A New Age For Movies

Irving Wladawsky-Berger at IBM has recently posted a couple of eloquent blogs about how the Internet has made movie-watching just that much more enjoyable. First of all, there are all of the reviews and the commentary--such as as IMDB. Like Irving, I find Roger Ebert's reviews on target (alomost all the time). In fact, though it would probably horrify many in the "Ivory Tower," I think Roger Ebert may well be one of the best essayists writing today. There's something nice about, not only getting input on which movies to see, but after watching a film that really connected having a virtual "discussion" on various aspects of the film. What did such and such mean? How did other people react? It doesn't even require active participation.

Then there's Irving's discussion about Netflix. Walmart is out of the game as I wrote about earlier. The latest buzz is that, although Amazon has a movie rental business in the UK, they won't be following up with a US version. In any case, Netflix provides a great way to invite almost every available DVD into my house, without fuss and without muss. It's partly about eliminating "stuff" from my things-to-do list. (II'll be posting on Getting Things Done one of these days. Don't worry: I'm not evangelical about it.)

But it's also about being able to easily depart from mass market tastes and indulge an exploration or an oddball interest. It's The Long Tail if you want to be jargonny about it. But it's ultimately "On Demand"--when you want, what you want. (Which, perhaps, is why Irving is so fascainated by it.)

Another Wikipedia Data Point

Although I've picked and probed at Wikipedia here and here, I find it a useful tool. But I think it important to understand its limirtations and boundaries. An interesting post from Nathaniel Ward at Dartmouth in that vein:

While doing research for the upcoming issue of The Review, I proposed to Executive Editor Scott Glabe that Wikipedia, a free communal encyclopedia, is a terrible resource. Since anyone can change any entry, a user cannot know whether the current version is accurate. Scott retorted that the encyclopedia's communal nature meant that all errors would be corrected in minutes.

It turns out I was right: it took almost 24 hours for users to notice and correct a deliberate error that made out Benjamin Franklin as the inventor of the printing press.

Although I have somewhat mixed feelings about Wikipedia "vandalism" even for valid research purposes and calling it a "terrible" resource seems overstatement, the data point still seems valid enough. (The "vandalism" in question inserted a common incorrect answer from The Dartmouth Review's recent poll of Dartmouth students about various Western cultural questions.) The highly democratic Wikipedia community implies both profound strengths and significant weaknesses.

Dartmouth Review 25th

This will be about as far as I get from IT here. But, given that it's the 25th anniversary of The Dartmouth Review, a newspaper I helped found, and that Dartmouth has just had a very significant trustee election, I guess I should say something.

TDR wasn't the first of the alternative right-of-center or libertarian college newspapers of the early eighties, but it became one of the more influential, if not one of the better mannered. I got involved with the founding through a friendship with Greg Fossedal who was the an editor of The Daily Dartmouth, the campus daily. I wrote about it long ago here. The precipitating event was the election of an "unoffical" trustee candidate. It's thus perhaps more than a bit fitting that we've just seen Todd Zywicki and Peter Robinson elected as the latest slate of trustee candidates running in opposition to the official ones. (T.J.Rodgers, the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor was elected in opposition to the administration in 2004. It has not been a good couple of years for the official slate.) Their positions haven't been political per se. Rather, they've spoken to directions that Dartmouth should take and principles that Dartmouth should have.

I won't go further into the arcana of Dartmouth governance and policies here. Trustee disputes at Dartmouth go back to the Dartmouth College case, argued by Daniel Webster, and a seminal US Supreme Court case in contract law. Suffice it to say that it's somewhat satisfying to see an institution like TDR still involving students 25 years later. It's never been about shadowy outside funding sources-rather TDR has always been supported primarily by Dartmouth's own alumni-but, rather, about students thinking and writing and questioning conventional wisdom. Which seems for the good. Wah-Hoo-Wah.

New PVR Blog

As some of my readers know, I've been fooling around with building up personal video recorders for quite a while now. In general, I still prefer my TiVo, which just takes less mental energy to use on a day-in, day-out basis than PVR software running on a general purpose computer. However, that said, BeyondTV from Snapstream has matured considerably and is now quite stable and functional. I still don't find it to be the "just works" experience that my TiVo provides but it's a good, if not great, PC-based alternative and is, in any case, the best PC PVR software I've run across.

