SteveStreeting.com

For 18 months I’ve been told by a succession of doctors and physios that I didn’t have anything structurally wrong with my spine and that my bouts of back pain were simply ’standard non-specific back pain’ – ie muscle problems that I should just take NSAIDs for and exercise more. I’d been a bit skeptical because the problems were occasionally quite extreme and seemed to be always centred on one particular location (the joint just at the bottom of my ribcage), but after getting many opinions and one set of x-rays I went along with it.

Things have been quite good recently, up to mid-February when I had a bit of a relapse for a few weeks after doing a little too much. I raised it with my doctor again, explained that I’d been doing all the exercise and going to the gym as recommended, and yet it still flared up at what I considered to be fairly minor provocation. He scheduled me in for another set of x-rays which I expected to not come back with anything conclusive since the last set didn’t (and you can’t get into the MRI scan here unless you go through this step again first, allegedly). They took more pictures this time but I didn’t expect much given all the opinions so far.

Imagine my surprise therefore that when I got the results today, they actually had a concrete explanation for me. Apparently in my lower thoracic (ie exactly where I’d been pointing all these months) I have some disc degeneration and calcification going on, which is what is causing the stiffness and pain. This is something that happens with age anyway, but given my relative(!) youth (36) they thought it looked like it might be a result of either a trauma such as a sports injury – I can’t think of anything – or sometimes they see it in people who were child gymnasts – again not something I can attest to! Basically, something has happened to make my spine degenerate in that area faster than it should have done for my age. Too many hours spent stressed out at a desk may have been a contributing factor in that, although he thought it would have to be a lot of hours and probably combined with other factors.

So anyway, the ‘good’ news is that I actually have a reason now, an explanation for why I’m so susceptible to strains and stress on my back these days. In a way it’s nice to have something to point at. The bad news is that this isn’t fixable, it can merely be managed via careful exercise and lifestyle changes – many of which I’ve made already but I probably need to go even further. The prognosis is that I should be able to live pain-free so long as I manage it carefully over the long term to stop it degenerating further.

Following this analysis, I’ve been prompted to make a decision which I’ve been reluctantly considering for a while anyway – I’m retiring as OGRE Project Lead. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my 10 years leading OGRE from unknown personal project to where we are today, but leading an open source project requires an enormous amount of dedication, passion, and above all an awful lot of time spent at a keyboard, most often in addition to a ‘regular job’ with which to pay the bills, and I feel I just can’t give that to the level that’s required any more. It will be with no small amount of sadness that I finally take off the leader’s hat – which by now is quite battered and worn in.

I still intend to be around and involved in the project – I’ll be contributing some code, giving advice when it’s wanted, and overseeing the establishment of an OGRE Foundation to handle the donations and funding side, but the days of me living and breathing OGRE, vetting every change, and being the person with whom the buck stops when there’s a bug, will be over. I’ll basically be contributing what and when I can, but shrugging off the responsibility and expectation that is inevitably associated with being the lead developer.

We have a great team and community around OGRE and I’m sure the project will be fine with me taking a more back-seat role – time for younger and less physically challenged developers to step into the limelight

I’m not blogging as often these days; as you know I don’t traditionally ‘do’ short blog posts – in my book if something is worth blogging about, it’s worth making sure it holds together as an argument, and as a piece of writing generally – and a combined lack of time of anything I’m motivated (or permitted) to talk about has left the site a little  bereft of content. Luckily my OGRE Twitter is stocked with more frequent and less lovingly crafted status updates on what I’m doing there.

So, on to the title of the post. The Internet has been around for a while now, and has evolved rapidly, particularly in the last decade. And yet, particularly in academic and some open source developer circles, there is an attachment to a particularly creaky piece of technology that I can honestly say I do not share - the venerable mailing list.

Now, to clarify the context, I’m referring to the use of mailing lists for multilateral communication for an entire community, including newcomers, as opposed to a simple 1-way notification list (like we use for commit notifications for example). For N-way communication among a small group of core developers, all of whom will want to read every post, I can see the utility and convenience of a mailing list. But as a community communication channel, where people just want to drop in and drop out, I find it a staggeringly inefficient, awkward and archaic approach. I say this primarily as an occasional community member of various projects that use mailing lists, and therefore someone who has a specific interest in a mere subset of the discussions that go on – I have no time or desire to read every single thread, and indeed if I tried to do this for every project I have an interest in, I’d never get anything done. It’s hard enough to keep up with my own open source community!

The simple fact is that mailing lists have an all-or-nothing mindset that is woefully outdated for community interaction on the scale that the Internet has now grown to.  Subscribing means you get bombarded with every single discussion, either individually or in digests, which pretend to be useful but in fact aren’t, because while they cut down on the number of emails you get, it makes replying to specific posts a pain. If you want to read every single mail in the list, I’m sure they work fine – but most people outside the core group do not want to do this. Most members of the community just want to keep a closer eye on a few select threads of discussion that either affect or interest them, and to be able to search and browse through the rest easily – and the mailing list is a woefully inadequate, blunt instrument for this kind of task.

