QoTD: Cory Doctorow
"One of my favorite reprints was one I sold to a magazine who'd found the text in the word-salad at the bottom of a spam e-mail. So even the spammers are helping me." -- Cory Doctorow
Desktop Linux and hardware as ad space
Matthew Aslett covers the irrelevance of desktop Linux.
He has some good points. The problem with breaking into the Microsoft-dominated desktop market is that it's sort of like competing with Soviet-style central planning on the technical side, which is good for Linux, but on the business side it's like competing with FedEx. In order to start a competing service, you'd have to go around to thousands of companies and convince them to let you put a box next to the FedEx one. And until you got enough boxes in enough places, users would complain. The equivalent for desktop Linux is hardware and software compatibility lists.
So far, so bad. But the news behind the latest "desktop Linux this year, honest" buzz is the trend that more and more software vendors no longer matter because most users just use a web browser plus a few little things that are already available on desktop Linux.
That leaves the hardware vendors. There, the story is a little more complicated. Sure, hardware compatibility is a pain, but PC hardware isn't just a product any more. It's also sellable ad space. The biggest example today is in the Microsoft Windows market, where PC vendors earn money bundling "crapware," demo versions of proprietary software.
Today, Everex is leaving money on the table with the gPC by not getting Google to pay for its users' eyeballs. That's not going to last. Next version, and this is just my prediction here, the gPC is likely to get two things: first, PAM integrated with the users' Google accounts, and second, some thanks-for-the-eyeballs money from Google to Everex.
That throws the full might of the online ad auction winner-take-all market share war (there can be only one) into the quiet cash cow pasture of desktop OS pricing.
As soon as Everex has an offer from Google to make the desktop OS into a profit center rather than a cost, Microsoft digs up the old ad-supported Windows idea, starts paying manufacturers to install it, and it's "Step 3. Profit!" for Everex. And the OS is a complementary good to the hardware that Everex puts in the box, so a falling OS price tends to increase the price that Everex pays for parts. More money for the component
vendors, too.
So everyone on the hardware side can make money with desktop Linux without actually selling much of it, as long as it's just good enough that it could potentially satisfy enough users to tip the online ad struggle Google's way. This is why it's important that the gPC isn't just a cheap box that people buy to put a different OS on. Everex needs the numbers on how many users are actually using the thing out of the box in order to get Google and Microsoft to pay attention to the Everex Threat.
Paul Kim from Everex is not going to be on any conference programs as an "Open Source Business Visionary," but his job could be changing, a lot. Get this thing to the point where it will work for the least demanding 5% of users, and in a few years he'll be sending sales reps to call on the OS companies with glossy media kits all about Everex customers' online shopping habits, and making money from the OS companies and from the hardware buyers.
Tonight's top ten list...
LinuxWorld.com catches the IT Media's top ten list fever: Top ten IT books never to admit you haven't read. I think I put in too few of the obvious ones, but at least The Mythical Man-Month is in there.
Plentiful bandwidth, scarce chairs
Thread on Doc's site about how to meter access to coffeehouse seats. The scarce resource here isn't the bandwidth or the address space, it's tables and chairs. So what you have to realize about coffee places is that they aren't restricting access to net and power because they want to make money partnering with a wireless company, or because they want to save money on the electric bill. They just have to do something to keep the whole place from filling up with people who buy one cup of coffee and sit there working all day. One way is to treat the customer's laptop battery life as a parking meter for the chair, and another way is to charge for a net connection.
But if a place looks "dead", with no customers, people are less likely to come in. If you're running a coffee place, you want some but not all chairs occupied. So, in the grand tradition of obscure technical fixes to social problems, what about this: treat net connections like chairs by setting the DHCP server to give out a limited number of addresses, say, number of tables minus two. If the place is full, someone coming in can't get on until one of the current users leaves. Put up a sign: "The number of active Internet users is limited to 8. If there are already 8 people using the Internet, please wait for another user to leave before connecting."
That way you don't have to worry about booting out the people who tie up IP addresses and chairs during rush hour—customers will talk among themselves to figure out a fair allocation of the addresses.
