I am a founder and the Chief Executive Officer of MindTouch, a popular open source business application and collaboration platform used by millions. Read more.
Roy shared this spectacular time-lapse video of Franklin Street (the main street in Chapel Hill) after UNC won the championship game.
Timelapse: Franklin Street after the victory from The Daily Tar Heel on Vimeo.
Watching the bonfires flare up is pretty nifty.
When I think of House undergrad library at UNC I’m immediately filled with exam anxiety and thoughts of how hard my life was back when I was a working student struggling to make ends meet. I remember the endless cramming, the sleep deprivation, the stress…errg…
Now, here’s how I’d like to remember House Undergraduate Library:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruEMaDZWRcs&hl=en&fs=1]
TARHEELS! TARHEELS! 
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.
I had a couple speaking engagements in San Jose at KMWorld last week that conflicted with Halloween; so, rather than missing Ashby’s first Halloween, Tara and Ashby headed out to San Jose with me. It was great to have them there. We spent the entire week at my sister’s house, Julie, in Atherton. It would be wonderful if Tara and I could live the rest of our lives without ever being separate for an entire day. Tara read somewhere this is how Paul and Linda McCartney lived. That would be fantastic. Anyhow, it was great for Ashby to see her cousins again: Skylar and Owen. We were out there in June for at least a few days; so, it wasn’t their first time together, but now that Ashby is older she was able to really engage them.
Ashby really digs traveling. She is so into it, it’s a riot. She just has the time of her life at the airport, on the plane, strolling about in public from place to place. I think she thinks she is the queen of the parade or something. She just loves it! This girl loves to be on the go. This was the third time 
she has flown since being born. The first time we flew to North Carolina so I could speak at UNC, then, as I said, we were in California last June (Tom Tran’s wedding), and now this Halloween trip. She’ll likely fly again this year to San Diego. More on that later.
Tara and Ashby spent all day at Julie and Paul’s while I went into San Jose to work from the hotel was holed up at: Hotel Montgomery, a snazzy and affordable hotel just a couple blocks from the McEnery Convention Center where KMWorld was being held. For some bizarre reason my sister’s place doesn’t have WiFi with broadband. I have no idea what’s up with that considering Julie is a Publisher for a major technology media company. It’s always strange going back to the valley. It definitely feels like home. As soon as I step off the plane the smell hits me and I immediately know I’m back to the homeland. Maybe that’s my kind of pollution. I don’t know. There is something comforting about the urban sprawl, the rolling foothills, and good Asian food on every corner. I guess you can go home.
Tara and I got out for sushi twice the week we were there. Living in Minnesota we don’t get many chances to get decent food…I mean Asian food. In case you didn’t know: Swedes, Norwegians, and Irish don’t have the most diverse palletes. We went to Bonsai in Redwood City off El Camino on Monday while Julie and Paul monitored Ashby while she slept, which had totally shitty service and ‘ok’ food. Then later in the week we took Ashby to some sushi place in Palo Alto that, oddly enough, Tara had been to once previously a couple years ago with her mother. Odd coincidence. This place was pretty good. Ashby ate rice for the first time, she loved it, and, as usual, had a gay ol’ time with us. She really gets a thrill about being on the go.
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I spoke on Tuesday about wikis being the future of Knowledge Management and then on Wednesday I spoke about business/enterprise wikis and features and attributes to consider when selecting a wiki. I wrote briefly about this at my OpenGarden.org blog, which reminds me: I need to publish my PPTs up there. In general, I’m sorry to say, I think KMWorld is lame. Mainly because the 
organizers were just so damn disorganized. Just to give you some idea: it took me 15-20 minutes, 5people and three trips to figure out that I needed another ribbon on my badge to get me into the exhibition hall. Also, they misplaced Joel Waterman (Program Director, Enterprise Search Solutions, IBM) and I in the ‘collaboration’ track and totally boffed the description for our presentation.
I was stunned to see TheBrain there. Apparently they’ve been at KMWorld every year since 2000. It’s weird because I remember this software application like 6 or 7 years ago. It’s a mind map based personal information manager. I remember when I first saw it I was so impressed by the interface. Strangely the interface hasn’t changed since I first saw it–six years ago. It looks old. It’s kind of like when you see furniture from the 1980′s…not pretty. Not exactly a classic. I look at some of these bubbly Web 2.0 interfaces and I just know it’s going to be the same thing a few years from now. We’re going to look back at them and wonder what the hell was everyone was smoking. Just because we can make everything clickable, draggable, with rounded edges and primary colors doesn’t me should. 
Then there was Halloween. Wwwwweeeeeeee!! This was so much fun! I hauled ass back to Julie’s house after my presentation on Wednesday just in time to catch everyone geared up and ready to go trick-or-treating. Ashby was, as you can see, dressed as a Lady Bug from hell. Ok, so I said she was from hell for creep factor. It didn’t work well. I grabbed the only costume I had at my disposal in 5 minutes and we headed out. It was awesome! Ashby was totally into it. We went a couple miles away from Julie and Paul’s place and met up with a mob of children, and their parents, that Julie and Paul know. Tara and I made it out to about a dozen houses before heading home early to get Ashby to bed.
