Planet eBox

Much time has gone since my last post, being the release of eBox Platform 1.4 and our (since yesterday) on-line store two of the latest and most interesting news.

eBox Platform 1.4 release has been a great step forward, more than 20.000 downloads in less than a couple of weeks are a clear evidence of the interest arisen. The huge increase of visits to our websites, partnership and support requests are the outcome.

On the other hand, our on-line store is bundled with the release of 2 new products we have been testing for the last 2 months: eBox  backup storage and eBox VoIP cheap calls.

As a consequence, eBox portfolio has growth and gained visibility, we are selling directly to our installed base and to and through our partner network.

First, we are offering directly to eBox’s users:

1. Technical support, one-time eBox support and safe migration from 1.2 to 1.4 support.
2. Subscription services, such as eBox backup storage, eBox VoIP prepaid credit and eBox Control Center.
3. Our first book “eBox for network administrators”! (only in Spanish currently though)

Tech support offered directly to eBox’s installed base is two fold: on the hand, helping SOHO users to solve punctual issues and doubts; on the other hand, assist companies on real-time to migrate from the good 1.2 to the great 1.4.

eBox backup storage is for those SOHO and SMEs which desire to keep their data safe off-site at a low price, and eBox VoIP is for those interested in making  abroad and international calls at very cheap rates, from their desktop using a softphone.

eBox Control Center gives the possibility to those companies with a number of deployments (e.g. several branches) the ability to monitor and administer their eBox Platform servers from a simple web interface.

Secondly, we are offering to and through our partners network:

1. To our partners: certified training, 3rd level technical support and eBox Control Center subscriptions.
2. Through our partners to their clients: eBox backup storage and eBox VoIP credit.

The certified training warranties both the partner and his customers a quality service by a qualified technician. 3rd level technical support brings them eBox developers on when required (issues, complex configurations). eBox Control Center provides our partners with a web easy-to-use and simple tool to monitor and administer their eBox Platform deployments.

eBox backup storage and VoIP credit grants our partners a recurrent revenue, while growing their portfolio within a win-win relation.

Our portfolio will include new SaaS products bundled to eBox Platform, but in the meanwhile we have tailored an offering for every eBox user, whether big or small. Compelling enough?

I was searching for a solution to a small Spotify bug and found this user praise: Spotify is what napster was for ten years ago.

Then another user replied:

how do you mean?

ten years ago Napster was an illegal channel for sharing and downloading music, built p2p.

are you ironic and i missed the punchline?

Fair enough. But still this guy had a point. Spotify is not the same thing as Napster, but another milestone in the Music Industry transformation.

Napster started a revolution. I’m not talking about piracy, I’m talking about spreading the message that the current formats were obsolete and people had different musical needs. The success of the iTunes Store is a good proof of that.

Spotify, as I see it, is the beginning of the end of that revolution. Say goodbye to useless CDs and DVDs. Goodbye to paying for an album with a couple of good songs and crap for filling.

The next logical step would be a Spotify for video.

The only thing I’ve seen coming from the (music and movie) industry in the last 10 years has been the message that piracy was illegal, and immoral, and that it would kill the music and movies. Maybe they have a point, maybe not.

Recently, they’ve been trying to ban download sites in Spain. What then? Without P2P:

• I can only get movies on theaters (when/where they want) or DVD (how they want). Theaters are expensive (especially if you account for most of the movies not being worth the price) and I just don’t see myself going to a store or having to wait for a DVD to arrive to watch a movie
• If you want movies in VO, there are little options. Thankfully we have now one cinema playing VO movies in our town, but still not enough
• If you want TV Shows on VO you have to wait until the DVD comes out. Most of the successful shows are on TV, but delayed for weeks (or even months) and in Spanish

I found a quote yesterday that summed it up pretty well:

“People don’t go out of their way to pirate movies and TV programs; they’re not intrinsically bad people. They do it because often it’s quicker and easier than legitimate means. The quicker the film and TV industries recognise this and make it as easy to buy legal content as it is to download illegitimate content, the more likely they are to stem the flow.”

But I believe if they shut up for a minute and listen, they’d realize there’s people willing to pay, but they are not selling to them.

