Ross Mayfield's Weblog

OSI Certifies Microsoft Open Source Licenses

OSI made an expected move yesterday, approving the the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL).  Michael Tiemann noted that Microsoft followed the process, the discussion on the whole was constructive and the licenses satisfied the 10 criteria of the Open Source Definition.

Microsoft should be commended for participation and engagement with the community.  Matt Asay notes this is within a finite scope:

I never doubted that these would be approved, but am glad to see the studied manner in which the process was (mostly) carried out. To me, this shows Microsoft the correct way to engage in open source: through the front door, rather than through back-door patent FUD...

In short, Microsoft played by open source's rules on this one and so was treated as a full open-source participant. In other contexts, with different behavior, Microsoft will be treated much differently.

The 451 Group highlights that the licenses passes the current test, but OSI is a position to evolve as conditions change:

“If, as some fear, the approval of these licenses ends up damaging open source, perhaps we will learn of some 11th condition or some change to the 10 that must be made to better preserve the integrity of what we call open source,” he [Tiemann] writes.

“Neither the First Amendment alone, nor the original 10 Amendments known as the Bill Of Rights were sufficient to establish a government truly of the people, by the people, for the people (and some would say we still have a ways to go), so why should we expect that after less than 10 years, the OSD will contain everything there is to know about promoting and protecting open source?”

For now though it’s all eyes on Microsoft to see what the company will do next, and in many ways this will be more interesting than whether or not the OSI approved the licenses. For reasons that were never fully explained, Microsoft wanted open source licenses.

Now that it’s got them, will it use them to release significant code to the community?

Good question.  Now that they are, in part, playing by the rules, lets give them a chance to play the game.

eXit Yahoo Zimbra (XYZ)

Yahoo acquired open source email (complete with Ajax pixie dust) company Zimbra for $350 in cash.  My most sincere congratulations Scott and Satish, as well as Brad Garlinghouse on the other side of the table.    Good move. 

This isn't just about competing with Google's Gmail.  It builds upon Yahoo's native email development plus acquisitions such as Oddpost and Stata Labs to build a credible web-native alternative to Outlook and Exchange.  At Socialtext we are moving to Zimbra for at least shared calendaring.  It will be interesting to see Google's offline moves as it will now need to play catch up.

But this isn't just about email and calendaring.  This is another significant commercial open source acquisition.  This also raises a time honored question when it comes to Yahoo, and how it relates to the enterprise.  Both Satish and Brad's posts highlight their partner network (mostly ISPs).  Selling and servicing enterprises is not the competency of Yahoo, but as Google has VARs for Appliances so to does this XYZ combination.  If this is a direction for Yahoo, their number of acronyms will exponentially expand.

MuleSource Adopts CPAL

MuleSource announced today that they are adopting the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) for its products, the third such company to do so.  On InfoWorld's Open Source blog, CEO Dave Rosenberg provides a great Q&A on his licensing decision and article in BusinessWeek.  Also see Matt Asay's commentary.

If you are considering adopting CPAL, do check out Dan Bricklin's guide and related blog post.

Well done Dave.

Time for Web 2.0 to be Unleashed with Open Source

Web 2.0 companies are largely built upon Open Source software.  But how many of them do you consider significant contributors to Open Source?  In general, there is an open ethic, and communities demand (and reward) it.  But somewhere along the way, the focus shifted to APIs and Open Source wasn't rationalized as part of the business model.  Some call them Open APIs or Open Data, but until there is a legal framework adhered to as community standard (word is OSI will work to address this), they are just APIs with unilateral rights.  And with the focus on APIs, instead of contributing code back to the projects you leverage, or contributing your own projects, cooperation has been limited (save a handful of great standards efforts like Atom) Business models have also been held back by the gradual evolution of Open Source licensing, until now.

The Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) meets commercial needs for both attribution and network use (the SaaS loophole).  My hope is to see:

• Web 2.0 companies seriously considering what portions of their codebase could be Open Source licensed for their own benefit.  As well as taking an inventory of what they use for the purpose of what they should give back.
• MPL+Attribution companies adopting CPAL because they want to be Open Source and part of the community
• Enterprise 2.0 SaaS providers reconsidering their business model with the one Open Source license that closes the SaaS loophole
• Enterprises considering what portion of their erstwhile custom in-house codebase could now be made available under CPAL
• Portal companies thinking beyond how they have the coding power to write around attribution and consider which of their projects could be licensed with it
• New Commercial Open Source ventures
• Native Open Source projects address the SaaS loophole and bring attribution back to their community because of the positive incentives it provides for innovation

Dan Bricklin has written a practical guide for applying CPAL to your product.  Also see his blog post.

I should say my first paragraph is a generalization.  There are lots of Web 2.0 companies that are great citizens of Open Source and some make it part of their business model, like Wordpress and recently Six Apart.  Some Portals make great contributions, but again, my impression is that they have played into the API parlay.  To defeat this generalization, there is almost a need for a wiki that lets people openly inventory the open source products leveraged, licenses used and contributions back.

UPDATE: Steven Livingstone comments:

I'm not sure the Open Source thing is such a big issue anymore. I see many Open Source platforms being managed by service providers and whether they are Open Source or not won't be as important - it will be whether there are open API's.  Underneath it could be anything...

This is precisely my point.  Yes, it is great that you can develop upon an API, from say, Flickr.  And look at all that innovation around the Flickr API.  But what makes it Open?  Because it is public? With a unilateral non-standard license, explicitly forbidding commercial use in some cases, that can be changed at the whim of Yahoo, any development or use is at the whim of Yahoo.  API standards like Atom Publishing Protocol or what we are doing with Amo are different.  But even on top of standards you need a legal framework to foster a real commons.

Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) Approved by the Open Source Initative

The Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) that Socialtext submitted was approved today by The Open Source Initiative (OSI).  As an OSI Certified license, CPAL should provide a solution for commercial open source application projects and companies.  I expect many of the 40+ companies using MPL+Attribution licenses not approved by OSI to apply the license to their products to meet both their commercial and community needs. Keep in mind there is more to it than Attribution, but it covers network use required to close the SaaS loophole in Open Source.

For Socialtext, this marks the end of a very long process where we paved the way for others.  I'm happy with the final result, which should be posted at opensource.org soon, and I'll update this post accordingly.  For now, an unofficial version of the final text is here.

eWeek has a good, in-depth article on this issue. 

See Also: The Register, InfoWorld Open Sources, the Open Source Weblog at CBR
Groklaw, LoopFuse, 

Open Source Licensing for Software as a Service

Open Source came before, if not provided a platform for, Software as a Service.  Open Source Licenses have a big loophole for the most common method of software distribution today.  Tim O'Reilly addresses this while making yet another argument for open data.

