November 25th, 2009

Death of the black box EULA

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:03 am

Categories: FOSS, General, Internet, Legal, Satire, business models, mass market, values

Tags: Software, Box, EULA, End User License Agreement, Tools & Techniques, Management, Dana Blankenhorn

Computing’s greatest accomplishment of this decade will likely go unremarked in the popular press.

I call it the “death of the black box EULA.” (Picture from the blog Fortunes Pawn Luncheonette, December 2007.)

Free software wounded it in the early 1990s. The Internet stabbed it again. But it was open source, in this decade, that struck the fatal blow.

Users under 25 may be unaware of what I am talking about. Let me explain how the scam worked.

1. I have this black box. It does tricks. I sell you the tricks it does with fancy TV ads or in glossy magazine spreads. You want my black box. You want it bad.
2. I will let you use a copy of the black box, but I will not sell it to you. I will take your money but you are not buying anything.
3. All this is covered by an End User License Agreement (EULA), written in a form of elvish. You signed it when you ripped open the black box.
4. The EULA states that the box may not work. The EULA states the box may do nothing. Regardless, I keep your money.
5. The EULA says you can’t look in the black box and try to fix it. You can’t even see what’s inside. You might steal it. Maybe I will talk to you on the phone about it from India.
6. Here is another black box. It fixes the first one, makes it better. It’s more stable. You need an upgrade, maybe a new computer, but you really, really want this black box. Seen the ad?
7. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The black box EULA is descended from licenses IBM wrote in the 1950s, when computers filled great rooms and the value of calculating, say, the pay-outs for a horse race were worth a fortune.

Software was unstable then, even more so than now, and without the EULA companies like IBM might have been sued out of business by angry customers. The computer revolution may never have happened without the black box EULA.

Companies like Microsoft brought the black box EULA into the 1990s intact. Even though PCs were very reliable, even though software storage had become stable, and even though the creation of software was no longer a black art, the black box EULA remained.

The black box EULA made Bill Gates a billionaire 50 times over. It made many other people wealthy too, rich beyond their wildest schemes.

But the black box EULA was always hopelessly one-sided. It was unfair to customers. And lawyers could provide no help — they had written the black box EULA and were sworn to uphold it.

So folks like Richard Stallman struck a blow against wealth and said software should be free. Not only free but visible so you could see it, smell it, kiss it, touch it. Fix it, improve it. And they wrote their own license, which they dubbed copyleft.

The war against the black box EULA was on.

The free software folks won applause, but the people who needed complex black boxes were skeptical. They knew you couldn’t just give stuff away, that software writers need to eat, too. Even if Linus Torvalds was happy with hamburger while the customers ate steak, a way was needed to get him a hamburger. And a beer.

This is what I have now spent a half-decade covering. Open source is a transformation enabled by the Internet, born of righteous indignation, and driven home by hard-headed businessmen and women on both sides of major transactions.

So now you have an alternative to the black box. The makers of black boxes know they can’t hold customers to their EULAs forever. They have to compete with free. The eye of Gates has fallen. The age of men has begun.

The black box is now encased in plastic and steel. You can return an iPhone to the store. The EULAs are still there, and they retain their legal weight, but they no longer control the market.

It’s a good time, at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, to look back from these heights and see what has been accomplished.

The black box EULA no longer has the power to cloud mens’ minds. It is dead as a controlling force in the software world. You can open the box, see what’s inside. You are free to tinker with it, to freely connect with it, and you no longer think of it as a black box that holds all light, but as a physical product, with a warranty.

There are obligations on both sides. It’s a fairer and more just software world. It’s worth celebrating this Thanksgiving.

Happy Turkey Day.

November 23rd, 2009

Google goes all-in with an open source cloud

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:13 am

Categories: Cloud Computing, General, Google, Internet, telecom, values

Tags: Google Inc., Open Standard, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Google quietly announced last week that its cloud will run nothing but open source software.

This is a big deal, but let’s first admit why Google did it.

As I have written many times, Google has a big cost advantage when it comes to delivering Internet resources.

It’s like America’s nuclear advantage during the Cold War. Anyone who sought to compete with America in terms like throw-weight would bankrupt themselves. President Reagan encouraged this competition and the Soviet Union bankrupted itself.

So as Google enters the cloud computing wars with outfits like Amazon and Salesforce.com, it is to its advantage that there be no proprietary software advantage. On a level playing field it dominates. They’re the New York Yankees without a salary cap.

Openness, represented by open source and Internet standards, are all to Google’s advantage. This is why opponents of open standards, like Scott Cleland, go to such rhetorical lengths to claim that open standards are, in fact, proprietary. If open standards are proprietary you can set closed standards without harm to the market.

But open standards set terms of competition that advantage the low-cost producer of bits and processing. The question for policymakers, both public and private, is what the terms of competition will be, not who wins.

Cleland and other Bell apologists want their clients to win. Thus they support regulation based on scarcity, under which the winner is the outfit that can hire the most apologists. I own no Google stock, and I make no money from Google. Never have. Probably never will. (If I do I’ll let you know.)

We should set terms of competition that advantage consumers, not particular producers, and that reward plenty rather than scarcity. By that standard Google’s dominance is a fair one, fairly obtained, and so long as it’s not abused it’s a good thing.

