A Hug is Symmetric

An embrace is warm when two are pulled together. A one arm hug is a patronizing squeeze that makes for a (bad) photo op.

This little blog post is my > 140 response to my new friend @dberkholz's post The Story Of Data: Whither the GPL? Why we don’t need it anymore. I met Donnie at FOSDEM this year just after he joined RedMonk -- the analyst firm that is essential for anyone in software development to follow. (Full Disclosure: RedMonk and Informatique, Inc. do not have any business affiliation).

While I acknowledge that permissive licensing has become fashionable I think it is a grave disservice to suggest that restrictive licensing in FLOSS is withering, unneeded or for the uneducated.

This recent dust up is a result of an ongoing meme of "the Decline of the GPL" started last year by Matt Aslett. To which fuel was added by a recent BlackDuck analysis also asserting the the decline of the GPL. In precious few seconds of research I was unable to to find the BlackDuck report itself, but only mention of it. Ultimately the approach of the BlackDuck study is one of the problems. The data and methodology have not been made available for peer review -- the basis of the scientific method which defines progress in every academic discipline.

During our first Legal Issues DevRoom at FOSDEM we had several talks touching on the impact of software (and other artifact) licensing on FLOSS. Of special note: John Sullivan, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation gave a talk "Is copyleft being framed?" and Richard Fontana, Red Hat's Open Source Licensing and Patent Counsel gave a talk, "The (possible) decline of the GPL, and what to do about it". Slides for these and other talks are available here. Sullivan's data and methodology are available for review and suggest that the use of GPL is vibrant.

I do hope that my friend and former Sun colleague Rich Sands -- who is now at BlackDuck -- can help shed some light on their analysis.

But I'm not here to quibble about the data. I want to talk directly to the assertions made from the data.

1. Compliance is complicated

In this era of continuous development and continuous deployment powered by tools like the uber awesome Jenkins you can't really say with a straight face that making a tarball and publishing it somewhere is hard. Even in the embedded space there are tools like Yocto make delivering "Complete and Corresponding Source" just one of the build products.

For the massive, commercial enterprise which is Java™ Oracle manages to publish the source code for OpenJDK. Under the GPL. And Oracle publishes it from a tightly intermingled source base comprising open as well as closed, proprietary components.

2. The collaborative development model is really all you need

Bruce Perens was right: collaboration is better. Yet collaboration is necessary, but not sufficient to build a community. As we have become more familiar with FLOSS models it has become increasingly clearly that copyright assignment or licensing agreements that put a corporation in asymmetric control of a codebase does not foster the healthiest communities.

When inbound == outbound licensing and everyone is symmetric footing collaboration and contribution thrive.

Simon Phipps, also a friend and former Sun colleague, has written about the health of projects such as Libre Office and assessing the health of FLOSS governance.

3. Commercial products == proprietary products

"Not to mention that copyleft licenses make it much harder to build proprietary products". Well maybe we should start with understanding there might be a difference between building products and making a biz model around them vs. the licensing of said products.

With Red Hat hitting the milestone of $1 billion in revenue I think we can put to rest the question, "can you make money with open source?" Certainly Red Hat has some proprietary licensed products, but the crux or their business model is based on restrictively licensed, copyleft software. Red Hat invests an enormous amount of developer time to give back to the community... And apparently they are not suffering for it. Apparently this isn't too complicated for them. And apparently the bottom line is doing just fine, thank you.

4. Restrictive licensing doesn't matter in Cloud

If anything the rise of "Cloud Computing" drives the need for an updated approach to restrictive licensing. This was the real motivation behind creating the AGPL. Why is this? It's because traditionally restrictive licensing kicks in when the software is delivered. In web services you get data, but not software (in any form).

A great deal has been written about copyleft in the cloud era... Since Donnie's post included "Data" I think it's worth mentioning the Freedom to Leave and the Franklin Street Statement.

(Secret: data is more valuable than code )

5. You can't build a business on restrictive software

Jeremy Allison has clearly articulated why the GPLv3 is essential for the commercial Samba marketplace to thrive. He talks about symmetry providing a necessary level playing field (and he spoke about this recently).

