Planet JM

Category: Syndicated

  • I love ankle bracelets


    (photo courtesy of Soccer by Ives)

    It’s official – soccer matches are where streakers come to party. Ok, so she’s not a *real* streaker, but close enough for our Puritan value 🙂

  • Scientology and Apple?

    I take back every bad thing I ever said about Dan Lyons. As reported in Michael Cote’s tweet from Lyons’ EclipseCon keynote:


    “If the church of scientology chose to go into the electronics industry, you know, they’d be Apple.”


    Frankly, I didn’t know he had it in him. And then Lyons followed that up with this sidebar on a slide:


    “Apple PR is like a Russian prison guard with a rifle on the ramparts.”


    Wow, I’m sad to have missed it! I never thought I’d be a kindred spirit with the Fake Steve.

    Edit: Ok, that’s a tad hyperbolic. Lyons has said some monumentally stupid things in the past. But I’m with him this time.

  • Getting Ready for OSBC – March 25 – 26

    I was quite startled to learn yesterday that next week is OSBC. Apparently, I’m the only person crazy enough to go up against Mark Shuttleworth, John Roberts and Marten Mickos. I am moderating a panel titled The Community Imperative: Building and Leveraging Community into IT at 10:30am on Tuesday, March 25. For the remainder of this week, I’ll report on who’s on the panel, what they’ve been doing in the world of Open Source, and why you should care.

    I’m really looking forward to this, as I’ve always been a fan of OSBC. It will be fun. If you’re going to OSBC and have already seen Mickos, Roberts and Shuttleworth speak multiple times, then this is the panel for you!

  • Good Moves by the OSI

    I was heartened to read this writeup on CAOS and the canonical blog post by Simon Phipps. I have thought for some time that the way the OSI (and by extension, the OSD) is set up does not meet the needs of the current software landscape. If you look at Creative Commons, they explicitly recognize different use cases and different licensing terms based on use case. I never understood why the OSI insisted on a one-size-fits-all strategy that didn’t recognize the different goals of some “open” technologies that did not meet the criteria of the OSD. While they always claimed to be business-friendly and not about ideology, their inflexibility seemed to indicate otherwise and resulted in some not-so-friendly encounters with companies who published software under

    Now it seems that Simon Phipps may be attempting to move the organization into a more nuanced, flexible direction. I can only applaud this line of thinking as it’s long overdue. He suggests renaming the OSD to “Open Source Copyright Definition” and creating the entirely new “Open Source Patent Definition” and “Open Source Trademark Definition.” This is a welcome change. It’s not exactly the Creative Commons model, but I look at it as the first step to recognizing that not all open definitions are the same – and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

  • Dear Dan Lyons: Open Source was Never ‘Counter Culture’

    Day 10,274 of misunderstood musings on Open Source. Dan Lyons talks about Open Source being in “an identity crisis” likening it to some punk band from the 70’s that’s now playing stadiums and losing touch with its original ethos. This is wrong on many, many levels.

    First off, Open Source was never counter culture. This has been a difficult lesson for many to learn, due to the casual conflation of Open Source with Free Software and the FSF. One could argue that there is a significant set of Open Source developers and users who believe very strongly in things like information rights, code reciprocity, and the like (I count myself in this group). But the real impetus behind the Open Source ecosystem has been decades-old economic trends which I outlined in this article.

    However, I do have to give Dan Lyons credit for this bit when discussing Sun’s acquisition of MySQL:

    “It’s a great publicity stunt, but how will giving away products Sun already owns, and spending $1 billion to acquire another free product, save Sun? Pixie dust would have to be at work here. It reminds me of a sketch from South Park where gnomes steal underpants as part of a three-phase business plan…”

    For whatever reason, Sun has spent a great deal of time commoditizing both hardware and software. One wonders if they’re actually trying to back themselves into the services corner, because they seem to be headed in that direction.


    So score one for the Fake Steve.

  • The GPL as IP Protection Tool

    Via 451 CAOS Theory, just learned that the Software Freedom Law Center settled its GPL infringement suit with Verizon. I’ll leave the details of the case as an exercise for the reader, but it basically involves a company not adhering to the terms of the GPL.

    As Jay Lyman of The 451 Group notes, this result is hardly a surprise:

    …the GPL is not some exotic, first-of-its kind license, document or legal doctrine. Actually, it is based largely on U.S. copyright law, particularly in the case of GPLv2, which is the BusyBox license. It amazes me that some people think the GPL will be refuted, defeated or ‘thrown out of court.’ That would mean ‘throwing out’ U.S. copyright law, and I don’t see that happening, ever.

    It amazes me how much misunderstanding of the GPL still exists. No, the GPL does not cede your intellectual property to the public domain – as a matter of fact, it does a pretty good job of protecting it. In fact, the GPL is a pretty good compromise between granting rights to all parties and protecting IP. This case is another demonstration of that. Verizon knew they couldn’t win, so they settled. Makes sense to me.

