Dana Blankenhorn

Can Open Source Save Ridesharing?

Before coming into the office this morning I took a walk. I crossed some major roads, stood waiting for the lights and looked into the cars that passed by.

Nearly every view was the same. One car, one person. Sometimes it was a big car, an SUV or pick-up. It seemed amazing to me. With gas at $4/gallon, almost no one in Atlanta shares the ride to work.

For most of my working life there have been attempts made to encourage ride sharing. Advertising has been tried. High-occupancy lanes have been tried. Now high prices are being tried. Nothing seems to work.

Does open source have a chance?

Open-Ride, a German program that arranges spontaneous ride-sharing via smartphones, hopes going open source will make things happen. The code, now available on Sourceforge, under the Affero GPL license 3.0 (the most open open source license there is) has a simple mobile interface that collects and matches desired trips.

Nokia, The Law and The Lab

When tech companies fall, they fall hard.

Anyone remember Data General? Wang? Silicon Graphics? Sun? They rise quickly to great heights, until they appear to be enormous institutions, then they fall as fast as they rose.

It's modern corporate evolution, one reason why you need to build a career on your own brand, never expect an employer to maintain one for you.

Nokia is now going down that same road. When phones were based on Real Time Operating Systems, Nokia was king of the hill. No one made as much from so-called “feature phones,” because Nokia had all the carriers locked-up, it owned the OS, and costs were outsourced, under control.

Scott Cleland's Game: Turn Google Into AT&T

Scott Cleland is a Bell troll.

He is what he has always been, an apologist and paid advocate for the Bell companies and their causes. He hides his source of funds, and reporters new to every beat keep buying the act. It's crazy. Crazy like a Fox.

This week he's a concern troll, having issued a "book" (the same way Regnery publishes "books") that is nothing but a long hit piece against Google. USA Today gave him an admiring interview without once asking him where his money comes from, which is like treating Glenn Beck as an unbiased journalist.

Cleland's theme is that you can't trust Google, that Google always lies, that Google is not out to serve anyone but its own shareholders, and that it deserves the strict government scrutiny given his clients, the Bells.

The aim is simple. To hobble Google with lawyers and layers of bureaucracy, hordes of people who spend their days focused inward, taking big salaries to prevent innovators from innovating.

The Many Markets of Open Source

Even people inside the open source market tend to underestimate it.

They think of it the way they think of the software market. If you're not collecting cash tribute for support (the equivalent of a cash price for the code) you somehow don't count.

By that reckoning open source has been a disappointment. Many companies have difficulty converting downloads into cash. Products on the "bottom of the stack" -- operating systems, databases, languages etc. -- have special problems in the era of "the cloud," with data centers consolidating.

But that's, frankly, a pretty stupid way of looking at it.

• What are Facebook and all the other social media sites but scaled, customer-facing open source applications? They're all written with it.
• Clouds are highly dependent on open source for their very being. Virtualization began with companies wanting to run Windows instances under server Linux. Most of the important cloud creation tools are open source.
• Android is a Linux. It's open source, even if the newest versions may be released first only to partners. Android is beating the iPhone the way Windows beat the Mac.

We got another example in today's news, the launch by Texas Instruments of a site called OpenLink, an open source community for wireless hardware development.

If You Don't Like Google Android, Dell, Fork It

The whinging just won't stop over Google's ongoing efforts to control Android and make it less chaotic.

Personally, I've already seen some benefits. A recent update to my Samsung Galaxy's software delivers a much cleaner, faster, more Android-like experience. Nothing like the horror show of crapware I had when I first got the device last year.

And I'm not just saying this because it's something I called for back in October, when no one was listening.

In today’s marketplace the word “Android” is becoming meaningless.

An AT&T “Android” phone is not an Android phone, but an AT&T one. A Samsung “Android” phone is not an Android phone but a Samsung one. If you get a Samsung phone from AT&T you get one thing, if you get the same phone from Verizon you get something else.

In the end, the question for Google is whether it wants to protect its brand, or let its brand be hijacked on behalf of the status quo.

About the only people who seemed to be listening to me last were were at Harvard. Now it seems someone in Mountain View was listening, too.

Why Android Won't Be Stopped

My friend Florian Mueller at FOSSPatents has been writing furiously about Android of late, becoming a one-man Groklaw on the subject.

His main thesis?Android has so many patent and copyright suits being filed against it that it can't survive, and that it could drag Google down with it.

