Dana Blankenhorn

The Real Fight for Government Control is Open Source

While fights over how much to spend, and on what programs, get the headlines, the real fight over government control involves open source.

That's because open source is, at heart, a make-or-buy decision. To get the most value from it, you have to become part of the community. You have to make contributions, report bugs, test beta code. You're not just investing money, but time. Employee time.

In the contracting model that dominates the boom town of modern Washington created by the Bush Administration (the Iraq War was almost all done by contract, and the Administration's “privatization” efforts mainly involved contracting) this doesn't compute. If you do switch to open source (and some contractors have) the savings are all the contractors', both now and later.

For government to get the most value from open source, it has to hire its own programmers whose time can be spent capturing that value on behalf of their employer, namely you and me.

This is not necessarily a partisan issue. The Conservative government of the U.K. is pushing open source heavily, to the delight of the industr.

But it's moving ahead slowly, and there is little indication the government has accepted the move's implications. They seem to think it relates to standards and interoperability.

Yes, you want standards and interoperability with open source. But they're not essential. You can go down a one-way road with open source and you can create proprietary software that's based on standards and interoperates.

Open Source is Capitalism

I'm always amused when people don't understand open source, when they take the nonsense of its adversaries -- that it's socialist or communist -- as gospel and act as though that's true.

Open source is capitalism. It's a capitalistic model. It's designed to help people compete and to make money.

Yes, open source spreads software wealth, but that has been the primary feature of capitalism for over 200 years. When capitalism discovers abundance, market processes give people an incentive to spread it around, broadly, creating new, more prosperous buyers by bidding up the value of labor. It's only in the face of scarcity that capitalism swallows its tail, the wealthy eating their own seed corn, weakening their future in the name of current consumption.

It's human nature. You do it too. When you lose your job (as I did with ZDNet) you get cheap, start rationing. Companies do that, whole systems do that. (Not that it benefits the system to crawl inside its own shell -- for capitalism to work there must be buyers for what is being sold or things break down.)

Open source creates abundance. By making the code available, you create wealth. Wealth then creates a larger market for you to compete in. Closed source may be a great way for you to make money, but its wealth effect is limited to those who buy and sell.

And so we come to the news that Canonical, the company that actually supports Ubuntu, is (gasp) trying to make money from the services enabled by its distribution.

Where did the love go, asks Bryce Byfield.

Instead of being the model corporate member of the community that it first appeared, today Ubuntu/ Canonical increasingly seems concerned with its own interests rather than those of FOSS as a whole. No doubt there are sound business reasons for the change, but many interpret it as proof of hypocrisy. Added to the suspicion towards the corporate world that lingers in many parts of the FOSS community, the change looks damning, especially when it is so clearly documented in Canonical's corporate history.

Of course there is no contradiction.

Bizarro Nixon and The Next Revolt

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 10 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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When I say this President is going down the Nixon Road, a lot of people get upset on both sides of the divide.

It's mainly because they misunderstand Nixon.

Liberals see him as evil, as the paranoid with the enemy's list, as Watergate. Conservatives see him as shifty, as inconstant, and would much rather talk about Ronald Reagan.

But all Watergate did was delay the changes Nixon stood for. And Reagan could not have succeeded without Nixon.

Nixon turned the ship around. He came to office in a liberal era and left in a conservative one. That didn't happen by accident. It happened because he engineered it, tacking steadily into the liberal wind, feeding his own side mainly rhetoric, putting in place political assumptions we still live with, and that Reagan took full advantage of.

This President is having to do the same thing Nixon did, in reverse. While Democrats won in 2006 and 2008, they won in a conservative electorate. Fact is, our assumptions about right-and-wrong, or right-and-left, haven't really changed. That's why, in the absence of anything like a coherent program from the President last year, the knees jerked once again – they're used to it.

What the President is trying to turn around is more than a policy. It's those assumptions which Nixon put in place 40 years ago, about how our political world works. The assumption of ill will on the part of both sides. The assumption of enemies held by both sides. Until that assumption is challenged and defeated, American democracy is under grave threat.

So the President comes to every press conference in a relaxed frame of mind. He doesn't try to offer simple answers. He admits things are complicated. He calls for negotiation. He doesn't offer any instant anything. He says real answers take time. This didn't happen all at once and we won't fix it all at once.

The Republican victories last year were actually very good news. For Democrats. Warning against what someone might do seldom works. Fighting against what they are doing works better.

What the end of the Nixon era has created is a bi-polar politics. We rush all the way to the left, and when that doesn't work immediately we rush all the way to the right. Politicians usually think they're in the middle, but in the case of 2010's winners they weren't.

So now those people have to govern. They only have two choices. They can anger the people who sent them there (which is what Democrats elected in 2006 basically did) by taking half a loaf on their goals. Or they can force through massive changes, which is what they're going to try and do now.

Unleash the crazy.

Hidden Risks of Open Source

Open source is computing the way it used to be.

