Once any computing niche becomes established, established players seek consolidation.

Squeezing out rivals, creating firm leadership, is how you move from buzz to sales to profit.

Social networking has now reached that stage, and nothing marks it more than Flock 3.0.

Most observers are focused on the switch from Firefox to Chrome as the base browser, including the setting of Google as the default search engine. It’s a complete rewrite, and the business plan rewrite is the most important bit.

Flock is no longer content to be cool — it wants to make money.

There is a sense of urgency to that, and consolidation of the social space will hasten it. The new software is focused entirely on two social networks — Facebook and Twitter. LinkedIn, MySpace, even Google’s Buzz are over the side.

These are good choices, but are they the market’s final answer? This is where I suspect Flock may have made mistakes.

Because not all markets consolidate as one or two mass market leaders and laggards who eventually fail. What can happen is the creation of solid niches, fortresses that are impregnable for parts of the market.

We saw it in PCs with Apple. We’ve seen it in cellphones with Blackberry, still the market leader. Apple established itself with artists, the Blackberry with e-mailers, and if that’s your thing these are the only choices you look at.

The same may be true in social networking. Twitter is for communication. Facebook is for kids. Linkedin is for professionals. And so on. By limiting its reach to just the two leaders, Flock may be missing much of the market.

This is far from fatal. Other networks and “special editions” are always possible, following suitable negotiations. And it’s clear now that if there is profit in it Flock will be happy to negotiate.

Social networking is here to stay. It’s time to make money from your friends.

The real Chrome threat to Firefox lies in add-ons.

This is currently Firefox’s strength. There are literally thousands of add-ons for Firefox today, over 1,000 in web development alone.

But by concentrating on niches, and signing exclusive deals, so the add-on makers work only on Chrome, Google is taking small but telling bites of the market.

The media is already flocking to one such deal. But a second extension better illustrates the trend, and it’s called (naturally) extension.

Extension.fm finds mp3 files on pages you visit and indexes them into a personal music library. This is a seriously cool thing for people like my own son, who loves to regale us at dinner these days by showing the latest music video he has found.

At 19 he’s never gotten into iTunes, and many feel the Apple-Google rivalry will define music in the future.  It’s the next evolution in the music business, from music you own to music you find. And the one rule of music is you want to be where the young folks are, not where I am.

Extension is the kind of game-changing add-on that can move browser loyalties. My son has been dismissive of Chrome in the past. When I tell him of this he won’t be, I guarantee.

And that seems to be the strategy. While Firefox acts like a typical open source project, listing whatever comes in, working with everyone, Chrome acts more like a proprietary outfit, strategically.

This is a key difference between Google and most open source companies. Most are looking to build an ecosystem however they can get one. Google can be more careful.

WordPress 3.0, dubbed Thelonius, is now available for download, filled with new features and bug fixes, including a merger of its single-user and multi-user versions.

A blog post at the site says the team is taking some time off to focus on other areas of the WordPress experience, like forums, themes and plugins.

The team said there were over 10.9 million downloads of WordPress 2.9. It’s released under Version 2.0 of the GPL.

Reaction has been enthusiastic. Bloggers, rejoice says Technorati, and DesignTaxi calls it a fine blogging service, while HTML Goodies hails the delivery of the new content management system.

Therein hangs our tail.

WordPress is known as a first-class blogging platform. It’s the platform we use here at ZDNet. I have grown accustomed to its face, and most bloggers I know say it puts other blog publishing platforms, like Movable Type (which I also use) in the shade.

But WordPress is not just a blogging platform. It is, in fact, a full-fledged content management system, a CMS. It has been given awards as a CMS, and beaten Drupal in that category.

Yet that’s not the way the market sees it. Blogging and content management have different markets. Blogging is well-understood by publishers and design houses. CMSs are the property of enterprises and communities.

