CollabNet Comes Out of the Shadows

CollabNet has a fascinating history that goes back to 1999, when Collab.Net launched SourceXchange:

a site where companies can post proposals for programming work and solicit bids from open source coders. It is intended to form the first of a series of projects exploring new business models based on open source, and which collectively make up Collab.Net. A list of those involved reads like a roll call of the leading players in the open source industry. Employees include Frank Hecker, who played a major role in convincing Netscape to take its browser open source, and James Barry, who helped convert IBM to Apache. Alongside [co-founder Brian] Behlendorf, Tim O'Reilly and Marc Andreessen are board members, and investors in a $35 million round of funding closed in June 2000 included Dell, HP, Intel, Novell, Oracle, Sun and TurboLinux....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Wanted: the First GNU/Linux Distro for the Cloud

As this amazing chart shows, there are basically three great families of GNU/Linux distros: those based on Red Hat, Slackware and Debian. The last of these was created as a reaction to an even earlier distro, SLS, as Debian's creator Ian Murdock (the “Ian” in “Debian” - Deb is his wife) told me a few years ago....

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Once and Future Economy

Great post by Tim O'Reilly about how we need to junk the idea that the economy can expand indefinitely, and move to a different system - one prefigured in the current sharing of code and content:

The consumption of electronic media perhaps gives a foretaste of an economy in which qualitative complexity might replace quantitative addition as the raw material of exchange. Obviously, we're not there yet, as we're still consuming lots of resources to build the substrate for our increasingly intellectual economy, but I love that he's broken the naive assumption that if we don't have growth, the only alternative is stasis.

This is yet another reason why the lock down of knowledge by intellectual monopolies is simply unacceptable in a world that will be predicated on sharing digital stuff, just as we used to share the physical stuff that Nature gave us a few hundred thousand years ago.

Computational Journalism

I like the sound of this:

the digital revolution that has been undermining in-depth reportage may be ready to give something back, through a new academic and professional discipline known in some quarters as "computational journalism." James Hamilton is director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University and one of the leaders in the emergent field; just now, he's in the process of filling an endowed chair with a professor who will develop sophisticated computing tools that enhance the capabilities — and, perhaps more important in this economic climate, the efficiency — of journalists and other citizens who are trying to hold public officials and institutions accountable.

Sounds like bringing in openness to government willy-nilly....
(Via @timoreilly.)

Tim O'Reilly's Greatest Post

I don't always agree with Tim O'Reilly's views, but it seems clear to me that this is his best, and potentially most important post even though - or maybe because - it's about politics, rather than technology:

for those concerned about climate change, the most urgent case for the election of Barack Obama was made by John McCain. Despite being an early and thoughtful advocate on the threat of global warming, he lost all credibility with his selection of Governor Palin as his running mate. We can not afford to take the risk of a Vice-President (especially for a candidate as old as McCain) who is scornful of science, denies human involvement in creating climate change, and is completely unprepared to tackle this most urgent of problems.

Let's hope America is listening to him and all the others saying much the same. If they don't, this planet is in very serious trouble indeed.

An Unclouded Analysis

I'm not a huge fan of Tim O'Reilly's position on free software, which seems to be that code exists primarily as a business opportunity for entrepreneurs (he played a key role in the coining of the marketing term "open source" as an enterprise-friendly alternative to "free software"), but I have to say his posting "Open Source and Cloud Computing" is not just one of *his* best posts, but one of the best thought-pieces on cloud computing and its implications I have read anywhere. Don't miss it.

DNA Vu

Now, where have I heard this before?

Today it costs only $300,000 to sequence a person's DNA, and the $100,000 benchmark is in sight. It's an information processing problem, he said. In other words, Moore's Law and genetics are tightly tied. It won't be long before your genome--and your likelihood to get various diseases, live long, be athletic, etc.--will be available in a standard medical test.

The implications for medicine, and its evil twin the insurance industry, are vast. Despite the privacy issues, Venter is in favor of transparency in genomics, so that, for example, you'll be able to "Google a date's DNA," as O'Reilly remarked. Scary? Sure. But "a good idea," Venter said. "Especially if you plan to have children."

Oh yes, I remember:

Consider a not-too-distant future in which personal genomes are readily available. For those with relations affected by a serious medical condition, this will conveniently provide them with any genetic test they need. But it will also offer the rest of us information about our status for these and other, far less serious, autosomal recessive disorders that might similarly manifest themselves in children if we married a fellow carrier.

A bioinformatics program running on a PC could easily check our genomes for all genes associated with the autosomal recessive disorders that had been identified so far. Regular software updates downloaded from the internet - like those for anti-virus programs - would keep our search software abreast of the latest medical research. The question is, how potentially serious does a variant gene's effects have to be for us to care about its presence in our DNA? Down to what level should we be morally obliged to tell our prospective partners - or have the right to ask about?

And just when is the appropriate moment to swap all these delicate DNA details? Before getting married? Before going to bed together? Before even exchanging words? Will there one day be a new class of small, wireless devices that hold our personal genomic profile in order to carry out discreet mutual compatibility checks on nearby potential partners: a green light for genomic joy, a red one for excessive recessive risks?

