1. The name means "I Am Java" in Portuguese.
2. "Javali" is a contraction of the expression "Java Livre", meaning "Free Java", but also means "wild boar" in Portuguese hence the cute mascot.
3. The synopsis is that 'open source' can be modelled as a software commons managed by a community of software craftspeople who use the commons to create richness (monetary and otherwise) and in the process enrich the commons to the benefit of all. I believe this model to provide the best basis for understanding most other aspects of open source including licensing and governance. I'll write more about this another time.

NeoOffice/J 0.7 Released

While we're celebrating the third birthday of OpenOffice.org, I'd like to pass huge congratulations to Patrick Luby on the release of v0.7 of NeoOffice/J for Mac OS X. He has single-handedly written a highly usable front-end for the Mac OS X port of OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 (itself an enormous achievement - credit especially to Ed Peterlin and Dan Williams) so that it doesn't require X11 to use. This new release makes it almost feature-complete, and it will make a lot of Mac users very happy.

Patrick has avoided needing either X11 or extensive Aqua programming by using core Java technology and leveraging its existing integration into Aqua. As a porting strategy I think that's pretty smart. This release adds printing, which for me was the missing link. There's still plenty of work to be done, but it's very cool.

This program is a case-study in the power of the open source method. With neither Sun nor Apple in a position business-wise to work on a Mac version of OpenOffice.org, the fact that all the source code was freely usable allowed capable and committed developers to 'do their own thing' and meet a community need. Traditional approaches to software would have left the idea to wither - this approach, through the energy of a few software engineers, lets many flowers bloom.

[Also posted to Webmink]

Monoculture Considered Harmful

I commented recently that, while we can each take steps to prevent virus and worm attacks on our computer systems, the biggest threat we actually face is the fact that we have a computer monoculture.

Most of the world’s computers run Microsoft’s operating systems, thus most of the world’s computers are vulnerable to the same viruses and worms at the same time. The only way to stop this is to avoid monoculture in computer operating systems, and for reasons just as reasonable and obvious as avoiding monoculture in farming. Microsoft exacerbates this problem via a wide range of practices that lock users to its platform. The impact on security of this lock-in is real and endangers society.

While appropriate remedies require significant debate, these three alone would engender substantial, lasting improvement if Microsoft were vigorously forced to: • Publish interface specifications to major functional components of its code, both Windows and Office. • Foster development of alternative sources of functionality through an approach comparable to the highly successful "plug and play" technology for hardware components. • Work with consortia of hardware and software vendors to define specifications and interfaces for future developments, in a way similar to the Internet Society's RFC process to define new protocols for the Internet

Before the usual and inevitable cries of 'Microsoft-hater' are raised, can I make a plea to people to look at the issue here (and read John Lettice's take too). It's actually not based on an instinctive hatred of Microsoft - as Geer himself says:

"If the monoculture was all Linux, it would be just as bad"

[Also posted to Webmink]

An Open Spirit

In the first posting in her new weblog, Anne Thomas Manes talks about the idea of porting Jakarta to Mono, the project to implement C# and the core of the CLI from .NET on Linux. She says:

But from the moment Miguel initiated the Mono project, I’ve been worried about its future potential. I’ve feared that it would go the way of DCOM on Unix. (DCOM is an Open Group standard – and Microsoft retains ownership of its intellectual property.) A number of vendors implemented DCOM on Unix, but almost no one ever used it, because DCOM is pretty worthless without a bunch of application-level class libraries, such as ODBC, OLE DB, ADO, and ASP to run on top of it. Microsoft never released these specifications to the public, so these technologies have never been available for Unix. Hence DCOM on Unix faded away into irrelevancy.

What we learn from each of these forays into openness is that it doesn't matter how sound the vehicle being used to express the apparent 'openness' is (ECMA for C#, Open Group for DCOM, partenr community for NT), what ultimately matters is the open spirit of the originator. If their intent and method is essentially open, the process bugs get fixed along the way and more and more becomes open.

In the case of the Java environment, things have gradually opened up to the point where Apache are able to implement the whole of J2EE (in their Geronimo project). The process bugs (there have been plenty over the years and as Anne hints there are still a few to fix) resulted in the most part from the design of the process by humans. Sometimes it took waaay too long to fix them, but the underlying spirit has remained an open spirit that's resulted in increasing openness. The result has been a rich and diverse marketplace with many strong players, and for J2EE there is wide choice at every stage for the developer.

So when Anne proposes

So the way I see it, in order for Mono to succeed, we need to develop a set of open frameworks, engines, utilities, tools, APIs, and class libraries that run on top of it.

[Also posted to Webmink]

Borg and the Penguin

It was interesting at LinuxWorld (back near the start of August) to see how many people from Microsoft were attending. Indeed, at both my session and the one with Sterling Ball, a show of hands revealed a row or more of Microsoft employees (sticking together for mutual protection?).

