Free is not open, and open is not free

When talking to computer users and buyers over more than a decade, I was struck by how much a desire for things “open” was less about freedom and more about free. Sorry, Richard, but the reality is that people want free beer more than free speech. I saw this at SJSU, when IT buyers wanted “open” standards without knowing what open meant. I’ve remarked on this repeatedly in my research, including a 2007 chapter on open standards and a 2008 chapter on open source ideology.

Next month, I’ll be talking about the principles of open source software with a new type of audience, KGI graduate students trained in molecular biology who are preparing to work at leading biotech companies. So I thought I’d find examples of both “open source biology” (which is hard to do) and open source software being used for biology.

The best known public domain package for molecular biology is BLAST, which as Wikipedia helpfully notes, dates to a 1990 article in the Journal of Molecular Biology. The “Basic Local Alignment Search Tool” can be used to match a DNA sequence to a library of known sequences to find similar patterns. This is a very computationally intensive process — I recall that Apple made a special effort to support BLAST in its servers after Art Levinson (then Genentech CEO) joined the Apple board of directors. (Levinson succeeded Steve Jobs as Apple board chair after the latter’s untimely death.)

There seem to be two variants of BLAST out there: NCBI BLAST and mpiBLAST. The latter proclaims itself as “a freely available, open-source, parallel implementation of NCBI BLAST.” It seems to be supported by contributors from Virginia Tech, several national labs, IBM and a research group in Taiwan. However, the developer and user mailing lists have no postings since August 2011.

The gold standard is the original BLAST from the National Center for Biotechnology Information. The NCBI BLAST is delivered as a hosted service (what we now call SaaS), altthough the code and database of BLAST+ can be downloaded from a NIH website. However, it appears as the flow of technology is one way — from the government out to users — reminding me a lot of the VistA healthcare IT system that prompted my original interest in open source communities.

In other words, BLAST is free, but it isn’t really open. The government is fine with releasing technology in the public domain — which often is required under basic principles — but not in sharing control or authority.

Sure enough, I found an August 2011 posting by Peter Cock, a UK blogger (and software developer) blasting at BLAST and its lack of transparency:

Now as a USA government funded project, NCBI BLAST is released to the public domain … That's great, it's free and open source, and means BLAST can be modified and re-distributed. This is perfect for inclusion in Linux distributions like Debian which take licence freedom issues very seriously (see packages blast2 for NCBI "legacy" BLAST, and ncbi-blast+ for NCBI BLAST+, the re-write in C++).

However, in other terms the NCBI BLAST project is far from open. Looking at the BLAST Developer Information there is nothing about participating in BLAST development, and no sign of a developers mailing list.

NCBI BLAST doesn't have a public source code repository. … Update (21 October 2011) Not sure how long its been there, but there is (now) a read only public SVN for BLAST+ etc,
…
NCBI BLAST doesn't have a public bug tracker. Instead individuals must contact the NCBI by email, at blast-help (at) ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, which gets you in touch with the front line support team that then pass proper bug reports on to the actual developer team. The only way to track an issue is by follow up email, referencing the original report by date and email subject -- if there is an internal bug tracking number I've never been told it, and I have asked about this specifically.

Actually Peter has set his sights somewhat low. As Sibohan O’Mahony and I found in our research, transparency is the de minimis level of openness that can be provided to outsiders by an open source community. The truly open projects offer permeability, or the ability of outsiders to influence the direction of a project to make it suitable for a broader range of needs than is conceived by the original authors.

This permeability consists not just of the code, but also the direction and governance of the effort. If you can add changes but not influence the priorities or direction, then a project isn’t really open.

Alas, only a handful of projects meet this standard: Apache and Eclipse are the gold standard. Instead, fishbowl type single-firm communities use open source as a distribution mechanism rather than as a way of harnessing distributed innovation; MySQL was once an exemplar, but nowadays it’s Android. But then for any corporate sponsor, letting go is hard to do.

In the truly open communities, the ability to participate attracts participation and builds a real sense of community and shared governance. When I started researching open source 12 years ago, we assumed we would see more example of such communities forming, but they still seem few and far between.

Of course, for many of these tightly-controlled open source projects, the “free” beer isn’t really free but instead is more like a free puppy (cheap up front, not in the long run). In this case, you have neither open nor free.

Open source doesn't repeal laws of economics

After failing in its webOS strategy, HP has announced plans to use it to create an open source project. This is an example of what (in our 2006 paper) Scott Gallagher and I called a “spin-out” strategy by firms to find a home for a technology they no longer wish to control.

Some might hope this would be as successful as IBM was with Eclipse. Others compare it to Fedora, the Red Hat desktop variant of its core Linux server product. However, with more than a decade of open source research and consulting, I don’t think it will be successful.

I take HP at their word that they will work with the open source community to set up appropriate licensing and governance. Unlike other firm-sponsored communities, letting go is not likely to be a problem.

However, open source only works when you have enough contributors. WebOS is not desktop Linux. Before a project launches, the best proxies are developer interest and user demand (“scratching your own itch”), and it’s no secret that webOS — although technically sophisticated — was already an also-ran when HP bought it in spring 2010.

The fact that when software has failed as a proprietary technology, it nearly always fails as an open source technology. From my research, I’d say a major reason is timing: firms don’t let go until the technology has clearly failed on the market.

The other problem that the world really only wants (or needs) a single open source product in each category. Eclipse was the first open source tools platform, so that Sun’s subsequent efforts to let go were too late (see #1 above). The BSD variants of Unix predated Linux but were swamped and the Netscape server never caught on against Apache. It doesn’t have to be all that open, as the success of MySQL (and Android) has shown.

(Some would argue that Chrome and Mozilla are an exception to this rule. Perhaps — but the competition is not over yet.)

In fact, with webOS HP seems doomed to repeat history — in this case, Nokia’s failed efforts with open source Symbian. In addition to being late and competing against Android, Symbian began open source life with a raft of problems that caused it to lose its once-dominant market share in the category it created. The prospects for webOS seem similar — except that webOS never had 60% of the global smartphone market.

Does webOS have a chance? Over a decade ago, Shane Greenstein and Tim Bresnahan showed that the only way a new platform succeeded was by identifying an unserved niche (that hopefully became a big market). So if webOS is going to succeed, the answer is the same as a year or two ago: not by competing head-to-head with Android and the iPhone, but serving a market that they’ve ignored. Since HP hasn’t found this market in the past 18 months, I can’t see how open source will change things.

