Apple and Microsoft, not surprisingly, are responding to Android’s threat in two different ways, but both are using HTML5 to compete on their own terms.

HTML5: Another wall around Apple’s garden

Those who, like I, hoped Apple would dramatically lower prices, increase developer outreach through open source and open standards, and otherwise emulate Google in order to grow its smartphone market share are going to be disappointed. The iPhone’s decreasing market share may be what Steve Jobs expected — or even wanted. Apple, after all, has built its business on emphasizing profit margins over market share. It builds a Ritz-Carlton experience, with no intention of ever competing for Holiday Inn distribution.

Yes, Apple is opening up to HTML5, but this is not at attempt to open up its system. Apple will continue to jealously guard a premium iOS experience for those developers willing to write in Objective C. Its adoption of HTML5 was purely a tactical move, meant to counter Adobe’s lock on web content. In order for Apple to maintain its control of its own ecosystem, it needs to keep other proprietary standards out.

Open standards open doors for Microsoft

Microsoft is taking the opposite tack, wanting to replicate its desktop dominance in mobile. While Windows OS is finally losing a little market share to Mac OS X, according to Gartner, Microsoft recognizes the need to win in mobile, which initially means catching up with Apple. The fastest way to gain app parity with Apple’s iOS is not by forcing developers to toe the Silverlight line, but rather by embracing an open web through HTML5.

Microsoft can always lock in customers down the road through proprietary cloud services that deliver data and more to otherwise open devices. But for now, unlike Apple, Microsoft needs a relatively open app story to make Windows 7 look less like a laggard. HTML5 provides a compelling means to this end, a more open approach than RIM’s attempt to quickly add apps to the BlacBberry by supporting Adobe’s AIR and its 3,000-plus ready-made applications.

Time will tell, however, if Microsoft can use HTML5 to wrest the mass-market crown from Google. Microsoft has already taken to the courts to try to slow Android’s momentum. Perhaps it should instead focus on besting Google’s developer appeal of openness. It’s not really in Microsoft’s DNA, but it may be the only way to make its HTML5 love-fest sound sincere enough to work.

Disclosure: I work for Canonical, a Linux vendor.

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For years, companies have looked to open source to salvage dying products, and each time these efforts have failed. Often dismally.

After all, if a product can’t make the grade as a proprietary product, it will almost certainly fare worse as an open-source product. Great open-source projects are founded on great code and robust community, two things largely lacking from failed proprietary products.

With respect to Symbian, its problems go far beyond its source code, but a lack of source code is the foundation for several of them. A year after announcing that its code would be available under an open-source license, the Symbian Foundation hadn’t actually released the code. Small wonder, then, that Symbian also couldn’t match the app store momentum of Apple, Google, or even its one-time sugar daddy, Nokia. No code, no developers.

No developers, no relevance, as its dying market share demonstrates:

Symbian: It used to be a contender

An open-source strategy generally favors challengers in a market, not incumbents. This is the genius of Google’s Android assault on Apple’s uber-closed iOS, and it is equally the reason that a swath of open-source upstarts — from Alfresco to BonitaSoft to Cloudera – has mounted successful challenges to the incumbents in their respective markets.

Open source, then, is a great way to spark or accelerate momentum. It’s a terrible way to reverse a product’s decline. If anything, it does the opposite by calling attention to the lack of interest in a project — freely visible through SourceForge or JIRA tickets or forum activity — and thereby compounding the indifference to the product.

Was open-source Symbian dead the moment it was announced? Perhaps. It certainly needed to demonstrate significant developer interest in the platform immediately upon announcing the code would be open-sourced, and then continuously thereafter. It did neither.  As a result, one by one Symbian’s key handset licensees like Samsung have dropped it for Android or other open-source alternatives. And it started way too late: by the time Symbian announced its code would be open-sourced, developer survey data already showed Android and OpenMoko interest running rampant. In the past two years, developer interest for Symbian has all but evaporated.

While interest remains relatively strong for Nokia’s Qt developer tools, it can’t compensate for fading interest in the overall Symbian platform.

Had Symbian gone open source when still strong with developers, and had the Foundation done a better job of engaging developers, it might have had a chance to survive as more than a dusty Wikipedia reference.

Open source isn’t a one-time announcement, coupled with a code drop. It’s exceptionally hard, ongoing work that requires equal parts evangelism, programming, and customer success stories to keep developers believing that their work matters. It’s especially difficult, as Drupal founder Dries Buytaert intimates, when a commercial entity gets involved, because it can frighten away community.