Sure, you can choose not to subscribe, and go through the archives, searching or browsing them. But you can do that with forums too, and there at least you have the advantage of categorised areas of interest, being able to follow certain people, and to watch certain threads. Mailing list archives have a single filter: date, and also lag by a number of hours dependent on the individual setup, so if you’re not subscribed, you get a lesser service.  Another technique is to subscribe completely but tell your email client to archive or filter things for you, so you can dip into your local replica at leisure. Horribly, horribly inefficient, but it does work.

Mailing lists worked in the 90’s when there were small groups of people who wanted to read everything being discussed, and when email was the primary form of communication between people. We’ve moved on. Forum systems and other flexible hosted systems are far superior in their ability to let you watch particular discussions (or all new posts) that you’re interested in and get told when there’s an update. Anyone can search them easily (internally or via Google) and there’s no archive lag. Maybe some people are worried about forum databases being lost, compared to inherently replicated mailing lists, but anyone worth their salt has a server backup strategy.  Honestly, any project that uses mailing lists as their only community discussion channel instantly puts me off getting involved in that community, because I know that as an occasional participant interested in only certain discussions, the experience is going to totally suck.

And, if you insist on loving your mailing lists approach so much, for goodness sake move to Google Groups. They’re still pretty basic, but at least there, those of us who have moved into the browser world can use an interface we find useful and productive, rather than being forced to use 20-30 year old technology designed to replicate posts around a university science department.

Making a living from open source is hard. Correction – making a living from writing open source software is hard – it’s incredibly easy to make a living from someone else’s open source software of course, which is why that’s what most people do At one time the popular opinion was that pure-play open source companies could make a living from support services, which works to a degree but I know from both my own experience and from that of others that it doesn’t work that well. Again, the best chances of it working are if you’re providing support services for software that someone else writes, because you’re only able to monetise the service, not the development. This actually discourages people from investing in development, and instead merely in deployment and ancilliary services which isn’t actually a good thing for core product development.

The best cases of companies funding open source are where they’re using it to deliver some other product or service which is directly monetised, therefore the open source development comes under their general R&D budget. Google, IBM and others fall firmly under this category, and you can bet that the largest open source software projects are funded this way – Apache, Eclipse, Firefox all pay their core developers like this. But, it requires a fairly significant level of scale to be able to do that, hence why it’s usually the giant corporations that do it rather than smaller companies.

The next favourite option is dual-licensing; the general set-up if you come at this with a commercial hat on, is that you pick a license that a lot of commercial entities will have a problem with extending from (ie GPL), then you sell them an alternative license; the idea being that you get the adoption via the open source license and make money from the commercial license. But, it can be controversial, as most recently discussed by Greg Stein in the Oracle / MySQL case.  The argument is that if your commercial license is just a proprietary license, and can be revoked and otherwise monkeyed with by the issuing company (or perhaps more importantly, its acquirers), you have actually been lured into a honey trap – the lure being that open source comes with certain protections, but that if you rely on the availability of the commercial license you actually have none of those and might as well have bought from a proprietary software vendor.

So, what to do? If you’re a small development company, open sourcing your product will definitely bring more people in, but if you’re not in the hosting / cloud business and don’t want to rely on services to earn your keep (who can blame you), what can you do to earn your keep except abandon open source for your main products (maybe splitting your time between proprietary and open source), or dual-license and face accusations that you’re fibbing about the true nature of your product for your commercial users?

Well, I’ve been wondering whether the problem is that dual-licensing typically falls back on traditional licensing concepts, ie that your commercial license looks very much like a normal proprietary license, which has all the problems of ‘what if my vendor changes the license conditions’ etc – when in fact it really needs to be more like a permissive open source license, with a payment condition. One of the great powers of open source is that it is ‘detached’ from the producer and compeltely predictable and immutable – once the software is out there, it can’t be taken away from the receiver and is always ‘whole’ in terms of the source code so no-one is tied in. There are also cast-iron source & binary redistribution clauses that are known up-front, and are again immutable, which mean everyone knows where they stand, forever. Why can’t the commercial side of a dual-license continue to do this, while at the same time generating a revennue stream for the company?

Maybe I’m being naive. But what about this sort of dual-license set-up for a library or toolset:

• Default is GPL (and obviously free)
• Commercial alternative license available, giving very permissive rights, but with these important rules:
  • The license is irrevocable once issued
  • The right to redistribute unlimited copies of derivative binary works is included with Apache-style conditions
  • The right to redistribute unlimited copies of derivative source to anyone under the GPL (for free) is included
  • The right to redistribute unlimited copies of derivative source under the permissive commercial license conditions is also included, provided the same original license fee is paid per receiver. Critically, the price and conditions surrounding redistribution may not be altered unilaterally by the licensor at any time after the license is issued (so once you’ve bought it once, the conditions and price for non-GPL redistribution are set in stone and cannot be altered unless both parties agree – say if the price is reduced later)
  • All software reverts to the Apache license if the company folds without selling the rights to someone else

This would mean that those choosing to opt for the commercial license would have the same kind of cast-iron guarantee an open source user has that once software is out in the wild and being used under some conditions, that the originator cannot possibly change that, ie take it away or change their right to modify and redistribute under conditions they agreed to at the start. To me, this seems to give the same kind of certainty over not being screwed over in the future as open source does, thus blunting the accusations of proprietary lock-in by the back door, but while generating some revenue for the developer too. It is, in effect, the same as a permissive open source license with the one addition that redistribution of the source to a new party requires either payment to the originator, or reverting to the GPL.

