FLOSS Foundations

This year in my keynote at DrupalCon San Francisco, I mentioned that the elephants are coming. Well, earlier this week Capgemini, one of the world's foremost consulting providers with 95,000 employees, announced a new service, Capgemini Immediate. I'm pleased to say that they're using Drupal as a foundational technology for their new Immediate platform.

Capgemini Immediate is an offering which helps organizations to build and run on-line services. It consists of a number of preferred technologies (i.e., Drupal, MySQL, Salesforce, Lithium, etc.), best practices, and an ecosystem of preferred partners of which Acquia is part.

Capgemini Immediate is already being well received and making news. The Royal Mail, the national postal service of the United Kingdom, has signed a large six-year IT contract with Capgemini to transform their on-line services using Capgemini Immediate. With almost 200,000 employees, Royal Mail is the second biggest employer in the UK. Signing of Royal Mail received significant press coverage, including the Wall Street Journal.

The Capgemini stamp of approval, and the fact that Royal Mail will be using Drupal, is tremendous news for all of us. If successful, it could be an important milestone in the history of Drupal -- similar to when Dell and IBM decided to ship machines with Linux pre-installed in 2007.

Incidentally, Capgemini is using Drupal to power their own 95,000 person intranet.

I was delighted to see that the GNOME Census presentation I gave yesterday at GUADEC has gotten a lot of attention. And I’m pleased to announce a change of plan from what I presented yesterday: The report is now available under a Creative Commons license.

Why the change of heart? My intention was never to make a fortune with the report, my main priority was covering my costs and time spent. And after 24 hours, I’ve achieved that. I have had several press requests for the full report, and requests from clients to be allowed to use the report both with press and with their clients.

This solution is the best for all involved, I think – I have covered my costs, the community (and everyone else) gets their hands on the report with analysis as soon as possible, and my clients are happy to have the report available under a license which allows them to use it freely.

You can download the full report now for free.

It’s nearing the end of July, which means that OSCON has come and gone. Here are my observations on this year’s event.

Talks

As always, there are a huge number of talks at OSCON, and this year I found it particularly hard to choose between sessions, though in several cases, hallway track conversations ended up making those choices for me. There wasn’t a theme to my talk attending this year, because a lot of topics are relevant to the work that I am doing now.

I attended a talk about Face Recognition on the iPhone. Sadly this turned out to be very focused on setting up for and calling the OpenCV library and less about face recognition, UI, or integrating face recognition into applications. As I’ve written previously, I think that new interface modalities may be arriving along with new devices, so I was hoping for a bit more than I got.

Big Data is also a topic of interest for me, so I went to Hadoop, Pig, and Twitter, and Mahout: Mammoth Scale Machine Learning. Hadoop, Pig, and Mahout are all projects at Apache, and each of them have an important part to play in the emerging Big Data story. The sort of analytics that people will be using these technologies for are part of the reason that data is now the big area of concern when discussing lock in.

The open source guy in me likes the idea of WebM, but it looks to me like there’s quite a way to go before it will be replacing H.264. I was surprised that the speaker didn’t have a better answer than “our lawyers must have checked this when we acquired On2″. More than anything else, getting clarity on the patent provenance for VP8 is what would make me feel good about WebM.

Robert Lefkowitz (the r0ml), is always an entertaining and thought provoking speaker. His OSCON presentations are not to be missed. This year he gave two talks, and you can read some of my commentary in my twitter stream. Unfortunately, r0ml picked licensing as the topic of his second presentation, and his talk was interrupted by an ill-tempered and miffed free software enthusiast, thus proving r0ml’s earlier solution that open source conferences are really legal conferences.

I’ve been following / predicting the server side javascript space for several years now. One of the issues with that space is the whole event based programming model, which caused mortal Python programmers headaches when dealing with the Twisted Python framework. Erik Meijer’s group at Microsoft has been grabbing techniques from functional program to try to make the programming model a bit more sane. I had heard most of the content in his Reactive Extensions For JavaScript talk before, and I’m generally enthusiastic about the technology. The biggest problem that I have is that RxJS is not licensed under an open source license. At JSConf I was told that this is being worked on, so I dropped in for the second half of Erik’s talk hoping to hear an announcement about the licensing. It was OSCON after all, and the perfect place to make such an announcement, but no announcement was made. I hope that Microsoft won’t wait until next year’s OSCON to get this done.