Snapstream now has a company blog, which is worthwhile viewing if you have an interest in PVRs and, certainly, if you're a Snapstream customer. PVRblog is must reading for more general coverage of the topic.

Now That's An IT Failure!

Not traditional IT to be sure, but an automated system nonetheless--the infamous Denver baggage-handling system. I still remember the first time I travelled through Denver aurport with its new system. You had to find a special line to stand in if you had odd-shaped luggage. Odd-shared luggage like... skis. In Denver. Hmm.

Well, it's no more.

United Airlines has decided to stop using its controversial automated baggage-handling system at Denver International Airport, reverting to a conventional manual system by the end of 2005. The automated system (which began operation in 1995) never lived up to original expectations. It had enormous difficulties in its early days, including construction delays, cost overruns, lost bags, damaged luggage, derailed cars, traffic jams, upgrade problems, political battles, and so on. (For example, see RISKS-17.61 and 18.66). United is apparently obligated to pay $60 million a year for another 25 years under its lease contract with the city of Denver (which owns the airport). However, United expects to save $1 million a month in operating costs by NOT using the automated system. The airport cost $250 million to build (BAE Automated Systems of Dallas, no longer in existence), and the city reportedly put up another $100 million for construction and $341 million to get it to work. [Source: AP item, 7 Jun 2005; PGN-ed] http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8135924/

via RISKS Digest

Recovery through genocide?

Good freakin' Lord. Why not just lay everyone off while they're at it? History may or may not show Sun's acquisition of StorageTek to ultimately have been a good move. I think it's potentially a significant win but won't be easy to pull off. (See my comments at IBD and ZDnet. My Illuminata colleagues have also posted in a similar vein.) But, whatever the doubts and concerns about the StorageTek approach, getting rid of all Sun's employees hardly seems a viable recovery strategy either.

"We do question the rationale of a transaction which reduces Sun's cash hoard by 40 percent, and does nothing to re-ignite revenue growth or profitability," Steven Fortuna, an analyst at Prudential Equity Group, said in a research note. "We would rather have seen the company buy back a billion shares and fire 10,000 people."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/06/02/ap/business/mainD8AFO1JO0.shtml

Taking Notes

Not to, in any way, equate myself with Fischer Black (of Black-Scholes option pricing fame), but I was struck by a recent posting in Marginal Revolution about how he took notes:

He did almost all of his work in an outlining program called ThinkTank, which he used as a kind of external associative emmory to supplement his own. Everything he read, every conversation he had, every thought that occurred, everything got summarized and added to the data base that swelled eventually to 20 million bytes organized in 2000 alphabetical files...Reading, discussion and thinking that Fischer did outside the office was recorded on slips to paper to be entered into the database later. Reading, discussion, and thinking that took place inside the office was recorded directly. While he was on the phone, he was typing. While he was talking to you in person, he was typing.

I'm not quite back at the ThinkTank stage--even if I remember the program (a "terminate and stay resident (TSR) outliner that essentially simulated multi-tasking in a single-tasking world)--although my sometimes preference for text editors over Mind maps may seem in a similar vein. However, such assidious notetaking does reflect how many of us work as we transition to a world in which our role is increasingly to synthesize vast amounts of data. It's really handy to have this sort of external memory in accessible and searchable form.

When I started as an analyst, I took old-fashioned longhand notes. I'm an enthusiastic convert to the electronic sort. t's just so handy during a briefing to pull up the notes from a peior meeting and ask: "So, when we last met, you said that XYZ was going to be the next big thing. Whatever became of that?" :-)

Convergence

The term "convergence" may be passe these days, but the question of which devices will fold into other devices is still of immense interest to a lot of people. Especially because it's all more than a little bit mysterious. I suspect that's in no small part because the (in many cases) engineers trying to figure all this stuff out are being entirely too rational about it. They tend to ignore style and fashion, which aren't exactly rational after all.

Let's look at a concrete example. Why haven't MP3 players folded into cell phones in a bigger way. After all, cell phones are ubiquitous and you don't need more than a bit more memory and another chip or two to make them do double duty as an MP3 player. Sure, there are some business issues--the carriers subsidize cell phones and aren't going to be exactly thrilled about subsidizing other types of gear that doesn't bring them services revenue. And some practical ones--does everyone want to drain their phone's batteries playing songs?