Given the daunting complexity of the ethical issues raised by knowing the digital code of life in detail, many may opt for the simplest option: not to google it. But even if you refuse to delve within your genome, there are plenty of others who will be keen to do so. Employers and insurance companies would doubtless love to scan your data before giving you a job or issuing a policy. And if your children and grandchildren have any inconvenient or expensive medical condition that they have inherited from one side of the family, they might like to know which - not least, to ensure that they sue the right person.

O'Reilly? I Think Not

Once again, Matt gets it, and Tim doesn't:

"I will predict that virtually every open source company (including Red Hat) will eventually be acquired by a big proprietary software company."

Thus spake Tim O'Reilly in the comments to one of his other posts. Tim believes that open source, at least as defined by open-source licensing, has a short shelf-life that will be consumed by Web 2.0 (i.e., web companies hijacking open-source software to deliver proprietary web services) or by traditional proprietary software vendors.

In other words, why don't I just give up, sell out, and go home? I guess I would if I thought that Tim were right. He's not, not in this instance.

There's something more fundamental going on here than "Proprietary software meets open source. Proprietary software decides to commandeer open source. Open source proves to be a nice lapdog to proprietary software." I actually believe that open source, not proprietary software, is the natural state of the industry, and that Tim's proprietary world is anomalous.

I particularly liked this distinction between the service aspects of software, and the attempts to view it as an instantiation of various intellectual monopolies:

Suddenly, the license matters more, not less, because it is the license that ensures the conversation focuses on the right topic - service - rather than on inane jabberings that only vendors care about. You know, like intellectual property.

And there's another crucial reason why proprietary software companies can't just open their chequebooks and acquire those pesky open source upstarts. Unlike companies who seem to think that they are co-extensive with the intellectual monopolies they foist on customers, open source outfits know they are defined by the high-quality people - both employees and those out in the community - that code for the customers.

For example, one reason people take out subscriptions to Red Hat's offerings is that they get to stand in line for the use of Alan Cox's brain. Imagine, now, that proprietary company X "buys" Red Hat: well, what exactly does it buy? Certainly not Alan Cox's brain, which will leave with him (one hopes) when he moves immediately to another open source company (or just hacks away in Wales for pleasure). Sure, the purchaser will have all kinds of impressive legal documents spelling out what it "owns" - but precious little to offer customers anymore, who are likely to follow wherever Alan Cox and his ilk go.

When Eben Met Tim

I've always felt rather ambivalent about Tim O'Reilly. On the one hand, he is undoubtedly a very shrewd reader of markets, and has undoubtedly contributed hugely to the rise of the open source movement. On the other, he always seems to take what might be called an extreme pragmatist position, where questions of making plenty of dosh always seem to be lurking in the background (and sometimes in the foreground).

I'm glad to see it's not only me:

At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention today, Software Freedom Law Center director Eben Moglen threw down the gauntlet to O'Reilly founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly. Saying that O'Reilly had spent 10 years making money and building the O'Reilly name, Moglen invited O'Reilly to stop being "frivolous" and to join the conversation about software freedom.

So it's really a matter of whether your on Eben's side, or Tim's side....

Do Not Feed the Patent Trolls

Good point here about a big problem with the apparently welcome Peer to Patent project:

Helping patent trolls with their QA is like going through bandits' ammunition and throwing out the dud rounds for them before they try to rob you.

And sensible advice, too:

If you have Prior Art, print it out and put it in your safe deposit box. Make sure that the source is verifiable, but don't tell anyone what the source is. Don't say it's from "the June 1997 login;" or "comp.sources.unix in May 1986". If you want, borrow a tactic from Tim O'Reilly and tell people that you have prior art for a certain patent, but don't give attackers any more information than you have to.

More generally, perhaps the free software community should set up a shadow scheme that tracks all of these patent applications, and works to find prior art, which it then stores safely against a rainy day.

The Tim O'Reilly of Open Access

I thought I knew open access history pretty well, but to my shame I seem to overlooked Melissa Hagemann:

Hagemann's strategic, behind-the-scenes planning on behalf of the Open Access movement during the past five years set in motion the series of events that have affected scholarship around the globe. It began in the summer of 2001, following critical developments in the Open Archives Initiative; the Public Library of Science petition advocating free access to research; and the establishment of BioMed Central. An environmental scan led her to layer her own assessment of what libraries and researchers needed on top of the varied, independent initiatives for free access underway among players in scholarly communication. She and her OSI colleagues brainstormed on a way to unify the movement under one umbrella – the umbrella of as yet-unnamed Open Access – and OSI gave her the go-ahead to convene the initial BOAI meeting.

BOAI refers to the Budapest Open Access Initiative; it was at this meeting that the phrase "open access" was coined and defined. In other words, it stand in the same relationship to the open access movement as the Freeware Summit does to open source. Which pretty much makes Hagemann the Tim O'Reilly of open access, I suppose. (Via Open Access News.)