Android forks: ho, hum

A friend sent me an article this week from InfoWorld entitled “Google Android's self-destruction derby begins.” The author seems to think it’s a big deal that the Android source code base is forking all over the place, although similar (and less apocalyptic) stories appeared last year in The Register and Business Week.

The reality is that forking is against the Free Software religion, and it’s also an inevitable outcome of any open source (or free software) license. People (or firms) make their own unique variants of the source code because they can: that was true 15 years ago with the BSD proliferation (BSDi, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD), and it’s true with Linux today.

Forking is an organizational and economic issue, not a legal or technical one. The economic benefit of avoiding forks is to avoid re-inventing the wheel (on a daily basis for decades).

Forking long predates open source. In my first job out of college,I made it my mission to merge back all the source code forks in our proprietary code base (for our SIMSCRIPT II.5 compiler). The nominal goal was to facilitate maintenance and reduce incompatibilities, but the real reason was that merging changes across forks was tedious work, prone to errors,and that no one wanted to do.

However, the problem — then as now — is that maintaining a common code base requires surrendering control: if everyone is going to agree, then no one is going to get exactly what they want. Or — as in many open source projects — egalitarianism and meritocracy is ala Animal Farm: all contributors are created equal, but some are more equal than others. (What human endeavor is without politics? I can’t think of one.)

Android‘s cellphone licensees don’t want to surrender that control — and for that matter, neither does Google.

Thus (as InfoWorld notes) the Android handsets are shipping in a wide range of OS versions: 1.5, 1.6, 2.0 and 2.1. Part of this is that Android (like any new code base) is a rapidly moving target. The issue is compounded by the fact that Android handset makers all want to have their own custom user interfaces. (It seems as though Android is making the Symbian UI proliferation mistake all over again, which seems consistent with the high concentration of hubris in Mountain View).

In addition to the fragmentation of user experiences, the handset makers are having trouble updating their UIs to the latest Android OS — apparently due to (again not surprising) rapidly changing Android APIs. So in 2010 Sony Ericsson will be shipping an Xperia Mini based on Android 1.6, while the Nexus One (and its flashier half-sibling, the HTC Desire) will ship with Android 2.1

Of course, Google has also chosen to fork from the Linux kernel, because its own widespread code changes are both incompatible and (now) rejected by the Kernel team. If Google wanted to get along, it would have had to slowly and delicately negotiate with the Kernel honchos to come up with a consensus solution, but (not unrealistically) that it decide it would rather ship product in 2008 and 2009.

At some point, the Android APIs will stabilize (3.0? 4.0?) and the handset makers will be able to track the latest OS releases without major changes. They’ll still have their own GUIs — and for now Android will remain separate from the Linux code base — but things will be a little more efficient and a little less hectic.

FOSS 2010, Day 1

Third #FOSS2010 posting of many.

Day 1 of FOSS 2010 has concluded, with only dinner left to go. I wanted to convey a sense of the session, although with 40 people in the room, it’s just a sense.

Of the 40, about 25 are either computer science or information systems (information school?) academics, 5 are social scientists, 7 are industry and 3 are from open source nonprofits. (There are some overlaps and that was from a show of hands).

There was live note taking on EtherPad. (EtherPad is a collaboration engine with lower latency than Google Wave, which is why Google bought its maker AppJet Inc.). Due to their freemium business model, only 16 of us could be typing simultaneously in the free version, but still the live updates were impressive. At some point the EtherPad stream-of-consciousness may be released to the public, or maybe not.

Definitely in the public was the huge stream of Tweets. If you want to drink open source snippets from a firehose, 140 characters at a time, check it out. By my count, I contributed (about) 36 of them.

As an experiment, below is (by my definition) an interesting excerpt of tweets from the conference:

openITstrat At FOSS 2010 workshop @ UCI, among 40 academics recommending to NSF future directions for open source research http://foss2010.isr.uci.edu/

openITstrat John L. King: open source is outlier in computing research to Congress, NSF, CRA.org, CCC — none of the heavyweights are arguing it's core.

dirkriehle John L. King pointing out that #foss2010 can have a major impact on future funding of open source research

openITstrat #FOSS2010 Stormy Peters [@storming] of GNOME: we're upstream project, we get less feedback from users than a user-facing project. How do we reach users?

openITstrat #FOSS2010 Bob Gobeille of HP Linux/Open Source office: 85% of HP products have open source software in them.

storming "FOSS after Google" - interesting slide title [by Chris Kelty]. (Was more about cloud, group identity, etc.) #foss2010

cdknutson Joel West at #foss2010 throwing down the gauntlet on motivation, terminology, perspectives. Good to see courage and conviction.

jerenkrantz Ok. I can't stop from laughing at Joel West bashing Sun. #foss2010

openITstrat RT @jerenkrantz I can't stop from laughing at Joel West bashing Sun. #foss2010 I didn't bash Sun, I bashed bad OSS investments by Sun CEOs

openITstrat #FOSS2010 Not all bugs are shallow. Apache pres Justin Erenkrantz [@jerenkrantz]: Debian introduced security bugs into Linux distro, but no one spotted it.

jerenkrantz @openITstrat http://www.links.org/?p=327 is BenL's post about that event #foss2010

klakhani @openITstrat maybe there were not enough eyeballs? i think ESR meant it as an average effect and not absolute..

openITstrat @klakhani The point of @jerenkrantz is that it's eyeball quality, not quantity. Monkeys could type Shakespeare, but how many would you need?

openITstrat #FOSS2010 Tony Wasserman [@twasserman], CMU: software startups now longer need to buy tools (unless developing for MS). OSS wiped out SW tools industry.

openITstrat #FOSS2010 Tony Wasserman, CMU: startups can just go to http://bitnami.org/ for stacks and applications ready to use — no new code or bugs

openITstrat #FOSS2010 Shoba Chengalur-Smith of SUNY Albany: "If a product is open source and the user does not know it, does it make a sound?"

felipecerda RT @fielding: Open source term should only apply if product can be modified and rebuilt by (or for) a user. Complex is no better than closed. #foss2010 [Fielding's comments: Mozilla can only be built by machine; can anyone outside RedHat build RH?]