This doesn’t mean the two types of software are unrelated. I have long believed that the failure of the 2004 Howard Dean campaign had less to do with the scream and more to do with the failure to upgrade from a blogging platform to a full CMS. That failure cost Iowa, and the dispiriting Iowa loss caused the scream.

The two blogger-consultants who recommended the upgrade to the Dean campaign were Jerome Armstrong, who now helms MyDD.com, and Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos. Both were engaged in such an upgrade when they made the recommendation. Kos now has the left’s largest online community and SB Nation, a competitive sports site.

The point is non-political. The market sees a CMS as big boy software, a blogging platform as mere publishing.

Since the launch of its commercial arm, Acquia, Drupal has solidified its niche in the CMS space. WordPress, meanwhile, has stuck to its knitting, hence commentaries like this one in FastCompany, 6 reasons small businesses need WordPress.

CBS, which owns ZDNet, is not a small company. We depend on WordPress. How about a story about 6 reasons big companies need WordPress, with examples?

I think Matt Mullenweg’s team might be well advised to spend less time working on the software, working in their business, and more time working on their business, seeking a way past Drupal. Mobile platforms represent a new opportunity to shake things up, but it won’t happen unless y’all make the competition explicit.

What open source needs right now is a good old-fashioned marketing war. WordPress vs. Drupal, WordPress.com vs. Acquia.

I’ll get the popcorn.

Want to beat the you-know-what out of your local newspaper “monopoly?”

Open source has found a way.

Your two ingredients are:

• OpenBlock, an open source version of Everyblock, which lets you organize police reports, real estate sales, restaurant reviews, and anything else in your local area, keyed to location, and
• YouTube, which now offers online video editing, social network marketing services, and YouTube Direct, which aims to leverage what it calls citizen reporting.

Your site will live locally only in part. Much of it  — the high-cost video part of it — will live mainly in the Google cloud, brought to your readers through embed links.

The key to it all is OpenBlock, which was first funded by the Knight Foundation as Everyblock, then sold to MSNBC in 2009.

The expansion of the open source project is pushed by two newspapers, The Boston Globe and the Columbia (Missouri) Tribune. The funding, again, comes from Knight, but the largest part of the funding goes to OpenPlans, which already has a number of geo-based projects underway.

As the deal indicates this is all aimed at making local newspapers relevant in the Internet age, but since OpenPlans is an open source project there is no reason why new entrepreneurs can’t take advantage of it.

You can start by looking at another OpenPlans project, StreetsBlog, or consider another open source project, the new WordPress. It is, as noted earlier today, a full-fledged Content Management Service, meaning it can scale to where you want it. Or, if you think you need professional help with your CMS, check out Acquia.

The point, as I have said many times, is to organize and advocate your local market. Geographic-based services help with the organizing, and community-created videos can create the advocacy.

The time is now, and the opportunity is here. Newspapers will never seize it. They haven’t over 15 years. You can. Just remember to start from the ad side in, linking buyers and sellers, then move out to advocacy, not the other way around.

The future of local news is open.

In the run-up to the Oracle acquisition of Sun, America’s open source advocates were mostly on Oracle’s side.

Oracle made big promises. They wanted the open source assets — Open Office, Java, and mySQL among them. They said they would invest in those assets.

CEO Larry Ellison called predictions by one analyst of massive Sun lay-offs “irresponsible garbage.” Anyone speculating in that direction should be ashamed of themselves, he said.

I wasn’t ashamed. I believed Oracle bought Sun for its hardware business, not its software. I saw Oracle’s promises as pie crust  — easily made, easily broken.

Many Europeans were even more skeptical. People like Florian Mueller of FOSSPatents and mySQL co-founder Monty Widenius stirred up anger across the continent to the pending deal. The European Commission emerged as the key roadblock to the deal.

But trustworthy open source advocates, like Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center, were adamant. “For its own business reasons, Oracle will heavily invest in MySQL’s future,” he wrote.