On Thursday, Paul and I went to a San Jose Sharks game. I had never been to a hockey game. It was a blast! Paul got us some killer seats: eighth row center. Other than Mark, the very big and clearly mentally impaired dude in the seat next to who kept crowding me and periodically dropping peanuts into my beer it was great. Hockey is loads of fun live. 
Sharks lost 1-2 to the Rangers.
Friday, we convened the: "Phase 2 of Establish Global Dominance" meeting with several of the MindTouch core team. MUHAHAHAHA!!! The next 6 months are going to be very exciting.
Finally, on Saturday we had brunch in Las Altos (Las Altos Cafe–good) with Josh Branscomb. An old buddy of mine that I graduated from UNC with. We did our senior project together. He’s pretty cool, for a Republican. Josh actually helped forge MindTouch waaaaaay back when it was still just an idea, before there were even other Wiki companies out there. In fact, he really was a founder. Instead of continuing with MindTouch he decided to go to Stanford Law School to get his law-monkey certification. He’s doing great though. He spent last Summer in D.C. and he’ll be working with Wilson and Sonsini this summer. In case you didn’t know, this is probably the most well respected technology focused law firm in the country. They represent Google, Yahoo, and perhaps the most impressive client: MindTouch!
The family and I travelled north this weekend to spend a couple nights on Madeline Island. It happened to coincide with Bayfield’s Applefest, which was a fortuitous circumstance as we had never been, but I have heard tons about it. Bayfield is a pituresque town on the south shore of Lake Superior, which seems to be an eclectic mix of ex-hippies and farmers. As you’ll see from the photo’s the Fall colors were in full bloom.
The cabin we stayed at on Madeline Island was allegedly “waterfront,” which apparently means lake superior is
about 75 yards away through some trees and across the road (photo to the right). However, the beach was the best damn beach I’ve ever seen on Lake Superior. Quite stunning. I was told the beach in the state park on the Island is the significantly better than any other place on the Island, but this was such a short visit we didn’t get a chance to see it up close. From a distance it looked to be a very deep beach, similar to what you would expect to see from an Ocean beach and not a Lake beach.
Ashby turned 9 months old on this trip and had some other milestones. It was the first time she was ever on a boat. She had previously stayed in a cabin and has been to Wisonsin before. To date she has been to Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, and California. She has already flown twice by now. She will be flying again when we go to California at the end of October again. KMWorld is in San Jose and rather than missing Ashby’s first Halloween we’re going to spend Halloween with Julie (my sister) and the Ekstroms.
As we walked around Bayfield on Saturday, which was packed with people, I stumbled across this fellow wearing a MindTouch Tshirt!! Ok, so it’s really my father in law. Although, I was recently related a story by a friend of mine in which he and his wife were in the Badlands camping when someone recognized the MindTouch shirt his wife was wearing and excitedly proclaimed: “hey I know those guys!” Evidently our brand has developed some equity as I have heard similar stories to this more than a few times. The setting is usually an urban one though.
There was this band playing music at Bayfield that got my attention when they announced they were from North Carolina. I’m unclear as to what their band name was, but they were quite good. I’m not sure if they were called “Bus”, “Big Pretty” or “Red Rockets.” Anyway, they had a suuuper unique sound. It was like ska fused with hip-hop with a tinge of folk/rock, and I’m certain I even heard a blue grass influence in a couple songs. Sounds weird, but it worked. At any rate, it turns out the fellow on the Cello (to the right) graduated two years earlier than me from UNC-Chapel Hill’s Computer Science program. Apparently after a stint at IBM he decided to pursue music full-time. We even had mutual friends, he knew Matt McCallus and John Crouch (Matt is at Red Storm still, I think, and John I believe is a full-time musician now). Crazy.
In general, it was a good mini-mini-vacation. If you do make it to Madeline Island definitely stop by the “Island Oasis” bar on a weekend night after 9pm. It’s a trippy local hang-out that is open only in the Summer and Fall (I’m told). Kind of hard to describe, but certainly worth stopping at.
During his career as one of the world’s most prolific spammers, the prosecution claimed that James amassed a fortune of some $24 million. According to prosecutors, he was churning out up to a million emails a day. Despite a response rate of 0.3 per cent he was bringing in around $750,000 a month.
Amongst the ‘products’ offered via his mass emailing were pornography, fake products and work-at-home schemes which purported to allow people to earn up to $75 an hour working from home. The prosecution had told the jury that in a single month Jaynes had received 10,000 credit card orders – each for the scam.
Although a resident of Raleigh, North Carolina, Jaynes’s trial took place in Loudon County, Virginia – the home of AOL. He was tried under State Law, which makes it an offence to use false internet addresses and aliases to send mass emails. James was convicted under this law of using the AOL servers to send the spoof emails.
Jeese! That’s a ton of money. You would think the guy would have been intelligent enough to call it quits after the first few million.