That is, you have choices. Basic choices. You make a choice that seems right, but later it can seem wrong, and meanwhile you've gone down a long road where your work seems wasted.

Over at Datamation, Serdar Yegulalp offers an interesting take on how this relates to Movable Type, the software this blog is written on.

I don't want to get into his accusations against this software or the decisions made by the people managing it. He does that well enough. But there is a broader point to be made.

Going with any software platform is a major commitment. It's a bigger commitment with open source because, in order to get the most value from it, you have to become part of a community, participating through bug reports, beta-testing, and (if you are capable) by writing enhancements.

Every piece of software you choose in open source is a platform. In the same way that going with Oracle or Microsoft or Apple means choosing a platform. As your time with a platform goes up, your investment does, too, and leaving the platform becomes increasingly expensive. This is lock-in, and proprietary vendors are great at profiting from it.

LibreOffice Making Community Software Sustainable

Revolution is easy. Nation building is hard.

At Gettysburg Abraham Lincoln dated this nation's founding to the Declaration of Independence. We celebrate July 4 as our national day.

Personally, though, I'm a fan of June 21. That's the day, in 1788, when New Hampshire ratified the Constitution.  As it was the ninth state to do this, it was on that day that our form of government was truly established. (For those keeping score at home, that's 11 score years and, as of now, a little less than eight months.)

For Libre Office, September 29 is their Independence Day.  That was the date, last year when The Document Foundation was created to fork the code base of OpenOffice.org  from its corporate owner, Oracle.

Apple Using Open Source While Enforcing Monopoly Rents

One big aim of open source is to eliminate “monopoly rents,” excess profits forced on users by someone controlling a bottleneck to commerce.

The idea has been around for over a century. Much of our anti-trust law stems from railroads applying monopoly rents to their farm belt operations in the 19^th century.

Once suppliers became dependent on railroads for moving goods, the railroads could raise prices at a stroke, sometimes because they were the sole supplier of transport to farmers, and sometimes because they made a deal to do so with another supplier – like John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil.

Music publishers have long charged that Apple's iTunes is a monopoly of just this type, one that has made theirs a declining industry. The fear is that Apple's App Store will become a similar bottleneck, with 30% of all revenue going to Apple.

What is interesting is the role open source is playing in what The Register calls the greed tax.

Tips for an Open Source Process

Governance is the word for open source in 2011. Governance breaks down to two topics, structures and process.

The same elements that make for a stable democratic system also make for good open source governance. This doesn't mean you need a balance of powers, or a judicial branch. It means you need the rules of governance clearly stated, and a process that will allow the best ideas to get prompt action from those running the project.

This is true regardless of the type of project you're running, assuming you care about getting something out of your community. Not every project cares. If you see open source as a feature, something that just lets you distribute free and gain customers by dialing downloaders for dollars, then governance and process may not matter to you. On the other hand, community-driven projects badly need a process to give everyone a chance to participate fully. Corporate communities need process negotiated so the companies involved have their prerogatives protected.

Process is the Key to Meaningful Change

Process is the key to meaningful change.

Open source is a process. When the White House announced two years ago it was going to run Drupal on Whitehouse.gov, and when it encouraged other agencies to support open source, that was a revolutionary act (in terms of government procurement), but it would have mattered little without the open source process.

You can see the truth of that when you look at efforts by vendors to simply fork open source projects like Snort and claim they've done something meaningful. Or when they try to put open source under a contracting model, doing the same work they did before using open source tools.

This saves nothing. It's the process that matters.

Rather than fight the power, the White House is engaged instead in the open source process. Last week it released its second set of open source Drupal tools, improving its file management with IMCE Tools.

Programmers working with the White House don't just use Drupal. They are part of the Drupal community, no more important than programmers who might work at, say, the Republican National Committee (if the RNC used open source). They give code to the community as well as taking from it. They participate in the process, in other words, and everyone benefits -- taxpayers, the White House, other Drupal users.

The example is powerful, not just in terms of politics and government efficiency but in terms of open source. If this giant enterprise can participate and benefit, other enterprises both within and without government have an example to follow. The benefits of process grow.

AWOL From Days of Rage

I have been between jobs the last few weeks

This has given me a unique chance to look at my “profession” from the outside as big things are happening.

What I've seen is a passing of the torch, from the trade to the people. And from the TV to the Internet.

Journalists, those employed by people who buy ink by the barrel, who control satellite transponders or who buy bandwidth by the gigabyte, have largely been Absent With Out Leave (AWOL) on the big stories of the day. Egypt, they got. Everything else, not so much. 

It's not all our fault. Journalism, especially TV, is power incarnate. In countries like Libya this means nothing is said unless the regime approves it. In America it means stories are reported as corporate owners demand they be reported.

But that's not always the truth.

For example.

I know you don't care about this but Atlanta Spirit can't sell the Thrashers because they lose a key tenant for Philips Arena, which they also bought. The only real solution is to sell the whole package, and even Arthur Blank can't do that without help. And he wants to build a new stadium -- Home Depot money only goes so far.