N. Alex Rupp's Blog

October 2003 Archives

Author Praises the Die-Hard Spirit of Silicon Valley Culture in Radio Broadcast

(the following is an excerpt of Greider's radio broadcast)

"I was on the west coast. I can't tell you how many good conversations I've had with people, many of them software engineers who were working in Silicon Valley. Two or three years ago they thought they were millionaires, cause they had a lot of stock options and the stock prices of their company was still going through the roof."

"And they're not destitute now--they got a buyout or something like that. They're not living in poverty. But they got whacked, big time. And instead of bitterness, they're mostly in a reflective frame of mind. Now maybe that's just the people who come out to talk with me, but I was pretty impressed with how many of them are sort of noodling through what happened, and trying to figure out what's wrong in the system. And then thinking about--at least, in theory--it could be fixed."

"And maybe that's just because they're engineers, you know, engineers believe they can solve problems and these people are working on it. Men and women." (emphasis mine)

"I would bet on this country as long as that spirit is still there."

Listen to the whole interview here: Real Audio / MP3 / more info about broadcast

The Death of a Titan

On January 6th, 2001 I woke up and went to work as normal. It was a cold Friday and I was looking forward to working on a streaming MP3 jukebox server I'd been building with Flash and Java. I had no idea what was going to happen that day.

I worked for a company called marchFIRST, which had only months before boasted a roster of 10,000 employees around the world. I remember the early days very well. I was hired by an enthusiastic creative director and flown to Chicago for a week-long orientation seminar. When I returned I was brought to the new offices, which crowned the top three floors of a new highrisein a nearby suburb of Minneapolis.

The place was magnificent. We had hexagonal "cubes" made from brushed steel with sheer white cloth walls between them to facilitate communication. I was a part of a creative team with 30 employees. 30 brilliant designers, a handful of whom were also skilled Presentation or client-side developers. I was among those rare crossbreeds who could travel between the creative group and the Java developer team downstairs, which also boasted about 30 developer seats.

Supporting the creative and development teams were a contingent of information architects, writers, producers, HR personnel, strategy, and marketing specialists. All of the different groups held each other up. The Minneapolis office had about 140 people altogether.

I remember the energy of that place. It was immense--impossible to explain if you were not there. We were the absolute cream of the international crop when it came to delivering corporate services. But trouble had set in very early in my tenure. The company had cooked the Q2 books in 2000, relying on "accrual" accounting methods to keep up their price-to-book ratios. A lot of the "profit" they put on the balance sheet was outstanding, and the Dot-commers who made up our client base would never be able to pay their bills. The Minneapolis office was working on Tremor.com for Procter & Gamble, and were raking in money hand-over-fist, so we thought we were fine.

But if you chop off enough of the beast's heads, the body is certain to fall with it.

In Q3 marchFIRST fell short of analyst's expectations and worse. It came to light that they'd mislead the public in Q2 to the tune of 50 million dollars (or something incredible like that) and dug a deeper hole in Q3. The "C-Level" people in the company had dumped their stock and resigned by the time the news came out, but I'd only been there a few weeks and didn't have any stocks invested in the company (and still didn't know up from down when it came to finance). The stock price plummeted from $30.00 to about $0.10 over the course of a couple of weeks.

And everything was quiet in the office for a couple of months.

That Friday morning when I went to work, my managers were in a meeting, and when they came back around 11 or so, they looked stricken. There was a group of about 20 people quietly talking over by their desks. I went over and learned that one of my managers (the better of the two, in my mind) had been terminated and was asked to pack up her desk and leave immediately. I was shocked.

Then I learned they were going to do the same to about half of us that day. My initial shock turned to silent terror. Nobody said anything. We all returned to our desks and tried to think about anything other than who was next.

A little while later, the telephones at our desks began to ring. One at a time people answered their phones in a quiet voice, stood up and marched in silence to a room somewhere on the other side of the office. About ten minutes later they would return, white-faced, and begin to pack their belongings.