divacanto @twasserman "Software Engineering books are outdated" #FOSS2010

dirkriehle John Noll at #foss2010: I wonder how many other fields have so much disdain for their textbooks

openITstrat #FOSS2010 @benevolentprof (Susan Sim): “not everyone can contribute to open source.” Me: not everyone can win American Idol, either.

cdknutson @openITstrat @benevolentprof "not everyone can win American Idol, either." American Idol is a cathedral. OS claims to be a bazaar. #foss2010

jerenkrantz @cdknutson I think Idol is certainly more bazaar than cathedral - at least compared to the rest of the music industry. #foss2010

cdknutson Walt Scacchi at #foss2010: "Software Engineering is becoming an empirical science

dirkriehle Walt Scacchi at #foss2010 - Software engineering is becoming an empirical science << pls tell that the program committees I'm on!

openITstrat #FOSS2010 @cdknutson likes Armour "The 5 orders of ignorance" (CACM 2000 & http://bit.ly/bPdfHX) 1. answers 2. questions 3. asking questions

The [bracketed comments] are changes I made later, particularly when learning people’s Twitter handles. Update: For an alternate summary, see John King’s CCC blog post.

What was particularly fun was having Karim Lakhani join the conversation, even though he’s not here, but instead (AFAIK) teaching in snow-bound Boston.

See also my open source bibliography on the open innovation blog.

OSS, FOSS and FLOSS

Second #FOSS2010 posting.

I was invited to a small conference at UCI this week with “FOSS” in the title, even though I have always called it “open source.” (The only exception was a book chapter on the irrelevance of the free software movement to Linux adoption — ironically for a 2005 conference here at UCI.)

One problem is that the term “FOSS” has always had the ideological baggage of Stallmanism. Those within the Reality Distortion Field of the Free Software Foundation will always say F/OSS, unless of course they say “Free Software” and ignore the open source types as heretics.

A related problem is the neutrality issue. Among academics, saying FOSS (or F/OSS) was a proxy marker for those who saw themselves as advocates for open source. My attitude has always been that I’m studying a phenomenon, not taking sides; I believe my research shows that, while my consulting has included both firms promoting open source and competing with it.

During the first two hours of the so-called “FOSS 2010” workshop it was gratifying to hear the industry people (including reps of GNOME and Apache) all say “open source” rather than “free software,” “free and open source software,” or any other variants. (I’m guessing we don’t have enough Europeans in the room to promote the F/L/OSS dogma).

So when I got the podium, I offered one slide about the use of the terminology.

“Free” and “Open Source” Software

• Licenses:
  • OSI says “Free” ⊂ “Open Source”
• Movements
  • “Free” is a movement, “Open Source” isn’t
• Industry
  • “Free” is an ideology
  • “Open Source” is a business model (often with GPL dual-licensed code)

I didn’t even mention the issue of “open” projects that are open only in their IP, not in their organization.

Finally, aside from ideology there is the communication advantage. If we use words (“open source”) instead of TLAs and FLAs (OSS, FOSS, FLOSS) in our communication, there is less of an insider/outsider boundary as well as risk of misunderstanding.

NB: Later in my talk, I referred to hypothetical “gullible 19-year-olds” who join an OSS project for a year until they burn out — and had to concede that this intentionally provocative terminology was value laden as well.

Google's half-full glass of openness

A number of experts have been remarking that the NexusOne brings Google into more direct competition with Apple and the iPhone, ending a once cozy and complementary relationship between the two firms.

Google’s mobile strategy continues to get closer to Apple’s. Both are peddling mobile platforms, seeking users, operators and third party software providers. While Google’s OS is open source — and available via multiple handset manufacturers — it still is a hybrid open/proprietary strategy that competes with Apple’s own hybrid strategy.

Some analysts understand this better than others. Dan Moren of Macworld portrayed it thusly:

By putting its name on the Nexus One, Google has given the Nexus One a sort of primacy on the Android front, unifying the disparate elements of the Android movement: now it’s Google going head to head with Apple, not a strange amalgam of Google, Motorola, and Verizon. It’s as if Google has promoted itself to head of the Rebel Alliance opposing Apple’s Galactic Empire.

Ooo, there's a value laden metaphor if there ever was one! (NB: In Star Wars III, Lucas is much more sympathetic to the Empire’s control problems than he was in 1977 with Star Wars IV.)

A much more accurate characterization came from John Gapper of the FT

Yet Apple is not as closed as Google portrays it, and nor is Google as open. Instead, like the proverbial half-empty glass, Google is best regarded as half-open and Apple as half-closed. That is significant because it shows how such companies need to compete in a networked industry.

Google is fighting for its own interests as hard as Apple does. That is, at one level, obvious since they are both public companies that try to maximise revenues. Yet its insistence on not doing “evil” and its dismissive view of Apple and Microsoft obscures this.

Gapper’s point is that even if Google’s OS is open, it plans to make money off these phones through its control of search. Gapper had earlier observed that mobile phone value capture had shifted from European telecom manufacturers towards US Internet companies (e.g. Google), as well as Apple.

I agree with Gapper’s overall point this week that mixed proprietary/open strategies are both normal and reasonable. I also share his aversion to exaggerated claims of openness.

However, in thinking about some of my earliest research on openness — ironically a 2003 paper about Apple’s early open source strategy — I think Gapper has only half the story.

Gapper focuses on how (to use my 2003 term) Google is “opening parts”. Its mobile phone OS is open source, but other parts of the value proposition (e.g. search, maps, mail, etc.) are proprietary. Google shares its code, but not is advertising revenues.

However, to use the 2003 terminology, I think it’s clear that Android is also “partly open.” Truly open sponsored open source communities do more than just provide source code, but also share in the governance and technical direction. Someday Android may be open, but it’s not there yet.

While Gapper talks about the openness glass being half full, I think an equally important point is that for many companies it changes over time, and differs between markets and products.

The two most proprietary companies in the PC industry, Apple and Microsoft, had various degrees of openness over time and across product lines. Among mainframe companies, IBM was once the captain of proprietary IT strategies, but in the past 20 years has moved to embrace open source and make lots of money off of services. Sun claimed to be open — and in relative terms it was — but still did everything it could to create switching costs and proprietary rents. (NB: Google CEO Eric Schmidt spent 14 years at Sun as a manager and eventually CTO.)

