The Open Road

Of the formative figures in open source, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Eric Raymond loom large. Arguably, however, few have had as much of a disruptive force as Tim O'Reilly, who has helped to create the open-source market and has spent the last six years reshaping it with his seminal "Open Source Paradigm Shift" and other articles.

In an engaging and informative recent TWiT podcast, O'Reilly revisits the theme. It doesn't break new ground (for O'Reilly), but does highlight, and render somewhat meaningless, the fissures currently running through the open-source community.

Host Randal Schwartz kicks off the podcast with a question about Twitter: Is Tim concerned that "Twitter is anything but open?"

I like to think I have a more nuanced view of open than a lot of people. Some purists will say that [I'm] a traitor....From the very beginning of my advocacy about open source, I've really just been interested in having interesting things happen in the world.

The reason I like open source and worked on this idea of renaming it from "free software" to "open source" was because I don't think it's a religious issue. It's really about how do we actually encourage and spark innovation. Because for me a more interesting world is one where there's more innovation and more freedom to innovate....

The idea is that people can build on it. You give it away because you want other people to do things with it that you can't do or don't want to do.

Open source, in other words, is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end, and that end is collaborative innovation.

While reputation is the first goal of many open-source developers, it's really a means, with the end for many being money ("There's huge currency in reputation. And that's how most open-source developers have 'monetized' giving away things for free.") But it's not really the ultimate end for, as O'Reilly rightly points out, "Money is a signifier of a more fundamental exchange."

Today, O'Reilly suggests, the real value in open source has little to do with source code; instead, it's the result of that code. Value has moved to data, with "network-effect driven databases - user-generated databases - [serving as] the heart of Web 2.0."

And yet, as O'Reilly points out, the open-source world continues to fixate on the wrong battles:

The whole context of free and open-source software is not about Linux taking over the world and replacing Windows. That might even happen, just as the PC replaced the mainframe. And it probably will happen. But it doesn't change the dynamic....

The heart of how we need to understand free and open-source software is in the context of Web 2.0. We can have as much open-source software as we want but we've now created this new layer where these databases that grow through user contributions are the real source of lock-in.

Eventually, these guys probably will make their software open source because it won't matter. The value lies in having the data. The real question is, will there be a future open-source movement that's really an open-data movement.

The market, in short, is no longer for software, open source or proprietary. Tomorrow's market is all about data. It's therefore not surprising that O'Reilly isn't too bothered by people who consume open source without contributing back. That's a short-term phenomenon:

Free riding doesn't bother me because we do get value from it.

That's not to say that there aren't real issues with the power that is accruing to Google, Facebook, et al., but open source is science, not religion. It's pragmatic. If you close things off, eventually you lose. This is why one of my slogans is 'Create more value than you capture.' As long as people are doing that, I don't care whether they're trying to capture some value.

It's a good point, and a great reminder that many persist in fixating on all the wrong issues in open source. The licensing wars should be a thing of the past. The question is how to drive participation while building businesses that improve as participation increases. Sometimes this will result from open-source licensing, but sometimes it won't.

So long as we focus on the correct end, rather than treating open source as an end in itself, we should be OK.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Open source has proved to be phenomenally successful, and continues to grow. As open source grows beyond its roots in software infrastructure like operating systems and Web servers, however, it is finding that the types of community it attracts is increasingly corporate.

Even in the geeky application server layer, Marc Fleury notes that JBoss' "community meant users, partners, consultants," not the freedom-loving developers we often associate with open source. This is because our simplistic conception of community has likely always been wrong, as Michael Dehaan suggests.

Open source has long been more about users than developers for the simple fact that a far greater number of people know how to use software than develop it. Hence, though Richard Stallman and early proponents of open source have issued a clarion call for the developer's right to view and modify source code, the silent majority of the open-source community really only cares about the right to use and extend binary code.

So, you see Openbravo's Paolo Juvara suggesting to its open-source enterprise resource planning community that it might be advisable to extend the Openbravo system, rather than customize it. (Read: modify core source code.) Or you read Jake Goldman rightly arguing that open-source software can lead to closed platforms (e.g., if APIs are not well-documented), while proprietary platforms like Mac OS X or Salesforce.com can actually be much more open platforms, despite keeping source code closed.

In an ideal world, you'd have open source and open platforms, but not every open-source project lives up to that ideal. It's therefore not surprising that open source is growing in two different but aligned directions.