I can't do justice to the nerve-racking terror of that day. Whenever anyone's phone rang, you thought it was yours, because sound carried so well through the office. Grown men and women were choking down the fear, but everyone was alone that day. We had been profitable, we'd pulled long hours and burned the midnight oil to make this company successful. How could they disassemble a team of this caliber? I couldn't believe it.

Eventually my phone rang. I took my licks, gratiously accepted two months of severence pay and got ready for the Freefall. I've been consulting for many years, and returning between gigs to the Freefall is the nature of the business. I could go back to being a Merc, I told myself. I turned in my equipment and left marchFIRST.

But what happened to me? I didn't return to the IT business that spring. I didn't go back to the freelance life or become an IT mercenary the way I'd once been. I had eaten the team rhetoric and swallowed the hook. And when they yanked the hook out and tossed me back into the pond, I took it much harder than I thought I would.

I stopped looking for jobs and decided to go back to the University in the summer. I became a hardcore introvert and stayed up for days reading Nietzsche, teaching myself J2EE, listening to international politics on the BBC. Needless to say, it was a long, dark spring. And it didn't get better in the summer, when I moved in with some friends. Or in the autumn, when I couldn't afford books for my classes, or anything but the most absolute meager diet. I didn't accept another job until December of that year, by which time I'd burned off most of the anger, frustration and bitterness I felt for the entire IT industry and all of the destructive greed that had nearly eaten me alive.

I started working at an IT helpline for the U of MN at a very meager hourly rate, and came home from work each day feeling that I'd genuinely helped the community, given something substantial back. All day long, all I did was help people fix their computers, or get their email or some other trivial thing. But it seemed like magic to them. It's strange, but I learned that giving something simple to real people, where I could clearly see the results each day gave me more of a sense of accomplishment than I'd ever felt bringing home the $4,500.00 paychecks.

That's about the time I quit my studies of computer science and begun studying literature and literary theory in school. You think Josh Bloch knows about languages? Try reading Jacques Derrida sometime. You want to learn about architecting or codifying a concept in an information system? Deconstructive analysis can teach you more about systems architecture than the Java Language Specification, or any book on java certification can. Ever seen that "code poet" shirt? There's more truth in that phrase than in most books on programming.

All the technical training in the world hadn't prepared me for the day my company and my ideals about the industry came crashing down around me. I had to realize there's more at stake than what first appears. Our industry and culture is one of engineers, we are those who build. But we don't just build software systems, because you can't live in your software. My friend Dain Sundstrom told me earlier this year while I was helping him move out of his house that in his heart, he's "really just a carpenter." My good friend Russel Colliton takes that a step further--he actually has a woodshop in his basement. And the time is fast approaching when a new wave is going to hit our US economy and take our livelihoods with it out to sea. Now, as carpenters, we either have to build an ark, or we'll have to rebuild our lives when the storm breaks.

And that day is coming. It's going to make that January seem like this June. Sound fatalistic? It is, but I'm optimistic because it can be fixed.

Like any complex system, our economy has bugs. Huge bugs. Critical, terminal bugs. Our monetary policy is trending toward a Weimar Republic-style infinite loop. You could call it a "Cash Overflow Error". There are also bugs in our heads, particularly about our notion of the "good life". But the general character of our community is strong and smart enough to hack this system, figure out its flaws and work to refactor it.

There's more to life than bits and chips, and coming to terms with that helped me flesh out my understanding of my place in this society. Being in the belly of that titan when it fell back to the earth seemed like the end of the world, but there is more meaning waiting out there if the same should ever happen to you.

A final quick note--I don't recommend Nietzsche as a post-collapse starting point in the search for meaning, but Walter Koffman's preface in the Viking portable edition is a priceless introduction to western philosophy.

