The news is in that the EU has finally approved Oracle's purchase of Sun, and while there are some more hurdles to cross I think James' response is very fitting so I'll reproduce it here too.

I doubt there will be an official wake given what happened when James tried to arrange one before, so we'll need to have drinks ourselves.

So you got through (or, if your not from the US, ignored) Thanksgiving and Black Friday, how about some free music? It's on my personal blog...

I spoke this morning at the South Tyrol Free Software Conference in Bolzano, Italy. My subject was the idea of a "software freedom scorecard", a list of indicators for the strength of software freedom in an open source project or product, about which I wrote recently. The slides are available for download.

I also refer to reptiles, and that's a reference to another blog post.

I just posted this week's free music downloads list over on my personal blog.

It may just be that you need some free music to soothe away the bad taste from a bad week. There are a bunch of pointers on my personal blog.

Several years ago, we had the chance to visit a crocodile farm in Queensland, Australia. There were several highlights, not least the chance for the children to hold a crocodile - a very small one, of course, with its jaws taped shut. Even with one that small, the frisson of terror remained and the children all laughed nervously for the camera.

[☝ Continued on Webmink Personal...]

Just a quick reminder to anyone who believes Sun has done something bad in the community; we do have a community ombudsman service. Send e-mail to ombudsman@sun.com with your complaints and they will be investigated.

It was a surprise to see Richard Stallman's signature on a letter to the European Commission calling on them to block the acquisition of MySQL by Oracle with its proposed acquisition of Sun. The surprise wasn't primarily because of that position.

[Continued on my personal blog]

In my previous posts, I've drawn an analogy between open source software and organic food, hinting that in both cases the rush to create a working brand lost some of the essence of the vision. I've suggested that having businesses identify "open source" purely on the basis of one "input" - using an OSI-approved license - is no longer adequate, because the success of the open source approach has led so many different companies to want to exploit the name. The need is clear; so many companies want to describe themselves as "open source businesses" that debates about "open-core" and "open source business models" were dominant at Open World Forum.

To address this, I'm proposing the Open Source Initiative go beyond the Open Source Definition and the Free Software Definition to devise some sort of a Software Freedom Definition which articulates a holistic vision of software freedom against which businesses can be benchmarked. I propose also creating a self-certified score-card which companies can complete to indicate the approach they are taking to promote software freedom as part of their business model - maybe "the Open Source Audit". I'd then expect abuses to be policed by the community at large with final arbitration from OSI.

What would be included in the two? My initial thoughts are that it should include 7-10 elements, each of which have a "yes/no" answer and each of which should be backed by a more detailed definition to make clear whether the answer is yes or no. Sample questions might include:

• Is the license OSI-approved?
• Is the copyright under diverse control?
• Is the community governance open?
• Are external interfaces and formats standards compliant?
• Does your community operate under a patent peace arrangement?
• Are trademarks community controlled?
• ...

[Also posted on my OSI blog. You can also watch the talk.]

When I wrote about Organic Software recently, I was largely eulogising the community dimension of open source software. But there's another way in which the idea of "organic software" is helpful to understanding the dynamic in free and open source software. Here are the comments I have been making at Open World Forum here in Paris.

Reading Michael Pollan's excellent book The Omnivore's Dilemma gives an insight into the real vision of the community behind the term "organic" as applied to food. Pollan describes spending what were clearly a few life-changing weeks at a New England farm that "farms grass". They feed the grass to cows for dairy and for meat. They fertilise the grass with chickens, which give eggs and meat and themselves clear the waste left by the cows. They have a complete cycle of production, working the land and returning it to richness and fertility rather than treating it as a "natural resource", exploiting it for monoculture and relying on petro-chemicals to keep it going. This sustained cycle of richness was the original vision behind "organic" - a rebellion against industrial food, yes, but a positive rebellion leading to skilled people with quality lifestyles farming sustainably and leaving the land better than they found it while producing wholesome and natural food. They treat the farm like an organism - which was in fact the origin of the term.

Branding

"Organic", of course, is just a brand. Brands ought to be good things - attention-markers that classify their bearer in the group of things we trust. The appropriation of the term drives my scientifically-trained friends nuts, because they (like me) were taught to understand the word as a classification for carbon chemistry. But it's a strong brand that people seek out, and that strength has itself led to a problem.

Seeing that "organic food" rang bells for consumers, the food industry wanted to use the term to label their products. There's a problem, though. The food industry has optimised their supply chains by driving monocultures in different regions, driving down prices by commoditisation. They further exploit government subsidy for things like maize and petroleum by-products to drive up yield as the monocultures use them to increase crop volumes - at the expense of the land. All the exact opposite of the vision that led to "organic", in other words.

But people were willing to compromise in order to achieve a little good - "surely it's better to have something than nothing?". The food industry managed to get "organic" defined not holistically but in terms of "inputs" - the things needed to drive the monocultures. Rather than changing their production and economic systems, they simply switched to techniques so that the monocultures could come to harvest without artificial chemicals. The rest of the context? All the same. So today, most people think of "organic" as just meaning the absence of artificial additives and fertilisers in the ingredients in the foods we buy.

But "organic" means far more than just "inputs". It actually describes a whole approach to food, embracing the lifestyle of the producer, the lifestyle of the customer and the relationship between the two. It implies "slow food, "local food", animal welfare, local diversity, sustainable agriculture, environmental awareness and more. Reducing it down just to the "inputs" misses the core values of "organic" and leads people to false conclusions (like the recent UK agency report denouncing organic food as no more nutritious than processed food). Inputs and nutrition are the currency of industrial food, where supposed health claims are the benchmark for marketing something unpalatable by ignoring the stuff that would make you run away (something that happens in the property market too). Hearing "organic" measured by them is a sure sign that the speaker has co-opted the brand rather than embraced the lifestyle and values.

Organic Software

Which leads me to "organic software" again. An open source project is what happens when people gather round a free software commons to synchronise a fragment of their interests alongside others doing the same. To succeed, it depends on a mesh of factors, not just on the way the copyright is licensed (although that's important of course). Ultimately to proponents of open source communities and of free software, it's not just about ... well, it's not just about any one attribute. What's happened to software freedom when it was branded as open source seems to me analogous to what has happened to holistic agriculture when it was branded as organic. A valuable brand was indeed created - companies wouldn't want to use it otherwise.

The various discussions about the state of open source here at Open World Forum in Paris seem to me to often miss the heart of the issue for the software marketplace. The reason open source has made such a huge impact is that it delivers software freedoms to software users. Software freedom is the key, and a company with a focus on open source will do business by delivering value through software freedom. There's no one way to do it - every business will have a different model. But any company wanting to affiliate with the open source and free software movement needs to be graded on their impact on software freedom.

Software Freedom Means Business Success

A focus on software freedom isn't just for the revolutionaries. All the values that make CIOs pick open source software are derived from software freedom:

• The freedom to use the software for any purpose, without first having to seek special permission (for example by paying licensing fees). This is what drives the trend to adoption-led deployment;
• the availability of skills and suppliers because they have had no barriers to studying the source code and experimenting with it;
• the assurance that vendors can't withhold the software from you because anyone has the freedom to modify and re-use the source code;
• the freedom to pass the software on to anyone that needs it, even including your own enhancements - including your staff, suppliers, customers and (in the case of governments) citizens.

Truth In Advertising

That's about more than just licensing. It also includes factors such as diversity of copyright ownership, representative leadership, use of open standards, patent safety, control of trademarks, openness of governance and more. While measuring such "inputs" can never wholly identify the holistic concept which is software freedom, I am still convinced the next step for open source is to devise "open source definitions" for these other key attributes, so that we can get away from an undefined and loose understanding of an open source business and instead have a more nuanced approach.

What I would like to see is a move by OSI to create a suite of "open source definitions" against which a business could grade itself, and then indicate how many "stars" they score against the full suite. There would be very, very few businesses able to score a full set of stars, but the transparency of being able to see how companies rate in cultivating (rather just exploiting) software freedom would benefit us all in creating a strong, open market. We could set benchmarks in our procurement guidelines, requiring "no less than a five-star rating on the open source benchmark", just as we require ISO9001 and similar ratings. OSI as an organisation is ready for this evolution of its role. Who wants to help make it happen? It's time.

[Also posted to my OSI Board Blog]

This weekend we went to Winchester Farmers' Market. It was a beautiful day and the season is especially rich so there's a wonderful range of produce on offer. Our larder and fridge are now full of produce grown nearby: onions, squash, courgettes, beans, fir apple potatoes, garlic, watercress and plenty more. Tonight we'll have River Test trout, sip a locally grown wine, nibble local cheese and finish with berries we harvested ourselves last week.

Wandering around the market, I used two of my OSCON bags - an older canvas one to carry my cameras, and one of this year's black nylon Chico bags for produce. A stallholder spotted them both and asked me which convention I'd been to. I told him I'd been to the Open Source Convention each year for the last decade, and he was interested to find out what that was. "Organic software", I said. I explained to him that he could be using open source software free of charge and be liberated from the corporations that were taxing him on computer software.

Rather like me at the Farmer's Market actually. I'm there because I'm tired of being in Nestlé's net, sucking from the teat of the maize and sugar industry, wondering if I'm eating Frankenfood, ignorant of the environmental cost of getting the food in front of me. Rather than going to a big-chain supermarket and leaving the provenance of the food to them, I go to the farmers' market because I get to ask the producers about their food, get encouraged to cook creatively and even grow my own (several plant stalls there) and give help to other people doing the same.

Some people do ask whether the farmers' market is scalable - surely having a big corporation planning all the production is better? But no, each week the market is full of produce produced by local people who love growing it, and producers turn up to sell in proportion to the number of people who show up to buy. No-one seemed to be struggling to make a living. The stallholder had never heard of OpenOffice.org or Firefox, but easily got the idea that software made by a community could be great and that having everyone doing the part they can for themselves means there's no need to have a big corporation wanting you to pay. There are no hidden ingredients either, and despite the lack of pesticides there seem to be fewer bugs...

Open source is "organic software" and its time has come. He's going home to his organic produce and to look for "open source software" and "open office" on the web. Me - I'm reflecting on Software Freedom Day as I prepare my trout.

I'm not sure why, but the "there is no open source business model" discussion has woken up again, with Matthew Aslett and Stephen Walli in particular chipping in views. Last time this debate arose was when 451 published a report of the same name. That report made quite a few people in the FOSS communities unhappy because it propagated the "open core" view that a business with an open source element somewhere in its activities (what Stephe calls a tool) could be described as an "open source business".

Oxymoron

Why is there no "open source business model"? Because open source is not a business. It's the same oxymoronic thinking as the question "how can you make money if you give the software away for free", which simply can't be answered without correcting the questioner's worldview.

To assert there is "an open source business model" is to lose sight of the nature of open source. It may have been a fair thing to do when open source was a novelty to business minds, but even considering there could be such a thing leads people to misunderstand open source and treat the exceptions - like MySQL - as the rule. Not that it's wrong to monetise ubiquity at the point of deployment by delivering the value that allows scaling (enabling adoption-led behaviour). It's just most open source community members don't do that.

Synchronisation of Interest Elements

An open source project is a community of participants that gathers around a free software commons, with each participant aligning an element of their interests with the interests of all the others there, in order to collaborate. The OSI-approved license gives them the freedom to do so. Each participant comes to the community with their own individual interest, which in the case of a business will stem from their own business model. The community itself is about the Free code in the commons. Just about the code - all other matters are subjugated (at least in working communities!).

An open source community is thus a mix of many motivations. If there's only one motivation present - only one "business model" - it's unlikely there is any true community either. People only care about the business model when there's only one business; in a real community the only way to get along is to mind your own business (model) and not try to mess with anyone else's.

As a follow-up to my posting on Monday about the new co-ownership license Sun has offered to all the bloggers on blogs.sun.com, I thought it would be good to post a link to the FAQ site and to the license itself (PDF). One interesting extra dimension is that the option to enter into the license is also open to former employees whose blogs are still on display (which is the policy for former employees, unlike some employers I could mention).

I think this is a great and wise step for Sun to have taken. I hope other companies with staff who blog will take the same step.

One of our design principles for blogs.sun.com over the years has been to allow everything and let good sense and existing rules prevent mishaps - at least until it's clear we need a new rule of some kind. It's been almost entirely effective, and the few cases where it hasn't have been quickly addressed by the Sun blogger community on an internal mailing list that almost every blogger subscribes to. Self-policing definitely beats supervision. Another design principle has been to encourage people to be themselves, and mix up the technical and the personal in their blogging. The resulting blogs have often been compelling and we've grown an unmatched bench of authentic, respected voices.

Of course, those principles leave unanswered questions. One of the questions Sun's present context has raised is, "who owns the blog content?" It's not obvious, since the postings include a mix of personal and Sun content, are posted on a Sun property but often in personal time, and so on. To make it crystal clear, Sun has created a licensing option for every employee that simply shares ownership of everything that's posted equally between Sun and the blogger. That allows Sun to continue to host blogs.sun.com in perpetuity and it allows employees to sort out their own uses for their content. I want to write a book for example, and other want to move their blog to their own domain.

The new license was rolled out today, to accompany the handy new function to export all blog content for use with (for example) WordPress. From now on, every Sun blogger has (if they choose to accept the new license) a clear, documented set of rights to their blogging content. Huge thanks to the team of people that made it happen, especially my favourite lawyer, Tiki Dare, who completely "gets" this stuff and without whose quiet and largely unsung help the open source community would be much the poorer.

Today sees the launch of a new coalition of businesses (large and small), organizations and individuals to speak up for Free and open source software in Washington DC. Open Source for America brings together a diverse alliance drawn from every corner of the software freedom movement. The Board of Advisors (on which I'm honoured to serve) brings together community, commercial, political and military voices, and the membership has been the easiest to recruit of any activity I have known. That's because at the heart of the organization you'll find the principles of the Free Software Definition, which themselves form the core beliefs of almost everyone supporting free and open source software.

The Freedoms at the heart of the alliance create an unparalleled opportunity for governments:

• Open source puts government in control of if and when they spend money on software, since the it guarantees the right to use without limitations
• It means that government IT investment is mostly spent locally with local experts since everyone is free to study and modify the code.
• It ensures that all - government, suppliers and citizens - can freely access the software needed for government engagement without toll or tax from a vendor since everyone is free to distribute the original and changed versions.

Whatever other lessons we can learn from this new initiative, I note that it was easy and rational for people from all the apparent factions of the free and open source software movement to come together. It's time to set aside the urge to fight over semantic differences and recognise how far we have come and see how much we can achieve when we pull together. Join Open Source for America now!

Readers here may be interested in the article I just posted on my personal blog.

