The Open Road

We have reached a critical inflection point for open source.

With everyone from Qualcomm to UBS to Microsoft embracing open source in one shape or another, the question is no longer "why" to use open source, but rather "how."

Because of this changing mindset around open-source adoption, we no longer need evangelists encouraging open-source adoption. Adoption is a given. It's the default.

No, what we need now are those that can illustrate how to derive the most benefit from the inevitable adoption of open source.

This is perhaps evident in MindTouch's just-released survey of the most influential people in open source today, as voted by over 50 top-level open-source business executives. People like Larry Augustin, Marten Mickos, Dries Buytaert, Mark Radcliffe, and Andrew Aitken make the list. (Note: I am honored to be on the list as well.) They are there not because they're open-source cheerleaders, but because they have helped vendors and customers alike understand how to get the most from open-source investments.

The trend away from evangelism is also apparent in the types of industry events that still draw an audience. The Linux Foundation's inaugural LinuxCon amassed over 700 attendees, in large part because it promised (and delivered) tutorial-like education on how to get the most from Linux deployments.

In a similar manner, O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), Open Source Business Conference (Disclosure: I'm program chair for OSBC), ApacheCon, EclipseCon, Red Hat Summit, and other such events remain popular because they give attendees real-world insight into how to get the most from open source.

The message used to be, "Open source is powerful! You should try it." The market got the message, to the point that open source is a de facto component of virtually every technology vendor's strategy and is reaching ubiquity in enterprise deployments, too.

It's time for the next phase of open source, the practical phase where we focus on how to deploy open source, not why.

This is what I (unsuccessfully) tried to say in my "Free Software Is Dead. Long Live Open Source!" post. I certainly wasn't saying that GPL-licensed free software is dead, or should die. Rather, I was (and am) arguing that pragmatism is the new order of the day: how real companies and developers derive real benefits from real software.

No ideology. Just adoption.

That's the message that resonates today and, frankly, always has been the right message for open source. It's what is driving widespread open-source adoption and will continue to do so, provided we can effectively help would-be adopters understand "how" now that they've bought into "why."

One of the most inspiring things I've witnessed in my 10-plus years in open source is its gradual embrace of pragmatism. By "pragmatism" I don't mean "capitulation," whereby open source comes to look more like the proprietary world it has sought to displace. Rather, I would suggest that the more open source has gone mainstream the more it has learned to make compromises, compromises that make it stronger, not weaker.

Let me explain.

There have long been two camps within what we typically refer to as "open-source software." The first is led by free-software advocates like Richard Stallman (who, importantly, largely eschew the term "open source" as not being sufficiently concerned with freedom), while the latter is led by no one, but was formally organized in 1998 by Tim O'Reilly, Eric Raymond, and others in Silicon Valley.

While free-software advocates provided the early backbone of the larger open-source movement, the market has been made by open-source backers. Free software makes for great headlines ("Miguel de Icaza is basically a traitor to the Free Software community"), but it is far too demanding, and of largely the wrong things, to capture mainstream interest.

To go mainstream, free software needed to become open source.

Open source also makes for great headlines ("Open Source Code Worth US$ 387 Billion"), but its real value is not in generating controversy but rather in alleviating it, turning the focus from open-source personalities to open-source code, and the value that companies and individuals can derive from it.

Free software demands one way. Open source encourages many ways.

To get there, open source has softened its elbows and opened its arms. Jason Perlow recently wrote on ZDNet that he, like most of the world, has to work with both open-source and proprietary software, and can't afford to dogmatically cling to one or the other. (It's a message that even Steve Ballmer begrudgingly repeats, suggesting that Microsoft must support those that "for whatever crazy reasons don't want to be on Windows, might want to be on Linux.")

For that reason, Perlow further writes:

But some people, particularly our free software leaders, are so mired in their hatred of Microsoft and proprietary systems that they will use only free and open source software for the sake of ideological reasons alone....Stallman and the FSF [Free Software Foundation], like his Cretaceous ancestors 65 million years ago, isn't evolved enough to see that his reign is about to come to an end. The open world needs interoperability, not shut itself off from other standards just because they originate from proprietary sources.

Hard-hitting, but true. Open source embraces interoperability, whereas free software takes a hard line that even Microsoft, despite its preference that customers use its complete software portfolio exclusively, won't take.

It's certainly not a line that open-source advocates should take, as it cuts against the very idea of open source: choice. Sometimes, after all, an open-source project is absolutely the wrong choice for a customer (just as sometimes a proprietary product may not be a good fit). There is no one-size-fits-all for either software approach.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and a staunch proponent of open source, with a penchant for free software, suggested as much in his LinuxCon keynote in which he argued that Linux 'desktop' developers need to be far better at meeting real customer requirements, not simply scratching their own, developer-focused "itches" (to use the Eric Raymond-inspired vernacular).