On Branding and Copyright--Open Source For Entrepreneurs

There are two subtle but unique resources in open source which, if acquired and carefully leveraged, can give your business a leg up over some of the big players in the market. One of these resources is control over the copyright of the software. The other is control over the brand.

Both of these resources are incredibly important over the lifetime of a successful software project but are often overlooked in the rush to set up a CVS tree and start committing. But later on, major problems can spring up when you find yourself locked in to somebody else's license scheme or (potentially worse), somebody else's brand.

The Licensing question eventually always boils down to Copyright authority. If you've a warchest of developers from around the world who've committed software to your project over the course of a couple of years, and you want to make a change in the licensing, you're stuck. In order to change the license you need to get the signature of every developer who has ever worked on the software.

Take JBoss for an example. Earlier this year when Core Developers Network forked the JBoss project, they knew full and well they could not change the license of the software from LGPL to Apache. They would have needed to get permission from every person who ever worked on JBoss if they wanted to do that. So they were bound to the LGPL, which is why the Apache Geronimo Project must completely rewrite the JBoss deployment system. Ironically, this has turned out to be a great excuse to overhaul and modernize a much-needed piece of technology. We're adding full JSR-77 and JSR-88 support, among other things.

But what few people know is that the licensing matter was the smallest obstacle in forking the JBoss project. The biggest problem was the brand. The trademark to the word "JBoss" is owned by Dr. Fleury. Now before you gnash your teeth and curse the man, think about the benefit for him as an Entrepeneur. He is the sole owner of his trademark, which means he owns the brand. Nobody can use the JBoss trademark in their product without his approval--including in package declarations and imports in their software. Now that's an advantage that could also be yours, if you ever built a successful product.

That degree of control over the brand gave Dr. Fleury an edge. Core Developers Network hacked the logic of the law and renamed every instance of the word JBoss to Elba, but go take a look at the Elba downloads from the last month and compare it with JBoss 3.2. The fact remains that Dr. Fleury controls the brand. He's invested a lot of time in that brand, and he'll no doubt reap the benefit of that investment someday.

And more power to him for thinking ahead. It's really too bad that he didn't think ahead about the copyright issue. He admitted earlier this year in an interview that one of his largest regrets was not licensing the product under the full GPL. Why? Because then he could follow the MySQL business model and sell non-GPL licensing at a premium, without losing the good graces of academia and the free software community.

Now consider the Apache Software Foundation. Here's an organization that really thought matters out. Not only does the Foundation have control over the brands of their respective projects, but they also require that all committers sign a contract assigning the ASF copyright authority over everything you commit to their projects. Now at first, this seems really bad, but once you realize you *always* have original copyright over your own creations and that you cannot just give it away, that the ASF really just has a copy of your copyright, you generally sign the form and bask in the glory of having committed code to the ASF.

So where does this bring us? To you, dear reader. Your projects and the potential companies you might someday form in order to help you promote and reap the benefits of your open source endeavors. We've seen how a strong brand can drown out an anemic one how control over that brand can be a tremendous advantage in business. Strong brands are assets which cannot easily be measured, but whose effects are nevertheless extremely important.

We've also seen how obtaining control over the copyright assignments for your software project can help that project leverage its license down the road, and how failure to do so can lead to license lock-in. Licensing is without a doubt a major concern of any software business. If you can't change your license over time to adapt to the changing needs of the market, you could find your company dead in the water.

Plus, open source developers will respect you for bringing up the license issue before they start contributing their spare time to furthering your commercial success. People like to know what they're getting into, or at least they like to have some idea about it.

So next time you come up with a fantastic idea with obvious benefits to the business community and you get serious about implementing it in Open Source, think for a while whether or not you'd like to stake a claim in the marketplace as a professional. Do some serious research on licensing and copyright law and if you decide to take the Entrepeneurial challenge give some serious thought to your branding strategy.

If you don't, someone else might just come along, scoop up your good ideas and do it for you. Who wants to be a starving artist, anyway?

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