The Brazilian economy is powered by the Java platform - even their new Free digital TV standard uses it. They took the decision to use Java for so much in part when we (Bruno, myself and a number of others) assured them, a number of years ago, that there would be Free implementations. The story ever since has been snowballing investment in Java skills and an economy capable not only of supporting its own needs but also of exporting skills - they've been making Java a priority for years.

When I was honoured to be invited to meet the President of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, at this year's FISL event in Porto Alegre, I naturally accepted. I decided to give him a Java Ring, a wearable Java-powered computer, as a symbolic token of the deep symbiosis between Brazil, the Java platform and Free software.

He took it enthusiastically, put it on straight away - and it fit him. He said that having a computer on his finger made him feel like James Bond and he posed for photographs with it.

Landmarks

The visit by the President of Brazil to (probably) the largest Free software event in the world is a landmark for the Free software movement. In his speech at the event, Lula recognised especially the work of Sergio Amadeu (once Lula's advisor on IT and the man Microsoft tried to sue for being honest about their strategy) and commented on the years of work that had been involved "preparing the meal" on which the country was now able to feast. In response to Marcelo Branco and the many others who had been lobbying him since he arrived at the event, he also too the opportunity to set his face against the terrible internet laws being proposed for Brazil.

The visit was a landmark in at least three ways:

• It represented the first visit I'm aware of to a Free software event of a head of state - in this case the head of the 14th largest economy in the world
• The speech demonstrated the key role Free software leaders like Sergio and Marcello have had in shaping the IT strategy in the country;
• The deprecation of the internet laws demonstrated that the Free software community actually has a powerful lobbying voice.

What was also fascinating was the regard in which Lula - and his ministers - held Richard Stallman. When the Finance minister came along the line-up before Lula arrived he commented on seeing Stallman "I know you!". Lula himself gave a warm and firm welcome to Stallman. Free software has been over 25 years in the making, but in Brazil it took place as a recognised force in affairs of state, in a way I am sure will be repeated globally in coming years.

Over the weekend, Mark announced he's updated the OpenJDK Interim Governance Board page to add details of the two new members Sun has asked to join the Board to navigate towards a permanent OpenJDK governance system. They are both well-known contributors to OpenJDK, and in fact when I asked Mark Wielaard to suggest the best pick for new Board members they were the names he suggested. They are:

• Andrew Haley, of Red Hat, GCJ co-maintainer and Classpath corner-stone, and
• Martin Buchholz, of Google, a developer of the JDK core libraries at Sun for many years.

I'm delighted they are joining the Board and, while there's no crisis to solve since the existing interim governance is mostly working fine, I hope their arrival will help us formalise arrangements at last.

• Colorado Software Summit 2009 Cancelled
  After 18 years, the world's best developer conference closes the shutters after seeing a huge fall in registrations. I have a decade of the very best memories of speaking there and I wish Wayne and Peggy the happiest retirement possible.
  (tags: Events conference Colorado java opensource software development programming softwaresummit)

Some of you may remember a fuss that was made a few years ago by some open source people over the copyright and patent policy used by OASIS, the computer protocols standards body¹. OASIS seems to have taken it to heart, because it has today announced what looks to me like the perfect basis for technology standards in an open source world.

Their new rules² include a new "mode" which standards projects can opt into using. In this new mode, all contributors promise that they will not assert any patents they may own related to the standard the project is defining. Contributors make this covenant:

Each Obligated Party in a Non-Assertion Mode TC irrevocably covenants that, subject to Section 10.3.2 and Section 11 of the OASIS IPR Policy, it will not assert any of its Essential Claims covered by its Contribution Obligations or Participation Obligations against any OASIS Party or third party for making, having made, using, marketing, importing, offering to sell, selling, and otherwise distributing Covered Products that implement an OASIS Final Deliverable developed by that TC.

That's deliciously simple, and implements close to what I have previously recommended as the basis for handling patents in open source projects. I've written before how patent non-assert covenants are low cost for the patent holder and low risk for the developer. There is of course a "patent peace" associated with it:

The covenant described in Section 10.3.1 may be suspended or revoked by the Obligated Party with respect to any OASIS Party or third party if that OASIS Party or third party asserts an Essential Claim in a suit first brought against, or attempts in writing to assert an Essential Claim against, a Beneficiary with respect to a Covered Product that implements the same OASIS Final Deliverable.

I think this is a wonderful development for protecting open source developers from patents, and I would like to see it replicated in all standards bodies. The only issue will be whether OASIS TCs choose to adopt this mode; we need to demand it and boycott the TCs that don't.

I ran into analyst Jonathan Eunice this afternoon. Jonathan's long experience following Sun and Java makes him a great person to ask for an insightful and impartial view of the news so I asked him about JavaFX, Java EE 6, JDK 7, Oracle and more.

I'm at JavaOne in San Francisco and this is a TweetSwoop, where I swoop on people who know the answers to the questions I've seen on Twitter.

This TweetSwoop asks Sun Director Simon Nicholson about the Java ME fragmentation initiatives launched this week at JavaOne by a group of key mobile industry companies, Java Verified and JATAF.

I'm trying something new today. Having finally given in to the desire to buy a personal video recorder (the Flip Ultra HD), I decided to use it to swoop on people who know the answers to the questions I've seen on Twitter.

My first TweetSwoop victim interviewee was Jeet Kaul, who I asked the question I'd seen from @The_Contrarian, who asked why the new Java Store was closed and under a kind of NDA and from a number of people asking why it was restricted to the US.

You'll remember my recent posting about the fine work journalist Brenno de Winter has been doing in his spare time, bringing a little healing daylight into local government in The Netherlands.

Brenno has been trying to get details of local government procurement published on the web, so that the resulting transparency can drive better decisions. Since most local authorities haven't wanted to do that, he's been filing bulk Freedom of Information requests (the Dutch abbreviation is apparently WOB) to get the data.

The local authorities haven't exactly been helpful. They have been slow, obstructive and have sent image PDFs instead of parseable data. Brenno knows his rights, however, and has pressed the point every time and has seen great results, posting data on his Big WOBber website.

I got a note from him yesterday telling me a new problem has come up. Despite the fact that the local authorities - like all in Europe - have a legal duty to provide the information, they have started sending Brenno big bills for the administrative work involved, in a kind of denial-of-service attack on his campaign.

He's pretty sure that if he takes all the claims to court he can get them struck down, but to do that he needs a fighting fund. There's an event in Amsterdam on June 11th where Scriptum Libre will be raising funds for him, and you can contribute by visiting their payment page and designating Brenno as the beneficiary of your donation. Worth supporting - pass it on.

Back in 1995 I was a huge fan and advocate of Java - at IBM - because it provided developers and deployers a universal layer that promised to reduce the lock-in caused by platform differences. The JCP went on to define a limited number of Java profiles and in the areas where the market has stuck to them we've seen great things happen. And in the place  it hasn't - Java ME - we've seen messy fragmentation that's held the market back. We risk the same thing happening in the Cloud if we don't define a Java Cloud Profile soon.

Slashdotted

Just before the Easter break here in the UK, I made a passing remark (in a link roundup and on Twitter) to the fact that Google has added Java support to their App Engine cloud hosting product. I did so because I've been associated with the Java platforms ever since I helped get IBM to support them before joining Sun (where I haven't really been involved with Sun's Java team).

To my surprise, a journalist decided this was big news and wrote a story implying Sun was "slamming" Google. That in turn led to a discussion on Slashdot where a whole lot of people asserted a whole lot of things based on the assumption my pithy micro-blogging comment was a treatise on Sun's behalf as well as on a weak grasp of Java standardisation, politics and history. Gah. Now I'm back from Oslo, I've time to comment properly.

Delighted

To be clear, I am delighted Google are supporting the Java platform on App Engine. Doing so grows the opportunity for the whole Java community. It allows a great deal of existing code to be re-used and offers use of a wide range of additional programming languages. It is a great solution to the problem many of us have had for years, that Java hosting is hard to find and hard to use when you do. GAE/j is a good thing and I welcome it, especially if it grows Google's engagement with the open source Java community.

Moreover, it seems entirely likely that Google's approach here to "subsetting" is simply because they haven't yet gotten around to making everything safe in their sandbox, not because they have some deep philosophical belief that those things should be removed. Reports I have seen suggest they have largely used a SecurityManager implementation (although there are some worrying reports also of people getting ClassNotFoundException for core classes). If they've simply made a temporary, pragmatic, resource-driven decision, we should all encourage them to work towards full compatibility as they head out of alpha. That doesn't change my reaction to the general issue, though.

Fragmentation Risk

My reaction related more to the fact that we can't afford as a community to leave this just to happen. While pragmatic innovation is a good thing on the part of an individual developer or even a diverse community, in the hands of a rich, powerful corporation it can - even unwittingly - quickly become market manipulation. That's why the JCP has striven to prevent unilateral subsetting. I can't speak for Sun - I am nothing to do with Java strategy at Sun - but I believe the Java community needs a new, agreed Java cloud profile.

If we allow each cloud provider in turn to define their own subset, we will be left in the same ugly position we have with Java on mobile phones where the common specification doesn't go deep enough and forces applications to be refactored for every different platform. On the cloud, this equates to having no freedom-to-leave - you'll be stuck with a price ticket if you ever want to move platforms.

Community Solution?

I was already worried about that topic and think we need a common set of APIs for provisioning in the cloud (Tim has started), a common way to abstract data storage and an abstraction layer so that applications written for the cloud can move freely between providers. Java would be perfect for this last item - but not if every provider has a different subset. That's the real meaning of "compatibility" in a Java context - not needing to refactor for equivalent deployment in different places.

What we need as a global Java community is "Java for Cloud" somehow. Given their good work so far, I'd like Google to show leadership and a commitment to openness by taking their subset to the JCP and offering to join a working group to establish a new Java profile for cloud applications. I hope Sun would enthusiastically engage. I know that there's already some work aimed at Java EE 6 to create a "web profile" - let's get a community effort going here so that innovation means progress and not lock-in.

Why is it so hard to get governments (especially local government) to use open source software? Here are some ideas discussed during my keynote today in Oslo at GoOpen 2009 for practical steps various people, from citizens to policy wonks to representatives, can do to help get open source in actual use and delivering on its promise (and I know it's not easy):

1. Fix the procurement policy. While a policy that says open source is great is a good thing, if you don't change the procurement policy it will have no effect. The best open source solutions result from a two-phase procurement process where the first phase buys prototyping and iterating using software on a white-list of approved elements that can be supported in phase two, and the second phase buys production deployment and scaling. If you have a procurement process that basically defines software as "something you buy a license for" you'll never get the adoption-led benefits of open source.
2. Publish tenders by default. In most places, it's illegal to specify a vendor explicitly in a generic request for tender. To deal with this, many countries have open procurement policies, but very, very few publish tender documents, so we have a problem. Initiating a scheme like the one Brenno de Winter has in the Netherlands brings the cleansing power of sunlight into the process. Brenno uses Freedom of Information requests to secure tenders and then posts them to a wiki for community review. You could do that too where you live.
3. Demand the freedom to leave. Often, the cost of migration is used as a barrier to use of open source. But the cost of migration is often caused by being locked in by an existing vendor. If migration costs are cited, so must be exit costs (one of the key changes in the UK open source policy). If you're not willing to demand exit costs are stated, exclude migration costs too. The longer you leave this unchecked, the deeper the lock-in will become and the greater the migration costs for new solutions.
4. Don't focus on cost savings alone. Any vendor with a decent sales function can cut one-time costs to get you locked in. If you have freedom to use/study/modify/distribute the software you use, you can drive down the costs - freedom can lead to cost savings but cost savings rarely lead to freedom. Making this the rule is a policy decision that your legislature needs to make.
   
5. Consider posterity. Solutions that require proprietary formats, DRM as an enabler to tracking, closed and NDA-only interfaces (and many more tactics) - all these things result in systems that lose the reasons why decisions get made and rob future generations of their history. Demand transparency with privacy. That's freedom; secrecy with controlled disclosure is not. Discriminate against offerings that use DRM, unpublished interfaces and anything else that your vendor won't let you publish without permission.

• Use open standards. What is an open standard? Well, that can take a great deal of argument to determine, but a great rule of thumb is if it could be implemented under all available open source licenses and is actually implemented under one, it's probably open. And if you use the open source implementation, chances are the extra freedoms will help too.
  

I couldn't decide where to write about this though, since the two stories span two blogs, so it's over on my personal blog.

Update April 14: BusinessWeek now looks fixed.

On Monday and Tuesday I had calls from a persistent journalist trying to get me to comment on the rumoured IBM/Sun negotiations. My reply was the same as it has been to everyone else who has asked - "what way would you like me to say 'no comment'?" - but I wondered why she was bothering me, a fairly small and isolated cog in the big machine.

Before you start to throw accusations my way, look at the original page. If you scroll further (assuming the page hasn't been withdrawn yet), you'll see some other unexpected names with incorrect affiliations. They are all, like me, members of the OpenSPARC Board (shown as a Board Committee by BusinessWeek).

Oops. Someone working from search results can't tell the difference between Sun's Board of Directors and the advisory board of an open source project.

I had always assumed that a publication like BusinessWeek would fact-check this sort of page all the way to eternity, but clearly they have not. It makes you wonder just how much else in the media is fact-based and how much is a random construction by a novice in a hurry. I've advised the Editor-in-Chief, let's see what happens next.

Update 11pm BST: I just got a reply from a person at BusinessWeek. He's clearly cutting and pasting a form letter and hasn't even checked how serious the error is. He says:

The fastest way to have the error corrected is to use the "Update/report content errors" link in the "Companies Toolbox," which is found in the left margin of every CIC page in the CIC. Doing so instantly puts the accurate data in the hands of the researchers who will investigate your report and, if necessary, make the change. Be sure to fill out the short form completely.

I've replied saying I have no idea what the correct data is and why don't they check some official sources. Watch this space.

Update 1:45am Thu: No news from BusinessWeek and I'm heading to bed. Decided that despite the fact I am not an authority I'd better fill out their form - I just sent a pointer to this page. Hey, BusinessWeek, go look at the SEC filings, they are definitive.

Update 1pm Thu: The plot thickens. Seems no-one at BusinessWeek can alter the page; they have referred the matter to a division of Standard & Poor called CapitalIQ. I'm assured it has been "forwarded on priority to our research staff for review."  Right now I am still on the Board, though, seems I may have missed a meeting on Tuesday according to press reports. That are presumably as accurate as this data...

Update 2:45am Fri: Heading to bed with BusinessWeek still unchanged. E-mail during the day shows Sun's Investor Relations people sent full, correct details a day ago that can be verified against the SEC filings. Rather surprised there has been no attempt to fix anything yet after > 48 hours.

Update Apr 13, 1:45pm: Just got an e-mail from CapitalIQ in India to say they have updated their database so it now includes only the actual members of Sun's board. They say "The same should start reflecting on BusinessWeek in a day or so."