These principles aren’t exclusive to open source, of course. Consider Skype, for example. Skype appears to be pulling a Microsoft: turning inward, seeking to build out its own ecosystem rather than fostering a robust, third-party developer ecosystem. Microsoft is famous for its developer outreach on the enterprise side, but is equally famous for a failed go-it-alone approach in consumer technologies. Its dying brand, as CNN reports, reflects this failed strategy.

Both companies need to engage and encourage a third-party developer ecosystem. Open source is a critical way to accomplish this.

But neither they nor anyone else can hope to use open source as a purely palliative remedy for what ails them. Open source can be used to inspire and complement successful products. It can accelerate momentum. What it can’t do is resurrect dying technology products.

Disclosure: I work for Canonical, a Linux vendor. I am also a former Alfresco employee.

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It’s not that developers have abandoned Java wholesale. They haven’t. Despite years of market-share declines amongst programmers, with the rising generation of developers preferring dynamic programming languages like PHP, job growth remains healthy for Java developers. Outside the realm of market-share data, however, there is cause for concern in Java Land. What with Oracle’s apparently loose management of the Java Community Process, Apple’s rejection of Java altogether, and Google’s sidestepping mainline Java for Android, Java’s future looks a bit shaky at present.

Intrigue at the Top

For one thing, as much as people may have complained about Sun’s guarded control of the Java Community Process (JCP), concern is growing that Oracle’s commitment to Java may benefit it more than it benefits the wider Java community. Oracle, perhaps recognizing that it had a PR battle to win, has repeatedly emphasized Java’s central importance to it, leading the Java community to mostly give Oracle the benefit of the doubt.

Well, until Oracle nominated little-known Hologic to the JCP’s executive committee, the body tasked with “guiding the evolution of Java.” The executive committee is supposed to represent “major stakeholders and a representative cross-section of the Java Community,” but prominent members of the Java community, including Stephen Colebourne, a prominent Java developer within the JCP, called foul on the inclusion of Hologic, a company little known in Java circles. Colebourne accused Oracle of stacking the JCP deck in its favor, given Oracle’s longstanding, cozy partnership with Hologic.

While Eclipse Foundation Marketing Director Ian Skerrett is quick to suggest this looks more like diversification of the committee than stacking it, he also points to a growing distrust Oracle has engendered by largely remaining silent in the face of criticism. Oracle’s management of the JCP has already caused one JCP executive committee member, Doug Lea, to reject further association with the JCP.

“Dear Oracle, get a clue,” suggests Skerrett.

No Room for Java in a Mac World

Maybe in addition to a clue, Oracle needs a developer platform. After all, this past week news broke that Apple had decided to discontinue development of its version of Java for the Mac. Apple CEO Steve Jobs put the onus on Oracle to develop Java for the Mac if it wanted Java to remain available to Mac developers.

But this is unlikely, as Java founder James Gosling writes, because “OS X has piles of secret APIs” which make the Mac version of Java difficult to implement without significant Apple involvement. OSI director and former Sun open-source guru Simon Phipps also points out that this move effectively leaves Mac-toting developers with a hard choice: stick with their Mac and largely abandon Java or move to a PC.

To add insult to injury, Apple’s new Mac App Store rules give Java the boot. Apparently, there’s no room at the Apple inn for Java.

True, Mac OS X still commands an anemic share of the overall personal computing industry, but as any attendee of a developer conference will tell you, it has significant traction with developers. Apple is betting that it can convince developers to “write once for Apple, run everywhere for Apple,” and it may have some success, which leaves Java fighting to stay relevant with the developer demographic. Chris Adamson, an industry consultant, believes Java’s disappearance from the Mac means very little, but removing the second-largest development platform for developers isn’t going to do enterprise Java any favors.

Stick a Fork in it

Nor does mainstream Java fare much better in mobile, with Apple ignoring or barring it, and Google Android effectively forking it. In fact, Oracle has also stirred a fair amount of ill-will within the open-source Java community by suing Google over this Android fork (“Dalvik”).

All of which leaves Java alive and still well in enterprise computing, but facing strong headwinds as Oracle takes it into the future. BonitaSoft CEO Miguel Valdes-Faura, however, feels that there’s room for optimism:

Java is facing a real challenge right now, but I don’t see it so much as being under siege as it’s facing a transitory period. There is ample evidence that suggests Java’s foundation remains strong: from the number of enterprise products being developed in Java — the associated Java developer jobs — to the growing adoption of Java by Open Source communities.