Evan Prodromou has built the StatusNet business on AGPL'd software and is selling the Decentralized Social Web into Enterprises.

And NoSQL all star, MongoDB, is licensed under the AGPL and the company behind it, 10gen, seems to be doing just fine.

Work with Me

So whether or not the GPL is in decline (or not) only scratches the surface of the how the FLOSS revolution has transformed information technology in the past 20 years. I bet the that Story of Data in the next 20 years will tell us that symmetric collaboration is the big win.

Ultimately the key thing is to remember that permissively licensed software is also Free Software.

Real World Clojure

I just completed giving my talk at Software Passion conference on Real World Clojure...

Here you can download my presentation:

• as PDF: real-world-clojure.pdf
• as source (org-tree-slide): real-world-clojure.org
• as source (org-tree-slide with images): software-passion.zip

I'm very impressed at the organization and quality of the content at Software Passion -- a first time conference. Clearly the organizers have appealed to the innovative voices in Sweden's academic and entreprenueal communities.

And, of course, the best part of any conference is the "hallway track" and Software Passion has a lot of interesting geeks!

Tack!

With Software Passion

Today I arrived in Göteborg, Sweden to take part in the first ever Software Passion conference.

I had a great time tonight at the Speaker's Dinner and look forward to the conference tomrrow.

I will post slides from my talk Monday here on my blog (along with other links/resources).

Comments on FaiF 0x22

I have some comments on today's episode of Free as in Freedom: 0x22: Elder's Methods of FOSS Activism. Obviously you should listen to it (and add FaiF to your favorite podcatcher. You will be the forth listener! ). This oggcast is the first in a series from the first Legal Issues DevRoom at FOSDEM which Karen, Bradley, Richard Fontana and I organized.

I think Bradley was critical of Ambjörn's talk not enumerating all the collaboration that has taken place in the FLOSS community. To be fair Ambjörn himself said he had tried to enumerate various examples (and has 196 or so pointers on his blog ... see the Speakers page for blog links). Karen makes the point that it is precisely these sort of events where we can learn about activisim across a broad range of our communities.

I appreciate Ambjörn's view that we can develop and use various norms and legal tools to help promote Internet Freedom generally, but sometimes activism is necessary to educate and move public policy (e.g. the SOPA protests). Indeed we seem increasingly under threat of being limited to walled application gardens or even being literally firewalled from the open Internet.

The key takeaway, I believe, is we need to collaborate more between Free Software, Open Source, Free Culture and broader Internet Freedom communities generally. In a conversation with Mike Linksvayer after the DevRoom session we discussed the challenge from a FLOSS project level of designing the licensing of software and non-software artificacts such that both could evolve together over time. This is a tricky issue which involves "or later" (plus licensing) versions and software/non-software licensing compatibility. We shared the observation -- apropos to Ambjörn's talk -- that many humanitarian or otherwise public activisim efforts often don't make FLOSS part of their agenda (and, in fact, may not even be aware of it). We need to do a much better job at this collaboration and cross-community education.

As for the logistics of the DevRoom allow my to publicly express a mea culpa. I have been to FOSDEM before and I know how challenging it is to fit "a 20lb conference in a 10lb bag" (as @spot said). I knew that 30 minute sesssions would be short... We had so many great proposals that I was happy to hear from as many as possible. However it is true that this was ultimately too short and the format did not adequately allow for Q/A, discussion, time to change DevRooms and setup for the next speaker. And I especially want to apologize to anyone who was waiting outside the DevRoom that I steadfastly refused to let in . I didn't want the FOSDEM volunteer organizers to have the University withdraw support for future conferences due to violating fire codes.

I hope everyone will be able to check out the slides and/or audio oggcasts of the talks as they become available. And, yes, we'll hopefully get a bigger room and plan for more discussion time next year!

Inbjuden tillbaks till hemlandet: Sverige

Det är en ära för mig att ha blivit inbjuden att tala på konferensen Software Passion i Göteborg, Sverige. Det här är en stad med en mer än tusenårig historia och ett område (byn Forsheda) från vilket min gammel mormor en gång utvandrade till USA för över hundra år sedan. Jag hoppas kunna lära mig lite svenska innan min resa.