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Looking back at 2009, it seems I haven’t been taking so many pictures as I did in 2008, but I see more variety. Here are some of those, some I feel proud of, some bring some good memories and some just make me smile

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< borrowed from Wikipedia >Disruptive technologies are innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by being lower priced (”low-end disruption”) or designed for a different set of consumers (”new-market disruption”). Disruptive technologies are particularly threatening to the leaders of an existing market, because they are competition coming from an unexpected direction.

In low-end disruption, the disruptor is focused initially on serving the least profitable customer, who is happy with a good enough product. This type of customer is not willing to pay premium for enhancements in product functionality. Once the disruptor has gained foot hold in this customer segment, it seeks to improve its profit margin. To get higher profit margins, the disruptor needs to enter the segment where the customer is willing to pay a little more for higher quality. To ensure this quality in its product, the disruptor needs to innovate. The incumbent will not do much to retain its share in a not so profitable segment, and will move up-market and focus on its more attractive customers. After a number of such encounters, the incumbent is squeezed into smaller markets than it was previously serving. And then finally the disruptive technology meets the demands of the most profitable segment and drives the established company out of the market. An example of low-end disruption is the way digital photography has largely replaced film photography.</ borrowed from Wikipedia>

No market is shielded against disruptive technologies, and the market of SMB servers is no exception. In fact, it shows all the conditions for such a disruption to happen, as it is a market in which:

• There is a clear leader (Microsoft)
• With a mature product (Windows Small Business Server)
• Over-provisioned product, providing more functionality than needed and overwhelming end users by the plethora of features
• Established on a continuous, evolutionary innovation cycle
• With little or no commercial interest in the lower segments of the market (WsSBS has no product or pricing segmentation for customers under 75 employees)
• With a strong motivation in abandoning the less profitable customers and focus in the more profitable ones (rising the license price by 80% is forcing customers in the low-end to look for alternatives)

Moreover, Linux and the open source tools for network management (Samba, Postfix, Squid, Snort, eGroupware, Spamassasin, ClamAV, etc) have a huge disruptive potential in the SMB server market, as they bring a great advantage in pricing (in fact, they are free). Besides, similarly to other disruptive technologies, they started offering a lower level of functionality than their closed source alternatives, but they have evolved and caught up or even surpassed them in many markets (close to 90% of the supercomputers in the world are based on Linux, which is a good indicator of the quality level this technology has reached).

However, in spite of these conditions, open source solutions have a very low presence in the market of SMB servers. The reason is simple: for a server solution to enter the SMBs, it needs all its components to be tightly integrated and be easy to administrate. SMBs do not have resources nor time to deploy complex high-performance solutions, so highly integrated products such as WsSBS cover pretty well SMBs’ technological needs.

This is where solutions such as eBox Platform, developed after the integration of standard open source components, have the required disruptive potential to change the market balance. On the other hand, as the software integrating these components is also open source, there are additional advantages, both in development costs (users community greatly helps reducing the effort needed for design, development and testing) and in sales and promotion costs (due to the word-of-mouth effect generated by the community and the option to try the product without previously paying for it). Thanks to this, it is possible to compete with the market leader with a lower cost structure, turning thus the market of lower-end customers profitable.

Finally, as it is not possible to use a traditional license-based business model, there is need to be innovative in the value proposition and bring it closer to customer’s needs. For us the solution came in the form of SaaS model (access to the eBox Control Center, offered mainly for VARs and MSPs) and subscription services (disaster recovery, cheap VoIP calls, security audits, reports and alerts, etc), which are not offered by the market leader.

In summary, the key points to disrupt the market of SMB servers are:

• Focus the product initially in the lower-end of the market, to later improve in functionality and start growing in the market stack
• Center the innovation effort in improving system integration and task automation, as well as usability and easiness of administration
• Use open source methodologies for development, distribution and commercialization of the product, generating a user community around the project
• Develop the value proposition in technologies and services that allow for a better convenience of use, such as SaaS or subscription to remote services

After seven months of the 0.6 release, ANSTE 0.7 is finally out. The project has been a bit abandoned because I have been very busy working on eBox.

Some of the new features were implemented time ago, but I was waiting for a big one for the new release, and precisely my work at eBox Technologies has brought me the opportunity to do it.  We are adding multi-gateway support to eBox with DHCP and PPPoE interfaces (currently it only supported it with static ones).

