Dana Blankenhorn

The Richest Man in Town

The secret to true wealth lies in working for others, doing work you enjoy, making a difference to a community.

By that measure the richest man in Atlanta isn't Arthur Blank.

It's Pat Apoian (right) .

Detective Pat (as he's known) is an Atlanta Police officer who was injured last Friday while pulling a double-shift on behalf of the Kirkwood Security Patrol, a neighborhood group I belong to. He was called to a domestic disturbance a few blocks from my home, and was run over by (allegedly) a 29-year old named Khalif Edwards, who remains at large.

The Business of Pissing People Off

So we find ourselves, once again, debating two Internet companies pissing people off.

Facebook is blocking tools that might let people move to Google+. Netflix is forcing through a price increase.

What reporters don't understand is that these moves are necessary, part of a balance between acceptance and rejection any proprietary company must engage in. Proprietary advantage is an asset. If you don't monetize your assets, you are leaving money on the table. So it's vital that all proprietary companies do this little dance, pushing customers for money or power, pushing as hard as they can, risking their ire in the name of profit.

Contrast this with open source. And with open source ideals.

Google is Not at War

I have always been annoyed by the lazy "great game" tech analysis of reporters who would rather be covering politics than business.

An example is found in a recent TechCrunch piece on Google. Headlined "Google's Six-Front War," it focuses on the areas of business where Google is now concentrating its energy under co-founder (and now CEO) Larry Page.

VC Ben Horowitz started this nonsensical meme, calling Page a "war time CEO" in contrast to the "peace time" leadership of predecessor Eric Schmidt.

There are two things that are true here. First, Page is paring down the company's development focus. Second, he's focusing the company's energy on areas where it is in direct competition with other big companies. Microsoft in browsers, Apple in mobile, Facebook in social networking, etc.

This is natural. This is good. Page is wasting fewer development hours, he's aiming to monetize his infrastructure advantages in various ways, he's working to compete.

AHLTA Connections Given Control of VistA Open Source Project

Fred Trotter writes about a very scary story out of Washington.

The custodian for the new VistA system, the open source software that's supposed to replace what the Veterans Administration is now using, will be a long-time Defense contractor with no ties to open source whatever.

This is important for two reasons:

1. DoD is not as enthusiastic about open source as the VA. 
2. The DoD's health care software system, called AHLTA, sucks. It sucks because it's built on a contractor model, with proprietary software companies holding their own intellectual property close to the chest, refusing to cooperate until they're paid by everyone else around the table.
3. Eventually, AHLTA and VistA are supposed to be merged, under the new open source process.

Is Amazon Good for Open Source

One of those silly open source pissing matches has broken out between Glyn Moody, an online friend and Matt Asay, a former online colleague, over Amazon's contributions to open source.

I call it a pissing match because Asay and Moody don't really disagree. Moody is saying it would be in Amazon's best interest to contribute more to the projects it benefits from. Asay responds that Amazon will decide when that happens.

Open Source Did Not Save Microsoft From U.S.

A lot of experts are weighing in on the end of the government's anti-trust case against Microsoft, many of them saying it was open source that stayed the government's hand.

I think they're wrong.

It was the case itself that stayed Microsoft's hand.

Anyone who hasn't been under antitrust scrutiny doesn't know what it's about. The launch of a case requires the hiring of all sorts of lawyers, both inside and outside the gates, whose job it becomes to look over the shoulders of the business and say "no."

No, you can't do that. No, you can't say that. No, you can't write that.

Oracle Decides If You Can't Own It, Wreck It

Destroying the village in order to save it is a cliche of war, and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has always seen business in that context.

With the move of Hudson to Eclipse, he demonstrates his loyalty to the paradigm.

Just as with OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice, Ellison waited until developers had forked the project, and gotten comfortable in their new home, before deciding the "community" should control the code base. In this case, the fork is called Jenkins-CI.

In case you're wondering, Hudson and Jenkins provide continuous integration (CI) of Java projects, and monitor execution of jobs created with Java. This makes Java more attractive to large enterprises.

The distinction this time is that Hudson is going to the Eclipse Foundation, but that's a distinction without a difference. The plain fact is, Hudson is going under the thumb of a collection of corporations -- VMWare, Sonatype, Tasktop, as well as Oracle.

Serve the Market or Serve Yourself

Over at the Institute for the Future, Marina Gorbis has one of those idealistic, infuriating posts that draw me in and then repel me.

The title is Ain't Gonna Work on Arianna's Plantation No More, and it covers recent efforts to sue AOL-HuffPost on behalf of freelancers who wrote for the site free.

Gorbis compares the current situation to a feudal economy, calling writers "digital serfs" who survive on a pittance, while digital lords like Huffington grab all the cash.

Gorbis may be a nice lady, but she knows nothing about journalism.

Unemployment and Mexicanization

Here's something no conservative will tell you.

There is no such thing as unemployment. Not in America.

There is, instead, a mismatch among our skills, our expectations, and the political value of work.

Go into a restaurant. Order lunch. Now, if you can, go into the kitchen. Chances are most of the people there will be Mexicans – cooks, dishwashers, everyone behind the scenes. Mexicans probably butchered your meat, picked the vegetables on your plate, packed the fruit. It's likely they, or their Central American brothers and sisters, mowed your lawn today, and wiped the butt of your aging mother in her nursing home. They may be caring for your kids right now.

Mexican labor is everywhere. Wherever there are employers who want to exploit workers in order to increase profits and keep prices down, you'll find Mexican labor. In Europe, it's Turkish and Serbian labor. In Japan, Philippine or Chinese labor.

It's not an immigration problem. It's a market problem. Employers aren't paying wages Americans will accept. If Americans took those wages they'd be living like Mexicans.

But when you drive labor costs down, you degrade the market you're selling to.

Open Source Balance of Power

There are checks and balances in our system of government. There are checks and balances in open source governance as well.

The latter checks aren't spelled out explicitly as in the Constitution. But it's very clear from recent events that governance is not a one-way street, and there are levers that can be pulled by the community, against a project's reputation, which will force a rational project manager to moderate their demands or lose everything.

These checks include the fork, the boycott and the strike. The threat to do any of these things against a project are powerful incentives for management to come to the table.

All three weapons were used against Oracle's management of Openoffice.org, and Oracle now seems to have thrown in its hand . That's the Oracle way. Rather than play out a losing hand they make a decision to toss it aside and move on.

Despite its efforts to isolate the community in Libre Office, to force that fork, and to stand alongside IBM with a fully corporate strategy, Oracle finally saw that its reputation was suffering from the dispute, and the marketplace implications of this forced it to act.

The hope had been to do with Openoffice.org what IBM has been doing for years with Symphony, to offer the code for a free download while restricting support to paying customers. It didn't work, in part because Oracle wasn't set up to do things that way, but also because Openoffice.org wasn't set up to have things that way, in the way that Symphony is.

Symphony's modest success as IBM's commercial open source office suite took years of quiet hard work to achieve. Oracle's attempt to match it was being done in full view of the public. Symphony users know the deal, and prefer it to the alternative. Oracle was trying to re-make the deal, reneging on the software's past commitments.

Open is not something you can really take back.