This photo is the number one result for [chris dibona] on Google Image Search. (Yes, I'm doing a presentation for LinuxWorld Conference and Expo people and I want to give credit to the organizers of LINC, which became the first LWCE tech program.) Somebody reboot the Google.
Desktop anti-virus software is an example of something that IT people like, but that doesn't contribute to the bottom line. What happens when you deploy AV-free desktops?
gPC leaving money on the table?
The Everex gPC is for sale at Wal-Mart. The distribution, "gOS" is an Ubuntu derivative from a new company, headed by David Liu, and the desktop experience is based on Enlightment, tweaked to look kind of like Mac OS X, with Big Obvious Buttons for all the Google apps.
I talked with David about gOS before the launch, and asked the obvious question: is Google paying gOS for the ads that its customers see, Firefox-style? No. Firefox has "a great model that we're obviously inspired by," he says, but so far no Googlebucks for gOS or Everex.
This could be a good thing in the long run, since it means Everex doesn't have an incentive to make it hard to install an alternate distribution on the gPC.
Corporate open source advice
Some surprising moves, such as the much-maligned mission statement, can help corporate open source projects work, said Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick at the Google Speaker Series.
The two Google developers put corporate participation in open source into four levels ranging from fake "open source" all the way up to giving a project the autonomy to make its own major decisions.
Faking it, or "level 0" participation, is doing PR blitz around open source but not actually using an open source license. "There isn't a lot of point to doing this unless you want to destroy trust," Fitzgerald says.
(Two related approaches that didn't come up were the weasel words "to the open source community" which a lot of vendors use in PR about proprietary products that interoperate with open source, and the YAFL approach, of using a license that's License Proliferation Initiative-approved but not compatible with the main licenses in your chosen field.)
Moving on to real open source, level one is to "throw code over the wall." Fitzgerald describes this as, "Clean up the code, get it approved by legal, release it. It's pretty effortless." The drawback is, he says, "you don't have any commuity to keep your software alive, and if it does form it's going to form far away from you." A company choosing this approach will lose control of the future direction of the software. One exception is media codecs, Fitzgerald says.
Level two is "develop internally, post externally" Collins-Sussman likened this to "throw over the wall," but on a daily basis. Discussions happen internally, and outside contributors can only see the actual source code and maybe some commit messages from the revision control system. "If you don't let everybody take turns driving the bus, you're going to get drive by patches," Collins-Sussman says.
Fitzgerald says you'll get "followers" who might do a quick fix, but it's difficult for outsiders to see where the code is going next, so you're unlikely to get major work.
Level three is "open monarchy," which is like level two except that discussion takes place in public. Contributors are still mostly employees, and a project lead inside the company makes decisions.
"You will attract better quality volunteers. They have a better idea of where your roadmap is," Fitzgerald says. But this level of participation is most at risk of what Collins-Sussman calls "angry revolutions," in which a group of outside developers creates a fork.
The final level is "Consensus-based development," which makes almost all project information public, and, as Collins-Sussman puts it, "the people who are members of the project are the ones who make the decisons. People are wearing two hats." Even an employee assigned to work on the project will have to prove himself or herself to the rest of the developers. He described the case of a CollabNet employee assigned to work on Subversion. Instead of just following instructions and checking in code, the employee had to "earn access" from other developers on the project, including non-employees.
Fitzgerald warns, "You're not going to get a big boost from this right away," and points out that employee contributors need political, not just technical skills. "You need to hire strong leaders. You can't just throw people at the problem."
Although bringing outsiders into the project does mean a lot of work, Collins-Sussman says there are three advantages. First, it creates a hiring track for finding outside developers who know the project's goals and code, and have already shown that they can work with the team. "When people get full ownership of the project, they drive the bus. Then the company says we want you to do this full time, instead of just on weekends," he says.
Second, there's an information-gathering role for outside contributors. Steering the project "The closer you can bring the consumers of your code to the people writing your code, the more you can get more productive engineers and better software," Collins-Sussman says. This seems like a waste of time at first, Fitzgerald says. "If they're writing the wrong code it doesn't matter how much code they're writing," Fitzgerald says.
The third advantage is project longevity. "Participants will come and go but the process will last a really long time," Collins-Sussman says. "The Apache web server project has been going on for 12 years and peole have come and gone," he says.