In making its cloud open source, Google shows it understands this.

October 26th, 2009

The chief value of open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:20 am

Categories: Development, Enterprise Policy, General, Infrastructure, business models, values

Tags: Code, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

One thing I agree with Matt Asay about. The key to open source is not that it’s free.

Open source doesn’t even cut costs, because code licenses represent only a tiny portion of a major product’s cost.

The chief value of open source is visibility. (These highly visible sneakers cost $120 from Xander. Picture from Hypebeast.)

You can see the code, you can test the code, you can improve the code, but mostly you can see the code.

When you see the code vendors, of necessity, change their business models. Their costs move to the back-end. They look for subscription revenue, for services revenue. They look for ways to help a project work.

When you can see the code you have a different relationship with it. You’re no longer asking what it can do. You’re asking how you can adapt it to your needs.

With code visibility, you and your vendors become partners in trying to make something work. The vendor can’t over-promise, but you can’t over-assume either. This may be one of main hidden reasons for IT failure, the two sides of the transaction not being on the same page.

You can also get around a vendor with open source. If the vendor doesn’t have time to fix your issue, you pay someone else to fix it. Maybe you hire someone, maybe you just go to the community or its commercial arm. There are no more excuses, well no more you have to tolerate, with open source.

When code is visible, and you’re a member of the code community, you’re going to be up-to-date on improvements, enhancements, and bug fixes. It’s not just that the code becomes visible, but you become visible as a user of the code.

It’s true that in the enterprise space there is no such thing as free code. There is only visible code and invisible code. When you have open source you have the visible kind, and this makes all the difference.

October 2nd, 2009

Open source is sold and FOSS is not

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:04 am

Categories: FOSS, GPL, General, business models, marketing, values

Tags: GPL, F/OSS, Matt, Alfresco, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

I have spent many pleasant hours with Matt Asay’s latest, “The wrong marketing for open source.”

I think I finally figured it out. Matt says that FOSS software can’t be sold while open source can be.

This is a feature, not a bug. It’s why the GNU smiles.

Much of my confusion involves the GPL and FOSS. The GPL was created as a FOSS license but it remains the most popular open source license out there.

I explained the reason in my 2006 piece The Open Source Incline. Giving outside contributors the same rights you enjoy is the best way to encourage their participation. For an open source company the GPL helps drive development and the construction of a community, which it needs to thrive.

So the GPL, while created for FOSS, is also used by open source. And there remains a key difference between FOSS software and open source, which Matt nails. Open source is sold and FOSS is not.

What marks a FOSS project is not its license but the motivation behind it. A FOSS project is not driven by dreams of financial gain. It’s driven by dreams of service, of shared effort helping all boats rise. The Mozilla Foundation is not about the Benjamins even though Firefox uses a Mozilla license rather than the GPL. Money keeps things moving but no one is getting rich.

Open source combines the shared effort of FOSS and marries it to the profit motive. Open source developers share code in order to sell support, or services, or products built using the code. The key word in the previous sentence is sell.

Open source is sold, FOSS is downloaded. Open source companies are looking for a profit, FOSS projects are looking to get by, to grow, to serve and to share.

Matt makes his living as an open source executive with Alfresco. Alfresco uses the GPL, but it’s an open source company, not a FOSS project. Alfresco wants to make money. Making money is good.

But how much money? To an open source company, the answer is as much as possible. To a FOSS project the answer is enough to get by.

There is nothing wrong with either model. Both can, in fact, use the same licenses, or different licenses. But if someone comes to you wearing a suit, a smile, and their hand out, it matters little what license their wares may carry. They’re still a salesman.

They’re open source.

September 28th, 2009

I for one welcome no overlords

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:05 am

Categories: Development, FOSS, GPL, General, Microsoft, values

Tags: Software, Microsoft Corp., Richard Stallman, F/OSS, Open Source, Tools & Techniques, Management, Dana Blankenhorn

Inside our own Matt Asay’s latest hymm to open source (as opposed to FOSS) is this simple message.

He accepts Microsoft as overlord. (Kent Brockman, right, from Wikipedia, famously welcomed “our insect overlords” in the episode “Deep Space Homer,” co-starring Buzz Aldrin as himself.)

Open source embraces interoperability, whereas free software takes a hard line that even Microsoft, despite its preference that customers use its complete software portfolio exclusively, won’t take.

This has always been true. FOSS is idealism, 80-proof distilled idealism, and the open source movement was born in 1998 as a reaction against that.

It’s not news. So why is Matt acting like it is? Here’s why:

Sometimes that openness will mean embracing Microsoft in order to meet a customer’s needs. After all, fierce partisanship and an unwillingness to compromise in software accomplishes is just as pointless, distasteful, and useless as it is in government.

Note our difference in emphasis. Matt put italics on “in order to meet a customer’s needs.” I think the more important message here is embracing Microsoft.

I do not think Microsoft is an evil empire, by the way. I accept the premise of the book “Burning the Ships,” that its IP policy is aimed mainly at letting Microsoft compete in growing markets than at demanding monopoly rents on Linux.

