Please see the response from Wolfram|Alpha at the bottom of this post.
One thing has become clear: to succeed on the Web and in the next generation of software, you need to invite, not dissuade, outside participation. Tim O'Reilly calls it an "architecture of participation," but whatever you call it, the best software strategies are those that encourage outside contributions, rather than discourage it.
This makes Wolfram Alpha's terms of service mind-boggingly backward at best, and troubling at worst. Some have pointed to the quasi-search engine's sometimes weird results as a reason to give the service a pass, but there's a far more fundamental reason to reject Wolfram Alpha , as Groklaw suggests.
Wolfram Alpha demands citation when using the results of its "searches," which is a distinct departure from Google's "use pretty much as you please" attitude, and will almost certainly curb the appeal of Wolfram Alpha, no matter how good its output becomes. Groklaw writes:
Wolfram's Terms of Use are not at all what I would expect from a search engine, probably because that isn't exactly what Wolfram Alpha is providing. It's a computational service, at least in some cases providing computational output from various sources of data that perhaps never existed until you asked your question. So, they claim copyright on the results and require attribution. That's fine with me, so long as the information provided really is uniquely theirs and not just the answer to what is meaning of life and everything, but it is different from what I'm used to from Google and other search engines, so it is counter-intuitive, something to be aware of before I include Wolfram Alpha output in a presentation on Groklaw or in a book.
In other words, Wolfram Alpha requires: "If you make results from Wolfram Alpha available to anyone else, or incorporate those results into your own documents or presentations, you must include attribution indicating that the results and/or the presentation of the results came from Wolfram Alpha." It's a fair request, but it may not be a reasonable request. Not if Wolfram Alpha wants people to actually make widespread use of the service.
Groklaw concludes that this requirement "means Wolfram Alpha will never replace Google," which is absolutely correct. Even if Wolfram Alpha delivers better "search" results, the burden of figuring out and delivering proper citation is going to keep people using Google, which doesn't make the same fetish of proclaiming its ownership of search results.
Wolfram Alpha may well prove to be the best computational search engine on the planet. But until it learns to lose the heavy hand of enforced citation, it's going to struggle to become a first-choice search tool.
UPDATE @ 12:48 PT. Wolfram|Alpha's Theodore Gray contacted me with the following commentary on my post above.
Hi, I'm the person who wrote most of the language in the Wolfram|Alpha terms of use, and I want to correct a couple of things you got from Groklaw.... There are two basic confusions they have perpetrated: First, Google does copyright its results pages just like we do in all comparable cases (e.g. images.google.com, news.google.com, etc).
And second, Wolfram|Alpha is not a search engine: We don't return "search results", we generate original content including plots and graphs. A more comparable situation would be Google Maps, which Google claims copyright on just like any other map provider. Similar, look at pretty much any site that generated financial trend charts, weather charts, you name it, they are always copyrighted. We are not doing anything more aggressive or grabby than Google or other widely used websites: Groklaw simply got it wrong.
I would be happy to answer any further questions you might have, but please, if you're going to criticize my beautiful terms of use language, please at least read it carefully first, and understand that it's not talking about search results. I'm happy to entertain criticism, but not if the starting point is that we're more restrictive than Google, because that's simply not the case.
My response? This misses the point of my post. As I wrote back to Theodore:
Thanks, Theodore. I quoted your terms of use directly - not sure how I can do more than that? Reading Groklaw's take and your note below, I stand by what I said. I absolutely think you have the *right* to require attribution, and I understand the reasons for doing so....
My argument is that by insisting on this, or at least not making it brain-dead easy for your users, you're going to a) make it difficult to enforce because you'll spend all your time chasing infringers and b) induce people to try to use an imperfect replacement for your service (like Google or other) because citation becomes too cumbersome.
You can resolve a and b by simply making citation automated in some way. I would be absolutely for that: I'd love to use results from Wolfram|Alpha in my work, but I doubt I'm going to want to chase down the citation every time. I don't think you want to burden "distribution" of your results: I think you therefore need to find a way to make it easy for users to show that the results came from your service, without making them do all the legwork. I'm not smart enough to know how to do that, but I think you/your team probably are/is.
The point, in short, is not whether Wolfram|Alpha has the right to do this, but simply that doing so may negatively impact adoption of its service. It's similar to copyright assignment in open source: David Neary recently made the compelling argument that copyright assignation can hurt community adoption of open-source software, but that companies may need to do it, anyway.
It's a trade-off, but in Wolfram|Alpha's case, I believe there are ways for it to make this trade-off less burdensome on users, thereby inviting participation and not unduly hampering it.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
I had to stifle a laugh (or was it a yawn?) when reading "So Open It's Closed" on Elias Bizannes's Liako.biz blog. Bizannes is a leader in the data portability movement, which movement seems to be undergoing all the growing pains that open source once had (and still does, I suppose).
Consider Bizannes' plea for true and well-defined openness in data portability standards:
It's time some boundaries were set on what is effectively the brand of open. It's also time the term is defined, because quite frankly, it's lost all meaning now. I've listed some criteria - but what we really need is some consensus on what 'the' criteria for open should be.
Um, yeah. Good luck with that! See, we in open source have been through this (attribution/badgeware debate, anyone?), and we resolved it by throwing up our hands in despair and moving on.
Oddly enough, that was probably the right thing to do, as the only people that really care about such things are the vendors involved. Customers don't care, as a group of New York City-based CTOs told me recently. They just want software to work and vendors to focus on making them work, not making fetishes of whatever the fetish-du-jour may be.
Personally, I care a lot about data portability, for all the reasons implicit in Tim O'Reilly's contention that "the company with the most data wins." I want to be able to move my data to another team (though, in reality, I probably won't, for all the reasons that will make that team the winning one).
But while Bizannes and other data portability people will debate the topic of openness, the reality is that the debate has far less value than supposed. Ultimately, customers choose, and customers prove to be far less finicky about such things than vendors.
I've been highly gratified to see the response to this Open Source CEO Series. I've been impressed by the sincerity and wisdom most of the answers have revealed. Running an open source company at the beginning of the commercial wave is challenging.
Nowhere is this more true than with John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM. I've known John for several years now, and can still remember first meeting him at an SDForum event (back in 2004, as I've described before). John, Clint, and Jacob approached me after I spoke on an open source panel and told me about their idea for an open source CRM company. I thought they were fools, because clearly open source wouldn't work in the application space.
Four years later, it's clear that I, not they, deserve the "fool" title.
In this eleventh installment of the Open Source CEO Series, John took time from his growing business to talk with The Open Road. John is a friend and someone I respect deeply. He has stayed focused and true to his ideal to make CRM easy to use and affordable to deploy.
Name, position, and company of executive
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John Roberts, CEO and Co-founder, SugarCRM.
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