Via Matt Asay, I see Robert Lefkowitz (better known as “r0ml” in open source circles) now has a blog. Subscribed!
r0ml is an all around brilliant and entertaining guy with a background that’s an interesting mix of business and technology (he has a degree in computer science from MIT and did a long stint on Wall Street at Merrill Lynch, where he managed to convince someone to give him the uber-cool email address r@ml.com). With the possible exception of Larry Lessig, he also gives what are probably the best talks I’ve ever seen.
I first saw r0ml speak at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in 2003. The talk was Protecting the Innovation Premium: Open Source Business Models. Not too far into the talk, he starts discussing Sharia, or Islamic law, how it forbids the charging of interest, and how banks with Islamic clientele have found clever ways of charging interest without it actually, technically speaking, being “interest”–hence, not in conflict with Islamic law. That’s neat and all, but a quick glance around the room shows I’m not the only one unsure what this has to do with open source business models.
Just as I’m wondering this, he puts up a slide comparing Borland’s and Red Hat’s (at the time) latest quarterly numbers, with Borland’s revenue labeled “license revenue” and Red Hat’s revenue labeled “subscription revenue”; and alongside these numbers a series of percentages (personnel expense as compared to revenue, etc.) that shows that, percentage-wise, the two are roughly equivalent compared to traditional service revenue. In other words, the “open source religion” forbids Red Hat from calling it license revenue, even though that’s what it really is, so Red Hat just calls it subscription revenue instead, all so Red Hat doesn’t violate “open source law” and damage their careful positioning as the open source good guys. Brilliant!
Great stuff on his new blog thus far, and some good quotables too (“Americans don’t need to be fat, but there are whole industries devoted to making them fat and keeping them fat”), which in my opinion, is the key to a great blog–weaving together insight and wit in just the right amounts.