The first direction is commercial open source, which generally trades off the promise of 100 percent source-code access for a hybrid open/proprietary approach, as The 451 Group captures in a recent blog post. This is spawned by a need to frontload development with a paid community at a level of the software stack that doesn't attract a broad development community. (How many people do you know have the aptitude and interest to develop an open-source customer relationship management system? Exactly.)

The second direction is proprietary software that emulates the best of open source by keeping APIs, data, etc. open. This comprises Web 2.0 and other technologies that are open, but not necessarily in a way that would pass muster with the Open Source Initiative.

Both approaches involve openness. Both make trade-offs, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Jake Goldman, echoing Tim O'Reilly's suggestion that open-source licensing matters very little in the grand scheme of things, declares "it's all about platform openness and adoption, not base code openness." He's absolutely correct.

Open-source projects need to focus on more than their license. We need to improve documentation and access to APIs that make source code more usable or, even better, somewhat meaningless. Cloud computing already obviates much of the value of source-code access, a trend that I believe we'll continue to see as users demand the transparency of open source without having to muck in the code.

Such a trend is a useful "next-generation open source" because it focuses on users, not developers, with data, not code, the primary currency. So, while I'm glad to see the GIMP project discussing usability enhancements, I'd much rather see such projects finding ways to include average users in the process of development.

This has long been a weakness of OpenOffice.org, for example. I doubt most of OpenOffice.org developers do a lot of presentations, spreadsheets, and such. But the target user--someone like me--is mostly locked out of the development process by unfamiliarity with the project and no clear idea as to how to help.

Meanwhile, proprietary software like Lose It! and other social software does a far better job of including users in the "development" process by making development all about data, not source code.

In sum, proprietary software has much to learn from open source, and is increasingly applying open-source lessons of transparency and modifiability. But open source also has a lot to learn from the proprietary software world, which increasingly involves lay users in a way that open source has not.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

The more Google grows, the more it becomes a cause for concern for many people--and not simply its competitors. But should it?

On the one hand, Google has become a privacy bogeyman, dropping off the list of the top 20 companies trusted with customer privacy. Ironically, this has come at the same time that Google has upped its commitment to open data policies, which enable users to control their own data privacy policies. Are users suggesting that they can't trust themselves?

This abandonment of trust in Google also comes in the face of an ever-growing commitment within Google to open source. Google now hosts more than 200 open-source projects, ranging from the more obscure (Protocol Buffers) to the well-known (Chrome browser, Web Toolkit).

Perhaps the drop in trust derives from Google's refusal to stay in its search sandbox, expanding its reach well beyond the search engine to mobile, for example, with a range of new features planned for the Android mobile open-source platform.

But why the lack of trust? The more Google has expanded its appetite for influence and dominance of the Web, it has has circumscribed its ability to control through open data, open source, and open APIs. As Google hasn't always had a policy of openness, I'm increasingly impressed by the search giant's widening commitment to it, even as it has the potential to seriously close off the Web to competitors' and, ultimately, customers' detriment.

Is Google perfect? No. But it is also not a 1990s Microsoft-style monopoly. Many of us begrudged Microsoft its dominance because it has been protected through things such as proprietary file formats and (past) illegal tying arrangements. Google does not compete this way. It competes in the open.

Have we lost trust in Google simply because it is winning, and we innately suspect the worst of a company at its scale?

Video games have long struck me as a perfect platform for open-source development. Unfortunately, many gamers agreed, and the courts are littered with copyright lawsuits over the years when developers tried to extend their favorite games.

Now Come2Play has made building and extending games and open-source affair: safe, legal, and fun. No, Come2Play won't let developers hack the games of Electronic Arts, Activision, etc. But it will allow them to create fun multi-player games and easily distribute them on Facebook and across the web, as TechCrunch reports:

Released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, the [Come2Play] API currently supports two players and will be gradually ratcheted-up to include a theoretically unlimited number of players. Developers will be able to create multiplayer games using ActionScript 2/3 which they should feel more comfortable with than server side scripting languages such as .NET, Java, and PHP....

[The Come2Play platform is useful because:] First, game developers can focus on developing games, rather than developing and maintaining infrastructure. Second, they get to keep all in-game ad revenue. Third, the developers get instant game distribution through Come2Play's publisher network. Plus, all games can be automatically ported to Facebook and OpenSocial apps.