Linux Magazine's article The GPL Has No (Networked) Future recognizes a point that I've been making for years: that free software license requirements to release source code are all triggered by the act of distribution, and that web applications, which are not actually "distributed," are therefore not bound by these licenses. (See, for example, my 1999 debate with Richard Stallman at the Wizards of OS conference in Berlin.) 

The article describes how during the GPL v3 discussions, there was a move to close the "SaaS loophole" by including some of the provisions of the Affero General Public License or AGPL:

the FSF supported the creation of the Affero GPL and attempted to integrate it into the early drafts of the GPL3. However, that plan backfired and the FSF not only struck the text that would extend the GPL to software delivered as a service but clarified just what "to 'convey' a work" actually means.

Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.

In other words, software delivered as service is now officially not covered by the GPL.

...the community forced the provision out as indicated in the FSF's 61-page rationale document [pdf] that accompanies this latest draft.

We have made this decision in the face of irreconcilable views from different parts of our community. While we had known that many commercial users of free software were opposed to the inclusion of a mandatory Affero-like requirement in the body of GPLv3 itself, we were surprised at their opposition to its availability through section 7. Free software vendors allied to these users joined in their objections, as did a number of free software developers arguing on ethical as well as practical grounds.

The article concludes that while this is the right decision, it places real limits on the long-term significance of the GPL: "The future is networked. The GPL isn't."

Bryan Richard's article is a great analysis and the implications of keeping the loophole open for SaaS are significant.  There are both practical and philosophical reasons to close this loophole with a network use clause:

If you're unfamiliar with the SaaS loophole, it's probably best described by a license that actually covers it. Fabrizio Capobianco, who created the Honest Public License describes it as such:

Some people interpret distribution of software as a service not as distribution of software (because GPL v2 was created before web services were on the horizon and therefore did not address them in the license). They believe that they can use open source software to offer services to the public, without returning anything to the community.

As to why you might need it, the creators of the Affero General Public License have this to say:

We believe that certain software can extend the bounderies [sic] of a person, and therefore should not be out of the control of the individual. We believe that people's freedom should be protected. We believe that this includes their digital interface to others.

Affero and the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL)

Many OSI Certified licenses were developed before the web became a common method of distributing an application to users. Making an application available for use over a computer network, such as an email service accessed and used like GMail, should be treated the same as compiling it, burning it on a CD-ROM, and mailed out that CD-ROM. We sought to address this issue when developing the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL). Some licenses use the Affero Network Use clause to this effect, but we chose the External Deployment clause from the Open Source License (OSL) because it is more technology-neutral (OSD #10) and future proof, and is clearer about the philosophy behind the requirement.

The other issue is the Affero license, while widely known and used, is not OSI Certified, whereas OSL is.  My hope is that CPAL, an MPL plus APL plus OSL license, is approved by the OSI at their next board meeting at OSCON at the end of the month and I can write sentences with less acronyms.  But my other hope is that there is a license accepted by the community that provides Attribution like GPLv3, but also closes the SaaS loophole.

CPAL Submitted to the OSI

Tonight I posted the following on the Socialtext Blog.  It may seem like a bit of inside baseball, but it could be a very big deal:

Today Socialtext submitted the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) to the Open Source Initiative (OSI).  OSI is a community appointed body responsible for open source licensing.  OSI is the creator of the Open Source Definition (OSD), certifies licenses as OSI Certified, guards against license proliferation and gives meaning to the term open source. Socialtext is the first an only company with a Mozilla Public License (MPL) plus Attribution license (amongst 40+ commercial open source businesses) to seek OSI Certification.  We do not, however, consider ourselves open source until all our licenses are OSI Certified. We have been working through this process for some time.  Today the submitted CPAL can be found here and we look forward to the open conversation on OSI's license-discuss mailing list.  For those interested in a summary of our submission, here it is:

1. The Common Public Attribution License ("CPAL") is based on the MPL which has been approved and all of the new provisions are in Sections 14 and 15 (and Exhibit B) and  adding "Original Developer"  to certain disclaimers ("Original Developer" is a term defined in the new provisions for those who originally created the program who may be different from the "Initial Developer"). Section 14 provides for an attribution notice based on the Adaptive Public License and Section 15 provides for a network use provision based on the commonly used provision on "External Deployment" found in the Apple Public License, Real Network Public License and the Open Software License. We have used the Adaptive Public License, which is virtually the sames as the prior attribution provision which was in Exhibit B of the proposed Socialtext Public License,  as the basis for the attribution provision because it was approved after OSD 10 was adopted. We have limited the placement requirement for attribution notice to "prominent" rather than a specified size or location. We have also permitted the use of splash screens. The term "prominent" is frequently used in other OSI approved licenses such as the GPL and NASA Public License. Socialtext believes that the application software has special needs as compared
to operating systems because of the application software can be used anonymously in large distributions and can be used to provide services
through an ASP which does not provide modifications back to the community. None of the approved OSI approved licenses include both a network use provision and an attribution provision. We have limited the new provisions to those which are either the same or very close to provisions from existing licenses (see above).

2. The license can be used with any software which is licensed under the MPL and licenses compatible with the MPL. The CPAL will take precedence for combined works. Some licenses such as the GPL which are incompatible with the MPL are also incompatible to the CPAL.

The above is a summary of how CPAL is OSD Compliant, but you can also explore this points one through ten.  If the license is deemed compliant with OSD by the OSI Board, it should be OSI Certified, a mark that carries great meaning on both the community and market. Socialtext also uses other OSI-Certified Licenses within its products.  Primarily, Perl Modules licensed under the Perl Artistic License, some originated by others, some by Socialtext employees in an act of giving back to the community. While working on CPAL, we developed a new strategy for open source licensing.  Some core components will be licensed under both CPAL and the Perl Artistic License (PAL, I like to call it because of the nice ring and rhyme, although it is commonly referred to as the Artistic License).  With CPAL and PAL together we gain something in a greater community and commercial interest. Dan Bricklin highlights this aspect I'm not supposed to call triple-licensing in his post SocialCalc 1.1 released -- we now have a real Open Source project:

The SocialCalc Engine code is being released under the Artistic License 2.0. This license, written by the Perl Foundation, is basically the same as the Artistic License used for years for Perl and was apparently just approved as "Open Source" by the OSI. (Perl also has the option of being used under the GPL.) I understand that this is a pretty liberal license which allows proprietary modifications but also allows code licensed under it to be included in projects licensed under GPL. This should hopefully help this spreadsheet engine code become part of a wide variety of projects and get a large number of developers contributing to its maintenance and advancement.

Tomorrow we will post to the wiki an expanded FAQ and guide for applying the CPAL to your own project or product.  We don't recommend doing so until OSI approves it, as a disclaimer, and provide it for broad understanding of the potential of this license to serve community and commercial needs.  If not, heal a growing rift in the community overall.