This year there were two of the keynote presentations that made enough of an impression to write about. The first was Rob Pike’s keynote on Go, where he eloquently noted some of the problems with mainstream programming languages. There was no new information here, but I liked the approach that he took in his analysis. The second was Simon Wardley’s Situation Normal, Everything Must Change . Simon is an excellent presenter and full of insight. While his talk was ostensibly about cloud computing, I think it was a little deeper than that. His story about the cloud is the story about commoditization of technologies, and since one of the roles of open source is commoditization of technology, I felt that there was some nice insight there for those of us working in open source. Simon also discussed the mismatch between innovation and mature organizations, another issue that people in open source often run into. The video is already up on YouTube, so you can make your own assessment of the talk.

The size and breadth of OSCON gives it one of the richest hallway tracks of any conference. This year was no exception – the hallway track started on the train from Seattle to Portland, and extended all the way through the return train trip as well. I always look forward to these discussions and to connecting with old friends. One friend that I caught up with was Cliff Schmidt, now executive director of Literacy Bridge, which is working to make knowledge accessible to people in poor rural communities throughout the world via their Talking Book device. Cliff had one with him, and this was the first time I had seen one. Just in case you haven’t, here’s what they look like:

Languages

OSCON began as a language conference, and this year, there were two special events in that space, the Scala Summit and the Emerging Languages Camp.

I have followed the Scala community pretty closely, because they are quickly accumulating real-world experience with functional programming. There are lots of cool tricks that remind me of stuff that I played with when I was in graduate school, and there are lots of bright people. But there are some things that I find worrying. For example, one of the speakers was touting the fact that Scala’s type system is now Turing complete. If I’m using Scala, one reason is that I want my programs to type check at compile time. Having the type checker go off and fail to halt is not what I had in mind. I recognize that you’d have to write some gnarly type declarations for this to happen, but still.

This was the first year for Emerging Languages Camp, and from what I can tell it was a roaring success. I didn’t attend as many sessions as I would have liked. This was due to a combination of factors – other talks that I wanted to see, being the biggest. The other factor was that the first talk I attended was Rob Pike’s talk on Go, and the room was very full, which made it hard for me to concentrate (probably had more to do with me than the room). When I saw that all the talks were being recorded and that the video folks promised to have them up in 2-4 weeks, it made it seem less urgent to try to pop in and out and fight the crowd. Still, this is a sign of success, and I hope that the minimum, the Emerging Language Camp will be given a larger room next year. Part of me would like to see it be a completely separate event from OSCON, but that’s probably not realistic.

Of the talks that I was able to attend, I found the Caja and BitC talks to be the most relevant. Fixing Javascript to have security is important for both client and the burgeoning server applications of Javascript. I wish that I had seen the talk on Stratified Javascript, since concurrency is ever the hot topic these days. As far as BitC goes, we are well beyond the time when we should have had a safe systems programming language. As much as C has contributed to the world, we really need to move on.

What is OSCON for?

I had a few discussions along the lines of “What is OSCON for?”, and Tim Bray shared some thoughts in his OSCON wrap up. As I have written before, I think that open source has “won”, in the sense that we no longer need to prove that open source software is useful, or that the open source development process is viable. There are still questions about open source business models, but that’s a topic that I’m not as interested in these days. Open source having “won” doesn’t mean that our ideas have permeated the entire world of computing yet, so there is still a need for a venue to discuss these kinds of topics. OSCON is more than that, though. It’s also a place where hackers (in the good sense) have a chance to showcase their work, and to exchange ideas. In that sense, part of OSCON is like a computing focused eTech. Apparently O’Reilly is no longer running eTech, which is fine – the one time that I attended, I was underwhelmed. I think that perhaps what is happening in the Emerging Languages Camp might be an example of how things might move in the future.