The consensus approach requires seeding the project with code, culture, and staff. "Start out with a small group of humble people who work well with others. It becomes a self-selecting group," Collins-Sussman says.
"The world is full of jerks, except the Internet makes it seem like they all live right next door to you," Fitzgerald says.
Surprisingly, a mission statement is a big help, Fitzgerald says, especially one that sets "non-goals." Put the mission statement on a web page, and point would-be contributors to it if they suggest something outside the project's scope. Fitzgerald recommends the book Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel.
Although project culture needs to be respectful and polite to attract productive contributors, many in-house developers will need cultural training to get used to honest code reviews. "In the corporate world, in many companies this is not normal. People own certain areas of code, and if you comment on what they're doing it's taken as a personal offense," Collins-Sussman says. Teach developers that "You are not your code."
Fitzgerald says newly open sourced projects need to make an effort to stop using internal mailing lists. And, Collins-Sussman says, the archives of an external mailing list help attract new contributors. At CollabNet, the CTO made employees take some discussions public, and, Collins-Sussman says, "a few months later some of the best developers showed up." Start with one list per project, and split into developers and users list only when there's too much traffic to handle.
One key problem is interfacing a consensus community to the market demand for a feature. What happens when a sales person comes in and says, "I can close this multi million deal if I can get this feature?"
Fitzgerald says that the company needs to see if a customer feature is one that the community will tolerate. If it's something that's completely out of scope for the project, it won't work. Collins-Sussman gave the example of locking for Subversion, which a CollabNet customer asked for, but no community member was interested in. Because CollabNet could safely add the feature, an employee did it and got it in.
MLP: cache control, mobile devices, HTTP headers
Bad CMS, bad, bad! Does your web app set "Cache-Control: no-cache"? Useful explanation, plus a Firefox workaround, from Akkana Peck. (You can also check the HTTP headers in a page using the Web Developer extension.)
Nifty snap-together mobile devices: Bug Labs podcast. (My idea for a cool thing to build with this: a "people who like this book also like" box for real-world bookstores. Scan the bar code of a book you like, and it gives you a suggestion of another book in the store.)
Joey Hess has some suggestions for offline Wiki work using git.
Let me sleep, please.
Facebook is now worth about four Red Hats? Bubble time—pass the seared ahi.
Matthew Aslett summarizes the latest on the Sun/NetApp beef. NetApp's decision to start this whole mess is a complete mystery to me, since it's completely irrevelant to what people buy NetApp for. NetApp is what your boss makes you buy, or approves your request to buy, when you have finally wasted too much time dorking around with the Solaris, Linux, or Microsoft Windows file server. They're like the FedEx of storage. You go with NetApp not because of their patent portfolio but because they get everything working right together, which for a company is much harder than just having a good filesystem. Sun could copy every line of NetApp code tomorrow, and so what? That wouldn't make a random Solaris box into drop-in storage that you don't have to worry about. It would be like Joe's Delivery Service photocopying the FedEx airbill.
QoTD: Nat Torkington
"Google can create the riches-of-niches world by promoting and implementing Fitzpatrick and Recordon's ideas, and thus set fire to the big pile of money that Microsoft and others just put on the table." -- Nat Torkington
QoTD: Joel Achenbach
"Newspaper journalism is different these days: Suddenly everyone is obsessed with eyeballs, page views, 'stickiness,' 'click-through rates,' and so on. No one shouts 'Stop the presses!' anymore, but they do whimper 'Why aren't I on the home page?' -- Joel Achenbach
(cited by Hal Crowther, via Doc Searls)
Friday afternoon reading and listening
Rebecca MacKinnon asks, "What did Yahoo! know and when did they know it?"
Brian Aker recommends High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Frontend Engineers.
Joel Spolsky: "Sandboxes are penalty boxes; they're slow and they suck, which is why Java Applets are dead, dead, dead." -- Strategy Letter VI. (Google might be a step ahead of this one, though, with Google Web Toolkit. We'll see.)
Val Henson talks about the Linux filesystem of the future.
Andrew Cowie on online voice community: "I have long observed that people in the Open Source movement spend far too much time conversing with each other by IRC, instant messenger, or on widely subscribed email lists when they could just pick up the phone and actually talk to each other."
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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