With this feature implemented eBox will take a big step forward to become the reference in the open source small business server market.

Now ANSTE is capable of easily simulate DHCP and PPPoE routers, this way we can automatize all the testing of the new features.

Here is the complete list of new features and fixes:

• Added new router types with dhcp and pppoe
• Added user-extensions and single-window settings for Selenium
• Now -wait-fail option gives the opportunity of retry a test
• Added new protocol and firefox-profile settings for Selenium
• Added precondition attributes (var and eq) to <host> test elements
• Added <precondition> element to include <test> and <host> only if
  condition is satisfied
• Bugfix: use flock for allowing only one instance of anste
• Added name of the user that executed ANSTE on the HTML report
• Bugfix: missing HTML report generation time
• Added scripts executed to the test results

You can get the anste package from the usual repository:

deb http://people.warp.es/~josh/debian ./

Since the redesign of eBox platform, our bounce rate increased dramatically. After a short investigation, it made sense: our new website was just the homepage and news, and the rest of the content was on different domains (trac, eBox Technologies, …).

So our bounces were either real bounces, or people visiting our other sites (which I wouldn’t count as bounces).

My solution: track outgoing links.

I searched for a solution and found this article, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted.

It’s a good first approach, but tracking external links as pageviews makes the analytics reports more confusing. Events Tracking API to the rescue! This API was conceived to track actions that don’t match a page view, like video plays and other application interactions.

So, with events we could track our exits separately, get the information we need, and get a more accurate Bounce rate.

The extra code:

The original article used rel="external" to mark the links to track. There is an easiest way: searching for absolute URLS in the href attribute. Also, I’m using the action parameter to differentiate between internal (our other websites) and external (facebook, twitter,…) links.

What we are tracking, and will be able to see on the Analytics reports is:

• Category: Exits. Could have been called ‘outbound links’, or any other variation
• Action: external or internal
• Label: the destination URL
• Value: not using it. This could be useful for other kind of events, like tracking video load times

Warning: your bounce rate will probably drop by tracking events. For us, it reflects our visits more accurately, but that might not be your case.

This is what google has to say on bounce rate impact:

In general, a “bounce” is described as a single-page visit to your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single GIF request, such as when a user comes to a single page on your website and then exits without causing any other request to the Analytics server for that session. However, if you implement Event Tracking for your site, you might notice a change in bounce rate metrics for those pages where Event Tracking is present. This is because Event Tracking, like page tracking is classified as an interaction request.

For example, suppose you have a page with a video player where the bounce rate is historically high, and you have not implemented Event Tracking for the page. If you subsequently set up Event Tracking for the player, you might notice a decrease in the bounce rate for that page, because Analytics will record user interaction with the player and send that interaction to the server as an additional GIF request. Thus, even though the same percentage of visitors to the page might still exit without viewing any other page on your site, their interaction with the video player triggers Event Tracking calls, which disqualifies their visit as a bounce.

In this way, “bounces” for your event-enabled pages means something slightly different: a single-page visit that includes no user interaction on tracked events.

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As you can read in the official press note, today is the 4th anniversary of eBox Platform as a open source project. What a coincidence, just two days ago was my first year anniversary as an employee at eBox Technologies, the company that supports the eBox development and offers all the professional services related to it.

The experience of an entire year working with the rest of the eBox team has been very positive. In this last year eBox has improved a lot and I’m very proud of being part of it. In fact, I started to work with part of the current eBox team during the spring of 2007, while I was doing developing ANSTE project, specially designed for the automatization of the integration tests of eBox Platform. But now, with a company fully backing eBox development, I believe it is our opportunity to make eBox the best Linux Small Business Server and the first viable open source alternative to Windows SBS.

I don’t want to finish this post without giving thanks to all the people that has contributed to eBox or used it during these four years. This has been a great year but I’m sure the next ones will be even better. And don’t forget to stay tuned for the 1.4 release that will be out just in a couple of months from now!

On a day like this four years ago eBox Platform was first published as open source. Anniversaries such as this one are good chances to stop for a moment and look back to how everything started.