But Matt’s growing distaste for Eben Moglen and Bruce Perens and (especially, even personally) Richard Stallman is both unseemly and silly. Free software advocates have always been transparent and upfront on what they were trying to do. Microsoft, by contrast, has often been opaque, sometimes deliberately so.

The argument between FOSS and open source has never been about economic systems. It has been about the meaning of freedom.

It revolves around Stallman’s fourth freedom, the idea that when you are given something and you improve it you have an obligation to share the improvement so that the realm of freedom can advance.

Stallman calls this patriotism. Matt now seems to think it’s communism.

BSD licenses like Eclipse, Apache and Mozilla let people take more than they give and profit from it. Microsoft’s MS-PL license lets it do this on a massive scale. The fact that Matt now embraces this idea, and embraces Microsoft’s overlordship over everything it has copyrighted, doesn’t mean he’s a hero of capitalism and the rest of us are dirty rotten commies.

It means he’s a businessman. Business is not about ideals of any sort. Businessmen exist in every country, under every form of government. They even existed under Soviet Communism, even if they didn’t call themselves businessmen. Business is about seeking advantage, taking it, and building on it.

You can mix business with idealism, but you don’t have to. This is the revised bargain of open source. To the extent that Microsoft accepts this bargain businessmen involved with open source are free to accept Microsoft. Always have been.

Just don’t expect FOSS advocates to kiss your ring for it, or give up their ideals because you’ve made a deal. They have their values, you have yours.

Let’s leave it at that.

September 22nd, 2009

Corporate open source is more vulnerable

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:41 am

Categories: Development, General, Strategy, business models, values

Tags: Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Yahoo’s move to offload Zimbra, combined with Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, are reminders of a nasty truth supporters of corporate open source would rather not recognize.

Corporate open source is vulnerable open source.

That’s because, with a few exceptions, open source has not been the money-spinner its boosters thought it would be. This should not be a surprise. Open source by its nature values other things beyond a vendor’s bottom line.

Funny, when you eliminate distribution and marketing, and when you can’t make people pay you for your product, your bottom line isn’t going to be as robust as it might otherwise be. Yet this is not a sign of open source failure. It’s a natural by-product of its success.

The money open source vendors aren’t making is money that open source users can make. It’s money saved on code, on systems, on development, money that can be used to do the work of the business. This is true whether the business in question is for-profit, a non-profit, or a government entity. The savings are real, and massive.

What is becoming clear, however, is that because open source values different forms of money, and different peoples’ money, it’s not such a great deal for vendors. That’s one reason entrepreneurial types like Matt Asay are saying good things about Microsoft. Open source, it turns out, is not about them.

But open source code still needs a place to live. It needs a home and homes cost money.

What the history of the last few years tells me is that the best home for an open source project is not a company, but a foundation.

Within a foundation costs are shared, savings are shared, but members are free to deploy those savings as they see fit. Groups like the Linux Foundation, Mozilla, Apache and Eclipse move forward smartly, developers getting plenty of resources to keep working, while corporate-backed efforts sputter and flame out with every season.

But life inside a foundation is not like life inside a corporation. What corporate eyes may see as healthy competition foundation eyes may see as wasteful redundancy.

Take the two code bases maintained by Openoffice.org, for instance. Few outside the business know there are two code bases, one based on Sun’s StarOffice, the other on IBM’s Symphony.

In a competitive world this would keep both sides honest. In a foundation world the benefits are not so obvious. It’s like having two separate offices within the same organization for Mozambiquan orphan relief. The orphans would do better with one.

These truths were not self-evident when the decade began, but they seem pretty obvious now. The question is what are we going to do about them?

September 14th, 2009

Open source loves profit

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 11:50 am

Categories: Development, FOSS, GPL, General, Microsoft, Oracle, Strategy, business models, values

Tags: Software, Marc, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

The biggest lie told about open source is that those who practice it hate making money, that they are  anti-capitalist.

(Picture from those dirty commies at Wikimedia Commons.)

Some people within the FOSS community do feel that way, of course. They are idealists first, developers second. It is thanks to such people that software is now a hollow mountain, the insides visible and little bits of open innovation pushing through the crust here and there.

It’s just silly to tar the whole movement with that broad brush, as Matt Asay does in tracking the attitudes of some to recent moves by Microsoft and Oracle.

He uses a pushquote to note the words of cartoonist and wine importer Hugh MacLeod, that “It’s easy to spot a purist. They’re the ones without any skin in the game.”

That’s some nice snark, but the reply is it depends on what you mean by skin.

GPL programmers, those who contribute code, have lots of skin in the game, real skin, skin that is more important to them than money. To disparage those in open source who value something other than a bank balance is to call the bulk of it anti-capitalist, when it’s just not.

Lots of people support the GPL because it’s the bottom of the open source incline. They operate transparently because that’s at the bottom of the open source development incline.  They have skin in the game, but their lives have fewer zeroes than yours, Matt. They get by with a little help from their friends.

Marc Fleury did a $350 million deal for JBOSS, still one of the largest open source deals on record, and that was for GPL software. Come to think of it, so is mySQL, which came out with $1 billion from Sun.

Marc is now backing another open source project, Open Remote, not because he’s gone Communist but because he knows the best way to clear an impasse of proprietary agendas is to take money out of the equation and move forward.

