Data Sharing Summit is Back

March 12, 2008 — Aaron Fulkerson

Main Page – Data Sharing Summit
The Data Sharing Summit is back, and bigger.

We received such a positive response to the Data Sharing Summit in September, 2007. And, given the ongoing emergence of different data sharing initiatives, such the finalization of the OpenID2 spec, emerging Open Social and other social graph API’s, the 1.0 release of the Higgins Framework, as dataportability.org, Social Networking Portability, FOAF and XFN as standards gaining traction, DiSO, MT activity feeds, etc. we decided that it was a good time to hold another summit.

Our purpose is to provide gathering spaces in which all parties can work together on the challenge of data sharing. We create the agenda the day it happens. It is about getting things done and figuring out the tough problems – there is no committee deciding who does or does not get to ‘present’ it is about breaking up and really diving in figuring out the solutions and building the consensus to get adoption.

We are pleased to announce the following two Data Sharing events:

* The Data Sharing Workshop, April 18 – 19 at the SFSU, Downtown Campus.

* The Data Sharing Summit, May 15, at the Computer History Museum.

I attended the first DSS last year. It was valuable, fun, and, with Kaliya as the facilitator, very well organized. I recommend it highly; although, I do not believe I’ll be able to make it this year I would merrily were my schedule to permit.

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Amazon SimpleDB

December 14, 2007 — Aaron Fulkerson

Amazon SimpleDB, which is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.

Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment, brings more complexity than is typically needed, and often requires a DBA to maintain and administer. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database – real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data – without the operational complexity.

Yay! More AWS goodness.

Resources:

The Data Model: Domains, Items, Attributes and Values
The data model used by Amazon SimpleDB makes it easy to input, manage and query your structured data. Developers organize their data-set into domains and can run queries across all of the data stored in a particular domain.  Domains are collections of items that are described by attribute-value pairs.

Think of these terms as analogous to concepts in a traditional spreadsheet table. For example, take the details of a product catalog shown in the table below and consider how they would be represented in Amazon SimpleDB.  The whole table/catalog would be your domain named “clothing.”  Individual products would be rows in the table or items in your domain.  The characteristics of items would be described by column headers (attributes).  Values are in individual cells.  Now consider the items below – a sweater, a dress shirt and a pair of shoes – are new products you would like to add to your domain.

In Amazon SimpleDB, to add the items above, you would PUT the three itemIDs into your domain along with the attribute-value pairs for each of the items.  Without the specific syntax, it would look something like this:

    PUT (item, 123), (description, sweater), (color, blue), (color, red)
    PUT (item, 456), (description, dress shirt), (color, white), (color, blue)
    PUT (item, 789), (description, shoes), (color, black), (material, leather)

API Summary
Amazon SimpleDB provides a small number of simple API calls which implement writing, indexing and querying data.  The interface and feature set are intentionally focused on core functionality, providing a basic API for developers to build upon and making the service easy to learn and simple to use.

  • CreateDomain – Create a domain that contains your dataset.
  • DeleteDomain – Delete a domain.
  • ListDomains – List all domains and associated metadata.
  • PutAttributes – Add or update an item and its attributes, or add attribute-value pairs to items that exist already. Items are automatically indexed as they are received.
  • GetAttributes – Retrieve an item and all or a subset of its attributes and values.
  • DeleteAttributes – Delete an item, an attribute, or an attribute value.
  • Query – Query the dataset using a query expression which specifies value tests on one or more attributes. Supported value tests are: =, !=, <, > <=, >=, starts-with. Example:  ["price" < "12.00"] AND ["color" = "green"]
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Open Web Awards

December 7, 2007 — Aaron Fulkerson

Whoa…MindTouch Deki Wiki is in the running for an Open Web Award. When I saw us get nominated I thought: “yah right, we stand a snow ball’s chance in hell on this one.” In fact, I think I told this to Corey who pointed out the nomination to me. Well, color me surprised! Don’t get me wrong, our tech has the baddest-ass kung fu. It certainly does make sense given we’re FREE and open source, adhere to open standards and have a 99 method REST-based API. It’s just that we’re really not that well known. I’m flattered. If you haven’t voted, please do so, and please help spread the word. Voting will take you 2 seconds.

