Ross Mayfield's Weblog

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.

Cap'n TechCrunch

Cap'n TechCrunch
Originally uploaded by Ross Mayfield

Thanks for the good party Mike.

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, 

Slidecasting

Mike Arrington just blogged about tomorrow's launch of Slidecasting by SlideShare.  Slidecasting is a new media format, the combination of Powerpoint slides (everyone has the authoring tool) and audio (can be located anywhere), including podcasts (where it gets interesting).  While I'm a biased advisor to SlideShare, you will have to agree that multimedia on the web just got a whole lot easier and accessible.  And as objects you can socialize.

Here's an an example:

If I was an event organizer or podcaster, I'd be setting up a group on SlideShare now.

UPDATE: Launched, see the FAQ

UPDATE: Made my first Slidecast.  All it took was the time to listen to my 13 minute presentation while sliding some markers.  The editor UI is really easy.

How To Wiki WIRED

Today the How To Wiki launched on WIRED, a collection of guides for how to Live, Work and Play better.  Powered by Socialtext, licensed under Creative Commons, I have to say it is one of the better wiki implementations for a media brand -- and perhaps how things may be.

Seeded with last year's and this month's issue of How To Guides from WIRED Magazine, it begins with the style and culture of WIRED.  But how it goes from there is a page that hasn't been edited yet. 

It does differ in content and form from my other favorite how to guide wiki, wikiHow.  How To guides, FYI, are also a very common use case behind the firewall for company wiki intranets (the biggest part of the Apple intranet, for example).

Some of my favorite Howtos so far:

• Get Off a Government Watch List
• Land a Fat Raise
• Rock  at Guitar Hero
• Bake a Wii Cake
• Turn Your Flickr Crush Into Real Romance
• Find Tiny Dinosaur Bones
• Disable Your Passport's RFID Chip
• Make Your Own Viral Hit

This is a very ambitious project, bold for a media organization (remember Wikitorial?).  I'm proud of the teams that drove this and look forward to something that could be a really fun community.

Will Be CEO For Food

Will Be CEO For Food
Originally uploaded by Peter Kaminski

Evan Prodromou dropped by for some coworking at Socialtext's Palo Alto office.

Since we're looking for CEO 2.0, he offered to help out there, too. :-)

CEO 2.0

As a company founder, as I've written before, it is inevitable and necessary that your role evolves for the best interest of the company and what you own of it. Today I'm invoking the most powerful inflection point I can for Socialtext. We've grown to 3,000 customers, 50 people, the leading brand in the space, an innovative product, solid revenue growth and are targeting profitability. It is time for Socialtext to be taken to the next level, and for that, I want to openly recruit the CEO 2.0 for Socialtext.

The ability to do this search openly is part of the great culture we have built at Socialtext. I'm going to transition to Chairman & President and focus on growing the top line with my external facing duties and drive corporate and product strategy. CEO 2.0 will bring a strong operations background and have a mandate to grow the bottom line. This is a dream job.

I'm just starting the search and you can help. We should be able to find the right person within our own strong network, so if you can make a strong recommendation please contact me through LinkedIn.

BarCamp Block Party, mark the date

We are looking to host the biggest BarCamp ever, on its third anniversary, at the place it started.   So far we have a date, August 18th and 19th, and location on the block where Socialtext is.  Mark it, because with the help of neighboring companies, we might have room for 1,000 participants.

Cases2.com launched

During his keynote at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, HBS Professor Andrew McAfee put out a call to create a community for sharing case studies on Enterprise 2.0.  After some sharing and prototyping in private, www.cases2.com has launched on a Socialtext wiki.  There are five cases so far:

1. Angel.com (MicroStrategy) case study

2. at&t Collaborative Integration

3. Boston College case study

4. Fidelity Investments Collaborative Integration

5. MWW Group case study

From Suw Charman's live blogging of his keynote:

Need case studies - have a few examples that we fall back on. Our store-houses of success stories needs to expand fairly dramatically if we are going to get traction with decision-makers within companies. What will help them make that decision is verifiable case studies. Need to make sure we don't keep using the same examples over and over. Mustn't get into the trap of coming up with impressive ROI numbers for these techs, Lots of these ROI numbers quoted are 200% - 300%, which makes people ask, if these are true then we should be throwing money into buying software. Those numbers have to be suspect. Don't want us to fall into the trap of coming up with glowing numbers.

Can talk about what happened, at the anecdote or case study level. These are very persuasive. Not all companies have a rigid ROI view of investments, but what they want is ways to triangulate the quality of investment.

Need to address this problem, need a repository of information. If and when we do this we need to throw the gates open as widely as possible - should be emergent, widely accessible, and egalitarian. Need to disclose where this information comes from - it's not automatically suspect when a case study comes from a vendor. Too often, we don't to basic levels of disclosure, so just need some disclosure rules about who's putting information up. Wikipedia has an elaborate set of rules, guidelines and policies which have emerged over time. Not sure what they set of ground rules is needed, but we'll come up with them over time. He volunteers to participate in this effort, what we need is a couple of technologists or vendors to provide environment; perhaps a wiki. Then everyone else throws information up, and structure will emerge over time, as will groundrules, but it would be an invaluable resource for all of us if there's a repository were we can point decision makers to so they can find valuable information.

McAfee put out the call for contribution today:

If you know of an E2.0 case study, please enter any and all details. We don't care if you were directly involved in the project or not, got paid for it or not, etc. We simply ask that you be as honest and forthcoming as possible, cite sources where available, and disclose your relationship(s) to the companies involved.

This last point is critical. It's fine for a vendor or consultant to add information about one of their cases, and it's fine if that information is not verifiable from objective and/or published sources. It's essential, though, that contributors correctly and completely identify themselves and their relationships so that readers have the information necessary to make their own judgments about possible biases.

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.