Category: Syndicated

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.

As I await the impending cure for writers block (today? tomorrow? next week???) I thought I would shout out to my manager, Stacey, who wrote a great post entitled "Nobel Prize Implies Open Source is A Perfect Market" - an analysis of this paper by Eric Maskin, one of the recent recipients of the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on Mechanism Design Theory. As someone who sincerely regrets never taking an econ class, this stuff is gold.

You should read her full post, but I'll note a couple of things. The quote she latches onto from the above-linked paper is this:

"...when discoveries are 'sequential' (so that each successive invention builds in an essential way on its predecessors) patent protection is not as useful for encouraging innovation as in a static setting. Indeed, society and even inventors themselves may be better off without such protection. Furthermore, an inventor’s prospective profit may actually be enhanced by competition and imitation."

The above applies specifically to patents, but the question is whether there's any application to open source software. Stacey's conclusion is that open source is software’s solution to creating the perfect efficient market, which is something to keep in mind the next time you hear anyone describe open source as "cancerous" or "communist" - not that anyone's ever done that or anything...

Read Stacey's post here

Here's a little test for you - quick, name the hardware vendor about which the following was said:

[their] commitment to providing high-quality drivers that meet the needs of the mobile Linux community is second to none.
- Matthew Garrett, Ubuntu Mobile Linux Engineer

I tend to suggest that... you buy [a machine] with [company's] graphics and wireless. That takes care of the 2 biggest annoyances right there.
- Linus Torvalds

(see source at the end of this post)

If you said "AMD" then you've been reading too many press releases. While it's nice that AMD appears to be making moves in the right direction with their ATI drivers, the fact remains that the only major vendor to release and fully support open source graphics and wireless drivers on Linux is... Intel. After speaking with Dirk Hohndel, Intel's Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist, it begins to dawn on me that we enjoy the fruits of Intel's labors, often without realizing it. While other vendors release binary blobs for their drivers, Intel has taken the total Open Source approach, with real working drivers available right now.

Perhaps lots of other people are well aware of Intel's contributions and I'm the only one without a clue, but somehow I doubt it. For a quick rundown of Intel's open source contributions, see this list, which I found at Matt Asay's The Open Road blog:

• EFI


• moblin.org


• Harmony


• Linux kernel


• Xen, KVM, UML


• LinuxPowerTop.org


• acpi.sourceforge.net


• openWSMan.org


• OpenAMT.org


• LinuxUWB.org


• LinuxFirmwareKit.org


• IntelLinuxWireless.org


• IntelLinuxGraphics.org


• Mesa


• X.org


• LSB

We are also participating in many other communities like MySQL, Apache, Firefox, and gcc, to name just a few. There are many more. Our goal is to ensure that people using open-source software have a good experience when running it on Intel hardware, so we are touching many different projects.

That's quite a list. I asked Dirk about making more noise about Intel's Open Source efforts. He mentioned the fantastic relationships that they have with so many Open Source projects, and that it's not in Intel's interest to screw them up - and the last thing they want to do is make the developers feel that they're doing Intel's bidding.

While I can understand this, I can't help but think that Intel is missing out a bit. Look at the goodwill that AMD has engendered with their recent announcements. While you could look at that as marketing fluff, I tend to think that the follow-up will be real. As I mentioned to Dirk, as long as you add real value to Open Source projects, no one can accuse you of marketing fluff. Thus, making a big deal out of Intel's contributions is simply making sure that the facts are reported to a wider audience.

While I am forced to admit that there's something refreshing about Intel's understated approach, I tend to think that the correct balance could lean a bit more to the loudspeaker side - without going over the top or hyping vaporware. But what really struck me about this difference in opinion is how much our PR sensibilities are a manifestation of the size of company we work for - Dirk is at Intel, a major multi-zillion dollar corporation that spans the globe. In that context, making hay over something as piddling as moblin.org or some modules in the Linux kernel source repository would appear odd and out of place. In my case, I work at Hyperic, a systems management startup fighting for PR space in a growing market with a lot of action. In my world, you let no PR stone go unturned. So when I hear about the gobs of code churned out by Intel and the fact that Dirk's group lets me run FlightGear at a good clip on my laptop, I'm naturally impressed and cannot understand why there isn't more noise about it.

So, I'll do my little part and hopefully more people will know about Intel's Open Source graphics and wireless drivers. In the meantime, applaud AMD for moving in the right direction and hope they one day reach the point of matching Intel's contributions.

* Source for quotes: Intel Developer Forum, 9/19/2007

To GPL or not to GPL: What Would Dostoevsky Do?

"Thou wouldst go into the world, and art going with empty hands, with some promise of freedom which men in their simplicity and their natural unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread- for nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom."
- The Grand Inquisitioner, Book 5, Chapter 5, The Brothers Karamazov

In "The Brothers Karamazov", Dostoevsky wrestles with many grand themes, including the above passage about freedom. The context of the above quote was a tale told through the eyes of Ivan Karamazov about the dangers of freedom and how it can ultimately result in enslavement. Without getting bogged down in details, I think it's pretty fair to say that Dostoevsky had some misgivings about modern perceptions of freedom.