If you want people to help you develop your software, give them equal rights to yours. If you really want them to help you, play as straight as possible with them. You can still make money. Your community will be thrilled if you do, because they want jobs.

Microsoft doesn’t play that way. In part this is natural, because their code base cost a fortune to develop and so their contribution to open source extensions will always be out-sized compared with those of small developers, as will the benefit they derive.

If you accept those rules. Matt, by all means play by them.

Just don’t throw stones at those who would rather take their software efforts elsewhere.

September 14th, 2009

Would you march for Internet privacy?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:31 am

Categories: General, Government, Internet, Legal, Security, identity, mass market, politics, values

Tags: Law, Internet, Government, Vertical Industries, Dana Blankenhorn

It’s marching season again, time for the political opposition to take it to the streets, and show its strength in numbers. (Picture from CBS News.)

But this article is no tea party. It’s about another march that happened over the weekend, in Germany. Over 10,000 people marched in Berlin marched for data protection.

They were protesting a new law meant to guarantee police the right to track back Internet traffic, with tamper-proof IDs and special police.

Germany has long been a world champion at seeking to monitor its citizens online, its avowed goal to make  online law conform to what is allowed offline.

So if the German law says the government has a monopoly on gambling, so should it be online. If German law says thou shalt not speak of Nazis, so should it be online. If sharing files is truly a copyright violation, the law must halt it, regardless.

The American reaction to such government actions is generally to engineer around them, or to laugh them off. My spam folder says they have apoint. Yet even here there are magic words that cause most voters to surrender any zone of privacy once offered by someone in authority. Watch.

Child pornography. (Open your laptop.) Terrorism. (Take off your shoes.)

The Internet, being based on computing, is a binary sort of place. To be effective, laws must become absolute. Which means, at some point, we’re trusting the government with the medium’s future.

In Europe, it should be noted, data privacy marches are the property of leftists, Greens, even pirate parties. In American, right now, it’s the right that’s out of power, fearful of an intrusive government.

Anyone expecting a tea party for the Internet?

September 11th, 2009

Will Microsoft always be seen as open source Astroturf?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:03 am

Categories: Development, General, Microsoft, Strategy, management, values

Tags: Group, Microsoft Corp., Matt Asay, Linux Foundation, Linux, Taxes, Open Source, Free Trade, Personal Finance, Operating Systems

There’s an old game in politics. If some group is giving you trouble, launch a competing group under your control.

Bar Association won’t approve your judges? Launch your own lawyers’ group. Feminists giving you trouble? Create a group of “real feminists” spouting your talking points.

These are the origins of Astroturf, a popular term in current political debates denoting phony grassroots, people who claim to be angry from the bottom up but are controlled from the top down.

(Are you ready for some football? My local team, the Atlanta Falcons, plays all their home games on the fake grass of the Georgia Dome. This weekend they’ll be tangled up in blue…)

Now before you go all political on me my question is whether we’ll ever see Microsoft as meaning anything but Astroturf in open source.

This week Microsoft is putting a cool $1 million into its new CodePlex Foundation. It’s a valedictory of sorts for director of platform strategy Sam Ramji, who has given his notice. Matt Asay thinks Ramji was da bomb, and suggests his replacement should be a diplomat, not a bomb thrower. (Just pass them your resume.)

The Foundation is organized under the tax law as a 501(c)6 organization. Sounds a lot like charities organized under 501(c)3, but it’s the designation given to business groups like chambers of commerce. The Linux Foundation is also a 501(c)6, while GNOME is a 501(c)3.

Fact is I can almost smell and taste the press releases sure to follow from groups like the Linux Foundation, the FSF, and Software Freedom. It’s phony, it’s an attempt to deceive, Microsoft will always see open source as captive to its interests.

Or to quote the philosopher Joe Wilson, you lie.

But do they?

September 7th, 2009

Why open source remains an ideological divide

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:17 am

Categories: Development, FOSS, General, Government, business models, management, politics, values

Tags: Matt Asay, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Matt Asay has a piece today that is the tech equivalent of a Barack Obama speech.

He tries, once again, to remove ideology from the discussion of open source vs. proprietary software. He urges consensus, the best of both worlds, and asks can’t we all just get along?

As in politics the answer often turns out to be no, because there is a basic ideological divide here.

Proprietary companies succeed by imposing a top-down structure on software development and using sales revenue to keep everyone in line. I mean everyone — marketing, legal, support, development, and customers, too.

With proprietary software you’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus. Leave the firm and you lose access to your code. Leave it as a customer and you lose all your past work, along with much of your knowledge.

You become the business equivalent of David Brock or John Dean. (This is not a political point. Think Dennis Miller or the late Ron Silver, who went the other way.) In religious terms you are apostate, exiled. There seems to be no middle ground.

Open source offers a bottom-up structure of development but money is something of an afterthought. By that I mean you focus first on the job at hand, then build a business model around it, rather than the other way around.

You gain freedom but lose money. The marketing money, the distribution money, all that lovely gelt that bought the lawyers and the trade show booths and the incentive prizes to exotic destinations, is out of your life.

Unless you consider Portland exotic.

This divide between money-is-all and money-is-not-all is baked into the system. You don’t want to turn into Richard Stallman when you take the open source road, you may even reject him personally, but you soon find a daily shave is not necessary, and that broken-in sneakers are really quite comfortable.

