Category: Opensource

Of sacred cows and barbecues

I’ve maintained for years that the core of my understanding of opensource came not from Richard Stallman or Eric Raymond but Jerry Garcia, that my understanding of open markets and democratised innovation came not from Yochai Benkler or Eric von Hippel but Jerry Garcia and his cronies. It goes beyond pure opensource, I think my understanding of the Because Effect was also stimulated by Garcia and by the Grateful Dead. Their commitment to live performances, the very concept of taping rows, the sheer size of the bootleg market for Dead recordings, all these bear powerful witness to my thesis. In fact, trivial as it may sound, my collection of over 50 Jerry Garcia ties is probably another simple example of the Because Effect. [If you want to know more about the Dead’s taping rows, you could do worse than start with this book.]

Bearing all that in mind, I was sure to take delight in this poster:

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My thanks to Paul Downey for the poster. You should really go to his flickr site and view the poster there, tags and all. Tag by tag.

I spent quite a while gently navigating the poster, viewing the tags that came up, occasionally doing myself an injury as I sought to harrumph away my laughter and continue sipping my green tea. There’s probably something there, within the intricacy of the poster, to raise an objection from pretty much every person who reads this post. I’ve rarely seen such an open barbecuing of sacred cows. Delightful, helps me remember not to believe in my own propaganda.

I also love the tagline.

The Web is agreement.

My thanks again to Paul.

Site specific random surfing and related subjects

random pageSome of you may have noticed that this blog now has a Random Page feature. The way I heard it, StumbleUpon announced a Site Specific Stumbling facility; someone asked Photo Matt whether there was a WordPress plug-in that did something similar, and soon there was one. Because Matt built it. Thanks, Matt! and thanks as well for the link to Curt Schilling, fascinating…. particularly for someone like me who follows cricket….

What Matt did is a perfect example of what I meant in an earlier post:

Scarcity models are by definition not scale-free; a hit culture prevails. Opensource, given the lower barriers to entry, allows someone to build a left-handed credit derivatives juicer because he felt like it. There’s a long-tail effect. You are more likely to find esoteric tools in an opensource world than in a closed source one. Opensource people don’t go around asking “Is there a market for this?” They solve problems and see if others have similar problems to solve.

Things happen in opensource communities, happen in ways that are fundamentally different from traditional models. The WordPress community is a good example of how this happens, how an ecosystem evolves around a many-sided marketplace. What Matt did is what opensource people do. And it is worth bearing in mind that while we speak of the community at large, work is actually carried out by individuals. Individual people doing individual things, but aligned to a common set of values and ethics. Values which include experimentation and learning and sharing and transparency and openness and component architecture and reuse. Values which do not include Not Invented Here and selfishness and not-sharing.

What you see in action is the A in NEA. Anyone can improve it. [See earlier post on CIOs and responsibility]. So now I look forward to further improvements, as someone adds collaborative filtering support to site specific “stumbling”.

10 reasons for enterprises to use opensource

I don’t really understand why it happens, but for some reason far too many people think opensource is free as in gratis rather than free as in freedom. As a result, when I ask people why they would use opensource, the answers are framed in the context of cost. The three commonest answers I get are:

(a) cheaper to “buy”

(b) cheaper to run

(c) cheaper to fix

This not-so-subtle positioning of opensource as “free” somehow translates to the enterprise equivalent of pinko communist left-handed tree-hugging vegetarian, and that’s all she wrote. End of story.

So I thought it was time to provide ten reasons of a different sort….

1. Opensource makes you responsible. When you choose the components yourself, you don’t have a vendor to scream at. Or, as is often the case, a whole heap of vendors to scream at, each merrily pointing all known fingers (and a few unknown ones) at everyone else. While you fume and stew.

2. Opensource makes it easier for you to get married. When your architecture is primarily based on opensource components, software and data integration costs stay low and the process works.

3. Opensource makes you more attractive. To graduates and first-jobbers, members of Generation M, opensource has an iPod-like halo. And they know how to use the tools as well.

4. Opensource keeps your tail in shape. Scarcity models are by definition not scale-free; a hit culture prevails. Opensource, given the lower barriers to entry, allows someone to build a left-handed credit derivatives juicer because he felt like it. There’s a long-tail effect. You are more likely to find esoteric tools in an opensource world than in a closed source one. Opensource people don’t go around asking “Is there a market for this?” They solve problems and see if others have similar problems to solve.

5. Opensource makes you look younger. There’s an elixir-0f-youth effect, a future-proofing that comes from using opensource. You cannot be blackmailed at the altar of Forced Upgrade. You have optionality. That is the Free that is Opensource. The implied optionality.

6. Opensource makes you cleverer. You innovate faster because you have access to faster innovation. Whenever you look at an opensource ecosystem, try and compare it with a closed-source version. Compare it in terms of the time taken for launching in different countries, languages, whatever. I should say “try to compare it in terms of….”. There is no comparison.

7. Opensource makes you a man/woman of the world. Globalisation is about global markets and global resources and global communications. When you use opensource components, you are more likely to find people all over the world with the right knowledge and skills; proprietary skills require proprietary investment.

8. Opensource makes you fitter. Most opensource components are seen as infrastructure, as commodity, and people often say that opensource is therefore about commodity. I’ve made that mistake as well. I think we’ve got cause and effect mixed up here. Opensource commoditises, and therefore creates commodity. When you get commoditised, you tend to look for other things to differentiate you, make you stand out. You get “fitter” as a result, with the two prongs of commoditisation and looking-for-fresh-differentiation.

9. Opensource makes you more famous. At least one of the essences of opensource is Given Enough Eyeballs. Linus’s Law. The opensource model attracts eyeballs.