Calling Socialtext Open Source

Michael Tiemann, President of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), takes a strong stand that unless a company uses an OSI-approved license they should not call themselves open source.  Technically, nobody owns the open source trademark, it is a common mark that anyone can use and modify how they see fit.  The community has a process with OSI that if followed lets a company use the OSI Certified mark.  If someone doesn't follow this process in using an approved license or getting theirs approved, they don't have the right to use the mark.  If they use the mark anyway, they will be both shamed by the community and potentially sued.  But that's technically.  Michael is suggesting that OSI and the community should defend the term open source, even through it doesn't have the legal means to do so.

Go read the whole post, here is just part of it:

So here’s what I propose: let’s all agree–vendors, press, analysts, and others who identify themselves as community members–to use the term ‘open source’ to refer to software licensed under an OSI-approved license. If no company can be successful by selling a CRM solution licensed under an OSI-approved license, then OSI (and the open source movement) should take the heat for promoting a model that is not sustainable in a free market economy. We can treat that case as a bug, and together we can work (with many eyes) to discern what it is about the existing open source definition or open source licenses made CRM a failure when so many other applications are flourishing. But just because a CEO thinks his company will be more successful by promoting proprietary software as open source doesn’t teach anything about the true value of open source. Hey–if people want to try something that’s not open source, great! But let them call it something else, as Microsoft has done with Shared Source. We should never put the customer in a position where they cannot trust the term open source to mean anything because some company and their investors would rather make a quick buck than an honest one, or because they believe more strongly in their own story than the story we’ve been creating together for the past twenty years. We are better than that. We have been successful over the past twenty years because we have been better than that. We have built a well-deserved reputation, and we shouldn’t allow others to trade the reputation we earned for a few pieces of silver...

Open Source has grown up. Now it is time for us to stand up. I believe that when we do, the vendors who ignore our norms will suddenly recognize that they really do need to make a choice: to label their software correctly and honestly, or to license it with an OSI-approved license that matches their open source label. And when they choose the latter, I'll give them a shout out, as history shows.

I applaud Michael's stand, as this kind of leadership helps move some core issues forward.  Socialtext has advocated that commercial open source companies should follow the OSI process and gain OSI Certification, as we are.  I've said that we won't use the OSI Certified mark until we have earned it, but use the term open source.  However, while this is technically correct, I'm concerned about the unfolding rift in the community. 

I am to blame for part of it.  When we submitted the Generic Attribution Provision (GAP) to OSI back in November we tried to both gain certification for an MPL+Attribution license, and do so in a non-standard way.  We sought to have attribution be a provision you could add to any of the 50+ approved licenses that allowed for extension.  While this might result in a more favorable taxonomy of available licenses and make license proliferation more future proof, we didn't follow the process correctly and submit a complete license.  We then took too long to draft and submit the Socialtext Public License (STPL) in March.  When OSI was going to vote upon it this month, we didn't have enough time to incorporate feedback, test the draft of the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) against our own goals and have time for the OSI-discuss mailing list to vet it.  Sure, OSI itself could have moved the process forward, but ultimately I could have driven it better.  Approximately 40 companies use similar licenses without following this process and are looking to us for leadership.  I'm not certain how many will adopt CPAL if approved, but I have a role in why there is no conclusion to certifying an attribution license, yet.

Most of our developers have a long track record in open source.  Having things take so long and with less than perfect execution effects them personally.  Which brings me to the point of Michael's post, on using the term open source.  We've had a lot of conversation within our company wiki about this over the past few months.  Casey West, in particular, took me to task for us taking the position of using the term open source, but not the mark OSI Certified.  Technically, I'm not sure what we should call ourselves right now.  We are following the process and have committed to using an OSI approved license one way or another (if ours is not approved, we will adopt an approved one, even at commercial cost).  Even edits on our Wikipedia page, from friends of ours, say we are not open source. 

So what I'd like to hear from the community is what we should call ourselves.  If the consent of the community isn't open source, but to use a different term, I'll edit our site and wiki appropriately.  It should be a short term monkier for us, but I believe it is our responsibility if we want to be part of the larger open source community.

One Wiki, Best of Both Worlds

Back in November, Andy McAfee shared a great wiki case study from Avenue A | Razorfish.  They adapted MediaWiki to meet their needs.  Leveraging open source, a great approach for a company that builds custom Intranets.

But Jeff Walker of Atlassian Confluence, a commercial wiki vendor, disagrees:

It strikes me that if Razorfish invested all this effort and money, then the question needs to be asked: Is Mediawiki an enterprise wiki? Certainly not out of the box.

One full-time intern and two part-time developers is at least $50-100K for one year! Probably the latter number. Mediawiki in this instance became an enterprise wiki but only after considerable work.

To which Shiv Singh of Razorfish replies:

… Our wiki did not take a full year to build and the part-time developers were bench resources. In other words, it did not cost us $100,000 as Jeffery implied. Furthermore, enterprise 2.0  as coined by Andrew McFee is not about cost but about what the software does for its users and how they shape the software themselves.

Commercial enterprise 2.0 software like Socialtext, Brainkeeper and Atlassian Confluence are great options for some business scenarios and we often recommend them to our own clients. But in other cases, simply modifying open source sofware can get an organization what it needs. Furthermore, by modifying mediawiki we were able to get exactly what we needed. Most importantly, by virtue of how it is being used, we know that it is social software in an organization - and that's the most important part of an enterprise 2.0 solution.

Anu Gupta of Headshift attempted to comment (as did I and I'm stealing the structure of this post from Anu):

Shiv - not sure I agree with you…

I think you’re lucky (or unlucky) in having bench resource available - a lot of companies aren’t in that situation and have a constant battle to get developer time. So, faced with that situation - what is the cost of having 2 developers available, part time, to develop and look after your mediawiki instance over 18 months ?

Secondly, would spending the relatively small amount on an unlimited license for Confluence ($8,000) or Socialtext, and getting out of the box AD integration, search and granular permissioning, represent better value than developing it from scratch ?

Also, developing inhouse commits you to a codebase that with an audience of just yourselves (until you release it out to the community ?).

I can see both sides here.  Jeff's point is that MediaWiki wasn't designed for Intranet use out of the box.  I believe there is truth to this, that MediaWiki will always be optimal for running a public online encyclopedia or similar community.

But you can't slap down open source development on the basis of cost alone.  Going with a proprietary vendor inherently restricts freedom -- both through lock-in and the ability to extend. Open source enables a company to both manage risks, share risks across a community and adapt software for their situation.  Engaging internal developers also engages core stakeholders that can help wiki adoption.   

I also find the cost argument to be misleading. The closed option has a license cost, the open option has no license cost.  But the customer's customization requirements would have to be met somehow, and who knows how the buy vs. build works out in this case where pricing isn't transparent.