Open source, as distinguished from FOSS, is an attempt to marry the best of both worlds, to build a business around a free model.

But no matter how capitalistic you may sound your hippie business heritage remains, and the best way to build a community around your software may still mean the GPL. Development will still require transparency.

Here’s where we turn back to politics.

When conservatives want to attack President Obama the first epithet they usually sling is “socialist.” What they mean is a demand economy, as in Cuba or the old Soviet Union. They don’t usually mean Sweden, or the Netherlands, or England or Canada, where life seems quite comfortable.

If you think of Stallman as Cuba and a company like Red Hat as Sweden, you get the ideological dilemma both Asay and our President face today.

I like shopping at Ikea. The solution for open source? Accept the limits and be proud of what you are. As to the President? Tune in Wednesday, but don’t expect it to be followed by a Republican chorus of Kumbaya.

Point is, Matt, in the end you have to choose a side. I say stand proudly with your friends or you get run over. Be open source, recognize the difference between that and the proprietary model, and go forward. If they want to give you the black hat for that, wear it proudly.

Stand for something.

June 26th, 2009

Is the world now an open source society?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:59 am

Categories: General, Government, Internet, business models, management, mass market, values

Tags: Revolution, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

I have long argued, here and elsewhere, that open source and the Internet values on which it is based has a political dimension.

They make it possible for great changes to occur from the bottom up, organically, transparently. They enable collaboration across continents.

It has lately become fashionable to believe my spiel. The Obama election and the Iranian “Twitter” revolution seem to argue for its reality.

But the Industrial Revolution wasn’t built in a day. The same is true for the Post-Industrial Revolution.

In business, I have learned, there is a price cheaper than free. The subsidies needed to move goods through the channel argue for proprietary models and strict protection of Intellectual Property.

The same is true for politics. The Obama campaign, in computing terms, was a much more top-down affair than the Dean campaign which preceded it. The Obama people bypassed the blogs just as they did media gatekeepers. The online environment they built, in the end, was proprietary.

It’s the ability to harness trends which leads to success, not the trends themselves. This harnessing would seem to contradict the open source ideal. But does it?

Again, I would argue that it does not. Open source is an accelerant of change. The Internet is the rocket fuel of change. Harnessing that power, directing that rocket, these remain tasks for leadership.

The way in which leadership works changes in an open source world, but the need for it remains. Even after the open source revolution is complete we will need leaders in politics, in business, and entertainment.

The question becomes, as it was yesterday, how far are we along this path?

I tend to date such things from the standpoint of Moore’s Law. Moore published his article in 1965. The integrated circuit is the steam engine of this revolution.

That revolution was sparked by James Watt (above, by Van Breda, from Wikipedia). Watt’s revolution, like America’s, is dated from 1776. This puts Moore’s revolution, relative to that one, at about 1820 or so.

Since there is no Moore’s Law of Training, I would say this revolution has a long, long way to go. And so do the changes deriving from it. So while we are evolving toward an open source society, we’re no closer to it than Beau Brummel was to Henry Ford.

I find that comforting. Do you?

June 19th, 2009

How much do desktops matter?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:22 am

Categories: Applications, General, Google, Hardware, Internet, Linux, Microsoft, Not Linux, values

Tags: Desktop, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Do desktops matter?

Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation insists they don’t. (The picture is from Terry Jones’ wonderful “flying penguins” ad for the BBC.)

As he explained to me during CompuTex, people are more focused today on connectivity and applications.

Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop no longer gives it control over whether or not you run open source, and it is merely competitive on the new platforms of the Web and phones.

Thus, he would argue, when our own Adrian Kingsley-Hughes asks, “could you switch over to being 100% open source” we may be asking the wrong question.

We’re all a lot more open source than we were, in part because we’re a lot less wedded to our desks.

This desktop still runs Windows, but most of its applications are open source — The Gimp, Open Office, Thunderbird, Google Chrome. Give me the right stick and the netbook I took to China will belong to the penguin.

Meanwhile I define my life more-and-more by online resources, less and less by what’s on my desk. What is most remarkable about my netbook is how it constantly seeks open WiFi connections. The netbook computing experience is defined by being online.

Bing may be on Windows, but does that matter? I’m writing this post on WordPress, not Linux, and I’m looking up links using Google, not Linux. When you’re online no one knows if your OS is a dog.

Much of Linux’s success has been in the fact that, in an online world, it’s invisible or, to put it another way, transparent. This transparency is a key open source value. Transparency gives Zemlin hope that phones will run open source operating systems like Moblin or Android. But will those users even know they’re running Linux?

The biggest computing job today is fitting all these pieces into a coherent computing experience. Right now people remain wedded to a device. It’s a desktop in my case, but in Japan it’s often a mobile phone, and increasingly an iPhone. For some people it’s an iPod or Kindle.  

It’s obvious that the only way to achieve device unity is online. One operating system is not going to bind our futures. You may choose to live in a Windows world, but each part of that world must compete with components running something else.

So where do you live your computing life?

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May 21st, 2009

Wolfram Alpha won't ask and won't tell

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:41 am

Categories: General, Google, Internet, Software as a Service, values

Tags: Wolfram Alpha, Internet, Dana Blankenhorn

In everything being written about Wolfram Alpha, here and elsewhere, an obvious point is being missed.