Update Apr 13, 5pm: Tweet from BusinessWeek tells me I am no longer on the Board; sadly, Jose Renau and Robert Ober (of the OpenSPARC Board) still are...

Update April 14, 4:25pm BS: All the names I know to be wrong have now been removed. Well done, BusinessWeek - that proves you're a weekly!

Anyone reading this coming to JavaOne and wanting me to arrange the usual Bloggers & Beer evening? Comment below! Oh, and remember early registration ends April 22.

I've got some speaking engagements coming up, two of them free of charge.

• This Wednesday I'll be at Manchester United FC delivering the opening keynote at the Local Government Open Source Conference.
• Then on April 15 I'll be speaking at CommunityOne North, which is still open for registrations free of charge.
• It is immediately followed by GoOpen 2009, where I have just agreed to deliver a short keynote and to join a panel with Bruce Perens, Maddog and Larry Wall.
• I also just got the acceptance note for a session at CommunityOne West in San Francisco - this is free to attend as well, and last year came with a free day-pass to JavaOne the next day, no idea about this year. I've not been asked to speak at JavaOne (must be a conspiracy against... oh, I don't know, who is the conspiracy against these days?)

If you're attending any of these, be sure to come and say hi!

That's it - Europe is now messing with the clock too, so the usual northern hemisphere time-zone spacings are back in place and the Twilight Zone is ended. Now we all need a new excuse for missing those telephone conferences.

You may remember last September I published an interview with crusading Dutch IT journalist Brenno de Winter. During our meeting, we discussed the sorry state of ICT procurement in Europe and the findings from a research group that many tenders illegally specified products rather than technologies.

Brenno decided to do something about it and started a project using Holland's freedom of information act to force disclosure of tenders. I had the chance to meet him again yesterday and to record another dueling podcast (Brenno's version is on his site) discussing his progress so far, especially the collaborative website where. Impressive and unusually energetic and imaginative journalism that I'd like to see elsewhere.

[MP3 | Ogg]

Today is Document Freedom Day, the second year it's been celebrated. We have a great opportunity in front of us this year. With Microsoft promising to support ODF any day now in their latest office suite (and with the ODF plug-in already freely available for their older versions), it will become politically acceptable for organisations everywhere to standardise on ODF for their documents.

This is an important step, because ODF is widely supported and implemented, openly developed and provides a baseline that will be readable for years to come. That protects the ability of future generations to read our documents in just the same way that we are able to read the documents that explain what went on in previous generations.

So what can you do to celebrate? Here are some ideas:

• Steer your organisation to adopt the Open Document Protocol, with the intent of sharing only widely available and open formats with other organisations.
• Give a friend a copy of OpenOffice.org
• Give a friend who's locked in to Microsoft Office a copy of the ODF Plug-in

Just a reminder to everyone I have calls with that Summer Time (Daylight Savings) starts in Europe on the last Sunday of March and not today like it did in the USA. That means we're in for a freaky month of people missing conference calls because they didn't check the world clock (or at least claiming that's the reason). In particular, the OpenSolaris elections fall squarely into the twilight zone and candidates and voters need to watch out for unexpected deadlines.

This is also the month to complain to the provider of your electronic calendar solution that they don't have time-zone support where you can specify the meeting timezone with the meeting (unless you are in the luck position that they do, of course!) Without that rather basic feature, it's impossible to automatically adjust meetings that fall into the twilight zone so they show the correct time. So if you're looking for someone to blame, looks like (say) Google is in the frame...

Next week is CeBIT, the monster IT trade show that has outlived COMDEX and all the others. Held in Hannover in Germany, it is an exhibition of staggering proportions that every geek should attend at least once (my preference: only once).

This year for the first time they have an open source sub-conference hiding pretty much unadvertised inside the event and I'll be speaking there on Wednesday March 4th at 3:15pm. I'll also be presenting one of the open source awards on March 5th in the evening.

It seems the Government Open Source Tipping Point (GOSTiP, as all government things need an acronym) is proceeding apace as national government after national government learns from the pioneers and dips a toe into the waters of software freedom.

Prior to the British government's announcement they would prefer to use open source and open formats, many of us also noticed the Canadian Government asking questions about "No-Charge Licensed Software" and using their "request for information" process to do so. Like many others we've taken a good, long look at their questions and written a suitably lengthy reply.

Do take a look; if you'd like to re-use any of it, there's also an ODF version. You'll note that we think lumping open source in with shareware, trialware and bait-and-switchware is a mistake; it's not about saving money on licenses, it's about securing key freedoms.  More inside.

Late today (UK time), the British Government issued a bold new strategy for use of open source software - and open standards - in Great Britain. In Open Source, Open Standards and Re-Use, the government's Minister for Digital Engagement (yes, really, and he's on Twitter too) significantly revised the brave but toothless policy of 2004 "that it should seek to use Open Source where it gave the best value for money to the taxpayer in delivering public services". This is fantastic news - the digital tipping point is at hand. (The publication is also progressive in having nominated use of the tag "#ukgovOSS" in comment and coverage so it can be found and aggregated).

Like other fine policies before it, the core of the document asserts that the government

• will actively and fairly consider open source solutions alongside proprietary ones;
• will consider exit and transition costs as well as the total lifetime cost of ownership;
• will pick open source where it doesn't cost more;
• will insist proprietary vendors explain exit, rebid and rebuild costs;
• will expect proprietary licenses to be transferable throughout government;
• will expect public sector solutions to be re-usable

• develop clear and open guidance for ensuring that open source and proprietary products are considered equally (action 1);
• keep and share records of approval and use of open source (action 3)
• support the use of Open Document Format (action 8);
• work to ensure that government information is available in open formats, and it will make this a required standard for government websites (action 8);
• general purpose software developed by or for government will be released on an open source basis (action 9).

This is all to be warmly welcomed and encouraged, and I congratulate the government on this progressive step. The endorsement of ODF is especially welcome, and would have seemed no more than an impossible dream to those of us associated with OpenOffice.org and involved in it at the start of the decade.

I will be very pleased to support and assist in any way that appropriate. In particular, I encourage the CIO Council to consider switching from an assumption of a procurement-driven approach to software acquisition to an adoption-led approach. Doing so does not favour open source; rather, it levels the playing field so that open source solutions can been seen alongside existing approaches. Sadly, if we stick with procurement-driven approaches and try to force-fit open source into them, we will be gamed.

In the unlikely circumstance that you are longing to hear me speak about the adoption-led market and the emerging new business reality it is driving, and on the assumption you can get to New York on Wednesday March 18, you'll be delighted to hear that I'm on the agenda for CommunityOne East along with friends Tim Bray and Geir Magnusson among many others who you almost certainly will find compelling even if I'm not. CommunityOne is free to attend, unless you want some deep training on March 19 on MySQL for an extra $200.

Monday is the last day of the internet blackout campaign organised and in support of it I have blacked out my avatars on Twitter and Facebook as well as on this page. Why? It's to appeal a very badly thought-out law that's been passed in New Zealand, one that the media lobby would love to see introduced in Europe too - it's already been introduced by threats in Ireland and we had a near-miss in the UK and in Germany. We need to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the kiwis. If the media lobby gets away with it over there, the rest of us will be picked off one-by-one via the global reach of the WTO and WIPO.

Bad Law

What's wrong with this law? It's not just that companies who built their business by using the commons now want to strangle it (although they hypocritically do want that). It's not that those same companies want their faltering business models shored-up by chilling effects, framing the celebration by their customers of the culture they are trying to create as akin to murder, rape and theft ("piracy"). It's not even that the new law in New Zealand gives a bunch of businesses who have shown themselves to have severely asymmetric morals the power to simply accuse without proof to get results.

Cultural Conduit

No, as I said when I was in Wellington, the problem is much deeper than the campaign against "Guilt Upon Accusation" in New Zealand would suggest. Our society has changed fundamentally in the last decade. The emergence of the world-wide web pushed the Internet from research curiosity into endemic facility, present in every office, then every home and now every pocket.

It is now the medium for culture, for education, for finance, for politics, for engagement with government services. Just this weekend we've seen RyanAir announce that the only way you can fly with them will be if you have an internet connection to check-in as well as to buy the ticket - no more check-in desks. We will increasingly see the Internet be the only way things can be done. Access to the Internet is no longer the casual frippery that this law believes. It is already integral to modern life. It will become a fundamental part of every aspect of our lives, as basic as electricity, telephones or pavements/sidewalks, the primary conduit for democracy, commerce, culture and social interaction.

Disproportionate Punishment

What crime do you have to commit in your country to be forbidden use of electricity (not just disconnected)? To be forbidden use of a phone? To be forbidden to walk on the streets? Yes, the lack of due process in this bad New Zealand law is a worry, but much more of a concern is its calculation that the infringement of a copyright justifies the removal of the main conduit of social engagement from a citizen. This cannot be allowed to stand.

This is not a matter for a "voluntary code of conduct" either. As use of the Internet becomes more complex and more fundamental, it's becoming clear in the UK that the Internet Watch Foundation - a group set up by ISPs so they wouldn't be regulated over every politician's excuse for bad legislation, "protecting children" - is harmful to us all, cracking small nuts with pile drivers and lacking transparency and accountability. It's great New Zealand has a temporary stay on the new law, but the reason - development of a voluntary code of conduct so citizens rights can be repeatably infringed in support of media business models - is still unacceptable, still agrees that citizen access to the internet is worth less than media business models.

It Shall Not Stand If We Stand Together

That's why S92A has to be struck down in New Zealand, why similar laws have to be resisted worldwide and why the media lobby needs to wise up and pipe down. We may not have reached a point where Internet access is an essential right, but it's too close now for us to tolerate its abridgment for any reason or set a precedent we then have to argue to undo. Infringing copyright is not something to be condoned, but there is no sense in which anyone's copyrights are more valuable than our 21st century human rights.

Best summary of the New Zealand Blackout that I've seen:

A rather unusual project just started in the OpenSolaris community. It's the OpenSolaris Lending Project. Instead of directly working on the code for OpenSolaris, the new project provides a venue for OpenSolaris community members who want to contribute to the OpenSolaris Lending Team at Kiva.org

If you're not familiar with Kiva, it is a scheme that acts as a marketplace and aggregator for microfinance loans. It allows ordinary people to make small loans to other people keen to lift themselves out of poverty around the world. The loans are aggregated by Kiva, sent via a local organisation that Kiva has vetted and used as start-up capital (or growth capital) by an entrepreneur who would otherwise be unable to get finance. The sums are small - $25 sums from lenders are aggregated into loans around $500 for borrowers - but the impact can be enormous.

The idea of the OpenSolaris community is to allow OpenSolaris community members who also share in the vision for microfinance to gather together and make a difference. By forming the team at OpenSolaris, we also hope that advocacy activities will choose to work with Kiva when they are looking for a gift or incentive for user groups and marketing activities. Not everyone would prefer a Kiva gift certificate to an iPod, but it's a gift that lasts longer and has a better effect on the world!

To get things moving, we've also opened an OpenSolaris Bookstore. If you order your copy of The OpenSolaris Bible through there, Amazon will give us a 5% commission that we'll use to fund Kiva gift certificates for use by the OpenSolaris Advocacy community. You can also bookmark this link and use it when you visit Amazon.

I was in Brussels at the weekend to attend FOSDEM, one of the handful of "real" Free software developer conferences I attend each year (another is LCA which I went to in Hobart two weeks ago). I was once again honoured to be able to briefly speak to the assembled audience as I did two years ago. This time I announced a small license change to some obscure code, written before the GPL was finalised, to fix a problem for Linux.

Why would that interest anyone? Well, the code in question is the original implementation of Sun RPC, which went on to become RFC 1057 and today is a core part of every UNIX-family operating system. Including Debian GNU/Linux.

The way the code was originally licensed was exceptionally liberal. Written in 1984 or earlier (before the GPL existed), it allowed unfettered use of the Sun RPC implementation in any program for any purpose. The only significant restriction imposed, entirely reasonable to most eyes then, was to say that the module itself could not be sold as-is, only as part of a larger work.

What was liberal is now conservative

Times change. During the 80s, Richard Stallman's Free Software movement established the four freedoms. During the 90s (1994-7), the Debian Free Software Guidelines established a need for the code in their distribution of GNU/Linux to be fully Free software. By the beginning of this decade, Debian maintainers were making a serious effort to audit the millions of lines of code in Debian for true DFSG compliance. And in 2002, they found the old Sun RPC code in core Linux files glibc and portmap.

Reading the history for Debian bug 181493 tells the next part of the story. Inside Sun, the challenge of finding the code in question was Just Too Hard, and the things reached an uneasy impasse.

The issue came back to life last year when the bug was re-asserted as part of the run-up to the Lenny release. I was contacted both by folk at Debian - notably my friend Ean Schuessler - and at Fedora asking if there was anything I could do to accelerate licensing of the old code. Both projects had decided to take a hard line and removing the code from glibc and portmap was going to be a real headache, especially for the stability of glibc.

Challenging

The task of relicensing old code can be pretty time consuming and involves people who are already much in demand.

• First, the old code is often very old. The people who wrote it are no longer with the company, it is no longer part of a current product, we sometimes can't even be sure it ever came from Sun. We have to find the original code if we're to make any progress at all. Doing so might mean retrieving crates of paper from long-term storage and crawling through them.
• Second, once the code is located, a legal expert has to look at the origins of the code and maybe once again crawl through retrieved paperwork to find the contracts behind the code. Their job is to determine if Sun actually has the right to change the license at all.
• Third, someone has to believe it is their job with respect to the code in question to act on Sun's behalf to evaluate the change, authorise it and bind the company officially.

With help both from Ean and friends at Debian and from the Fedora team at Red Hat, we managed to identify some modern OpenSolaris code that matched the code in Linux. This was a key step. It meant we could trace ownership through the comprehensive records for OpenSolaris and start the process moving. By last week, we finally reached the point where we felt comfortable to relicense the Sun code involved.

Relicensed

On Saturday I was able to tell Europe's Free Software developers that the licenses on the RPC code are no longer a barrier to Free software - we'll change the license to Sun's copyrights in the RPC code to a standard 3-clause BSD license, allowing inheritance of that licensing by both Debian and Fedora. I'm delighted to have been able to fix this problem, which arose not because of failure but because of the success of software freedom over many years and becuase of Sun's early commitment to it.

While I was in Australia I recorded this video with the essence of my talk about the third wave of free and open source software - the adoption-led trend, the freedom to leave, the way it's Stallman's four freedoms that are the root of the value for enterprise use of FOSS and the way Sun's new organisation can deliver the value needed to succeed with open source.

Check out the full page too. I'm checking with them what happened to the Ogg version.

The Register article reporting Ian Murdock's move to Sun's new cloud computing group seems to have irritated Ian and it does indeed seem to be an attempt to gather as many half-understood-half-facts as possible and sensationalize them.