  1. Click image below
  2. Scroll down, Click “MindTouch Deki Wiki”
  3. Bask in the glory of knowing that you’ve just made two-clicks for humanity

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links for 2007-09-12

September 12, 2007 — Aaron Fulkerson
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Open Letter to OSI

June 26, 2007 — Aaron Fulkerson

Cross Post

Mike Tiemann, President of OSI and CTO of Redhat says he's putting his foot down. In a recent blog post he states:

Enough is enough. Open Source has grown up. Now it is time for us to stand up. I believe that when we do, the vendors who ignore our norms will suddenly recognize that they really do need to make a choice: to label their software correctly and honestly, or to license it with an OSI-approved license that matches their open source label.

If you read my personal blog regularly you know I’ve been outspoken about companies claiming to be open source, but not adhering to the OSD or licensing with an OSI approved license. In fact, I’ve been so outspoken I’ve offended some well connected people, I have even been called infantile names, and in some circles marginalized. I’ve blogged about the dilution of open source and the confusion created by new pseudo-open source licenses and I’ve left lengthy comments at OSI. Moreover, I spoke directly with Mike Tiemann about the need for OSI to put their foot down and take a stand for open source. I've even provided some ideas about how this can be accomplished.

In Mike's aforementioned post he specifies a few CRM companies that have been waving the open source banner, but do not license with an OSI approved license. The most well known being SugarCRM. I've blogged about SugarCRM and it's CEO John Roberts previously (the last bit of this post). Let me say, I really like John and I think SugarCRM is a quality product. Previously I stated I wasn't certain if attribution licenses were "bad", but that they were definitely unnecessary and placed unfair restrictions on others because the authors don't provide similar concessions to projects they use in their development. I now believe attribution is bad. If an open source project/product requires prominently displayed attribution shouldn't they also do this for all their components? Won't this escalate? Will applications end up looking like NASCAR? Take MindTouch's DekiWiki for example. What if it had the requirement that logos for MindTouch, MySQL, PHP, Mono, ImageMagick, Debian, Apache, on and on…were prominently displayed? Wouldn't this diminish reusability and begin to infringe on the freedoms of others? Isn't reusability, at least partially, the point of open source? I believe it is. We want people to reuse MindTouch's software and do great things with it. I'm certain a growing use of attribution would diminish the reusability of open source.

Those who use an attribution license do so with the intent of protecting their intellectual property. First of all, it should be understood copyright does this already. Secondly, I've often heard from companies who use an attribution license that they don't want a competitor incorporating their work into a competing proprietary product or stealing their work and rebranding it as their own. This is mostly solved by using GPL because of the nature of its copyleft clause. Eben Moglen gives a wonderful talk on not being another's free lunch that explains this brilliantly. All the attribution licenses I've seen are modified MPL licenses, which doesn't offer the same protection as GPL. Finally, the notion that someone will come along, steal your code, and be able to out-innovate you on your own code is a spurious claim. And quite frankly, if you can be out-innovated on your own codebase..well, you've got bigger problems. Free and open source software, is about freedom and freedom (and more choices) is always what's best for the market (users, developers, etc). For those who assert: "It's their work, they should receive attribution." or "I want to be attributed for my work." Well, so do I. MindTouch receives attribution thanks to copyright. It's wonderful to receive attribution, but restricting users or developers by requiring a prominently displayed logo and link is wrong and potentially harmful for reasons that should become clear when you understand the significance of free and open source software, which I will go into in a moment. For additional historical perspective on this topic review the UC Berkeley advertising clause.