Its attitude toward the Internet. (Picture from the Richmond Library childrens’ blog, Batavia, NY.)

Stephen Wolfram does not trust the Internet. He doesn’t trust its inputs, he doesn’t like its outputs. He doesn’t like what it has done to “intellectual property.” He does not like it, Sam I am.

Notice what I just did there? I alluded to a copyrighted work without attribution. Wolfram wouldn’t like that.

Wolfram promises that all Wolfram Alpha results will be “vetted.” The freewheeling attitudes of Google or even Wikipedia are forbidden.

It’s the site’s attitude toward Internet inputs, as opposed to Matt Asay’s revelations on Internet outputs, which I am afraid marks Wolfram Alpha for failure.

The Internet, for all its messiness, for all its lies and lying liars, usually does come up with the right answer. Maybe it’s not on the first reference, certainly not on every page, but if you page through a dozen good links on a subject, collected objectively, you’re going to get around the answer to your question.

Wolfram Alpha takes a different, more proprietary approach. They control their inputs, and their results are essentially reports. Ask about Google vs. Microsoft and you get financial charts. Ask about me and you get nothing.  Same with Matt. Same, for that matter, with Palamida.

What Wolfram Alpha wants to build is an authority, and my point is that on the Internet there is no unitary authority, no final answer. Questions on the Internet lead mainly to other questions, or to data, or to opinions, usually all three.

Personally I don’t want a cul de sac. I prefer the superhighway. Wolfram Alpha won’t ask the Internet for the data it needs and it won’t tell you what it hasn’t checked. That is not a strength.

May 15th, 2009

Activists push city endorsements of open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:59 am

Categories: Enterprise Policy, General, Government, Infrastructure, Legal, politics, values

Tags: City, Channel Management, Open Source, Marketing, Dana Blankenhorn

The city of Vancouver, in British Columbia, is about to pass a resolution endorsing open source, open standards, and open data networks.

The resolution is supported by Mayor Gregor Robertson. It is being pushed locally by activists like Ifny Lachance of Free Geek Vancouver, who says open source reduces e-waste.

Among those behind the resolution are David Eaves, who writes on his blog,

I can certainly see this motion as the cornerstone to transforming Vancouver into a open city, or as my friend Surman puts it, a city that thinks like the web.

Surman, in this case, is Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. Eaves produced the presentation above for the city of Toronto after Surman gave a talk called “A City That Thinks like the Web” at a conference last year.

As the site puts it (I can’t tell whether the writer is Eaves, Surman or someone else):

This marked a turning point in the history of the city. It was the moment when the Mayor, Council, City Staff and an increasing number of citizens collectively understood the power and potential of architecting a city to be open and participatory. 

This is a movement on the march. Want to join or would you prefer to fight it?

May 8th, 2009

The fundamental value of Internet access

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:21 am

Categories: General, Government, Internet, mass market, politics, telecom, values

Tags: Internet Access, Constitution, Dana Blankenhorn

Is Internet access more like cable television or a telephone?

In other words, is it a luxury or should it be a right? (Pictured, the new Cooper River Bridge in Charleston.)

Matt Asay holds to the former view. He doesn’t want to see Internet access defined as a fundamental right.

I agree, but for a different reason.

Fundamental rights can be taken away. Anyone who has been tortured, or had their free speech rights abridged, knows there is nothing really fundamental about rights other than our common agreement to respect them.

My Congressman is John Lewis. When he was a child, in Alabama, during the days of segregation, he had no rights. He had to demand them, march for them, get beaten bloody for them.

The Constitution is just words, the Bill of Rights just words. They can be ignored or abridged with a simple memo.

Internet access, then, is more fundamental than rights. It is an economic necessity.

People with no Internet connection, by definition, have less economic power in the 21st century than other people. They have less access to training, no way to see over the horizon (which is why TV has become so trivial). Their connections to the world are entirely local, except for those few people they maintain contact with by telephone or mail.

I’m old enough to remember a world before the Web was spun, when Internet access was an elite activity. I am returning to those heady days next month, when I visit my friends in Japan.

My last journey there was in 1989. I went there to cover a conference with the Electronic Networking Association, an early group of online advocates.

While there I wrote a few stories for Newsbytes, the online news service I was then employed by. On a trade show floor I found a phone line, connected my laptop modem to it, and bounced my stories to an editor in London, for forwarding to the publisher in San Francisco.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and even 20 years ago this kind of casual access to online resources was considered somewhat magical.

Today my kids take this kind of thing for granted. Neither can remember a time before the Internet. My daughter assumes she can download detailed directions to a likely college. My son assumes he can discuss computer games and culture with friends around the world.

Internet access, in other words, is fundamental to my childrens’ interactions with the world. It defines their economic utility, their ability to learn, even many of their social relationships.

Enabling that, or disabling that, is not a question of “rights,” but it is fundamental.

It is fundamental to our future as a nation that everyone have the best possible access to this resource. Just as it’s fundamental they have a way to get around on our road system.

You don’t have a “right” to drive but we know that if you can’t you are handicapped. Those who can’t drive and don’t live near public transportation are economically isolated, unable to get to work, to school, or to shop.