So I think that the only realistic way to view Google is as a self-interested, profit-maximizing, semi-proprietary company that embraces openness when it suits its purposes. Consumers should (and do) welcome that many of its ad-supported services are free, but continue to remember that Google wants to keep its repeat customers every bit as much as Apple, IBM and Microsoft do.

Maybe Google is serious about OSS

With its open source release today of its Closure JavaScript tools, Google is starting to suggest that it may eventually become a good open source citizen.

The newly released tools include a JavaScript compiler, a very broad JavaScript class library, and Java/JavaScript-friendly templates. All are released under the Apache 2.0 license, a very permissive license that essentially lets outsiders do whatever they want (rather than a viral or semi-viral license like EPL or LGPL).

Sure, Google has released other code before. Some of it has been experimental (beta quality) examples. Much consists of libraries (or example code) to get at Google’s APIs and thus provide complementary products that increase the value of Google’s services. Even Android would fit in the latter category — albeit at a larger scale — since it helps make handsets that access Google services.

However, the Closure Compiler, Closure Library and Closure Template are production level code that’s been used for years. These are the same tools that Google uses to implement gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps. Theoretically, a competitor could use these tools to make web-based services that compete with Google: Microsoft and Yahoo are unlikely to do so, but I would be surprised if some of the foreign portals (without large internal R&D staffs) don’t quickly adopt the technology.

Of course, Google’s not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, and the ultra-secretive company has not said why this release now of this code. Perhaps it doesn’t think rivals will use it, perhaps it has a huge head start, or perhaps it’s just non-strategic commodity code. Conversely, perhaps it’s trying to shape de facto industry standards for JavaScript (now that Netscape and AOL are gone), either to influence complementors or assure a supply of well-trained newby programmers.

Still, this is only one step of openness from a semi-open company leading the race for Total World Domination. Even if — as blogger Matt Asay and Google spokesperson argue — Google is a leading (if not the leading) contributor of open source code, that doesn’t mean that they have become good open source citizens.

Revealing code is only one part of sponsored open source openness, which also includes shared authority over the future of the code and governance of the community, providing both transparency and permeability to outsiders. This has proven impossible for many companies — both big, powerful, autocratic ones used to throwing their weight around, and smaller so-called “open source” startups that use OSS as teaseware for their real (commercially licensed) product.

IBM was the first and one of the few companies to prove it was serious about open source — but then it could sell hardware and services if the OSS commoditized its software offerings. Its Eclipse Foundation remains the largest and most successful multi-vendor sponsored open source community.

Five years ago, HP had a similar business model and comparable principles (if not level of investment) in Linux and other open source efforts. However, under its new penny-pinching CEO it seems to have cut back on many R&D and community oriented efforts, and the former Linux Systems Division (later Open Source Business Office) now seems to be just a web page.

Apple isn’t normally considered an open (or open source), but its WebKit library is perhaps one of the most successful and most cooperative firm-sponsored efforts after Eclipse. Google, Nokia and now even RIM are working to make the library suitable for the industry’s wide range of mobile devices.

Meanwhile, Nokia got off to a bad start last year — following the model that Sun used for so long — of a nominally open project that’s completely controlled by the sponsoring company. Maybe both will get better someday (and to be honest I haven’t checked Sun recently), but letting go is clearly hard for big companies to do.

So will Google ever let go on strategically important code on projects? Or will it always require that it retain control of such efforts? My crystal ball can’t see through all the walls of secrecy erected by the Monster of Mountain View, so I refuse to hazard a guess. But I suppose anything’s possible.

Hat tip: Matt Asay’s Twitter® feed.

Keep out the lawyers

Free software, open source software and creative commons are all efforts to use copyright law to enforce a particular philosophy of collaborative innovation.( In many cases, the philosophy is more important than the technology, as Jason Dedrick & I discussed in a 2007 paper on the minimal impact that F/OSS ideology have upon F/OSS adoption.)

At the same time, possession (as they say) is 9/10 of the law. Proprietary software was a barrier to imitation because of trade secrets, not copyright. Inherently, giving out your source code means that other people have it and that you need a lawyer (and a court) if someone uses your code in a way you don’t want them to.

A friend (and blog reader) forwarded to me an interesting summary of an OSS dispute involving Jin (a GPL-licensed Java client for chess servers) and iChessU, a new company.

Sasha Maryanovsky, maker of Jin licensed his code for US $4,000. iChessU used the code but reneged on papying so Maryanovsky sued in Israeli court. Both sides hired lawyers, filed briefs, and also argued the case in the court of public opinion. (Linux.com wrote up the dispute in 2006).

Maryanovsky summarizes the saga in his blog, which eventually settled in 2008. I don’t know the billing rate of an Israeli IP attorney, I’m guessing that both sides would be lucky if they paid less than $100k to their attorneys. (The settlement terms are confidential, but if the case against iChessU is as open and shut as GPLniks would claim, it’s likely that it paid both sets of legal fees.

Interestingly, Maryanovsky’s home page (and LinkedIn account) imply that he’s an unemployed Java programmer. Open source is often used by student programmers to signal their skills and availability to the labor market, so either the Java programmers labor market is very soft, or Maryanovsky sent the wrong signal. (Perhaps a JME/J2ME social networking client would have been a better signal).

Amusing OSS perspective

I was poking around on a Google search and found an July 2002 speech by novelist Bruce Sterling at OSCON. Ironically the conference was held in San Diego a few weeks before I moved from San Diego to San Jose to work at SJSU and study OSS in Silicon Valley, but this is the first I’ve heard of the talk.

I found the reference from Slashdot (with plenty of commentary from those who were there), but the text of the talk is at the home of his “Viridian Design” movement.

It’s definitely inside baseball — for software geeks if not OSS geeks. And it’s long (5,000+ words). However, I don’t think “colorful” really captures the unusual nature of the talk or his viewpoints. His “Contrarian View of Open Source” seems an equal opportunity offender.

Here is a small excerpt:

The coolest thing about doing this artsy noncommercial creative work is that you get to stop. You get to throw up your hands and quit, if you want. It's like a charity. The widows and orphans are telling you "Thank you for not letting us starve, kind sir!" They're all grateful to you, they're touching the hem of your garment. You get to feel pretty good about what you're doing, and if you're tired, you just stop. It's like: "Okay, I'm tired! I've got compassion burnout now. No more free software. Lady, you and your damn kids can starve."

