Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems

Josh over at Web 1 Marketing writes about using www versus leaving it off. What’s wrong with no-www:

Websites should use or at least always accept both formats. Regardless of which you choose, someone will always try the other.

At Freelock, we’ve noticed that www is a bit of a litmus test for how technical a person is–all of our more technical users omit www, while all of our less-technical users always include it. We’ve had to add www to several domain names of things like mail servers that are not general web sites, just because our users assume it’s there.

Where we’ve really noticed this phenomenon is in deploying Joomla web sites. While you can see pages on Joomla from a variety of domains, links get rewritten to whatever domain you designate as the main one. This usually isn’t a problem, except when people log into the first page they visit–they inevitably have to log in again when the domain changes, and they get confused. So as a rule of thumb, we set up sites using www unless our users are clearly web-savvy.

Several others have listed the applications they use on a daily basis. I’ve been using Linux for my desktop environment for several years, and thought I would share what I use constantly.

• Operating System: Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, 7.10
• Desktop Environment: Gnome (though I tend to prefer KDE overall, Ubuntu does a better job with Gnome, especially integrating laptop features like power management, and Gnome has gotten good enough to use as the primary desktop. You’ll see lots of KDE applications listed here, though!)
• Browser: Firefox (what else?)
• Firefox plugins: Bookmarks Synchronizer, Firebug, Web Developer, Forecast Fox, Google Preview, HTML Validator, Sage, SearchStatus
• Email client: Mozilla Thunderbird, occasionally Evolution
• Thunderbird extensions: Asertiva Extension for Sugar, Display Mail User Agent, Enigmail, Lightning, QuickFile, QuickText
• News Reader: Firefox Sage extension for general stuff, Thunderbird for security-related feeds
• Calendar: Evolution
• Address book: SugarCRM (okay, it’s not a desktop application)
• Miscellaneous notes: Tomboy
• IM: Kopete (though I mostly keep it off to avoid interruptions)
• IRC: Konversation
• Networking: NetworkManager with OpenVPN add-on, OpenVPN Admin for connecting/testing client VPN networks
• Development: ActiveState Komodo Professional (almost the only proprietary software on the list!)
• File management: Konqueror (hard to beat this for connecting to almost any type of server out there)
• General editing: vi
• Office software: OpenOffice.org (currently at 2.2)
• Desktop search: Beagle
• Graphic editing: Gimp
• Database editing: Rekall
• Multimedia playing: Kaffeine, Amarok, and DemocracyTV
• Photo Management: F-Spot
• Audio editing: Audacity, though I’m starting to play around with Jokosher
• Disk Encryption: Truecrypt
• Personal Finance: GnuCash
• Repetitive Stress Injury Prevention: Workrave

I use a lot of server software, and spend much of my time in shell (terminal) windows… I usually have two terminal windows, each with 3 or 4 open tabs, all connected to different servers, many with multiple sessions running in screen.

There’s a bunch of other software I have installed, but don’t use regularly, including Scribus, Inkscape, Xara Extreme, and many others. Aside from some specialty industry applications, I have a hard time imagining anything I couldn’t do with my current desktop environment, and out of this entire list, there’s exactly one item I have to pay for: the Komodo IDE I use for development. Everything else here is free.

Marc Andreesson, one of the authors of Mosaic, the original web browser, has taken up blogging, and in his first week he’s got some thought-provoking posts. I’ve adopted many of David Allen’s Getting Things Done ideas to help get my business off the ground, but Marc has some great tips here: blog.pmarca.com: The Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity.

I particularly like structured procrastination and strategic incompetence…

Seen on Rocketboom: There’s a new documentary film in production about Wikipedia. It’s a non-profit project, and they’re looking for donations. Looks like a great project, and we’re delighted to see the cover of our book in the trailer.

