I just posted my opening thoughts on the current debates over software freedom versus open source software as a foundation for a discussion about open core as a business model. They are over at the CodePlex Foundation blog. Please discuss there rather than here.
It was brought to my attention that the FSF has re-posted its CodePlex Foundation commentary from last Fall on the day it was announced that I took the position as technical director at the Foundation. I'm not sure that anything has been added to the new commentary. Re-reading the FSF re-post, I can't but point back to my original response. I will add a couple of clarifications:
The CodePlex Foundation has taken a while to get going, but there are already six projects across two galleries, some of them non-Microsoft. Paula Hunter joined as executive director last March, and I arrived a few short weeks ago. It's early days yet. Rome was not built in a day.
Pax.
All: I've joined the CodePlex Foundation starting Monday, 17 May as the Technical Director reporting to the executive director. My responsibility is to set the strategic technical direction of the Foundation, and work with the gallery managers and project leaders on a day-to-day basis. I'm excited about this. I believe the CodePlex Foundation has a great role to play as we continue to see more and more commercial organizations participate in open collaborative software development.
The CodePlex Foundation exists to encourage and support the creation of more open source software, specifically working with commercial organizations. People have shared software since we started programming computers. The sharing bandwidth used to be mag tape sized packets and conference schedule delivery rates. Now we have the Internet which changed the dynamics and economics dramatically. Historically, software foundations tied to free and open source software grew to support a particular licensing scheme or project technology community. I think the CodePlex Foundation complements existing organizations quite nicely. The Foundation is an excellent opportunity to broaden the contribution base from commercial organizations and I want to ensure processes and education are in place to enable those contributions.
My first order of business will be to meet with the existing gallery managers and project leads to begin to put in place any process and services they urgently need. From that point forward it will be to help define and shape the rest of the project and IP management processes that are needed to make the Foundation's value proposition a reality for new sponsors and contributors.
A few friends and colleagues have asked what it means for Microsoft's open source initiatives. I don't know. I certainly don't speak for Microsoft. The CodePlex Foundation has a very straightforward mission and I work for the Foundation. Microsoft is the first and founding sponsor, essentially putting their money where their mouth is with respect to managing their own contributions. I expect there will be more sponsors and participants over the coming year and my goal is to enable them all.
I was dismayed this morning to see Andy Updegrove's write-up on Alex Brown's post on Microsoft failing it's own Office Open XML (OOXML) standard (formally known as ISO/IEC 29500). It is the second anniversary of the ballot resolution and approval of the standard. While Andy was reporting from the trenches through the final ballot resolution, Alex was responsible for the negotiations that allowed the standard to pass. Essentially Microsoft seems to be breaking the promises it made to the international standards community to get the standard through the process.
If Microsoft ship Office 2010 to handle only the Transitional variant of ISO/IEC 29500 they should expect to be roundly condemned for breaking faith with the International Standards community. This is not the format “approved by ISO/IEC”, it is the format that was rejected.
Unfortunately it's unclear what condemnation will bring. Even were the EU Commission to involve itself as Alex later suggests, it is unlikely that this would effect shareholder value in any meaningful way.
Alex also wonders at how such bad implementation can be allowed to happen:
So why — given the awareness Microsoft has at the top, at the bottom, and round the edges [for standards] — does it still manage to behave as it does? Something, perhaps, is wrong at the centre — some kind of corporate dysfunction caused by a failure of executive oversight.
It's nothing sinister I suspect. Cynically — it was nobody's job, and by that I mean no development manager or program management manager (or test manager for that matter) of any reasonable authority or seniority likely had it as a primary rewardable objective on their annual review. If the bugs were even filed, they were likely never deemed sufficiently important to fix during bug triage on the road to release-to-manufacturing. I saw bug triage meetings circa 1999 on the road to Windows 2000 where non-critical bugs that were effecting 10,000 beta customers were ignored because there were other bugs effecting 100,000 users. When you ship a product that has a consumer base of tens of millions, you learn different skills in the triage process. I suspect it's similar on the Office side of the company.
And Alex is completely correct, there would be no executive oversight pushing down from above on the Office development organization. The vice-president that published the open letter two-years ago making the promises has probably either (a.) moved on to other responsibilities, or (b.) assumed he had made the promise and someone else was to carry it out. It won't be on his review objectives either so he's still being well paid. So too with any other exec in the pipeline two-years ago. Even the standards team that worked so hard to get it through the ECMA and ISO processes will have moved on to other standards (and certainly wouldn't be so naive in the product-centricity of Microsoft to have accepted such an objective so far out of their control). The marketing team got its talking points two years ago. This is a cultural problem. The development teams within the company (i.e. the revenue generation engine) with a few exceptions in a few Web-related product teams just aren't tuned to deal with standards in a serious manner the way certain other vendors do.
Until there are serious lost sales to do with non-conformance from large government organizations, and the field organization starts to seriously yell, there will be no understanding in Redmond that it really mattered and that certain government officials may even have bet their careers on such promises. Even then, the first question in Redmond will [cynically] be, "How much do we sell to the Ministry of [Big Issues] in [Name-of-small-northern-European-country]?"
Alex finishes with the quote:
In short, we find ourselves at a crossroads, and it seems to me that without a change of direction the entire OOXML project is now surely heading for failure.
Failure indeed. I used the photograph at the top of the post two-years ago when I cynically predicted how this was going to go down over time. I summarized my opinions on the battle between ODF and OOXML and how Microsoft should have played the war as one of the examples in a standards primer I wrote around the same time. It will be interesting to watch how Microsoft responds to Alex's post. The world is indeed watching.