Nobody can do anything about that sudden refusal on your part. "Well, he gave us a really cool algorithm.... What more can we possibly ask?" If you abandon your rug in the bazaar, people just steal it immediately. They steal everything in a hot second. But if you abandon your open source code, the code just sort of sits there. Other people pitch in, and it gets bigger and fatter. There are big festering piles of code, huge piles of code. This has been playing out for seventeen, eighteen years now.

A classic struggle in other ways. You've got the Stallman free-as-in-freedom model... This guy sees code as some kind of handmade luxury vehicle. Maybe it's a tank. And you've got Gates, who is the commercial industrialist robber baron. The Ford Model T... any color you like as long as darkness is the standard.

The metaphor of proprietary vs. OSS as dating a supermodel vs. procreating with a hippie chick (playing Linda Ronstadt) might come across as sexist to some, but as the metaphor goes way over the top, it’s clear that Sterling has a very vivid imagination. Maybe even enough to get me to read his books.

Reasonable vs. unreasonable intellectual opponents

I’ve previously written about Paul Krugman, the political pundit and NYT columnist who shares the same name (and AFAIK body) with an MIT-trained economist who won the “Nobel” prize in economics. Somewhere in the 1990s there was a “body snatchers” type moment and the old (Prize-worthy) Paul got replaced with the new one. Generally fans of the old one don’t have much respect for the new one.

Unfortunately for new Paul, like an incautious politician or Supreme Court nominee (i.e. David Souter), the views of the old Paul are preserved for posterity. As Bryan Caplan of EconLog writes:

The Krugman we've got is sold on the House health bill. But the Krugman we had, the thoughtful economist who wrote The Accidental Theorist, would have responded differently. Krugman Past, unlike Krugman Present, would have pointed out that when the unemployment rate is 9.7%, it's a bad idea to legislate an 8% payroll increase on businesses that fail to offer health insurance. Employers are reluctant to hire workers at today's wages; how are they going to feel once the marginal worker gets 8% pricier?

Serious economists do have differences of opinion, such as about value judgements over equal outcomes vs. equal opportunity. However, they tend to agree (as do physicists or chemists or materials scientists) about the basic precepts of their discipline, things the like increasing the price of something (in this case labor) will reduce the demand.

I’ve experienced this first-hand in my own life as a pro-entrepreneurship, anti-collectivist social scientist studying open source (actually “free, libre and open source software” or F/LOSS) where a majority of the researchers are promoting the cause. It is possible to have different values but agree on the facts.

This week I traded e-mails with a PhD student in the F/LOSS (as opposed to OSS) camp who nonetheless believes that F/LOSS software is usually imitative and (coming late) rarely better than proprietary software: it doesn’t matter to him, because unlike the proprietary software it is “free” (as in speech). Similarly, I have agreed with many activists (and even OSS execs) about certain companies whose open source strategy isn’t really open (in a governance sense) but merely a marketing gimmick akin to demoware or teaseware.

Usually with the reasonable people we can agree everything has its place: proprietary companies and open source companies (or communities) should produce their respective technologies and leave it up to adopters to decide what’s best for their needs. Certainly, if a farmer’s co-op or a rich socialist or a university wants to make something and give it away, then it’s up to the firm selling something for big bucks to show theirs is worth a premium — just as Apple has to show that an iPod or a MacBook is worth a premium over their commodity rivals. And if you can’t beat them, then you pull a Microsoft and give away something (e.g. a mini-Office suite) to compete with your free alternative while selling something for those who want more. (We call that freemium).

Such a pluralism of ideas works much better in free markets (where the markets decide) than government policy, where we have to pick one answer a priori. As in the Caplan example of healthcare, we know that taxing businesses to pay for healthcare will increase business costs and taxing affluent people will reduce investment capital and the incentives to work. What’s in dispute (as with any prediction) are how big these side-effects are, whether they are worth the cost, and whether there’s a more efficient way to achieve a similar outcome.

Alas, in economics (unlike experimental nuclear physics or recombinant DNA) there are enough confounds that the experts will argue over the data for decades, as (some) argue about the impact of minimum wage increases upon unemployment. Unfortunately, national policy choices are hard to reverse, even if they do prove to be flawed (Google “social security Ponzi scheme”).

Free to choose: free riding inherent with free software

Blogging is mainly suspended this week as part of my full-time efforts to cover the User and Open Innovation Workshop 2009 in Hamburg.

Bill Snyder of InfoWorld had a provocative article earlier this week about free riders in open source projects. Here is how it began:

"Leeches" -- that's how Dave Rosenberg, co-founder and former CEO of MuleSource, and now part of the founding team of RiverMuse, refers to companies that use open source technology but don't give back to the open source community. Companies like Cisco's Linksys subsidiary, whose routers rely on Linux. Companies like Amazon.com, whose Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) service depends on Eclipse Foundation's open source offerings.

Your ear doesn't have to be pressed to the ground for long to hear angry grumblings in the open source community about leeches, vampires, or freeloaders.

"The future of Eclipse is in danger," Michael Scharf, a member of the Eclipse Foundation's architecture council, said in an angry April blog post. "The problem is that there is no real pressure for companies to contribute back to the community and it is easy to use the Eclipse 'for free' for their own products. The Eclipse community should create peer pressure to prevent the freeloaders and parasites from getting away without punishment," he wrote.

Scharf likens the lack of contributions back to the community to the "tragedy of the commons," in which greedy individuals unthinkingly destroy a shared resource. And in an e-mail exchange, he put it this way: "The general mentality of the industry frustrates me; the attitude to take advantage of something like open source and not give back anything to the system."

It’s a silly notion. The Open Source Definition explicitly says everyone can use code for any reason — that what makes it open source. There is no responsibility to contribute changes or otherwise participate in its development.

I’ve been studying open source since 2000 and a few years ago co-authored a paper looking at movement ideology and its role on adoption of the Linux platform. From my own experience, I would disagree slightly with one point

It's not surprising that the discussion has become so polarized. There's long been a tension within the open source community between those who have seen it as a movement and those who believe it is a business.

If there was an ideological movement, it was really the Free Software movement — a desire to create code that’s perpetually available to hackers without corporate control.

