Open Source, Open Standards & Peer Production

Considering an Open Future

by on November 16, 2007 · 16 comments

Presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-Texas) became the “Internet” candidate this month when 36,672 people contributed more than US$4 million online to his campaign in a single 24-hour period. This impressive feat demonstrates the power of an open source culture, a lesson that should not be lost when it comes to other important issues.

The campaign to raise money for Rep. Paul was open source in a number of ways. First, it was a decentralized effort, promoted by people all over the country simultaneously. Indeed, Paul’s campaign was so hands-off that the candidate told The New York Times that he “had nothing to do with it.” It was two independent people who started the ball rolling.

James Sugra posted an online video proposing a big day of fund-raising for Paul, and Trevor Lyman separately created a site, www.thisnovember5th.com, that featured the video. Lyman’s site is now planning another big day on Dec. 16, the anniversary of the Boston Tea party.

On that day, Paul’s open source campaigners are hoping to encourage 100,000 people to donate $100 each.

Choosing a historical day may not be a particularly new fundraising tactic, but the additional open source cultural spin is that the site is automatically updating how many people have pledged so far. This transparency complements the home page of Ron Paul’s Web site, which constantly pops up names of his campaign donors. Those revelations stand in direct contrast to traditional campaigns, which tend to be silent and proprietary about who is donating.

Paul’s “donation feed” is reminiscent of the somewhat addictive “newsfeed” on social networking site Facebook,and it appears to have the effect of increasing donations. In a society where privacy is shrinking, it seems many embrace the idea of sharing more information, not less. Paul’s supporters are not alone in their recognition of the power of a voluntary open source culture.

Internet giant, Google, announced this week that it is offering $10 million in prizes for people who build the best software for Android, the company’s new open platform for mobile devices. This move shows that Google knows its tech history. Back in 1985, Apple made a huge mistake of saying no to a young Bill Gates who wanted the company to open up its proprietary architecture to developers. We all know how that ended, and now a similar story is likely to play out if the big phone companies stay closed while Google opens things up.

This reality, unfortunately, has led many to the erroneous conclusion that since openness is good, the government should force it, no matter what the cost. However, government force rarely leads to the open societies people seek. Take Net neutrality advocates, for example.

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Enlightening Some of the Closed Thinking about Openness

by on November 15, 2007 · 2 comments

When and how does ICT interoperability drive innovation? This is the subject of a new paper on interoperability by the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society (the webcast of yesterday’s launch event at the Reagan Building is now available).

Co-authors Urs Gasser and John Palfrey have published a thoughtful and well-balanced study. There’s a lot to agree with, especially their essential conclusion: that interoperability is important for innovation in the IT sector and the market, not government, is the preferred mechanism for achieving interoperability.

But I also think this paper achieves something more, even if unintentionally. It helps debunk the rhetoric we’re hearing about "openness" (and there are many definitions) as the best and only way to achieve interoperability.

First of all, according to the paper, "interoperability is not an unqualified good and is not an end in itself." Furthermore, just because interoperability is not present doesn’t mean there’s a "market failure" — the authors cite DRM-protected music distribution and the growing shift toward unprotected music as a response to interoperability concerns voiced by consumers.

Importantly, the paper identifies that interoperability can be achieved by multiple means: IP licensing, APIs, standards (including "open" standards), and industry consortia.

As it affects innovation, interoperability can help some types of innovation, especially incremental innovations. But higher levels of interoperability may diminish incentives for radical innovations if the network effects of interoperable systems increase switching costs for consumers.

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Wikipedia’s Notability Requirement

by on November 11, 2007 · 0 comments

The more I think about it, the less sense Wikipedia’s notability rule makes. That’s the rule that says that the subject of an article must “worthy of notice” to merit the creation of an article about them. For example, today I was goofing off on Wikipedia and looking at Wikipedia’s encyclopedic coverage of the Taft family. I was curious about Pres. Taft’s living relatives, so I drilled down to William Howard Taft IV, and I noticed that he has a son, William Howard Taft V, who appeared not to have a Wikipedia entry.