Before open-sourcing eBox code we had been working in it for some 20 months already, since before summer 2004. Originally the whole idea of eBox came up as a joint-project between DBS (now defunct) and Warp in order to develop an open source server to offer small and medium businesses all the functionality needed to run their computer networks and network infrastructure. The stress was put in simplicity and usability, as most small businesses do not have an IT expert nor the time to set complex systems up.

After some work we quickly realized that a Webmin approach of developing just a web interface on top of a Linux system could work fine for a single network service but it lacked the service integration required for an easy-to-use, all-in-one solution. That’s where we started developing eBox as an integration framework, an abstraction layer that could turn a bunch of independent network components into a single entity. A kind of “glue” for network services in a Linux server. It was a beautiful idea, though challenging and complex, and no one before had proposed it.

The initial business model that was conceived for eBox was to bundle it in a specific hardware (a box) and sell it like hot cakes. Hence its name “eBox”. Clever, eh? Well, the amount of work needed to develop it turned out to be much greater than expected and we did not have enough resources to fund such an adventure and its market introduction, so we turned to search for public funding.

Our initial idea had always been to make eBox open source so we organized an event at the Chamber of Commerce of Zaragoza to give solemnity to the moment (in those times open source was in fashion among the public sector, but cases of businesses open sourcing their products were really scarce). We got over a hundred attendants, including some of the most important local politicians and IT entrepreneurs, and initial interest on eBox was pretty high, at least in the local context. However, this interest faded away during the following months and it was not until October 2006, almost a year after its publication, that eBox downloads started to take off, climbing to 2,000 from a meager 500 the month before.

It is really gratifying to see how long we have gone since the kick-off of the project and since we started with the development of the community. Now, with more than 2,000 members in our community and 150 new members every month we are becoming a well-established solution in the open source market and we can soon fulfill our goal of becoming the Linux Small Business Server.

It’s been 3 weeks since we launched the new eBox Platform homepage, and I wanted to share the different steps through the redesign.

Do you like the new design?

Do you like any of the previous steps better?

Do you have any suggestions?

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Since I came back from Dublin I had pending to release the new ebox-radius module. This new module for eBox Platform 1.2 brings integration of eBox LDAP users with FreeRADIUS allowing the deployment of WPA/WPA2 EAP wireless authentication using eBox. In fact is very simple as seen on the screenshot, you can choose whether all the users are able authenticate or just a group of them and the NAS clients that can query the RADIUS server.

ebox-radius

This module is still in beta, but packages for Hardy are available from my PPA so you can try it in your eBox 1.2, a version for eBox 1.3 will be released very soon. FreeRADIUS packages where self builded because of #266299, I hope this can be fixed very soon, see Debian, EAP, and the OpenSSL and GPL incompatibility.

If you give it a try, please give us feedback on the forum or the mailing lists.

As of today, November 18th, eBox forum has reached the number of 2,000 users registered.

2.000 members is not a small amount for an open source small business server such as eBox Platform. It’s more impressive if you know how the numbers have evolved lately though.

The eBox forum was originally set up in May 2007, more than 2 years and half ago. However, 58% of the users registered during 2009 only, and 30% in the last 4 months and a half, since we released eBox 1.2.

Whether as Gateway, UTM, Infrastructure manager, Office Server or Unified Communication Server, it’s good to know than eBox Platform has become one of the most used server-side  products out there.

We hope to reach 3000 members in the following 6 months, or even less if we have into account the number of improvements and new features already being tested for eBox 1.4:  Active Directory sync, remote backup, webmail, support for Master-Slave LDAP, PPPoE support, usability enhancements, …

The bigger is our community, the better will become eBox Platform, and also faster.

My sincere thanks to all our eBox community members!

Since I upgraded to Snow Leopard I’ve been missing readline whe using irb. As I discovered in this article, this is due to apple’s ruby linking to libedit instead of libreadline. I didn’t have that problem before the upgrade since I had compiled ruby myself.

This time, I was looking for another solution. I could have compiled ruby with readline support, but then probably I’d had to reinstall some gems too. So I present you the quick way to fix your readline

Step 0: Setup temp dir

mkdir -p /tmp/rlruby
cd /tmp/rlruby
sudo -s

Step 1: Install readline

curl -O ftp://ftp.cwru.edu/pub/bash/readline-6.0.tar.gz
tar xvf readline-6.0.tar.gz
cd readline-6.0
./configure && make && make install
cd ..

