The Open Road

There's something different about the Apache Software Foundation. While Apache hosts some of the world's most important software development, its members seem more concerned with good code than good politics.

It's no secret that I've become enamored lately with the Apache License, but it's less well-known what first attracted me to the license: the wonderfully nice people affiliated with Apache. From Greg Stein to Geir Magnusson to Brian Behlendorf, it's hard to find a jerk at Apache. I'm sure they exist, but they hide pretty well.

In fact, in a presentation today I attended at SAP in Walldorf, Germany, Apache Software Foundation President Justin Erenkrantz called out the importance of good manners to good governance at Apache:

There are going to be people on an open mailing list who are idiots, or maybe they're just having a bad day. Don't feed the trolls. Don't become a poisonous person.

It seems like reasonable advice, but it's discouraging to see this basic rule of polite society regularly broken within the wider open-source community. Some feel that a license to code is a license to shout others down. It's not. At least, not at Apache.

Perhaps this is particularly important to Apache because of the way it manages project development. It's one thing to be open source but, as I've written recently and as Erenkrantz highlighted in his presentation, open source doesn't necessarily equate to real openness:

You see a lot of people doing open source, but not a lot of people doing open development...At some open-source projects [Erenkrantz mentioned Mozilla], all of the technical decisions, even if the license is open source, are not subject to public comment. At Apache, everything is done in the open over public forums.

Or, as Day Software's Roy Fielding says, "If it doesn't happen on-list, it didn't happen."

Such transparent development creates great software, given that it fosters a true meritocracy. You know exactly who's doing what at Apache: it's all on the mailing lists.

Erenkrantz also noted a few other interesting aspects of Apache:

• Each Apache project is independent, which means that status on one Apache project is not fungible to another Apache project. I can be a core committer on the Apache HTTP project and it won't get me any brownie points with the Apache Cocoon project.
• Microsoft was a sponsor before it was a contributor. Its sponsorship was meant to send a message to Microsoft internally that it was OK to contribute to Apache projects.
• Erenkrantz stressed that Apache developers tend to believe that code, not licensing, should motivate contributions. Apache doesn't believe in forcing contributions through licensing or other mechanisms.

It's a great way to do development and, as Day Software and other companies have discovered, it's also a great way to do business. Open-source development, done openly.

And no jerks allowed.

Some of us take longer than others. Tim O'Reilly moved on years ago from talking about open-source licenses and instead focused on the importance of data to business success. In the open-source industry, we heard his words but clearly didn't understand them.

We kept selling software through our "awkward teenage years," even as Google, 37Signals, Facebook, and others gave it away.

Years later, as Google pays for mountains of open-source code by aggregating data and selling data-rich services, we're starting to grok O'Reilly's message. It's what makes companies like Path Intelligence so interesting.

Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady notes:

Much has been made of the lack of an obvious revenue model for properties like Twitter, and to a lesser extent, Facebook. But when looking at the organizations' balance sheets...it seems self-evident that the value of the data assets involved is seriously underreported...

The economic value being assigned to data helps to explain why, while being sympathetic to questions about Twitter business models, I've never been overwhelmingly concerned. Where the revenue model for the dot-com era "eyeballs" strategy was equal parts indistinct and aspirational, the Web 2.0 businesses are being built out in an era of customers increasingly predisposed to analytics and data driven decision making. In other words, there's a market for their most valuable asset.

As Microsoft's Windows, Office, Xbox, and SharePoint businesses demonstrate, the real money is in the platform business, which is, or which can be, a data business. The more businesses and developers that build upon your software, the more valuable that software becomes. Even systems like Twitter are being turned into platforms.

But how you build the platform is increasingly important. Microsoft is Platform 1.0. Open source is Platform 2.0. It's a more efficient way to build community around a core, which is why Google and other savvy companies increasingly turn to open source as a fundamental way to entice developers, which developers create more software which invites more adoption which yields more data...you get the picture.

It's also why I believe Google Android, in its platform battle with Apple's iPhone, will ultimately prevail, so long as it can work in peaceful coexistence with the developer community (which has not always been the case).

Unlike many open-source companies, however, Google et al. have the singular benefit that since their business is data, not software, they can shepherd open-source development without taking a heavy hand in community management. More open source leads to more adoption, which leads to more data, which leads to the Googles of the world being able to give away even more software for "less than free."

