It’s been a pretty busy and interesting week. OSCON is going on out in California, and David and Matt are there for OpenNMS. As it is the probably the premiere open source conference it seems important to attend, but when I went a couple of years ago I really didn’t enjoy it.

Part of the reason is that I am not a developer, and the conference is very developer-centric. The other part is that while I maintain an e-mail correspondence with a number of open source “superstars”, the vibe is all strange at OSCON. If I meet these people in any other situation or conference we’re cool, but at OSCON it is different. I don’t want to say they are standoffish, as that isn’t the case, it just seems that it is harder for me to just walk up to them and start talking.

I know I’m not making any sense, so I’ll move on.

Oh, a big “congrats” to Brian Aker and the other winners for their Google O’Reilly Open Source Award. It is well deserved and I’m a little jealous, sort of the same way I felt when Tobi Oetiker got his SAGE achievement award at LISA. The jealousy stems from the fact that I’d love to get awards like this, but it should never happen. Not because I don’t work hard, but OpenNMS is such a community driven project that there really isn’t a single person we can recognize as being responsible for OpenNMS. I’m just a cheerleader, and my reward is being able to watch such an incredible team of people take the field.

Another announcement made this week was the founding of Open Source for America. This is a lobbying group designed to promote free and open source software in the US government. Their first goal is stated:

Aligned with our commitment to the four principles, our goals are to help effect change in the U.S. Federal government policies and practices to allow the federal government to better utilize free and open source software;

I think this is a great idea, but I was seriously confused when I read the list of founding members, which include such companies as Oracle, most likely involved due to its purchase of Sun; Medsphere, which sued its founders out of the company for daring to open source their “open source” software, and Alfresco.

I find that last company’s involvement amusing, since their most vocal employee often rants on about how “open source” is not free software, yet they helped found an organization, with “open source” in its name, blatantly based on the four principals of free software. It comes across as a little hypocritical and self-serving.

However, quite a bit of the organization reads like a Who’s Who of free and open source software, and so I asked one of the advisors to help me explain the discrepancy. He replied:

.. the companies involved wanted the biggest tent possible. Also, there are no dues being charged, so there’s no reason for people to think twice about joining up. The belief of the parties putting this together … is that the Administration will not speak to individual vendors, but will greet an association in proportion to the size of its membership, so they are bulking up.

Makes sense.

I am one of those guys who always thinks twice about signing up for stuff, so I am going to wait awhile before getting involved (I am also surprised that they didn’t involve Mark Taylor of Sirius IT who has a lot of experience with promoting FLOSS in government for the EU).

Unfortunately, this “thinking twice” gets me labelled some sort of free software zealot, and I’m not invited to cool parties with lots of shrimp cocktail and free drinks. It did land me a free sushi lunch with Andrew Oliver, a board member of the Open Source Initiative.

We met yesterday in Chapel Hill and the one hour lunch turned into more like a four hour gabfest on free and open software (those that know me are probably not surprised).

One of the cool things he brought up, and which I had not considered, came up during a discussion of venture capital. VCs usually fund rather novel ideas (well, for certain values of “novel”). Perhaps the idea of an open source company has grown past that novelty stage and is more mainstream than we think. For example, no one would go to a VC firm if they wanted to open up a restaurant. They’d go to either the bank or to individual investors, most likely family and friends. Heck, that’s what we did with The OpenNMS Group. I think it would be an indication that open source has arrived if the idea of starting an open source company did not immediately begin with “get VC money”.

He also complained about our lack of marketing with respect to OpenNMS. I have often resisted doing any kind of formal marketing because it is hard to reconcile my core beliefs of transparency, openness and no bullshit with what usually passes for marketing. Yet it would be great to be able to communicate that OpenNMS is a real company with real customers and a long track record of delivering the highest quality management solutions, and not just a bunch of open source zealots hanging out in North Carolina.

So I was happy to find a company called Bold Interactive that does marketing but shares our ideals that clients are partners and not checkbooks, and that doing good, besides being the right thing to do, has positive financial benefits. We are just getting started on what will be our first ever formal marketing effort, and I expect the community to provide feedback and keep us honest.

In addition, Bold introduced us to a really talented public relations person named Margaret Gifford. She has an amazing amount of marketing experience coupled with the same attitude we look for in all of our partners (she resigned from a very powerful position due to quality of life issues) and we are happy to have her apply that experience to getting the word out about OpenNMS.

