SteveStreeting.com

I picked this story up via Matt Asay and it pretty much summed up the frustrations I’ve had in the last 10 years when talking to certain people about open source – particularly when I was involved in business software. Peter Gyorgy, CIO of GE made this comment in a recent panel discussion:

“I think open source is great for own internal playground type of things but if it’s running vital mission critical applications – networks running on open source for example – then that is a huge, huge risk to the organisation,”

This would be incredibly funny if it wasn’t so damn indicative of so many CIOs, managers and other closed-minded, overly conservative IT people who have long since given up on trying to stay reliably informed and just believe what their vendors tell them. It’s especially amusing given that GE’s healthcare division runs its mission critical software on Linux, which their CIO seems oblivious of. And I would expect the New York Stock Exchange would be considered ‘mission critical’, and it runs on an open source platform (and interestingly the LSE is switching to Linux too) – so clearly not everyone thinks like this.

The one place where he does have a potential point, albeit skewed beyond all recognition is when he says:

“We are not here to be an IT shop, we are here to be the partner of a business and we shouldn’t put businesses operations into risk by running very low cost solutions,”

That’s a very valid point. However, it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with the choice between open source and anything else! This is such a common misconception. Open source has matured – if you need enterprise-level open source there are companies that are quite happy to take your money to remove the hassle and worry of system stability. They’re really no different from the Microsofts and Oracles of this world, except that the software they’re running your system for you on is open source rather than closed. That gives you an additional bit of leverage because if they suck, or if they try to pull a fast one on prices, you can actually get that enterprise management from someone else without having to change your software too. Try doing that when you switch from Oracle to Microsoft or vice versa for services.

You also have the advantage of not having to wait for a central vendor to hear your pleas for feature A or B, or a bugfix that might be low priority for most people but is absolutely critical for you. Instead of hacking workarounds and seething in the wings while you wait for your vendor to get around to addressing something they think isn’t a priority because it’s not affecting that many people, you can pay someone to fix it for you and submit it upstream, where it will undoubtedly get accepted far quicker than it would have got fixed if only a central vendor was looking after it.

You don’t have to be running an IT shop – although if you do, you have the option of trading your own time for monetary savings and greater agility – your support options are just different. Sure, they can be slightly more complicated if you let them be – particularly if you’re looking to save money or drive things in an optimal direction for your company such as tailoring the software – but if you want to have a simple 1-vendor setup using only standard versions you can do that with open source too. Delegating all support to a third party will cost you more but the option is there. It’s all about choice, flexibility, and empowerment – all things a CIO should welcome, not be afraid of (otherwise he/she’s probably in the wrong job).

I think too many IT managers / CIOs have a mental block which prevents them from being really committed to optimising their IT delivery, in terms of both spend, alignment with the business and agility for the future, because they’re locked inside a box of their own making.

I always find Matt Asay’s blog an interesting read – even if I don’t always agree with him, his posts on open source are always thought provoking. Today he was talking about how Wikipedia’s contribution rate is falling and how that has parallels in open source; that the community is no replacement for a centralised, focussed team.

He’s right on the core point – at the heart of every successful open source project there’s always a core team (or individual), and in the really influential ones, that team is usually funded – Mozilla is famously bankrolled almost entirely by Google, the Apache foundation has many, many sponsors including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, Eclipse has IBM, and so on. Many of the big projects that don’t have more general sponsorship still have a core team funded by a dual-license or other premium software model: MySQL, RedHat/JBoss, Qt etc. Such guidance & direction at the core is crucial – at OGRE we have a core team too, except that we’re not directly funded by anyone in terms of developer time (we have several generous sponsors who cover the majority of our hosting needs); we guide it because we want to, and because we use OGRE ourselves too. My company is probably the closest thing to a core development sponsor, in that I’ll allocate “work time” to doing OGRE development that could otherwise be spent making commercial products or doing consultancy, but it’s by necessity small beer compared to the likes of Mozilla and Apache.