But we're heading down the rational path. I was informed by a college freshman of some much more fundamental reasons this past weekend: iPods are cool and small cell phones are cool. The mathematical corollary, I suppose, is that big cell phones playing MP3s are decidedly not.

Q.E.D.

Folksonomies?

John Dvorak's been writing about computers since the early days of PCs. Does he like to be controversial? Sure. That's his thing. And is he sometimes WAY off base? That too. But that more or less comes with the territory when you've been writing for a long time about a wide span of topics--at least some of which you aren't exactly an expert in.

Dvorak's been heating up the Linux zealots of late with his reportage of the PJ-O'Gara tiff. Seems pretty accurate, if a bit over the top. However, it's his latest critique of "tags" that really caught my eye. With all due respect to all the fans of high-tech "blogosphere" linkages, but John nails the hype.

The "folksonomy" notion is the bloggers' last hope of invention, although it's a rewrite of the prebubble "semantic Web" technology at best. And it too is doomed to failure. The utopianism and idealism that exist in the online societies ignore the real problem with tags, metatags, übertags, folksonomies, and the like. This is because they honestly think that most people are goodhearted. The online world, because of its anonymity, encourages bad behavior. "You suck!" is a common post, and it would be the number-one tag if tagging ever became popular. Then would come the tags about "Online Casino!" One site promoting folksonomies is the darling of the bloggers: Flickr.com—an excellent photo-sharing site where being in perpetual beta is a marketing tool.

Interestingly, the ever-insightful Clay Shirky seems to at least sort of endorse the idea of tags in a recent post although he has skewered the "semantic web" in the past. I suspect that there's a bit of a definitional issue going on here. But that's the problem isn't it? When tags become both everything and essentially nothing (i.e. keywords), they lose much of their significance.

My current feeling is that extensive linking and the fact that digital documents have no need for a single physical place means that keywords are preferable to rigid hierarchies. But to extrapolate from there to deep physical meaning for those keywords across individuals and communities seems a bit much. Keywords (or tags if you prefer) yes. Folksonomies, no.

BBS Documentary

For the young 'uns that's Bulletin Board Systems.

Before the Internet was democratized, there were BBS's. At their largest, they were big multi-line operations. My service of choice was Channel 1 Communications in Cambridge, MA. Communications software like Telix and off-line new readers like Qmail let people snarf the contents of various discussion forums onto their PCs. After all, telephone rates were higher back then. BBS's were also where Freeware, Shareware, and less savory files and programs were exchanged. (Mostly legal in the case of the big operations, less so in the case of smaller and shadier ones.

Compared to today's Internet, BBS's could be much more intimate and could even be the hub of a sort of local community given that the reality of phone costs tended to keep a lot of the membership relatively local. (The larger BBS's also participated in various networks of discussion boards but they also had non-networked boards strictly for the "locals"--i.e. those who dialed in directly.)

There's now a documentary out about those days. I haven't seen it and haven't heard any reports, but if it's any good could be quite the nostalgia trip for some of us. I've thought of doing a book on some of the social communications history of the computer age but I haven't made any real progress on doing so.

So Apple's Jumped On the Podcasting Bandwagon

Actually it was more like a ginger step, but the Steve says that iTunes 4.9 will get podcasting support. I suppose it's the least they could do given that they have this buzzed-about phenomenon further building up their iPod brand even though podcasting has basically nothing to do with either Apple or the iPod.

Make that overhyped buzzed-about phenomenon. I'm going to be a party pooper here and suggest that podcasting is not getting anywhere as big as ordinary blogging. Which, by the way, is overhyped too but does seem to be a legitimate phenomenon albeit one that's not as widespread or influential as some of its practioners think it is. But back to podcasting. Why the yawn. Let me posit a few reasons:

• It's harder to do well than written content. There are lots of technical issues as well as strictly content-related ones.
• Power Laws are going to make it real difficult for thousands of broadcasters to find an audience. It's just much harder to "skim" through audiocasts in search of gems than it is through regular blogs. I have to be pickier.
• It's not exactly hard to get a podcast onto your portable flash memory music thingamajig. But it does take several steps more than just turning on the freekin' radio. When we get to the point that your home computer handles this all automagically between itself and its counterpart in your car, OK. (But then will we just want on demand versions of more commercial fare for the most part?)

I have to admit that I don't like even professionally-done talk radio for the most part. OK, maybe that's a big reason that I'm pretty indifferent about podcasts. But I think there are other reasons to think they won't be the "next big thing" too, Wired covers notwithstanding.