Step 2: Get ruby source

To keep the complications to a minimum, I downloaded ruby from apple (check 10.6.2 open source, or other releases). The current patchlevel is ruby-75 so fetch that one:

curl -O http://www.opensource.apple.com/tarballs/ruby/ruby-75.tar.gz
tar xvf ruby-75.tar.gz
cd ruby-75

Step 4: Build readline extension

We don’t need to build all ruby, just the readline extension

cd ruby/ext/readline/
ruby extconf.rb
make

At this point, you’ll probably get the following error:

readline.c: In function ‘username_completion_proc_call’:
readline.c:730: error: ‘username_completion_function’ undeclared (first use in this function)
readline.c:730: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
readline.c:730: error: for each function it appears in.)
readline.c: In function ‘username_completion_proc_call’:
readline.c:730: error: ‘username_completion_function’ undeclared (first use in this function)
readline.c:730: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
readline.c:730: error: for each function it appears in.)
lipo: can't open input file: /var/folders/s4/s4qO7oueE3ijABAH7qB6Dk+++TI/-Tmp-//ccW5lOLL.out (No such file or directory)
make: *** [readline.o] Error 1

We need to tell gcc that our readline is in /usr/local

make readline.o CFLAGS='-I/usr/local/include -DHAVE_RL_USERNAME_COMPLETION_FUNCTION'
cc -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -pipe -bundle -undefined dynamic_lookup -o readline.bundle readline.o -L/usr/local/lib -L/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib -L. -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -lruby -lreadline -lncurses -lpthread -ldl

To be sure we are using the real readline run otool and make sure libedit doesn’t appear on the results:

$ otool -L readline.bundle
readline.bundle:
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/libruby.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.8.0, current version 1.8.7)
/usr/lib/libncurses.5.4.dylib (compatibility version 5.4.0, current version 5.4.0)
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 125.0.0)


Step 5: Replace readline.bundle

cd /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/Current/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/universal-darwin10.0/
mv readline.bundle readline.bundle.libedit
cp /tmp/rlruby/ruby-75/ruby/ext/readline/readline.bundle readline.bundle

Now launch irb and check if all your favorite shortcuts are in place

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Yeah, after cauterized.net crash I’ll be back soon with yet an other blog, try 3.

I sure am. After a proper installation/configuration, the most important factor is to always stay updated to the last version. I’m managing at this time 8 or more blogs/websites running different versions of WordPress and it’s hard to keep them up to date.

Automatic upgrades help, although they still terrify me after the 2.8 crash.

The problem is, some of these blogs are set up for friends or old projects, and I forgot to frequently check if they are using the latest version. Most of the times, they become crammed with spam, and eventually trigger google’s malware detectors. Most of the times I notice the hack because of firefox malware warning.

So I started a side project to help me keep track of all those blogs and their versions, and it’s seems is close to see the light. This is how it looks right now:

I will need testing, so if you want to participate in the beta, fill the signup form, and I’ll send some invitations.

Also, I’m looking for a nice name for the thing. If you have a good idea, put it in the ‘Proposed name’ field on the signup form. The winner(*) will get the first beta invitation and free full access to the product for 1 year after it launches. Make sure a .com domain is available for the name you propose or it won’t have many chances.

(*) There will be only 1 winner: the first person to propose the chosen product name. Simple rules, but… without rules we are nothing but savages.

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I need help with this. I had a dream… Well, not so much as a dream, maybe a “It’d be cool to…”

I thought it’d be nice to discover new photos on flickr using your favorite photos and the people who also favorited those photos, and the favorite photos of those who also favorited my pictures. Still with me?