Far from being a "shift in Sun's thinking from the open-source software mindset of two years back and into the nebulous cloud market", the restructure of Sun's business units (happened last November actually) demonstrates Sun moving to the next level with open source, since all three business units - that's the whole company, for those keeping count - are driven by the three viable open source business models:

Payment at the point of value

The Application Platforms group covers infrastructure software like JavaEE (Glassfish) and MySQL and its primary business model is the one I discussed a while back where Sun drives adoption of the software and then sells the means to sustain value as the customer scales deployment.

Open Source Firmware

The Systems group covers storage, servers and the software chiefly associated with them and sells high-value, low price-point systems where the open source software is the operating system or firmware. You could often make the same systems yourself if you wanted; Sun does it better, at lower cost and with full support. Take a look at Open Storage and its use of OpenSolaris, ZFS and DTrace to get the idea.

Cloud Computing/SaaS

The new Cloud Computing group that Ian has joined (leaving his job running developer marketing - he's not been at OpenSolaris for quite some time) plans to run its cloud on open source and sell a reliable, supported, scalable service over the network.

From this you'll see that, far from moving away from open source, Sun has put it at the heart of every business unit. Maybe that would have made for an even more sensational story if the journalist had asked?

Speaking at conferences like linux.conf.au (where I delivered a keynote last Friday) and OSCON is great fun. It's challenging to speak to an audience that's so diverse that it includes both the creator of the Linux kernel and students who just discovered it exists. It's humbling to know that the intelligence and achievement in the audience dwarfs anything I've ever done. And I admit that sometimes it's frustrating that there's a requirement for political correctness!

There are political correctness landmines littering this domain. For example, using the terms "open source" and "free software" is often taken as an indication of either one's cluefulness or of one's affiliation to a particular world-view. Personally, I consider the two expressions complementary - open source communities collaborate on a free software commons - but there's rarely a chance to explain that before I speak.

An especially frustrating one is the expression "intellectual property". The term is used widely in the business and legal communities, and it becomes second nature to speak of patents, copyright, trademarks and trade secrets collectively in this way. The problem with doing so is that the expression is factually wrong, and a legion of open source developers (you know, the ones working on free software) take the use of the phrase "intellectual property" as a genetic marker for "clueless PHB-type" at best and "evil oppressor of geeks" at worst.

Why is it wrong? Well, none of those things is really "property". In particular, copyright and patents are temporary privileges granted to creative people to encourage them to make their work openly available to society. The "social contract" behind them is "we'll grant you a temporary monopoly on your work so you can profit from it; in return you'll turn it over to the commons at the end of a reasonable period so our know-how and culture can grow."

Using the term "intellectual property" is definitely a problem. It encourages a mindset that treats these temporary privileges as an absolute right. This leads to two harmful behaviours:

• First, people get addicted to them as "property". They build business models that forget the privilege is temporary. They then press for longer and longer terms for the privilege without agreeing in return to any benefit for the commons and society.
• Second, they forget that one day they'll need to turn the material over to the commons. Software patents in particular contain little, if anything, that will be of value to the commons - no code, no algorithms, really just a list of ways to detect infringement.

Working on the legacy of this sociopathy is the subject for another time, but I believe we need to change the way we talk about the subject. Both Lakoff and Lewis agree; the words we use to describe things change the way we perceive them. The term we use probably needs to allow us to speak casually of "IP", so that we don't find every conversation to be a minefield of political correctness. Various suggestions have been made, but each of them seems to me to be so slanted to the opposite agenda that there's little chance of practitioners using them.

However, the term "intellectual privilege" seems to work. It's got the right initial letters, which is a huge win! But it also correctly describes the actual nature of the temporary rights we're considering. After having written most of this, I then searched to see if anyone else thought the same and found that someone is actually working on a book, endorsed by Lawrence Lessig, that has that as the title!

I doubt I will get the chance to explain all this before my next conference keynote. So if I don't, accept my apologies. When I said "IP" just now, I meant "intellectual privilege", and I think it's the right phrase for the job.

There's an interesting comment from 451 Group's Matthew Aslett on the five stages of community open source engagement that's worth reading. I've been using a model something like this for quite a while too. It's interesting to visit companies and see their reach and spread on this model, and to spot the distinctive signs of change that result.

It is resonant with a much older piece of research on the psychology of human belief systems (which works beyond just the religious since capitalism, for example, is also a belief system) by James Fowler in his book Stages of Faith from 1981. The two aren't identical but they suggest there's an underlying maturity model at work.

Aslett asks where Microsoft is placed in the model. Cal Evans responds

Having just returned from 3 days in Redmond discussing PHP on Windows with Microsoft, I agree that Microsoft cannot be pinned to a single stage on this chart. However, realistically, even their forward thinking divisions are no farther along than contribute. I would spread them between denial and contribute with denial being the majority and contribute being the long tail.

They will likely operate at different levels of maturity in different areas of their life as well. This is not a bad thing, and one of the risks of using a "maturity model" is the temptation to treat the later stages as "better". When we do this, instead of valuing and supporting people in the lower-numbered stages, we treat them as "in need of growth".

Maturity Spread and Reach

It's easy to forget that corporations (and indeed large non-profits) are not people, but are rather a vehicle for the collective expression of the vision of many individuals. Things happen not because a faceless corporation somehow chooses to act, but because of the persuasive decisions of actual people, acting within their belief systems. Every good - and bad - decision ultimately goes back to an individual somewhere.

In any collective group, there will be a maturity reach and spread. The "reach" is the furthest stage the most pioneering individual of any influence has been able to take a team. The "spread" will be the range of stages the collective grouping is willing to tolerate existing within itself (there may - will - be isolated earlier and later stages too). Thus in the example Aslett seeks of Microsoft, the reach is to stage 3 on the data in the comments (I would actually suggest recent staff changes may even push that to stage 4) and the spread is back to stage 1 with the weighted centre around stage 1. In Sun, the reach is stage 5 and the spread goes back to stage 1 and is weighted around the stage 3-4 boundary. This is also a fractal effect, exhibited within the groups that comprise each organisation.

That's why I expect Sun, Microsoft, IBM and other corporations to be inconsistent in their approach to open source. I also expect to find that in large groups like Apache and Eclipse there will be a good deal of inconsistency of view. I get very suspicious of attempts to make open source engagement appear uniform across such a wide spread of activities. Both the model Aslett reports on and the work Fowler did in 1981 suggest to me that real engagement will be diverse. And that's actually a good thing.

This has been a time for anniversaries. It's been 25 years since Richard Stallman started the GNU Project, 40 years since Doug Engelbart demonstrated the future of computing at "the Mother of All Demos." Both of these are profoundly important moments in the future of technology, but the anniversary I think is most important to celebrate - and which has appeared least in my news feeds this week - is the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948.

This document is one of the most important documents created in the 20th century, delimiting the unarguable rights of every person, and doing it in cool, clear prose. Flowing out of revulsion at the excesses of the Second World War, it sets a benchmark that is still vibrantly relevant to world society. For example, it makes clear that the Guantanamo concentration camp that the US is still running is abhorrent (see articles 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 - even arguing articles 3 and 28 implicitly allow it is dealt with in article 30). It casts light on the US wiretaps and the UK's surveillance society (article 12 supported by articles 7 and 11), on the TSA (article 13), on internet filtering (articles 18 & 19) and on so many more issues.

The more I look at it, the more convinced I am that this visionary document, born from the lessons humanity wanted to learn after the horrors of 1939-45, is a source text that can guide so much we're all trying to achieve. As we're working on the future, be it Web 2.0, rebuilding our political life in the west  or freedom for Tibet, I'm struck that the Declaration is a primary source document against which to measure our intent and action.

Following up on a conversation on Twitter recently, Stephen O'Grady has a useful defence of Redmonk's practice of licensing their copyrights initially under a Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commercial/Share-Alike license (CC-BY-NC-SA) and then downgrading to CC-BY-SA after sixty days. A number of people commented they thought that the "NC" clause wasn't sufficiently defined and was therefore useless. I posted a comment there and thought I should expand it a little, so...

The problem here is similar to the one people have understanding open source licenses. We have got very used to the role of a license as being to define the parameters for a bilateral relationship. But as Eben Moglen has pointed out, open source licenses are more about defining the context of shared values for a community, and when we see them that way choices become much easier. For example, for me, choosing the license for the Java platform was fairly easy once I realised the primary goal was to open up the GNU/Linux world for Java developers.

CC licenses are not so much about defining exact terms for a bilateral relationship as defining the bounds of a multi-lateral relationship, a sharing community. They can still define bilateral relationships, and well enough that many people find it easy to understand them only in terms of playing that role. But as I tweeted at the time of the original conversation, the CC license is there to tell you when you have to go ask for rights as much as it is there to give you rights.

So the non-commercial clause has massive value, because it tells your community the point at which they need to go ask for rights. Stephen has some fantastic examples of it working in practice that I'll not repeat here (I share the Schmap experience). The NC clause is part of a scheme of multi-lateral licensing. As soon as it's not clear rights are available, go ask - people who use CC licenses are usually delighted to help and almost always prefer to make things work than to get legalistic. But to understand Creative Commons, I suggest reading that "CC" as "community-centric".

I wrote recently about the Sun Model for open source business, my high-level overview of how Sun is working with open source.

To summarise:

1. remove barriers to software adoption between download and deploy;
2. encourage a large and cohesive community of software deployers;
3. deliver, for a fee, the means to create value between deploy and scale, for those who need it.

I've had a number of comments and questions about that third phase. It can include all kinds of value-creation, depending on the product in question. Here are some examples of delivering value for people who have already deployed and are heading towards scale:

• For Solaris and OpenSolaris, Sun offers subscriptions that include the updates, support and warrantly that allows deployers to get the maximum up-time and performance for the minimum cost. You can get the same results yourself by hiring experts to do the work for you, but the Sun subscriptions save money and time.
  
• For MySQL,there is the same sort of deal with the addition of software features needed only by those between deploy and scale, such as MySQL Enterprise Monitor.
  
• For Glassfish, again, there is a subscription offering that's perfect for those who have taken the decision to deploy and now want the greatest value with the least fuss.
  
• ... and so on, across the portfolio.

...and hardware too

But it would be a mistake to believe Sun's open source strategy is only about software. As has been frequently explained, Sun is a systems company, and the news last week and today underlines that fact by showing two new ways Sun is offering value for those between deploy and scale:

• Systems for MySQL

  Recently, the first database servers optimised for MySQL were made available. For MySQL users who have moved beyond initial deployment and are now looking for high performance servers with rock solid support at great price points, these are excellent. They are optional, but I'd wager most people will save money and create more value by graduating to them for some applications.
  

• Unified Storage

  Today's huge news is the release of the new Sun Storage 7000 Series. These new storage appliances create value by combining open source software with commodity hardware and very clever programming and hardware design to deliver low cost storage appliances with great performance. And the use of open source means the extra access protocols other storage vendors try to charge for are included free.
  

There's plenty more to say on this subject.  For Sun, open source is not a matter of warm statements of alignment while we carry on with the same old business or keep our core products proprietary. I hope it's becoming clear that the Sun Model is a directional matter.

Another milestone on the Open Document journey was just announced. Sun and IBM are joining together to sponsor the new ODF Toolkit Union, a collaborative community to develop the tools software developers need to support ODF in their applications. The goal is to make it very easy for any application to embrace ODF and to do so with a collaboratively-developed codebase so that it's really easy to make interoperable documents.

There's a substantial initial code donation there from Sun, including an ODF DOM and a .Net ODF library, all licensed under the Apache License v2. There is also an ODF validator, to help developers check the documents they create are correctly constructed.

Hopefully this will catalyse participation by a very wide range of developers, and promote the spread of document creators and consumers that work smoothly together. If I can clarify things for any organisation wanting to join the Union, get in touch by e-mail (details at the foot of the page). And if you're at ApacheCon, come and find me today and ask.

I gave an interview to a journalist last week in response to the research that the European Commission's Open Source Observatory publicised in Malaga last week and the corresponding draft procurement guidelines (thanks to Roberto for the pointers to the Malaga news). I was at the conference but a scheduling conflict prevented me attending IDABC's session, which I regret.

Good News

I very much welcome the guidelines; as I have been saying for well over a year now, the first step to encouraging the use of Free/open source software in the public sphere is to facilitate the adoption-led model in addition to the procurement-driven model, at the very least to the extent of encouraging two-phase procurement. As Rishab pointed out (although not with the same words), there are also the issues of substitutability and the freedom to leave, which I believe it's fundamental for a public administration to consider.

Substitutability guarantees citizens access to government without being forced to trade with a single vendor in order to do so, and the freedom to leave ensures public administrations always have the negotiating power to get the best deal for taxpayers. The guidelines begin to address those issues as well - great news.

Concerns

The journalist went on to ask me about all the documented procurement violations. It seems that:

Of a sample of 3615 software tenders that were published between January and August this year, 36 percent request Microsoft software, 20 percent ask for Oracle, 12 percent mention IBM applications, 11 percent request SAP and 10 percent are asking for applications made by Adobe.

That's bad enough, and likely illegal in most cases, but then it also turns out:

According to Gosh, software tenders often have either implicit or explicit bias for software brands or even specific applications. Of a thousand government IT organisations, 33 percent said compatibility with previously acquired software is the most important criterion when selecting new applications. Ghosh: "This implicit vendor-lock in means that a tender, meant to last for only five years, leads to a contractual relation lasting ten, fifteen years or more."

Most concerning of all, however, was that despite this all being completely transparent and public, the Commission is doing nothing about it. They regard the problem as being one that the competitors of the favoured companies should address through the courts. That would be fine if the market was largely functional and there were only rare cases of abuse.

But it's not. The improper procurement activity is endemic, and until that's addressed any competitor attempting to act through the courts is likely to find themselves discriminated against even further. It's never good to sue your customers (as the music industry is finding), and in a market where the customers can specify you out of the running with impunity, it's suicidal. Moreover, it can take years for the courts to make a ruling, which means even more lost opportunity for competing companies - assuming they can survive the wait. Until the European Commission takes adequate corrective actions to address this disease, there is no step in the current software market condition that any competitor is likely to take to address it.

Recourse?

Given the scale of the disadvantage already present, why would any player want to make their position worse? In the report of the interview the Commission representative says: "There are sufficient ways for companies and other organisations to protect their rights." He may be right, but they aren't being used by the FOSS community and the reason is that the abuse is too extensive for anyone to want to make the first move.

I'm delighted by the fact the new procurement guidelines exist, but personally I want to see direct action to establish them - it can't be left up to those already disadvantaged. I wonder if anyone has the stomach for it?