Anu's System Integrator perspective provides a third way, where a third party gains economies by providing solutions across a base of customers.  But to remove the question mark at the end of his comment, so does an open source community.  It seems Razorfish benefits from having the bulk of its codebase be community maintained, and I would suggest sharing their extensions are in their best interest. I'm not questioning the value of such integrators, each has their own proposition and value add, but the customer would be better off if an SI serviced codebase was, again, open source.

The fourth way involves me tooting my own horn.  If Razorfish started their project today, they could use Socialtext Open and get the best of both worlds.  The best of breed enterprise wiki and the freedom of open source. 

We chose a commercial open source business model because it strikes a balance between freedom and profit.  Not because we are hippies.  But because it is in the best value for end customers.  As first to market and first to feature, we continue to innovate and there is the chance that one day Razorfish would find having us service the software to be a valuable option.  But that is up to them.

When competing in a market full of choice, you have to be a choice leader.  Not just in providing on-site, Appliance, SaaS and open source deployment and licensing options.  But enabling your customers to make their own choices.

The Wikinomics Playbook

UPDATE: An interesting related project by Penguin Books is A Million Penguins, letting anyone edit a book to be published.  The wiki is down at the moment, but PaidContent notes it began with “It had snowed, and was now raining. Gritty slush covered the pavement. Sharp crystals of snow decorated grass.”  Reuters notes the challenge is finding “believable fictional voice” within the mass collaboration.  This was a big challenge for group editing of the Wired Wiki story.

The last chapter of Don Tapscott's new book, Wikinomics, invites readers to write it: “Join us in peer producing the definitive guide to the twenty-first-century corporation on www.wikinomics.com.”  Today we launched a Socialtext wiki for the Wikinomics Playbook, where people can not only learn about the power of mass collaboration, but participate in it.  The book is already one of the fastest selling business titles and is an excellent primer on how models of collaboration are unfolding from open source to blogging to wikis in the enterprise to enable people to participate in the economy like never before.

The second to last chapter is about enterprise wikis.  Half of it discusses how Best Buy is using a wiki knowledge-base for the Geek Squad.  The other half is an interview with yours truly and shares some of Socialtext's success stories. The first chapter is available online as a pdf.

 

This is a great example of how a book can be augmented with a wiki, as most books are out of date by the time they are published, never quite finished and have the potential for participation. Last month we helped Larry Lessig share the entire Code 2.0 book in a wiki.  I expect that soon such commons-peer production, a wiki for every book, will be common.

Certifiable

There is a recursive irony in the public debate about the Generic Attribution Provision proposed before the Open Source Initiative.

In blogspace, David Berlind raises the red flag broadly and narrowly on vendors and projects calling themselves open source without using an OSI approved license or having their license certified. In fact, there is no trademark on "open source." The commercial open source vendors David identifies broadly and narrowly in his second post are not breaking any rules or undermining the community. This doesn't mean David's flag is moot, there is an underlying confusion in the market he is bringing to light.

There are clear incentives for companies and projects to seek to be OSI Certified, because it is a trademark. Trademark is the the one body of intellectual property law that largely supports innovation with relative Freedom -- and trademark is attribution. Open Source projects that have followed the process and gained certification have earned something. It is a process that is inevitably burdensome and risky, as is any process, especially subject to an open community. But because it is difficult, no matter how helpful those involved, it garners meaning. The certification mark means something, a signal of trust, relative efficiency to the noise of the market, acceptance in the bazzar backed by conversations that others can join.

The recursive irony is that Socialtext seeks certification attributable to OSI for a license that includes attribution. The OSI Certified badge will be proudly displayed. A signal that we are playing by the rules of the open source community and by doing so contribute value to the community.

For the Socialtext community, to be part of it must mean something. Those that preceded you must have done something. Being spawned and rooted by a commercial open source company must mean more than a value proposition that attracts. Leadership means more than creating something on your own and citizenry means being a part of an inevitably larger whole. People participate through social contracts. Agreements build upon agreements to constitute a body made of bodies. We think that the Socialtext Public License attribution provision will compound community value as the OSI Certified badge does, and will not stifle innovation as the Creative Commons attribution provision has proven.

Some companies may not choose or be able to attain the value of the OSI Certification mark. They can use the term "open source" to describe their offerings, but it is of less value to be part of the non-standard part of the market.

I already find the license-discuss mailing list full of noise, engaged in personality conflicts and not deliberating the approval in question. Partially this is because of the mailing list as a tool, which is lacking the attribution affordance of hypertext, and the emphasis of identity of contributors without persistence leading to personal flame-wars, the babel problem revisited, lack of memory, permanent addressability and all the things new tools have moved past. The conversation even spiraled into notions of an explicit reputation system outside of certification (the horrors, for goodness sake move this to a blog or wiki and let the community imply judgment). Oh, wait, this is not about our tool, but tooling the machines of the future.

Badgeware

Bruce Perens calls web applications with attribution provisions "badgeware."  Somehow this seems familiar.

The original quotation comes from the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with Humphrey Bogart. One of the most memorable scenes in the movie is where a Mexican bandit leader (Gold Hat, played by Alfonso Bedoya) is trying to convince Fred C. Dobbs (played by Bogart) and company that they are the Federales.

Dobbs: "If you're the police, where are your badges?"

Gold Hat: "Badges!? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinking badges!!"

Source: Wikipedia

I hereby issue the Gold Hat challenge.  Find me a mashup of open source applications (not infrastructure) with attribution requirements that adversely constrain the interface and I'll send you a legal copy of the Treasure of Sierra Madre.

Badgeware is oh so catchy and cute.  But the underlying issue is attribution is an incentive for innovation with freedom, or a burdensome constraint.  And if the deputizing body functions. I'm with Bogart on this one, you are either one of the Federales, or not.

Don't Bogart that cert from me, pass it over, my friend. 

Socialtext Proposes Attribution Provision

When going through the process of opening Socialtext, we need to choose a license that is a fit for a commercial open source company.  Commercial open source strikes the balance between freedom and profit motive, and the license you choose becomes a contract not just for the company, but a community. 

The decision to open is easier for vendors than it was just a few years ago because of the common practice of Mozilla Public License-based licenses by companies such as SugarCRM, Zimbra, Alfresco, Scalix and about 10 others.  MPL is the most popular OSI license and it allows for extensions (MPL section 6.1 says "However, You may include an additional document offering the additional rights described in Section 3.5." Section 3.5 ensure that the modifications must apply equally to every developer or contributor.). 

Good thing too, because in my humble opinion no other licenses are a fit for commercial open source web applications.

For Socialtext, we made three modifications:

1. Attribution: We believe that attribution provides positive incentives for creativity and innovation, as witnessed by the success of Creative Commons attribution licenses. Trademark is attribution. We require the display of the project's mark within the UI, not just the code, with a link back to the community that contributes to it.
2. Network Use: Delivering an application over HTTP should the same as compiling, burning and distributing on a CD.  If you distribute over the network, you should share your contributions with the community.  See this wiki page for more details.
3. Trademark Use: Section 6.3 says that if you make a modification to the license, you cannot use Mozilla trademarks within the license. So we called it Socialtext Public License, but we can reference MPL publicly or in the license expressly to point out the first two differences between SPL and MPL.