It’s actually a quite simple code (about 500 lines, check it on github: discovr), but it’s terribly slow. Some possible reasons:

• Way too much data. I’ve found people with around more than 18000 favorites, and there are photos with more than 2k fans. After limiting to 50 last favorites, the numbers are still creepy. Following from my personal favorites (366), I discovered 1268 users and 52632 photos
• Too complicated for an API. This is the kind of feature that wouldn’t be so hard to implement if you have access to the flickr database directly, but having to do so many requests adds a lot of time to the process.
• Inefficient library. I had to do some modifications to the flickr ruby library just to make it work, but it’s still quite inefficient in some cases. Want to know the url of a picture (knowing the picture id)? 4 (completely unnecessary) API calls
• My code is bad. OK, I know it’s ugly to start blaming everyone else. I know my code is not very good, as it’s a quick prototype. Still, I’m not sure if making my code/libraries better would be enough improvement given the network/api bottleneck

The simplified algorithm goes like this.

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  # method from class User
  def similar_pictures
    similar = {}
 
    favorites.each do |favorite|
      favorite.favorited_by.each do |user|
        user.favorites.each do |v|
          similar[k] ||= {:weight => 0, :picture => v[:picture]}
          similar[k][:weight] += 1
        end
      end
    end
 
    similar.values.sort {|a,b| b[:weight] <=> a[:weight]}.select {|v| v[:weight] > 1}
  end

So I’ve created a github repository and uploaded the code: discovr at github. Feel free to clone, test and improve

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October has been a good month for records, our community is growing fast.

Last month, 163 users have enrolled in our forum, the main site for sharing ideas about the future of eBox Platform and getting free (as in beer) support.

eBox forum will reach 2.000 registered users before December. As of today, we are more than 1.900, from which 725 came in the last 6 months.

Directly from the stats section of the forum, 2009 October’s records:

• 163 new users registered. An impressive 21,6% growth compared to the last top: 134 in September.
• 184 new topics and 931 posts. 167 topics and 773 posts were the former highest, reached in May.

Another record is related to the number of downloads for the eBox 1.2 iso, more that 8.300 during October from the new Sourceforge repository.  Another 20% increase compared to September less than 7.000.

Worth to say that those downloads don’t take into account our under development unstable release eBox 1.3, only for installation through packages, neither eBox deployments from Ubuntu repositories.

Therefore, both new users registered in eBox forum and the number of downloads of our eBox 1.2 iso have grown ~20% in the last month, compared to the former one. It seems to point out we are in the right path.

A few weeks ago I was playing with statistical data from eBox forum, trying to find some behavior pattern and to understand a bit better its dynamics. I tried in particular a couple of well-know principles applied to businesses:

• The Pareto principle, stating that 20% of your customers are behind 80% of your revenues
• The Long Tail distribution, described by Chris Anderson, stating that in an Internet-based business, sales tend toward a long tail graph

Well, as I wanted to see how well these two principles were applied to our community, I just had to change customers with forum members and sales with posts in the forum. The results were really surprising. I was expecting some correlation with the previous principles, but I found out that the behavior was exactly as predicted by the business principles. Here you can see the graph of our long-tailed community (data are freely available at our forum statistics).

So far, it was qualitatively well understood that in every open source community there is a core of very active members and a bulk of sporadic contributors. However, these results can give some quantitative and visual insights on this behavior. I believe they can be applied to other communities and I would love to hear of other examples where these principles work.

When I explain the benefits that a business can get from open sourcing a product, the contributions from the community in the technical aspect are well understood and accepted. But when I get to the point of sales leads and opportunities, the reactions are often skeptical. So far I could only come up with examples of other products and companies with just vague descriptions of the benefits in their sales process. Even when I tried to find more convincing figures I just could gather some more vague data.

Well, I finally have some real figures from our own product and company which I think are self-explanatory and I would like to share them as a snapshot of our current situation. My goal is that they could serve as a graphical example of how using an open source approach can help a start up increasing its sales and commercial opportunities. But first I need to explain a little background …

Our main market focus is through partners and resellers who can deliver eBox certified services locally, so for us a commercial opportunity is a system integrator or a managed service provider who contacts us interested in a partnership agreement.

It’s been less than three months since we launched our partnership program and the results so far are the following:

• We have received 50+ partner requests from 30 countries in every continent in the world, except Antarctica
• We have already signed up with close to 10 of them
• More importantly, over 80% of our partner requests have tested and deployed eBox in production environments, half of them at their customers’ premises, before contacting us, showing the value of allowing free download of your own product
• Surprisingly, one in every six is a member of our community, which shows that open source communities are not just “non-paying users”

Having this data would have been very useful for me some 5-6 years ago, when I had to do a lot of open source evangelizing. I hope they can be useful for someone else now.