As time has gone by, a clear "Sun Model" for open source business has been emerging, at least to my eyes. The summary of it is:

1. remove barriers to software adoption between download and deploy;
2. encourage a large and cohesive community of software deployers;
3. deliver, for a fee, the means to create value between deploy and scale, for those who need it.

Each software team at Sun interprets this model in a slightly different way, but the model holds pretty much everywhere and works regardless of the license for the code. As a business model, it doesn't have much to say about the nature of the development community, but I believe dysfunction in that area is a barrier to adoption so it's always an issue if dysfunction exists.

This model is the natural progression of the concept of monetising at the point of value, and I hope to explore it more over the coming weeks. Feel free to ask questions below about the things needing clarification.

At the ODF Workshop last week, a number of the delegates were asking about the right way to handle archiving of their documents. Obviously ODF offers a baseline file format that promises long-term readability and editability, but the question remains of how best to handle files. With the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0, there are now two alternatives, and we heard at the conference of a third alternative coming in the future from ODF.

1. ODF plus PDF

   Most of the archivists I have spoken to have insisted that one should always keep the original document in its original format, regardless of other choices. The easiest option for archiving is to retain the original file, with an optional copy filtered to ODF if the original is not in ODF, and then accompany the file with a PDF image. Technology exists to automatically create all this.

2. PDF Container

   OpenOffice.org includes extensive new PDF handling features, including PDF/A support, access to PDF's distribution and use controls and the ability to include the original ODF in a "container" inside a "hybrid PDF". This last feature offers a fine archiving alternative, where a single file is created but within it the original ODF is retained for future use.

3. Read-Only ODF

   At the workshop, we heard from Jomar Silva on the future of ODF 1.2. One of the features he described was signed, read-only ODF, allowing the preservation of the document exactly as used (it's on slide 4).

Choosing which to use is obviously a decision for each archiving authority, but the richness of the new PDF support means that the options open to arhcivists just grew enormously.

If you've been wondering where I have got to (go on, humour me), the answer is I am miles from home in South Africa where I came on Tuesday to participate in the second International ODF Workshop. The South African government were perfect, gracious and attentive hosts, personified in conference co-chair Aslam Raffee, and the attendees were from a wide range of countries.

Content highlights for me were hearing from the Belgian and Brazilian delegations on their progress with adopting ODF as a standard; the infectious enthusiasm of Justice Singh from the high court in Allahabad, India speaking of how and why his court is embracing ODF; practical, sensible questions from so many people; and the announcement from the Venezuelan delegation of their decision to adopt ODF.

The event also encouraged me to think about the words that will shape the global ODF adoption community going forward. My presentation, Seven Words, traced a little of the history of both ODF and the Free and open source software communities that created it. It went on to consider adoption philosophies and practicalities, including a sketch of a migration plan I created by consolidating the various stories I heard from adopters on the first day.

Marino Marcich of the ODF Alliance pointed out that there are now organisations from 62 countries represented in his membership, and I'm left with the strong of impression of a growing global community of practice in governments of every kind, both politically and geographically. From small roots ODF has grown to both a global movement and a strong technology, spreading wherever fair-minded people are willing to take a stand. It's been worth the trip.

I speak at loads of conferences, but there's one I have been attending for nearly a decade which I'd like to recommend you consider. Every year I go the content is spot on, and I know I have to find new insights for the audience in my annual keynote because they are all probably more qualified to be speaking than I am.

This conference:

• Features technical sessions of depth and current relevance to practicing enterprise software developers without hyping a particular fad;
• Features speakers who are current practitioners, all of whom have high speaker-quality ratings from previous events;
• Schedules each talk to run two or three times so you can attend everything you want to;
• Includes a daily open town-hall meeting for questions and problem solving;
• Is a favoured destination for long-term open source contributors, especially from Apache;
• Just announced they will be making the most of Apple dropping the iPhone NDA to include an iPhone developer track with real code from real developers;
• Is a non-partisan, privately-run event with no exhibits, no "sponsors" skewing the agenda and no marketing hype allowed and no marketing droids presenting;
• Has been running for seventeen years paid for solely by attendee fees, and has the highest repeat attendee rate of any event I know;
• Is a family affair, run by a family for their extended family of friends and soon-to-be-friends;
• Is held in a beautiful high mountain retreat where everyone, delegates and speakers, stay all week and meet and eat together. Delegates go home with a rich contact list as a result;
• Has great food;
• Is probably the best technical conference in the world.

If you're an enterprise developer with a leaning towards open source and the Java platform (in all its modern incarnations), you should consider attending this event, despite the fact I will be presenting a keynote there for the ninth time. Try Dave Landers for a second opinion.

The event?  Colorado Software Summit, in Keystone, Colorado. I hope I'll see you there.

It's Tuesday so that means LiveMink. I got the chance to speak with Dave Johnson last week and catch up on his work building Project SocialSite, a social graph framework exposed as widgets and web services for use by websites wanting to build collaborative communities. Both technically interesting and destined to be an important part of the social media scene, I'll be looking forward to seeing SocialSite in action.

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You may have seen that version 3 of OpenOffice.org is nearly ready for release - I am now running release candidate 2 and finding it ideal for work. Along with the new release, there's an important change emerging in OpenOffice.org development. For the last 18 months or so, the team has avoided adding significant new features to the core code, focussing instead in performance and usability improvements as well as on preparing a full, native Aqua port of OpenOffice.org to Mac OS X. That hasn't meant that innovation has stopped, however. Instead, the developers have been able to devise valuable new functions for OpenOffice.org without having to mess around inside the (undeniably complex) core code.

The result has been the emergence of many add-ons for all parts of OpenOffice.org and all supported platforms, by virtue of the Add-On Manager and the powerful platform-neutral UNO API offered by OpenOffice.org. After a discussion with Allison Randal on identi.ca about which tools to use, I thought I'd spend a little time while I wait here at the airport describing the add-ons I find are essential.

1. Presenter Console

   My absolute favourite add-on is the Presenter Console. This adds a new display mode to Impress so that, when using an external monitor (i.e. a projector) the laptop screen differs from the external display. While the audience sees the slides being presented, the presenter sees the slide sequence, speaker notes and a timer and is able to navigate directly to slides if necessary. It's a familiar function with some other packages but it revolutionises Impress as a presentation tool and I have been using it constantly since it first appeared.

2. PDF Importer

   Next favourite is the PDF Import Extension. As the name implies, this enables OpenOffice.org to import PDF files so that the text they contain can be edited. It's not perfect, not least because it imports into the layout tool (Draw) but it has proven so useful time and time again when I have been supplied with a "dead" PDF file from which I have needed to derive some "live" text.

3. Presentation Minimiser

   The Presentation Minimiser can be a real problem-solver. I use photographs extensively in my presentations, and the resulting ODT files can be absolutely huge. This add-on does its best to make the file the minimum size possible by removing unused templates, rescaling graphics and doing other tricks to eliminate wastage. Having it on-hand is essential for me when I need to e-mail presentations to other people.

4. Template Packs

   One of the common criticisms of OpenOffice.org when compared with other packages was that it didn't include templates to allow people to build appealing presentations. Sun included commercially-created templates in StarOffice, but has now paid the originators for permission to make the two template packs freely available to all OpenOffice.org users. Template Pack 1 will be familiar to many StarOffice users; Template Pack 2 includes a range of newer templates and is my favourite. The packs are also available in a range of languages in addition to English.

There are plenty of other add-ons available and which I'm gradually trying, but these are the ones that have become part of my work style. Individually, each of these add-ons has been very helpful for me. Together, they represent a set of power tools I'd not be able to get by without any more.

If you survived the knockabout discussion in Tuesday's podcast, you'll want to give this second episode a chance. It was recorded during JavaOne this spring at the Sun Open Source Party ("unBOF") in the Thirsty Bear pub in San Francisco. It features Redmonk founder James Governor, Joe Hildebrand of Jabber (acquired by Cisco since the recording), Ross Turk of SourceForge, Silona Bonewald of the League of Technical Voters (among other things) and myself. We discuss all sorts of random stuff in a random way - hope you like it!

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I'm delighted to see that Sun India is repeating the Code For Freedom Contest again this year. It's a scheme to directly reward contributions to a selection of open source communities by citizens of India, and was very popular last year. This is in addition to the various participating communities in the Sun Open Source Innovation Awards, which are just now announcing winners.

Since today is a travel day for me and I'm unlikely to find a chance to blog, I thought you might be interested to hear this podcast recorded during JavaOne this spring at the Sun Open Source Party in the Thirsty Bear pub in San Francisco. It features a round-table discussion with uber-journalist David Berlind, Redmonk founder James Governor and his colleague Michael Coté and myself in a raucous and opinionated discussion about whatever came to mind. There's another episode coming soon.

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Update: Episode 2 now online.

This is by way of a pointer to the podcast for those only subscribing to LiveMink.

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It's Software Freedom Day, and among the many other volunteers around the world, Sun-sponsored students have been working hard on their campuses to prepare for the opportunity to cry Freedom! One of the questions that came up was why students should care about software freedom; here's the answer Lowell Sachs and I came up with.

The growing popularity of free and open source software offers advantages and opportunities to students (as well as developers, users, and budding entrepreneurs) all along the adoption curve. Many will already recognize that the future for society is one of digital liberty, where every user of digital technology is a possible creator, and where all creators in the digital medium are, by definition, users. The open source model fits in perfectly with this emerging reality. In fact, the remarkable success of open source is the result of a feature that is at once a key characteristic of the program and a fundamental pursuit of people everywhere... freedom.

Software Freedom

Many people, if asked to name the main appeal of open source software would reflexively point to the fact that it is free of charge, and thus a good way to save money. However, it is a different kind of ‘free’ that lies at the heart of the open source movement -- the freedom to acquire, adapt, tinker, develop and deploy code (applications) without the restrictions traditionally associated with proprietary offerings. All the best virtues of open source software are really derivatives of this kind of ‘free’ (as in liberty) rather than simply ‘free’ as in price … although the savings are certainly a nice draw as well.

On the academic front, open source software can serve as a real boon to the student looking to sharpen his or her skills or excel in a class. Those looking to build a career in IT will find open source software the perfect virtual laboratory to build skills or explore new ideas without the constraints and prohibitions that come with proprietary programs. Break it down, build it up, throw in something new. Hit a brick wall?... No problem. Try a different approach. It's yours to play with.

This freedom can come in as handy for those working on a supervised project as it will for those trying to seize a share of a new market. Looking for a little enlightenment outside of lectures? Open source software is there as well. It empowers independent learning by letting you tinker with the code on your own schedule and your own system -- no professor necessary.

Entrepreneurs

Looking for an application that does what you actually need it to do? Gone are the days of having to hope that a large corporate player will develop and offer for sale a program that you want, only to discover that it is at a price you can't afford. And when you find it doesn't quite live up to the hype? No longer will people have to wait for expensive and imprecise updates or patches to fix their applications. When source code is shared and distributed freely under an open source license, anyone is allowed to use, modify and reproduce that code on a non-discriminatory basis.

With open source software you get to decide what to create and when to release it. Then your friends and peers can fine tune and improve upon it with the fruits of all this labor being offered back out to the general community... at no cost. Where will the next YouTube come from, or FaceBook or Wikipedia? It may just come from you. And now you don't need tons of capital and corporate infrastructure to launch that next great innovation. All you need is inspiration.

Transparency With Privacy

The emergence of open source promises a world marked by several digital freedoms -- the freedom to participate, collaborate, create, use and deploy. Open source communities can enable students to connect with each other and collaborate across the boundaries of geography and culture in a way that benefits all of society. Part of this emerging reality is a shift from the old model of security with secrecy, where lack of access to a program's source code often (ironically) spawned vulnerabilities and restricted choice, toward a new paradigm of transparency coupled with privacy, where communities can flourish while assuring quality and protection to their members.

It is a world of expanded opportunity, increased flexibility, and continual innovation. Keep your money - Release your ideas - Build a business - Launch a community - Start a movement! The barriers to entry (and exit) are down, new horizons are emerging, and the climate for innovation is more welcoming than it has ever been. Jump in!

I'm in Amsterdam today where I've been giving a keynote at the HollandOpen conference. As it happens, I just had the pleasure of discussing the open society with journalist Brenno de Winter. We sat with our R-09 recorders head-to-head and we're both publishing. His is of course more polished :-)

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of discussing Free software and Software Freedom Day with co-ordinator Pia Waugh, John Sullivan of the FSF and Jono Bacon of Canonical. The podcast has some rather nasty background noises caused by the telephone system, but some interesting conversation. Software Freedom Day is this Saturday, do join in - there are local events all over the world, including many sponsored by Sun!

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As part of a series of open source activities around Software Freedom Day, Sun quietly rolled out a cool new open source facility this week. Before I tell you about it, I should mention I've been part of the revived discussion considering open source license proliferation and the Open Source Initiative (OSI). As you may recall, I am keen to fix the problem of the proliferation of open source licenses, even to the extent to asking OSI to regard two Sun-created licenses (SISSL and SPL) as no longer for active use.

License Choice

One of the approaches advocated in that discussion is to run open source hosting facilities that only allow a subset of licenses, making most licenses unavailable to new projects. While the ideology behind the selection may appear sound, I think that's the wrong direction to take. If OSI is to have any relevance in the future, we all need to respect its decisions and strengthen its authority. If we think they were or are now wrong decisions, we need to help OSI put its house in order and not usurp its authority and put ourselves unilaterally in the place of arbiters of what is a "true" open source license.

That's why I'm pleased to say that the new community hosting system Sun opened for beta this week, Project Kenai, uses the OSI License (Anti-)Proliferation Committee's report as the basis for license selection for new communities.

When you create a new hosted project, Kenai offers first of all the "recommended" licenses ("Licenses that are popular and widely used or with strong communities"). If you're looking for a specific license, you can "grow" the list to show the rest of the OSI-approved licenses. Finally the deprecated/retired licenses are available if you specifically request to use them (since OSI doesn't un-approve licenses). Hopefully this approach will cause new projects which don't have a specific license in mind to choose from the small pool of common licenses, while at the same time allowing existing communities to use the licenses they already prefer.

Community Hosting

Project Kenai is pretty interesting in all sorts of other ways, of course, not least that it's a Ruby on Rails application. Tim has some of the technical details on his blog. We created it because we realised that, with Sun involved in upwards of 750 different open source projects, acting as host for some reasonable number of them, we needed to have some hosting infrastructure of our own. It also gave us an opportunity to build a large-scale site using modern techniques, as well as to offer the facility as a service to the open source community at large.

It's more than just a "forge" offering Subversion and Mercurial - it includes infrastructure for social networking within and between communities as well, and the development team is continuing to enhance these. They're not quite ready to open the doors to new projects yet, but if you have a project you would like to host there, please contact me for an invitation to the beta programme and get in on the ground floor. And of course you are invited to explore the system and to join in with existing projects if you want - no invitation is needed to do either of those things. Take a look especially at the new xVM Server project, launched yesterday.