The deal was approved.

Now that Sun has been inside Oracle for a few months I believe the skeptics are being proven right. While some analysts say they’re not surprised at recent job cuts, they are pretty deep, in line with the predictions Ellison called “garbage.”  The Wall Street Journal has estimated the job cuts will cost Oracle $1 billion in severance. Sales are slowing.

Worse may be to come. Java is fragmenting. Solaris is increasingly being treated as proprietary, not as open source. Sam Dean of OStatic agrees with me that Open Office is drifting. CNET’s James Urquhart sees mySQL as a minus, not a plus, for the cloud. The M in the LAMP stack is falling behind.

Larry Ellison’s pattern with acquisitions is clear. He engages in asset stripping. He uses vendor lock-in with those he acquires to reach deep into their wallets. He pushes those customers toward proprietary Oracle technologies.

Nothing wrong with that, in theory. But when these assets are created by a community, not a company, when they are part of a commons, I think they deserve protection. They shouldn’t be treated the way BP treats the Gulf of Mexico.

Why anyone expected something different with Sun and its open source assets is beyond me. Ellison verbally attacked all who questioned his motives, and his intentions, but his record had already spoken for him.

As it seems to be speaking in this case.

You may disagree. If you do, I want to hear from you.

Certainly there is an argument to be made that Oracle is increasing its investment in mySQL. But if open source is all about ending vendor lock-in, Larry Ellison is its worst nightmare. And since acquiring its crown jewels, I would argue, that nightmare has slowly come true.

How do the open source advocates who argued for this deal feel about it now?

Apple is proprietary. Apple doesn’t like open source.

That’s fine by me. Apple is not a monopoly. As far as I’m concerned they’re shooting themselves in the foot. Android proves that every day.

But there is proprietary and there is proprietary. There is the proprietary that says, I can decide how my gear displays stuff, so Flash won’t. There is the proprietary that says I will control what my device will do, and it won’t do porn.

And there’s the proprietary that says you can only build stuff to run on my gear with my tools.

That is what programmers who use Appcelerator’s Titanium are wondering right now. And if Jobs insists on controlling the tools used to code for his hardware, I think he’s shooting himself in a far more vital place.

At the end of the day, whether you’re writing in Objective C or Javascript, all your code gets turned into 1s and 0s, and all 1s and 0s are created equal. An iPad can’t tell that a programmer originally used Javascript, so long as the code is translated into something the machine understands, Objective C, which Titanium does.

Since its introduction in 2008 Titanium has become an important competitor to Adobe AIR. If Jobs hates Adobe, the enemy of his enemy should be a friend.

So far Appcelerator, which was formed in Atlanta but then moved to Mountain View, is keeping pretty quiet about the issue. Its latest news release notes only that it supports a lot of developers, and is getting more all the time.

But there is a message there for Jobs. Developers can learn a lot of different languages, but most don’t want to. It’s much easier for them to become comfortable with a few tools or programming environments. This makes them more productive.

Appcelerator notes that this makes it popular. Programmers can use whatever system they want to program for whatever target they want. The code is open source, but that’s not the point my friend. The point is programmer comfort.

If forced to choose between comfort and market share, moreover, there’s always Android. Despite its growth and hype Apple iPhones and iPads still represent a small portion of Internet traffic, and the Android platform is now growing faster.

If Jobs has better tools for creating apps, let him compete for programmers’ loyalty. Dictating to them in this way risks the consumer market share already gained, because consumers don’t care about programming tools, only about their own experience.

And if they can get just as good an experience with an Android, plus more apps because programmers prefer other tools to those of Apple, well, the Macintosh was better than PCs in the 1980s, too.

There is a limit to how far a vendor can push a market. Steve Jobs has pushed too hard before. Appcelerator could be the turning point ending the second age of Apple.

Or not.

Red Hat has been doing the dog-and-pony this week, and by accepting the criticism of open source licensing gotten the rest of the industry into a bad odor.