An even more toxic misuse of open source that seems to be growing more prevalent and brazen is when a company successfully wields the banner of open source for years, but doesn't release a line of code. There is a difference between using open source and being open source. I suspect the Free Software Foundation would claim there is a difference between being free and using free software and would draw this line between free software and open source. I don't agree with this, but I do believe “open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.” And open source is a development methodology inspired by free software. At any rate, the ignorance of analysts and journalists has assisted offenders in spreading their deceptions intentional and otherwise. And OSI is partially guilty for this by not being more aggressive to stop it, but before I constructively criticize OSI I want to address why open source is so very important to all of mankind.

So what is the significance of free and open source software (FOSS)? If you don't understand why open source matters then this is a pointless conversation. Therefore, just to make sure we're all on the same page let's address this first. The reason why open source matters is the same reason why open standards matter. The Internet revolution and perhaps the very dawn of the Information Age has been fueled almost entirely by FOSS and open standards. Without FOSS and open standards there simply would not be the Internet you know and love today. The current boom in the technology industry is due almost entirely to FOSS and open standards. The first .COM boom also owes itself to FOSS and open standards. How so? So as to not dig too deeply into history let's just examine the current Web 2.0 boom. Because there are huge repositories of open source applications, libraries, and components developers are able to very quickly build interesting things at very low costs. Most often these applications are then released for others to create derivatives of and build on. Or, thanks to open standards and increasingly this is true with SOA, one can provide an API for others to incorporate functionality into their own projects, but let's just focus on FOSS. In short, open source projects like Apache, Linux. MySQL, Perl, PHP, and many other thousands of projects are building blocks for engineers to construct wonderful things for all of mankind.

Having, I hope, now sufficiently established the importance of open source I suppose it's important to answer the question: so what, if others don't adhere to OSI'

s vision of open source? Who cares other than OSI, right? OSI is a community appointed board that is tasked with ensuring the building blocks, that are open source components, fit together cleanly. What if there were no standards body for licensing and defining open source? The result would be a chaotic landscape that would be very difficult to navigate and that would require an army of lawyers. It would not be clear what one license means relative to another, if they fit together, or how they would fit with proprietary software systems. Each license would have to be carefully examined by the individual wishing to use the component. I surely do not want to be responsible for this legal bill. FOSS would quickly become too expensive to be worth using. Clearly, only the lawyers win in this reality. I want to rely on OSI. They should make my life simpler and require less legal expense on all our parts. Moreover, I want them (and FSF) to be the umbrella that polices offenders who misuse the title of open source by not paying forward the benefits they reap from FOSS.

This brings me to my most unfortunate conclusion that OSI, in my opinion, has been remiss with its responsibilities. First and foremost there needs to be a membership, member involvement, and some transparency in how the board is appointed. I think a portion of the board should be elected. More importantly I think OSI should be more aggressive in policing our community. This can be done with very little overhead by using a "wall of shame", which I proposed previously. The wall of shame could be structured such that offenders are warned of their offenses and then ultimately ostracized by listing their offenses on a public website, namely www.opensource.org. This is a low cost solution that will undoubtedly prove to be effective.

 I believe that the folks at OSI are well intentioned hard working people who probably give far more than they receive. With a membership, perhaps paid, I believe the board can afford to give more and expect more in return. I know there is already a move underway to put in place a membership and I'm quite thankful for this. Moreover, it seems with Mike's most recent post there will be an increase in the aggressiveness of the organization in protecting open source. This too is wonderful news. I think open source is experiencing some growing pains as the community tests boundaries; however, if OSI doesn't reign the problem children I believe we'll all suffer.

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Another belated summary: Web 2.0 Expo

April 29, 2007 — Aaron Fulkerson

I attended the Web2.0Expo last week. MindTouch was exhibiting and Ken spoke about wikis in the enterprise. I had an interesting and pleasant conversation about badgeware with John Roberts. I made it to the AllThingsD launch party. And I spoke so much to so many people I ended up losing my voice for a couple days. I believe this was the largest trade show/conference I have ever been to. I was told there were over 10,000 people in attendance and the exhibit floor had more than sixty exhibitors.