Happy New Year! Here’s a quick story about why Linux is the future:

Windows screwup forces Ubuntu shift

We’ve needed this sort of thing for a while:
Openoffice.org Label Templates for Ooo Writer free

We’ve noticed a huge increase in the spam getting dropped into our spam quarantine–it’s doubled in the past two months. I have clients complaining about greatly increased spam as well. It turns out we’re not alone:
Spam Doubles, Finding New Ways to Deliver Itself - New York Times

Spam is back — in e-mail in-boxes and on everyone’s minds. In the last six months, the problem has gotten measurably worse. Worldwide spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to Ironport, a spam filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages sent over the Internet.

… What to do about it? Our next Freelock Irregular newsletter will offer some help. But meanwhile, for the technical folks, here’s a link to a How-To to implement checking for Yahoo domain keys:

Postfix with dkfilter (DomainKeys Implementation)

There seems to be a misconception out there that business applications don’t exist for Linux. Wrong. There are some excellent ones. Recently, the Linux equivalent of QuickBooks just hit version 2.0, and it has become quite easy to use. Joe Barr has a nice article describing how to get started with GnuCash, with some helpful tips for downloading transactions from your bank with minimal fuss. From the article:

Using GnuCash to balance your checkbook is perfectly legitimate. It’s easy and it’s accurate. You don’t need a commercial product to do the same thing. GnuCash 2.0, however, can take you well beyond a simple checkbook: you can track your credit cards, savings accounts, and investment accounts, or you can keep a full set of books for a small business.

Linux.com | Using GnuCash 2.0 to balance your checkbook

From the BNI Tech Alliance News:

The speaker at the Puget Sound Area BNITA for November is: John Locke Manager, Freelock Computing

The topic for November’s BNITA will be: Manage your web site with Joomla, an Open Source content management system.

Many web developers have created basic content management systems to allow their customers the ability to edit their own web sites. And while many of these are very good, it’s hard to compete with an open source project that has 60,000 active users.

For beginners, Joomla is dead simple to use. Log in, click the Edit button on a page, and edit its content in a comfortable WYSIWYG editor.

For those with more experience, adding items to a menu or creating a highlighted block of text are straightforward tasks. But when it’s time to add something more, that’s where Joomla and open source truly shine.

There are over 900 add-ons for Joomla. Things like event calendars, wikis, photo galleries, shopping carts, and forums. Joomla forms a great framework to drop other web applications into, and provides a solid base to build a full-featured site with many active parts.

John Locke of Freelock Computing will provide a basic tour of Joomla, including editing pages, adding new pages, custom add-ons, and other integration possibilities. Plus, he’ll show you what’s coming up in the new version…

The BNI Tech Alliance is a group of technology professionals who provide services to small businesses. The group meets on the first Monday of most months, except when there’s a holiday. The meeting is free for visitors, and this month’s meeting is at the Lake Hills Library in Bellevue, 6 pm on Monday November 6.

Open Source projects have to deal with something most proprietary projects don’t: forked projects. What’s that? It’s when a person or group exercises the terms of an open source license to create a derived version that competes with the original. It’s practically the definition of open source, the ability to take the code and do whatever you want with it.

This frightens most business people. In the business world, attorneys have designed all sorts of non-compete clauses they attach to contracts, to prevent employees from starting other businesses with the knowledge they’ve gained from working for you. In the open source world, anybody is explicitly allowed to take that knowledge embodied in your software project and set up their own shop.

How do you build a business around something you can’t control?

SQL Ledger/LedgerSMB
In the past couple weeks, there was a fork in the main open source financial project out there, SQL-Ledger. The users’ mailing list is full of insults and accusations between supporters of the old project and the people who’ve left to set up shop. It’s quite an ugly place to visit right now…

What gives the upstarts the gall to leave the project and start their own, LedgerSMB? How is this good for users? Why would they do such a thing?

Turns out, a whole bunch of reasons.

First of all, SQL-Ledger has always been tightly controlled by a single developer. While he accepts help from translaters, most other code he does alone. So new features take months to come out. I’ve been using the system for three years, and there still isn’t a payroll module. While there have been developers willing to help on the project, at least from an outside view the developer has not been that receptive to contributions from the community.