My initial response on this was that the effort was self-defeating, that it was attempt to end competition through the force of law, and competition doesn't work that way. I even trotted out my picture of Samuel Slater, whose mill (a mile from where my mom grew up) in Pawtucket R.I.  was a deliberate copy of a protected British design. Slater had to smuggle himself into the country in order to steal that intellectual property.

The simpler answer to Florian's point is not a look back at our own history but a single word – China.

It's an important point which a friend reminded me of recently. Android let Chinese OEMs create their own software ecosystem. They're not going to give it up.

The Lessons of Nokia

The mainstream can't be ignored.

Nokia tried to do just that. It thought its Symbian Real Time Operating System (RTOS) could be tweaked and remain competitive indefinitely. That's not the way computing works. Computing always moves toward higher levels of complexity, on every platform, as the cost of complexity is constantly moving downward.

The question now is whether Nokia is still ignoring the mainstream by linking up with Microsoft. The move became inevitable as former Microsoft executive Stephen Elop was brought in as Nokia CEO and the company's market share remained in free fall.

What were his options?

• Become just another me-too Android play. Or, through Meego, an Android imitator.
• Die.
• Find an ally who could bring the company one last crack at relevance.

There was really no option, was there?

Those who say Microsoft actually got Nokia for nothing in this deal are probably right. But no other option was on the board.

There's another lesson from this, one that open source needs to remember.

The Audacity of Bits

I am sick and tired of the liberal blogosphere panicking about the Obama campaign.

I am sick of their repeating tired Old Media narratives. I'm sick of the henny pennies at the HuffPo, and I'm getting frankly sick of Digby's assumptions that "they're going to do it again and we're going to let them."

I'm sick and tired of the whinging.

This is not 2000. This is not 2004.

This is also about more than the country having changed. The Obama campaign is like a giant iceberg -- most of it is under the water line. What is above the water line looks to be of similar size to the McCain iceberg.

But there's nothing under McCain save water.

Obama and McCain have been making similar-size media buys, but Obama is raising more than twice as much money. What's going on? Is anyone even asking?

No. They're not. So I'll tell you.

A Reason to Produce

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 21 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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All the economic problems of our time have a single root cause. (Cartoon by Thomas Nast, for Harper's Weekly.)

Whether we're talking about the Internet, about wireless technology, or about energy, the cause is a lack of reason to produce more.

Consider oil, only because it's top of mind. Why should OPEC produce more? Why should any other major producer? Why should these suppliers lift a finger to halt the thefts and corruption which keep oil from the market?

Will they make more money by doing this? No, they won't. Oil is at $130 per barrel and going higher. Add more supply and the price will go down.

The same is true for Internet service and wireless service. Why should the companies which control Internet broadband allow the creation of a "new pipe" in wireless? It would compete with their shared monopoly. Having kept prices for basic broadband at $50/month and higher, these monopolists are now moving to actually raise prices by limiting the number of bits they deliver under those contracts, and preventing the spread of competing technologies.

Why shouldn't they? What is their incentive for investing in their networks to increase the number of bits they deliver? Will they earn more money as a result? No, they won't.

The problem in all these cases is the same. Shared monopolies, or oligopolies. The free competition of capitalism naturally moves markets toward this climax state. Think Coke and Pepsi, or Bud and Miller, or WalMart and Target. A very small number of companies in each market control the bulk of supply, and are thus in a position to set prices. Why do you think it costs over $1 for a can of fizzy water?

While proclaiming the benefits of capitalism and competition, the United States government has been endorsing this principle of oligopoly for most of the last century, and that trend has accelerated during this decade. All that has really happened is that the oil producing nations of the world have figured this out and taken advantage.

So the answer to our economic doldrums is simple. We need to switch from giving people reasons to withhold product from the market and give them reasons to supply it.

U.S. Cellular Market Nearly Worthless

Much is being made of Google "buying Zingku," a mobile social networking site.

There is much less to this than meets the eye.

First, note carefully how a Google spokesman worded this. "we acquired certain assets and technology" of Zingku. That's a term of art meaning you didn't buy the company, the company wasn't worth buying, and you got the pieces for cheap.

Next, why were the "assets and technology' available? The only logical reason is that Zingku is going nowhere. This might mean that Zingku management is especially inept, except for the fact no other mobile social networking sites are hitting the news, either.