Dana Blankenhorn

The Era of Systems

Every decade since I began writing has delivered a new era in technology.

The 1970s was the start of the PC era. The 1980s saw the local networking era. The 1990s saw the rise of the Internet. The 2000s was the decade of mobility. This decade has been that of the cloud.

The 2020s will be the era of systems.

We have been talking around this for years. We talk about the Internet of Things. We talk about artificial intelligence, adding it to the cloud to create FOG computing. We talk about blockchain.

We talk about these technologies as silos, but that’s not the way technology works. As I have been writing since publishing Moore’s Lore  in 2001, the exponential improvements driven by chips go into many directions. They pile atop one another, they reinforce one another like electric waves.

PCs combined chips with a user interface. Local Area Networks combined PCs with techniques derived from telephony. The Internet takes these LAN techniques global. Mobility again combined chips with new user interfaces, eliminating peripherals. The cloud era is built on open source software, standardized chips, and the same networking used in the Internet.

How the Web Killed the Media

The great tragedy of our time, the tragedy that led to Trump, is content’s loss of control over its own business models.

When I began writing the weekly newsletter that became this blog, 20 years ago, the threat of this loss was a primary theme. I asked newspapers and magazines “how hungry are you?” suggesting that if they turned advertisers into business partners, and earned commissions on sales, they could prosper on this medium.

Advertising is just a means to an end. Newspapers sell space for ads, and ads start readers down a sales funnel. Sales are what the buyers of advertisements want. If online publishers could deliver sales, I thought, they would earn all their business partners’ marketing budget.

I saw even then how the Internet could deliver a store’s entire experience, from advertising, through marketing and sales, through the transaction to service and support. It was the publishing opportunity of a lifetime.

No One Took It

China Winning the Internet of Systems

Our capitalist system has a way of developing and defining standards that was effective in the 20^th century but may be ineffective early in the 21^st.

We wait for the market to create a need, and to create a leader. Then everyone else gangs up on the leader and creates what they call a standard.

Think of Betamax and VHS. Sony was the first mover, and the other manufacturers ganged up on it to take the consumer market. Or think of Apple and Microsoft in PC operating systems, where Microsoft, IBM, and their OEMs convinced most of the market to wait six full years for a working user interface Apple had introduced in 1984. The same thing is happening with Apple and Google in phones, although in this case Apple has managed to sponge off most of the profits and leave the OEMs toting Google’s laundry and holding the bag.

But there are areas of technology where that process doesn’t work, where only the government can create and enforce standards because the players are too selfish and diffuse to accomplish it themselves.

It’s why the Internet is the way it is. I was covering the story at the time it happened, so I know.

The Truth About The VA “Scandal”

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 21 written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

 

The VA “Scandal” is considered one of the biggest of the Obama Presidency. Commenters from Andrew Sullivan to Jon Stewart bring it up constantly.

But the truth is that this isn't really a scandal at all. Not in the sense you're thinking, a deliberate theft of public funds by someone. It's scandalous, sure. But there's a difference.

At the heart of the scandal is the computing systems used by the military and the VA.

Graphene and the Nature of Change

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 9 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

---

Change can be slow, and change can be sudden.

Those who practice the theory of “oh noes,” the idea that it's all about to go pear-shaped, either see slow change that can't be undone, or a sudden change that others see as unlikely.

The people I meet on Seekingalpha.com, the ones who are certain that we're about to go into another Great Depression, believe in sudden change. Those who talk about climate change tend to see slow change that can't be undone.

But most of the time, disaster does not strike. And sudden change can be good as well as bad.

This is one of the great things about being a science reporter, the idea that someone, somewhere, might suddenly come up with a mighty idea, one that will drive out big problems at a stroke.

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.

---

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 Cloud Starts Now

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

---

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.

---

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.

The Blackboard Jungle

Blackboard is the Oracle of online testing systems.

Most big colleges use it to give students homework, even conduct tests. My son has it at Georgia State and is prone to using the name as a verb -- "the professor decided to blackboard that."

Since it's proprietary, and there's an itch among many colleges for open source alternatives to everything, there has been an assumption in the open source community that it's going to get hit, like Microsoft was hit, by an open source alternative (like Linux).

One way to forestall that is to do what Oracle did, essentially buy out the competition. Oracle's purchase of Sun brought it mySQL, Java, OpenOffice, and a ton of bad publicity, giving Larry Ellison the kind of tsuris Bill Gates had to get used to back in the day. (Of course, that means he's crying all the way to the bank about his fee-fees being hurt.)

So Blackboard has chosen another path. Rather than buy out an open source project like Moodle, they bought two of Moodle's big support organizations, MoodleRooms and NetSpot. It created an "Open Services Support Group" specifically to sell colleges support for these open source projects.

The reaction of the open source community was kind of -- "uh-waah? Waah!"

Project Takeover

Note: An edited version of this story appeared last week at Open Source Delivers.

 

---

We all know what happens when a big company comes in and takes over a popular open source project.

It's not pretty.

What happened to Java, OpenOffice and Solaris under Oracle was not pretty, but the community did all it could about it. Those projects had already been under a big company, Sun Microsystems, so Oracle's takeover was something in the natural order of things.

What we may soon see, however, what we're starting to see, are big companies taking on support of projects that already have a corporate sponsor. A small company devoted to the code that has been fighting to monetize it suddenly looks up and finds a giant hovering over it. The cat eating the mouse becomes food for the coyote.

Revolution Analytics recently found itself in this position. The corporate sponsor of the R big data language recently found out that Oracle will be offering support for R in its data center offerings.

David Smith, the company's vice president of marketing and community, doesn't feel like the cat before the coyote, however.