I spent most of my time at the conference on the exhibit floor working the MindTouch booth with Patrick (our newest addition–a very competent and pleasant sales dude) and Corey. I have to mention I love demoing our software! I'm not trying to gloat, but when we show people our work we regularly receive unanimous praise from the crowd. Or should I say from the merry mob? We had a lot of traffic. Those who gave us positive feedback included customers of competitors and even a couple competitors who stopped by to see, our enterprise software, MindTouch Deki in action. Every once in a while I spoke with someone who wanted to know if MindTouch Deki could part the Red Sea, end world hunger, or make their ex-spouse love them again all for under $5,000. However in general, folks understood Deki for what it is: a very powerful, highly usable, incredibly affordable collaboration platform that MindTouch has managed to make ridiculously easy to install (15 minutes including download), remarkably easy to use, and it's delivered with a dramatically lower total cost of ownership because Deki automatically updates and patches itself.

I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with some current customers of MindTouch who stopped by our booth too. One had come all the way from Salisbury, North Carolina. The city of Salisbury uses MindTouch Deki for sharing information and team collaboration. I wish I could remember the fellow's name. It was nice chatting with him. I asked him how the software was working out for them and he said: "It's great, we love it!" Sweet! (I said 'sweet' not him). I really enjoy connecting with folks, talking tech, and showing off MindTouch products. MindTouch gets most of our inspiration from feedback we get through in person encounters or by way of our community at OpenGarden.org.  

Unfortunately I only managed to make it to a few sessions. I caught a couple sessions on identity and missed a couple others I would have liked to had made it to. If you read this blog regularly you know I'm keenly interested in an Open Web Initiative (OWI) by which we users could have an extended YADIS or just use XRDS to describe a person's identity; e.g.- OPML file for feeds, and podcasts, URIs to personal resources (Flickr, Jaiku/Twitter, personal and work blog), a URI to a personal Atom repository, a FOAF, etc. This isn't for any commercial interest, but is really spurred by my (and SteveB's) personal interest in having more sophisticated privacy controls and mobility of profile, content, contacts, ect…i.e.- identity. Anyway, it was great to meet the folks who are driving OpenID, The first OpenID talk I attended was Kaliya's (talk here). She's wonderful and fun. She's also a powerful Connector in the OpenID space and an information Maven, which is remarkable because she isn't an engineer. At one point I participated in her talk because the audience didn't seem to understand the significance of OpenID beyond a single sign-on. So, I gave a 60 second monologue (at her invitation) about how it can and almost certainly will enable things like OWI. Later I attended Brian Ellin and David Recordan's talk, which was a rudimentary technical talk about how to implement and consume OpenID. It was useful and well attended. They also passed out a fancy OpenID tools CD. 

I attended a session on Open Source Business Models for Web 2.0 with John Roberts, Co-Founder and CEO, SugarCRM  and Mårten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB. I met Mårten previously at OSCON06 along with Monty Widenius (co-founder MySQL) who graciously attended our OpenGarden.org launch party. I asked John a few pointed questions about badgeware during the question/answer section of the session that got him a tad on the defensive. Turns out badgeware is a dirty word to folks with an attribution clause in their software license. One of the questions I asked was: "do you think that if all the components and libraries you use in your stack required similar attribution it would adversely effect your business." I didn't really get an answer from John on this. After the session I spoke briefly with Mårten and tried to pin him down on whether he thought the recent badgeware licenses were good, bad, or otherwise for open source. I also asked him if he thought the recent flood of cash from venture captialists to "open source" companies was going to positively, negatively, or at all effect open source and the software industry as a whole. The VC backed open source companies are primarily the folks spawning new licenses with attribution clauses. Mårten was very diplomatic and unwilling to voice any opinion other than suggesting companies with attribution clauses were trying to prevent closed source competitors from stealing all our portions of their source code. I suggested using a GPL style license would prevent this from happening.