The Open Source gang explicitly disclaimed ideology, positioning and organizing themselves to be more friendly to businesses creating and adopting open source. (There is some blurring of the two, since the GPL/LGPL of Linux is blurred by the more open source ethos of Linus Torvalds and the IBM/Intel/HP corporate support for Linux). My new friend Benjamin Mako Hill (a FSF board member) here at UOI 2009 points out that the Open Source types claim that open source is inherently better, whereas the fearless leader of the Free Software movement makes no such claim.

So open source is about making great code and giving it away free (free as in beer). It’s stupid to get upset about people using it for free, particularly free-riding is an inherently invariant human trait.

And the tragedy of the commons metaphor is inaccurate. Here in Hamburg, we have the end of the North Sea fisheries: that’s a real “tragedy of the commons.” Software is a non-rivalrous good, which means the good is no less valuable if 3 billion people use it than if 300 do so. (Don’t try that with a herring fishery).

The problem (other than the egos of a few F/OSS contributors) is never how many people use without contributing, but merely how many do. If a core development team of 20 people is adequate for 5,000 users, why is it inadequate for 5 million? Yes, if the 5 million are submitting bugs, that’s a lot of work to keep up, but if users are “not contributing” that would include not contributing bugs (since bugs are considered a contribution in the F/OSS world.)

The problem is also naturally self-correcting. If the team is understaffed, then users will get unhappy and complain or possibly switch. The firms that make money deploying OSS have to keep the bug fixes and improvements coming or their business will dry up — so that encourages them to step up and get involved.

If anything, the complaints about "leeches” is an effort by OS (or F/OSS) activists to de-legitimate their own movement. If the development and maintenance of the code depends on the passion and volunteer efforts of activists (who will inevitably burn out), then a given project or movement is not sustainable and viable over the long haul. If the technology is economically valuable, there will have to be people whose primary responsibilities (i.e. their job) including keeping the code vibrant and up to date.

Open source projects run by grown ups will focus on attracting new contributors. Whining may be the last gasp of projects about to burn out because they don’t have a sustainable inner core of contributors to keep the project going.

Truly open systems

Yesterday, the WSJ had a glowing article on the role that the public domain software VistA might play in the administration’s efforts to promote electronic health records.

The article highlighted a deployment of VistA by Medsphere of Orange County at Midland Memorial Hospital in Texas. The founders of Medsphere were working to land the Midland deal at the time I was a consultant to the company on its open source strategy. Promoting VistA was also the focus of the trade association I co-founded.

For hospitals that install VistA, they are not bound to any one company: as the WSJ article notes, there are multiple firms that can install and configure the VA software. Medsphere has also released some of its extensions as open source on SourceForge.
The Oracle purchase of Sun notwithstanding, I think open source has a particularly bright future in enterprise software for one reason: data portability. So much of what we do — whether memos in Word or elaborate customer databases — is reduced to information on a hard disk.

If the program that created it is open source, IT managers know they will always be able to get at the data, if by no other means than maintaining the open source code that reads it. If the format is proprietary and the software to read it is proprietary, then there is the strong likelihood that at some point the data will no longer be available — and the firm must hope that it can export or upgrade the data to some other format.

This issue also comes up at the personal level: I have PowerPoint 3.0 slides I can no longer read (which is why I save all notes in RTF format). But the availability of open source solutions is far less useful for a one-man individual or consultant as opposed to an IT department supporting a 1,000- or 10,000-person organization.

Geeks hate ugly logos too

The Symbian Foundation has proudly announced its new logo, which is part of the whimsical branding that the foundation has been using for its appearances at Mobile World Congress (in Feb.) and CTIA (last week).

I find myself in an interesting position in commenting on the new branding.

My friend and co-author David Wood — the only Symbian executive to remain from beginning to end — is at the thick of it as the “Catalyst and Futurist” within the Symbian Foundation leadership team. David was (at one point) ecosystem manager for Symbian Ltd. Now that Symbian is open source, he is handing much of their community relations (although that job is far too big for one person to do alone).

Another friend and co-author, Mike Mace, posted an article Saturday about the Symbian logo entitled “The ugliest logo ever.” He worries that the logo will make it difficult to communicate Symbian compatibility if developers don’t want to display this logo. (I disagree with Mike slightly — I think the Symbian logo is uglier than Tux the penguin).

The money quote:

The bottom line is that any logo artless enough to please the open source community would be problematic as a marketing tool. As is often the case in marketing, you can't please all your audiences, so you can either be universally bland or you can optimize for one audience. I think the folks at Symbian decided that open source street cred is the thing they need most.

I don’t see it as either/or — but then Mike’s the mobile/PDA guy and I’m the open source guy.

While ugly might be necessary for free software movement types, it’s clearly a silly idea for the professional open source community. Geeks want to be associated with a winner, not with something that looks like a 2nd grade doodle.

There are many counter examples of projects that have both more professional looking logos and greater “open source street cred,” including

• Apache
• Eclipse
• Gnome
• Python

Even some of the older logos, like FreeBSD and Perl are superior to the Symbian Foundation look. Heck, I think my old company’s logo beats that of the MNC-funded nonprofit.

If Symbian were asking me, I’d quietly kill the heart. Keep it on the website, but deprecate any other use, and then retire it at the next major community milestone in Q3 or Q4.

To replace it, I’d design a tight new multi-color (or gradient) logo that evokes the Symbian spaceman, which is friendly, animate, unique and has a vaguely high-tech association. In the meantime, keep the spaceman on business cards and other collateral.

Of course, they’re not asking me. Instead, I’m guessing they’ll continue along, lost in branding space, until the person responsible for the logo leaves and internal politics allow the foundation to gracefully change course and pick something different.

R favorite datamining tool

There’s a new user group in the Bay Area, organizing around the use of the R open source package.

On his blog, Data Evolution, blogger Michael Driscoll talks about Wednesday’s kickoff event on how R can be used for predictive analytics.

The marquee speakers were from Facebook and Google. Characteristically, the Google speaker apparently didn’t say anything at all about why they used the software, only for the mechanics of running the analysis.

The Facebook speaker talked about using R to study customer retention. Also, the Facebook employee and two consultants suggested specific packages within R that could be used to solve specific tasks.

