Weblog: category "business"

Both companies and public administration are starting to understand the benefits of free software: reducing vendor lock-in, possibility to continue development of a project after a vendor has gone out of business or lost interest, and in general enjoying the four freedoms. But unfortunately much of this understanding has been limited to the context of licenses.

In reality, licenses are only a small part of a project being truly open. They are just a layer of insurance comparable to traditional source code escrow.

What we really need is understanding of a bit more wholesome project openness. The actual goals of openness that the license should derive from. Here are some aspects to consider:

Project transparency

If a project aims to have outside users or contributors, they need to be able to see the history of changes in the software, decisions that have been made, and the open list of bugs or enhancements being worked on.

A released software package answers these questions poorly regardless of a license. Instead, what is needed is the project being developed out in the open, preferably using one of the common project hosting environments like Gitorious, GitHub, SourceForge, Launchpad or GNU Savannah. You can also host the project yourself using something like Trac or GForge but this limits access and visibility to the project.

The project must actually use the service, not just by code dumps at release time, but with constant development activity visible as code commits and active issue tracking. Depending on business goals it is also good to have future plans for the project visible to the public.

All of this is mandatory for others to gauge the viability of a software package to their needs. Josh Berkus presented a good list of things you shouldn't do to create a community around your project.

Contribution policy

Potential users and developers need to know how they can make their changes available to a package. Is it possible at all, are copyright assignments or some contributor agreements necessary, is there a documented process for submitting changes or even becoming an acknowledged developer in the project? Or is the project being developed behind closed curtains of a company?

Requirements and software stack

Another area some projects fail at is communicating how the software can be built and installed. If the only practical way to run the software is from released binary packages, or through buying consulting, is it truly open? Does the project require additional closed software or specific hardware to run with?

Specialized licensing concerns

Depending on the type of software other concerns may be being able to provide it as part of a Software as a Service offering, or being able to deploy it on some constrained or closed hardware.

Some software licenses address these questions clearly, like EUPL requiring contributions to be opened also when the software is offered in SaaS manner, or GPLv3 forbidding device manufacturers from locking down or 'Tivoizing' their hardware products.

Wrapping up

Most of these questions are well understood within the free software community itself. But we generally communicate it poorly by focusing the discussion on license technicalities. I guess this is because we're so used to working in this open manner that we take the it as a given. But users, especially in the public administration only see the licensing side of things because that is the only aspect we talk about and have definitions for.

A good exception for this is the Apache Software Foundation that has a well-defined set of rules that projects must follow before they can be adopted under the ASF umbrella. Maybe FSF and OSI should also publish some understandable guidelines and definitions for project openness?

At Nemein we have a monthly staff meeting to go through all project backlogs, new initiatives and happenings in the R&D side of things. Today the weather was nice, so we decided to keep the meeting in the nearby Sinebrychoff Park, armed with croissants, cake and the company waterpipe. Quite pleasant change from routine!

Thanks to Aslan for the cake!

Facebook is facing a backlash on their constant erosion of privacy. They have a privacy policy longer than US constitution, and a track record that has even sparked a federal complaint. While I'm a big believer in a transparent society I still believe users should be in control of who can see their information and how.

I think Qaiku, the conversational microblogging service, is doing this quite well. In your profile you have a simple setting:

Privacy of individual conversations comes from the settings of the person who initiated that thread. The setting is clearly shown in the sidebar. Some examples:

This way you can know who will be able to see your comments and make the decision before posting them.

The Terms of Service are not too tricky either, containing items like Be Nice and What is yours is yours.

Apple iPad is certainly interesting. It seeks to challenge the concept of PCs by providing something that is at the same time more personal, and a lot easier to use. The personal computer of the future.

Gone is difficult file organization - instead, applications use their own purpose-build content repositories. Instead of seeking software from many places, all of it is easily available in an App Store, all quality-controlled by Apple. And same thing with content - forget about bookshelves and stacks of CDs, instead simply dowloading all you need from iTunes.

This sort of user experience obviously comes with a cost. Important computing concepts like multitasking are not supported. The iTunes/App Store experience means that Apple is in the position to ensure no software or content competing with its or its business partners' business model gets on the device. And most of the content you buy for the device is DRM'd, meaning that you're only renting it for the time allowed by content owners, never buying.