    There’s a reason we chose the GPL v2 when releasing Hyperic HQ under an Open Source license. As Eben Moglen himself has been known to say, It’s Good Not To Be Your Competitor’s Free Lunch.

  • Republicans Voting for Clinton?

    So I wonder if this is finally going to get some mainstream press: story on Republicans “spiking” the Democratic primaries in the hopes of pushing Clinton over the top.

  • Dirk Riehle: Total Growth of Open Source




    Via Dana Blankenhorn’s blog, I came across an excellent article, “The Total Growth of Open Source” from Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle from SAP Research. In it, they look at over 5,000 active and popular Open Source projects and concluded


    “…that the total amount of source code as well as the total number of open source projects is growing at an exponential rate. Previous research showed linear and quadratic growth in lines of source code of individual open source projects. Our work shows that open source is expanding into new domains and applications at an exponential rate.”


    It’s one thing to read that. It’s quite another to actually see it in action (see graph above tracking lines of source code over time).

    This is pretty heady stuff. One of my assumptions has been that Open Source, being a child of the internet, directly benefited from the sheer numbers of people who understood more about software development. My hypothesis was that, as more knowledge was distributed online, the growth in Open Source development would continue. The evidence would seem to corroborate that assumption.


    Also interesting was the methodology of the study. As online tools grow ever deeper, the data at Riehle’s disposal is richer than ever. In fact, they pulled their data from Ohloh.net, using their data pulls from source code repositories to measure the additions and subtractions for Open Source projects. They used a measure of the number of incoming links to project home pages to determine the top projects to measure, and then tracked their growth over time.


    One thing I would have liked to see and didn’t – at least, not that I can tell – is how much of the growth was “organic” and how much was due to more projects springing up. It’s great to know the total number of lines of code and the total number of projects. What we don’t know is which of these projects are chiefly responsible for the growth, or what the average “health” rating is for each project. Even better still would be to divy up the projects into general categories based on growth in lines of code: would that give an accurate representation of a project’s overall “health”?


    Back in 2001, when it seemed that our world was imploding, I recall some folks wondering aloud whether Open Source contributions would stop. Judging from this study, at least, it seems pretty clear that the .com implosion had little impact on Open Source growth, if any at all.

  • Adios, Mexico! El Tri Crashes Out of Olympic Qualifying

    Poor Mexico – they sustain yet another soccer disappointment after crashing out of the olympic qualifiers in a wild game against Haiti (they actually won this match 5-1, but didn’t make it out of their group due to goal differential).

    Mexican arrogance about soccer is almost entirely undeserved – and inexplicable. The fact is, they’ve always been on the wrong side of Brazil and Argentina and really have not fared better than your run of the mill South American contenders. Yet, from hearing them describe their love affair with futbol, you would think they deserved to be in the upper soccer echelon. They don’t.

    In many ways, and this will bring a tear to many a Mexican eye, their soccer history really isn’t so much further along than the USA. Until very recently, many of their players were just as tactically naive as Americans – everyone knows the craftiest footballers come from the big 2 in South America. Everyone else is just fighting over the scraps. Other than better foot skills, which does count for something, Mexico really doesn’t have any better coaching, better soccer IQ, or for the last 10 or so years, a better team.

  • Yahoo’s Zawodny: We’re Open, Too!

    I’ve met Jeremy Zawodny, although I don’t know him. From what I have gathered, he and a bunch of people at Yahoo are doing some great work on the Open Source side of the house. In a blog post, Jeremy talks about how Yahoo! has “been on the openness road for a long, long time.” The focus of his post was in response to an absurd Mary Jo Foley post about Yahoo’s openness being a poison pill for MSFT. Matt Asay also picked up on this and gives Yahoo well-deserved kudos for their efforts. But I couldn’t help but notice this little nugget from Jeremy:

    Some times it hasn’t been as visible as others, but believe me, the trend is quite clear when you look at all the data.



    Er, not as visible as what others? Well, we know the answer to that one. You would think that with this admission that Yahoo’s efforts lack the same visibility as Google, that the higher-ups might, you know, take notice and learn from the success of others. I know Jeremy has promised more openness, and I look forward to it, but something tells me that they lack Google’s knack for maximizing the exposure of their Open Source contributions. It’s one thing to make real Open Source contributions and give your community value. It’s quite another to make those contributions *and* get real value in return. When it comes to reaping benefits from Open Source efforts, no one comes close to Google.


    But Yahoo’s not the only one who fails to understand this. I continue to be amazed at those companies who insist on repeating mistakes from the past and refuse to learn from successes and failures. Google has already shown how a major technology company can use Open Source to its advantage. “Tier 1” tech companies should be lambasted by shareholders for not following a winning example.