Note: This post is even more navel gazing/philosophical than usual with little OpenNMS content.

Between running The OpenNMS Group and keeping my farm from falling apart I don’t have much free time. It is extremely rare that I can take a vacation, eat out with friends or family, or see a performance (although OpenNMS has grown enough in the last couple of years that I do get to take the occasional vacation – wasn’t always the case).

So it was quite the treat when I got to go out for a nice dinner last night as well as to see a lecture by Anthony Bourdain. I really like food, both eating it and preparing it, and Anthony Bourdain is one of my favorite “celebrity” chefs.

I went with a couple of friends of mine who I met 25 years ago at Harvey Mudd College (the first of several schools that eventually kicked me out). They have hectic careers coupled with two children, so going out for an evening like this was rare for them as well. The only problem we had was trying to figure out how to schedule dinner, since a meal with them usually lasts about four hours. The show started at 7:30pm, so for our normal routine we would have had to start dinner around 3:00pm. We decided to compromise at meet at 5:30pm, when the restaurant opened.

For those who don’t know Anthony Bourdain, he came to fame several years ago with the publication of the book Kitchen Confidential. It was pretty much an exposé of the high end restaurant business in New York City. He wrote it mainly aimed at people who worked in that industry but it caught the attention of foodies like myself. The thing I loved about this book is that he wasn’t afraid to talk about iconic restaurants such as The Rainbow Room. He’s blunt, opinionated but quite often right, and when he’s not he tends to apologize.

In my deepest conceit I’d love to be known as the Anthony Bourdain of Open Source. He has strong views on food and its preparation, and he isn’t afraid to criticize institutions like The Food Network, his one-time employer which used to be much more aligned with his ideals but over time became more about entertainment and money (such as the Sandra Lee episode where she opened a bag of pre-cut vegetables, dumped some Ranch dressing on it and called it haute cuisine).

I feel the same way about open source. Back before Red Hat went public the open source community was focused on creating great, new software with a strong interest in keeping that software 100% free and open. Once organizations started to make money around open source software suddenly everyone wanted on the bandwagon, even if their business model was still staunchly based on closed, commercial software. Through marketing dollars it seems that “open source” has come to mean “open core“. For those companies trying to make billions of dollars on software quickly, I agree with Coté that the only way to do that in today’s market is with the hybrid model where much of the revenue comes from closed software licenses.

But I bristle when that is called open source. Furthermore, I think the window for even the open core model is quickly closing. True open source software gets better every day, and for successful projects they will continue to become viable alternatives to paid software. Thus paid software margins will continue to decrease, making them less profitable and less attractive as acquisition targets. For those commercial and open core companies they’ll have to write more software to keep up, but since their revenue model is based on closed licenses this will require even more money for programmers and result in even lower margins.

Anthony Bourdain is not a fashionista when it comes to food. He is not a locavore nor a vegetarian, and he even had the gall (gasp) to question whether or not the organic food movement was a good thing. In much the same way, while I am big on individual rights, I’m not a hippie, a tree hugger or a kumbaya free software for everyone bigot. I consider myself a hard core capitalist, and I don’t run a charity.

The commercial software industry has created a number of extremely wealthy people because for the first time something could be created that literally has an almost zero distribution cost. Even the tulip bulb bubble required something to be created each time, whereas bits are pretty much free. For some reason people have come to believe that this is the way things should be, and this was amplified even more by the Internet bubble where just an idea could result in millions of dollars.

The downside is that people have forgotten that it is possible to make money simply by helping customers and having fun doing it. To go back to my food analogy, one of the tastiest things I had on my last trip to Italy consisted of a slice of freshly baked bread topped with fresh tomatoes, basil and olive oil. High quality ingredients prepared in a simple and straightforward manner. No fancy “paradigm shifts” or “clouds” – just healthy nourishment.

For some reason if you can’t have a billion dollars in revenue in five years Silicon Valley thinks you have no value. I would think in these economic times people would appreciate businesses that grow more organically. It’s all about the basics. For example, Dan Ariely had a post today quoting Gregory Clark, an economist at UC-Davis (ironically, the birthplace of Net-SNMP). He states:

The debate about the bank bailout, and the stimulus package, has all revolved around issues that are entirely at the level of Econ 1. What is the multiplier from government spending? Does government spending crowd out private spending? How quickly can you increase government spending? If you got a A in college in Econ 1 you are an expert in this debate: fully an equal of Summers and Geithner.

In much the same way, the vast majority of successful businesses are going to be based on the basics: make a good product that people want and sell it at a fair price while watching expenses. No magic and no marketing mumbo-jumbo. As straightforward as a nice bruschetta.

I want to end this rather rambling post to a reference to some recent research done by Ryan Howell at San Francisco State University. He discovered that, in the long run, experiences make people happier than possessions. I had a wonderful time last night, even though I usually feel guilty doing something that doesn’t involve either working on the business or working on the farm (and to the bozo in seat E 210 at the DPAC, turn off your fracking blackberry during the show – you ain’t that important). I’ll probably remember, fondly, that experience much more so than anything I’ve purchased in the last year.

Working on OpenNMS, if we measure wealth by positive experiences, makes me the richest man on the planet.

Well, it didn’t last. Today Congress passed a measure to delay the digital television cutover until June. The revised bill allows television stations to switch over any time during that period, and this change was enough to get it passed in the House.