Why aren’t there any $1 billion open source companies, asked Glyn Moody. Strange criticism, given that Red Hat is now worth nearly $6 billion.

Of course, you then note, he must be talking about sales. It’s true, Red Hat’s run rate is still short of the mark at about $800 million. It’s close to that of Novell in that regard. And I haven’t even mentioned Ubuntu and Canonical yet. (OK, now I did.)

On the other hand it’s also possible that Moody’s definition of “an open source company” is too narrow. He seems to think that you’re only an open source company if all you do is sell support for open source products, and we should only count that revenue.

When you put it that way Red Hat’s success becomes even more remarkable. No one has to pay an open source software company for its code. If a pure open source company is only one that depends on voluntary code payments for its bread, then getting $800 million of such payments a year is pretty amazing.

There may never be another Red Hat, a company that grows organically out of Linux support contracts, quietly building billions in value thousands of miles from Silicon Valley. So what?

Open source is still a raging success, and not just for customers who have seen costs slashed, or brought inside, by the availability of free online code.

IBM, for instance, rationalized what a decade ago was an incompatible collection of hardware and business units around open source software. Linux now runs on all kinds of IBM hardware, open source tools drive its service business. Do I have to mention how much money it’s worth or what its sales figures are?

Google is not the only SaaS outfit driven by open source. There are dozens, some of which are vertical, others horizontal in nature. Google’s open source Android design may have saved Motorola, to cite one example.

I suppose none of that counts, because IBM and Google and Motorola aren’t relying entirely on voluntary payments of support for their code. They do other things.

But so what? The success and importance of open source should not be measured entirely by Red Hat, even though Red Hat is a great example of what’s possible.

The billions saved by customers, the hundreds of thousands of jobs created for developers working on open source code, the hardware and service revenues made possible by open source, these count, too.

Open source is one of the great, continuing success stories of our time because there are many different ways to skin the open source cat. You can put it under your Red Hat or use it as an ingredient in many other business models, models that succeed on the bottom line. There are still more such models to be discovered.

If that’s failure, give me more failures like it.

Eucalyptus Systems — with former mySQL CEO Marten Mickos now at the helm — is readying for battle with VMware.

On Wednesday, the open source company will announce a major upgrade of its private cloud software that offers, for the first time, support for Windows images — a necessity for any company targeting enterprise customers.

Version 2.0 of Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition is “more scalable, has features we didn’t have before and now hosts Windows images. You can run Windows applications on Eucalyptus, a major new opening for new use cases than before,” said Mickos, who took over as Eucalyptus’ CEO last March. “It’s obvious [you] need to do it at some point. We supported Linux and now there is support for Windows.”

Mickos noted that Eucalyptus is preparing for its first real competition with the release of VMware’s vCloud later this year. Yet, he is in no mood to pick a fight with a business partner and a rival that he says will end up generating more business for his latest enterprise.

“I have no doubt they will be successful in the market … but the market is very large,” he said, noting that VMware is one of Eucalyptus’ virtualization partners. He also said Eucalyptus’ open source model and support for Amazon’s APIs (and multiple virtualization hypervisors) gives it appeal to customers that prefer standards.

Yet Mickos himself emphasized that the infrastructure-as-a-service software category is in its infancy. Unlike software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google, Eucalyptus offers software that allows enterprises to launch their own private clouds — which allows them to harness all of their compute power and hardware assets and quickly provision applications and services.

Mickos, who sold mySQL to Sun for $1 billion, knows how to take an open source company from obscurity to the top of the commercial world. Still, Eucalyptus is pioneering a new category of software, he emphasizes.

“Eucalyptus is an innovator of the new …. mySQL came out with a product that was a known quantity. People knew what a relational database was,” he noted. “We were David versus Goliath but cloud computing is new and we’re the first vendor with a cloud computing platform available. We are the ones setting the standards.”