Over the past week the question of who pays for open source and whether it faces a tragedy of the commons in the future has kept coming up. There seems an instinctive acceptance that open source is a charitable venture that should seek collective donations like any other non-profit. I don't think the tragedy of the commons applies to a true open source community, and I think the assumption it's all done "for free" is a mistake.

Three Threads

Three threads came together for me this evening from diverse sources:

1. Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail, is now blogging his way to his new book about the impact of "free". I've found the posting stimulating and insightful and I'm finding the blog as valuable as his earlier "long tail" series. His posting last week about the three basic economic models involving getting something without paying was very clear, laying out all the approaches I could think of for leveraging "gratis". But at the end he made me wonder if he's completely clear about the "Free" in open source meaning "liberty" and not "price". The trigger was when he suggested the third model - "freemium" - was the model behind

   open source's "support included" commercial versions of Linux.

   While the models he describes can certainly apply to products delivered to consumers, I am not so sure they apply to the commons at the heart of peer production of which Yochai Benkler wrote.
2. As it happens, I am currently reading Clay Shirky's (excellent) book Here Comes Everybody, which explores commons-based peer production in terms far more acessible than Benkler. I have reached the chapter called "Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production", which largely uses Wikipedia as an example¹. Clay's book so far has been an ode to the power-law curve, and this chapter pointed out how the attribute of collaborative communities that, characteristically for power-law contexts, 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people (with one or two doing 80% of the work done by that 20%)². Looking at Anderson's third diagram it's clear he's talking about the same sort of phenomenon.
3. The third thread came from several conversations in different contexts about cash donations to open source communities. I have been being a a nuisance on some open source boards I participate in over accepting large donations from non-participants in return for giving them recognition. I've been asserting that it's not right to allow outsiders to gain the benefit of being seen as part of a community just because they made a large financial contribution. I still stand by that assertion, despite getting considerable push-back from several people whose opinions I respect.

Paying Your Own Way

These three threads all come together in the observation that open source is what happens when several different people choose to work together on the same code base rather than working separately. Each of them is there for their own reasons; each covers their own costs and contributes the code they choose to. There is no pooling of funds to pay for work to be done because everyone is solely responsible for their own costs.

As a consequence, there is no fiscal power that any contributor holds over others, so no-one has the right to tell the others what to do. An open source community is an example of a group of people choosing to synchronise their mutual interests, each at their own expense, for the benefit of all involved including themselves³. While there may be a non-profit organisation for administrative reasons, an open source community is not a non-profit or a for-profit.

Now, if the motivation of one or two of the participants is to then offer the software as part of a "freemium" plan, that doesn't mean the whole project is there to serve their activity. That's just the motivation of one or two participants at work. They are not giving away their work without payment; they are giving away the contents of the commons at the same price at which they acquired it.

As long as their activity doesn't "take over" and disrupt the interests of others, no-one minds too much. Your motivations for participating are rarely my business. There's a "long tail" out there too, made of a large number of others who have their own motivations to be there and who are covering their own costs as a part of executing on those motivations. And the commons isn't spoiled in any way by being more widely used.

If that's the case, allowing a donor to give only money to be able to use the community's "brand" flies in the face of the basic dynamic of the community. Whuffie is not for sale. I understand that some communities have created an adjunct non-profit, and that body can use the money for socially useful things like hosting or employing a facilitator. But the money that's needed ought to be coming from the community members themselves, not from an outsider trying to wrap themselves in the community's "flag". The community is only about contributing as far as that is about collaborating.

Mesh of Motives

Any open source project that actually has a co-developer community is thus not an example of Anderson's third model because profit doesn't come into it. Some of the contributors might be, but the community as a whole is actually a mesh of different participants, all with their own motivational models and all paying their own way to achieve them outside the context of the community. If those motivational models involve business, I am sure they will be about payment at the point of value. But the community itself is about the liberty to align interests, not about the presence or absence of profit. Once again "free" deceives english speakers...

1. All the way through the chapter I've been wondering the effect of the strong Wikipedia culture. Shirky somewhat idealises contribution and the fact that there's an inner circle of "Wikipedians" taking actions like deleting non-notable entries rather than developing them isn't reflected.
2. When I read about this at the end of last year it was a small revelation: whenever you see an 80/20 rule at work, there's an underlying power-law curve involved. I wonder how I had managed to miss this for so long.
3. Before I get accused again of saying open source doesn't involve altruism, let me be clear that I don't think that. I do, however, reject the definition of altruism as being "an act that benefits other but not me."

Last week I had an enjoyable conversation with my old friend Randall Schwartz on Leo Laporte's TWiT.tv (which to my surprise was broadcast libe too). It was published on Friday, although I've not had the chance to listen yet as I am connected to the internet via dial-up for the weekend.

The conversation - discussing Sun's open source strategy - is one I have had so many times over the last few months that I wonder if it would be worth writing a book. If you have the time to listen to the podcast, I'd be interested in your thoughts as to whether a book about the third wave of open source and its impact on the software business would be worthwhile. Let me know, by comment or e-mail.

Today marks the start of celebrations for the 25th anniversary of GNU. It took a long time to get a working operating system, and a new paradigm to get it adopted, but the tenacious idealism of RMS has bourne fruit.

Like Barton, I am especially delighted that the Java platform has gone from being a case study in closedness to being the chosen technology for hosting the birthday video by polymathic British actor Stephen Fry.

I got a comment this week from someone asking why OpenSolaris didn't accept commits from community members. The fact that a reasonably well-informed individual could ask that question suggests there are some misunderstandings that need clearing up. I've been investigating the current status.

Already Open

First, the question itself is wrong - OpenSolaris accepts commits from outside Sun. Both Subversion and Mercurial have been available on OpenSolaris.org for a couple of years now so that projects there can host their source code. Indeed, one of the significant new-code updates in OpenSolaris - the integration of ksh93 - was accomplished mainly by Roland Mainz and his sponsor April Chin with support from a range of community members, who put in a huge amount of work and achieved integration into the OpenSolaris code in build 72 in August 2007.

Multiple projects are being developed in the open on the site with source code repositories out there using one or the other. Individual projects grant commit rights using whatever method they choose. There are multiple examples of non-Sun people having direct commit rights on projects - one that comes to mind is Shawn Walker on IPS before he became a Sun employee.

Sponsor System

While many of the code groupings in OpenSolaris (consolidations) have been publishing source code for a while now, the version control systems (VCS) used by some of the OpenSolaris consolidations are still inside the Sun intranet at the moment, having completed their move from the old closed system to Mercurial (with much help from Richard Lowe). Changes to those must be done by a Sun volunteer - this is what the sponsor program is for. The outside person can work on the code (for the "ON" consolidation, using the Mercurial mirror repository that has been available for about a year), make changes, test, do a code review in the open, and so on.

The Sun sponsor is needed to update the bug tracking system inside Sun (although we now have a public one that many projects are using) and do the actual putback. The request-sponsor table lists the 600+ contributions offered to date via the sponsor program and their status (~43% integrated; ~20% in progress).

In Transition

ON has transitioned to using Mercurial as its VCS as of this month. The tentative date for ON to move its VCS to the public internet is the end of October. Companion CD and JDS have been outside since 2006 (they use Subversion). G11N has been outside since 2007 (they use Mercurial). The new install code has been outside since it started; it's been developed in the open. Publications has a gate with source for four books so far (opened this Spring). I didn't get status reports from some of the consolidations, most importantly SFW, and I think it's important from them to move as soon as possible.

Summary

The summary is that OpenSolaris has been accepting commits from community members pretty much from the moment the source was published. Of necessity there were Sun employees inserted in the flow when the project opened because the VCS in use was closed source and internal. In the years since then the process has gradually been getting easier and easier. Having the gates internal to Sun certainly hasn't helped growth, but it was unavoidable. That is finally getting fixed.

The Sponsor system itself is actually a great idea and is now working better than ever before. Like Jim I think it should be retained - and populated with experienced developers regardless of employer - even when all the gates are publicly accessible. Even in the world of Linux it's hard to get started as a contributor and the Sponsor system provides a great pathway.

One of the perennial problems of sponsoring an open source conference is that the organisers always seem to want the sponsorship to pay for an exhibition booth. Exhibition booths need furnishing and decorating. They need things to exhibit. They need staffing. Most of this would be fine at a traditional exhibition, but at an open source conference there aren't many people attending to choose things to buy and thus the sales staff aren't keen to do all the above.

So what should we do with that booth? An approach we first tried at FISL a few years ago was to stop treating it as a selling space and start treating it as a social space. This year at OSCON in Portland we've decided to open up and dedicate our booth to hosting a micro-unconference. We've set it up with whiteboards, tables, electrical outlets and fresh coffee. And if having a place to veg isn't enough, we've invited all comers to deliver lightning talks throughout the two days. There are still a few slots on the agenda if you want to deliver a talk, but the quality of the speakers already listed is high (check out Monty's talk on Maria for example).

By the way, the legendary (or is that "mythical") Sun FOSS Party is back again this year, 8pm in the parking garage at the Doubletree hotel on Wednesday (July 23). Loads of cool diversions and I gather there is plenty more to drink this year than last. All welcome.

I'm in Portland, Oregon this weekend for an interesting meeting, but I'll not be able to stay on for OSCON this year because a change of my role at Sun necessitates attending a meeting in California that's a direct conflict with OSCON. It's not an especially closely-kept secret but I've now moved from Sun's software group and taken the Chief Open Source Officer role over to a newly-formed team reporting more directly to the CEO and working on Sun's relationships with communities globally.

The new team comprises some of Sun's best experts in open standards, open IPR and open source. It's called the Sun Open Technologies Practice, and in particular manages the Sun standards and open source websites. It allows us to take a more holistic approach to Sun's engagement in open standards and open source, especially in the area of influencing open standards bodies to have IPR policies that allow - or even encourage - open source implementation.

I'll let the new members of my team use their own channels to say they have joined, but suffice to say I'm excited by the challenging new opportunities this presents around the world.

Having held fire for a few days to make sure I was cool-headed, I was about to go to comment on a poisonous little posting on a ZDNet journalist blog. I wrote a cool-headed reply and clicked "post".

Then I found that despite the appearance of openness (no hint on the comment form of all this), ZDNet has no interest in "community comment". They are actually cynically trying to capture reader data so they can "monetise" it.

To post a comment, I would have to go through a multi-step registration process and fill out the form shown over to the right (which requires personal information including a postal address, requires I accept their EULA and is set to "opt in" for spam by default - I have annotated the version on Flickr if you click through). There's no way I am doing that. I suggest you take the same attitude to them and avoid giving them any sort of support until they fix this cynical community attitude.

The most delicious irony though is they were criticising me for poor community skills...

I'm not sure what it is that's making ZDNet treat the interviews I gave last month in Australia as new news, but to be clear, the comments they are reporting and that Slashdot and DZone have been trying to spin as divisive are nothing of the sort (if this all passed you by, please ignore - I'm not in the mode to give any of the above any link love). I note Rich Sharples is also helping tidy up. The work the IcedTea folks did to make OpenJDK 6 capable of passing the TCK have been contributed back to the OpenJDK community and are being integrated.

People are working together just the way one would hope they would. My previous comments about JDK diversity hold. And my delight that we finally have a Free, compatible Java implementation based on shared, open source code is still making me smile, as the audience here in Zürich for Jazoon saw this morning.

For all of you who dislike my daily link postings, here is an Atom feed you can subscribe to (and a web page you can view too) that gives you all the Mink without the Links.

Yesterday was a landmark that plenty of us have been working towards for nearly a decade. As MR and I have been indicating for a while now, the remaining obstacles to a fully compatible and Free implementation of Java SE have all been removed by efforts like renegotiating the terms for the source of Java 2D and various community members (Sun and others) re-implementing some of the other code.

But the proof is in the fruit of the process, and yesterday it was confirmed that the implementation of OpenJDK 6 that the Fedora community has packaged does indeed pass the TCK. This is a huge achievement for everyone who has been involved - the Fedora team that Rich mentions in that last link, the team that MR leads at Sun, the team that I lead, plus the many, many people who have worked for a Free Java for so many years.

Some may fear, as Fabrizio does, that this (and the many GNU/Linux, OpenSolaris and BSD packages that will follow) will lead to such a diverse set of Java implementations that "write once, run everywhere" is doomed. I don't agree.

What made Java so compatible, in my view, was the fact that almost all versions found in the wild were built with Sun's class libraries even if they used a different VM. With Sun opening the reference implementation and then the community taking it on and embracing it, we now have that same basic code-base at the root of Free implementations everywhere. And we now have the benefits of community diversity to ensure many eyes are making bugs shallow and that innovation is accelerated.

Free, compatible Java everywhere. That's exactly what we all wanted, and we have it at last.

We've been considering refreshing the OpenSolaris community governance in the light of experience. During the OGB meetings, I have made the following proposal a few times, so thought it would be good to write about it and see what people think.

I think the OpenSolaris governance needs to be simplified. We should move to an approach of "drawing a line around existing practice" rather than trying to invent a new system and force-fit everything that is going on into it. This is the approach we're taking with OpenJDK and, barring a few problems every now and again, it seems to be working.

For Governance purposes, all the overall community needs to have regulated are:

1. What the top-level structure of the community looks like
2. Who gets to vote in plenary decisions (OGB elections, constitutional amendments, extraordinary general meetings)
3. Who gets to consume resources (create new mailing lists, repositories, web pages and so on)

All other factors are local to a particular grouping of the community, and given the size and diversity of that community it's likely attempts to generalise in a way that effectively embraces all the groupings will be very hard. I therefore suggested that, for governance purposes only, we treat all entities in the community as "community groups" empowered to do whatever it is they are already doing, but coming to the OGB for approval when they do one of three things:

1. Instantiate a new top-level entity
   • I suggest that new instantiations be handled on a case-by-case basis by the OGB.
   • Top level groups can then create nested groups any way they wish
   • However, new groups must abide by points 2 and 3
   • The OGB may wish to publish criteria for which groups it would be likely to permit and limit creation of top-level groups to one-per-type but I suspect writing rules for this now falls under YAGNI.
2. Grant a member voting rights at the plenary
   • I suggest that the OGB create a Board Committee with diverse composition to grant plenary voting rights
   • I suggest that the committee ask groupings in the community wishing to have the power to grant plenary voting rights to members to submit a proposal for how they will decide to do that
   • The proposed process should as a minimum:
     1. Be deterministic and repeatable
     2. Grant voting rights only to those who have already demonstrably contributed, not to those intending to
     3. Require those being given voting rights to publicly assent to the grant (either by nominating themselves or accepting the nomination of others)
   • The committee should grant rolling annual permission to groupings to grant voting rights once their process is approved
   • The committee should draft a default process for new groupings to adopt if they don't need special treatment
3. Choose to consume resources in a new activity
   • I suggest the OGB create a Board Committee for this too
   • I suggest the committee also grant resource access allocation rights on a rolling basis to those groupings exhibiting bona fides

As plenty of people will agree, I am no master-of-governance but that seems sufficient to protect community-wide rights while leaving maximum flexibility for there to be Consolidations, an ARC, User Groups and more. Thoughts?