Of course, there’s a larger question, which is why do we have conferences at all anymore? Many conferences now produce video content of the sessions. I don’t really think there’s a lot of value in having an event to do product launches or announcements. The big thing is the hallway track, which allows for realtime interchange of ideas and opinions, and in the case of open source, provides a dosage of high bandwidth, high touch interaction that helps keep the communities running smoothly. We’re in the 21st century now. Is there something better that we can do?

(Reposted from Neary Consulting)

Today at GUADEC I presented the results (Slides are now on slideshare) of the GNOME Census, a project we have been working on for a while. For as long as I have been involved in GNOME, press, analysts, potential partners and advisory board members have been asking us: How big is GNOME? How many paid developers are there? Who writes all this software, and why?

By looking at the modules in the GNOME 2.30 release, made last March, we aim to answer many of those questions, and give deeper insight into the motivations of participants in the project.

Here are our key findings:

• GNOME has a rhythm – there is a measurable increase in activity before release time, and after the annual GNOME conference GUADEC
• While over 70% of GNOME developers identify themselves as volunteers, over 70% of the commits to the GNOME releases are made by paid contributors
• Red Hat are the biggest contributor to the GNOME project and its core dependencies. Red Hat employees have made almost 17% of all commits we measured, and 11 of the top 20 GNOME committers of all time are current or past Red Hat employees. Novell and Collabora are also on the podium.
• A number of top company contributors are consultancy/services companies specialising in the GNOME platform – Collabora, CodeThink, Openismus, Lanedo and Fluendo are in the top 20 companies. As many of these companies grew initially through work on Maemo, this is a sign of the success of Nokia’s strategy around the GNOME stack.

One of the interesting things that we have done for the census is to look at who is maintaining modules by looking at commits over the past two years, and use this data to identify areas of the platform which see lots of collaboration, areas where the maintenance burden is left to volunteers, and areas where individual companies assume most of the maintenance burden.

There are a number of modules in the platform which see a considerable amount of co-opetition, including Evolution, Evolution Data Server, DBus and GStreamer. Most modules in the platform, however, are either maintained to a large extent by volunteer developers, or see the vast majority of their contributions from one company.

I see this information being useful for companies interested in using the GNOME platform for their products, companies seeking custom application development, potential large-scale customers of desktop Linux or customers buying high-level support who want to know who employs more module maintainers or committers to the project.

Update: Two significant omissions in the maintenance map were pointed out to me. After correctly associating a number of commiters to a company, Lanedo is responsible for 16.5% of the commits in GTK+ over the past two years, and volunteers are also responsible for at least 17%. Red Hat are still the largest contributor, with 32% of all commits to the module. libsoup is maintained by Dan Winship, who left Novell to join Red Hat in 2007, where he developed and maintains the module.

Update 2: As I announced in this post, the report is now available as a free download via neary-consulting.com licensed as Creative Commons by-sa 3.0

A while back we announced that we were starting to look for a new CEO for the Mozilla Corporation as John Lilly moves to Greylock Partners sometime later this year. Here’s an update of what’s going on.

First, there are a lot of exceptional people interested in Mozilla. Mozilla is in an exciting and challenging place. There’s a lot to do, the opportunities in front of us are immense, and the need for excellent leadership and execution is as great as it has ever been. Firefox on the desktop is strong and effective, we’re moving into the mobile space (Firefox Home for iPhone release this month, Firefox browser on Android phones coming later this year), Sync in Firefox 4 and related services in development. The Internet environment is changing, and Mozilla has a unique role.

Second, we know that a great CEO needs a combination of a bunch of different characteristics, such as:

• great executive skills — able to cause us to get things done, to get the right things done, and to get them done effectively and efficiently
• able to lead in a complex strategic environment
• collaborative, good at making others better
• great technology sense
• and of course, phenomenally attuned to the nature of Mozilla — who we are, why we do things, the centrality of the mission and the community building it

We decided to start by getting to know people across a wide range of backgrounds skill sets. We’re fortunate that we have flexibility and aren’t pushed into making a hasty decision so we can do this. This means that our recruiters are talking to people with software backgrounds, Internet backgrounds, consumer backgrounds, open source backgrounds, platform backgrounds, engineering, strategy, start-up, big company and community backgrounds. The recruiters and John also spend a lot of time working together, and John has talked to a broad set of people as well.