Unless, of course, they have Internet access, which offers all those things. The better the access, the better for everyone.

The Internet, in other words, is the real bridge to the 21st century, and those without it can’t cross. It’s not a fundamental right, but it is fundamental.

May 7th, 2009

What does open source community mean?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:21 am

Categories: General, business models, management, marketing, values

Tags: Open-source Community, Matt Asay, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Matt Asay is out with a post calling the whole concept of open source community overhyped.

If by that you mean the Tom Sawyer concept of volunteers coming over to whitewash the fence for you, he’s right.

(This classic image of Tom Sawyer by Norman Rockwell was made into a U.S. postage stamp in 1972.)

But that’s not really why companies leave Sourceforge and start their own community forges. It’s not why they hire community managers, not why they run message boards, newsgroups and blogs.

Some of these reasons involve profit. They are looking to convert downloaders. They are looking to build goodwill and word of mouth. They are seeking corporate collaboration. They are building their reputations.

What I have found, in general, is that the more an open source company gives to its community, the more that community gives back.

True, most users freeload. That is, they don’t become members of the project’s community in a meaningful way. They download the software, they use the software, and that’s about it.

This does not make the community-building effort meaningless, or overhyped.

It means you need to seek its value elsewhere. You find it in your reputation, not just among the rank-and-file but in boardrooms and other places where big decisions are made.

This recession has been frustrating for many leading open source businessmen, like Matt. They do not feel they have gotten their just desserts for their willingness to release code. They feel like they left money on the table, money that won’t be coming back.

I understand the pain. I had over a dozen paying assignments during the Internet boom, where I warned constantly that the boom would bust. Yet when it busted I wound up broke like everyone else. It was unfair, I thought.

Then I found the real benefit of my Internet-era honesty, when I looked in the mirror and liked what I saw. Staying true to your path and true to your readers is its own reward. Even though some may never appreciate it.

The same is true here. Those open source businesspeople who remain true to their community ideals through this recession are going to come out stronger for it. If the companies don’t come out despite high ideals, then they will.

Long ago there was an Internet rumor of Kurt Vonnegut giving a commencement address at MIT. Someone even wrote a phony speech for him.

In fact Vonnegut did give one commencement speech I recall, at my own alma mater, Rice University.

He told the graduates most would not be rich, or famous, that they should seek instead to become good members of their communities, and that this was a great source of wealth and happiness.

From Twain to Rockwell to Vonnegut. All with the same lesson for open source, which is to stay the course. 

So it goes.

April 28th, 2009

Everything on Facebook is an ad

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 9:10 am

Categories: General, Internet, business models, identity, management, marketing, mass market, values

Tags: Facebook, Advertisement, Permission, Advertising & Promotion, Marketing, Dana Blankenhorn

The announcement by Facebook that they have opened their Open Stream API has the usual suspects wondering aloud if Facebook just gave itself away.

The theory goes like this.

You give people new ways of getting into your site’s services and they are not going to be looking at your ads. No ads, no money, no business.

But there is a deeper question at work, namely the future of the advertising model, and how open source might hasten its replacement.

Ads, in general, are a shrinking water hole, both because the economy is contracting and because their usefulness is declining. Many sites built with open source software depend on advertising revenue, the thinking goes, so we’re cutting off our noses to spite our faces.

I think something deeper is going on and can be summarized this way.

Everything on Facebook is an ad.

Facebook, like all its rivals, is about relationships. Their mission is to bring people together, casually, as friends, even intimately. That’s what advertisers do, too.

In his 1999 classic Permission Marketing, Seth Godin described all the levels of permission most marketers care about.

This starts with transaction permission, which happens when you buy a hamburger, and extends to intravenous permission, as when the doctor assumes you’ll pay for the blood that saves your life after an accident.

This is like assuming that relationships start with a one-night stand and extend to your son giving you his kidney. There’s a bit more to life than that.

What Godin does not do is describe the various levels of permission that occur before the transaction happens. There are several, as anyone who has been on a date will tell you:

1. Stranger permission, as when you first see someone or look at an ad.
2. Pitch permission, as when you let someone ask you for coffee or listen to a salesman.
3. Relationship permission, as when you acknowledge someone or talk about some great ad you’ve seen.
4. Friendship permission, as when you go for a second cup of coffee with someone or identify yourself with a product or service.

At no time here does a transaction occur. At no time does money change hands. But each step of this journey may be essential toward someone actually making a purchase and (more important) giving you deeper levels of permission.

Don’t think sex. Think seduction.

All social networks, all Internet connections, create these shallow types of relationships. They’re the editorial “meat” in the meet-up, as it were.

Companies have a hard time with all this. They see the costs and not the benefits. Yet the Internet makes it cheap-and-easy to build these kinds of non-transaction relationships with people, relationships that will make your product or service the only choice when the customer’s need arises.

What nearly all companies do is act like a bad date, the guy or girl who is trying too hard, who is trying to be perfect. You know the type. You have failed to return their calls often enough.

Social networks can help companies build these shallower levels of permission, if clients are willing to do what’s necessary to build them. That’s the opportunity social networks, regardless of their source code, offer marketers.

The next great marketing genius will figure out how to make that equation work.