But I do think he underplays the changes that have taken place in the software development world. He asserts that because most headline software development is still focussed at big influential companies, we’ve mostly just rearranged the chairs a bit at the same banquet. I don’t agree with that at all – by nature it still makes most sense to concentrate much of the development in a small team for quality, consistency and organisational purposes, but the point is that where precisely this centre is determined primarily by merit, not by the boundaries of a company’s org chart. While the core team is doing a good job, and accepting reasonable patches and such, people are happy for the show to be run there. The community is still definitely involved in the development, and certainly adds considerably to the end result. Yes, proportionately the central team does more, but crucially, should anything go badly wrong – such as the core going in a direction a lot of people don’t like, or the product being sidelined, if there’s enough of a community a fork will emerge, with another core team to lead it. That’s a critical safety valve that keeps companies more “honest” than they had to be in the past, and is a vital insurance policy for anyone investing their own resources in a piece of software. Matt claims the ‘Command and Control’ setup of software vendors is still in place; I think his view is clouded by the fact that he’s solely focussed on enterprise software, and enterprise customers move at such a glacial pace that any change is largely imperceptible – to the extent that ‘community’ maybe does look a lot like the ‘customers / partners’ relationship of old. But that would be a bad call, completely ignoring the difference in the level of control that is ceded to a community versus the customers of old – sure, many enterprise customers may not wish to leverage that control, and would take a long time to move if someone else chose to do so, but that option is still always there. And not everyone in the world is an enterprise customer – the enterprise usually follows the grass roots eventually.

In practice, it’s really all about balance, the middle ground. Yes, we still need focii of development just to make sure things get done in a reasonable fashion – no-one likes chaos in their software. Yes, it makes most to have that focus funded, in a traditional company model, if that piece of software gets beyond a certain size / popularity. But that doesn’t for a second undermine the value of community participation; in fact the two are deeply interdependent – one without the other is just not sustainable in a sizeable project.

So, people certainly shouldn’t be deluded into thinking that random crowds of people on the internet will create great software without some organisation (the infinite monkeys creating Shakespeare fallacy), but they also shouldn’t think that community is disposable and that we’re in the same situation we were before but with a different label. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I’ve been pushing quite hard to get this done before I head off to Qt DevDays next week, and luckily it all came together in the last few days:

Some of the notable back-of-the-box (if there was a box) items:

• Upgrade to SpeedTree v5 – supporting all the great new features. See the SpeedTree site for more details on this release.
• More lighting options – Ambient Occlusion, Ambient Contrast, Specular Lighting, Transmission Lighting, Global Light Scalar, HDR.
• Improved LOD fading – LOD transitions are now implemented via less perceptible techniques thanks to SpeedTree v5.
• Dynamic soft self-shadowing via depth shadowmaps – (was also demonstrated on SpeedTree 4.2 in OgreSpeedTree 1.1.0)
• Improved alpha to coverage support – alpha to coverage rendering has been significantly improved and is now enabled by default (you must render with at least 2xMSAA to see the effect), resulting in significantly smoother foliage edges and smoother fade transitions.

I’m just really, really glad to have got this done. SpeedTree v5 was quite a big change to handle, but hugely worthwhile, the guys at IDV have done a great job. I made the choice from v1 to do a ‘deep’ integration (ie all objects are first-party Ogre objects, everything uses Materials and RenderQueues properly, etc), which made the transition considerably more time consuming than using the higher level pass-through interfaces, so this took some effort. I like it this way though, it means it’s a ‘real’ integration as far as I’m concerned, not just a simplistic bolt-on.

There’s still more to do, not least of which a demo that’s more interesting than just a technical performance test But at least I can tick off one of the major things on my TODO now. I’d been putting in quite a few extra hours to try to handle this, and my Qt presentation preparation, and Ogre, and consultancy, and it has taken its toll a bit – I’ve been spending more time at the desk and think that was a contributing factor to me straining my back at the gym last weekend. Hopefully that’s just temporary, I’ve been a lot better these last few months.

Hope you like the shots anyway. I know, I’m pimping them all over the place in my Twitter, here and on the Ogre site, but a guys gotta make a living, right?

I reported a few months ago on how pleased I was that Qt was changing license to the LGPL, something I saw as a watershed for Qt adoption. I already had an awful lot of respect for Qt, but the previous GPL/commercial license did mean that adoption was in two quite widely separated camps – those who were already making GPL software, and those that could afford to license it for other cases. Great though Qt is, the price of the commercial license is really quite steep ($3,695 per-developer, per-platform), and that was hard to justify for a small developer.