Being eBox Platform the main product of our company, the title of this post could be just a nice play on words…

However, reading on the open source and business model debate, from Stephen Walli’s to Mat Assay’s blogs, I believe I got to something interesting around eBox Platform as a platform, despite of (please forgive) the repetition.

From the latter, Mat Assay’s “Product management goes open source”:

[...] We were so busy marketing our vision that we almost missed listening to our users’ vision(s) [...]

[...] open-source companies, if they listen to their users, are well-positioned to build platforms that can become the lifeblood of enterprise IT [...]

If you ask me which is the eBox’s vision, I would speak about our perspective instead: eBox Technologies and eBox Platform desire to be for Linux in the server, what Canonical and Ubuntu have been for Linux in the desktop.

And the key point is: how are we building it?… Listening to our users and clients (our partners), so supporting them to develop their business using eBox as a Platform.

Not by chance, eBox Technologies is a 100% partner-focused company. Not by chance, our partner program puts the stress on flexibility, strongly encouraging our partners to develop their own value on top of eBox, even building eBox based products to be re-branded. Mixed, combined or pure, but always flexible.

Whether a mini data-center, a security/VPN appliance, or a micro home sever; eBox is being customized and combined to fit in every hole… Because marketing such a horizontal product would be much difficult without partners which struggle for their picked niches with self adapted tools.

It’s not a new business model neither a brand new strategy, but just a(nother) way to explain Ebox’s perspective.

Paraphrasing both Stephen and Matt blogs, I feel like “in the open road, once more unto the breach”.

I was used to think that in the open source world, business and community were always separated, that it was a bad idea to mix both worlds. That was the reason why I tried not to interact much with eBox community. Perhaps ill-advised, I thought that there was a natural mistrust in community members for everyone bearing a CEO title and talking business stuff. That was my main line of thought … until last week.

We got to a point where we needed to gather better information about how eBox is used, so I decided that we had nothing to lose if we asked our community. I prepared a poll in the forum and asked the members about the most critical environment in which they had deployed eBox. Not only I got a high number of votes (around 10% of all the members of the community in less than a week) but also a lot of replies specifying the environments eBox has been deployed, its functionalities, the best features of eBox and what should be included in our roadmap.

Moreover, it seems the information gathered was not only useful for us but also for the community itself, as a new poll was launched (thanks Elliot!) asking about the most important services in eBox. The results were not only extremely interesting, but also the subsequent debate and thoughtful analysis (thanks Sam Granf and SamK!).

I don’t think business people should be kept out of interacting with the community. Engaging in an open and honest conversation will be very gratifying and rewarding and it will favor community-driven development at all levels.

Having a great product is not enough to make business, everyone who has run a company knows that. If they don’t see you, you don’t exist. Since our company web site showed up a couple of months ago, the number of qualified leads (potential qualified partners) has been growing up steadily.

Geographically, they are coming mainly from US and Spain, although they are other countries such as Italy and Brazil catching up fast. Surprisingly, A company from Mauritius has been the last one in filling up our “become a partner” form…

Having in mind the where the visits to our websites -both eBox Platform and eBox Technologies- come from, Germany is missing despite of being the third country in number of visitors, very close to US (first) and Spain (second). I am puzzled, why don’t we have any VAR or MSP from Germany knocking in our door yet?.

Anyway, things are going quite well. In the next few weeks we are going to make public the list with the first authorized eBox partners, both Service and Training, from countries such as US, Spain, Mexico or Singapur.

Having in mind than we just sign partners who show real commitment -say, those which are able to offer a superb quality service-, and the time we employ with them to define and develop their business plan with eBox, we should reach the number of 15-20 partners during the next 16 weeks.

Looking at the map and how (geographically) diverse is the people who approach us it’s really motivating. More partners and more diversity, more fun.

And I should be taking the coach to the Dublin Airport in half an hour … but still packing !

I’ve been using Windows for years in the desktop (from 3.1 to Vista). Of course I prefer Linux, but it’s true that sometimes Windows have some advantages over it in a few points (Linux has many others ).