Sun bureaucracy rejects alien beings

My friend Matt Asay is reporting that MySQL CEO Maren Mickos is bailing from Sun Microsystems, a year after Sun paid $1 billion for the open source database company. This follows by four months the exit by one of the MySQL founders, and a goodwill writedown of sizable fraction of the purchase price. The other cofounder left last week.

Asay blames the departure on Sun bureaucracy

What Mickos doesn't say in the staff letter, but which I sensed in my conversation with him, is frustration at Sun's bureaucracy. As one of the most foundational personalities in open-source business, Mickos should have been given free rein to change Sun's fortunes. I don't think that he was given that freedom, based on other conversations I've had with Sun executives, and this clearly led to his desire to leave Sun.

There is no doubt that the Sun bureaucracy has been strangling the company since the end of the dot-com bubble, when it was perhaps hidden by Sun’s wild ride. While Asay refers to Mickos (who I met a few times) “the face of MySQL, but also of the rising open-source industry,” it’s clear that Mickos was never going to pull off a reverse takeover the way Steve Jobs did in 1997.

But I’d argue with Asay’s basic premise: Sun’s “open-source rebirth was just given a massive blow.” There was no rebirth and never would be. Exhibit A is Matt himself, who I met when he was the open source strategist for Novell. Novell did an exemplary job of acquiring Ximian and one of the open source industry’s superstars, founder Miguel de Icaza, and he still appears to be a Novell VP.

Linux revenues (from its SuSE acquisition) have grown to 16% of the company’s total in 2008. However, Novell hasn’t had a decent year since 2004, losing money in 2008, 2007, and 2005 (if you exclude the Microsoft settlement), and eking out a 2% profit in 2006 that was lost again in 2007.

If this is the best job of any incumbent in making the switch to open source, what hope did Sun have? (IBM is the exception that proved the rule: they had a senior exec who led a cultural shift nearly a decade ago).

So Sun may find its way out of the wilderness — even if the odds seem long. But MySQL isn’t going to do it, and I don’t think open source will either. Perhaps Sun’s future lies not in showing everyone it does commodity systems better than Dell, IBM or HP, but instead giving CIOs a reason again to pay a premium for its products. Apple’s done it in the consumer space, so perhaps Sun can pull it off for mission-critical enterprise IT.

R challenge to proprietary stat software

The NY Times published a glowing story Tuesday (with a follow up blog posting Wednesday) on the success of R, an open source project that has grown to fill most statistical software needs.

R was launched in 1996 as a knockoff of the Bell Labs statistical programming language, S. As with Apache or Perl, much of the value comes from add-on packages, and it has grown a remarkable library of donated packages stored at CRAN, which is modeled on Perl’s CPAN.

I first came across R when running the MacStats website in the late 1990s, and recommended it to fellow academics (interested in stat software and notoriously cheap) back in August 2000.

From an economic or organizational standpoint, R is just a new act of the original open source story: user-innovators solving their own problems. Or, as Eric Raymond observed a decade ago, good software (especially open source software) comes from “scratching a developer's personal itch.” That scratching gave us Project GNU, with programming language compilers, a text editor, and gradually bits and pieces of an operating system.

Once upon a time, statisticians had to write their own Fortran programs to solve their analyses. Even today, most have better math and computer skills than the average college graduate.

So R — as with compilers — had a large pool of potential users who could write their own code. (Unlike, say, those who write children’s edutainment software). Also, university professors have autonomy over use of their time — organizational slack — but often not a lot of discretionary cash. So spending a few days to write a library — rather than buying a $100 or $500 off-the-shelf package — made certain economic sense.

When I was first evaluating R in 2000, the problem was the lack of a GUI. Statistics teachers often could program but undergraduate psych (or business) students could not, nor would they be keen on navigating a line-oriented program.

To make a GUI solution available, R had a Windows version, and started on Mac OS X with an X11 (Unix workstation GUI) implementation. Now it has a native UI version for OS X, in addition to Windows, Linux (4 flavors) and Solaris. It has scientific, social science, probability and domain-specific statistical packages contributed by users. Where once social scientists fought to find any implementation of partial least squares — since Herman Wold, the implementor of the original PLS package, died in 1992 — there are now at least 4 PLS packages available (free) for R.

When I was recommending R back in 2000, it was rough but obviously ambitious in its goals. It’s gratifying to see how it’s evolved to success (and fame), even if it doesn’t teach us anything new about strategies for growing autonomous open source communities.

Nokia's new subsidiary

Largely lost in the announcements at Nokia World is this press release

Nokia acquires Symbian Limited
December 02, 2008

Espoo, Finland - Nokia today announced that it has completed its offer to acquire Symbian Limited. All conditions to Nokia's offer to acquire Symbian Limited have been satisfied and it has received valid acceptance of greater than 99.9% of the total Symbian shares that Nokia did not already own. Symbian is the software company that develops and licenses Symbian OS, the market-leading open operating system for mobile devices.

The closing of the offer is a fundamental step in the establishment of the Symbian Foundation, announced on June 24, 2008 by Nokia, together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, ST-NXP Wireless, Texas Instruments and Vodafone. More information about the planned foundation can be found at www.symbianfoundation.org.

All Symbian employees are planned to become Nokia employees on February 1, 2009.

After 10 years, Symbian is gone as an independent company. Although the acquisition marks an important milestone to the plan announced June 24, the more important milestone will be (as noted) when the employees get all shuffled around and dispersed to Nokia divisions after Feb. 1. The bulk of today’s Symbian Ltd. — software engineers and associated QA and management — will presumably end up somewhere within handset R&D.

One major unknown (and for now unknowable) is how loyal Symbian handset makers (beyond Nokia) remain. Nokia’s always had a difficult time balancing its internal goals against attracting competitors to share an ecosystem. There have also been a series of one-off problems that seemed to jinx the other participants: Motorola’s ongoing saga, Sony Ericsson’s withdrawal from much of the world, and the emphasis of the Korean vendors on cool hardware rather than usable software.

Something that will be resolved sooner is the nature of the Symbian Foundation. The most successful multi-firm open source consortium is the Eclipse Foundation, which lists 17 names on its staff page. By my guess, this is a small fraction of those portion of Symbian employees that today work with the Symbian ecosystem — the “few hundreds” mentioned in a June interview.