It's genius. And it's amazing that it took so many of us so long to heed the counsel O'Reilly offered years ago.

In sum, this isn't a suggestion that companies should forgo profits in exchange for mindless popularity contests, as 37Signals' Jason Fried rightly pillories.

Instead, it's a call to look for ways to fund open-source development with rich, data-driven businesses. Most open-source companies focus too much on software, and most Web 2.0 companies focus too much on data. It's the blend of the two that makes a company successful.

Just ask Google.

(As an end note, I think Gartner's Brian Prentice is on to something when he speculates that enterprise applications may increasingly be communally developed by IT end users, though perhaps coordinated by vendors. It's a very interesting prospect, one that will enable even more open-source development in an area where data may not fund it.)

Ars Technica's Ryan Paul wants to know, "Can a [truly open smartphone] be done?" But the real question is, "Should we care?"

I ask because some within the open-source ranks can't see the forest (choice) for the trees (freedom). For them, Freedom (with a capital "F") has but one meaning (free and open-source licensing), and is the end itself, not the means to an end (user choice).

Hence, Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center expresses anxiety about the future of freedom in mobile...

We are in a very precarious time with regard to the freedom of mobile devices. We currently have no truly Free Software operating system that does the job.

...when he really should be concerned with choice in mobile. Right now, we're spoiled for choice in mobile, what with Apple's iPhone, Google Android, Symbian, LiMo, Moblin, etc., which suggests that users are free to move between devices.

In this case, it's not the license that makes users free. It's the market.

Open-source software plays an important role in ensuring user choice, but it's not the sum total of the freedom/choice equation. It's just one factor. As Tim O'Reilly reminds us, it's not even necessarily the most important factor, either.

Kuhn and other free-software advocates worry that the nuts and bolts making up the software on mobile phones be free, but this is surprising given the increasing irrelevance of single-node freedom when it's tied into a network. This is what I've described as "the Hotel California of tech," and it suggests we should be far more concerned with freedom between nodes than freedom of the nodes themselves.

In other words, the real concern should be over open data, not open phones. No matter how open my phone's software may be, it's meaningless if I can't move my data between devices or wireless providers.

Even here, there's cause for hope. For example, Funambol's open-source mobile cloud synchronization and push e-mail software is in use by 10 of the leading mobile service providers, as identified in a new report, which arguably should be more relevant to the Freedom fighters than whether Bluetooth is open source.

Glyn Moody, a journalist with strong free-software leanings, understands this. That's why he makes the case for an open cloud, and not simply "open node in the cloud":

Ideally, what we need is a completely open source cloud computing infrastructure on which applications providing people with things like (doubly) free email and word processing services could be offered....The trick here is not to fight the battle on the opponents' terms, but to come up with something completely different.

For example, how about creating an open source, *distributed* cloud? By downloading and running some free code on your computer, you could contribute processing power and disc space that collectively creates a global, distributed cloud computing system. You would benefit by being able to use services that run on it, and at the same time you would help to sustain the entire open source cloud ecosystem in a scalable fashion.

One can quibble with the feasibility of this approach, but at least Moody is thinking at the right scale. Those who are still stuck in the Open Source 1.0 of isolated, client-side software are not.

I suppose someone has to fixate on upper-case Freedom above all other priorities. Like usability. Or ubiquity. Or...well, anything.

But most of us don't think this way, because the world is a lot more complicated than Freedom on one hand, and Slavery on the other. Also, the focus of freedom has evolved in our networked world, though some free-software advocates seem mired in Freedom 1.0.

It's time to upgrade. Freedom is more than a license. It derives from a competitive market, one that is assisted by open source but not exclusively or even primarily defined by it.

The freedom to fork is the essential right of open-source software. Until Oracle's attempted acquisition of Sun/MySQL, however, few realized just how important it would be to retain the right to fork one's own code.

After all, just because you have the letter-of-the-law right to fork doesn't mean you have a meaningful ability to do so. So long as you're not the primary copyright holder, you're always going to be second place, with second-place commercial opportunities in the software.

MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius hints at this in his letter to the European Commission, citing conflicts of interest between Oracle and MySQL development interests. Such conflicts wouldn't be of such importance were it not for the lack of external commercial appeal that stems from MySQL's use of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Even Richard Stallman, co-author of the GPL and founder of the free-software movement, and not someone that spends much time worrying about monetization of open-source software, gets this.

