Open Source and Jxta

Open Source and P2P

Whatever investors think of open source, peer to peer developers have embraced it. The early success of Jxta shows why.

Sun's open source business strategy for Jxta is boringly obvious: give away razors to sell blades. Free the platform and generate revenues on ancillary products like consulting, security, and payment. The problem with the razor strategy is that it sometimes amounts to unilateral disarmament. If the core product doesn't reach a level of adoption that leads to demand for value-adds, then the company has lost the ability to charge for anything at all. With adoption comes free developer time, grassroots marketing, and a snowball effect. Without adoption there are fixed costs but no product.

For networking platforms the importance of adoption is magnified by Metcalfe's law. Utility of the platform comes from users at least as much as software. Anything a company can do to encourage adoption is even more effective than normal; low adoption makes good technology superfluous. This is the reason why developers of collaboration software (like Magi and Uprizer) are more likely than many others to use open source: they live or die by adoption.

Jxta

In that context, open source has made Jxta a runaway success for Sun. There are currently 14 projects listed on jxta.org. There are ports underway by independent developers to C and C++, to the WinCE platform, to Linux on the iPaq. There already exists a chat tool based on Jxta, created at no charge by a third party. There is a reputation management project. There is much talk of payment mechanisms, and it is likely that these are under development in stealth mode. The main mailing list is high traffic and high quality. Clip2 is running a high availability rendezvous service, with the source open.

Less than one month from first release there is strong adoption.

Sun stands to gain a lot. Free developer time, of course, but also high quality developer time: killer programmers are plentiful in the open source world but scarce and expensive in the secret source world. Buzz is doing Sun's marketing for free. The ideological appeal of open source is generating goodwill among developers who had been alienated by Sun's predatory habits (for example, in appropriating without credit the Linux Java port by the Blackdown group). Network effects are magnifying Jxta's value. The more attention a project gets, the more ego strokes are available for open source contributors, so Jxta's success is sucking developers away from rival platforms.

Business and Investment

This is all happening in opposition to investors' mach ten flight away from open source businesses like Eazel, Linuxcare and Red Hat. Since Sun's ultimate goal is to sell servers, and they aren't primarily seen as an open source company, investor psychology with regard to open source doesn't affect them. They are free to use their own judgement.

Tech trends are cyclical. One of the first things to happen in the cycle is the founding of businesses devoted to that trend, for example open source businesses or P2P businesses. If the technology is successful it eventually gets adopted by businesses with other revenue streams. GPS road maps in automobiles; shared source by Microsoft; decentralized networking by the defense industry. By then investors are long gone, their attention spans exceeded years before. Now consider that Jxta is hosted at Collabnet, co-founded by Brian Behlendorf of the Apache group, and one of those open source businesses.

(Unauthorized distribution +

 open source +

 a far out technology platform) =

Real customers with real checkbooks?

Sometimes life is far too kind.