Ideas behind the future and importance of Big Data and the Cloud continue to thrive. Tim O'Reilly has been hammering home the message for some time that data will become the "Intel Inside" of the next generation of lock-in, (most recently in a fabulous keynote at OSBC). Companies like Cloudera are making big bets on the platform architecture of the next wave. And when the Economist starts to dedicate special reports to the topic, you know it's reached a particular threshold in people's minds.
I've had the pleasure of knowing Carolyn Johnston for some time. She's a math geek and lead researcher in the MSN Advanced Engineering team specializing in location data and data quality. She's started blogging last week, and her topics will be both fun and educational. (I've the privilege of seeing early drafts in the pipeline.) If you care about the evolving world of big data in the cloud, I encourage you to give her a read.
Matt Aslett gave a great talk about the evolution of open source business strategies last week at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. In it, he presented a model to allow one to visualize businesses that use open source in their solutions, and what it means in terms of relationships with customers and the community.
The community relationships are driven by the lower triangle:
The customer relationships are driven by the upper triangle:
Matt goes on to apply the model across a collection of companies and business models, visually demonstrating how different companies have made different choices and evolved those choices, as well as playing out a number of scenarios. It's an excellent model.
Matt and I have debated in the past as to whether or not there is such a thing as an open source business model. I've argued there's no such business model, but discuss it as a set of tools that are applied to the business. Regardless of one's opinions however, Matt has provided an excellent visual model for the discussion and presentation of the ideas. It works in much the same way as the Business Model Design template in visually capturing the information to ensure a completeness of discussion and an understanding of how the parts relate. I'm looking forward to the continuing evolution of the model over the coming year as he prepares the next major open source business report from the 451 Group, and would encourage you to give the entire presentation a read.
The juxtaposition of two recent New York Times articles quite terrifies me. The first which I read a week or so ago concerns the fact that the religious right is now attacking science again, but this time they are not restricted to merely Darwin's theory of evolution. It opens with:
Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation’s classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools.
Other fine quotes include:
The linkage of evolution and global warming is partly a legal strategy: courts have found that singling out evolution for criticism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state. By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution can argue that they are simply championing academic freedom in general.
And:
In South Dakota, a resolution calling for the “balanced teaching of global warming in public schools” passed the Legislature this week.
“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” the resolution said, “but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life.”
And the article closes with:
After that, said Joshua Rosenau, a project director for the National Center for Science Education, he began noticing that attacks on climate change science were being packaged with criticism of evolution in curriculum initiatives.
He fears that even a few state-level victories could have an effect on what gets taught across the nation.
James D. Marston, director of the Texas regional office of the Environmental Defense Fund, said he worried that, given Texas’ size and centralized approval process, its decision on textbooks could have an outsize influence on how publishers prepare science content for the national market.
“If a textbook does not give enough deference to critics of climate change — or does not say that there is real scientific debate, when in fact there is little to none — they will have a basis for turning it down,” Mr. Marston said of the Texas board. “And that is scary for what our children will learn everywhere.”
It's a disturbing article to read in general. It's terrifying because it presents the idea of small steps, none of which are catastrophic (e.g. South Dakota), leading to a destination where the world has changed in the most fundamental of ways (i.e. Texas setting the tone for the national market).
The second article (actually the first chronologically) was in the business section. It gets scarier still. It has to do with MacMillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks, introducing fully editable textbooks. The article begins:
In a kind of Wikipedia of textbooks, Macmillan ... is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes.
Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations. [srw &mdash Emphasis added.]
While many publishers have offered customized print textbooks for years — allowing instructors to reorder chapters or insert third-party content from other publications or their own writing — DynamicBooks gives instructors the power to alter individual sentences and paragraphs without consulting the original authors or publisher. [srw &mdash Emphasis added again.]
I have great confidence that the contracts the authors sign will give MacMillan the ability for appropriate copyright control to allow this sort of re-editing. But let's be really really clear. This is NOTHING like Wikipedia. The ability to change the author's original content to suit one's own needs is not the same as providing a rich editing environment where controversies are clearly apparent. The ability for a professor at a university with a strong religious bent in a State "simply championing academic freedom in general" to edit text books to suit their needs is a recipe for disaster. Credible sources (and the original author's brand and credibility) can be twisted to support the insanity of challenging established science. This is not good.
Writing the rules such that content can be changed without changing an author's intentions is still a recipe for disaster as it will place efforts to police, debate, and correct things on the authors and the system. The damage will have been done. Orwell suggested that language precedes thought. If there is no word for a concept, it cannot be expressed. A proper tyranny would do well to remove such words from use. In the modern web connected world, the concept may still exist on the web, but sowing confusion may replace the need to remove a word from use, or to destroy a book outright.
Textbooks still have weight in our society. It's not just the literal weight of paper, but the sense of organization and flow and prestige and credibility. They are also a legacy of a particular way of teaching subjects. As more professors explore the ability to develop course materials from an array of online sources into a coherent collection that matches their curriculum, the textbook will rightly shift in the minds of students and lecturers alike into something that is less important. In such a case, one might presume that individual course collections maintain copyright appropriately, with individual authors credited for their contributions, as well as the overall collected work copyright. This is a interesting marketplace design problem where individuals, journals and historical textbook companies make materials available for use to lecturers assembling course readings. More importantly, however, it means the integrity of the original materials will be maintained. No "books" need be destroyed in the process.
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