Dana Blankenhorn

News Sites Play Hide the Pickle

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 16 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Throughout the Web, the information with the highest cost and lowest return is news.

For me to appear at an event in person, I have to get dressed, get there, stay there, and get back home. It's a full day production. It keeps me from doing anything else.

The problem is that all this effort doesn't bring me any more page views than I'd get from just picking the story off the wire and commenting on it. Less, because I'm not a major news player.

The problem I face is exponentially greater for the major news player. Everyone links to the first person with the story, sometimes with credit but more often not, and the number of page views the first-mover gets may be relatively small. This isn't all bad. Often, the best story is the one that is well-considered, that brings in other facts, that's researched with links and thought through before it's published.

As a result, news sites have been engaged in a growing game I call hide the pickle.

Round Two of the Copyright Wars

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 13 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I have been following the copyright wars since their inception, in 1997. I watched the passage of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, and the No Electronic Theft Act.

Both had a similar aim, to keep people from stealing making and re-selling copies of material subject to copyright, now that technology allowed for clean (or nearly clean) copies.

My sympathies here are purely with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and blogs like Boingboing, which hate these laws as attacks on freedom of speech, of association, and the free exchange of ideas.

Time Is Money And Money Is Time

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 12 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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All the talk about the price of content misses the point.

Content has a price, always. Whether you're reading content, listening to it, or watching it on a screen, the price is your time.

Time is the most valuable asset any of us have. Our time is limited. We must spend big hunks of it sleeping, eating, and traveling. We spend a third or more of our time making the money we need to sustain us.

What's left, the time available for content, is thus very precious.

I got a clue on this when I received an Amazon Kindle Fire for Christmas. I'd gotten Amazon Prime for the cheap shipping, thus I suddenly had access to all sorts of “free” content. Lots of TV shows I missed, lots of movies. Too many, it turns out. When I try to catch up on a series I thought I'd like, I find I'm taking time away from reading I could be doing.

The Open Source Thesis Returns

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 48 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Right after this year's election I began looking back at all the stories I've written, since 2006, on political philosophy.

I was looking for patterns, and frankly for an e-book.

My review is far from complete – there are over 200 pages just in the first year I began my work – but what I have found is that my views on political patterns were first informed by my work on open source. I first wrote about what I called the “open source thesis” in 2006 , and I found, even then, that it matched up very well with the political aims of one Barack Obama.

If A Story Isn't Linked To Does It Make a Sound?

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 39 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Since joining TheStreet.com earlier this year, I have been struck by their 1990s' attitude toward links. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

The idea is that, when you link to something, you tell people in the text who you're linking to. Sounds fair, doesn't it?

But what if the story you found on Google News originated with, say, The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times? Further, what if you found the story somewhere else, when it was republished by an affiliate?

Who do you link to?

The Open Source Contradiction

I will be on vacation next week and, in light of events decided y'all deserved an early present. So think of this as Volume 16, Number 35 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I have covered open source since 2005, and there is an inherent contradiction in the model.

The contradiction is that projects may be “owned” and that owners can be trusted to maintain community.

The contradiction has been hiding in plain sight ever since the open source movement split from Richard Stallman's Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) camp in 1998, with the publication of Eric Raymond's “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” Raymond and other advocates for a more “capitalist” model figured you could deal with the contradiction by just saying, in effect, “fork it.”

But that's a cop-out. You need funding to run anything. Private enterprises don't exist for code, they exist for profit. As soon as the needs of the code contradict the needs of profit, and that's solely at the profit-making enterprise's discretion, it's going to go bad for the code.

I have seen this play out many, many times. Companies have tried to change their licenses, but users revolted. Groups have revolted against their corporate overlords and forked, some successfully, others less so. We've had open source inclines – Stallman's GPL turns out to be better at building community than any BSD-like license. We've had open source development inclines – a foundation-based development model can build community better than a GPL license alone.

What's happening right now with Oracle, which threw Open Office away, tried to extort money from Google over open source Java and is now turning mySQL proprietary – is par for the course.

It's the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules.

The most effective approach has proven to be what I call the “scorpions in a bottle” methodology of the Apache Software Foundation. That is, you bring multiple stakeholders under a development group which is dedicated solely to the code. This is supposed to separate the business needs of the code from the development needs of the code.

But even this is subject to abuse. Oracle screwed Apache over royally when it seized Java. Other companies abuse Apache by tossing them failed products with promises of support, only to see that support (and the code) wither, damaging the Foundation's good name. It has taken Apache's leaders a lot of time to figure out that they might be getting “used” when they're offered projects, and to resist that abuse. It's an ongoing process.

Corporations understand the open source contradiction better than open source advocates do. Simon Phipps says open source “won” the Microsoft Word vs. Open Office format battle because Microsoft eventually decided to support the Open Document Format. But its gaming of the standards system maintained Word's enormous market share, and Office's profitability within the company. What was bad for the code was good for the company.