This is pretty cool, and perhaps stands a greater (short-term) chance of succeeding than enterprise software-focused "Platform as a Service" plays, because individual game developers may be more willing to build on others' platforms, given the experience with Facebook and other web applications.

But what is it missing? True open-source licensing that would enable games on its platform to be modified by unrelated third parties. Right now, Come2Play is only an open-source API that allows developers to work with its platform, but says nothing about developers being able to modify others' games. To me, that is the missing ingredient. Add that and Come2Play's platform may prove to be the ideal way to build, extend, and play games online.

Some very interesting tidbits floating around the open-source web today:

• OStatic gets a scoop on Eucalyptus, an open-source version of Amazon's EC2. I'm not sure if this means you still have to build your own data center, or whether it leverages EC2 as the backend, because I'm a little lacking in funds to be able to build out my own "cloud." (Kudos to OStatic for becoming a useful, productive member of the open-source blogging community. I read it every day.)


• Yahoo! has opened up the API to its address book, allowing developers to do things like "start[] up a social networking site...[by using] the interface to send invitations to a member's list of contacts stored at Yahoo." Cool. The web continues to open up, one interface at a time.

... Read more

I've been an outspoken critic of Google over the years, admiring some of its products (Search, SMS, News, etc.) while deriding its relationship to open source and deprecating most of its products.

There appears to be, however, a new Google afoot, and it's one that I like quite a bit. Google may need to change its slogan from "Don't be evil" to "Be open," as this looks to be the direction it is going. At Google I/O today, Google announced a few things that make me feel like the future of the web is much safer in its hands than in Microsoft's (if Microsoft ever figures out the web at all).

First, as ReadWriteWeb rightly applauds, Google is dropping its name from its Gears project, a

symbolic move aimed at reinforcing Google's commitment to working with existing standards communities and helping them to define better open standards for bridging online applications and the offline world.

Indeed, Google's Gears Engineer Aaron Boodman writes that Gears "aims to bring emerging web standards to as many devices as possible, as quickly as possible."

More open, much sooner.

In Google's increasingly open world, Steve Ballmer's insistence that Vista "is not a failure and it's not a mistake" speaks to the wrong questions surrounding the much maligned operating system. What he should be protesting is that "It's not irrelevant."

The last week of news surrounding Google doesn't paint a picture of a lovey-dovey company that just wants to help you search. The backdrop for all of the news is the emergence of "cloud platforms" upon which developers can build. It used to be that developers would write for Windows or Linux: Now they're writing applications to run in the cloud of their choice (Google, Bungee Labs, Salesforce, or open-source Coghead)

The problem with this approach, as Tim O'Reilly points out with reference to Google, is it paves the way to lock-in that the "offline" world could only dream of inflicting:

I've been warning for some time that the first phase of Web 2.0 is the acquisition of critical mass via network effects, but that once companies achieve that critical mass, they will be tempted to consolidate their position, leading ultimately to a replay of the personal computer industry's sad decline from an open, energetic marketplace to a controlled economy.

Enter Google's soft disavowal of its "Don't do evil" motto. As Techcrunch suggests, Google likely doesn't like being held to this (somewhat subjective) standard anymore, now that not doing evil becomes ever more difficult at its size and scale.

So what is Google to do? How can Google preserve the impressive heft of its momentum without strangling its potential supporters?

Laura Merling, former head of SDForum and vice president of Business Development at Krugle, today joins Mashery as its vice president of Sales and Marketing. Mashery makes it easy to deploy web services (as Reuters recently discovered with its Calais service, which used Mashery).

I've known Laura for six years. She was the one who made SDForum relevant in open source. She was the one who brought Krugle to my attention. I'm certain she'll continue to do what she does best at Mashery: raise awareness, build connections, and put lots more miles on her car. (Buy, Laura, don't lease. :-).

Good luck to you, Laura. Please stay in touch as I'd love to hear what you're up to at Mashery.

Not everyone's "got the 'open' memo" just yet, but Reuters apparently has.

The global news and information company this week has opened up the API to its OpenCalais project, which enables content creators/aggregators to enrich their content services. What does this mean in English?

That's hard to say, because after reading through the FAQ and the project site, I'm still awash in a muddle of buzzwords and Silicon Valley speak. But what it appears to mean is that it's a Web service that allows someone (even me) to send content (this specific blog, your recipe, a weather report, whatever) to the service to have it (in under a second) attach metadata.

Huh? And? Well...