He could be right, but now seems like an ideal time for Oracle to rally its Java troops with a truly open JCP. The company recently made a big move in this direction by bringing its long-time nemesis, IBM, more firmly into its Java camp through an OpenJDK partnership. Some, like Lea, feel that OpenJDK is the only future for Java, given Oracle’s heavy-handed stewardship of the JCP:

For the core Java platform…the only existing vehicle for which I can foresee a useful role for the academic and research community is OpenJDK. OpenJDK is a shared-source, not shared-spec body, so is superficially not an alternative at all. But at this point, a Linux-style model for collaboratively developed common source is likely to be more effective in meeting upcoming challenges than is the JCP.

Oracle needs to head off this criticism with open, candid involvement in the Java community. It needs to communicate its plans for Java, and then listen for feedback. Oracle needs to rally the troops around an open Java flag, rather than sitting passively as Apple and others dismiss Java, which is far too easy to do when Java comes to mean “Oracle’s property” rather than community property.

Disclosure: I work for Canonical, a Linux vendor.

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It’s a bit ironic that such a closed platform as Apple’s iOS, and its accompanying App Store, welcomes open-source software at all. Yes, the Apple iPhone SDK states, “If Your Application includes any FOSS, You agree to comply with all applicable FOSS licensing terms.” But the platform itself, and the App Store rules, effectively block adherence to this stipulation by removing the ability to access, read, and redistribute underlying source code for apps.

It’s a core part of Apple’s mantra, as repeated by Apple CEO Steve Jobs this week, that “integrated will trump fragmented [Android] every time.”

This integrated approach is at odds with the more free-spirited, open-source approach, as reflected in new skirmishes between open-source advocates and Apple or app developers. For example, the Free Software Foundation recently filed a complaint against Apple for its distribution of the open-source GNU Go game without providing its underlying source code, as required by the GNU General Public License (GPL). The FSF believes Apple’s App Store rules violate Section 6 of the GPL, which indicates that “a redistributor of the licensed program may not impose further restrictions on the recipients to copy, distribute, or modify the program.” Apple doesn’t allow any of those freedoms.

Unsurprisingly, rather than confront the question, Apple simply dumped the GNU Go from the App Store.

But the issue won’t die, thanks to a similar concern arising over The Battle for Wesnoth. It’s a tricky situation, because in this case, Wesnoth’s developers — at least, many of them – do not favor the FSF’s position, and believe that the App Store regulations do not violate either the spirit or letter of GPL licensing.

As an interesting corollary to this legal argument, Wesnoth developer David White defends open-source applications on the App Store because they funnel money and interest back into open-source development:

• Wesnoth has obtained significant revenue streams which have been used to fund the development of art and other content in areas in which Wesnoth needs improvement to compete with commercial offerings.
• FLOSS [Free, libre, open-source software] gaming has been exposed to a significant audience which might be otherwise unaware of it.
• Other FLOSS games are now also interested in distribution on the same platform.

In large part, these funds are possible precisely because the App Store regulations make it onerous to get Wesnoth on the iPhone/iPad in any other way other than through the original Wesnoth development team. Apple doesn’t allow multiple entries for the same app within the App Store, and Apple’s policies make it difficult to replicate the open-source code.

Can developers get the source code from the app developer’s website? Absolutely. Can they recompile it and distribute it to jailbroken iOS devices? Of course. It’s open source. It’s the platform that’s closed, and closure provides the opportunity to better monetize the code.

The platform effectively makes the open-source app proprietary without a single line of code licensed under a restrictive license.

This isn’t actually new. Think of Google. As Om Malik has written, infrastructure is Google’s key competitive advantage. Guess what? That same infrastructure that makes it possible to run open source at dramatic scale and efficiency is the very same infrastructure that makes it virtually impossible for anyone else to make any use of this open-source software.

Because Google runs this software internally, it isn’t required to release it.  Even if Google released every single line of code, small competitors couldn’t replicate its services, if for no other reason than they couldn’t afford the hundreds of thousands of servers necessary.

More fundamentally, even big competitors couldn’t replicate Google, for the reasons Tim O’Reilly pointed out at the Open Source Business Conference in 2009:

Tim asked a question to the audience: “Could anyone in the Open Source community build the infrastructure to deliver Google Voice Search?” The response: a stony silence. The implication? Vendor lock-in is [no] longer about proprietary source code. It’s about massive, hard-to-replicate data sets — making Google a potential Microsoft of the next decade.