Today, I had my first experience with Windows as a server (Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition). I wanted it to serve as Domain Controller. Well, it’s not difficult, but it’s really painful. You spend several minutes clicking “next” buttons on a few wizards, watching progress bars, choosing lots of options… And finally, when it’s ready, you try to add a new user to the domain and after 10 tries you get tired because all passwords are rejected due to “insecurity”.

I spent a couple of minutes trying to find where to edit the password policy with no luck.

You’ll probably say that I have no idea about Windows. Yes, it’s true. But if you have used eBox you already know that you can deploy a Domain Controller in less than two minutes, just accessing the web interface and enabling the proper module (one click), and then you press the “save changes” button and you are ready to add users from the “Add User” menu in the same interface (intuitive, isn’t it?) and changing the password policy settings (new feature on eBox 1.2) is also immediate.

Is Windows Active Directory more powerful? Yes, that is probably true. However, let’s think about a typical small or medium bussiness, do you think they use all windows server “advanced features”? I don’t think so, and remember that eBox is constantly evolving.

I think that free software wins once again. But that’s only my opinion. Is it yours too?

I’ve done a fair amount of web “design” (mostly implementing designs of others) and development in the past, I usually set up a lot of virtual hosts in my local apache. I’ve done that in three different ways.

The quick&dirty hosts file

Point any of your development domains to 127.0.0.1 in the /etc/hosts file. It’s the easiest way, but you need to add them one by one. At some point, mine could look like this:

127.0.0.1 warp.dev
127.0.0.1 ebox-platform.dev
127.0.0.1 ebox-technologies.dev
127.0.0.1 jorgebernal.dev
127.0.0.1 projectA.dev
# ... and so on

Getting smart with dnsmasq

This is a more automated method. You install dnsmasq and configure 127.0.0.1 as your DNS server. Then add this to your conf:

address=/.dev/127.0.0.1

This worked well, and acted as a dns cache. But I had some trouble with dynamic dns entries at our old office: projects.warp.es would point to a local address inside the office and our remote IP from outside, so I found myself clearing the cache too often.

42foo: the zero-code web service

So I made it external. I bought 42foo.com and set up a bind zone with this:

@                       A       127.0.0.1
*                       A       127.0.0.1

So warp.42foo.com, ebox-platform.42foo.com or whateveryourprojectis.42foo.com always point to 127.0.0.1

You still have to set up the virtual host, but there is one step less for web development. Feel free to use it, and let me know if you set up something similar with a shorter domain name

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Sorry for the title. Actually there is no overall “best camera”, “best laptop” or “best whatever”. It always depends on what you need. If you just need a compact camera to take some pictures of your family trips or your college parties, almost any camera will do the trick for a much lower price.

That said, if you are serious about learning photography you should probably get a DSLR. You can get a Nikon D40 for about $400 or a Canon Rebel XS (aka 1000D) for about $500. I own the older Nikon D50 and I love it. Most of the pictures in this website were taken with that camera. I would only upgrade to the Nikon D700 but the gain isn’t worth $3000 to me.

Then, why am I recommending the LX3? Simple. The only problem I have with my D50 (and any other DSLR for that matter) is the size. It’s not too big for a DSLR, but it’s not a gadget to carry everywhere.

So, if you want a portable camera which allows you to learn photography, the LX3 is for you. I won’t go too technical here, but let’s highlight some of the features

• 10 Megapixels (large enough for screen and print)
• Shoots in RAW
• It has manual exposure and manual focus modes, so you can learn all the basics
• And the automatic modes are really smart
• It’s actually a leica (in fact this one but with the lumix logo and $200 less in the price)
• Very good optics
• Shoots video in HD

If you want more details, read the full review at dpreview.

Some samples:

I added more contrast on this one, but the original was already amazing.

Macro focus works like a charm

Not actually a video, but a time-lapse. It has a hi-speed burst mode where it can take 3-megapixel stills at 6fps

Get a drink on Vimeo

Not mine, but shot with a LX3, although it seems to have gone through some good post-production

Words Don’t Mean The Same Thing To You… on Vimeo

If you like what you see, you can get the LX3 on Amazon for $567.99

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