A few people have been surprised that John is so central to this process. I think that’s because it’s a bit rare to let the world know what’s happening at this stage. Often the first hint is the announcement of a new CEO, or that the old CEO is gone. In our case John is still here, still deeply engaged day-to-day and still our CEO in fact as well as name. He’s also the person closest to the CEO role and so a really good source for the candidates and recruiters.

The next step in the transition process is to bring a much smaller number of people in to meet members of the MoCo Steering Committee — the management and leadership and strategy group for our product efforts, and if that goes well, to expand the number of people a candidate meets from there. We’re still in the very early stages of this part of the process. Members of the Steering Committee have met a handful of people and we expect to meet more in the coming weeks. So far this step has helped us figure out that a few candidates don’t fit, and some we’re quite eager to talk to more. It’s hard to predict what the right set of traits will turn out to be; the search is highly individualistic. John is fond of saying that he wouldn’t have looked like a particularly good candidate on paper either. That’s in part why we want to meet a wide variety of people.

The Drupal trademark policy was launched officially about 11 months ago. As explained in my blog post on the Drupal trademark policy, the purpose of the policy is to create a level playing field for all. It allows everyone to use the trademark without administrative hassle, while at the same time keeping some control and oversight to avoid dilution and misuse. For example, we all know the scarcity of cool domain names, and how frustrating it can be for a local Drupal user group to find that their domain name has already been taken by a commercial entity. The trademark policy seeks to resolve this problem.

Now one year later, there have been some interesting results from the trademark policy. So far, I have received 89 serious trademark queries. Twenty-three of these resulted in a license being granted because the requested use was intended completely to foster Drupal software. For example, there was a request for the name Drupal to be used in the title of a Drupal camp. There were other requests for the name to be include in non-commercial modules. These are all acceptable and good uses of the trademark.

In 32 other trademark usage requests, a formal license contract was required. Among the formal licenses, so far only four contracts have actually resulted in the payment of the administrative license fee. Although the fee is quite reasonable (i.e., 600 euros for clearly commercial use; 300 euros for mixed use), many correspondents ultimately changed their plan in order to avoid the administrative fee. In quite a few other cases where a formal contract was imposed but the intended use was clearly not commercial, no administrative fee was requested. These were typically requests from local Drupal groups.

Finally, there were several trademark usage requests that were rejected simply because they would endanger the level playing field due to their monopolizing nature. Examples of this include domain names like drupalhosting.xyz or drupalthemes.xyz.

I hope everyone can see that the trademark policy is not a money printing machine for me. In fact, it's the opposite. I have paid personally for the creation of the policy and the cost of responding to trademark usage requests. The balance between costs and income is quite skewed out of my favor, although the amount of payments seems to be increasing.

Nevertheless, I am happy with the results so far. I've learned a great deal in the process, and, despite a few unsupportive comments from some, the reactions I have received overall have been positive. In fact, the most common reaction is that, although they understand why they need to pay the administrative fee and why they cannot use a monopolizing domain name, they cannot understand why numerous websites seem to get away with trademark infringements.

This reaction is understandable, of course. Remember, though, that the trademark policy is still quite new. I trust that most members of the Drupal community will comply voluntarily with the policy. So far there hasn't been a need to be a lot more vigorous in ensuring compliance with the trademark policy. There have only been a few difficult people or organizations that have attempted to infringe on the policy, requiring me to become more stern at times.

As expected when we first announced this policy, there were some comments on the actual content of the policy. My lawyers are now in the process of preparing a slightly updated version of the policy. So if you have any suggestions on improvements, please share them with us. For now, though, I'm quite pleased at the results of our first 11 months of having a trademark policy.