Even with the limitations concerned I can see myself buying an iPad. It would serve as a very nice device for web surfing from the couch and as an e-reader on business trips. I can also see myself running demos and presentations from it instead of a laptop.

Even with the limitations concerned, it is likely that the iPad will happen, and will blaze the trail towards a new way of personal computing. Stephen Fry says it well:

Like the first iPhone, iPad 1.0 is a John the Baptist preparing the way of what is to come, but also like iPhone 1.0 (and Jokanaan himself too come to that) iPad 1.0 is still fantastic enough in its own right to be classed as a stunningly exciting object, one that you will want NOW and one that will not be matched this year by any company. In the future, when it has two cameras for fully featured video conferencing, GPS and who knows what else built in (1080 HD TV reception and recording and nano projection, for example) and when the iBook store has recorded its 100 millionth download and the thousands of accessories and peripherals that have invented uses for iPad that we simply can’t now imagine – when that has happened it will all have seemed so natural and inevitable that today’s nay-sayers and sceptics will have forgotten that they ever doubted its potential.

The success of iPad will mean more than just a completely new level of App Store economy. Other companies will certainly seek to emulate the model, coming up with their own post-WIMP devices and their own content and software ecosystems. This all will be a challenge for the free software movement.

The world of free software is still very much stuck in what computing was in the 90s. We think of desktop computers, we do not integrate with the web. And we do not get the transformation that is happening with personal computers. Taught by smartphones and cloud applications, users are moving from desktops through simple netbooks towards information appliances.

With information appliances you need a seamless user interface. You need an ecosystem where content comes alongside the software to utilize it. You need to move past the old WIMP metaphors and the idea of separation between data stored in a a file system and the software manipulating it.

So far the first convincing attempt towards this direction I've seen in the free software world is KDE's Social Desktop initiative. It allows users to connect with each other straight through the desktop, and it allows discovery of new applications and content to download and use straight in the applications. We also use it with Maemo's new App Downloader.

Threatened by the cloud from one end, and closed-ecosystem appliances from the other, it will be interesting to see how we react. Will we rise to the challenge and start providing new user experiences? Will we build a free cloud? Will we integrate with initiatives like Project Gutenberg and Creative Commons to provide the content integration? Will the open web be our safe haven?

Definitely interesting times to be a software developer.

An increasing number of web services and applications are emphasising search terms or pre-selected websites instead of allowing users to enter any address they choose. This is worrying, as while searches are more user-friendly, URLs are the heart of an open web where anybody can publish without obscure business dealings or oppressive app store policies.

There are many examples of this happening, from Facebook's framing of web to netbooks systems like the JoliCloud not having an address bar. Certainly many companies are looking at Mozilla's search engine revenue and Apple's app store model and want to emulate that, moving the web into silos of their own control. But at the same time, we're thinking of Linked Data and open, interoperable web standards.

Web indeed is at new crossroads.

Chris Messina predicts the death of URLs:

a future without URLs and without the infinite organicity of the web frightens me. It’s not that I know what we’ll lose by removing this artifact of one of the most generative periods in history — and that’s exactly the point! The URL and the ability for anyone to mint a new one and then propagate it is what makes the web so resilient, so empowering, and so interesting! That I don’t need to ask anyone permission to create a new website or webpage is a kind of ideological freedom that few generations in history have known!

Tim O'Reilly presents a call to arms:

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we'll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we've enjoyed for the past two decades. But I'm betting that things are going to get ugly. We're heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it's more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

And it's time for developers to take a stand. If you don't want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don't wait till it's too late.

Fake Steve Jobs on the Trouble with Android:

Um, hello? Folks, the whole point of doing open-source code is to let it fork. The idea is to accelerate evolution by encouraging weird mutations. Creating an open source program and hoping it won't fork is like decorating your house with a zillion Christmas lights and a forty-foot inflatable Santa and hoping nobody stops to look at it.

This is an interesting way to look at Open Source. Traditionally freedom to fork has been seen as a safeguard against dead projects or vendors, as a way to hand maintainership over to parties that are still interested.

But what FSJ is talking about is forks being beneficial by themselves. This is the model that Distributed Version Control Systems like git also promote: every developer has their own fork of the software, and merges to "blessed" repositories happen under the watchful eye of a maintainer.

This is quite a different model than the traditional centralized way of working with projects. Merging between forks has its costs, but if we embrace this model we gain lots of new developer flexibility and possible new workflows. DVCSs haven't been with us for a long time yet and so it takes some time for this new distributed way of working to take root.

