Omniture & Fedora

[Jesse Eversole Jr]

In answer to the question as to when Omniture might open source their 
hosting code I would say definitely not before they let Charles Manson 
out of jail. I could be wrong. I am genuinely interested in the movement 
toward hosted systems that are driven by proprietary software. Many of 
these systems are data collection and reporting systems that serve 
business needs. The data belongs to the subscriber of the service while 
the core software remains proprietary and belongs to the hosting 
provider. In many cases these systems provide open APIs for clients to 
customize their own installations. In reading the thread I am 
interpreting from some that service providers such as Salesforce should 
open source the software that drives their service business. Indeed I 
have heard calls for Red Hat to open source RHN. Google is a proprietary 
software service that makes money off indexing open source websites as 
well as the rest of the world. Does it make sense for an open source 
community driven website to collect revenue from banner ads pointing to 
its site through Google?

Mike McGrath wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Feb 2008, Jesse Eversole Jr wrote:
>
>   
>> Sure,
>>
>> Omniture uses what I call a "client side" tracking technique using javascript
>> to dynamically markup an image tag with a query string and fetch that image
>> from Omniture's servers sending data to them via the query string.  Google and
>> Yahoo offer similar services with less sophisticated features, but the
>> approach is effectively the same.  The data is stored on Omniture's servers
>> and available for reporting in near real time especially when it comes to
>> basic traffic data.  It is probably important to note that Omniture and
>> awstats are not mutually exclusive.  One is server based and the other runs on
>> the webpage sending data to a hosted platform.
>>
>> I would have to dig into details to completely expose what our license
>> agreement with Omniture is as is applies to the usage of their software since
>> is a service that we buy from them.  Omniture is more akin to Salesforce.com
>> and Google Analytics.
>> To get started with the base functionality of Omniture you drop in some
>> javascript, hopefully in a header or footer, and a few minutes later you can
>> login to your account and start looking at traffic reports.  Omniture has many
>> sophisticated features one of which has the interest of Red Hat in response to
>> your comment about Red Hat's needs relating to Fedora.  We have the capability
>> with Omniture to do cross-domain path analysis.  That is, we can gain much
>> deeper insight into the relationship between the two or more sites from
>> tracking cross site browsing behavior.  We can track visitor paths across
>> multiple sites including our international sites.  This extends beyond simple
>> entry and exit page analysis.  The data is rich and the reporting interface
>> powerful to the extent that it takes some time to explore all the different
>> capabilities should the Fedora community wish to use Omniture for some of its
>> own reporting.
>>
>>     
>
> I think this is great, really.  I'd love to do it but Omniture has chosen
> to build their software in a closed source manner so I don't think we can
> do it.  Unless they want to OSS their code, we won't be able to use it.
>
> 	-Mike
>