Many corporations confuse the open nature of open source development and the free downloads with free software. Open source and free software are different things. Red Hat is a true open source company, but it still requires you to buy Red Hat Enterprise Linux, even though you can look at that code, and even while that code is based on the free Fedora distribution every enterprise that's serious about using Red Hat's Linux pays for.

They pay and pay and pay. Because free code that's not understood isn't worth much to an enterprise, and the only way to truly understand that code is to engage fully in the open source process, offering “committers” to the cause who will work for the project on company time, contributing enhancements, filing bug reports, and testing buggy beta code. The love you take from open source code is always equal to the love you make, and while time is money, money is time. The deeper you engage with open source code, and its community, the more value you gain from it.

What's true for code can also be true for words, and this is what drives companies crazy. They see how Wikipedia destroyed what had been a thriving encyclopedia industry, despite all their efforts to sow Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about the project – efforts that continue throughout academia to this day – and they get scared.

That's why Disney writers threw some open source misinformation into a kids' sitcom recently. A nerdy kid with a PC laptop asks her friends if they used open source code with a hidden virus inside it – as though open source code is virus-ridden but Microsoft code never has security flaws. The premise was stupid, but it's ingrained in the corporate mindset.

Fortunately, as with social issues like gay marriage, minds can be changed. My wife works at a company that is totally proprietary, that for security reasons never, ever trusted open source code. Until recently. Now it's suddenly using open source regularly, even asking, before engaging in a small project, whether there might be an open source workaround. That's called progress.

The open source contradiction may never be bridged, but over time it gets easier to jump over. You learn who code's friends are, who code's friends aren't. You learn that it's not just code, but people and organizations you have to learn to trust. And if you're burned once in a while – as every kid is as they grow into fully social adults – you learn from that.

Open source is growing up. It grows along with Moore's Law of Training, and as we all should know by now there is no Moore's Law of Training. There is just learning.

 

 

 

The Real Cloud Problem is Identity

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 32 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The whole “cloud problem” FUD being sold by the media and Steve Wozniak over Apple's so-called iCloud service comes down to one word.

Identity.

It's a simple word, one we use every day. And it is a real problem.

But only because we choose to make it one.

Days of Apps

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 28 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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In 2012 the software industry is like an iceberg. Most of it is under the water.

Not underwater, mind you. Under the water.

That's because the world of “applications” is over. It's all about the apps now, brutha. And no one in the app business has yet gone public. The smart VC guys and private equity people are putting tons of money into the space, so there's no need to go public, no need to give the public investor a taste.

It's like the social boom. You'll know the bust has started when one of these outfits starts looking for suckers on NASDAQ.

Doesn't mean there's no there, there. There is. I found that out Monday when I went to a “MeetUp” for Techcrunch.com at the Sweetwater Brewery, a few miles from my home.

The place was packed. Cars were parked around the corner and down the next street. (They could do it because this is a warehouse district where everyone else goes home around 5 PM.) There were well over 3,000 people there. Mostly male, mostly young, mostly white. But not exclusively. I was also pleased to find two people who rode bikes there. A guy my own age who admitted he'd taken the train to a nearby transit stop, and a younger guy who'd ridden 8 miles in rush-hour traffic. 

The Cloud Starts Now

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 26 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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One thing tech reporters often ignore, or forget, is that most companies don't live on the bleeding edge.

It's easier to ignore now, with the consumer market dominated by gadgets that anyone can afford, but which can go from latest-and-greatest to obsolete within a year.

The business computing market isn't like that. It's much bigger, and what works tends to keep working until it becomes obsolete.

So I make it a practice to connect, once in a while, with the realities of the business computing market. And I was fortunate that Red Hat invited me to witness their annual Summit in Boston, so I could listen to their customers.

Makers Define the Next Boom

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 18 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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One striking aspect of all recoveries I have witnessed is how you never know where you're going when you start the journey.

Instead, analysts look for the next boom in the embers of the last one, much as at present everyone talks about the housing market.

Forget housing – that was the last boom. (Picture from LiveScience.)

Similarly, early in the last decade, I don't recall many people talking about housing or deficit finance as being the keys to growth. Everyone was stirring the embers of the tech bubble, hoping for a rebirth. Google's IPO was celebrated in part because everyone saw it as organic growth, rather than as a replacement for many, larger, more unfocused efforts that had failed.

Same thing in the 1990s. We spent three years talking about multimedia when the Internet was on our doorstep. And the 1980s – everyone talked about the PC rather than the secular change in enterprise computing, toward client server, that was the real economic driver.

Point is we should not be surprised at the current mistakes. But we shouldn't be fooled by them either.

The next boom has begun, but it's not about housing, nor is it about the Internet.

It's about making stuff.