So, the LGPL move is a big change and opens up a huge opportunity for Qt to be adopted in the ‘middle ground’. But beyond just adoption, Qt are clearly pushing for much higher levels of community participation going forward. A couple of weeks ago I got a call from someone in their strategy group, who is looking to reach out and build relationships with other open source groups & companies in related fields, to see how we might help each other in the future, and that sounded really promising. Today I received an email from the Qt mailing list outlining how they’re structuring their new public code repositories, and how they’ll be accepting external contributions. It all looks well thought out – they’re using Git to make patch submission easier on a large scale for example (something I’ve considered in the past, it’s only unfamiliarity and the lack of good Git UIs that puts me off doing it).

It’s great to see big companies making such solid moves into true open source participation like this, as opposed to some other companies which use open source licenses, but still operate a 100% ‘push’ model of development. Ultimately I’m sure it will pay huge dividends both for them and for the Qt user community. Obviously before the Nokia aquisition, Qt had to generate all its revenue from licensing so it had less scope or impetus to explore openness like this, but still I think there’s scope for many organisations to explore this approach with some aspects of their software products; specifically those parts that underpin the ‘premium’ side of its business or provide other infrastructural elements on which it builds its higher-margin offerings. As more companies explore these kinds of opportunities to blend open source and commerce, both as providers and consumers (and open source offers benefits on both ends of the relationship), I think we’ll see an acceleration of iterative innovation in the industry.

Yes, I got back from FMX/09 last night, after the usual pain-in-the-ass shuttling between London airports to make my connections and the inherent waiting around that entails. I’m constantly disgusted by the amount airports charge for internet access so I left writing this post until today.

I really enjoyed FMX – it was the first graphics conference in which I’d been officially on the speaker bill, so I’m not sure how well other conferences treat their speakers, but at FMX I thought they did a fantastic job; everything was really well organised and went very smoothly. I actually enjoyed FMX more than Siggraph to be honest; it’s smaller and I found it a bit more manageable, and people seemed to have more time to talk. The speakers dinners were great for meeting & talking with various random people – such as having a quick chat with Ken Perlin, creator of the ubiquitous Perlin noise, and who had already heard of Ogre, which was nice.

My presentation went well, I was fussing over and tweaking the content right up to the last minute – was there enough for the time, was there enough technical detail, or too much, and so on – but in the end the feedback I received suggested I got it right. There was theory and arm-waving, I dove into code for a few minutes to illustrate how you build up a simple demo, I showed screenshots of Torchlight and OgreSpeedTree, videos of Venetica, ZeroGear and Dangerous Australians, and ran a real copy of The Book Of Unwritten Tales (and in the presentation tradition, my machine choked on the DVD the first time). In the end the hour flew by and I had to speed things up a bit, leaving 5 minutes for questions, which was just enough, so not bad on a timing front.

The room was also packed, people were standing at the back and sides of the room due to lack of available seating – I had no idea what to expect in terms of interest levels so I was very pleased with the turnout in the end. I also collected quite a few business cards and contacts from people using Ogre or thinking of doing so, which is always good, especially for a free agent such as myself!

I also met up with the guys from Filmakademie (who run the conference) who are developing some really cool tech using Ogre, such as procedural facial animation systems and non-photorealistic rendering. The editing framework they’ve built for these kinds of projects to sit on top of is looking really slick (it reminds me a bit of Houdini), and the good news is that they’re going to be releasing it as open source (LGPL) very soon, so I’ll be sure to link that both here and on the OGRE site when it’s available, because I think a lot of people are going to like it. All in all it was great to meet them and we intend to stay in contact in the future.

I’d like to thank everyone at Filmakademie (Constanze, Volker, David, Stefan, Nils, Simon and Thomas) for inviting me, and making it such an enjoyable visit.

[edit]Oh, and please bear with me if you’re waiting for a reply to something – I did manage to keep up with email somewhat whilst away, but more significant things will have to wait for me to catch up with them in the coming days.

A few days ago, Yahoo! announced that they would be shuttering the venerable GeoCities this year. “So what?” you might well ask – GeoCities is after all an ageing service from a bygone era, and apart from some nostalgia and perhaps some data that some people might have had parked there for a while, most people won’t really notice it’s passing.