We put SPL out into the world after a lot of research and conversation, but decided to be open to granting more liberal rights in the future if demanded by the community.  More importantly, while SPL is consistent with the Open Source Definition, we firmly believe in the mission of the Open Source Initiative and desire to submit to their process for sake of license proliferation.

While it is inside baseball for some, David Berlind has a very well researched post that asks, are companies using MPL extensions are abusing the term Open Source?  I've spoken with David about this several times.  I think his article provides a balanced view of those who believe the licenses are OSI compliant and those who do not. I'd also like to highlight OSI board member Danese Cooper's blog post on attribution.

But unfortunately I haven't had a chance to talk with David in a little while, as I would have highlighted that Socialtext submitted a memo to the OSI board for consideration on November 14th -- proposing a Generic Attribution Provision.  I've shared the attribution memo on a wiki page, where you can find additional background information on the issue and the proposal to resolve it through a standard attribution clause that OSI could certify for any OSI license.  This structure would be similar to how Creative Commons enables attribution as an option.

SuiteTwo Launched: Enterprise 2.0 in a Box

A small dream of mine came true today.  We've been preaching an ecosystem of tools for some time now.  We've helped customers stitch them together in interesting ways.  In fact, Andrew McAfee's original article on Enterprise 2.0 was borne from observing what was happening in one of our customers and projecting into the future.  Well, future happens fast.

Looking back, look what I blogged just before the first Web 2.0 conference:

I'm providing a workshop on Enterprise Social Software with Socialtext Customer Mike Pusateri from Disney.  You might recall his great presentation at the at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Confererence in February. Mike and his team are leading the way with how they are using lightweight web-native tools as a platform for productivity. Not just how they use Socialtext for project communication, but how they stitch it together Moveable Type and Newsgator for an ecosystem of tools with RSS.

That was then, this is now. This morning I provided a workship on Enterprise 2.0.

Today we announced SuiteTwo, The Enterprise 2.0 Suite powered by Intel.  Intel is distributing the Best of Breed wiki (Socialtext), blog (Six Apart), Feed Aggregation (Newsgator) and Feed Publishing (SimpleFeed), supported by Spikesource, through its channels including Dell, NEC, Ingram, Novell and Red Hat.

This fulfills Andrew McAfee's vision of Enterprise 2.0.  In a box.  Made simple for Small-to-Mid-sized Enterprises.  Extensible because we've all supported open APIs.  Enterprise 2.0 is freeform social software adapted for organizations.  SuiteTwo is the first offering to realize the SLATES paradigm:

SLATES = Search | Links | Authorship | Tags | Extensions | Signals

In the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, McAfee went further to distinguish this Network IT (NIT) from Functional IT and Enterprise IT:

As the DrKW example illustrates, NIT’s principal capabilities include the following:

• Facilitating collaboration. Network technologies allow employees to work together but don’t define who should work with whom or what projects employees should work on. At DrKW, ad hoc teams have formed because employees read one another’s blogs. These teams have used the wiki to accomplish tasks, and they have disbanded without orders from senior executives.

• Allowing expressions of judgment. NITs are egalitarian technologies that let people express opinions. DrKW employees use blogs to voice their views about everything from open-source software to interest rate movements.

• Fostering emergence. “Emergence” is the appearance of high-level patterns or information because of low-level interactions. These patterns are useful because they allow managers to compare how work is done with how it’s supposed to be done. Emergence is also valuable for users. For instance, employees can easily search and navigate DrKW’s blogs and wiki for trends and data even though nobody is in charge of making them easy to use.

...Employees exploit older NITs such as e-mail and instant messaging on their own, but business leaders have a role to play in exploiting newer technologies like blogs and wikis. They can help sustain and increase the use of complements to make the technology continually more effective, primarily by guiding users. Darren Leonard, a managing director in the global equity derivatives business at Dresdner Kleinwort, recalls how he got his colleagues to use the company’s wiki: “First, if a wiki has no structure, it’s perceived not as an opportunity but as anarchy, and our people have no time for anarchy. I went back to my initial pages and rewrote them to be a lot more directive. For example, I made a page with the agenda for an upcoming meeting and asked people to add to it. Second, wikis have to be clearly better than other ways of collaborating. There have to be uses [for them] that demonstrate their power. One of these uses came prior to a special senior management meeting where we could bring questions from our groups and get them answered. I put up a page…asking my [team members] what questions they wanted me to ask on their behalf. People used the page to post questions, edit them, and discuss which ones were the most important and why. That really accelerated wiki use. Finally, old habits are hard to break. The tendency is for people to keep using e-mail because that’s what they know....I have to [tell them], ‘I’m not reading e-mails on this topic. Use the wiki’ or ‘Everyone’s assignments are on this page—use the same page to report on progress.’”

Lead users and enterprises already work this way today.  Only they do so without usable efficiency.  Integrated single sign-on, search and tag cloud are just the beginning.  One click subscription to a page, blog post, search query, report, weblog and wiki make feeds usable (unlike today's user experience, when they click on an orange icon and think their browser is broken).  Rapidly form groups, draft together on a wiki page, publish to a blog and track results. 

Beyond making such tasks efficient, the benefits to productivity, discovering emergent intelligence and high-engagement marketing are significant.  Very soon a user will wake up in the morning, log in to SuiteTwo, immediately recognize something emerging.  With the top blog posts telling her what the company is talking about, the top wiki pages showing her what people are working on, top posts from the outside that her company is subscribed to and the feedback from what they are publishing
-- something will emerge.  She recognizes the opportunity, pulls on the social fabric and easily forms a diverse group of experts.  They follow new feeds and generates others while working with a little productive friction.  They develop a plan and draft a new offering in the wiki.  They publish to a public blog and track where it goes. The feedback loops continue, she goes home for the day and the organization is bound to adapt again.

This isn't your Dad's enterprise, but one you will be working with soon.

Chat with Sam Ramji on Port 25

When we launched SocialPoint on Monday, I had a chance to sit down with Sam Ramji of Microsoft.  A video of the conversation and Sam's thoughts are on Port 25.

Even more interesting to me given my role at Microsoft is that Socialtext has built a Sharepoint integration ("Socialpoint").  This gives Sharepoint users access to a best-of-breed wiki and blogging engine while retaining presence, Office integration, and a unified portal infrastructure.  My inner geek got going when Ross described the new protocol handler they’ve built - "socialpoint:foo/bar" - for navigating within Sharepoint across wikis.  I think this is a good example of how Microsoft platform software should be combined with open source applications.  We continue to invest in scaling the infrastructure, and open it up to developers for innovative applications that can change as often as customers require.