The clock is ticking until 19:00 European time today when Firefox 3 will be released. I'm planning on participating in the Software Download World Record attempt that the Firefox community is planning. I was going to get Firefox 3 anyway, but that's an added incentive to grab it today since I've never been part of a successful world record attempt before. Join me!

Apparently I don't blog any more. I got some indirect feedback yesterday that I'm not a blogger because I "only post links". I find this fascinating. When I have the time to write an essay on a particular topic, I post it here. I've done that a great deal over the last five years, and you can find the results easily.

Back in the early days, when I wanted to comment on something in passing, I had to go through the process of creating a full blog entry for it. When I got busy (it happens from time to time and usually involves aircraft), all blogging would stop for the duration of the trip. So over the last month, when I spent 28 out of 35 days travelling, that would have meant the blog going dark for a whole month. People used to complain about that, so I got with Dave Johnson and devised a feed aggregator of the kind FriendFeed has now made available to everyone. The problem with the aggregator was all it showed on those trips was the personal stuff like photos, and that led to more complaints that I'd stopped commenting on open source.

del.icio.us to the rescue! It allows me to construct a daily blog post simply by writing my opinions on what's going on on the Web in pithy (hopefully insightful) analysis displayed together with the link. I've actually had plenty of feedback that people only subscribe to Webmink for the links...

So what's to be done? Are my comments less insightful because they are short? Am I only a blogger when I write essays? I'm sure there are plenty of folk out there who would say yes to both. But fortunately there are still one or two people who think otherwise.

I was tidying in my office recently and found my attendee badge for the Open Source Convention held in Monterey in 2000. The big news that year (apart from the fact that the world didn't end) was that Sun, which had just bought a German company called Star Division, was releasing their flagship product StarOffice under an open source license and sponsoring a new open source community called OpenOffice.org. The t-shirts we all received just said "Freedom". We all had high hopes that simple but bold move, as well as giving all of us a great document suite, would begin to lubricate the market for document tools and get its corroded competitive gears turning again.

I'm now completely convinced that it worked. The widespread adoption of OpenOffice.org both on Windows (for which millions of copies of OO.o are downloaded each year) and on GNU/Linux (where it is distributed with almost every copy) was an early sign. The growth of OpenDocument format from a seed planted by OpenOffice.org to an independent plant nurtured by OASIS to a spreading young tree at ISO was another.

But today there are many senses in which we all in the OpenOffice.org community could be delighted at our influence on the world of software. The steady pressure has paid off. Not just because OpenOffice.org is better than ever at version 3.0 (now available in a native Mac version among others). But because we were accused of being derivative, yet it's now our innovation that is setting the pace.

Change of Heart?

I'm referring to the announcement Microsoft just made that they will be issuing a service pack for Office that adds native support for ODF. I've been repeatedly calling on them to support ODF like they do many other formats, and to do so in a way that makes it just another format that can be made the default. They've said they will as of SP2, and I warmly congratulate them on finally overcoming the NIH and FUD instincts. Way to go!

More than that, they also announced they will join the OASIS ODF TC and work to develop ODF. I've also been calling on them to do this, pretty much since the TC was formed right in front of them (they are board members at OASIS) in 2002. I'm not a member personally, but if I were I would want to warmly welcome them to the team as it enters the final straights towards completion of ODF 1.2 and submission to ISO.

Of course, I might also reflect on the fact they are finally doing exactly what Stephe Walli said they ought to do to kill ODF. But for now, it's huge, warm congratulations on giving your customers the freedom to leave and the confidence to stay - and a small British mutter of "about bloody time".

If you're attending JavaOne this year, do come to my session on Wednesday at 2:50pm. It's T-7064 and I will be talking about the Adoption-Led Market and the challenges it brings to the open source and free software community of communities. It's in room 305.

Alternatively, come to the Thirsty Bear on Tuesday evening around 8pm and I'll see you at the open source un-BOF for chat, food and drink.

I've been speaking at the excellent Go Open 2008 conference here in Oslo today - attendees may be interested in my slides. My talk embodied the comments I made in response to Michael Tiemann a while back.

Of much more interest was what happened at lunchtime, however. I've heard plenty of accusations from certain OOXML proponents that all the noisy opposition to them is coming from extremist agitators and anarchists and should be ignored as a consequence. The (very un-Norwegian) activities in Oslo today seemed to suggest otherwise. As the International Herald Tribune reports, there was a demonstration and protest march by placard-wielding demonstrators on the streets of Oslo - see the local TV report. This in itself is unusual - Norway is not given to such outbursts - but there's more that makes it unusual.

This protest was organised not by extremist agitators but by Steve Pepper (who made a great speech), the widely respected chair of the SC34 mirror committee that reviewed OOXML for Standards Norway and by his colleagues. I asked them why they were taking this unusual step and they told me it was because the majority view of their committee had been ignored by Standards Norway. They are furious - Pepper has resigned. So there may be extremists involved in the protests against OOXML somewhere, but in the specific case of Norway the protesters are highly respected standards and business people who have been driven to extremes rather than starting from them.

Podcast Interview With Trond Heier

I also had the chance to interview the CEO of Linpro AS, a respected Norwegian open source service provider, about his reasons for taking part in the protest. You can listen to the podcast in either MP3 or Ogg format. Trond explains that the message Steve Pepper delivered was in English so that the Norwegian group could encourage other, similarly unhappy groups in other countries to speak out as well. The protest was held outside the building where JTC1 SC34 was holding a meeting.

More pictures:

If you are a writer looking for photos or clips for your article or blog, you are free to use any of these as long as you attribute them to me. I'd also prefer you to link to this blog posting too.

If you've been following my series on the adoption-led market, you may have been looking for some solid examples of how a software vendor can build a business model that is designed for an adoption-led market. Solaris is already there, offering subscriptions for updates, defect resolution, indemnity and more of the values that the deployers of Solaris look for. I've kept looking to OpenJDK waiting for the same business model to emerge.

Well, today it happened. Sun announced Java SE For Business. It's not something that's likely to show up much in bids for new business. Rather, it offers companies that have already adopted the Java platform a new subscription that will reduce their overall costs and improve their success in using the Java platform to run their business. There are three levels:

• Standard Support extends the life of existing Java applications for your organization and for your customers. Fixes provided to you will continue to be made available to Java SE for Business customers along with new operating system support and all other maintenance in quarterly updates. Perfect for customers whose primary interest is in running their Java applications much longer than ever possible before.
• Premium Support adds the ability to have a fix provided to you by Sun to also be incorporated into Sun's next available bi-weekly standard revisions, ensuring your network of customers and partners can leverage that same fix, faster than ever before. Premium support is perfect for customers' whose Java application are critical for their and their customers businesses.
• Premium Plus Support further adds the ability to request a quote for a Java SE for Business custom revision for an older update or revision of the Java platform (additional terms and conditions apply). Premium plus support is perfect for customers seeking maximum assurance for their Java applications from Sun.

No lock-in. No hard-sell. Just a value proposition that can be calmly evaluated on its merits. Java users have the complete freedom to work as they were, or to invest in a subscription and reap the benefits. Since Sun invests so heavily in the core contributors to the platform, it is uniquely positioned to offer the subscriptions. This is the heart of the primary business model for the adoption-led market and I believe we'll see a lot more of it.

[Previous: Why Adoption-Led Is Not Trialware | Root: The Adoption-led Market]

Many thanks to the people who voted for me in the OpenSolaris Governing Board election last week. I was very surprised to receive so many votes, especially considering the strength of the field and who else was elected. I was also pleased that both the constitutional amendments I proposed were approved - I edited them into the Constitution this evening.

I've dived straight in on the ogb-discuss mailing list and IRC. Our first OGB meeting is on Wednesday and I welcome input, especially conversation on the OGB IRC where I try to show up at 10pm UK time each evening if I am free to do so.

Happy Document Freedom Day! Today, March 26th, is the first such global celebration of open documents. When I look back to 2002 and the ridicule that we faced when the first proposed that the world needed a stanard for office productivity documents, it's amazing to see those same mocking voices six years later advocating XML-based open document formats as if they thought of the idea!

We still have a long way to go. There is more to this than just standards. Our freedom depends on being able to implement, being able to influence future evolution and on having collective ownership of document standards. Today, only ODF offers the hope of that so here's to the ISO 26300 Open Document Format today, Document Freedom Day.

The OpenSolaris elections are ending soon (they close at 7am UK time on Tuesday). If you have a vote, please use it!

In particular, I'd draw your attention to my election statements as I would be grateful to receive your vote. You may also be interested by my comments on the constitutional amendments.

Do please vote - those amendments need a "yes" from 50% of the overall electorate if they are to pass so I doubt we have enough "yes" votes so far to pass these very rational and widely agreed amendments.

We're half-way through the voting for the new OpenSolaris Governing Board as I write there have been 74 votes cast. That means there are plenty of people (nearly 300) who have yet to vote.

If you've not seen them, I wrote some notes on why I encourage you to vote for both of the amendments I proposed. There's been some comments against them from certain community voices, so I'd like to clarify that both of those amendments are submitted by me as a community member in response to community comments and I have tried to incorporate all the feedback I received for both. I was not asked to submit them by any Sun management and they are not "official" Sun amendments.

In those notes I also listed some other candidates and endorsed them as people I would be pleased to work with on the future of OpenSolaris if I was elected. It was noted they are all Sun candidates, and while that reflects the significant presence of Sun employees in the OpenSolaris community, I'd like to make it clear that I would also be pleased to work with candidates like Michal Bielicki, Stephen Lau and Justin Erenkrantz, all of whom have shown the sort of constructive spirit we'll need to take OpenSolaris forward.

Ultimately we need an OGB that has the backing of all the Core Contributors. So if you have a vote please use it, whoever you vote for.

In response to my article last week on the emerging adoption-led market, IBM's Savio Rodrigues suggests this is just a description of Shareware and asks why anyone would ever pay for what they got free.

I can't say I agree. Of course, there are similarities between the two - in fact, I was closely associated with a successful shareware business at the start of the 90s, so I have a fair insight into how that works. We actually had close to 10% of estimated users registering our software. But what I am describing is not the same model.

First, what I am describing is a change in the software lifecycle which is facilitated by open source, rather than a business model which is initiated by vendors. Software deployers will switch from procurement-driven to adoption-led patterns without any intervention from vendors; it's a natural consequence of software freedom. The question really is not whether or not this market will come, but how vendors will remain relevant in it.

Second, this is not a support-only model. The model assumes that enterprise users will want the value-added content of a "subscription" (the model most closely associated with Sun to date) or "enterprise version" (such as the RHAT model). Value-add can include patch management, performance tuning, additional utilities and more. Corporate governance regulations may make enterprises using software for a mission-critical purpose require a service contract, or seek a warranty for their software infrastructure. Those who are embedding software in their own product may require indemnity. Finally, many businesses are reluctant (for whatever reason) to use open source licenses and so want commercial licenses for their production systems.

So I think people are more than willing to pay if what they are paying for reduces costs or adds value. It's the software that's free of charge, not the people who work on it. They benefit from the freedom Free software brings, and their employers or customers benefit from the choices that freedom brings.

[Previous: The Adoption-led Market | Next: A Force Of Nature]

Polling is now open for the OpenSolaris elections and will remain open until March 24. If you have Core Contributor status in any OpenSolaris community, you are eligible to vote. In addition to some test questions which have been put back on the ballot, there are three important polls; two constitutional amendments plus the election of the 2008-9 OGB. Since I proposed both of the amendments, I'll explain them both.

Article IX: A Process For Managing The Constitution

The first proposes replacing Article IX of the constitution. At present this Article reads:

This Constitution and its bylaws may be altered, amended, added to, or repealed by an affirmative vote of a majority of the Members of record, provided that the proposed deletions and additions, when applied to the Constitution, will result in a new Constitution that remains in complete compliance with the OpenSolaris Charter. The complete text of the proposed deletions and additions must be delivered in a notice by electronic mail to the Members no less than ten (10) days prior to any vote on said deletions and additions.

In the run-up to the current elections, it became apparent that this article was not sufficiently detailed to tell people how to frame amendments. In addition, it did not specify who could propose amendments or when, or require any kind of community quality control to proposals prior to voting. I spent some time on IRC and then suggested text in the tracking system. After some discussion at the annual meeting I then sent the text to the Core Contributor list according to the current process. The proposed new text is:

This Constitution and its bylaws may be altered, amended, added to, or repealed by an affirmative vote of a majority of the Members of record during Annual and Special meetings as defined in 5.2 and 5.3, provided that the proposed deletions and additions, when applied to the Constitution, will result in a new Constitution that remains in complete compliance with the OpenSolaris Charter. The complete text of the proposed deletions and additions must:

• be approved within an OpenSolaris Community Group using the Majority voting rule in article 8.4 prior to being delivered to the full Membership for adoption.
• be delivered in a notice by electronic mail to the Members no less than ten (10) days prior to any vote on said deletions and additions.

This new text is intended to allow the flexibility members need to discuss and propose amendments anywhere in the OpenSolaris community. It also applies a quality control measure (the amendment has to be vetted in a Community Group somewhere) and limits consideration of amendments to either the Annual Meeting or, in exceptional cases, to a Special Meeting.

I believe that this amended text offers a more balanced and operable process for the constitutional amendments - something I am convinced we need - and I encourage you to vote "Yes" for measure "Amend_Amendment".

Article VI: Promoting OGB Transparency

One of the controversial topics associated with the OGB this year has been a lack of clarity about the connection between OGB members and their employment-related interests. While some have proposed attempting to prevent OGB members having such interests, I believe that's impossible. Instead, I suggested on the tracker that the OGB should engage in the same level of transparency expected of political leaders by declaring their employment-related and other interests that affect OpenSolaris. After discussion there and on IRC, my suggested amendment text is as follows:

Addition to section 6.3: "Candidates for election shall publish a list of their commercial affiliation, or other interests related to OpenSolaris, so that a voting member can understand the context from which they would act on the OGB and the likely biases they would bring. Candidates who before the start of voting do not publish such a statement and attest to its accuracy shall not be eligible for election. The Secretary of the OGB shall maintain a public register of OGB Members' interests."

Addition to section 6.2: "OGB members upon change of corporate affiliation or other interests related to OpenSolaris, must notify the membership of the same when that change applies.