Josh Ledgard was there, and while I must have been speaking a bit fast (I've never worked for MSFT, I was just an ordinary developer in the Word beta program, back in the days before MSDN made it into a business) I think he's on target with his report (even the StarOffice crash). As he notes, the 3D graphics innovations Sun is bringing to Linux were a big hit:

It seemed the most innovative demo was Sun showing off " Project Looking Glass". This was a three dimensional desktop environment for Linux that looked like some mix of OS X(Complete with that funky pop-up start bar) and Longhorn. The audience went crazy for this.

IBM claims to have put more than $1 billion behind open source software, but the company is failing to pay even a modest amount of lip service to one of free software's most needed products.

I saw plenty of people with windows laptops and plenty of OS X notebooks, but outside of the booths and Sun sessions I was surprised at the lack of people running Linux. Sure, their slide decks talked a big game, but it looked a lot like Powerpoint and Windows XP underneath for Dan Powers(IBM VP of Grid Computing and Emerging Technologies) and several others. For presenters and general show goers I saw it felt like the order was MS > OS X > Linux. It surprised me enough to mention it I guess.

Linux on the mainframe might be interesting to a few customers, but it's not the OS's future. If IBM wants its Linux investment to keeping paying off, the vendor should push solid open source achievements instead of plugging Microsoft where it's convenient.

I'm also not even sure what the details of our licensing policies are, but if you were at LinuxWorld you were educated on how evil they are. No one at the show claimed that Linux was free, but one company that made the Linux switch did claim that no evil lawyers have come after him since they switched for being 8% under licensed. It just depresses me to lose customers because of this.

[Also posted to Webmink]

Sun and Open Source - Development, not Deployment

In his recent posting on java.net Alan Williamson asks how open source software can ever be profitable. I believe his thinking confuses two different issues - how software is developed and how it is deployed. In some contexts they are the same thing, but in a growing number they are completely different. In the difference lays the answer.

I believe the best way to understand open source is as a methodology. It's essentially been in Sun's genes for 20 years, and Sun has repeatedly tried to fuse open community development and the creation of broad commercial markets in project after project. Today Sun sees open source as the best way to build great software in co-operation with the rest of the massively-connected community, given the commercial freedom to do so. We employ engineers to work on open source projects. We support the open source community; we deliver value to customers; we protect, facilitate and enfranchise both.

Open source is a software development methodology - that's why you need the source! The openness facilitates a developer community. It's not primarily intended as part of the deployment vehicle for end users, and that's where the risk lies. The developer-friendly features make it all seem so tempting for deployers - control over the software, free code and no lock-in - but those things were put there for the developers, not the deployers. Obviously an open development community needs the source code to be under an open-access license and on a web site - otherwise how could it function?

When deployers decide to use the benefits that facilitate the developers as the vehicle for deployment, they will inevitably 'pay the price' somehow. They could pay by putting people into the open source community to act on their behalf, collecting the code and deploying it on their systems. Alternatively they could get community members procure, perhaps customise the code and then deploy the results. But an expert is always required. Sun's answer, the one most companies want to hear, is "we join the community so you don't have to" - and in the process we indemnify you, we get your bugs fixed and we hold your hand.

For Sun, open source software development often makes perfect sense as part of our business plan. Our story is not "we want to bring it down", it's "we are a member-practitioner, and here's how we do it". Sun works in the Open Source community, and then adds value with packaging, documentation, support, long term insurance that the project will continue, indemnification and more, so that the Sun customer can feel secure in adopting an Open Source technology, and feel that they are justifiably receiving a value for paying money to Sun. Doing these things to enable deployment doesn't impact the 'freedom' of the development community - it just that the freedom that enables development isn't applicable to most people deploying.

Sun invests more in open source than pretty much any other company, has more reliance on open source in its products, and uses that experience to deliver the value customers want. I might summarise this by saying "Sun is the industry's biggest open source company" and "we joined the community so our customers don't have to" and currently most importantly "we're taking the risks so our customers are indemnified".

So how does open source make money, Alan? Well, simply by letting businesses make great products that people want. Development and deployment aren't (always) the same thing.

[Also posted on Webmink : the Blog]

Open Design

I have commented to a few people that Blogging is a Big Deal. Not, I hasten to add, because I think that anything more than a core of special people (special can have many meanings, but I like Halley's article...) will ever decide to participate in a meaningful way in that specific activity. Rather, it's because of the work that it's catalysing, both extending blogging and going way beyond, as Jorgen Thelin hints and Tim Bray explains.