Hardware and data make Google’s source code essentially useless to anyone but Google. Does this make it less valuable as a member of the wider open-source community? Hardly. Indeed, as I’ve said before, Google is the world’s largest “open-source company,” and a better open-source citizen than most. Why? Because Google can afford to give away mountains of code because its sales aren’t threatened by competitors (or customers) taking the services enabled by its code without paying.

Smaller software developers lack Google’s scale, of course, but may be able to achieve some of the same effects by writing applications to run on closed platforms like Apple’s.

Wesnoth’s developers don’t appear to have been motivated by the desire to sell more games because of Apple’s restrictive policies. Rather, they simply wanted the maximum audience for their creation. But the closed nature of the App Store is helping them to both find more users and more paying customers, all while leaving source code fully available for those who actually want it: developers.

Disclosure: I work for Canonical, a Linux vendor.

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At least, that’s the message conveyed by the report by the Linux Foundation, in partnership with Yeoman Technology Group (please see my disclosure below). The two surveyed 387 IT professionals, with some surprising findings:

• About 79 percent of companies are adding more Linux instead of other operating systems in the next five years, compared to a mere 21.3 percent which expect to add more Windows servers over the same period.
• In the shorter term, things aren’t much better for Microsoft. Only 41.2 percent of respondents plan to add more Windows servers in the next year, and 43.6 percent expect to decrease or maintain their number of Windows servers over the next year.
• More respondents reported that their Linux deployments are migrations from Windows than any other source, including Unix migrations.
• Two-thirds of users surveyed say that their Linux deployments are brand new deployments.
• Almost as many (60.2 percent) respondents say they will use Linux for more mission-critical workloads over the next 12 months.
• Drivers for Linux adoption extend beyond cost; technical superiority is the primary driver, followed by cost and then security.
• At 86.5 percent, a vast majority of respondents report that Linux is improving, and 58.4 percent say their CIOs see Linux as more strategic to the organization as compared to three years ago.
• Among the early adopters who are operating in cloud environments, 70.3 percent use Linux as their primary platform, while only 18.3 percent use Windows. Interestingly, only 26 percent plan on moving applications/services to the cloud over the next year.

It’s not surprising that Linux would cut into Unix market share. Both are based on the same technology, requiring a similar skillset, while Linux costs considerably less due to its community development model. When you have IBM, Intel, Oracle, and others contributing free labor to develop Linux, vendors can sell it for little to nothing.

But cost can’t adequately explain this apparent shift from Windows to Linux. After all, in some scenarios, Linux may actually be more expensive than Windows, as Savio Rodrigues highlights when comparing Red Hat Enterprise Linux pricing to Windows Server pricing on Amazon’s EC2. Not surprisingly, Microsoft has its own pitch on why enterprises should choose Windows over Linux, arguing that cost considerations favor Windows, not Linux.

The problem for Microsoft is it’s no longer a matter of cost. As the survey results demonstrate, 67.5 percent of survey respondents cite “technical superiority” as the reason they choose Linux. Microsoft may still have the edge in terms of lowering the bar to development and deployment through development tools and the like, but Linux appears to have replaced Unix as the operating system enterprises trust with their mission-critical workloads.

Granted, the Linux Foundation is hardly an unbiased observer: A segment of the survey respondents include members of the Linux Foundation’s End User Council. But it’s hard to impugn the credibility of even that part of the survey’s demographic, given that it includes companies like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Bristol-­Myers Squibb, NTT, Dreamworks, ADP, McKinsey and Co., the U.S. Department of Defense, Goodrich, and other companies that have big investments in both Linux and Windows.

That said, it’s interesting that the original survey included 1,948 respondents, but the Linux Foundation only reports on the largest 387 respondents. Perhaps a different story of adoption emerges from the smaller 1,561 respondents? It’s very possible that Linux has not had as impressive traction against easy-to-use Windows in smaller enterprises as it has in the more self-sufficient larger enterprises. Microsoft’s own research (PDF) indicates that Windows significantly outpaces Linux in SMB adoption.

At any rate, Microsoft has spent years trying to dampen Linux’s momentum through patent-suit sabre rattling. This tactic has failed. Microsoft needs a new strategy, one that includes more R&D and fewer lawyers.

Disclosure: I work for Canonical, a Linux vendor.

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It’s also not clear what the company could have done differently. Lawsuits, after all, appear to be par for the course in the mobile market, with at least 20 lawsuits being flung between companies as diverse as Kodak, Oracle, Toshiba, Samsung, and RIM.

But Android particularly annoys Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle, albeit for very different reasons.