Illuminata Perspectives is Live

In addition to here on Connections, I will now also be posting about IT topics to Illuminata Perspectives. Posts that veer close to mainstream, datacenter IT will tend to migrate over there, but most of what I've been writing about--social connections, photography, etc.--will remain here. Collaboration will likely bridge between the two somewhat.

Time To Revisit Micropayments?

"Micropayments" were part of the Boom's lexicon. But they never really went much of anywhere. Instead, everything was "free"--either in the frequently forlorn hope of charging later or in the often deluded hope that it would be paid for by advertising or some other deus ex machina.

We've ended up in this sort of binary state as a result. The free (perhaps with annoying registration) and true subscription. That's a bit of an oversimplification of course. A site like Nerve has both free and premium content. A site like Salon offers various forms of free access in exchange for watching commercials. But, close enough for government work. But, in general, it holds. We've got sites that are largely free and sites that charge subsriptions--often in the neighborhood of $25 to $50 per year--that exceed what I pay for most of my magazines.

And $1 an aricle? Forget about it unless your audience is mostly well-financed paid researchers. That's not a micropayment. That's a midi-payment--just like buying a song is. Perhaps not a major purchase, but something that you'll think about, or as the ever-interesting Clay Shirky calls it, a transaction cost. (I'm not sure that I agree with Clay that free is the only way to go, but I certainly agree that payments large enough to make you think about them are a real inhibitor.)

Perhaps we need to look again seriously at micropayments. In the cents per transaction range--and, perhaps, implemented as subscriptions that span sites rather than per-transaction decisions. Hard? Sure. But the alternative may well be a dichotomy of free sites and sites that hardly anyone has access to or reads.

Score One for the Littler (But Not So Little) Guy

So Walmart is getting out of the online video rental business in favor of a partnership with Netflix. Blockbuster then promptly took the opportunity to start backing off its recent round of price cuts--which certainly undercut Netflix but were also doubtless aimed at keeping its close to Walmart's rates, which were lowest of all.

I don't shed any tears at Walmart exiting this business or at a certain softness in its overall fortunes. There's a lot not to like about the company as a whole (however much I appreciate the low prices when I shop there myself) and it's hard to see that their online video rental business would ever have been more than a very mass market, lowest common denominator, compete-on-price offering that made like difficult for other companies with more interesting and broad-based services. It's nice to see that Netflix is apparently able to stand up to challengers that could have potentially steamrolled it. (Which is not to say that Netflix is exactly raking in huge profits.) I'm a big fan of their service.

This does seem to be a case where the Internet boom mantra of "Spend to capture mindshare" has more or less played out. Netflix now has the brand (along with a competitive service) and its apparently going to be hard to displace. I think there are a few reasons for that in this case:

• Scale matters. Without multiple distribution centers, it takes too long to send and receive movies. For an East Coaster like myself, this was a frustration with the early Netflix which had only a single DC in Los Gatos, CA.
  
• Scale also matters to selection. Perhaps there's an opportunity for a company that deals only in high volume, mainstream fare. But there's a lot of aggregate volume in the less popular titles too--"The Long Tail" popularized by Chris Anderson of Wired.
  
• And, if you're going to have scale, and a broad-based selection, how much more differentiation is possible? Perhaps someone will figure out an alternative way of doing things. (Distribution by broadband will presumably be such an alternative someday; Movielink and its ilk are not not meaningful competitors today.) Perhaps pay-per-movie alternatives to subscription. But the current pricing schemes seem popular and if any such alternative did click with consumers, it would be easy to quickly replicate.
  
  

All of which leads me to think that this business isn't favorable to having a lot of niche companies playing in it. (Porn being, of course, the exception given that it's big business, its boundaries are fairly well defined and mainstream companies--especially public ones--want nothing to do with it.)

The Expanding Linkosphere

It seems like every day we're seeing various information that we've stored away for our own benefit being open up and linked to others in new ways. Now, I'm not referring here to clearly personal data that's being disclosed and compiled against our wishes--inadvertently or otherwise. That's a different topic. Rather, I'm referring here to how we're steadily opening up our wishlists, our bookmarks, and our movie rental lists for all the world to see.