Secondly, while the code is free, the documentation is not. The maintainer of SQL-Ledger hordes knowledge about how to use it, and disseminates it only to people who buy the manual from him. While he has every right to do so–open source is, after all, a voluntary gift to the community when you own the code–it does seem to go against the open source ethos. It feels like a disengenious use of open source–hook them with free software but then force them to buy the manual to be able to use it effectively. Few other open source projects get away with this model.

Thirdly, the mailing lists, which are the main free support for the project seems to have been heavily moderated, and not in a fair or balanced way. I’ve had several of my posts that point out apparent bugs not make it to the list, along with a few answers to other people that might’ve helped them solve their problem but might have been considered too close to the secret sauce in the manual. Meanwhile, some vitriolic subscribers spew ugly insults to others on the list, with apparently free reign, as long as it’s in support of the lead developer. It’s not a friendly place to be, on the Internet, and probably does a lot to drive people away from what is really a great piece of software.

But it appears that the final straw was the lead developer’s complete disregard for a major security vulnerability. At least one developer found this hole nearly a year ago and informed the developer. While we’ve seen more than half a dozen releases since then, this hole wasn’t fixed during that time, until another developer stumbled on it. This developer also tried to work with the main developer to get the hole fixed, but was met with hostility and an unwillingness to take the problem seriously.
So the other developers felt like they had no choice but to take the code and start a new project that took these security concerns seriously.

As a result, all sorts of new possibilities become available: a whole new list of features people have wanted to see may get implemented; people can contribute directly to the project to see enhancements they need; a true open source feel, where people are actually helpful instead of just telling you to purchase the manual; and a sense of shared ownership of the code, not held hostage to a single developer who could decide to pack up his toys and go home.

Now, I don’t mean do speak ill of the original developer. SQL Ledger is really a great program, and he’s done a lot to make it that way. I’ve paid for the manual twice, most recently just to give him financial support to keep working on the software, not because I really needed it. But I do think SQL Ledger has outgrown what can be managed by a single developer, and he stands in the way of its growth. So I look forward to seeing a community-forked version thrive.

Mambo/Joomla 

SQL Ledger is far from the first business open source project to fork. Joomla recently celebrated its first birthday. Joomla is the result of the core Mambo development team getting into conflict with the company that sponsored it, and owned the Mambo trademark. So they all left the project and started Joomla. It took several months for the dust to settle, but Joomla is the clear winner of this fork, with some 2.5 million downloads already and some major innovations on the horizon. Mambo, while it still exists, has barely been able to keep up with security vulnerabilities, and has already lost some of the replacements brought in after the Joomla revolt, for apparently similar reasons.

SugarCRM/VTiger

Not all forks eclipse the original project. SugarCRM has become one of the most successful companies that uses an open source project as its flagship product. And the product is very well done. And it has also been forked–into a community project called vTiger. The reasons for this split are less clear–it apparently has to do with a group of free-software proponents who didn’t really like the idea of a clearly commercial open source project.

SugarCRM is released under a different license than Mambo or SQL Ledger (Sugar Public License, instead of the GPL), so the viability of vTiger is less clear. vTiger has diverged quite a bit from SugarCRM already, adding more enterprise management features like accounting and inventory management while SugarCRM has focused more on enhancing the customer contact side of things with workflow, email campaigns, projects and cases and the like. At Freelock, we’ve stayed on the SugarCRM side of this split so far.

Asterisk/OpenPBX 

Here’s a fork that seems to have dropped off the map. Asterisk is the incredibly popular upstart free PBX (office phone) system that’s starting to decimate the lucrative telecom market. And OpenPBX is an Asterisk fork that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. It has a stated goal of being more stable and better documented, and while it’s still alive, I don’t hear anybody really taking them seriously.

Mandriva Multi-Network Firewall

I’ve even tried to do my own fork of a project. Mandrake Linux for years had a great firewall distribution, called the MNF. As it got long in the tooth, a replacement MNF2 was developed, but it wasn’t released under the same terms as the original. Mandrake had become Mandriva at this point, and it saw MNF2 as a corporate product, not something they wanted to make freely available.