Well, if you’ve read this far you really should get a hobby, and I want to apologize for the rambling and newsy nature of this post.

Scott Adams has been blogging recently about Cheapatopia.

Cheapatopia is a hypothetical city, designed from scratch to be an absurdly cheap place to live with a ridiculously high quality of life.

It got me thinking about an idea some friends of mine and I had back in my younger days. We called it the Promune, for Professional Commune.

I have been exposed to two examples of intentional communities in my life. Back in 1984 I spent a week at Twin Oaks, which is near Louisa, Virginia.

From their website:

We do not have a group religion; our beliefs are diverse. We do not have a central leader; we govern ourselves by a form of democracy with responsibility shared among various managers, planners, and committees. We are self-supporting economically, and partly self-sufficient. We are income-sharing. Each member works 42 hours a week in the community’s business and domestic areas. Each member receives housing, food, healthcare, and personal spending money from the community.

It was a really amazing week. You might be thinking to yourself “Hey, 42 hours a week is more than the 40 I work” but this includes meal preparation, laundry, yard work – pretty much a lot of what you would do outside of your actual job. What amazed me is that these 100 people live near the poverty level as calculated by the government, yet their standard of living is much, much higher. Meals are prepared and served for you, your laundry is done for you – some of the things we associate with the rich.

Me at Twin Oaks, circa 1984

Flash forward 15 years and I am buying a farm in Chatham County, North Carolina. Right next to me is another intentional community called Blue Heron Farm.

Blue Heron is more individualistic than Twin Oaks in the sense that there really isn’t as much shared housing and living (folks at Twin Oaks live in a dormitory style arrangement and share meal preparation, etc.) The folks at Blue Heron tend to have their own houses, but they also have a lot of community oriented activities such as a community garden, project weekends and “pot luck” meals. I was there this weekend dropping off a load of horse manure and I couldn’t help but notice how pleasant it was on their land. Again, here is a group of people living together with a much higher standard of living than they could accomplish individually.

Note: At least one person who reads this blog also knows Blue Heron, and there is a chance that someone from Twin Oaks may see this as well, so let me stress than I am oversimplifying the experience at both these places, and in the case of Twin Oaks, my time there was nearly 25 years ago.

So, back to the Promune. Think about things that we usually associate with wealth in this country: land, big house, nice cars, etc. In almost all cases most of the “luxury” items are rarely used. Unless you have a big family my guess is that most of your house is often empty. In my own modest farm house someone is upstairs less than 30 minutes a day on average, unless we have guests.

But it is still nice to have that space when we do have guests, just like it would be nice to have a billiard room, a library, a gym, a music room, a home theatre, a gourmet kitchen, a swimming pool, a Ferrari and a ski boat.

While my experiences with intentional communities revolve around people who are into sustainability (“live simply so others might live”), the idea of the Promune was to see what would happen when you throw, for lack of a better phrase, conspicuous consumption into the mix. If people near the poverty level can live like the middle class, what would happen if you started with the middle class?

Like Blue Heron, the Promune would be organized as a corporation in which people would buy shares. The initial investment would go to buy land, since we’d want on the order of 50-100 acres just to have the room. Central to the community would be the “manor house” which would be similar to what a single wealthy individual might build. While it would contain the billiard room, library, home theatre, guest quarters, etc. no one would actually live in the manor house. Instead, everyone would get individual small bungalows around the property. These would contain a kitchen, living area and bedrooms. You wouldn’t need specialized rooms since those would be in the manor house.

Being geeks at heart, the Promune would be technologically advanced. There would be a fat pipe to the internet, which would be shared around the property. So-called “green” building techniques would be used, and each house would have an electric cart to easily get from their bungalow to the manor house (recharged via solar cells – natch).

Many of my friends have jobs where they work from home, so it would be possible to have a business center in the manor house where people could work together. Depending on how much money was available, there could also be a staff to help keep the common areas clean and perhaps even a cook to plan and prepare meals.

Of course there would be the stable of toys such as sportscars, motorcycles and a boat or two. The swimming pool and tennis courts could be added near the manor house as well.

Sounds good, huh?

I’m not sure why we never gave this a go. Part of it is that we all went our separate ways. Another part is that society isn’t really structured for shared property. Most home owners in the US have a good portion of their assets in their house (along with value appreciation), so how would equity be split? It would be easy to do on a per share basis, but the shares wouldn’t be very liquid.