After the crowd of job hunters cleared from around John I spoke with him about badgeware, open source, and OSI. He seemed defensive initially, but as soon as I convinced him I wasn't out to 'get him' and that I was only interested in understanding his position he lightened up considerably and we had a friendly chat for about thirty minutes. He described his point of view and I described mine regarding attribution licenses. John wants to protect his and his team's work. He feels attribution is the right way to do this. I feel attribution is unnecessary and I reiterate my original question, which I never did get a good answer to, what if every open source project required attribution? For example, PHP, Linux, MySQL, etc. How would this impact companies like SugarCRM or MindTouch? It seems ridiculous, but I think it's a valid question. The fact is the forces driving innovation today in technology on the web, you know this thing we call Web2.0, is open source and open standards. Period. Developers can very quickly create compelling applications because there is a wealth of open source components available to us. Also, thanks to open standards you can throw an API or two into the mix and you have something pretty cool. If it's not particularly useful it will likely become a component of something that is useful at a later date. What if all these components had attribution licenses? Even trivial applications would end up looking like NASCAR race cars. I suppose that's not the worst thing in the wor
ld.

John suggested attribution is similar to what open source packagers like RedHat are doing when they bundle software and brand with the RedHat logo. I disagreed because removing RedHat branding is trivial and there is not a licensing requirement that the RedHat logo be present. At least, not to my knowledge. The conversation with John was friendly, but at times I felt like I was talking to Ari Fleishcer because so many of my questions were being deflected or were met with canned responses that didn't quite answer the question and were barely applicable. John was warm to note that the entire SugarCRM application was developed by his team and it's not a fork of something or a repackaging. I'm sure this is true, but it's still using a lot of additional open source components and libraries. There are many people who are passionate about open source who believe John thinks open source is whatever helps him to make money. I told John this and he sincerely informed me that he and his team are engineers who believe in open source and are simply trying to protect their hard work.

The final point I pressed John on was OSI. I think OSI performs a useful service to us as open source developers. They educate the public and attempt to ensure standardization of licensing, which prevents confusion. Also, they're a useful resource and community that can be tapped when people have questions about copyright and software licensing. By SugarCRM not seeking OSI certification of their license they're, in effect, turning their back on what is widely accepted to be the organization that is the keeper of the open source definition. John said he had tried to engage with OSI and had not gotten anywhere. He was interested in participating and claimed that some of the people he had spoken with had unfairly labeled the SugarCRM license as being a rehash of the Berkeley advertising clause (I'm recalling from memory), which personally I don't think is an incorrect assessment. John also posited that OSI is non-inclusive and difficult to work with. Moreover, John asked who are these guys and who voted them into office? How do they vote? Why are they the keepers of open source? Who appointed them? Can I participate? How do I? These are valid questions. Some, but not all are answered by the bylaws and there is an, albeit slow, movement underfoot to create membership, which in my opinion is long overdue. I'm glad to be able to point out the board is now posting their minutes too. The very interesting point John made was that the FSF was being especially helpful and inclusive in approving his attribution license. This surprised me because of the previously linked to article put out by GNU on the Berkeley advertising clause (re-link), which describes a history identical to my aforementioned NASCAR example.

For the record I think John is a good guy who is trying to do what he thinks is right for him, his team of engineers, and his company. Also, I think SugarCRM is a good product worth buying. I'm not sure yet if attribution licenses are bad. I think they're unnecessary. I am suspicious of this new crop of licenses because more licenses means there is more to be confused about. Moreover,  it seems strange to me that an application should be given special concessions that other components required by it are not given. In other words, what makes SugarCRM or one of the other twenty applications with an attribution clause different from the more than dozen open source components they're building on? Should they honor these components and libraries similarly to how they're demanding by prominently displaying all their logos on their application's interface?

The last bit worth covering regarding my attendance at  Web 2.0 Expo is the AllThingsD launch party thrown by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of The Wall Street Journal that Graeme and I attended. It was held at the Mountain View Computer History Museum. There was great food and good drink. Graeme blogs about my driving. Also, the Web2Open party was fun, but I'm afraid I had quite a lot to drink there.

