The intellectual property racket must end. Intellectual property laws were designed to promote innovation, not to allow monopolists to stifle it. We have an entire generation that has been taught that new ideas have to be “protectable” to be worthy of consideration. Whatever happened to being faster and better than the competition? Do these companies really need a seventeen year head-start? Does Microsoft really need a government-sanctioned sledge-hammer with which to intimidate smaller companies?

Do we, as a society, still need to grant monopolies to companies in order to promote innovation? I’ve never felt I needed a monopoly to be successful; I just needed to be faster than the other guy. I’m a pedal-to-the-metal kind of guy and I’m convinced that I can move forward faster with my own ideas than anyone else can move in trying to copy me.–Dave Dargo

Hell yeah! Excellent post.

With only a couple late nights we pushed out Hayes Beta 2 last night. Thanks Pete. Download now, Release notes. It has a new WEB INSTALLER w00h000!

Poof! No Wikipedia right now. It looks like it’s missing a print stylesheet. Why this would prevent the page from loading, I have no idea. Worse yet, I can’t gloat over MindTouch’s download stats because the SourceForge.net statistics server has been down since 10AM yesterday. 😦

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&#3
9;

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.

Yay! IMAP from GOO. Sweet! Why? All my email will now be routed through my Google apps Gmail account and I’ll receive via IMAP. I only use IMAP because I don’t want to lose my email archive and the best way to achieve this with the least effort on my part is by leaving a copy of all my emails on the server. Also, this means I can use Google’s spam filter.

First plastic bags, now bottled water; San Francisco is certainly setting an example. Mayor Gavin Newsom signed an order this week banning the use of City funds to purchase single-serving bottled water. –San Francisco Mayor Bans the Bottle (TreeHugger)

Errrg…plastic bags need to be banned! Bottles too. It’s difficult to avoid plastic while shopping. I try to remember to bring my reusable bags. I often forget. I never mean to get plastic bags, but it’s automatic with the baggers. They default to plastic! I was at Ikea a couple weeks ago. They’ve implemented a bag tax. This is wonderful. No one was leaving Ikea with bags. Go San Fran. I wish San Diego were as forward thinking. I’m not in favor of legislating common sense, but it’s very difficult for me to avoid plastic bags. Perhaps a state bag tax is in order. Ultimately we tax payers will pay for the pollution anyway.

Cross Post

This video is longer than the last, but I think you'll agree it’s worth the 20 minutes of your life. Live Data Services is one of the most exciting new features coming in the Hayes release. With Live Data Services DekiWiki's original goals are reaching fruition as a web framework for developing enterprise and social applications. Specifically one can register a webservice with DekiWiki, describe the new service in DekiWiki's services manager control panel, and thereby operate on external data as if it were local or extend DekiWiki with other applications and widgets. DekiWiki is now a social media aggregation platform, easily integrated with other applications and data stores, and very easy to extend with additional functionality.

This video is a screen capture; so, you’ll probably want to watch it in full-screen mode in order to be able to read the screen text clearly. To put the Viddler player into full-screen mode mouse over the player and you will see a command bar appear at the top of the player. Click the icon to the far right.

We’ll be providing a video-cast weekly. Please send us your requests for topics. We’ll happily reorder our current schedule of topics to suit requests. If you have questions about items we show in the video you can insert comments into sections of the video. If you have suggestions about the mechanics of our vids please email me directly.

Cross Post

I promised previously to highlight a developer a month. This month I'm highlighting Pete Erickson. I guess this makes Pete our developer of the month. Roy told me he was unwilling to peaceably relinquish his crown. Too bad Roy. It's Pete's turn to shine because he's a superstar and you're old news.

First a little background on Pete. Pete was born and grew up in a teeny tiny village in way northern Minnesota called Roseau.. He attended college at Bethel and then NDSU. He was hired by Great Plains software after school. Pete tells the story of his first week at work. He was informed the company was purchased by Microsoft. He was sufficiently pissed he considered quitting. He didn't though and he continued to work with Microsoft for a couple of years in and out of Redmond, WA. PeteE (as I call him) is passionate about open source and open standards. He enjoys participating in triathlons, biking, hiking, camping, and long walks on the beach with pina coladas. Ok, the last two items I manufactured, but the rest is true.

 Open Source Developer Poster Child

Pete manages most of our infrastructure stuff. He's probably the best Linux guy we have other than Geoff. He codes mostly in C# although he's recently become adept in PHP. He manages the NOC, all our software packaging, install guides, and upgrade scripts. Mostly recently he's done a lot of work in Hayes on Lucene with search indexing, he wrote the RSS API, and he even wrote a Drupal authentication service for DekiWiki.

Pete was actually the first engineer hired by MindTouch. He was a contractor even before Roy came on as a full time employee. He was introduced to me by his now girlfriend Marianne who was doing some business administration work for MindTouch. Pete literally worked with me out of my windowless basement for a couple of months off and on. Unfortunately Pete still lives in MN. Hopefully his recent surfing expedition in Pacific Beach with Max will entice him to move to San Diego very soon.

Pete blogs on rare occasions too. He's done a nice write-up about the upcoming Hayes Beta2 release. Specifically he highlights:

• Hayes has a web installer! No @#!t! And PeteE wrote it too.
• New parser
• Live data services
• External Authentication services
• Extensible storage provider model
• New indexing service
• Nicer UI, but I think he means improved presentation layer

Pete's post is a useful read for all you interested Gardeners. Enjoy! Oh, and be sure to click on the photos in this post so you can see the witty Flickr notes I placed on the photos. 😉

Vice President Dick Cheney has asserted his office is not a part of the executive branch of the U.S. government, and therefore not bound by a presidential order governing the protection of classified information by government agencies, according to a new letter from Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., to Cheney.

Bill Leonard, head of the government’s Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), told Waxman’s staff that Cheney’s office has refused to provide his staff with details regarding classified documents or submit to a routine inspection as required by presidential order, according to Waxman. – The Blotter

Throw these bastards’ corrupt asses out of office and try them for war crimes already! I am dead serious. Many of these people belong behind bars. The Dems aren’t any better. If they were they would have pushed for impeachment and fought the twice illegal seizure of the office of President. Any 2008 Presidential candidate that seriously pushes to impeach these pricks gets my vote. I guess this leaves Kucinich. He’s definitely one of the most intelligent candidates even if he is a tad liberal for my taste. Gooooo KUCINICH!!

Please consider voting for DekiWiki as best new project at Sourceforge.net. It will take you two clicks. I’m a little late in announcing this. Therefore there is only a very short time left to vote. Every vote counts and the winner is included in a press release and is given an award at OSCON.