Abundance, and Five Years of Blogging

When I sat down in my first economics class at UCLA, the professor wrote on the blackboard all we would learn, in really big letters:

SCARCITY

I've been blogging for five years as of this month, and here's what I've learned:

ABUNDANCE

I have discovered I have a lot to give.  And when I give, I notice others give more.  Some of them I've formed relationships with, and trust opens giving, but I have also learned to trust strangers to share in abundance.  Life is iterative, markets are not transactions and scarcity of attention is false. Our learnings compound abundance and there may be no limit to what we can produce.

David Hornik strikes again with Chris Anderson Strikes Again: The Economy of Abundance:

The basic idea is that incredible advances in technology have driven the cost of things like transistors, storage, bandwidth, to zero. And when the elements that make up a business are sufficiently abundant as to approach free, companies appropriately should view their businesses differently than when resources were scarce (the Economy of Scarcity). They should use those resources with abandon, without concern for waste. That is the overriding attitude of the Economy of Abundance -- don't do one thing, do it all; don't sell one piece of content, sell it all; don't store one piece of data, store it all. The Economy of Abundance is about doing everything and throwing away the stuff that doesn't work. In the Economy of Abundance you can have it all.

I trace a lot of my thinking about abundance to Jerry Michalski's, here's a small chunk of it:

It drives me nuts that scarcity is seen as such a fundamental requirement for creating a business. Sure, there are plenty of businesses built around scarce resources, and sure, Dave's time and my time are scarce, but that's no proof that businesses can't cruise along profitably creating voluntary loyalty by knowing their customers better, never betraying them, always being available and fixing problems, responding more quickly than others.... you get the picture. But go to business school and what they teach you is how to create artificial scarcity. That's the kind of thinking that got us into the present mess.

Digging deeper, Howard Reingold is fostering a discipline of cooperation studies. You can also find this wiki page, with a link to a 1994 essay by Flemming Funch who I used to blog alongside a lot in the early days.

I suppose that abundance economics would include giving one's ideas and actions freely, because one feels like it, because one sees the need for it, and because one understands that when you contribute to the whole, we all benefit.

The Internet is a good example of some of the principles of giving freely and of abundance. So many resources here are given freely, without expecting anything directly in return. So many people are willing to help each other, even though they don't really have to and they don't get "paid" for it.

I think there are many times more power in actions that are done freely, because one sees a need for improvement, than in actions that are done reluctantly, because one is forced by lack.

I believe that abundance thinking, and actions, trumps the minds and greed of the scarce.  That the one overarching pattern in the present wave of innovation is share control to create value.  That what powers it isn't Moore's Law processessing infinite supply or Metcalfe's networking choice and collective wisdom.  It is the capacity of people to produce when old frameworks don't in the way of each other.

So much of this is about how we envision the future.  Not in the grand sense that the rules are changing.  But when two or more people can believe in an opportunity, they can share cost and risk to get there together, in the process reduce them -- and learn so they and others can build upon it.

Common Attribution

One benefit of participating in LinuxWorld was spending time with peer companies.  A number of Commercial-Open Source companies have similar licenses to ours.  Because of the realities of networked use of applications, we share a very similar Attribution Clause to visibly give credit to the project if you use the code.  Attribution is a value consistent with the Open Source Defintion and as Creative Commons has demonstrated, attribution can foster innovation.  What I have to share is a couple of us believe we can look to harmonize our attribution clauses into what could become a standard.

Brewster Kahle on Universal Access to All Knowledge

An Impressionistic Transcript of Brewster Khale's talk at Wikimania...

You are really on to something. There is something big going on here and a lot of these talks are about trying to figure it out. At the beginning of the talk I'll talk about things I know about and at the end talk about things I don't know -- how is that for a VC pitch?

I'll talk about open source, open content and the rise of the technical non-profits. Universal Access to All Knowledge is a big goal, and if you accomplish it, what are you going to do? Move to Florida?

Wikipedia is the 15th most popular site on the web. This is because of the enlightenment goal. The goal isn't a technical one, but a structural one. Despite centuries old balance...1976 radical expansion of US Copyright Regulation. Property of IP is perhaps the worst idea since the Domino Theory. Information is knowledge, not property. Valenti's crowning achievement radicalized copyright regulation. Most people talk about 130 year protection, but it is the vast scope and repercussions.

First casualty was software. The response was Open Source licenses. MIT's sale to Symbolics, which forked development and RMS' experience lead to open source. This is Brewster's revisionist history, but it may be where it came from.

The second casualty was Music and Video. The response was Creative Commons licenses. Another response was organizations to facilitate community effort. We lost the help of institutions like MIT so we built new ones. The Free Software Foundation. DejaNews was a for profit, sold to Google, dissapated. IMDB, 6 guy community project was bought by Amazon. CDDB became Gracenote, Inc. WAIS Inc was sold to AOL. FTP Software sold to NetManage. Cygnus sold to Redhat. All commercial companies built upon community effort that don't last long. FSF is still around.

The response is the rise of the technical non-profit. Apache software foundation has no full-time employees, but is incorporated to last a while. OASF has gotten money not only from Mitch but from Foundations. Mozilla Foundation is a great success with Firefox and the Google toolbar (money) they spun off a for-profit company. Interesting ecology to watch and try and understand what it means. Linux. Internet Archive is based on the open access model -- can we get paid for the administration we do so everything we do can be openly accessible. Wikimedia foundation you know about. The rise of the technical non-profit is an interesting addition to the ecology, we went wrong with the over-corporatization post WWII. EFF., Public Knowledge and Open Content Alliance exist to enforce rights and serve us. We massively screwed up our law structure and the general approach of knowledge of property.

Open Hardware. Petabox, a cheap machine that is open sourced. The $100 Laptop Program has interest in the order of 5-10 million. What would happen if the next major laptop company is a non-profit? It is because they are non-profit that they are trusted and base on open work.

The structure is now in place to proceed towards Universal Access to All Knowledge. We have institutions dedicated towards these goals, but how are we doing towards it?

In Text, getting the 26-28 million books in the Library of Congress. 1 megabyte for a book, 26 terabytes, $60k cost for the entire library on a Linux machine. But I actually like books, the printed page. Created the mobile bookmobile, which has printed a million books. The cost is a penny a page, a buck a book means you can give books away. In our first debut of this was the supreme court when they were arguing to extend copyright another 20 years, but we lost that one. Erik Eldridge has one, two in India, one in Egypt, one in Uganda... this gets closer to universal access, but what we realized is we need to scan more books. One way to do this is send them somewhere else. The Million Books project sends them to India, but we had to buy 100k books to send to them, but not many others wanted to send books to them. So the Indians were scanning their own books, which may be the right thing for them to do. Put the scanners next to the books. Sending to India to scan is $10 per book, in the US it is $30. The automatic scanners are not effective, so we made our own scanner and can do it at 10 cents a page. Scanning 400 books a day. $750 million dollars to digitize the Library of Congress. About a year an a half of the LoB budget.