You may be wondering what in God's green earth this has to do with the GPL. Lately, a few folks have written about the wonders of permissive licenses and the death of the GPL and how developers will migrate towards BSD-like licenses because of fewer limitations associated with it. Just as Dostoevsky warned us about the ultimate outcome of total freedom - oppression and totalitarian hegemony - I too worry about the ultimate outcome of permissive licenses like the BSD license. If you are not familiar with the basic differences between the BSD and GPL licenses, I encourage you to read them:

read the GNU GPL license
read the BSD license

To over-simplify the differences: the GPL has more downstream restrictions on how derivative works may be distributed, the primary one being that derivative works must also be licensed under the GPL.

I get nervous whenever large software shops talk up the virtues of a license with fewer protections of developer and user rights. In the linked articles above, there is talk of permissive licenses being the path of least resistance, with the premise that it's "easier" to gravitate towards them. My question is - easier for whom? Easier for the developers or easier for the companies who wish to make use of it without those annoying obligations to the greater free software ecosystem? As is often mentioned by others smarter than me, a scenario where developers gravitate towards permissive licenses makes it easier for companies to avoid community reciprocity.

A free software ecosystem works best when there are some limitations on what can happen downstream from the developer. In the case of the GPL, there are downstream limits on distribution of derivative works, among other things. No, it's not a perfect license, as the arguments over distribution and software as a service bear out. Really, the GPL serves to keep an honest person (or company) honest and is the best means available today for maintaining a vibrant, free software ecosystem over the long-term - and I include commercial as well as non-commercial projects in the mix. You see, as Dostoevsky attempted to show, the best kind of freedom is one with long-term viability, and that requires some restrictions to maintain order. It is with this in mind that I must respectfully disagree with those who proclaim the libertarian roots of free software. Certainly, I can see some libertarian elements of the free software ecosystem espousing the BSD license, but the GPL cannot be considered libertarian. Quite the contrary, it's designed to carry forward a moral framework by which users, developers, and companies can abide. That it seems to work out for commercial and non-commercial entities alike is testament to the genius of one RMS.

Personally, I think this is the right way to do business - and make money, to boot. If you didn't see it, you should definitely read about Marten Mickos' keynote from OSBC on why MySQL uses the GPL. Protecting developer rights isn't just some nebulous hippie ideology - those same rights extend to commercial free software projects, too.

So would Dostoevsky use the GPL? I have not a doubt 🙂 I have written in the past about the long-term trends towards lower software prices and freely distributed software, but there is no such trend towards the protection of rights. That only occurs through the vigilance of the greater free software community.

While I'm waiting on my brain to cough up the rest of the "Open Source Macro vs. Micro" series, I thought I'd post about the Most. Irritating. Question. Ever:

"OMG! Like, how are Open Source developers gonna get paid???"

...usually asked in some worrisome tone, as if Open Source developers around the world were, like, starving or something and panhandling on the street. So here's a quick test on the absurdity of this question:

1. Do you see lots more open source development than ever before?
(yes)

Ok, proceed to the follow-up:

2. Do you see open source developers filling homeless shelters and food stamp lines?
(no)

Well, gosh, I guess that solves that dilemma. And yet, I hear that question ALL THE TIME. In 1999 - 2001, sure, it was a fair question. After all, there was legitimate hypothesizing that open source was fueld mostly by the .com bubble. I never believed that, but the concept was new enough at the time that I can see that as a plausible explanation. But now, going on 7 years after the dot bomb? No way.

Frankly, I just don't understand why the question still pops up. Nor do I understand the usual companion question/statement: "OMG! Red Hat, Canonical, and <insert company here> make money off the backs of free labor from individual developers!" 1.) I don't see why anyone is concerned if an open source developer is monetizing their project and 2.) I don't believe it's true - I think Open Source developers do, in fact, make money. Let's look at Red Hat, a well-known example of an Open Source company - they make money off of many open source projects because they can. Because they've built a reputation around their ability to deliver such projects in a form that is readily digested by their users. Customers find value in this, which is why they pay for it. So what of the individual projects that comprise Red Hat's distributions? What if they don't get paid? Assuming they don't get paid, you can really only point to one reason: because no one thought it was of high enough value to pay for it. Whether or not Red Hat is in the picture to make money off of their distribution and support is immaterial - either way, this hypothetical open source project is not making money. However, *with* the existence of Red Hat, suddenly these open source developers have a conduit to a rather large audience and now have business opportunities that would not otherwise be possible. In fact, if you take a look at Fedora or Ubuntu these days, you'll find lots of software that is directly supported from various companies for various reasons - and some that isn't.

If developers don't get paid, it's not Red Hat's (or anyone else's) fault. I don't actually believe that open source developers work for free - in fact, I think the vast majority of developers get paid in some form or another. Those who cut their teeth on personal projects will surely be able to parlay that into some form of employment in the very near future. Or they're paid by their company to work on a side project that's not a core piece of software. OR, as is increasingly true, they work for a company that sees the light and pays them to work on their core product, which happens to be Open Source.

This is not rocket science. The early open source nay-sayers often contended that open source wouldn't last because no one would get paid for it. They were wrong then, and they're wrong now.