I believe this approach recognises the inevitability (and indeed the desirability) of having an OGB consisting of people with a stake in the future of OpenSolaris while encouraging transparancy of motive. I note that many of the candidates for the current election have indeed declared their interests in a way that would satisfy the requirement as worded here and I think it is would be healthy to formalise this requirement. I encourage you to vote "yes" for measure "Amend_Board".

Board Election

Finally: the Board election. I would be delighted to have another opportunity to serve the OpenSolaris community on the Governing Board, as I was able to in 2006-7. I did not stand for election last year and since then have been observing and occasionally participating. My statements of interest are in my OpenSolaris profile so I'll not repeat them all here. I believe that in the coming year we particularly need an OGB that is equipped to communicate strongly, clearly and frequently with Sun's management. For communication to take place through channels other than the OGB undermines the OpenSolaris community. I also think that the OGB membership should reflect the interests around the project, and so in addition to the valued participation of those outside of Sun, I hope we will continue to see a strong showing of Sun employees elected to the OGB.

The candidates I'm referring to have all received endorsement to stand for the OGB from their management chain and all have seen Sun's employee policy on open source participation. They are all committed to asking Sun's management to communicate regularly and clearly with the OpenSolaris community and they represent a diverse cross-section of the community. I consider all to be independent-minded and honourable people. In arbitrary order they are John Plocher (plocher), Jim Grisanzio (jimgris), Glynn Foster (gman), John Beck (jbeck), Michelle Olson (michelle), Alan Coopersmith (alanc) and myself (webmink).

Of course, there are other excellent candidates. It is in the interests of getting proper Sun representation on, and dialogue with, the OGB that I encourage you to place the people I have listed early in your order of preference when you vote. I will be on IRC in the Annual Meeting at 10pm GMT each night this week if you'd like to discuss anything in this posting.

And thanks for reading to the end!

Update 15-Mar: I've clarified the intent behind these positions, take a look.

In response to a request from the European Union concerning DRM and interoperability, Sun has submitted a lengthy written response. Preparing for and reviewing the response with colleagues took me back to my earlier article, DRM and the Death of a Culture. My tendency is always to look for a guiding principle rather than to seek a set of rules, and in this case it's about quantization of discretion. Here's what I wrote:

People talk of "fair use" but what they actually mean is that we all depend on the exercise of judgment in every decision. Near the "bulls-eye" of copyright we're all clear what is what, but as Lessig eloquently explains in Free Culture, in the outer circles we have to make case-by-case judgments about what usage is fair and what usage is abuse. When a technologist embodies their or their employer's view of what's fair into a technology-enforced restriction, any potential for the exercise of discretion is turned from a scale to a step and freedom is quantized.

It strikes me that the inherent quantization of rights is what makes DRM at best undesirable and at worst a guarantee of cultural Alzheimer's. I was thus delighted when a very senior Sun executive insisted that the position paper include the following paragraph:

Before we discuss interoperability in detail, we would like to emphasize this last point. Sun believes that DRM should be a solution only when necessary. DRM should never restrict the user's ability to utilize the content in legally-permissible ways. With this in mind, any DRM system must be open, fully interoperable, and free from hidden IP licensing burdens that effectively re-close the system economically. Indeed, in the spirit of the company that supports OpenOffice.org, Sun believes that the Commission's stance should enable it to be possible to create a free version of any DRM system used in the EU!

Of course, I am personally among those who believe it is never necessary to apply Digital Restrictions to content, but I'm very pleased that Sun is taking a position that DRM should not be assumed to be automatically a part of the entertainment business.

You may recall that a team from Sun devoted a great deal of time to the process of drafting the GPLv3. Our engagement was not just the monitoring exercise that I suspect it was for many of the corporate participants. It was always my hope that Sun would use the license for significant software projects.

Since then, the FSF has made some welcome clarifications to the license and Sun released its first project, Openxvm, as GPLv3. The next step for us has been to review the licensing for OpenOffice.org. We consulted widely in the community and received an overwhelming response on a number of proposed modifications to the project, starting with the license. The LGPL has served OpenOffice.org well, so the move to LGPL v3 seemed very logical. LGPLv3 is actually almost identical to GPLv3, but with an additional clause limiting the scope of the requirement to release source code under the same license.

Upgrading to the LGPLv3 brings important new protections to the OpenOffice.org community, most notably through the new language concerning software patents. You may know that I am personally an opponent of software patents, and that Sun has already taken steps in this area with a patent non-assert covenant for ODF. But the most important protection for developers comes from creating mutual patent grants between developers. LGPLv3 does this.

So it's a pleasure to be able to say that Sun supports the community's input. OpenOffice.org's license will change to LGPLv3 as part of a broader set of changes intended to improve the OpenOffice.org community for everyone. Those changes also include a switch to the latest version of the standard Sun contributor agreement, with an addendum specifically tailored to the needs of the OpenOffice.org community. There's increased latitude for documentation writers to publish their work on OpenOffice.org. And in future, plugins for OpenOffice.org may host their source code directly on the community site without copyright being shared, helping collaboration within the community.

There's more news about OpenOffice.org's infrastructure as well as the project's governance - see Jim's blog for more detail as well as Louis' community announcement. For all the details, you can listen to a discussion Barton George had with Michael Bemmer, the development director of OpenOffice.org at Sun, his boss Jim Parkinson, and with Peter Brown, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation, on this podcast: [MP3]-[Ogg].

I've been spending a little more time than usual on IRC because the OpenSolaris Annual Meeting is currently in session on Freenode. There was some excellent discussion on Thursday about constitutional amendments and I went on to submit two amendments for consideration by the membership (to article VI and to article IX). I plan to show up this week to discuss those amendments with anyone who has questions; I'll post the times once I know I have internet access in the places I am visiting!

On the subject of IRC meetings, there are also a series of them coming up this week to give the MySQL community the chance to chat with some Sun people. Kay Arnö has the details on his blog; I'll be joining #MySQL on Thursday at 2pm GMT (my nickname is "webmink", naturally!)

The news just went out that March 26 2008 will be the world's first Document Freedom Day, celebrating and championing the cause of true freedom for our data. You may recall that I wrote about this back in 2006 and also gave a speech at the European Commission. I coined the term "Freedom To Leave", referring to the liberty to take your data and go elsewhere uninhibited by DRM, closed interfaces or file formats that require a particular program for faithful reproduction and use.

I believe this to be the new front line in defending the freedoms of computer users. Richard Stallman's four freedoms are now driving the mainstream of software (especially here at Sun), and while software freedom is not yet a given, the next challenge for us is our freedom to own and move our own data anywhere, any time.

Defining Data Freedom

I believe there are multiple dimensions to data freedom.

• There is the personal dimension - being able to take the data I "own" and use it with any software or service that's appropriate.
• There is the historical dimension, ensuring future researchers have access to the electronic information that is driving directions in society today.
• There is the commercial dimension, ensuring that data interfaces remain open, equitable and interoperable so that we have a fair yet competitive marketplace.

Interesting to see the Microsoft folks making a big deal out of the fact that companies are implementing OOXML features in their software products. I'd hesitate to join them being thrilled at IBM's new-found support for their strategy. Truth is, when there's a monopolist in the market it's impossible to ignore the consequences of even their worst ideas, let alone their good ones. Responding to the needs of locked-in customers who will find themselves using OOXML is a different deal to strategic support.

A much more crucial question, though, is why the folks at Microsoft are so surprised. If you know your customers have a requirement, surely you respond to it? The real question this situation brings to my mind is not "why are IBM implementing OOXML features". It's "why won't Microsoft implement support for ODF at least to the same level as RTF built-in to Office?" Given they have a number of very significant and visible customers demanding that support, it seems to me they are the ones with the explaining to do, not IBM, Google, OpenOffice.org or anyone else.

Epigram on Singers

Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Verse and Worse

Eduardo P-L has announced the membership line-up he's proposing should form the Interim Governing Board of the Glassfish community. We'll be devising a constitution to ensure that all of the contributors to the rapidly growing Glassfish community have a say in how the community is governed.

The other Board members represent a great selection of stakeholders in the user community for this application server and Eduardo has done a fine job identifying them. As for me - well, you may think it's a foregone conclusion that I'd be included, but it wasn't (and hasn't been for any of the others) and I'm honoured to have been asked to contribute.

I was very pleased just now to see that Red Hat has announced they are joining the OpenJDK community to work on and use the Java implementation being developed over there. They have signed the contributor agreement as well as the OpenJDK TCK license. I hope we'll see IcedTea become an OpenJDK project as a result of this - the Classpath folk have been doing an awesome job.

Creating an environment with licensing, code and governance acceptable to groups like Red Hat was one of the primary motivations of our choices around OpenJDK, so this is fantastic news all round, and an interesting counterpoint to the approach others have taken in other projects.

Update: Interesting comments from Mark Reinhold, positivity from Mark Wielaard, congratulations from Dalibor, early coverage on JavaLobby. And later still: NetworkWorld, CMP, eWeek (quoting this blog), WRAL, CNet and TechTarget (also quoting this blog, almost) and even later: InternetNews, which includes interviews with me and Shaun Connolly of Red Hat.

I hear that the JavaOne Call For Papers is now open. I'd love to see a big turn-out from Java-related open source projects across the board.

The open source content my team moderated last year was so popular that open source has been made a feature of all the tracks. I also gather that there are an even larger number of non-Sun paper reviewers this year. Put together, those factors mean so your paper submissions have a high chance of acceptance. So, get going!

Just a reminder to my American friends that the UK ended Daylight Savings on Sunday and so we are back to UTC - that means this week there's just 7 hours difference between California and the UK, for example. If you're expecting a meeting with me and I'm not there, you may wish to call and check we're both expecting the thing to happen at the same time.

I've been engaged with the OpenOffice.org community for a number of years, and I'm as aware as anyone that it has had some historic issues with its contribution processes. However, all the signs I see suggest those have been or are being addressed - most notably via the Engineering Steering Committee, but with a number of other important changes (including huge improvements in responsiveness on patch integration in response to earlier complaints). I hear there's more to come, too - Jim Parkinson, the VP who employs all Sun's contributors to OpenOffice.org, has a blog on the blocks about a new OpenOffice.org Advisory Board.

The result has been a fresh start over the last six months, with both IBM and Red Flag 2000 choosing to participate for the first time alongside Sun, Novell and others, and with a fresh road map and new ideas. I'm sure there remain issues to address, but what with all this improvement as well as the strength of the ODF community, OpenOffice.org is on the up-tick. As I said on the panel at OOoCon, we're reaching a tipping point for ODF and OpenOffice.org that is making the opposing forces sit up at think.

In the midst of all this, I see my friend Michael Meeks has been challenging Sun in a creative way - it even made Slashdot today. I remember the days when Michael used to enthusiastically encourage OpenOffice.org community members to sign the contributor agreement, as recently as last December...

Thing is, there's way more to it than Michael is discussing. It seemed to me that Michael has been looking for an excuse to publicly challenge Sun for ages, and finally found his excuse in some well-meaning actions by his employee Kohei. There are two independent issues here that Michael appears to be intentionally confusing in order to make his competitor look bad.

Community Norms

The first is an attack on community norms. It's tempting to use a real-life example but here's a work of my imagination. Let's detach the Novell-Sun competitive issue and work by analogy. Imagine you decide you want to work on Apache Roller, their great new blog server project. You create a fantastic new capability that, when people see it, they realise it needs to be part of Roller - just like you hoped.

You tell them "look, I'd love to contribute it. I have put it under the Apache v2 license. Please accept my contribution." They say to you "well, that's great, but it's a community norm that we ask people to sign Apache's contributor agreement" (yes, that is an Apache requirement in this sort of case). You say "no way Jose" and the Roller guys say "well, we can't accept your contribution until you do". This goes on for a while and it's clear you're not going to budge. All the same, the users make it clear that the feature you are implementing (which is just like one we all saw in WordPress) is just going to have to get implemented.

Finally, some other guys on Roller decide they are going to reluctantly do an independent implementation of the same function. It will use none of your code, and probably work rather differently, but it will make sure Roller gets that feature that Wordpress has too. It's a waste of everyone's time, but Apache has those rules to protect all the members as well as their own administrative functions.

Despite Michael's framing, this is the same situation he describes. An existing community, with existing and well-understood norms, is approached by an enthusiastic developer who breaks the community rules and refuses to accept the correction he receives. The rules were not made to thwart Kohei - they have been there for years.

Contributor Agreements

The second issue is the subject of contributor agreements. They are very common - the FSF has one, so does Apache, and so do projects like MySQL and even, I believe, some of Novell's own projects. There are several reasons to have them:

• They act as an assertion of originality. By saying you grant rights to another party, you implicitly but demonstrably assert you have the rights to begin with. That means the community can have greater confidence that there are no submerged rights issues waiting for the future.
• They allow the copyright steward to act on behalf of the community in the event of any license violation. FSF has done this before now, and Sun is more than ready to defend the projects where it is steward in this way.
• They allow maintenance of the license in the future. Without aggregated copyright, a switch from v1 to v2 of a license (for example) involves locating every single contributor and getting their agreement to the change. If any of them decline or even ignore the request, the code will need re-implementing. It took Mozilla two years to complete this when they re-licensed. The only cases where this isn't necessary are those that have what I call "class A licenses" (like MIT or BSD - more in my white paper).
• More controversially, it allows dual-licensing to parties (such as corporations) who are too worried about open source to work only under an open source license but are willing to work through a mediator.
• In many cases (including some very well-known open source projects) it also allows the original donor to offer commercial offerings, thus ensuring the project continues to have engagement funded by its major participants.

The Sun Contributor Agreement is in my view the best there is. Sadly the OpenOffice.org community doesn't appear to be using the latest, much-improved version - maybe that's the problem? We've been evolving it to have some very desirable community attributes:

• It does not require the contributor to surrender their copyright. They share their rights instead and retain the freedom to do whatever they want with the code contribution.
• It has several layers of agreement, so that if one proves to be unenforceable in some jurisdiction, there are other layers to ensure the community still has aggregated rights.
• There is an "open source covenant" - Sun promises that any contributions that get used will always remain as Free software wherever else they may end up, so that proprietary-only forks are impossible.

It's a shame Michael has chosen now - a turning point in OpenOffice.org and a moment when Sun has radically improved the SCA in response to broad feedback from many communities - as a time to mount a fresh challenge to Sun that by implication also harms OpenOffice.org. And when you distill out all the details, that's what this turns out to be even by Michael's admission - a competitive issue, not a community one.

Update Oct-17: Someone pointed out to me that Novell demands copyright assignment on Evolution and on Mono, and what's more the agreement they require involves giving Novell the copyright, not sharing it, and includes the same language Michael criticises as inadequate about subsequent open source licensing. What gives, guys? You criticise Sun for doing the same thing Novell requires of contributors? Right in the area where you work?