Author: John Mark

I've met Jeremy Zawodny, although I don't know him. From what I have gathered, he and a bunch of people at Yahoo are doing some great work on the Open Source side of the house. In a blog post, Jeremy talks about how Yahoo! has "been on the openness roa...

Federal Computer Week has a story covering the US Navy’s position on open source software and open standards. There are a few choice quotes from Vice Adm. Mark Edwards which show the navy understands benefit of unhindered access to information. “The days of proprietary technology must come to an end,” [...]

There’s been a lot of reporting about the ISO fiasco with OOXML. You can read writeups from people much more tuned in to the process than me. You can start here, here and here (the last is a highly recommended roundup from Andy Updegrove). But somewhere in this process, much of the coverage of this event [...]

By now, you've no doubt heard of Chris Anderson, Wired's Editor, and his recent article, Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. If you haven't, you should read it - it's an interesting compendium of how technology is changing the value of things. H...

At a recent SDForum event, I was doing my usual schtick about communities, when I happened to mention one of my recent thoughts: that Google's Open Source Program Office kicks major ass. I can think of no other company that has merged marketing, PR, real code, real community events, and real *stuff* that geeks find enthralling as cohesively as Google. It seems to me, as an outsider, to be an almost perfect blend of how you develop community and derive real value from it. And as I always like to point out - in order to do that, you must first give your community real value. Google seems particularly good at both giving and getting value. Better, in fact, than anyone else.

And yet, you would have thought that the audience were a collection of cows staring at a newly-installed gate. Crickets chirped. And then I heard some push-back:

They do it for recruiting!

Well, yes, this is true. But then, I didn't say they were altruistic, but rather that they knew what they were doing with respect to community development. They invest in communities, many of them related to Open Source, and this devotion to community helps them tremendously. It helps them when they launch a new set of services, because the communities they target will no doubt be the early adopters. It helps when Google launches a new platform, such as Android, because their communities will be the source of a great number of hackers who will enjoy bending Android to their will.

As is often the case, whenever I say something that meets with any sort of vehement disagreement, I obsess over why my view differs so greatly from those whose opinions I normally agree with. So, expect to see more posts as I dive more deeply into this issue. It also helps that this happens to coincide with the latest installment of the Google Summer of Code.

The ISO folk have put out a press release about how wonderful the BRM worked out and what happens next. However, it tells us little people to stay out. Here's the operative language:

The BRM was not intended to be a public event but followed the orderly and inclusive process of ISO and IEC. With the BRM review completed, it is now up to national bodies to determine whether approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500 is warranted.

So much for an open standard. I have a question for the ISO. Have all prior meetings been run like this? In the deepest shade you can find? You know they have not, and I know they have not.

So, how about letting us listen to audio of the meeting, so we can compare claims now coming from all sides? There are so many different accounts, and they don't all sync up. Given that this format, if accepted, will impact us little people, not just a bunch of vendors, how about letting us in enough to make it at least possible to figure out who is telling the truth?

Hey, EU Commission. Did you know that there is reportedly audio made of the BRM meeting?

I posted this over at BytesFree.org. The subject matter is about Linux, specifically, but really it could apply to any Open Source software user. Re-posting below:

Over at the TuxToday blog, there’s a post about Linux users not caring about freedom - because they’d rather just use Adobe’s Flash plugin in lieu of Free Software like Gnash. Or they think Richard Stallman and the FSF are morons who are hurting the Open Source movement.

I’m torn by this argument, because I can see both sides of this. On one hand, it is true that fewer Linux and FLOSS users today care about the “free” in Free Software, and I lament this occurrence. On the other hand, however, I would be remiss not to point out that, at times, the FSF and Richard Stallman can be their own worst enemies. Note, however, that I am in full agreement with the stated goals of the FSF.

Also, we must understand why this phenomenon is taking place. I think a big part of it is that simply Free Software has expanded beyond the traditional techno-libertarian space it once occupied. And furthermore - and this is why groups like BytesFree.org even exist at the moment - we have done a very poor job of explaining to people why they should care. If you look beyond the techno elite, very few people understand the underlying problems of the lack of protected freedoms in the digital space.