.

Apple may want to think twice before banning Appcelerator Titanium as a tool for building iPhone and iPad apps, vice president of marketing Scott Schwarzhoff told ZDNet Open Source.

Titanium is good enough, it works well enough, and by gosh, developers like it for building apps.

“I can’t speak to the prospects of being banned. Since this started in April over 1,000 apps have been approved.” By “this” Schwarzhoff means Apple’s jihad against Adobe Flash, and by extension against third-party tools used to build what goes on its hardware.

Back then CEO (and former Atlantan) Jeff Haynie wrote that Titanium was fully in compliance with the Apple terms of service “as we interpret them.” Schwarzhoff said there are now over 50,000 Titanium developers producing 100 new apps for the Apple platform every three days. And those apps are being approved.

“Our position on how we work with Apple or any OS platform” is the same, he said. “We only communicate with documented APIs, we compile everything down to native code, and we follow the entire Xcode tool chain.”

The only thing Schwarzhoff can’t give is a confirmation from Apple that open source Appcelerator is A-OK with them.

Besides, there are other mobile platforms. Android developers like Titanium. So do those working with Microsoft. And Appcelerator will have full support for the RIM Blackberry by fall. “We talk to them all the time,” Schwarzhoff said.

Appcelerator presently has a survey of its developers in the field and more will be known on their feelings by Wednesday. Meanwhile, they’ll take Jobs’ no comment as a yes.

With little news happening on the beat this morning (Google offering a command line interface) I started thinking about open source as an attitude.

While we usually think of open source as a development model or a business model, it is also, very much, an attitude. It’s a counterweight to the “not invented here” syndrome we find in most of industry.

The oil industry is an example. Oil technology is dominated by a small and shrinking list of companies. All are large bureaucracies. All are attuned to a single mindset on the part of their customers.

As a result, we have learned, oil technology has barely changed in a generation. The same techniques that tried, and failed, to stop an undersea leak 30 years ago are being tried now, only in deeper water. And they’re not working.

Liberals want to chalk this up to a lack of investment, a willful blindness to risk. But it’s also a form of groupthink, a narrowing of vision caused by a shrinking pool of competitors.

The OTS Model 10 shown, from Kevin Costner’s Ocean Therapy Solutions, is a very simple device. It’s a centrifuge. A combination of oil and water flows into it, it’s thrown by centrifugal force, and this separates the two.

Yet for nearly 20 years Costner has been the oil industry’s Flying Dutchman, wandering the world with this solution, unable to land, because no one would even acknowledge the problem. Observers still wonder whether BP is serious about using it or is just engaging in PR by signing a letter of intent with the company,

Part of this had to do with Costner’s celebrity, but most had to do with his outsider status. Had Cameron or Halliburton come up with this device, they might have sought changes in maritime law to consider leaked oil salvage, which it in fact is.

We can still make those changes. The BP disaster has uncovered many opportunities for legal and regulatory changes which need to be made. Yet some in the industry are now calling this a “natural disaster.” It’s not. It’s completely man-made.

I don’t want to make a political point here. Groupthink can happen in any industry, or in any government. Eyes can be closed to opportunity, the attitude being that if we didn’t think of it the idea can’t be any good.

People in technology have learned the danger in this attitude.

It may be hard for many readers to conceive of just how wedded to its own ideas IBM was 20 years ago, just how resistant it was to concepts it had not created. The attitude brought the company to the verge of collapse.

Today’s IBM is very different. Open source, collaboration, coopitition — all these concepts have resonance far beyond software.

I began my journalism career in Houston, and I sometimes see that city’s industry now as being very much where IBM itself was 20 years ago. IBM needed to be shaken to their core in order to accept the necessity of change. The same is true here.

It’s a tiny silver lining in a very dark cloud, but maybe it can grow into something bigger, if it sparks an open source attitude in the oilpatch.