As noted in a letter co-drafted with Open Rights Group and Knowledge Ecology International, Stallman notes that Oracle's proposed acquisition of MySQL could hurt its development because the GPL reduces incentives to commercialize the code:

The acquisition of MySQL by Oracle will be a major setback to the development of a FLOSS database platform, potentially alienating and dispersing MySQL's core community of developers. It could take several years before another database platform could rival the progress and opportunities now available to MySQL, because it will take time before any of them attract and cultivate a large enough team of developers and achieve a similar customer base.

Given that forking of the MySQL code base will be particularly dependent on FLOSS community contributions - more so than on in-company development - the lack of a more flexible license for MySQL will present considerable barriers to a new forked development path for MySQL. [Emphasis added.]

For those who have been reading/hearing Stallman for the past 10-plus years as I have, this admission is shocking in the extreme. The GPL, which is supposed to be the ultimate guarantor of software freedom, may deliver the opposite. Because of its control-freak urges, it can stymie competition, which is presumably why Stallman is now calling on the European Commission to grant what his license couldn't: freedom.

Now consider if MySQL were licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. MySQL 2 could arise, take the code, hire all of the developers, and development of the open-source database would not miss a beat.

Could MySQL 2 achieve the same with the GPL? No, it could not, because the copyright holder, Oracle, would always have a superior commercial opportunity, because it has more rights than downstream users, as the GPL leaves the copyright holder with a greater range of business model options, and not simply support/services.

Apache leaves everyone--developers, users, vendors, etc.--on equal footing. The GPL does not. With the GPL, the copyright holder retains effective control.

That's one reason it has been so popular with commercial open-source companies, but the Oracle/MySQL situation may prompt more companies to consider using an Apache license so as to preserve maximum freedom in case of takeover, hostile or otherwise.

Disclosure: My company uses the GPL but has been actively considering areas to use Apache licensing.

Enterprises and other users deploy open-source software because it works. For those of us in the open-source vendor community, however, too often we waste time talking about issues that have relatively little resonance for the vast majority of users.

We miss the mark on open-source marketing. In fact, it's often the case that the very standards we seek to set for the software world--interoperability, transparency, etc.--are better observed and delivered by open standards than by open source.

As a case in point, Red Hat and other open-source companies (including Alfresco, my employer) routinely advertise "no lock-in" as a key reason to buy open source. There are two problems with this marketing pitch: one, it's only technically true, and two, customers don't care, as Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady recently noted.

On the first, it's true that open source can reduce vendor lock-in by ensuring that a customer can get support and ongoing code development from someone other than the original developer of the software. But this is only trivially true.

Once a customer invests in a particular vendor (be it Red Hat or Canonical or Novell or MySQL or...), there will always be a cost associated with leaving that vendor, a cost that arguably isn't much different whether that vendor's code is open source or proprietary.

Cost aside (which is easier said than done, as cost is the primary consideration for the buyer), the support options for Vendor X's code from Vendor Y or Z are unlikely to be on par with what Vendor X can deliver. Just ask Red Hat about CentOS or Oracle Enterprise Linux support. ("Compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux can only be verified by Red Hat's internal test suite.")

Apparently there's no lock-in...so long as you stay with the original open-source developer. :-)

The reality is that open-source vendors should be pitching real value to real customers. As Josef Assad presented at the Open Source Days 2008 conference, open source should strive to "lose the TCO (total cost of ownership) war with proprietary vendors." Open-source value is about performance and flexibility at a great price--and not necessarily about absolute freedom from lock-in.

Red Hat gets this. That's why most of the time it sells the value of its subscriptions, and not the hocus-pocus "no lock-in" story. Red Hat doesn't have 75 percent of the paid Linux market (or, probably more accurately, 62 percent, according to IDC) because of its lock-in story.

Would-be customers don't care about that. Really. They just want Red Hat's performance and price, especially compared with Unix.

In fact, to the extent that customers really do want interoperability and reduced vendor lock-in, it's open standards that they should be asking for, not open source.

IBM's Savio Rodrigues points this out in his analysis of the different permutations on the open-source WebKit project. Serdar Yegulalp adds to the analysis:

Source code is a building block, not a standard. It's something you turn into other things. A standard is something that stands above and apart from all of those things, a guideline for what that finished product ought to be like....