But nevertheless, it’s important, and people who get carried away with putting a dollar value on the current favourite websites of the day (e.g. Facebook) should take careful note. GeoCities was huge, really a sensation at the time, before many of the people raving over Facebook now were online, or perhaps even born (scary). It was easily as big culturally as Facebook at the time, which is why Yahoo bought it for almost $3 billion. I bet they regret that, because what happened was exactly what will continue to happen in this sort of space – things changed. New technology comes along, new techniques, new fashions, and the old sites are abandoned like burning ships incredibly quickly, until as happened this week (perhaps a little overdue in fact), the charred, lonely hulk sinks beneath the waves.

The issue is that these sites are not really ‘sticky’ on an individual basis. There’s really very little investment needed to use them, so getting up and moving somewhere else really isn’t much of an issue. Sure, with social networks the main ‘index of stickyness’ is your friends list, so people tend to stick where their friends are, but really, I don’t see this being a major barrier in practice, because by nature most of the stuff on there is non-critical and for fun, and these things are often follow generational ‘clusters’ – the students in the 90s were all on GeoCities, now they’re all on Facebook. Where will the next set be? I wouldn’t for a second assume they’d stay in the same place; they’ll want sites for their own generation, not the last one.

The eventual destiny of GeoCities should be a significant warning to anyone thinking of paying top-dollar for web companies that have no business model beyond casual eyeballs, and rely on fashion to drive that attention. Fashion changes, and you really don’t want to be stuck with $3bn worth of brown corduroy flares (assuming that they’re not fashionable right now – I can’t keep up! )

I picked up on this via Gringod‘s twitter: Windows 7 will have an XP Mode, a virtualised environment but with the added bonus that it doesn’t create a new desktop, just virtualised application windows inside Windows 7 that are actually running on an XP SP3 VM.

At first it all sounds pretty damn good, paving the way for MS to ‘do an Apple’ and redesign things more fundamentally without having to worry about being backwards-compatible forever. However, there’s a catch – XP Mode will only be available to licensees of the Professional edition of Windows 7 or above, it will be missing from the entry-level versions. Gah.

Rant mode: all these versions of Windows are bloody stupid. It’s a client operating system for feck’s sake, it’s not an enterprise application where people have wildly different requirements. It sits on a bloody desk doing work for one user at a time, how realistically do you imagine that those tasks are highly partitionable? You know the argument that with Linux, things are too complicated because of the fragmentation? Well, then why are MS deliberately doing the same thing to their own product? It beggars belief.

The argument may be that only businesses and professional users need this backwards compatibility, to which I say total hogwash. I just can’t believe you would come up with basically a silver bullet for finally breaking away from the legacy of poor Windows OS design, and then say you won’t include it in every box, thereby leaving a class of users without the option to rely on that facility as a bridging point. You think only businesses have legacy apps? As a software guy, it seems a stupid decision motivated by the bean counters who want to find new and inventive ways to upsell to customers. The baby is most definitely surfing away on the bathwater.

For God’s sake MS, make this a standard feature. It looks excellent, but locking some customers away from it totally undermines it and just looks like greed. And really, think seriously about unifying your client OS offering into one product and limiting your bizarre urge to partition everything into 20 confusing editions to your higher-end server / developer products.  A client OS should be a standard, simple affair.

In a past working life, I used Oracle a fair amount – I used Oracle 7 through 10, and they were pretty decent products. The lineup was pretty simple back then – Oracle was the gruff, stoic mercenary who didn’t talk much and cost a fortune, but had it where it counted – if you could get him to do what you wanted; SQL Server was the approachable and gregarious rogue who was a jack of all trades and came fairly cheap, but had a habit of disappearing into the shadows or asking for more money at more sticky moments; and MySQL was the happy-go-lucky bard who was just along for the ride, happy to work for free so long as it was all just a jape and no-one asked him to do any real work.

How things have changed; SQL Server has got more mature (and more expensive), Oracle has bristled with ever more confusing add-on components while the core has got cheaper, MySQL has become a much more serious contender for many businesses and has already been swallowed once recently by Sun for an insane $1bn. However, that’s all going to change again now that Oracle is buying Sun, and thus with it, MySQL. So what does this mean for MySQL?