Weblogs are, in my opinion, the most successful application of web services to date. They have been successful because a combination of social factors and sufficiently OK technology have come together at the right time, and because they have a universally almost-agreed format for the content of the conversations. Most of the fuss in the world that calls itself web services has been about the plumbing, and no doubt one day there will be wonderful things happening there, but for now the big win has been for the application with a standard content format, transferred using whatever communications method comes to hand (for the most part, HTTP - XML-RPC has and continues to be crucial too, and while I don't share Tim Appnel's distaste for mentioning it I do share some of his reservations about its future).

That's why I consider the current online debate about whether XML-RPC should be used for nEcho divisive (Update: and is seems Sam agrees). It does a great job baiting certain individuals but fundamentally nEcho has to be about a content description first and then later about a way of communicating it.

Blogging was already a fascinating social crucible, empowering millions to express themselves and thousands to engage in distributed, accountable conversation. Now it's spawned a unique technology encounter. Open source has given us a development methodology for the massively-connected era. We now see the spontaneous formation of a potential design methodology for the massively-connected era.

[Also posted to Webmink : the Blog]

Sun has an Open Source Info Site

Solving the Patent Problem

Responding to my earlier posting, Glen Martin comments that:

To my mind, patents in software add no value, and really only serve to subject software development to the less than scrupulous (lawyers, that is).

It is starting to look to me as if the OSS world won't ever meet its real potential unless software patents go away. Since the non-OSS world has little incentive to change, it would seem to be up to OSS boosters to drive it.

What became apparent (to me at least) at F/OSS this week was the need for research into how to create mechanisms that protect open source projects against patents. In his evening keynote Richard Stallman suggested building an anti-patent 'poison pill' into the GPL such that any attempt to assert patent rights against a GPL-protected project would result in automatic loss of rights to use any GPL-protected software anywhere. One delegate noted, however, that such a provision would effectively prevent a company like IBM, with a history of patent suits, from using GPL software. Ironically, a company like Microsoft with no history to date of patent suits would be able to use GPL software without any problems!

As I suggested before, I think it's necessary to understand what is the real problem patents pose to open source and then address that problem. It seems to me that, to expand Benkler's definition, open source is commons-based, rapidly-iterative peer production. Patents delay or erode the commons, and disincent peers from involvement in rapid iteration. Fighting patent legislation is one way to address the commons, but a seperate mechanism such as use of foundations to own code as a haven against prosecution seems vital to address the iteration issue

I'm not a lawyer, so have no training to construct the defences against patents. But it seems to me this is a vital research area, and I encourage the F/OSS academics to engage in it without delay.

[Also posted at Webmink]

F/OSS on Patents

Just sitting in the final session at F/OSS at Harvard, largely on software patents. The research, presented here by Jim Bessen (the paper is available online and Slashdot has a great summary), suggests that it's become cheaper and easier to get software patents over the last 20 years (overall and compared with other patents). The research finds "... software patents substitute for firm R&D rather than complement it." Increasingly, it seems, the innovation is happening elsewhere...

Several voices have suggested that the real key to open source is the practice of rapid incremental development by a distributed community. But patents are the big threat to open source authors as infringers are typically unwitting, easily traceable through the very tools that enable the process and liable for unlimited damages. So if anything open source is more vulnerable to patents as the very FUD about them could inhibit the rapidity of improvement.

Commercial firms protect themselves from patents by gather 'thickets' of them for negotiation, and it becomes an arms race. Open source can't generally play this deadly game of gathering 'thickets' of patents, so some other protection is essential. An earlier presentation by Siobhan O’Mahoney hinted at a partial solution for this, using a non-profit foundation to own the code and protect the author. But whatever the treatment, the illness is clearly dangerous and systemic.

[Also posted at webmink]

At F/OSS

I am (unexpectedly) at the MIT/HBS Free/Open Source Software conference at Harvard. The first session included a paper comparing Apache, Mozilla and a commercial software project. The results suggested open source development does indeed deliver higher productivity levels and lower defect counts than closed team development. While I felt intuitively that this was the case, I'm pleased to see a growing research base supporting the fact.

All three papers also suggested that, regardless of the overall size of the community, most of the work was conducted by a core of participants which, as one delegate pointed out, tended to be of similar size to hunter/gatherer groups across human history. Much of the presentation activity is trying to model and understand effects which seem intuitively correct but lack logically coherent discussions.

But the one topic I'm not sure is really being explored is the phenomenon of commercial involvement in open source activities. All the discussions assume that all the participants are volunteers, but in communities like NetBeans.org and OpenOffice.org there are a large number of participants who are employed as professional engineers to participate in the community. I'll be watching today to see if this dimension gets some airtime.

Webmink About Town

I've been blogging for 18 months or so over on my personal page so it's a delight to finally be able to write under the java.net banner. Starting at JavaOne 2003 in San Francisco I'll comment on trends, oddities, gadgets and whatever else catches my eye as I travel. I'll cross-post anything relevant from my personal blog but if you want to read about my politics, musical taste etc you'll need to read that blog too :-)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.