A whole crop of tools has sprouted up to syndicate Amazon wishlists. "I want this, what do you want?" ("Or, please, buy me this!") What started out as more of a personal organization tool--the list of things that I might want to buy someday--is increasingly something to show off to others. del.icio.us and its brothers are even more explicitly communal. They provide a place on the web to store and organize your bookmarks--an increasingly useful concept in these days when people commonly use multiple computers and tyerminals from a panoply of locations. But, in exchange, you bookmarks are exposed as are the way you categorize them using tags - essentially keywords, but explicitly communal.

Now Netflix is the latest to provide an option to make the individual organization part of a collective pool of preferences and predilictions. You can now invite friends to share their movie list queues with you and you with them. Know someone whose taste in film you like, or at least intrigues you, share a list with them. Cool idea.

At the same time, it's impossible not to think that we're rushing pell-mell into throwing a huge amount of at least moderately private information here. Perhaps as Sun CEO Scott McNealy famously said once: "You have no privacy, get over it." much to the consternation of privacy advocates everywhere.

To be sure, that line was a typically McNealy-ian one line zinger; elsewhere he's spoken on the subject in a more nuanced way. But his zinger as a clear kernel of truth as well. The plugged-in are, for the most part, far less private than they've ever been before.

The Sorry State of Collaboration

Stephen O'Grady writes here:

One of the reasons I think applications like Trumba are important is that I think calendar applications are an area with a lot of potential in the near term.

a.) There's been essentially zero innovation in them in recent years,
b.) We've all got complicated schedules and
c.) Most of would like some mobile integration (cell phone at a minimum)

That seems about right. I'd go further though and say that there's been essentially no innovation in any of the core "collaboration" apps. I use the term "collaboration" advisedly because it strikes me as a rather overblown and pretentious use of the word given the sorry state of affairs in software that's supposed to help us work together--especially at remote locations.

What advances we have made have come neither from traditional productivity apps stretching themselves (unsuccessfully for the most part) into a more multi-person context nor form the blaoted, monolithic software that passes for serious collaboration tools. The latter may be useful, or even necessary, in some environments for regulatory and other reasons--but it's hard to see them in the mainstream.

Indeed, the most genuine collaborative innovations have come from the outside. They're lightweight and modular. They're IM and blogs and all the other pieces of software that real people use to communicate and commiserate.

A Hilarious Spoof...

of high-tech marketing creative.

Life is Random...

or at least multi-dimensional.

Tablets are an idea that refuses to either truly live or truly die. It's an idea that certainly has its enthusuasts. Most recently, James Governor of RedMonk weighed in on how Tablets could essentially be a Microsoft killer app in Microsoft: Putting Coolaid in Tablet Form.

It seems like the Tablet PC is one of the few things Microsoft can do (put in people's hands) that just stops people dead and cuts through prejudice. Tablet PC is disarming. Its funny to watch begrudging envy; is there a word for the opposite of schadenfraude?

The big issue here is that theTablet concept fills a very basic need. Us modern folks who have been using keyboards for a long time can type much faster than we can write. Indeed, my handwriting--in addition to bewildering even myself much of the time--cramps my hand and s incredibly slow by comparison to my (non-touch-typed) typing. But that typing is essentially linear--one-dimensional.

By contrast, when we take notes or sketch out ideas, we're all over the page--essentially two-dimensional.

See the problem? Great modern thought organizational techniques like mind maps are essentially 2-D while our fast input mechanism is 1-D.

That's why I consider tablet PCs a great unfufilled promise. Someone's going to ultimately crack the keyboard-tablet hybrid code and then it's going to be "You mean, people didn't always build PCs that way?"

In closing, I have to disagree with my buddy James on OneNote. Maybe it's a good app for Tablets but I don't see it as an underappreciated app for normal PCs--for reasons that I covered here. Microsoft: even if you have to look ugly, lose the proprietary format or at least provide a convenient export option.

The Nikon RAW Format Rumpus

There's been considerable noise from many quarters over the Adobe vs. Nikon tiff about Nikon encrypting the white balance data in its model D70 RAW files. Adobe yelled that it wouldn't support Nikon's RAW format in Photoshop. Nikon came back with a not-entirely-satisfactory offer to make the SDK available to some developers.

My intent here isn't to recapitulate the debate here--which now appears to be at least somewhat overblown anyway. (For the edification of non-photographers, RAW is a camera (or least sensor)-specific format for the digital data captured by the sensor. Because it hasn't been further manipulated or compressed in a lossy way (a la JPEG), it's the highest quality way to store images on camera that support it.)