Workstreaming means collecting activities of geographically dispersed team members into a consistent news feed, enabling managers to track process and colleagues to stay up-to-date with the day-by-day happenings. As maemo.org is a distributed project worked on by a group of both volunteers and paid employees, some sort of activity monitoring is quite necessary.

For a while this has been done in wiki pages, but since that is not very flexible or connected, better ways have been discussed. The current approach being tested is workstreaming via a Qaiku channel:

Qaiku is a conversation-oriented microblogging service that suits workstreaming quite well:

• It has both a web view and a mobile view, meaning you can workstream on-the-go
• Channels support means activity log entries don't need to "spam" normal microblogging contacts with workstreams
• Private channels means you can track workstreams of confidential projects too
• API and RSS feeds enable us to integrate the workstreaming feed to the wiki pages or where ever we want to
• Separation of comments and actual activity log entries make it easy to discuss things related to the activities

In near future there will also be support for additional machine-readable "Qaiku Data" (like hour amounts, bug numbers, whatever). This is inspired by the Twitter Data initiative, but keeps the data separate from actual message contents to keep Qaiku human-readable. Once that is done, we could possibly build some more workstreaming-oriented UI for this on maemo.org.

So, if you're doing anything on maemo.org, sign up on Qaiku and start posting your updates!

Technorati Tags: microblogging, qaiku, workstreaming

About one year after Operation Suvilahti, Nemein has now grown out of the space there and so we're moving again, this time to a 50s industrial building in the Hietalahti district of Helsinki.

Here's the initial floor plan that still lacks couple of desks:

Our development servers and other network infrastructure will move to AfHeurlinia where there is a diesel generator and pretty good connections, so the new office space will indeed be just office. AfHeurlinia is a very secure location for our servers, as the place is guarded by both ninjas and ferocious dogs.

Couple of workstations in the lobby area will be reserved for visiting contractors and may become available under some kind of coworking arrangement.

The new office will be a lot closer to many of our important clients, and has a very nice view to the historical Hietalahti area:

After Tuesday Apr 28th the new address will be Hietalahdenkatu 8 A 22.

Technorati Tags: nemein

So, Oracle bought Sun, and MySQL with it. Since MySQL runs much of the current web, I'd imagine many developers are now concerned with the future of that database and looking at alternatives like PostgreSQL.

But instead of locking yourself to another specific database, how about going with a content repository?

Content repositories are services that wrap different storage back-ends and provide an abstracted object-oriented API to them. As long as you write your application using the repository's interfaces, you can switch databases behind it at will.

For web development, there are two good alternatives:

• Java Content Repository: the content repository standard for Java applications that has many implementations, including Apache Jackrabbit
• Midgard2: generic content repository for PHP, C, Python, C# and Objective-C based on libgda

In addition to database abstraction repositories often provide other services like versioning, multilingual content handling and signals between multiple applications using the same repo.

Technorati Tags: jcr, midgard, mysql

Last night Finnish energy company St1 launched ReFuel, their new biofuel product. ReFuel is interesting in the sense that it is produced from biowaste, and so no farmland is used in its production.

To support the product launch we helped to create ReFuel Tehdas, an application for converting internet trash (bad pictures, advertisement banners) into money. To use it, you install a Firefox 3 extension with which you can then flag images as garbage:

The image will then be sent to our garbage processor, which churns it into money for your account. You can claim some of the money by ordering a St1 Visa card. Other users of the extension can see what has been already processed, as all garbage images are automatically blanked out from their respective websites:

This makes browsing even the noisiest websites a serene experience, as dutiful ReFuel users have probably already removed most of the obnoxious blinking banner ads.

Watching images pop into the garbage processor is also quite addictive, and gives an interesting insight into the dark subconscious of the Internet.

To try it out, register to the site or watch the screencast.

Technically the site is also quite interesting:

It uses the new Midgard2 platform, combining the PHP-based Midgard MVC framework with some Midgard-Python processing tools. It also utilizes Facebook Connect for easy registration, and is probably one of the first campaign websites out there to be based on Firefox extensions.

Much of the platform is same as what the Qaiku microblogging service uses.

Technorati Tags: biofuel, campaign, ecology, firefox, midgard, biofuel, refuel