This will be an exciting challenge for me because I realize that most of my public speaking in the past few years has been very much in a FLOSS context. The program at Software Passion shows quite a diversity of technologies and topics -- including proprietary technologies that I know little about. In my talk I will cover some of the great fun I've had with the Clojure programming language. Therefore I will consciously make a point to highlight the importance of "standing on the shoulders of giants".

The productivity I have enjoyed would not be possible without the stack Free Software I count on, including, but not limited to:

• Clojure
• Clojure Contrib libraries
• The noir web framework
• The leiningen dependency management and build tool
• OpenJDK
• The Redis database
• The Jenkins continuious integration server
• And, of course, the bedrock of it all: Debian GNU/Linux

Several years ago I was able to travel to Norway on a project I had with the electric vehicle company Think Global. I was able to visit my aunt in Oslo and get very close to the border of Sweden while working at the car factory in Aurskog. Indeed many of the engineers I worked with were Swedes who commuted across the border each day.

My great-grandmother, Olga, immigrated from Sweden to the United States around 1900. She was from a fairly well-to-do family in Fosheda. After some careful investigation we learned that she had fallen in love with a servant, but couldn't marry him due to family pressure. A few years later after her mother died she came to the USA with her "little brother" and started a new life here. She was studying nursing in Boston when she was asked to accompany the Minneapolis Postmaster's wife back home on the train.

Much earlier than the "personal ad" era Olga mysteriously found my great-grandfather, Andrew, within 3 days of arriving in Minneapolis and married him soon thereafter (the Swedish mafia? ) . This is the background on my Nordic roots in Minnesota.

I realize that for non-Americans the obsession with immigration history seems a little silly. I'm proud of my mixture of German, Danish, Swedish and Bohemian roots. And I'm especially excited to finally set foot in Sweden!

Noir is the new Black

Next week (Wednesday Feb 1) I will give a talk about my experiences in Clojure and noir.

Brian just sent the our local Clojure user group a pointer about the meeting at 7pm at Refactr (Thanks Brian!).

I will work to post slides here on my blog (along with other links/resources).

See you next week!

FOSDEM will be intense!

I mentioned that I'm helping to organize two DevRooms for FOSDEM 2012... And now I'm thrilled to announce the speakers and schedules for each have been posted on the FOSDEM website:

• Free Java DevRoom Schedule
• Legal Issues DevRoom Schedule

But, of course, there's more! There are main tracks, Lighting Talks, Stands, the Beer Event and the Keysigning. I want to see all my Java friends, Legal friends, Debian friends, and meet a whole new bunch of interesting hacker friends.

In a word... FOSDEM will be intense. It's crazy, busy, chaotic and charming. What's the big deal about Free Software? It's not about free beer... It's not about the most efficient means of software production... It's all about the people! See you there!

p.s. Ask me if you need help to get ready for the Keysigning (by Jan 29).

The Sunset of the DLJ

The actually sunset of the DLJ happened last summer, but it's news because of an article in OMG! Ubuntu! and Simon's followup today in Computerworld UK.

Simon's article does a good job of highlighting the role of the DLJ in the pre-OpenJDK days. Even for many of us at Sun we didn't know at the time we working on the DLJ that the plans to open source Java would be announced at JavaOne 2006. Even so it would be over a year before OpenJDK source was actually released and several more months before it was built and distributed by major Linux distributions.

Especially in the early days the DLJ bundles played an important role in the transition to the Free Java we enjoy today. In particular this enabled meaningful conversations between Sun and the community around packaging which have continued to this day on the subject of Java modularity. Yet there is one thing Simon did not mention: how many people thanked Sun for making Java available under the DLJ.

The people who were most appreciative were those using government mandated applications (e.g. tax filing in France) or financial applications (e.g. banking in Brazil). What is very important to note is that these key applications use Java applets. These applications depend on having a solid Java plugin which provides applets in modern browsers.

What the community lost in the sunset of the DLJ was the de facto plugin implementation even though it is not, in fact, part of the Java SE specification. Since Java 6 update 10 or so the Sun (now Oracle) implementations have used a new, re-architected plugin (let's call it plugin2). One of the large, remaining deltas from Oracle's closed Java and OpenJDK is the plugin: neither plugin1 nor plugin2 have been open sourced.