One final note. Ross Mayfield attended Ken's wiki session. If you read my blog you know he had some harsh words for me at the Gilbane conference in San Francisco a month ago. Granted, I've been critical in the past of Socialtext espousing open source. When Ross saw me he came over and shook my hand and said: "Hi, my name is Ross. We got off to a bad start previously. Let's drink a beer some time and chat." That was nice of him. We bumped into each other throughout the event and we were friendly. I had planned to take him up on that beer offer and discuss with him badgeware, to get his opinion as I did John Roberts, and my opinion his company has approached open source incorrectly. However, the fact is his team has helped define open standards, adheres to them, and has helped several other open source projects monetarily and otherwise. Nonetheless, I don't agree with his approach to licensing or that Socialtext claimed for several years to be open source, but didn't release any source code.  

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Alfresco Opens, What's Open?

February 26, 2007 — Aaron Fulkerson

Matt Asay.Weblogs.Infoworld

Alfresco just released their source under GPL with a FLOSS exception.

This move is about choice, in other words. Choice for our customers (Freedom of access to the world’s best content management system). Choice for our partners. Choice for our competitors (join us or get run over :-) . Choice for the community.

…The GPL is open source’s best business license. It is open source capitalism – the free market at its finest.

Freedom pays great dividends.

…the proprietary software companies we compete with have a limited shelf life. :-)

Welcome Alfresco and kudos. Enough of this non-OSI-approved modified MPL bullshit. If your license is not approved by OSI then you’re not open source. Real simple. Worse yet you have companies like Socialtext. I think I’ve remained silent about these guys too long. Socialtext has claimed to be open source and fervently waved this banner since their founding in 2002. However, they didn’t release a stitch of source code until July, 2006. Four years later. WTF? When they did release their source they did so under a non-OSI-approved modified MPL license. WTF? Most recently Mayfield suggested that because they’ve allegedly "supported Kwiki for years" this makes Socialtext open source. I’ve been using Kwiki at every O’Reilly event (I love O’Reilly) and to the best of my knowledge Kwiki hasn’t changed in three years! I’ve kept my mouth shut because they’re competitors and I assumed others would have cried foul over their behavior long ago. Oddly, no one has. Then a few months ago (around Thanksgiving 2006) murmuring started about attribution licenses, which really is of lesser concern as far as Socialtext is concerned. Berlind blogged about how he can see it either way blah blah. In the end he called for "disclosure" as to whether the license is OSI approved or not. If you’re not, you’re not open source! What’s there to disclose? I responded here. Shortly thereafter Berlind sent me an email titled: "Laughable." It may have been a tad condescending, but in general he stated that disclosure is a good thing he didn’t see how anyone could disagree. Sure, I was a tad harsh, but I didn’t get the impression he was saying anything of use and I was also a tad offended by his statement: "the supposed keeper of the official definition of ‘open source’ and the consortium to which open source license authors typically turn to have their licenses ratified as adhering to that definition". Supposed? Typically turn? Read his post, read my response, you be the judge. As a side note, isn’t Berlind on the advisory board for Socialtext? I know one of those ZDNet blogger dudes is and I thought it was him. I’m not certain. UPDATE: I don’t think it’s Berlind, but I know there is a ZDNet journalist/blogger guy who is on Socialtext’s advisory board. Update’: My bad, it’s Mitch Ratcliffe.

Nat Torkington while organizing OSCON (which I love and is where we launched www.opengarden.org, OSCON06) recently asked: "Is ‘Open Source’ Now Completely Meaningless?" Well, if we continue down this road I don’t see how it couldn’t become meaningless. By the way Nat, I don’t think you should make a hard and fast rule as to whether you should disallow closed source companies to participate in OSCON. Do it on a case by case basis because surely there will be some worthy exceptions. Anyway, back on subject. What I propose is that OSI manages a wall of shame for companies that behave inappropriately with respect to use of the term "open source". It could work something like this. 1). The accused company receives a public warning via email and it’s also published online (posted on a wiki perhaps). Along with the warming the company is asked to cease their inappropriate use of the term open source and provided clear steps for complying with OSI. 2). The accused follows the steps for compliance in the provided timframe or they receive public censure, which starts with a public admonishment of their actions and could be escalated. All this is archived (hence the wiki suggestion) and indexed. Perhaps OSI could work with SourceForge.net and other sites to create a coalition that could perfrom the censure.