Call me paranoid, but who does this benefit? The sponsors of the bill are all crying that it’s the poor people and elderly that aren’t ready for the switch, but since the new bill allows stations to switch early I’m assuming most will (since at this late date they were probably ready to do so). Chances are if you were going to lose TV on the 17th you’re still gonna lose it.

However, those companies who want to start utilizing the freed bandwidth will have to wait four more months. Or, in the case of some, they will have four more months to get ready without existing competition.

So I ask again, who does this benefit?

One of the things I like about living where I do is the high density of amazing people. Part of that is due to the proximity of universities like UNC, Duke and NCSU. Silicon Valley likes to brag about its atmosphere, but I think parts of the Triangle could give them a run for their money.

Yesterday, living here allowed me to have lunch with Dan Ariely. Dan is the author of “Predictably Irrational” which is a book of which I’ve become quite fond (if you haven’t bought it already, order it using this link since I’ll get some Amazon kickback, yo). He is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke, and since that was one of the schools I got kicked out of it was nice to visit the old neighborhood.

Me and Dan at Parizade

I studied economics in college, and while I liked the logic behind it, it assumes that people react rationally. Dan was the first person I came across that actually studied how people reliably act irrationally when faced with certain decisions.

Lunch lasted close to two hours, and I’d probably still be there now if he didn’t have a meeting (yeah, most of you who know how much I like to talk are thinking it wasn’t a real meeting, admit it) and the topics were pretty wide ranging.

One topic that stuck in my head concerned lotteries. People like lotteries and gambling in general, but I never understood that the games play to an innate attraction of animals to randomness. I’ve just always joked that lotteries are a tax on people who are bad at math.

B.F. Skinner did some work on the power of random rewards. When a pigeon was taught to press a lever to receive a food pellet they were much more likely to press it if the reward happened after some random interval than, say, consistently after five presses. In fact, even after the reward stopped the random reward subjects would end up pressing the lever for a long time afterward.

Think about it. Suppose I set up a game where you bought $1 tickets and after you bought five of them I gave you $5. You’d probably think, like most people would, that it was a stupid game and I wouldn’t sell any tickets. Yet the expected return on lotteries is so much worse, yet people play it every day.

Dan told me that the average American adult spends $4000/year on gambling (including the lottery). I haven’t been able to find a reference for that number but if it is true then there are a number of people out there spending large amounts, since my family probably spends less than $50 a year and that definitely brings the average down. I buy the occasional Powerball ticket for entertainment purposes (the daydreams I have about what I’d do with the money are worth the dollar I spend) but since the odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 195 million I only play when the jackpot is greater than $195 million. I’m no dummy.

So here I was, eating a nice lunch and feeling superior, when Dan pointed out that the same thing can be applied to e-mail.

E-mail? But … I love e-mail … what could be wrong with e-mail?

As I write this it is all I can do to stifle the urge to switch over to my mail application. It just beeped at me. I have new mail. Could be a letter from and old friend. Could be spam. Might be a support ticket or possibly new OpenNMS business. Like Skinner’s pigeons (or Pavlov’s dogs) when the bell goes off I must go and investigate.

So I’m not all that superior to those people who play the lottery or spend their lives in Azeroth. I have an e-mail problem, and now I have to think about how it impacts my life and how to address it.

This was just one of the things Dan and I talked about. It was a great, e-mail free lunch.

Plus, he got me thinking out of the box.

I’ve been kicked out of some of the best schools in the country, so I can’t say that my college career was in anyway stellar. But although it took me seven years to get my four year degree, I did manage to take away some important knowledge from the experience.

Part of that was an understanding of “Informal Fallacies of Logic“. When I was introduced to the Internet in 1984 on a VAX running Berkeley UNIX, it was first and foremost a text based experience. A lot of the action occurred on newsgroups, and thus I was exposed to the usual flamewars and hyperbole that one often finds there.

I knew of things like Godwin’s Law, but it wasn’t until I was introduced to informal fallacies that I had a way to formalize behavior that I saw on the Internet (and in “real” life as well). While Wikipedia as always has a definition, an “informal” fallacy is basically a statement that may be or seems to be true, but it is irrelevant or doesn’t support the argument being made.

What I didn’t realize is that, like the fnords, informal fallacies are everywhere. Once I had a method of formalizing them, they became much easier to see.

The reason I’ve been thinking about them today is that a gentleman named Dennis Byron has decided to take me to task for my post on The War for Open Source, first in the comments and then on his blog.

The point of the post was to state that the term “open source” has a certain meaning, defined by the OSI, and that the commercial software industry is trying to blur that meaning so that consumers won’t be able to tell the difference between truly open software and commercial software.

So, instead of attacking that argument, Mr. Byron decides to pull out some of my illustrative prose, find fault with it, and thus attempt to discredit me.

This is an informal fallacy known as a “Straw Man“. In a straw man fallacy, one “takes the original argument of his/her adversary and then offers a close imitation, or straw man, version of the original argument”. This argument, made of “straw” is much easier to defeat.

In the case of Mr. Byron, he attempts to find fault with my history of commercial software, which is funny since I never intended to write one.

And if anyone can tell me what the heck the “razor blades” are that the OpenNMS Group is selling, I’d love to know.