So I googled WHT V and quickly came to this 2005 wedding announcement in the New York Times. I thought I’d do my good deed for the day and create a new Wikipedia article based in the information in the Times story.

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Waiting for the Open Search Alliance

by on November 6, 2007 · 6 comments

The brilliant Fake Steve Jobs has a great post on Google’s announcement of its new Open Handset Alliance. You should go read it right now because it’s all priceless, but I love this particular bit about openness:

Finally, has anyone else noticed the way Google is kind of desperately grasping at straws lately? They spend years trying to do something other than search and nothing works. Then, despite their big brains and IQ tests, they get totally blindsided by Facebook and have to gin up this ridiculous OpenSocial thing. Just like with this phone thing, they round up all the losers in that social networking space to form some dumbass alliance. You know how it looks? It looks weak. Companies don’t form alliances and consortia when they’re winning. Also, whenever you see companies start talking about being “open,” it means they’re getting their ass kicked. You think Google will be forming an OpenSearch alliance any time soon, to help also-rans in search get a share of the spoils? Me neither.

I love that Kevin Martin put out a press release (PDF because the FCC has apparently never heard of HTML) praising the Open Handset Alliance. So we’ll see press releases from now on each time a communications company announces vaporware?

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Yochai Benkler’s Apocalyptic Rhetoric

by on November 3, 2007 · 17 comments

Matt is clearly right that geek activists are lousy at political organizing, and Internet utopianism may lull some of us into a false sense of security. But I think that, if anything, Benkler’s writing demonstrates the opposite tendency: his pronouncements tend toward the apocalyptic. For example, he says:

I think there are certain well-defined threats to this model. If we end up with a proprietary communications platform, such as the one that the FCC’s spectrum and broadband policies are aiming to achieve; and on that platform we will have proprietary, closed platforms like the iPhone, then much of the promise of the networked environment will be lost.

Now, I’ve written before that I think Benkler overhypes the potential of a spectrum commons. I won’t belabor that point, but I think his comments about the iPhone are particularly interesting. It’s certainly true that advocates for open standards like Benkler (and me) have much to criticize in the iPhone. But it’s a mistake to view the iPhone as a step backwards for open networks without looking at the broader context.

In the first place, Apple’s attempts to lock down the iPhone have sparked an enormous customer backlash and that backlash may have spurred Apple to release an SDK for the phone. I would bet money that the iPhone will be a de facto open platform within five years, with a thriving community of third-party developers.

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Citizendium Turns One. Point Still Unclear

by on November 1, 2007 · 0 comments

Larry Sanger has an essay touting Citizendium’s accomplishments over the last year. Apparently they’ve amassed a whopping 3,200 articles over the last year, and are adding about a dozen new article per day.

He puts a brave face on this, but it’s really hard to see how this is success. Wikipedia has 2 million articles, about 500 times as many as Citizendium, and it’s growing a lot faster. I decided to check out the articles on a few topics I’m interested, and most of them didn’t exist. No articles on the Cato Insititute, libertarianism, F.A. Hayek, or even copyright. There is an article on Milton Friedman, but it’s extremely short and frankly not very good. Take the first sentence: Friedman didn’t consider himself “a leader of American Conservatism in its libertarian aspect.” He called himself a liberal. The corresponding sentence in Wikipedia is “His political philosophy, which Friedman himself considered classically liberal and consequentialist libertarian, stressed the advantages of the marketplace and the disadvantages of government intervention, strongly influencing the outlook of American conservatives and libertarians.” That’s much more accurate and informative. The Wikipedia article on Friedman is also more than twice as long as the Citizendium article.