Last weekend I attended the Internet Cowboy UnConference in Wyoming, organized by Yossi Vardi. It’s a collection of people hand-picked for some combination of technology or media or advertising or investment savvy and so it’s wildly eccentric. It’s an “unconference” meaning that rooms and times and projectors and organization are provided, but all content is created by the participants by adding your topic to the schedule, which is kept on erasable whiteboards. Since this is in Wyoming the mornings are optional outdoor activities, and the afternoons and evenings are “school.” It starts Thursday evening and goes through Monday morning, though I leave Sunday night because Monday is generally a busy day at Mozilla.

Some of the sessions are tightly related to the Internet, technology and media industries, and some wander wildly afield depending on who brings things — last year there was a fascinating video of a dance club and its members in Israel for example, plus some “let’s go do interesting photography” sessions. This year included Segway sessions, education for the modern world, the nature of conferences and events, and “21st century statecraft” in addition to the Internet-focused sessions. Plus an evening talent show, a gadget-a-thon and the local rodeo. It’s amazing what one learns about people while watching them paddle on a raft in (mild) white-water!

Last year there was a lot of erasing and rearranging and combining of topics, this year it seemed much less so to me. Last year I joined Don Levy of Sony and Rachel Masters in jointly hosting a session on creativity and synthesis — I even took a piece of in process fabric artwork with me since it had caused the topic to be top-of-mind for me. This year I didn’t expect to lead a session until I got there and a few people were disappointed.

I decided to host a session on a topic of interest to me where I’m still thinking things through. This leads to more of a discussion than a presentation, and allows me to learn at least as much as anyone else. I opted for what I called “Delivering the Internet Experience — browsers, “apps,” TV, the “web.” I wanted to explore the question of how we get the characteristics that have made the “web” so innovative and explosive as new use cases develop. The session turned out to fit in well with a few of the other sessions. We started with one on big trends — search, social, for example, what has made search so successful, how do the underlying concepts relate to today’s big trends. Then Jeff Pulver lead a session on the real-time web called “Connected Me.” Then my session, and then one on the ways in which “the titans” of different areas of the industry are likely to end up competing more and more with each other. It was a pretty interesting set of conversations. In part because a similar group of people self-selected to attend this arc and so we could push ideas around from different perspectives over the course of a few days.

A good part of the discussion about apps, browsers, the web was not surprising — local execution is fast, it’s easy to like the current “app” model as long as there’s only one platform, much harder if the Internet remains heterogeneous or new technologies/ platforms develop, web platform not (yet) as rich in accessing capabilities of the devices.

Much less crisp (and also more interesting to me) was the discussion about the traits of the web that we don’t have with the current app model, ranging from the ability of developers to reach a potential audience without centralized control to the ease with which one can move from consumption to creation on the web. We also talked a bit about how and where a human being has the ability to integrate, mange, filter, change and “own” his or her online life. To me, this is an often-hidden but essential aspect of a browser. The obvious part of a browser is that it delivers the web, and this is a massive task. The less obvious piece of the browser is its ability to give an individual the ability to integrate, manage, and change our experiences across the range of sites we visit and apps we use.

Thought-provoking and fun as well.

Following on from the recent release of the Seaside release candidate for 3.0, a Squeak “One-Click” image has been put together to allow you to try out the new version with—er—one click!

The new image is based on Squeak 4.1, and launches fully configured with Seaside running with Comanche on port 8080, so you can immediately see the new improved Seaside welcome page at http://localhost:8080/, with links to documentation and the Seaside book.

Seaside’s 3.0 release is faster, cleaner, better tested and has many other changes and improvements over previous releases, so it’s well worth checking out this release candidate now.

I will be around only very intermittently for at least the next six weeks, because I will be doing the following things:

• Helping run a Christian kids camp on canal boats
• Getting one of my kidneys pierced
• Relaxing on my fiancée's family's holiday
• Preparing to get married
• Getting married
• Going on honeymoon
• Moving in to our new flat

So, if you are hoping for me to do something, please expect highly delayed service. We thank you for your patience. See you in September :-)