I do find one aspect of this mess particularly troublesome, however. And it's not Nikon's lack of openness--which is a boneheaded PR move that I can't see benefiting them. (Nor am I convinced that Adobe's motives in taking this public were necessarily pure.) Rather, it's the fact that Adobe could credibly invoke the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) as the reason it couldn't decrypt Nikon's format.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm far from convinced that the DMCA--and specifically its decryption provisions-- would apply here. After all, it's the metadata for the photographer's own data (picture) that's being decrypted. But, the fact that Adobe's can claim concern about violating the DMCA--and people widely accepted that concern as valid--should be concerning.

We don't really know what a judge or a jury could decide are the limits of the DMCA. Certainly "DMCA" gts thrown around by the anti-IP crowd as a bogeyman on the order of RIAA--but that doesn't mean it's right either.

Considering (ID3) tags

I've had occasion to be thinking about certain types of metadata recently. Actually, that's a somewhat pretentious and jargon-y way of stating it. To be both more precise and more colloquial--always a good combination--I've been working on tagging my digital music collection. Some of my findings and experience are doubtless specific to digital music or to my personal requirements and priorities, but I think much of it probably applies more broadly.

For example, why tags in the first place? Well, because there's a bloody lot of data--songs and other sound clips in this case. As a result, while you may want to make hand-crafted playlists for some situations, for your day-to-day background music you might well want the computer to do some of the work. And that means tagging the songs with relevant characteristics that an be mainpulated with some relatively simple rules to create playlists. The analogies aren't perfect with other sorts of media, but, in both cases, neither totally manual selection nor completely unaided computer search are completely effective.

I'll go into the specifics of what I've done and what I'm doing with my music collection in a future post. However, let's first consider some of the more general characteristics of such a scheme. I wish I could pretend that this was a top-down analysis. In reality, it's more like trial and error--and is still ongoing. Be that as it may:

• Eschew unnecessary complexity. With multiple thousands of songs et al. in my database, each additional field could mean a lot of work entering data. If that field isn't going to be used effectively to create playlists consider ommiting it.
• Automation is our friend. To the degree that a utility or your jukebox program can auto-fill a field, that's a big win. For example, J. River Media Center, which I use, can populate an "Intensity" field and a "Beat" field. Even though I've found that these computer-generated fields correspond only modestly to my personal perceptions of these attributes, they're essentially "free."
• Build off the "standard" ID3 tagging infrastructure as much as possible. Unfortunately, once you get beyond the standard artist, album, etc. fields (that is, the truly stanardized ID3 tags), programs start having a lot of trouble interchanging the information. Even the seemingly standardized "Rating" tag isn't. My J. River Media Center can interchange rating information with my iPod, but a lot of tag editors don't seem to see the rating tags that it generates. Thus, for example, if you want to create a "subgenre" tag, you may want to consider keeping the standard "genre" tag and using something like an existing "keywords" field to hold the subgenre data.
• Use fields that you can fill consistently, meaningfully, and without too much mental effort for each choice. For example, I've been toying with a "Mood" or "Situation" field but have had trouble filling in entries in a consistent way that I could then meaningfully use to build a playlist.
• For anything like genre, subgenre, mood, etc., draw out a taxonomy or set of choices that you intend to use. Modify as required but at least you have a starting point.

Anyway, that was my retroactively arrived at starting point. More specifics coming.

Adobe-Macromedia Humor

This Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Adobe’s ‘FAQ’ Regarding Their Acquisition of Macromedia is both pricelessly funny and spot-on. I just want to know why, in this day and age, an "industry leading" program like Adobe's GoLive (which does admittedly do many things rather well) can get away with still being so crash prone after all these years.

Some Additional Good License Commentary

from Tim Bray as well.

I likewise have wondered all along about the dual-licensing option (i.e. license OpenSolaris under both the GPL and CDDL). It's a complicated issue though. How would the patent indemnification work under those circumstances? Would Solaris just be strip-mined for the benefit of Linux? (And should Sun ultimately care?) Would it be compatible with third-party closed-source linked to OpenSolaris?

In any case, it's clear that Sun and CDDL have prodded the GPL-is-the-only-true-Open-Source-license forces into action.

The Open Source license debate continues

Simon Phipps over at Sun has, what seems to me, a particularly nice overview of the three main Open Source license "families."