The source code, however, was still covered by the GPL license, which means anyone can take it and start their own version. So we could take the MNF code, rebrand it, and release it under a new name.

Unfortunately, I’ve got a few too many projects on my plate, and so that project didn’t get off the ground. Meanwhile, the formerly thriving community around the MNF has completely died–the mailing list which used to be very active hasn’t seen a post in months. This is a project that could still make for a very fine fork, but that takes time and effort, and nobody has stepped up to the plate to make it happen.

To fork or not to fork

Creating a successful software project of any kind is a daunting task. In the open source world, forks are a natural part of the development of projects. In a very Darwinian way, some forks succeed and grow to become thriving projects of their own, while others die a silent death. A few fill the niche of the parent project, killing it off completely. Forks can be very unsettling, especially when they happen to projects you rely upon for day to day business. It’s generally better to concentrate developer talent into fewer projects, making them develop faster and better. But in the long run, forks are sometimes unavoidable. Forks are an activity that make open source projects thrive, and ultimately result in better software for us all.

Looks like IBM is going aggressively up against the Outlook/Exchange juggernaut. Several months ago, they made Domino, their mail server, free for any business who buys the licenses for the mail client, Notes. Now they’re making Notes available for Linux. The Notes/Domino combination is more than just an email system–it’s a complete database system, including calendaring, team rooms, private intranet features, addressing, and much more. While Notes is a lot different, with a fair learning curve, my clients who use it absolutely love it.
IBM unveils Lotus Notes client for Linux

Over at Freelock Computing, we’re learning the fundamentals of business from experience. We’ve been doing technology for a long time, but are relatively new to business, so what we’ve learned is hardly innovative or new. But we seem to be honing in on different computing solutions to support the four key parts of any business: marketing, sales, operations, and finances.

As mass markets become micromarkets, marketing becomes ever more important. If people don’t know about your services, how can they buy from you? But marketing is not always enough. At a certain point, sales takes over. Sales, in the Internet age, is not about selling some product you don’t really need, but about developing a relationship with your customers until they have enough confidence, trust, and desire to buy from you.

Our favorite marketing guru, Seth Godin, writes about how a good sales person truly helps his customers: Seth’s Blog: Hard sell at the farmer’s market

Sitepoint has a nice summary of when to get a merchant account, versus when to use a third-party payer such as Paypal, complete with detailed example total costs for different types of businesses. Required reading for those thinking about accepting credit cards over the web, who do not already have a merchant account.

Solve the Payment Processing Problem [eCommerce]

Good introductory article on monitoring disk usage, with a nice little script to send a mail as filesystems approach their limit:

System Administrators Toolkit: Monitoring disk space and usage
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Carla Schroder covers a great network backup utility in her current series. Here’s where the rubber meets the road:

Do Automated Cross-Platform Network Backups The Easy Way (Part 2)

Not to make you paranoid or anything, but here’s a fascinating story of a new social engineering tactic: a new way somebody might trick you into giving away your passwords and any other sensitive stuff on your computer.
Dark Reading - Host security - Social Engineering, the USB Way - Security

… according to Jamie Kellner, former CEO of Turner Broadcasting, in an argument that ultimately caused the demise of the ReplayTV 4000. In case you don’t remember, the ReplayTV unit was essentially a Tivo that, among other things, automatically skipped commercials.

The IEEE Spectrum this month has a good article outlining the problems with Digital Rights Management and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). From the article:
“Copyright is being turned from a limited-term incentive designed to encourage creative artists to a broadly scoped transfer of wealth from the public to the private realm.”

IEEE Spectrum: Death by DMCA

Eben Moglen on Free Software:

“The politics of open source are not anti-business or anything to be ashamed of, but a return to America’s inventive roots after a period dominated by innovation-stifling monopolies.”

Open source politics are ‘American as apple pie’ - ZDNet UK News

We could be there soon. By the end of this year, if an independent survey of developers across North America is accurate.

Linux Today - Editor’s Note: Tipping Point Ahead

Every day, you hear more stories about open source successes. Like this one:

Techworld.com - City finds big savings in Linux