The problem with using code as a standard is simple: it's too fluid. The minute you implement it in something, it's not the same code anymore. It almost always has to be changed to fit its container, as water changes to fit.

Open source is an indispensable complement to open standards, but it's not a substitute for them.

This isn't the only area where open-source vendors misread customer tea leaves. For years open-source insiders have debated definitions for "open-source vendor," even as customers shrugged their shoulders and continued using open source--from different vendors with very different business strategies--without worrying about the various shades of ideology and pragmatism that fuel open-source development. I'm as guilty of leading this foolish march as anyone.

Real customers simply don't care.

This is why I think Sun open-source guru Simon Phipps' proposed expansion of the Open Source Initiative's charter is misguided, though very well-intentioned. (The 451 Group's Matt Aslett also weighs in on the proposal.)

Phipps wants the OSI to establish a "holistic vision of software freedom against which businesses can be benchmarked" because too many companies, apparently, are calling themselves "open source" without a consistent definition for what this means.

I don't think it matters. The reality is that businesses don't seem to have any trouble adopting open source regardless of such "truth-in-labeling" initiatives. Gartner suggests that 85 percent of businesses are already using open source. Forrester tells us that a big majority of enterprises are adopting open source because it's delivering real cost and quality benefits to them.

And so the problem is...?

Well, the problem is that open-source advocates are often out-of-sync with open-source adopters. We probably need a new breed of open-source advocate, as ZDNet's Jason Perlow suggests, the kind that reflect customer interests in pragmatic adoption and not advocates' interest in controlling and fine-tuning that adoption.

We don't need paternalistic oversight of open-source adoption, and we don't need to fuel it through vague and inaccurate marketing. Open source is a fantastic way to develop and distribute software. Customers recognize this and don't need to be cajoled or confused into buying.

In the cloud, no one cares about your software license. That is one of the most liberating--and frustrating--things about cloud computing.

Depending on your perspective, it either opens up computing or closes it off. Customers don't seem to care one way or another, happily shoveling data into cloud services like Google, Facebook, and others without (yet) wondering what will happen when they want to leave.

Cloud computing may just be the Hotel California of technology.

I say this because even for companies, like Google, that articulate open-data policies, the cloud is still largely a one-way road into Web services, with closed data networks making it difficult to impossible to move data into competing services. Ever tried getting your Facebook data into, say, MySpace? Good luck with that. Social networks aren't very social with one other, as recently noted on the Autonomo.us mailing list.

For the freedom-inclined among us, this is cause for concern. For the capitalists, it's just like Software 1.0 all over again, with fat profits waiting to be had.

The great irony, of course, is that it's all built with open source.

In this cloud computing/Web 2.0 world, infrastructure needs to be cheap, flexible, and plentiful. Open source delivers all three.

Hence, we've seen companies like MySpace tripping all over themselves to open up parts of their platforms in order to make themselves more appealing to developers. As ReadWriteWeb wrote of Facebook back in 2007, however, such developer outreach has not opened up these Web platforms in the sense of providing useful off-ramps to services like Twitter, Digg, Facebook, etc. It has simply created more on-ramps.

Cue the nefarious Microsoft theme song.

Rather than wringing our hands over this, I think there's an opportunity to create amazing amounts of good (and wealth) in this open/closed Web. Frankly, the longer we're in this, the less it's going to matter whether the code is open or closed because, as Tim O'Reilly has been saying for years, data is the heart of the Web, and even open data isn't going to hurt a successful vendor's network effects.

Take Google Trader, an interesting new SMS application that helps people buy and sell goods through text messaging. As The Economist notes, however, one of Google Trader's most interesting applications is in helping to foster free markets in emerging economies:

Lastly there is Google Trader, a text-based system that matches buyers and sellers of agricultural produce and commodities. Sellers send a message to say where they are and what they have to offer, which will be available to potential buyers within 30km for seven days. Mr Makawa says his father used the service to look for a buyer for some pigs, which he sold to pay school fees. These services cost 110 shillings ($0.05) a time, the same as a standard text message, except for Google Trader, which costs double that. In their first five weeks the services received a total of more than 1m queries.