A lot of people are saying it’ll be curtains, but I’m not so sure. Oracle has already chowed down on several other open source vendors in this space, and perhaps surprisingly not much has changed. In 2005, they bought Innobase, a Finnish company that produced the transactional back-end for MySQL, InnoDB. So essentially from 2005 Oracle controlled the most important part of MySQL anyway, certainly from the perspective of increasing its business use. And yet, really not much happened, except for some rumblings in the community and some uncertainty around MySQL 5 (which was no doubt Oracle’s intention). Then in 2006, Oracle bought Sleepycat, which produced Berkeley DB, an open source embedded database. Again, this continued pretty much unchanged afterwards. So, what will they do with MySQL now?

I’m not even sure it matters. Because the reason that Oracle’s purchase of InnoDB and Berkley DB were effectively a non-event for users is that they were both open source. No matter what Oracle did, it couldn’t change that – if they try to change the license from future versions, a fork will just appear instead and people will move. The key people involved in the project would just leave and work for whoever ends up running the fork (probably a startup) – after all, most of the time these people were in the startups that created it. There is actually not that much ‘control’ at all that you gain from purchasing an open source project like this – you get the copyright, so that means you’re the only one who can change the license for future versions, but the open source license can never be revoked on existing versions. You might own the rights, but you don’t own the customers.

So really, it makes very little sense for Oracle to try to ‘kill off’ MySQL, or to cripple it somehow. With Inno, the one thing they had in their back pocket was the Hot Backup, which was a closed part of the code, but because it’s not the majority of the product there’s nothing to stop someone else developing an equivalent – most of the time the only reason people don’t is that while the company plays fair, there’s no need to. If it’s a higher-end add-on, people tend to accept that the originator company can sell a minority of their product as an add-on, it’s “fair” given all the code they’re giving away as open source. But, if the company acquiring them then tries to exploit that, say by making it prohibitively expensive or withdrawing it completely in order to try to make the core open source product less attractive (maybe in favour of their own proprietary product), then you can guarantee others will enter the space to resolve the issue.

It’s a perfect example of why open source is a hugely valuable insurance policy to anyone using it. Even if mergers and acquisitions change the priorities of those who control the code, the kinds of forced switching and upselling that typically occurs to customers in the proprietary space (I’ve had this happen to me several times) in the wake of such M&A activity just doesn’t generally happen so much with open source products – because if vendors inconvenience their customers, they really do have the viable option to go elsewhere. As it should be!

I picked up on the Gamasutra article about B-games thanks to Penny Arcade, and I found the debate fascinating. I’m a regular casual consumer of B-movies myself, thanks to the fact that the Sci-Fi channel shows them almost constantly, and their ability to amuse is seemingly inexhaustable. I also like the fact that you really don’t need to watch the whole of a B-movie to get something out of it, or even see the beginning or the end; you can have fun just trying to figure out the (usually awful) plot by just watching a 30-minute slot – in fact this is part of the entertainment.

So, B-movies are great because a) they’re highly amusing, b) they require little commitment, and c) they’re dirt cheap or free. So, why can’t this work for games too? Well, I think it can, and in some cases already does, but not without straying a bit further away from the centre ground of game industry. B-movies are made by people who are on the fringes of the traditional movie industry, and like art-house and international cinema, the fringes of the movie industry are far more developed than they are in the game industry right now. So actually, we’re not really talking about B-games per se; we’re talking about diversity and niche markets as a whole.

So how does diversity thrive? Most importantly, by lowering barriers to entry at all levels. Making games needs to be cheaper, quicker and accessible to all. The tools of the trade have to be widely accessible for little or no cost, they need to be mature and well understood, by a wide range of people from professionals, to students, to hobbyists, to retirees – everyone who wants to mess about in their garages (or in this case, home offices) for fun, education, and creative expression. With some variation on quality and scale, they all need to be using fundamentally the same principles and toolsets. Such openness and accessibility is necessary to create a melting pot of ideas and creativity that just doesn’t flourish as well  in a closed industry. It happened in the Super-8 generation, and look at all the great directors that nurtured.

