party in full-swing.

I was reminded this evening why I’m such a fan of digital rights when I dropped our venerable copy of the Dances with Wolves DVD. Bye bye Kevin Costner. Point being, I’d much rather by the right to a movie than a piece of plastic that happens to contain a movie if it’s not abused.

Most businesses have long ago caught on to this trend, procuring rights instead of plastic for all manner of software used to run their business. And sometimes even hardware agreements can be structured, through leasing, into a model that focuses on the asset truly being procured instead of physical units.

But buying rights and then maintaining an iron-clad record of rights – understood through personnel turnover and as the years go by – can be tricky. What seems to be needed is akin to an asset management system, but a virtual one.

There are a large number of software packages that attack this problem, for software, for businesses. It’s a complex issue that I’d love to hear your best and worst practices on.

As for me, I’ve got to invest some time in ripping my DVDs to my hard drive before they’re all gone – and perhaps it’s time to buy new titles in iTunes. My only worry is quality – am I buying rights to the titles in the current, not-quite-as-good-as-DVD resolution or will I receive a free upgrade to high-res when the service improves?

Tatonka anyone?

We announced our A-Round of funding today. Lots more to come on this – and be sure to check-in over at the Coupa blog for additional detail.

I’ve known for awhile now, but wanted to wait for the Press Release to congratulate Don publicly for taking over as CEO of Compiere. Jorg Janke, Founder, has done an amazing job over the years building an ERP system with nothing but blood, sweat, and tears. Now it’s time for them to get big…

Don ran Supply Chain applications development at Oracle & provided a steady hand over the group for many years. It’s nice to have another ex-Oracle executive in the commercial open source neighborhood! Congratulations Don!

Every once and awhile I tune in to JanRain’s broadcast – they are the team behind the Open Source project OpenID. (Which is timely to share since I think WordPress is now OpenID compatible.) I’ve written on OpenID in the past – but to recap it allows you to use your login credentials from your favorite trusted site when logging into other sites. (i.e. use your Yahoo! login to log in to WordPress, etc). It’s like a simple version of LDAP that any site in the world can tune into.

Now the guys over at JanRain has also baked up some Jyte. It’s like an open version of MySpace (without friendship rings, etc) with a little of Wikipedia thrown in. Its special sauce is that you or others can make claims about you – and then people get to vote on whether they believe or agree with your claim.

What if we all started using this for suppliers? And what if suppliers could use it for their customers?

For example: GE Pays Really, Really Late (Thumbs Up, +1000, Thumbs Down, 0). Or how about: Grainger’s Emergency Repair Part Service Is Inexpensive (Thumbs Up, 0, Thumbs Down, 321). Fun stuff!

As a Mac enthusiast who also uses PC’s, I thought this Business 2.0 article was pretty funny. DOT bans Vista! Also Internet Explorer 7. Well, I do have some insight on the IE 7 trouble. IE 6 so blatantly violated browser standards that it required some serious coding to support. Plus it was so dominate in the market that people just wrote apps that worked on IE 6 – forget browser compatibility, it’s not important when you get 90% of the market with just 1.

Internet Explorer 7 is far more standards friendly. Said another way, it works NOTHING LIKE IE6. So as I visit Windows IT shops most of them have “No IE7″ policies in place b/c they find all their production web applications are broken. There’s a lot of short term pain here, but in the end IE7 will behave a lot closer to Firefox and other browsers who respect standards, and so these same IT shops will have more choice moving forward.

Microsoft should have produced some sort of help for IT departments needing to migrate their web applications from IE6 to IE7. And who knows, maybe they did – so by all means point me to it if it’s out there.

I received a heads-up in late January from Scot Case over at the Green Electronics Council that President Bush had signed an Executive Order requiring all federal agencies to buy EPEAT registered “green” computers.

Given that estimates are US federal agencies buy 7% of the world’s computers, this is a big deal. And I think it’s great!

Now someone needs to explain to me, in small words please, how on Earth US federal agencies can possibly need 7% of the world’s computers…