The path forward is open source, not free software. Sometimes that openness will mean embracing Microsoft in order to meet a customer's needs. After all, fierce partisanship and an unwillingness to compromise in software accomplishes is just as pointless, distasteful, and useless as it is in government.

Free software has lost. Open source has won. We're all the better for it.

Silly season is upon us.

The Free Software Foundation is on the warpath against Microsoft's launch of Windows 7, as CNET's Ina Fried reports, denouncing Microsoft for "poisoning education," "invading privacy," and other evils.

The irony is that the Web site used to promote this latest rant uses a license that prohibits derivative works, a cardinal sin in Free Software Foundation theology.

The site uses the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License, which allows people to copy and distribute a page, but not to actually modify and improve upon it ("No Derivative Works--You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.")

This sounds reasonable to me, but has traditionally not sounded reasonable to the Free Software Foundation.

For example, foundation founder Richard Stallman was in Argentina on Wednesday and when mentioning Wikipedia, he suggested that the open-source ethos depends upon freedom of text/code:

Wikipedia's text is free. It is released under a free license. That is the aspect to me that makes it ethical.

The freedom to modify that text is an essential freedom for which the Free Software Foundation has spent decades fighting. It's the first freedom listed at the top of its site:

But apparently it's not an essential freedom for its anti-Microsoft screeds.

I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but the Free Software Foundation's hypocrisy on this is galling. Its logic is also a bit wearing, as Download Squad notes. The Free Software Foundation wants to make lack of freedom the source for all ills. It's not. It's just a good start.

Against this sort of dogmatism is a much more rational response to competition with proprietary software: the Processing project's FAQ. Processing has been positioned by some as an open-source competitor to Flash, but Processing's developers refuse to be drawn in and respond:

We're not targeting the same audience Flash. If we wanted to make a Flash killer, we'd have set out to do that and our stated purpose would have been more specific (and we'd have more on the site about "Processing vs. Flash" in the competitive shootout sense... right now we just have information about how the syntax differs so that people can make the transition).

We could have saved a lot of time if we just wanted to build a better Flash. But as two people, do you really think we can or should bother competing with a company as large as Macromedia? Macrodobe? Does anyone really want a "better" Flash? We certainly don't, so that's not an interesting goal for us.

There are things that are always going to be better in Flash, and other types of work that will always be better in Processing. But fundamentally (and this cannot be emphasized enough), this is not an all-or-nothing game... We're talking about tools. Do people refuse to use pencils because pens exist? No, you just use them for different things, and for specific reasons. If Processing works for you, then use it. If not, don't. It's easy! It's free! You're not being forced to do anything.

How refreshing--that "reason" thing. It would be nice if the Free Software Foundation spent more time coding the changes it would like to see in the world, rather than writing to Fortune 500 companies to advocate they switch to Microsoft alternatives.

Put your code where your mouth is, Free Software Foundation. And make sure it's truly open to derivative works, while you're at it.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

In 2008, Todd Barr left Red Hat to try his hand at an open-source start-up. Now, one and a half years later, Barr is doing just that, hoping to turn the telephony world upside down at Bandwidth.com, a company that operates a proprietary voice network, but is betting a great deal on the open-source FreePBX project.

This shouldn't be surprising, given the increasingly intertwined fates of proprietary and open-source software. But it's interesting to watch Bandwidth.com--a 10-year-old company that sells business voice and data services--incorporate open source into its strategy. After all, the company recently built its own, nationwide CLEC IP voice network. It has a lot riding on that proprietary network, including 4 billion minutes of voice traffic in 2009.

So why bother with FreePBX, an open-source graphical user interface for managing Asterisk, the leading open-source telephony engine? That's the question I took to Barr. His answers are instructive for anyone hoping to leverage open source into their business.

FreePBX is mostly invisible: not many people know about it but it just happens to be the basis for the interface that you see if you're using AsteriskNOW or Trixbox CE, and many other open-source PBX distributions. In total, FreePBX is running on over 300,000 phone systems (with 3 million downloads, to date)...with virtually no one knowing they're even using it.

This is an impressive level of adoption for an independent open-source project. Now Bandwidth.com, and the FreePBX community, are investing in the next generation of FreePBX.

Why? Why is Bandwidth.com spending so much money developing software that it has no interest in selling?

Bandwidth.com's interest is in selling network services, not software. But that software provides the basis for a larger community's interest in Bandwidth.com's network services. The FreePBX community, in turn, benefits from having access to Bandwidth.com's network features, but for the most part, it focuses on technology innovation that benefits other communities such as Asterisk and FreeSWITCH.