This is why BytesFree.org is dedicated to the idea that everyone deserves the protected right to access what we own, on our terms. Because identifying the problem in that language makes it apparent to the layman what is wrong, ie. we *don’t* currently have the protected right to access what we own. And in fact, with laws like the DMCA, not only do we not have that right, but we can run afoul of the law simply by acting on the supposition that we have that right.

We believe that the secret to these issues lies in addressing them in a language that everyone can understand. This is about the right to education, our mandate as human beings to wipe out the digital divide and ensure tech access for everyone, and the simple fact that the prominence of technology in 2008 raises information rights to the level of human rights. Note the term I chose there: information rights. Not “digital rights”. “Digital rights” seems to be a term reserved for the technorati, something that everyday people need not care about. “Information rights” - ok, that’s a term more people can identify with.

So, if we want things to change, we’re going to have to get organized and make an effort to speak “right down to earth, in a language that everybody can understand.” At BytesFree.org, we’re working on political efforts to make sure that both politicians and the non-techie audience can understand why we care.

Won’t you consider joining bytesfree.org?

For those of you with a dislike of all things political, I strongly suggest you avert your eyes from this post.

If you've already booked your ticket to SCALE, I hope you'll drop by the Open Source Politics birds-of-a-feather on Friday at 8pm in the appropriately named "Kennedy" room. There, I and Ilan Rabinovitch, one of SCALE's co-founders, will discuss a Voter Information Project as well as some of our other thoughts around bytesfree.org. Of most importance is how to approach the upcoming June primaries in California (Feb. 5 is "just" the presidential primary).

If you want to know more, sign up for the mailing list.

On the Open Sources blog, Savio Rodrigues goes to great lengths to basically say "It's proprietary Open Source! Not that there's anything wrong with that..." Savio's point is to define as "proprietary open source" when you cannot post your modifications upstream into the canonical project. He uses the following example to illustrate his point:

I buy a license for RHEL
I find a bug or want a new feature
Lucky for me, I have the source code to RHEL
I also have the technical skills to pay the billz
I fix the bug and add that new feature to my copy of RHEL
I no longer have RHEL, I have RHEL*

Can I get support for RHEL* from Red Hat? A candy bar to readers who answer, “nope, you’re out of luck, Red Hat won’t support you on anything other than RHEL (i.e. RHEL* != RHEL)”.

Well, yes, Savio. It's called gating your community to prevent any riff-raff from contributing their riffy-raff into your codebase. Put another way - let's say that the people producing RHEL* above were to, say, learn from their experience and become more involved with the software projects that form parts of RHEL or Fedora. In that case, their changes are not for nought and are then propagated throughout the RHEL ecosystem. Yes, it's true that before you build up that trust you are basically SOL when it comes to pushing your changes to the upstream project(s), but I can't see this trust mechanism going away, and for good reason.

Savio's larger point, and the reason he calls it proprietary, is to state that this is the moral equivalent of good ole regular proprietary software... not that there's anything wrong with that! However, the fact remains that Savio's commentary would have been just as valid if he used any of the .org-iest of the .org's in his example. I defy anyone to name an open source project, no matter how academic or non-profit in structure, that will immediately take on a new contributor's code. They won't, and they shouldn't. The RHEL / RHEL* example above would have been just as valid if it were about Linux kernel / Linux kernel* or bash / bash* or any number of other projects in the world.

So yes, being the creator of the code does place you in a position of power with respect to what goes into it in the future. This is true whether you're a traditional proprietary ISV or a college professor itching to form a non-profit foundation around your pet project. This is not news, and I'm pretty sure it's not proprietary.

I finally wrote something for the Hyperic blog:

The term innovation opportunity has been discussed by Matthew Aslett, who described it as "the potential to lower development costs for business users, while at the same time raising their potential to focus on innovative development." This falls in line with the view that an open model is more efficient, but how exactly is it more efficient, and how does one maximize that efficiency? Does Open Source development lead to the creation of a perfect market? I will attempt to describe how innovation opportunities come about, and how to take advantage of those opportunities. The key would seem to be enhancing the ability to deal with parallel feedback loops that arise as a matter of course from interactions with your user and developer community. Put another way, maximize the surface area of your community and be able to capitalize on these "touches".

Read the rest of Parallel Feedback Loops.