Books are within our grasp technologically. There are issues about if it will be done by non-profits or projects like Google Books. We have an orphaned works problem. The way you ask a question in the US is through a lawsuit, Khale and Eldgrige. But if you get to frame a problem (orphaned works) you have already won. Who would forget the orphans? Give the orphans a home!

Next is in-print works. Amazon is working the other way, from print to out of print. We have found with the Open Content Alliance something that works. Even Microsoft is giving us money.

In Audio, if you take all the published works, there are 2-3 million musical works. A fairly litigated area. Some precedent that ripping them and putting them online might not be okay. A lot of musicians just looking to be put on the internet. The Grateful Dead allowed people to trade music. The key was, as long as no one was making any money. This allowed people to feel good about it. Legitimate bootlegging copies by other bands. So we went to this community and said: "would you like unlimited storage and bandwidth for free." They said, "we don't believe you." And they didn't like lossy compression. We said try us. Got lots of Okays. 2k bands, 30k recordings, everything the Grateful Dead played. Many versions of each concert, as there are debates over microphone types. If you give something for free, not only is it not taxed, but you get a tax rebate. Getting Slashdotted is a nightmare, your ISP bills could make you sell your guitar or house. Europe has a different copy-write scheme for performances (50 years), so we are working with the Dutch government to make old stuff free.

In Moving Images, 100-200,000 films. Not much, makes putting them online conceivable. We want to do this with DVD quality, but we are finding lots of archival films that never had distribution. Have 30k films on the Archive, dwarfed by YouTube, which is cool. Discovering genres like Lego Movies. Lots of these things end up in closets. Putting them online is $15 per video hour. We will host it, if it generally belongs in a library and it is okay to share it.

Television, we have a big Tivo, captured a Petabyte so far of 20 channels over a couple of years. We made one week available, the week of 911, we put online a month after. We are now understanding in the US that the news comes with a point of view. Chomsky used to say you should read 7 newspapers a day, recently this might make sense. Getting multiple points of view.

Television is technologically possible, there are some rights issues, but we could do it all -- all text, music, movies and TV is within our grasp. We got a change in the DMCA, yea! But we need a lot of help.

Web. We are best known from our web collection, about a Petabyte in size. In the history of libraries, they tend to get burned, usually by governments, and then they are sorry for 100 years, but it is too late. The lesson from the Library of Alexandria is don't just have one copy. Give copies away. Our first shot at this was with the Library of Alexandria version 2. If we had six or seven of these around the world I could sleep at night. We are trying to do this through large scale swap agreements.

Here is Wikipedia in the Archive. But most people are using it to look at their own stuff, their old websites. One of the reasons this is working is because we are non-profits.

Books, Music, Video, Software and Web -- it is all possible. Some open questions if it is public or private, for-profit or non-profit. Is Google the only shot we are going to have at scanning Harvard's library? Looks like it.

I'm going to use this opportunity to advertise some projects we need help on.

Non-profit Open Networks like SeattleWireless.net or MIT roofnet. Telecom company interests are not aligned with an open internet.

Distributed ownership network -- SFlan mesh network.

Open and transparent Web Search System -- Nutch. Let's build some alternatives and be more creative. Recall which does time-based search on the whole Archive, a project done by one woman that indexed more pages than Google, then she went to work for Google and hopefully she will come back.

Privacy and Anonymity. It is now known that the US Government is monitoring us. Tor.

Defensive Patent License. What if you did a GPL for Patents? The DPL is a license that reflects a public commitment to defense, so our patents are forever defensive. Any organization may freely use these licensed patents while so publicly committed to defense.

An Open Textbook system, started by Wikipedia. The number one request we get for books is textbooks.

Add Attribution to Wikipedia. Gutenberg guys didn't were nervous about the copyright thing. We should know where the facts from Wikipedia came from. Go read about Transclusion with Ted Nelson, backpointers. Richard Feignman, a physicist in 1982, was talking about how many layers it would take from Propedia to Micropedia to books as sources.

Open Library: annotate the book collection. Why is this book interesting to someone in the modern world. What can we do to re-inject old books into today?

We can pull off Universal Access to All Knowledge. This is where Wiki is going towards, one of the great things that humanity will be remembered for, up there with a Man on the Moon in the mythology of humanity.

Socialtext Open

I'm pleased to announce Socialtext Open, an Open Source distribution of our flagship wiki product.  Available for immediate download on SourceForge, this is the first Commercial Open Source wiki and weblog offering on the market.  It's been a long time coming, this change in our business model, a way to strike a balance between freedom and profit motive.

Socialtext Open changes everything.  Including the way we are going to communicate, with nothing to hide and sharing our Public Roadmap.  While Open is still in Beta and we don't know the full impact this release will have, my hope is it fulfills our goal of wikis everwhere and cultivates a broader developer community.

So, go get the code, and tell us what you think.

It Changes Everything

Many have written about how going Open Source changes your business model or sales process.  Dana Blankenhorn notes that the open sourcing of Hyperic's product changed how they work.  It required them to write code for stability and continuity, as well as adopt more Open Source tools.

This is not a big story, but it's the kind of thing that is happening constantly in the open source world. Once companies commit to open source, they often move to open source tools and open source business processes.

This is something companies considering the open source way need to understand before they get started. Open source does not just change license terms. It can change everything.

Nat Torkington highlights this by saying:

...There needs to be a phrase that's the exact opposite of "throwing code over the fence" to describe this change from closed source company to open source. I saw this when Sun opened Solaris. They looked at every facet of their software, from repository to decision-making to the libraries it used, and changed everything so it would work as an open source project. A huge task, but Sun knew it was essential if the open sourcing was to work. If Sun ever transitions from a hardware company to a consulting company, these best practices for open sourcing are something it could sell. Think Producing Open Source for the whole company...

As Socialtext gets ready for it's Open Source release next week, we know it will change everything.  We don't have the luxury of undertaking an exhaustive process prior to opening, but we do have the benefit of being an adaptive startup that has iterated towards this milestone for years.

While most people know that Open Source results in quality code as a by product of having more eyes on it, simply knowing that it will be public has provided great incentives to developers enhance the quality of the code.  That said, we know when we go Open that sunshine will be a great disinfectant for the bugs in the shadows. 

But beyond the license and the code, we know there are many changes in store that we can't anticipate.  Changes embraced.