Or, to make an analogy to Linux, FreePBX is like Gnome or KDE, and the open-source telephony engines (Asterisk and FreeSWITCH) are like the kernel. While the kernel makes the operating system function, the user experience and key tools for the application development environment is really driven by the user interface, as with FreePBX.

With the preview release of FreePBX version 3 on Tuesday, FreePBX now supports FreeSWITCH (and soon Asterisk, as well), making it completely engine agnostic. Not only does this expand the footprint of open source in telephony, it also gives customers choices, so they can pick the right engine for their use case.

It also turns open-source telephony inside out, setting up FreePBX as the focal point for future innovation in open-source telephony. I suspect that FreePBX's new modular architecture and standards-based frameworks may inspire application developers to target new telephony applications to FreePBX to be able to run with any "engine".

All of which should help Bandwidth.com. Barr told me that the key to innovation is better linkage to network functionality. Because of its network, Bandwidth.com is in a position to drive innovation through FreePBX, faster. The more FreePBX adoption, the strategy goes, the more consumption of Bandwidth.com services.

Bandwidth.com launched a Developer Sandbox Program on Tuesday that aims to give developers enhanced access to its VoIP network features. The idea is that developers can now make use of open-source software and open access to network functionality and develop a new generation of applications that function seamlessly with the voice network.

As an example, Bandwidth.com already has a contextual "store" in beta that allows FreePBX users to turn-on dial-tone and get phone numbers right from the interface.

As Barr puts it, FreePBX, backed by Bandwidth.com, is about lowering the overall cost of telephony for customers and having better open-source technology that encourages new network-aware application development.

It's a classic razor/blade model, as Bandwidth.com heavily invests in open-source complements for its network services core. The model seems to be working for Bandwidth.com. Can 4 billion voice minutes be wrong?

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

At the Oscon conference this week, Tim O'Reilly repeated something he has been arguing for years, but that resonated powerfully given some of the rancorous debates currently raging in the free and open-source software community. O'Reilly cut through the misguided logic of free-software advocacy with a simple statement:

I don't care about free software. I care about freedom...Architecture of systems matters more than licenses.

An open-source software license doesn't necessarily make you open. An open-source license doesn't guarantee freedom, either--at least not in the broad sense of the word.

For example, O'Reilly indicated that he uses proprietary Twitter instead of open-source Identi.ca for at least two reasons: 1) O'Reilly's preferred microblogging (Twitter) client, Seesmic, doesn't support Identi.ca (this will soon change) and 2) Twitter actually has a very open platform, as can be seen in the diverse and deep developer community growing up around it, something that is not true of open-source Identi.ca.

Twitter, in other words, with its closed license, may well be more open than Identi.ca, at least in the areas that most people care about (development community plus the ability to use tool of choice).

Sometimes we in the open-source community forget that licensing is a means to an end, and not the end itself. Licensing does not create a community: there are plenty of open-source projects that completely adhere to the Open Source Definition and yet are effectively closed to outside developers, while Microsoft and others have shown for years that they can attract significant outside development around their platforms.

Free-software advocates, despite their calls for freedom, can sometimes achieve the opposite, as Linux kernel founder Linus Torvalds declares:

I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out.

There are 'extremists' in the free-software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do 'free software' any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred."

Open software...but closed minds? What counts as open, and why do some believe the conversation begins and ends with a license? Which breed of openness do you, as a developer or as an end-user, care most about?

It's similar to the current calls for transparency in government. Transparency is a very good thing, but it is a means to an end. It is not the end itself, and creates significant costs, as Andrea DiMaio notes:

While increasing momentum on transparency consolidates and creates further political capital, it will also cause significant stress to the machinery of government. Processes will have to create and expose more data to comply with additional requirements. Executives, managers, and other government employees will be held accountable against a much larger set of metrics, and their decision-making processes will be potentially under scrutiny at every single step.

Some will say "To hell with the cost or difficulty! Just do it, and do it NOW!!" But these are the same sort of people who demand that all software be completely free forever, and right now, because they've never had to make payroll or, if they do, it's for a small consulting business whose industry impact is constrained by its own ideology.

Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez suggests that "taking purely ideological positions does not work in real life. Instead, flexibility and nuanced approaches to complex problems will tend to win the day over dogmatic approaches."

He's right, even if Microsoft doesn't always measure up to this "flexibility" and "nuance" he prefers. But then, none of us really do live up to our own hype.

Which is why, as Glyn Moody writes, we need to be careful in how we engage in discussing various strategies of openness:

Ad hominem/ad feminam attacks are not just irrelevant, they are harmful. They can lead to abiding rancor that poisons discussions and decisions for some time, and that helps no one--neither purists nor pragmatists--and certainly not free software.