Apple, design purist that it is, disdains the momentum Android has seen. Apple is, of course, the early winner in the smartphone market, and its lawsuit against device manufacturer HTC seems to be a means to slow Android’s advances. It hasn’t worked. Not content to sit by and watch its market share erode as developers flock to open-source Android, however, Apple has loosened its grip on developers and is making a serious attempt to win in the market, not simply the courts.

Microsoft, a serial underachiever in mobile, despises Android for the same reason it has long wrung its hands over Linux servers: Microsoft doesn’t know how to compete with free. Google gives Android away, but Microsoft has repeatedly stressed that patent-encumbered Android isn’t free. As Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told The Wall Street Journal, “Android has a patent fee. It’s not like Android’s free. You do have to license patents.”

This is the same strategy Microsoft has employed in the server market, signing up licensees to its patent portfolio based on vague FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) that Linux violates its patents. If Microsoft can force Google to license its patents, it can make it harder for Google to keep Android free.

It’s by no means clear that Microsoft will win. As TechDirt notes, at least some of the patent claims made are absurd. But it’s possible, as Mary Jo Foley speculates, that Microsoft is hoping to boost interest in Windows 7 by creating FUD around Android. Good luck with that.

The most interesting of the Android patent lawsuits, however, is Oracle’s, in large part because it seems the least motivated by a desire to cripple Android. I’ve written that Oracle sued Google to skim some of Google’s mobile money for itself, and I continue to believe this is part of Oracle’s rationale.

But there’s more to the story than that. Much more.

First, Oracle inherited the lawsuit from Sun. It didn’t initiate it. Sun was actively preparing to sue Google over Android in order to protect Java. Oracle was apprised of the lawsuit during its short due diligence process prior to its acquisition of Sun, and decided to move forward with it, but the suit was founded under Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s leadership, not Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s.

Second, the lawsuit is likely more related to Oracle’s ability to make money from licensing Java ME generally, and not specifically to Google. Indeed, sources inside Sun/Oracle have told me that negotiations with Google involved roughly $0.00 changing hands. The problem wasn’t one of negotiating a license fee for Java and its associated patents. The problem was more fundamental: Sun (then Oracle) had the option to let Google attempt its end-run around Java ME licensing restrictions, but undoubtedly it would then come under increased pressure from RIM and other licensees not afforded that leeway. To keep its Java ME licensees happy, Sun (Oracle) couldn’t afford to allow Google to snub the Java ME licensing requirements.

So why didn’t Google just go along with Sun and take a fee-free license to use Java ME? Because doing so would have required Google to keep its Java implementation consistent with the standard instead of forking it with its Dalvik virtual machine. As much as Google might talk about standards, Google has much to gain by keeping Android applications on the Android platform, rather than allowing them to run on competing platforms like RIM.

Google has now answered Oracle’s complaint, denying all allegations and eviscerating Oracle for hypocrisy over the open-sourcing of Java. What Google doesn’t do, however, is reveal its own reasons for wanting Java open-sourced, which I believe have much to do with forking Java and little to do with any particular affection for open source.

It thus does little to answer the critiques laid out in Oracle’s response to Google’s formal answer to Oracle’s complaint:

In developing Android, Google chose to use Java code without obtaining a license. Additionally, it modified the technology so it is not compliant with Java’s central design principle to ‘write once and run anywhere.’ Google’s infringement and fragmentation of Java code not only damages Oracle, it clearly harms consumers, developers and device manufacturers.

Whether Oracle is being hypocritical or not is immaterial. Whether Java should be open-sourced or not is also immaterial. Google’s contention that openness is essential to the mobile industry is also immaterial.

What is material is Oracle’s accusation that Google chose to circumvent the Java ME licensing process which RIM and others abide. That is what is at issue, not Google’s appeals to the open-source crowd.

Ironically, then, Oracle, perhaps the greediest of Android’s patent foes, may well have the purest motives in suing over Android. Of the three litigants, only Oracle seems to actually be defending its patents, rather than attempting to throttle Android’s momentum.

Image courtesy flickr user miusam-ck

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This isn’t because Microsoft is somehow smarter than Apple, but rather because the underlying dynamics of the technology industry have fundamentally changed. In brief, the technology world is increasingly embracing “write” communities, as Jono Bacon calls them, not simply “read” communities. Open source may have kickstarted this trend, but open APIs and open data are taking it to new heights.

Read communities aren’t characterized by a dearth of developers, but rather by what those developers can do on a given platform. After all, few can claim to sing to developers as eloquently as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer does, but there’s a (big) difference between talking to developers and letting them talk back. In your code. On your platform.