10. Opensource makes you safer. When code is open to inspection it is harder to create backdoors; harder to exploit weaknesses because the weaknesses get fixed faster; harder to make monoculture threats because there is a form of natural selection taking place.

And yes, the first three standard reasons are true as well. Opensource does make you richer.

Random musings on opensource

As you would expect, I spent a lot of time with my wife and children over the Easter break. And then stayed up to watch the golf. When I wasn’t doing either of these things, I was catching up on my reading.

Dan Farber’s True Nature Of Open Source post got me thinking. Go take a look yourself, Between The Lines is a place I visit regularly; in fact I read most of the ZDNet bloggers pretty often.

Dan ends with the following:

Economics don’t favor pure open source. The future is hybrids–cars, software, people, pets. It’s better for the planet…

And that’s what set me thinking. As usual, I’m sharing that thinking with you, in the knowledge it is provisional and only-partially-formed. For the sake of brevity I’m making this a bullet-point list. [Yes even I can be brief sometimes!]

1. Economics can favour opensource. Commodity economics, based on scarcity, does not. But gift economics, based on abundance, can and does favour opensource. There’s a lot we have to learn about the economics of abundance. It is at the heart of Doc Searls’ Because Effect; it connects Stallman and Raymond and Torvalds to Brand and even Garcia.

2. Gift economics relies, to quite an extent, on delayed gratification. The same delayed gratification that is at the heart of Daniel Goleman‘s Emotional Intelligence work. The same human capacity that engenders the perseverance that characterises so much of innovation, of invention. For that matter, the same human capacity that allows people to have faith.

3. The willingness to accept delayed gratification (besides being central to Goleman’s themes) is critical to building community, to engendering teamwork and collaboration. Communities are defined by their shared purposes, their treasures in heaven. They evolve and grow despite their differences, held together by their common goals. I would go so far as to say they evolve and grow because of their differences, they learn more from the differences than from the similarities. But they stick together because of their shared vision.

4. Teamwork and collaboration are essential for the success of any 21st century organisation. Collaboration within the enterprise, collaboration across the supply chain, collaboration across the customer chain. Collaboration with the customer.

5. Opensource connects the customer with the coder in different and powerful ways. Transparency of demand and supply. The impact of Linus’s Law. True future-proofing. The wisdom of crowds. Evolution of software as a result of natural selection, driven by open market adoption rather than the slave trade of vendor-locks. [If you think about it, vendor-locks are really a form of slavery].

So for me there is a golden thread that links opensource with abundance with delayed gratification with collaboration and teamwork all the way to co-creation of value with the customer. All economically sound, just not scarcity-economy sound.

What Dan says about opensource is true, but we must understand why before we can make the right calls. I will post separately about the inevitability of hybrids.

Look what they’ve done to my song, ma

[With thanks to Ms Safka, and to Malcolm for alerting me to this story via his post here.]

[An aside: Would you believe Melanie turned 60 earlier this week? Happy belated birthday.]

In a HotNews post earlier today, Steve Jobs opened up (pun intended) with his views on DRM. Well worth a read. For me, the most telling quote was this:

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

I am aware that there have been attempts to develop DRM systems for CDs, as discussed here. But they were (thankfully!) catastrophic failures.

This whole DRM thing, when put in the context of what Steve says, now reminds me of something else tangentially Apple-related.
Soon after iPods came out, we had this flurry of activity from some information security professionals saying things like “iPods should be banned from trading floors”. My natural counter at the time was “OK, provided we check every person in and out of the building, look into their briefcases or whatever passed for briefcases, scan and analyse their cellphones and PDAs, and so on.”

I likened it then to being asked to shut the attic window while the front door was not just wide open but barn-sized. I would not ban the iPods unless they “shut the barn door”.

And I guess that’s the way DRM now feels in the context of music. Shutting attic windows while barn doors  flap forlornly open.
Critics of Jobs may argue that CD sales are eroding fast and being replaced by digital downloads, and that stopping the illegal reproduction of digital tracks was therefore imperative. My answer?  No cigar. Not even close.

The damage done by poorly implemented DRM is damage that is being done to all and sundry. Damage that affects everyday people carrying out everyday activities. Damage that affects business and leisure, creativity and pleasure. Damage that extends way beyond music. Legitimate software doesn’t run. Legitimate subscribers can’t get access to digital things they’ve paid for. There are too many examples for me to continue to cite them here.

It’s been no secret that the drive for DRM has come from “content owners”. Even Bill Gates, someone who doesn’t automatically conjure up images of being the Godfather of Open, said so here a couple of months ago.

Take a look at Steve’s penultimate paragraph:

If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

It’s a classic Because Effect situation. We have numerous examples of publishers saying they’ve sold more books once they opened up to Google Search or Amazon Look Inside This Book or similar; numerous examples of musicians and bands being successful selling DRM-free downloads; I could go on but won’t.

The whole concept of an e-book failed, as far as I am concerned, for three reasons:

  • The hardware was too heavy.
  • The process was too unwieldy.
  • Reading a book was no longer a pleasure.

We appear to live in very strange times. Times when people in the hardware, software, media and entertainment industries spend enormous sums of money on making their products and services more “user-friendly”, more user-centred, simpler to use, more convenient. They know all the buzzphrases, so do their consultants. And vast sums get spent.

And then what do they do? They put poorly thought out DRM all over the place. Go figure.

Folks, this is not sustainable. We need new ways of paying for creative value. So go read Terry Fisher, go watch Larry Lessig, go surf Cory Doctorow, go pore over Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, go study the opensource movement. Go write to your local DJ. Go burn a disk.
Go do something.

Because the walls are coming down. They’re coming down.