As we broaden the conversation in the open-source software world to focus on freedom, and not necessarily free software, we'll find that there are different mechanics to accomplish this goal. Sometimes this will include open-source licensing. Sometimes it won't.

So long as it's the customer that takes center stage in the debate, I'm convinced we won't go wrong.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

As a law student doing my thesis on open-source licensing (PDF), it was nearly impossible to find any substantive legal papers on the topic. In fact, the only one I can remember is Ira Heffan's excellent "Copyleft: Licensing Collaborative Works in the Digital Age" from Stanford Law Review in 1997.

This week, in a sign of just how far open source has come in the past decade, the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSSLR) was launched, aiming to "bring the highest standards to bear in analysis and comment on all aspects of Free and Open Source software."

It's about time.

The journal is peer-reviewed by an editorial committee made up of members of the European Legal Network which, despite its name, actually includes legal experts from all over the globe. A few of the better-known names include Andrew Katz, Amanda Brock (Canonical), Mark Webbink (former general counsel at Red Hat), and Lawrence Rosen (noted author and author of the Open Source License). The journal will be released biannually.

As companies like Qualcomm seek lawyers with deep open-source expertise, journals like the IFOSSLR are critical to elevating the depth and breadth of open-source analysis, moving it well beyond the intellectual battleground of opposing ideologues.

The first issue is now available online. As Glyn Moody notes, despite the legal nature of the journal, its contents are genuinely interesting--fascinating at times--and relevant to anyone in the business or development of open-source software.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

A rich irony of the free-software movement is that it heavily depends upon proprietary hardware and proprietary software to make its voice heard.

As an example, while Mark Antony (really a nice person--we've had tea in London before and I genuinely like him) rails against my "Is open source losing its soul?" post, he does so using proprietary hardware and proprietary Twitter.

Apparently the irony is lost on Anthony. (And yes, he could find an open-source chip to use if he wanted to.)

Not that he's alone. Glyn Moody, one of the most persuasive of the free-software crowd and a wonderful person, writes his well-written Opendotdot blog...using proprietary blogging software. This wouldn't be so bad except that there is plenty of open-source blogging software out there. Heck, even Microsoft has one.

In reality, what the free software world declines to admit is that its very existence owes much to the proprietary hardware and software world that makes it possible. For example, IBM never would have been able to commit $1 billion to the advancement of Linux without a hefty war chest, one built entirely with proprietary software and hardware profits.

This isn't a paean to proprietary software. Nor is it a suggestion that Anthony and Moody scramble to find 100-percent pure open-source alternatives. That would be silly. They use what works, and should continue to do so. If an open-source alternative works better, use it. Otherwise, we shouldn't make a religious fetish out of it.

Indeed, this is a request that we recognize that when we advocate for open source or free software, we're generally doing so within our own distorted reality, one that decides X is OK if it's proprietary while Y is not. So, Anthony clearly believes that his operating system should be free software, but he's not too bothered if the laptop's hardware is proprietary, or that the communication media he uses to advocate for free software are also closed.

Is he a hypocrite? No. He's a pragmatist. He has simply decided that an OS must be free and that the rest...need not. At least, not yet.

We're very good at pointing out flaws in others, and usually point our fingers just beyond the periphery of our own faults. This is convenient, but it doesn't make us any holier than the next guy.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay. Or don't, if you've found a superior, free-software clone of Twitter. ;-)

Open source has always been as much about free markets as it is free software, so it wasn't surprising to come across this quotation from Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States:

As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.

Franklin, no lover of patents, would likely have felt right at home in the open-source movement. But then, so might anyone who believes in decentralized control.

Indeed, while programmer Eric Raymond categorized proprietary software development as a "cathedral," it's really much more like a Soviet-style store, with centralized control of development and deployment.

Open source? It's free-market.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

I have some unfortunate news for those socialists and communists who still believe that open source is their movement. It's not. Open source is firmly capitalist. Always has been. Always will be.

Sarah Grey, writing in Monthly Review, talks up "open-source anticapitalism", but she's too late. Open source, from its inception, has been avowedly pro-business. That was, after all, the whole point behind changing the terminology from Richard Stallman's preferred "free software" to Eric Raymond and Co.'s "open-source software."

The former term scared off business. The latter term invited it.

Grey writes that "there are alternatives to capitalism." She's right. Unfortunately, open source is not one of them. Open source is the essence of free-market capitalism.

However much one may want to lay the blame of the current economic collapse at capitalism's door, one need only look to Soviet Russia or France's socialism (and the massive unemployment it brings) to be grateful that capitalist, free-market open source is currently reshaping the software industry. It's called open source, and it's a capitalist's game.

We have nothing to lose but our license fees.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.