As noted, it’s telling that the shelf life of Apple’s dominance is much shorter than Microsoft’s decades-long dominance. Microsoft, after all, never had to deal with competing write communities, as Apple does with Google Android. Major developers like Facebook find Android more flexible: It allows them to write into and draw from the platform the capabilities they need.

Hence Apple, once the no-brainer first choice for developers despite its heavy hand on the development process, is increasingly losing out to the more free-spirited Android, which analysts see claiming over 50 percent of the smartphone market in just a few short years. Apple has responded by loosening its grip on iOS application developers, but it may be too little, too late.

Android isn’t perfect, of course, and still suffers from a worsening fragmentation problem. But its comparatively open nature makes it an inviting alternative to the closed iOS development. As but one example, try to get meaningful analytics data out of the iPhone. If you’re Apple, you can do that. If you’re anyone else, particularly Flurry, you’re out of luck.

Apple giveth, and Apple taketh away.

Contrast that with Google Android, which has an open-source logging/analytics tool developers can use called Logcat. Android is open source, which prevents Google from exercising control over how developers collect analytics data on Android devices. While one can make an argument that it’s good to have potentially sensitive analytics information guarded well by a responsible party like Apple, given Apple’s record of somewhat arbitrary and heavy-handed control over its platform, I’d vote for freedom on this one.

This isn’t just an Apple vs. Google story, either. It’s just one example of how innovation happens generally, no matter the industry. As Steven Johnson points out in The Wall Street Journal:

[I]deas are works of bricolage. They are, almost inevitably, networks of other ideas. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape. We like to think of our ideas as a $40,000 incubator, shipped direct from the factory, but in reality they’ve been cobbled together with spare parts that happened to be sitting in the garage.

The problem, as Johnson goes on to highlight, is that governments have largely pursued innovation in the past 100 years by doing the exact opposite of what is actually required to foster such innovation. The same is equally true of individual corporations like Apple or Microsoft:

[I]ntellectual property, trade secrets, proprietary technology, [and] top-secret R&D labs…share a founding assumption: that in the long run, innovation will increase if you put restrictions on the spread of new ideas, because those restrictions will allow the creators to collect large financial rewards from their inventions. And those rewards will then attract other innovators to follow in their path.

The problem with these closed environments is that they make it more difficult to explore the adjacent possible, because they reduce the overall network of minds that can potentially engage with a problem, and they reduce the unplanned collisions between ideas originating in different fields. This is why a growing number of large organizations—businesses, nonprofits, schools, government agencies—have begun experimenting with more open models of idea exchange.

It’s this sort of open exchange of ideas and code that leads to economic historian Eckhard Höffner to conclude that Germany closed the gap on England’s industrial revolution in a short span of time due to the wide-open nature of the country’s publishing market in the mid-1800s. Weak copyright law enforcement sent innovation into overdrive in Germany, while a comparative monopoly on publishing in England stymied that country’s early industrial lead.

Eventually, Germany followed England’s lead, and innovation slowed there, too, but ramped up in the United States, where “borrowing” the works of Dickens and other great European authors, not to mention technological inventions, was standard operating procedure. European creators didn’t like the Yankee “thieves,” but loose IP protection led to greater adoption of their works, industrial and cultural progress, and the authors still managed to get paid.

Since then, the industrialized West, including the United States, has increasingly clamped down on intellectual property in the interest of fostering it, but with the opposite effect. As numerous studies attest, patents and other intellectual property tools have slowed innovation, not accelerated it. Industrial innovation has accordingly moved to areas like Brazil and China where IP protection is light.

This isn’t just a matter for economists, but also for business strategists. It’s possible, for example, that Oracle’s integrated approach to product development will prove successful, but likely not over the long term. Such an all-consuming, go-it-alone approach breeds powerful enemies, including within one’s own customer base. It certainly creates distrust within the developer ecosystem.

Oracle may profess not to care, but competitors like Microsoft increasingly recognize that they must care. Software developer Dave Newman declares that “The .Net community operates in a non-collaborative vacuum,” and then announces he’s abandoning .Net. Microsoft can’t afford to lose too many Dave Newmans.

Neither can Oracle.

In today’s market, companies need community. They need adoption of their APIs. No company is smart enough to come up with all innovation on its own, so the best companies will create read/write platforms through which third-party developers have the flexibility and distribution to reach customers.

Open source is an essential part of this, but isn’t sufficient of itself to crown any particular vendor or technology king. Linux is rapidly taking over in the mobile market, but has yet to make a dent on the general consumer desktop. But the fact that open source isn’t sufficient of itself to decide a winner is no reason that platform vendors, specifically, and technology vendors, generally, shouldn’t be making the most of open source to enhance their attractiveness to third-party developers.