I'm not familiar with the economics of SMS, but I'm guessing that Google gets a cut of the messages its application generates. The more useful Google Trader becomes, the more SMS it generates, the more commissions Google collects.

For the entrepreneurs using Google's service, they could possibly care less whether Google Trader is open source, but Google might. Open the source (and the API to the service), and let a thousand add-on development projects bloom. The more useful and feature-rich the Trader application, the more SMS, the more...you get the picture.

The key is to create an open Web platform, one into which a diverse array of mobile software services can tie. This is one reason Google is such an advocate for open source. Android and other projects bring more people to the Web, a Web that Google monetizes through proprietary services like AdWords.

The community is critical to building upon the platform, but the money is in control of the platform and provisioning of services therefrom.

Just ask Amazon.com. According to ZDNet, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service makes roughly $220 million per year. That's a lot of cash, and is a function of EC2 sitting at the heart of a growing developer community, one that builds upon Amazon's open APIs to the service.

Some companies like Cloudera and Red Hat will make piles of cash providing the infrastructure for this cloud-computing gold rush. But the biggest money of all will be those that can build platforms in the cloud, platforms that depend upon open source but which aren't open in the traditional open-source license sense of the word.

That traditional licensing world is dead. Open-source licensing has become an on-ramp to closed data services, hardly what its creators envisaged. In fact, proprietary cloud vendors are almost certainly going to become the biggest cheerleaders for open source, because it means more developers creating more on-ramps to the cloud.

Even if such providers create effective exits, it's unlikely that consumers and businesses will actively use them...

...just like in the Software 1.0 world.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Microsoft dominates enterprise IT and likely will for a long time. But the software giant is struggling to match the nimble pace of open source on the Web, a pace being set by Google and others.

As but one example, Microsoft's Internet Explorer lost market share to Mozilla Firefox in September. To compete effectively on the Web, Microsoft will have no choice but fight open-source fire with fire.

This isn't about a need to appease the proverbial "community." It's about broad-based development, low-cost distribution, and, frankly, revitalizing its brand with developers.

Google gets this. While Google has long embraced open source like Linux and MySQL to give it flexible, low-cost technology with which to scale out its operations, the company has dramatically increased its open-source developer outreach in the past two years. And while some companies dribble out open source at the edge of their operations, Google is releasing core software like Wave and Android for open-source communities to help develop and shape.

The result? A loud and loyal following. Google may not get much in the way of quality external contributions from these efforts (It's still too early to tell.) But the strategy is already paying for itself in terms of marketing, if nothing else.

Hence, while Microsoft's mobile software has stalled for years and recently dropped to 4 percent, according to CNET's report on recent AdMob data, Google Android jumped from 2 percent to 7 percent in just six months.

That's the power of community.

It's a community that Microsoft arguably has in the enterprise, but which it emphatically lacks on the Web. Facebook-style developers simply don't think of coding in Microsoft's .Net. They write LAMP applications. To match this, Microsoft is going to need to join the open-source party.

Microsoft is slowly getting the message. For example, the company has been optimizing Web technology like open-source PHP to run well on Windows. More interestingly, Microsoft's experimental Barrelfish multicore operating system has been released under a highly permissive BSD-style open-source license.

The use of a BSD-style license suggests Microsoft is serious about adoption of the project, and of generating trust with developers. Developers can take BSD-style code and do pretty much whatever they want with it, with no permission required and no oversight exercised by Microsoft. It's a great move.

Microsoft needs more of this.

The company recently saw its open-source chief leave Redmond for a Silicon Valley cloud start-up. Such movement, from Microsoft to cloud/Web-based computing, is well under way and something that Microsoft can only halt if it starts to play the same game as its competitors.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer seems to think the key to competition is features (in IE8 and elsewhere). It's not. That's just a start.

The key is encouraging and harnessing the power of community. Microsoft, which has done this so effectively in the enterprise, needs to learn to do this on the Web, too, which is tantamount to saying that Microsoft must fully embrace open-source development.

No, it needn't release all of its software as open source. Google certainly doesn't and, until recently, neither did the open-source bellwether, Red Hat.

But Microsoft needs to be doing much more to embrace, without extinguishing, open source. Open source is the key to making money on the Web, and last time I checked, Microsoft still liked money.