I’m biased, but I think open source is simply the best way to deliver on this, hands down. Not just for people using the the open source projects directly themselves, but also in the lower cost commercial products they allow to be created with them, in the same way that cheaper manufacturing led to the higher availability of affordable camera technology for the masses to start experimenting with. Open source creates a ‘continuum’ of technology availability, allowing anyone to pick where they want to be on the scale of time investment vs. financial investment. Short on money, but have the time and energy to figure things out? Grab the open source components and build yourself a toolset. Got more money and less time? Supplement the base technology with packaged solutions & helpers – and those based on open source will likely be cheaper. Somewhere in the middle? Products built with open source tend to allow more granular decisions of that nature, not only because openness breeeds more competition, but also that the parts of packaged solutions are generally assembled from many interchangeable components, rather than being one big opaque tarball that you have to buy off the shelf, with limited choice & flexibility.

Publishing also needs to change, and that’s already started. To a degree the promise of the openness of digital distribution hasn’t delivered, since the majority of portals are still controlled by a small number of incumbents. The barrier to entry is lower, but it’s still out of reach for many – and that’s understandable from the perspective of those running the portal. However, what’s really needed is a greater range of portals catering to different audiences, user searchable portals in which quality rises to the top and is marketed on its merits rather than whether it is favoured by a portal owner. XBox Live Community Games tried to tap into that, but despite the positive step of letting the community rank content, it really hasn’t worked that well so far, due to the restricted toolset (XNA, no using native libs and little portability through which to maximise your tech investment) and almost complete lack of marketing; with most content there appearing like a second-class citizen. Apple’s AppStore has done a bit better – even though one company still controls the publishing decision, the toolset is less restrictive (you can use the full capabilities of the device, and use a far wider range of mature libs) and there’s greater perceived equality of content. Also, what the AppStore clearly showed is that people will happily buy ‘B-apps’ by the truckload if the price is right, and making them can be very worthwhile – provided it can be done cheaply. Cable channels also show that niche content can work, and will be paid for and enjoyed in small portions, so long as it’s part of a larger bundle. In all, I think there’s demand out there for a flatter, wider range of product than is generally sold right now, but we have to stop trying to shove it all through the single simple sales & marketing pipeline we use for AAA games.

Lastly, culture. In the core game industry,  a common attitude among both consumers and developers is that if it’s not a AAA game, it’s not worth the time of day. That’s not a universal opinion of course, look at how well Popcap have done for example, but I think it’s fair to say that as an industry, there’s a huge amount of elitism and focus on what I would call ‘whizbangery’ (Oxford dictionary, please save some space for that one in the next edition). We need to adjust our thinking and stop considering ‘worthwhile’ to mean ‘big budget, movie-like effects, cutting edge tech, 200-strong art team’. If it entertains, there’s a market out there for it, so we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss games that don’t fall into a particular style & budget range. Provided the price is right (and the typical game price point is still far too expensive), people will pay for content that entertains them in one way or another, and that doesn’t have to be a 20 hour Hollywood-effects filled epic. B-movies make me laugh, and I’m happy to consume them within the commercial framework of my TV subscription, even though I would not buy a boxed copy of them, or even watch them all the way through. Games can absolutely explore such territory too.

My office has finally been christened as a legitimate workplace – I now have a photocopier

Well, of sorts – it’s actually one of those All-in-one devices, which I finally decided to buy because I was fed up of laboriously scanning multi-page contracts / licenses on a flatbed. I went with a HP Officejet J6410 – it was cheap, got some very good reviews, and I’ve generally been happy with other HPs over the years. Sure, their cartridges are some of the most expensive around, but I’m not a heavy duty user anyway, and the main thing I like about many of their recent devices compared to other manufacturers (at least at this price point) is the built-in wifi, which this one has too. Having the ability to put the printer anywhere and not connect it to any PC or even an ethernet port is something I’m not willing to do without anymore, especially since this new one is pretty large.

So far, so good. It’s not that noisy, setup was quick and fairly painless, and (most importantly for me) it’s super-easy to scan multipage documents direct to PDF, pushing them to PCs with an agent installed or emailing them if you want. The copy facility is fairly slow (obviously) but then I only need it very occasionally – after all, who wants to generate more paper?I probably won’t use the integrated fax since I use scanned documents on email, or an electronic fax bridge when I need to, but it’s nice to have the option.

Yay, no more babysitting the scanner when dealing with tedious paperwork!