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After all, it’s not as if office suites are playing center stage in technology innovation. Not even Microsoft, which has owned the office productivity suite market for decades, has bothered to release meaningful changes to the desktop version of Office this century. So why should we expect more from The Document Foundation?

Supporters will likely cite Microsoft’s dominance as the very reason to look elsewhere for innovation. Indeed, The Document Foundation has declared its aim to channel innovation back into the office productivity market:

The Foundation will be the cornerstone of a new ecosystem where individuals and organizations can contribute to and benefit from the availability of a truly free office suite. It will generate increased competition and choice for the benefit of customers and drive innovation in the office suite market.

Perhaps. But why start from the paradigm of 1980s technology? Nothing on the Foundation’s new website, or in any of its press materials, suggests that the Foundation’s purpose is to do anything more than free OpenOffice development from the control of one company, Oracle. There’s no discussion of the possibilities of integration with the web. Screenshots look an awful lot like the OpenOffice suite that LibreOffice claims to leave behind.

This isn’t surprising, given that the new LibreOffice has only recently divorced itself from OpenOffice, not to mention the Foundation’s own proclamation that it’s not looking to fork OpenOffice, but rather for “continuity” with its OpenOffice past. Given that it starts from the same client-heavy code base and mentality, how can it hope to truly liberate OpenOffice from the shackles of the desktop on which it was born?

If anyone is advancing the office productivity market, it’s Google Apps  or Zoho Office, which were born on the web. It’s unclear what a web-light, client-heavy Microsoft Office clone can hope to achieve in terms of real innovation. And why are we worried about replicating Microsoft Office functionality, which has long been the aim of the OpenOffice community? While some Excel spreadsheet jocks may live in Microsoft Office, very few of the rest of us give it more than a cursory glance on a regular basis. It’s not that we’re not engaged in “office productivity,” either. We just work differently now.

We email. We SMS. We Facebook. We IM. Or perhaps we crop photos in iPhoto  or make movies in iMovie. What we don’t do, or rarely do, is open a Word document to create a stale relic of communication. Business moves too fast these days to open attachments. Again, yes, there are people who live in documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. But these people are not you, most of the time.

Real innovation today is occurring at the intersection between cloud data and client-side code, as TripAdvisor demonstrates. And it’s happening in the very definition of rich-client applications, as such applications become more mobile and more web-friendly through the innovations of Strobe Inc. and others.

In short, there are far better uses of The Document Foundation’s developer talents than replicating Microsoft’s tired Office legacy. I think a better OpenOffice is a worthy goal, and support that. After all, enterprises will rely on Office and documents for years to come, even as they keep the green-screen terminals around to support outdated applications.

But the future belongs to the web, and The Document Foundation’s very name suggests a backward-looking focus, not the future focus that will keep it relevant. The web is built upon open source, and many of its most interesting innovations have arisen from the open-source community. I’d love to see The Document Foundation help move the conversation around “documents” to the web that is supplanting the need for relics of the way we once worked.

Note: My company, Canonical, supports The Document Foundation. The views expressed here are completely my own.

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After all, there’s no real mystery to Novell’s business (see disclosure below). Most of its legacy product portfolio is just that: a legacy of a bygone era when Novell was king of the networking hill, with a suite of services built up to sustain and advance that leadership. Products like GroupWise and Zenworks, renamed and reorganized constantly to make them appear fresh and new, have mainly sat on the shelf, as financial results demonstrate, quarter after quarter.

The crown jewel — Novell’s SUSE Linux business — has never gotten the mileage it deserved, shackled by Novell’s weak corporate brand. It was propped up only by a desperate deal with Microsoft that cut SUSE’s appeal to the very technical crowd that was best positioned to help Novell stage the bottom-up coup into corporate computing that Red Hat has enjoyed. Microsoft topped up its Novell deal once for $100 million, but has shown no signs of doing so again.

Nevertheless, there’s still plenty of strategic value in Novell’s Linux business, but perhaps even more in its patent portfolio.

Novell has a rich and varied patent portfolio that touches on everything from core networking technology to office productivity suites and beyond. Novell has patents that cut to the heart of Microsoft’s Office business. Indeed, it has patents that cut to the heart of many different businesses.