Microsoft is launching an open-source foundation. Google is promising to keep user data portable. Both moves seem to cut against the financial self-interest of the two technology giants. Have the gods gone crazy, or are the business strategies of the industry's biggest players more subtle than "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish"?

With a steady adoption of open-source business and development strategies, Microsoft has gone from open-source hater to open-source embracer in just a couple of years:

• Created its own open-source foundation, the CodePlex Foundation.
• Launched CodePlex, an open-source project-hosting site.
• Started actively contributing to outside open-source projects, including those of the Apache Software Foundation, which it also financially supports.
• Embeds open-source code such as JQuery into its own products.
• Releases complementary open-source projects to augment its customer relationship management software, SharePoint, and other products.
• Received "unanimous approval" by the Open Source Initiative for a few open-source licenses.

This isn't to whitewash all that Microsoft has not done well vis-a-vis open source (e.g., I'm not a fan of its patent-licensing arrangements, including the "interoperability" agreement with Novell), but clearly, Microsoft has been actively adopting open source as part of its business strategy. I'll address the "Why?" question below.

Google, for its part, has long supported open-source software. And it's easy to see why: the company makes its money from data, not software. The more people that have access to a great Web experience through Firefox or Chrome, or have computer access through low-cost Chrome OS-based Netbooks, the better, as they'll almost inevitably find their way to data-rich services from Google.

Google, in other words, has a strong interest in promoting open source and closed data.

All of this makes Google's Data Liberation Front--"an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products--so intriguing. The DLF appears to be giving away Google's single best option for monetizing its user base.

What is Google thinking? One answer may be that Google is trying to head off government scrutiny and intervention. As CNET News' Tom Krazit posits, "anything Google can do to show that it isn't planning to create an impenetrable fortress surrounding user data, it's going to do."

That's one cynical and likely accurate view. But I think that there's more to the story.

Google has created an array of services that increasingly dominate their respective markets. Consumers and businesses are apparently very happy to give more of their time and attention to Google products.

As such, Google's primary concern revolves around keeping those users from leaving. While the DLF makes it easier for customers to leave Google, it also obviates the need to do so. So long as Google customers feel sure that they can leave on their own terms, they likely won't.

Microsoft is starting to learn the same thing. Its customers tend to use Microsoft products because they work, not because some evil genius in Redmond dreamed up diabolical ways to keep them locked in through closed file formats.

Don't believe me? Look at Microsoft's support for CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services), a new content standard that promises to do for content management systems what SQL did for the database market. CMIS enables information portability between different content repositories. (Disclosure: Alfresco, my employer, was a founding member of CMIS, along with IBM, Microsoft, EMC, and others.)

In other words, CMIS makes it easy to move content out of SharePoint into, say, Documentum. It also enables application vendors to write to the CMIS standard, rather than specifically to SharePoint.

Microsoft has been actively engaged in drafting the CMIS specification and appears to be a strong proponent of it. Why? Why would Microsoft, which has much to gain from SharePoint being the center of a new lock-in strategy, support an open standard that makes it easy to move content out of SharePoint and into competing repositories?

Because Microsoft knows that it can win.

Take Microsoft's pre-CMIS partnership with Documentum. As CMS Watch anecdotally references, SharePoint is much easier to use than Documentum, making any partnership/integration between the two a largely one-way street from Documentum to SharePoint, just one reason that SharePoint has boomed, even as the economy has busted. This is only going to get better for Microsoft with CMIS interoperability.

Interoperability favors the vendor whose products are easier to use. By opening up, Microsoft is opening its doors to more customers and, hence, more money.

Google and Microsoft aren't supporting open source or open standards or open data because they grew up as Boy Scouts or Girls Scouts, and feel that it's the right thing to do.

Rather, they're increasingly engaged in open business strategies because they recognize the financial rewards that can stem from doing so. Openness is not a religion; it's a business strategy--a strategy that Microsoft and Google are learning to play too.

Richard Stallman, godfather of the free-software movement and co-author of the GNU General Public License (GPL), has apparently found a home:

It's not clear whether it's a retirement home, a private club for members, or what, but I'm sure they'll welcome him anytime he's in London, where it's located. Let's hope it's nearby Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's Zune House, as the man doesn't seem to have much love for the iPhone, according to this story in Ars Technica.

(I think GPL, in this case, actually stands for Garden Picture Library, but...don't tell Stallman. :-)