April 23rd, 2009

Another term for open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:38 am

Categories: BSD, GPL, General, Government, business models, values

Tags: Software, GPL, F/OSS, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Democratic software.

Open source is the democratic process applied to software, just as Wikipedia is the same process applied to the collection of information.

(Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedom paintings, including Freedom of Speech to the right, were originally created to sell War Bonds during World War II. From the National Archives.)

A proprietary software model is more like China. Only the leaders get to know what is going on in the code. The company is like the Communist Party, and you’re only in on the change process if you’re inside.

By contrast open source offers true democracy, more like that of a Vermont town meeting than the U.S. Congress. Everyone has a voice. Everyone can see the code, edit the code, fix the code. Official changes go through an official process, but that process too is open and transparent.

Some may think my pitching open source as democratic software and proprietary software as autocratic software is some kind of public relations exercise.

They would be right. But open source itself was created as a PR move, in reaction to the dogmatism of the FOSS movement.

One point I have to make about open source again-and-again is that the term was created as a reaction against the concept of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) pushed by people like Richard Stallman, whose freedoms included one to gain improvements from the community.

Entering into the community through a license like the GPL gave equal rights to all, but some felt it placed unequal responsibilities on some, namely those who contributed the biggest improvements to the code base and who might want to profit from that knowledge.

They were looking at the GPL through an economist’s eyes. They wanted a meritocracy. They wanted entrepreneurs and free enterprise to gain a seat at the table, to drive the software forward.

The roots of this understanding can be seen in licenses like the BSD License, the Apache License, and the Eclipse License. While the GPL is still the leading open source license its roots lie in FOSS, not open source.

To people like Eric Raymond, sharing did not work as an economic model, even though the GPL turns out to be the best way for business to get maximum input from the community for open source software.

But visible code, and whether it’s BSD or GPL all open source code is visible, is inherently democratic. So why not just call open source democratic software?

April 9th, 2009

What open source should tell the FCC

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:28 am

Categories: General, Government, Infrastructure, Internet, LANs and WANs, content, mass market, politics, telecom, values, video, wireless

Tags: FCC, Open Source, Broadband, Moore, Government, Federal Government, Broadband Internet, Network Technology, Vertical Industries, Telecommunications

The Federal Communications Commission is seeking comment on a natonal broadband plan, with detailed rules expected next year. (To the right, incoming FCC chair Julius Genachowski.)

What should those who follow open source and the Internet values behind it be telling the agency?

My own wish list is pretty simple.

1. Guarantee competition. We lack broadband because we lack competition. You can’t force monopolies to do what’s right. As it was with the banks so with the telcos. Break ‘em up.
2. Open the Spectrum. We need more open spectrum, in which rules are defined by equipment and enforced upon equipment makers, rather than closed spectrum where monopolies act as the government and innovators must ask permission.
3. Free the bits. Moore’s Law as applied to radios or fiber implies we should have abundant broadband right now. We don’t because monopolists are holding those bits for ransom. They claim they are doing the will of content companies, yet those companies too are being shaken down.

What has happened in this last decade is that we allowed private monopolists to become the government. Government should go back to performing its legitimate role, setting the rules of the road, assuring that competition is a continuous process, and adjudicating disputes.

The danger in this call is that every special interest will come in with special pleading, and that the general interest will be drowned out. That interest is for more — more capacity, more competition, more freedom for individuals and innovators.

Crime can occur on many levels and we need cops on every beat. It can happen on the streets, in the suites, wherever corruption is allowed to frustrate law enforcement.

Government should be limited, but it must exist, or anarchy rules. That is the essential lesson of our time. We need light rules, rooted in technology, enforced as easily and lightly as possible.

That’s how we’ll get the most broadband.

April 9th, 2009

It's the recession stupid

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:00 am

Categories: GPL, General, Government, Internet, Legal, business models, content, mass market, values

Tags: Revenue, Recession, Operational Accounting, Finance, Dana Blankenhorn

All this talk about demanding new business models, whether open source closing extensions, newspapers demanding we show them our money, or Web 2.0 outfits looking for cash, has a single cause.

It’s the recession, stupid. Or it’s the stupid recession. Take your pick.

(To the right, the most iconic photo of the Great Depression, Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange. The girls are hiding their faces, one explained recently, because they were ashamed.)

A falling tide strands all boats.

Advertising revenues dry up, so that model which worked well in good times no longer does. Businesses tighten their belts, so subscription revenues decline. ISPs and Web hosts lose money so they look to squeeze their best customers a little tighter.

Nothing in the models of open source or the Internet is really broken. The economy is broken, around the world. Capital lost in the crash isn’t coming back soon, so everyone tightens their belts and some fall by the wayside.

These are the times that test your business mettle. Those who get through to the other side will lead the next boom. Those who don’t will end up working for them.

Whining about it, or trying to change the rules of the game, as the newspaper industry is trying to do, won’t get the job done. Looking for courts to shake down your competitors and fill your coffers with cash, as Microsoft has been doing, won’t work either.

What will work? Owning it. Sharing the pain, expanding your corporate network, innovating, and keeping a wary eye on expenses. What business schools might call blocking and tackling. What your rabbi would call being a mensch.

It’s not as complicated as people are making out.