Why is this better than the current process? Well right now it’s very ad hoc. Only geeks know what’s going on because we’re the only ones willing to participate in a rabid discussion list. Ultimately OSI has no stick to wield and everything is pretty quiet outside geek circles. Even within geeky circles people are confused and it’s unclear if someone is violating the will of OSI. Also, this way when someone performs a web search for the aformentioned accused company the warning and censure would be found in the search result set. Thus providing a monetary incentive for compliance with OSI’s will. I very recently emailed these thoughts (mostly) to Tiemann. UPDATE: Michael and I spoke. I talk about it in this blog post. Something needs to be corrected though because this is a growing trend that seems to be spurred on by the flood of cash resulting from the venture capitalists’ interest in open source. And to compound the problem you have very media savvy folks with deep deep pockets that are very clearly manipulating public perception by injecting their will into journalism (mostly bloggers).

Anyway, enough soap-boxing. Back to Alfresco. What’s the intent of the Alfresco FLOSS exception (also employed by MySQL and others)? It’s meant, as far as I can tell, to maximize freedom in extending and integrating with dissimilarly licensed FLOSS software. Meaning, whatever you extend or integrate can continue to maintain it’s own licensing as long as it’s OSI approved (or on a list of OSI approved licenses that Alfresco provides). We achieved the same end result at MindTouch by providing DREAM under LGPL. DREAM is our Distributed REST Application Manager and what we’re building MindTouch DekiWiki on top of. In fact, we’re slowly discarding MediaWiki PHP logic for C# on Mono/Net 2.0 in the form of DREAM services. And as you would imagine DREAM is also powering our API. It will should be technically feasible that ultimately one could install just a PHP layer on their shared server and have a very sophisticated Service Oriented Distributed Architecture (SODA) powered by DREAM providing all the business logic. Think about that for a moment. It has huge benefits and enormous ramifications. Anyway enough about us. Is this FLOSS exception OSI approved? I saw one reference to it being an OSI approved exception, but I really don’t know if it is. It’s exception is only for other OSI approved licenses, it’s got to be.

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Dandelife and autobiography

October 3, 2006 — Aaron Fulkerson

I recently did a little experiment over at Dandelife.com to see if this could replace my personal blogging space. I think this is a really cool service. It’s been a long while since I did any real blogging as is evident by perusing the archives here at SunNimbus. I thought Dandelife may reignite my interest in personal blogging. It did, but I’ve now decided to stop blogging at Dandelife. Why? Well, I want to own my data (plus they’re not open source). Sure, I really like Dandelife’s cool timeline view and how easy it is to add my Flickr photos, but what happens to all my content? Who owns it? I think it would be great for my daughter, Ashby (photo here at Coon Rapids Dam), to be able to read my crap ten years from now. However, where is Dandelife going to be 2 years from now? Where will all these other hosted services be? Who Knows!! As an employee of a ~”Web2.0″ company that is constantly evangelising data custody maybe I’ve drunk my own Kool-Aid. Or, have I? There are ample stories of hosted companies, like Flickr, blocking competitors from using their API to allow ‘we the users’ to pull our content out and /or expose it elsewhere. Who owns my content…If it’s not on my server? So, why am I using Flickr still…I don’t know…I still have high res copies of all my photos. Is there a better photo sharing service out there? Anyhow, I’m going to move all my posts from Dandelife to SunNimbus and abandon that space. I want data custody! Nonetheless, I think Dandelife’s timeline view is cool and overall I think they have a slick interface; moreover, I think their emphasis on providing an autobiography is a really good idea, perhaps more so now that I have a progenitor. After all, who else would really give a damn?

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