So speaking of splits, how would one handle a divorce within the community? Would there be limits on children? Twin Oaks realized early on that it had to have a certain ratio of children to adults in order to function (I had been told that communities such as The Farm in Tennessee were nearly 50% children) but would that be required or even work on the Promune (our original vision of the community was primarily for DINKs)?

The Promune would have the best chance of working with a small group of people, unlike the “city” that Adam’s envisions in Cheapatopia, but would it be possible to find enough people to make it viable? I would think that having about 5 families to begin would be enough to get started. Once the Promune was in operation I believe it would attract others.

What does this have to do with OpenNMS? Not much, except that people involved in the project seem to like thinking about stuff like this. OpenNMS itself is a little like an intentional community. Respect is built on merit, and while the community itself is large there is a much smaller group of people at its heart.

Also, OpenNMS is able to compete with products like OpenView and Tivoli, which are definitely “wealthy” products, yet it is produced on a middle class budget. Seeing how successful OpenNMS has been (and where it is going), the Promune doesn’t sound so far fetched.

This is another one of those customer service-centric posts with no OpenNMS content, so please feel free to skip.

I like to cook. It goes well with the fact that I have a physique designed for eating. Two of my favorite magazines on cooking are Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country.

Both are great. They accept no advertising and tend to base a lot of what they print on experiments in the “test kitchen”. I like stuff that is backed up with lots of testing.

The downside? They have the worst subscription/marketing team on the planet. I dropped Cook’s Illustrated because they kept calling my house (at least twice a month) to try to sell me things despite repeated requests to be taken off their phone marketing list. But I couldn’t bring myself to cancel my Cook’s Country subscription since I like it so much.

Looks like I didn’t need to bother, as yesterday I received an e-mail telling me that my subscription had ended, even though I’d paid until 2010.:

I called them and verified that, yes, I would continue to receive the magazines I’ve paid for, but what a way to put a black eye on an otherwise great magazine (outside of allowing their servers to be hacked, of course). The publisher claims to be some sort of “country” down to earth guy, but this kind of marketing is just wrong. Either they have a poor database, and are spamming people with incorrect e-mails, or this is some ploy to boost subscription revenues early.

In either case I don’t like it, and if it happens again I’ll drop even Cook’s Country.

NOTE: Wikipedia has a entry about the company’s aggressive sales practices.

One thing I hate about the general perception of open source software is that it is somehow amateurish. Sure, there are a lot of projects that are less than professional out there, but that’s just because there are so many projects. A large portion of them can compete with the best software, period, closed or open.

At OpenNMS we take our development process seriously. For example, we have a ton of junit tests. It’s the only way we can insure robust code while committing a large number of changes from different people. I was talking with a commercial Java company awhile back, and when I brought up junit tests the CEO said, “oh, we tried that and found it was just too hard.”

Chalk one up for open source.

So it kind of bothered me that Slashdot ran a story tonight that Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame is against anyone hiring out their services as a Wikipedia editor. I can’t understand why.

Does he not think that almost every commercial entity out there with an entry has someone in their marketing department tweak if not outright write their article? I quote Wikipedia constantly on this blog and I must say that I assume most entries are written by someone with some form of self interest. Heck, I take everything I see on the Internet with a grain of salt and Wikipedia is no different.

While I can see blocking people who constantly violate the guidelines of Wikipedia by posting marketing material, how-tos or other content that goes against the “form” of an encyclopedia entry, I can’t see why people talented at writing such copy should be prevented from charging to do so. Heck, I wish the OpenNMS entry was better written (and I wish that my own entry wasn’t there at all – it’s a little embarrassing to me to have one). I would gladly pay someone a reasonable amount of money to put in more information on the OpenNMS entry yet not slop over into marketing or promotional-speak.

Think about it. Suppose you were the AKC and you wanted to have detailed entries for all of your registered dog breeds. If Wikipedia is to become the main source for such information on the web, wouldn’t it be prudent to higher someone to write them? Sure, there could be a single line stating that “the Standard Poodle is an AKC registered breed” and I couldn’t see anything wrong with that. Users get great information on dogs they are interested in and the AKC gets a tiny amount of promotion in exchange for paying for that information to be created.

