Heat Maps

August 4, 2009 — Aaron Fulkerson

Random photo of Saint Paul, MNI’m reading a book on web analytics and I have determined my employer should be using heat map analysis of our corporate website. In fact, it’s ridiculous we haven’t been benefiting form this already. For some reason the Google Analytics overlay feature isn’t working at our corporate website. It must have something to do with how JavaScript heavy the site is. So last night I checked out www.crazyegg.com and www.clickdensity.com. This morning I attempted to login to ClickDensity and inadvertently included a comma. In return I received the following exception:

Titter titter. www.clickdensity.com doesn't like ","

Wow, that is shoddy engineering. If the service can not provide a reasonable user experience for even the most basic boundary cases how can I trust them with anything else? What else have they ‘missed’?

Currently I’m leaning toward CrazyEgg.Image representing crazyegg as depicted in CrunchBase

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ThinkTank 2008 Day 1 Summary: Ramji, Golden, Mickos

February 8, 2008 — Aaron Fulkerson

I had a fantastic time last night with several Microsofties whom I had not previously met. I can’t recall a more pleasant time with colleagues at a conference except for those rare occasions Steve (other Mindtouch founder and CTO) comes along. During the regular conference session yesterday there was a CIO panel and a brainstorm session. During the brainstorm session we were tasked with answering some simple (and rather boring) questions. What could have been a dull time was actually quite entertaining thanks to Doug Levin, Ross Turk, Larry Rosen, and Larry Augustin who were some of the people in my assigned group. Doug is a fantastically witty fellow and a Tarheel; so you know he’s wickedly smart too. :-) After the regular conference session Larry Augustin introduced me to Sam Ramji. Having spent dinner and several drinks in conversation with Sam I have to say: that dude is smart, hilariously funny, and very authentic. I was surprised. :-) I didn’t expect *bad* things, but I didn’t expect to hit it off with him as we did, especially not so immediately. A highlight of the evening was getting to know Tim Golden from Bank of America. I’ve seen him speak at a couple conferences in the past, but I had not met him until last night. That guy had me laughing so damn hard over dinner I twice almost fell out of my chair. What an amazing fellow!

As the night wound down, along with my sobriety, I found myself chatting with Marten Mickos the CEO of MySQL. I thanked him for his work and the benefit he’s given to all commercial open source companies with the recent acquisition of MySQL by Sun. This provides a very helpful data point for all of us in this space. I’ve always admired Marten and Monty. I asked Marten several questions that he, as he always does, very candidly answered. I asked him: What was his biggest mistake? His best move? Starting over what would he do differently? Will there be a stand-alone open source software Goliath? And some other common questions. It would be inappropriate for me to blog much of what he said, but something that really struck me was his assessment of being a CEO. He said, and I may get the wording slightly wrong, being CEO is a lonely and often scary position. You’re alone. You often have to make decisions that others don’t agree with and you really don’t have someone else to speak with about your anxieties and concerns. You can’t talk to your wife about it because she doesn’t understand it, nor would you want her to. And there are occasions when your decisions will put you at odds with everyone else’s thinking; thereby alienating you entirely–perhaps even from the board and advisers. It can be very lonely. Another of Marten’s responses I feel comfortable divulging is what he felt was his best move as he matured MySQL. “Personally engaging the community.”

One final point of interest I feel compelled to cram into this blog post. During the regular conference sessions a person asked everyone to raise there hands if they’ve written code. 90% of attendees raised their hand. It’s an open source conference, right? So what? Pretty much everyone at this conference is a CEO and it’s not all startups. I thought this was fascinating. More so, I believe, in open source than with proprietary software companies the executives come from an engineering background.

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Open Source Think Tank 2008 – Olliance Group

February 7, 2008 — Aaron Fulkerson

Cross post

Olliance Open Source ThinkTank 2008Open Source Think Tank 2008 – Olliance Group – Home
this is not a traditional conference; all attendees are expected to contribute in the brainstorm and workshop format and take advantage of the CIO panels.

I’m at the Olliance Open Source ThinkTank in Napa Valley from February 7-9. The guest list is a long list of C’s (CEO, CIO, CTO, etc) from predominately open source software companies, but proprietary software companies are well represented as well. I just skimmed the guest list. It’s a veritable who’s who of open source. The event is intended to achieve two goals: give open source company executives access to CIOs through a series of panels. And provide a venue and medium for open source entrepreneurs and executives to brainstorm about key issues that effect our businesses and the industry as a whole. Rather than spamming the MindTouch blog I’ll likely post a couple times during the event to my personal blog at O b (LOG N ).

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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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