Socialtext Partners with Dan Bricklin on wikiCalc

Today Socialtext announced a partnership with Dan Bricklin (inventor of VisiCalc) to exclusively distribute, redistribute and co-develop wikiCalc -- the social spreadsheet. Dan brings a rich understanding not just of spreadsheets, but also open source and social software. You can thank VisiCalc, the original killer app, for the Personal Computing revolution and bringing PCs into enterprises from the bottom up. It may take some time, but Socialtext, wikiCalc and the community will develop an important contribution to Social Computing. I'd like to share how this came together, what it means and where we are going.

David Weinberger re-introduced me to Dan, whom I met at a couple of conferences. The deal was a calculated decision that took almost six months. We needed to build a shared understanding for how we can work together and work with a community. We share common principles in open source and designing social software. We see an opportunity to change the way people work together, that is different from an office on the web.

Andy McAfee defined Enterprise 2.0 as the use of freeform social software within companies: freeform in that the application does not impose structure prior to use. Since the inception of Socialtext, we have avoided the temptations of structure, not just because one man's structure is another's barrier, but because it immediately divides the world into those who can structure it, and those who cannot.

Wikis begin as a blank page, just like spreadsheets. Some think this is a weakness, but it is actually a strength -- because it asks all the right questions. How should we use this tool? What should we apply this to? What kind of buckets should we put information in? What's my role? To make a wiki work, and all IT for that matter, agreement on how to use the tool makes it work.

When Ward Cunningham invented the wiki ten years ago, one of his core design principles was a collaboration environment for experts and novices alike. This equality of usability matters, especially in the context of an enterprise. Some approaches assume that users will learn a new proprietary scripting language to create or modify structure, but programming will never be a novice activity. Writing and linking can be done by novices, and so too using a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are the most widely adopted interface for creating and modifying structure, databases and applications.

One way that a wiki, and wikiCalc, enables social use of a tool without imposing structure is the properties of transparency and memory. In a wiki, a copy of every edit is saved with attribution. This supports trust and accountability. Given the nature of spreadsheets, wikiCalc takes this one step further, creating a revision history of every single edit to any cell -- not just when you save and the undos before. This not only holds the promise of tracking down errors, but provides an audit trail.

But spreadsheets, like other killer PC apps, were not designed for a networked world, but for a single users. Today the problem isn't just people playing email volleyball all day digging for who did what to each revision. Work is social, information can be linked and data comes in feeds. Today it isn't the problems of productivity kept personal, but the opportunity to build computing that is social.

Dan just released wikiCalc Beta as an Open Source GPL distribution. Right now you can use and modify a web-based spreadsheet of your own. We hope you will join this community. In the coming days we will release wikiCalc under a more liberal and commercial-friendly distribution. I'll let you determine the differentiating features, but the primary one isn't in the code -- it's that it is Open Source. We see great promise for an enterprise-friendly wikiCalc.

You may know Socialtext's commitment to Open Source has been a foundation of our company values. Today I can share that the Socialtext Open Source Edition, functionally equivalent to our commercial wikis for users, will be released next month at OSCON. Yes, I know it's a little odd for startups to communicate such news in advance, but there is nothing to fear, and it's part of being open with a community. Wikiwyg, wikiCalc and the Socialtext Open Source Edition will all be released under the same OSI complaint Open Source license, based upon the Mozilla Public License. For more information on Open Source licensing, see Dan's great video.

It's a delight to work with Dan. We have a lot of work ahead of us and hope you will join us.

UPDATE: The Associated Press has an in-depth profile of Dan.

The Elephant's Dilemma

I'm in Sapporo, Japan, at the New Industry Leader's Summit.  While paneling with Scott Dietzen of Zimbra and Mark Tolliver of Palamida, I had time between translation to think of some ways of describing open source phenomena.

The Elephant's Dilemma is when two or more large incumbents face disruption and need to cooperate to get out of the door, one at a time.  But their instinct is to fight with each other, while little guys run through their legs (some get squashed).

The analogy proved tough to translate. 

It also dawned on me that when Tim O'Reilly talks about how many people use open source if they use Google, that's using open source infrastructure.  Firefox is an example of using open source applications, of course.  But the interesting thing is how simply using open source infastructure or application contributes value.  Although at a lesser scale on the power law of participation, each new user to a given platform is an attactor for developers to contribute to it.  Much more virtuous than dancing with elephants.

The Open Source Community Imperative

Notes from a panel at OSBC

Peter Fenton, Accel Partners, Moderator
Ranga Rangachari, GroundWork Open Source Solutions. Has a hybrid OSS model, 100 customers.
Daniel Frye, IBM, works on their open source strategy team, manages a ton of OSS developers.
Adam Tractenberg, eBay developer evangelist
Clint Oram, SugarCRM, from inception a commercial open source entity
Mike Olsen, sold his company, Sleepycat, to Oracle today

• Peter Fenton fesses up to the irony that a VC is talking about community, but notes that enterprise software model is dead and the big hits lately have been from communities. Communities appropriately applied will be the big breakouts. Open source as an invention, a form of sales and marketing to bring costs from 60% of revenue to 20%.
• Daniel: Communities are quite different, from an analysis we found that some build around a single commercial effort, entity or individual. Looks and acts different from a community that is very broad, with multiple interests. Differences in governance models. Have learned, in some cases the hard way, it is really not easy to start communities. Much easier to leverage, adapt and adopt communities. Most important thing when building one is asking why people would join. Raymond's Rule of Everyone Scratches Their Own Itch.
• Peter: Striking differences in the level of community contributions to the code. Sleepycat does all the contributions, for example.
• Daniel: Most are less that 10%
• Clint: first thing we did was to start forums for $200. From then we ahve continued with tools for people to collaborate, SugarForge. Tools kicked off the community into high gear.
• Adam: we had a community of buyers and sellers before developers. We saw people screen scraping to automate, a latent demand for web services. We had a community that was reaching out to us. Gradually releasing commercial constraints for leveraging our platform. There are still costs for maintaining a web service. Making it more free has enabled greater growth, spreading eBay in areas we haven't anticipated, the best part of the initative.
• Peter: they are often viewed as cost centers, how do you explain that.
• Adam: eBay is metrics driven. Didn't start that way with the project, but now 45% of all listings go through a web service. We track (paraphrasing: everything).
• Mike: It's okay to pay attention to the cost center aspect, but you have to take a longer view. Fundamentally you want a happy community producing customers for you. The things that haven't worked as well are when we have tried to learn lessons that are objectively true in business school. How to do direct marketing. Had to build out infrastruture, cold call for lead gen, that was at best breakeven. Doesn't give us the same scale or engagement. On the developer forum, watching interactions, you get a very good idea for who is interested. The one way programs don't work. It has to be two way.
• Clint: When we focused inward on our internal operations, we neglected the community sites and had a bit of backlash for not participating enough. Had to refactor priorities. I then focused full time on the community.
• Ranga: not having a community person has been successful. Lots of splinter communities, keep them engaged by contributions. 10-15% of an engineer's time is spent contributing back to the community.
• Peter: VCs see it as a radical distirbution adv