If Mr. Wales wants Wikipedia to be taking seriously and not just another amateur endeavor, there has to be room for professionals.

When I presented my “Fauxpen Source” post, I had several goals. One was to introduce the term “fauxpen source“, which I think is clever. The second was to firmly state my position on the term “open source” as it is applied to “open source companies”. Finally, I wanted to show that open source qualifies as free software per the Free Software Definition.

I figured it would stir up some debate, but I was actually quite disappointed that while my post was attacked as being “tired” and of limited usefulness, not a single person stepped up to offer a different definition or to debate the points I raised.

I’m a pretty open minded guy, and I would love to see someone take a stab at a definition that takes into account the open core folks in a way that differentiates what they offer from commercial vendors, as well as what companies like OpenNMS offer. Instead the debate wandered all around the subject and never addressed it directly.

Matt Aslett questioned whether or not the “industry” needed a definition at all. I would claim it does, since many governments, including that of the US, are considering mandating or at least exploring requiring the use of more open source software. Isn’t that important? Shouldn’t we define terms? Aslett doesn’t like the OSD to be applied to business, but he didn’t go as far as to offer an alternative.

Some dude over at Information Week expressed the fact that he was bored with the whole thing, and asked “at what point does it cease to even matter?” (I would have commented on his post but it appears that they are unable to get comments working over there). I would claim that if it doesn’t matter, then why do all of these fauxpen source firms emphasize that they are “open source”? Just this week I saw a press release from one of them that started out “Open source network management” – if it isn’t important why lead with it?

The best comment I saw on the whole thing was from David Dennis of Groundwork:

So if a vendor isn’t primarily making money from license sales, but only partially, would they be misusing the term open source?

If a vendor gets 40% of its revenue from license sales, and 60% from support and services, they’re not ‘primarily’ getting money from non-open-source software.

Yay! An actual question that is relevant and is hard to answer. It is easy for me to claim a company is fauxpen source if their business plan is based on software license sales (i.e. the hockey stick revenue graphs they presented to their VCs ). But what if only 1% of their revenue comes from such licenses? What about 10% or 20%? At what point does it cross the line?

I don’t know, but I’d love to discuss it.

Ben recently posted about intent. I think intent does have a lot to do with it. If your intent is to basically force people toward your “enterprise extensions” by purposely crippling your “community edition” then that obviously isn’t in the spirit of open source. However, can I imagine a situation where a complementary add-on in no way blocks the functionality of the main project, so would it be okay to license that as commercial software and still call oneself an open source company?

Unfortunately, as it is not possible to objectively measure “intent” so we can’t use that as part of a definition. Again, the question is not an easy one.

Furthermore, it doesn’t seem like anyone is really interested in talking about this in a rational manner. People seem to prefer making blanket statements and not backing them up. Not to purposely pick on Matt Asay, but in one of his posts today he stated:

Red Hat is an example of “free done right,” following analysis from TechDirt. We’ve moved beyond the business models that insist that every line of software be open source: they couldn’t scale and tended to treat openness as an end in and of itself, rather than as a means to an end.

Today, if you look at the most successful open-source businesses, none of them pass the ideologues’ unrealistic and counterproductive “100-percent freedom” litmus test. Not a single one of them.

He uses Red Hat as an example quite a bit, but when Andres Garcia (and myself) asked “which software made by Red Hat has lines of code that aren’t open source?” there was no reply. This is because, to my knowledge, all of the software that Red Hat actually distributes (versus uses in house) comes with the source. So does OpenNMS, but my guess is that Matt wouldn’t categorize us as a successful open-source business. However, it is hard to argue that Red Hat is not (plus they pass the CentOS Test). But my guess is that Matt will continue to insist that Red Hat is a hybrid vendor since many of his arguments come crashing down if they are not.

I also assume am I one of those “ideologues” he talks about, but that is not the case. I just insist that software called “open source” meets the Open Source Definition – not that all software is open or free. I’m even open to an alternative definition, but so far no one has come up with one. Thus Matt hopes to sway people by using rhetoric, informal fallacies and irrelevant examples – not to enter into a real dialog.

Unfortunately, this is the state of the debate. Heck, it is the internet after all, so I guess I was a bit naive to expect otherwise. I’ll probably take a break from it for awhile, since it’s like the old joke about the pig – you always lose and end up dirty while the pig enjoys it.