This is why Red Hat has remained interested in Novell, despite a lack of competitive threat from SUSE. At all. In a world of rough-and-tumble patent litigation, Red Hat can’t continue to bring vague rally-the-troops, anti-patent jingoism to a knife fight. Yes, it has done well to support the Open Invention Network and other patent collectives, but having its own defensive patent war chest would go a long way toward securing its thriving Linux, virtualization, and middleware businesses from latent patent suits.

The problem, however, is valuing that patent portfolio, especially in light of the dwindling value in Novell’s other assets. No one wants to pay a premium for Zenworks, for example, simply to get the associated patents, but a buyer may not have much of an option.

Stacked against this patent interest is the strategic value Novell’s Linux business holds for VMware. Indeed, I see the virtualization vendor as the most likely home for Novell, both because the deal wouldn’t raise the same antitrust concerns that the combination of Red Hat’s and Novell’s Linux assets would, and because it’s clear how VMware would monetize Novell’s SUSE business:

It wouldn’t.

Not directly, anyway. VMware sells virtualization and cloud services, not operating systems, but it increasingly depends upon Linux and already works with Novell to virtualize SUSE and distribute it to VMware customers. Buying SUSE wouldn’t give VMware the developer outreach it’s sought in its Springsource, Zimbra, and RabbitMQ acquisitions, but it would give VMware a very solid Linux distribution that’s well-engineered and brings with it industry-wide ISV certifications.

It’s possible that VMware (or another buyer) could buy Novell’s patent-poor Linux business, leaving a private equity firm or other buyer to take over the remainder of Novell’s business, including its significant patent portfolio. However, until the parties involved can figure out how to fairly price the rising value of Novell’s patent portfolio combined with the decreasing value of its product portfolio, no deal will be consummated.

Disclosure: I was part of Novell’s original Linux Business Office and now work for a rival, Canonical.

After all, Google’s Android already claims 25 percent of mobile web usage, and is on track to dominate over half the smartphone market, according to a new report from Piper Jaffray. So where’s the Android Fund?

Yes, Android has been slower to pay dividends to its third-party developer community than Apple’s iOS, in part because of its platform fragmentation problems. However, this strikes me as a transitory problem: one that is being resolved by Google, and that entrepreneurial developers are likely to help fix. There’s simply too much money at stake for the problem not to be solved.

All of which leads me to believe we’re not far off from the time that startups will pitch VCs on their new Android-only software. Whatever the one-upmanship between Steve Jobs and Google over which company is activating the most handsets, it’s clear that Android is shipping in huge quantities, and its momentum is accelerating, while the Piper Jaffray report referenced above predicts Apple’s iOS will plateau at 20 to 30 percent of the smartphone market. That’s nothing to sneeze at, of course, but if Android looks likely to top 50 percent, which is the smarter long-term bet?

Android also comes with the added benefit of being very developer-friendly. It’s not perfect but its openness is a welcome reprieve from Apple’s ‘Big Brother’ approach. Noted Firefox developer Joe Hewitt calls it “really flexible, agnostic, and developer-friendly…[like] Windows.”

That’s not a critique. Hewitt, in addition to his browser claim-to-fame, is also the developer who originally took Facebook to the iPhone. He’s been involved in some exceptional projects, and recognizes Windows as an exceptional developer platform, a compliment he’s willing to offer Android despite its shortcomings, particularly in the area of tools.

Windows, for all its stodginess, managed to take at least 95 percent of the desktop market. I suspect Android will claim quite a decent share of the mobile market, too.

Again, Android is far from perfect, but it offers developers some pleasantries that iOS, and more to the point, Apple, doesn’t provide. Android development is done in Java, as opposed to Apple’s once-obscure Objective C. Java may be old-school, but it’s still a primary development platform for a wide swath of developers, particularly in enterprise IT, which does a great deal of the world’s application development.

Android’s restrictions on how applications work are based on the carrier, rather than Apple’s often arbitrary usage policies related not just to application submission, but also to location, logging of user clickstream and content. That kind of information can be manna from heaven for developers as it helps them fine-tune their apps to meet user needs, but iOS is largely a black box, whereas Android is an open book.

For these reasons, and for the ease of working with Google compared to the Apple alternative, we should begin seeing more developers start with Android, rather than iOS. And it will happen soon. Yes, despite Android’s fragmentation problem (though for the company that overcomes this fragmentation for Google, there’s a lot of money to be made). Yes, despite the uncoolness of its Java approach, or even the Oracle lawsuit-inspired cloud hovering over Android.

When you have big market share and an open approach to development and deployment, the developers will flock. If your startup is on the cusp of making this decision, or already has, please share your experience with us in the comments below.

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