Presumably the goal of the foundation (as with any consortium) is to be supported by a broad base of members rather than getting most of its money from one or two highly motivated members. Nokia will pay for a thousand employees (in R&D) but will its partners (with their smaller smartphone sales) pay for hundreds of foundation employees?

At Nokia World, Symbian Foundation executive director (designate) Lee Williams gave one of the keynotes. Williams was the obvious candidate, as a member of the (former) Symbian board and the outgoing head of Nokia’s S60 software development (a distinction that will go away once S60 and Symbian are merged). He also had experience as a manager at Be Inc. (the Apple spinoff) before and after it was acquired by Palm.

Alas, the first 15 minutes of the talk is exceedingly platitudinous, as executives seem wont to do with a large captive audience.

The useful part of the talk is the last eight minutes, beginning with the phrase "In terms of the goals of the foundation at a very concrete and practical level …” The basic message (in R&D speak rather then MBA speak) is that Symbian OS will leverage its economies of scale and scope to maintain its lead over all rivals. He emphasized three major goals

• A complete platform in 2009, and with it a more compete platform — in terms of devices, third party applications and platform maturity — than any rival.
• Hardware agnostic. 7 chipsets, 5 baseband modems, plus other chipsets and components
• “A real ecosystem” of a wide range of firms, small and large, with no one party advantaged

Obviously paying the Symbian engineers to keep updating the OS will work as long as Nokia pays the bills, and there should be some great improvements of efficiency and effectiveness after Nokia removes the Symbian/S60 schism.

The long term question is outside participation and financial support for the Foundation outside Espoo. In theory, open source should attract third party participation but in practice it rarely works that way: when a single firm sponsors an open source community, usually other firms choose not to participate due to a lack of accessibility. The IP may be open but the production and/or governance are not.

IBM gained outside supporters when it created Eclipse it created the open source Eclipse Project, but today that remains unique. Symbian was already fairly open — certainly as open as many standard consortia — and for now it’s not clear whether Nokia owned (with a smaller open source foundation) will be more open (in governance) than the previous arrangement.

Reboot your gPhone

ZDNet has an amusing report on how Android monitoring keystrokes can also be used to reboot your phone. Try it on your T-Mobile G1 — if you have firmware RC29 or earlier, kablooee.

Ed Burnette notes the linkage to open source:

Because Android is open source, the problem was quickly tracked down by users to a couple lines in the system file init.rc. My guess is that this was accidentally left in during device debugging. Thankfully the fix is trivial; you can probably even make it yourself if you’re so inclined (just comment out the offending lines described in the reports above and reboot).

How much did Sun lose on MySQL?

Sun Microsystems announced today that in its most recent quarter, it lost $1.67b on revenues of $2.99b. That’s a -56% net margin (if there were such a concept as negative margin), but only -5.6% without special charges. Compared to analyst expectations, the revenues were $150m low, as was the net income. Its gross margin also fell dramatically.

The NYT notes a consistent pattern of bad news

With falling revenue, problematic acquisitions, product slip-ups and a stock that has lost three-quarters of its value in the past year, the investment community is getting impatient with Sun’s management, including chief executive Jonathan Schwartz.

“Sun is a problem child, and the problem child has to change,” said Brent Bracelin, a hardware analyst for Pacific Crest Securities.

The Times estimates 40% of Sun’s total revenues come from financial services and telecommunications companies, two sectors that are now cutting back. Longtime CEO Scott McNealy was forced out 30 months ago because he never adjusted to the fact that the dot-com era was a one-time lucky break. So far, Jonathan Schwartz isn’t doing any better.

In today’s announcement, there is the minor problem of that $1.44 billion charge for “goodwill impairment” on unspecified business lines. There is no excuse for Sun’s obfuscation: the size of the charge is clearly material, while being truthful would not provide advantage to any competitor. Instead, it’s just management seeking to avoid accountability for its recent mistakes.

In particular, the presumption is that most (if not all) can be attributed to overpaying for two recent acquisitions, the $4.1b purchase of StorageTek in 2005 and the $1b purchase of MySQL (for 20x revenues) earlier this year.

On InfoWorld, MBA-touting blogger Savio Rodrigues estimated $2.48 billion in goodwill booked between the two sales. By his calculations, MySQL is 29% of the total, which (if pro rata is a fair allocation) would be a $420m charge on the purchase. Rodrigues reminds us that eBay took a $1.4b writeoff for its purchase of Skype.

The MySQL purchase was intended to give Sun a lynchpin role in the open source world. But the shift to get open source religion was too late. The acquisition isn’t going well for either side: Schwartz clearly overpaid by hundreds of millions of dollars while MySQL is being strangled by the Sun bureaucracy.

Maybe it’s a lack of imagination, but I don’t see where Sun can go and how they can get there — or that they would ever do it, even if they knew where and how to go. By comparison, Motorola’s problems look easy: at least they’re in a growing market.

Yet another mobile browser

On the Mobile Monday mailing list and various website, Skyfire this week advertised to grow their marketing staff.

Skyfire is the Mountain View startup that’s garnered $18m in VC to put yet another browser on cell phones — competing with WebKit (on iPhone, S60 and Windows Mobile) and of course the venerable Opera. Until the job ad, I’d never heard of the mobile browser software company, which is supporting WIndows Mobile and someday Symbian S60.

Skyfire is based on Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine. Its claim to fame is that it (unlike say the iPhone) delivers the full desktop browser experience — complete with Flash, QuickTime, Silverlight, AJAX and other goodies not available on the iPhone and other mobile phones — either because they conflict with platform strategies or because of a lack of horsepower in the mobile device. Providing these also gives full access to YouTube, Hulu and other media sites.

Skyfire not only has lots of features, but is also very fast. Of course, there’s a trick — they render the pages on Skyfire’s server and then push bits down to the device. The server-side tricks mean that you need to subscribe to a (presumably paid) service to get the benefits, providing a revenue stream in an era of commoditizing web browsers. Its pending patent could even protect this unique business model.

The problem is, server-side rendering seems to address a temporary (and closing) window of opportunity. As Clay Christensen observed, technology improves faster than customer needs, so low-end solutions display high-end soltuions.

If the Pentium II/Pentium 4 transition is any indication, today’s 300 MHz smartphone will sport a 2 GHz processor in 3-4 years. By then, some will also be multicore, well suited for rendering web content on one processor and doing the remaining computations on another.