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Given enough eyeballs, all corruption is shallow

by on October 22, 2007 · 5 comments

I’ve been laboring for a few months on a paper about government transparency on the internet and I’m happy to say that it’s now available as a working paper. In it I show that a lot of government information that is supposed to be publicly available is only nominally available because it’s not online. When data does make it online it’s often useless; it’s as if the .gov domain has a prohibition on XML and reliable searches.

First I look at independent third parties (such as GovTrack.us) that are doing yeoman’s work by picking up the slack where government fails and making data available online in flexible formats. Then I look at yet other third parties who are taking the liberated data and using them in mashups (such as MAPLight.org) and crowdsourcing (such as our own Jim Harper’s WashingtonWatch.com). Mashups of government data help highlight otherwise hidden connections and crowdsourcing makes light work of sifting through mountains of data. If I may corrupt Eric Raymond’s Linus’s Law for a moment, “Given enough eyeballs, all corruption is shallow.” In the coming days I plan to write a bunch more on how online tools can shed light on government, including a series dissecting the FCC’s website–not for the squeamish.

I believe opening up government to online scrutiny is immensely important. If we’re going to hold government accountable for its actions, we need to know what those actions are. The Sunlight Foundation has been doing fantastic work on this front and I would encourage you to visit them and especially their Open House Project blog. I would also encourage you to send me any comments you might have on my paper as I’m still perfecting it before I submit it to journals.

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Windley on the iPhone

by on October 1, 2007 · 0 comments

Phil Windley has a mature and thoughtful post on the iPhone (inspired by a clever CrunchGear post) that captures a lot of the issues we’ve been discussing here.

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News Flash: Apache Developers Not Planning to Switch to GPLv3

by on September 26, 2007 · 5 comments

A new survey shows that “OPEN SAUCE developers are staying away from the latest GPLv3 licence in droves.” Well, sort of. The survey says that six percent of developers are using the license now, which actually seems like a reasonable number given that the license was released less than three months ago. More ominously for the FSF, almost half of the developers surveyed do not plan to ever adopt the license.

However, it seems to me like the press release omits some important information. For one thing, apparently “The Apache Foundation was identified as the organization having the best Open Source offerings.” The Apache Foundation, remember, uses a BSD-style license that allows code to be incorporated into proprietary software. In other words, it isn’t a copyleft license.

That suggests that a significant number of the open source developers being interviewed are not users of copyleft-style licenses in the first place. That they’re not planning to adopt GPLv3 is no more remarkable than if they’d conducted a survey that included a lot of Microsoft employees and discovered low enthusiasm for the GPL.

The important question is how many developers currently developing GPLv2 software are planning to switch to v3. The organization doesn’t appear to have released any detail about how their developer were chosen, so there’s really no way to tell the answer to that question from the information they’ve released.

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A Free Software Experiment

by on September 18, 2007 · 0 comments

It will be fascinating to see how well this works. Mozilla has created a for-profit subsidiary that will work on improving Mozilla’s Thunderbird mail client.

The danger, it seems to me, is that once you’ve got $3 million burning a hole in your pocket, there’s a serious danger that the characteristics that make the free software model viable in the first place—lack of bureaucracy, community enthusiasm, relentless focus on users—will be undermined. The paid employees can begin to see themselves as “running” the project, as opposed to facilitating the collaborative efforts of community members. In a traditional open source project, the only things that get done are the things that somebody is passionate enough to do themselves. On the other hand, in a traditional for-profit company, the product gets the features the CEO thinks the product should have, whether or not anyone else wants those features. Trying to mix the two approaches could be poisonous in an effort in which the bulk of the manpower is still provided by volunteers.

Still, it’s a worthy experiment. And the guy they picked to run it seems like a smart guy who may have the combination of good judgment and humility to pull it off. With the Mozilla Foundation sitting on tens of millions of dollars, they can certainly afford to experiment. Free software is a new enough phenomenon that there’s still a lot to be learned about when and how it can be combined with more traditional top-down management styles.

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