Here we must acknowledge the amazing community effort of the IcedTea project in Free Java and, specifically, around an open source plugin implementation. So is Java in Ubuntu? Yes. Is there a plugin in Ubuntu? Yes. Yet this is one area where the community is struggling to provide users with Java functionality they need and Oracle isn't cooperating with the community as well as they are on the bulk of OpenJDK.

My former Sun colleague David Herron has blogged about the DLJ as has a fellow Debian Java developer Sylvestre Ledru.

We not at the End Times for Java. I would even go so far as to suggest that we are now in a Java renaissance thanks to the variety of languages and projects running on the JVM. If you would like to experience the vibrance of the community please join us at FOSDEM 2012.

I do hope Oracle will decide to liberate the new plugin (only then will the DLJ R.I.P.).

You are going to find yourself immersed in legal issues

The title of this blog post is a quote from Karen in the most recent Free as in Freedom oggcast

FAIF 0x1E:

Legal issues are an inherent part of Free and open source software generally. If you get passionate about Free and open source software you are going to find yourself immersed in legal issues. It's something I think developers are really aware of... much more so than in other fields.

I consider myself to be very passionate about FLOSS and I care about the it's legal underpinnings because I see the enormous potential good FLOSS can bring to addressing the big challenges facing the planet. Continuing to enjoy the right to engage in FLOSS depends on the legal terrain which makes it possible.

We have seen the excesses of copyright maximalists in Free Culture and the damaging impact they can have. The SOPA (PIPA) debates are simply the latest chapter in that saga. Lessig points out that, at least in the USA, we will never win that war until we win the war against corruption of our Republic. We must strike the root of the problem in addition to the branches. I say we must remain vigilant about the branches as well.

FLOSS is another branch which is as important as Free Culture. Understanding that FLOSS is possible due a hack on copyright underscores how critical it is for developers to be aware of the legal environment in which their creativity can thrive. And the escalating software patent war -- especially in Java and mobile -- has had a chilling effect on innovation.

One the strengths (can we think in terms of countermeasures?) of our community is that we function out of basic principles of transparency and respect. The traditions in FLOSS like the traditions in the early open Internet form a culture of true innovation where working code drives collaboration and makes it possible to "stand on the shoulders of giants". Fontana has talked about this lex mercatoria in Free Software as an essential part of understanding the context of legal issues in FLOSS. I hope he will expand on this in his new blog.

I am optimistic that if we combine our brainpower to protect FLOSS as we do to create awesome software we can enable new kinds of working together which other fields will emulate. I can't wait to explore the frontier of the future possible.

Listen to the oggcast introduction [4:25..12:55] (at least) to hear Karen and Bradley discuss the upcoming Legal Issues DevRoom at FOSDEM 2012. The Legal Issues DevRoom Call For Participation closes on December 30 -- please consider submitting a talk today!

Two DevRooms for FOSDEM 2012

I am really excited to be part of two DevRooms for FOSDEM 2012: Free Java and Legal Issues.

I first participated in the Free Java DevRoom in 2007 just after Sun announced the liberation of Java. This was an amazing time to be able to represent Sun and meet the developers who had actively sought open source Java for so many years. Just after FOSDEM 2008 I left Sun, but I got involved in the the Free Java DevRoom again last year and had a blast. From the interest so far I suspect we will have even more great speakers this year!

Having been part of Sun's team that navigated tricky copyright, patent and trademark issues in publishing OpenJDK I cultivated an appreciation and fascination for the legal frameworks that make FLOSS possible. The obvious success and growth of software in our everyday lives makes the vitality of software freedom a huge concern. This year "legal geeks" will be thrilled to learn that we have just proposed a new Legal Issues DevRoom for FOSDEM. This is a "Saturday Only" DevRoom which will culminate in a one hour interactive panel with all our speakers.

Of course the big challenge with FOSDEM is there are far too many DevRooms to go to at the same time. I apologize in advance for making your decisions even trickier! I can assure you that the FOSDEM "hallway track" will be better than ever....

So please check out the CFP's for each DevRoom and submit a talk idea or share the pointer with someone who would be a great speaker.

Merci!