• BSD-style licenses (of which I regard Apache v2 as the state-of-the-art) place no restriction on whether derived creations are returned to the commons. Thus the creative works of the community surrounding a commons created by a BSD-style license may be returned to that commons, may be applied to a different source-commons¹ or may be incorporated into a closed-source work.
• GPL-style licenses require that derived creations, both resulting from the original commons and created newly around the commons, be licensed under the same license. The commons is thus enriched as it is used, but innovations created outside the commons can very easily be found to be licenseable only under the GPL and thus need to be compulsorily added to the commons - the artisan will often find that there is no freedom of choice in this regard.
• MPL-style licenses (of which I regard CDDL to be the state-of-the-art at present) require that creations derived from files in the commons be licensed under the same license as the original file, but allow newly-created files to be licensed under whatever license the creator of the file chooses. This is a win-win; the commons is continually enriched, and the artisan retains the freedom to license innovations in any way that's appropriate.

This seems to capture things pretty well. I've actually changed my own thinking a bit. I've tended to look on the MPL (and CDDL) as part of the BSD "family" of licenses contra the GPL. I think the main criterion I was considering was friendliness to intermingling with proprietary code--which you can do with both BSD (essentially without restriction) and the MPL (so long as you keep the source code files separate).

I think that view's still valid, but a view that explicitly recognizes that the MPL and CDDL do require giving back to the commons at some level is more complete in important ways. Thus, I like this three bucket taxomy.

If We Buy It, Will Use Come?

I'm sure that we've all had the experience of buying something that we just had to have and then, after the excited opening of the UPS box and the equally excited showing off to your many (bored) friends, the long sunset of said device on the dusty shelf. I know I have.

I've come to the conclusion that personally applying the sort of "use cases" that companies like Intel try to apply to their designs can be helpful. Basically, this boils down to "what are you trying to do?" and "how would you use device X to accomplish this?" Some of ths same sort of thinking is described in Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.

That's all very theoretical. So let's look at a specific, personal example. Last time I had a new cell phone to buy (the old one was slipping into a coma), I got to thinking about a smartphone. It would be a bit pricey as would the services, but it would be cool. Time to think about usage models.

OK. I travel a fair bit and like to stay in touch. A smartphone sounds like the ticket, but what would it incrementally do that was important to me? Hmm. Email of course! OK, but I already have broadband at just about any hotel I'm staying at and at most conference sites too. I could even have it at the airport and at Starbucks if I were willing to pay the fees (which would doubtless be less than the smartphone data services would be). I have a nice, compact laptop (a Fujitsu P5000) that I always travel with. A laptop which, by the way, is far more friendly to navigating web sites and dealing with attachments than any smartphone would be.

I could go on with the personal details but, although they're relevant to me, they may not be for you. Cost tradeoffs, for example. This would have been coming out of my pocket. The bottom line is the value of trying to work through how you would use a given device that isn't already met in other ways.

Of course, it can sometimes be hard to predict or grok radically new usage models in advance. Especially when it comes to communication, so much depends on what others in your circle do. If text messaging is the norm, you text message. If it isn't, you don't.

That said, usage cases are at least a framework. If you can't think of a practical (or fun!) reason why you'd use a new gadget or piece of software to do things differently--you probably (though not certainly) won't.

The Centralized Ideal

So many of our network-inspired ideals imply--directly or indirectly--a hankering for a neat-and-tidy cenralized sense of authority and control (or at least a singlular guarantor of great QoS).

Historical sources and anecedents made such centralized command-and-control explict for philosophical reasons. Edward Bellamy's citywide pneumatic tube systems--contra the relative anarchy of the later real-life bicycle messengers of a later era--were at least the product of an explictly socialist utopian fantasy.

However, such an almost Jungian yearning for authoritative centralization also comes from less explicitly politically sources. Whether Isaac Asimov's Encylopedia Galactica from his Foundation Series or Jerry Pournelle's descriptions of brain implants that could ask any question of some (presumably) "knows-it-all" computer (Oath of Fealty), the implicit assumption has always been that there's a neat and correct source of all information.

We (hopefully) realize today that the reality is messier. There's no Encyclopedia Galactica; there's Google. Google (together with its sister search engines) give us the keys to the Web's treasures. Of course, they also give us acces to the "Net of a million lies." Nothing neat there.