Now, of course there is still potential uncertainty around new versions of the software, but this is no different from open source, where your only guarantee is over what is published right now, not what might happen in future versions.

Does anyone know companies that use this model? My experience is that commercial dual licenses tend to be as restrictive as proprietary licenses, which then can justifiably lead to accusations that the open source license has been used as a shill to get people into a lock-in scenario. Is there really a ‘third way’ or am I missing the point?

Gartner haven’t exactly been the sharpest tools in the box when it comes to predicting open source trends over the last few years, vastly underestimating it until about 2008, by which time it didn’t exactly take a professional analyst to tell you that it was popular. Still, now they’ve woken up to its potential, occasionally they post something useful. In particular, I liked a recent blog post about how open source is “trending towards customer obscurity” – that is to say that while open source is incredibly important to producers of software, the vast majority of consumers don’t really care how their software is made any more than they care how their car was made.

I support this view, and it’s one I’ve subscribed to for a while (although the somewhat condescending tone of the article is typical Gartner, the point is valid). My own open source software is aimed squarely at developers, where I think it adds value; since the users of my software are themselves making significant development investment in products using it, open source has significant advantages – the openness and participation-friendly nature of the development, the fact that the software can never be taken away from them either by company policy or acquisition, the fact that absolutely nothing is hidden behind any curtains so there aren’t any nasty surprises. When you’re investing your own time building on top of a foundation, there really is no substitute for being able to see all the working parts, should you want or need to.

Developers can be quite a broad church too – enterprises for example often have a need to modify and adapt software and that’s why open source has been very popular there too, even if they’re not actually making products of their own for publication.

But there’s also a vast group of people who are more traditional consumers (personally and in companies) – and they have no reason to care about open source if they’re never going to modify the software. There is a group of people who are philosophically dedicated to using free software (more so than open source) even if they never modify it themselves, but they’re a minority in the grand scheme of things. Most people that use open source do so because they feel it gives them what they need as users. Even personally, I use Linux on my servers not because I’m dedicated to using open source over the alternatives wherever I can (although I probably do have more bias in that direction than the average), but because it does exactly what I want in a server – it’s reliable, unobtrusive, cheap, has low hardware requirements and plenty of good software. Conversely, I don’t use Linux on the desktop much because personally I don’t feel it operates better than the commercial alternatives in that environment. I decide on a case-by-case basis what works best for me, and so do all but the most fanatical of users.

Now, of course open source regularly helps developers make better products (by using mature, reusable and adaptable components), which in the end can result in more users using software made from open source even if they don’t realise it. But the important thing to remember is that open source itself isn’t a marketing bullet point except to developers and the enthusiast minority. Like any gathering of like-minded people who mostly talk to each other, we open source developers / advocates can often forget that our enthusiasms aren’t necessarily shared by the rest of the populace. We have to remember that the end result is everything – and while open source definitely has a positive knock-on effect on product quality, it’s often a means to an end, not the end in and of itself. It’s obvious really, but worth keeping in mind.

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’ve already posted about my experiences with Git and Mercurial, the end result of which was a vastly increased respect for Git but a basically confirmed preference for Mercurial, based on ease of use, platform consistency and resilience.

Mercurial’s conversion tools are really quite good – the core tools worked fine but I was impressed by hgsubversion’s speed and that it seemed to just work, in both initial conversion and pulling subsequent updates. It was missing a couple of features that I wanted though – firstly the ability to reflect merge points between branches during the conversion, and secondly to be able to ’squash’ ancient history down to a simple snapshot to save space.

At OGRE, we’d carried forward all our history from CVS to Subversion and as such have almost 8 years of history, including a couple of file reorganisations. Mercurial’s storage efficiency falls down compared to Git when files are moved around, because a file stored in more than one place in the tree over the history of the project is physically stored multiple times too, whilst Git stores the content only once with pointers from the various locations / history points. Most of this overhead could be removed just by eliminating old history we didn’t need anymore – history that does no harm in Subversion since only the server holds it, but does cause unwanted overheads in a DVCS since every user gets the entire repository. Removal of history is something that Mercurial shuns – rightly so in the case of public repositories but in these rare cases it would be nice if there was a tool for removing old history; again Git allows this but it has to be used with care. In the absence of that, doing it at conversion seemed the best way.

I asked about these things in the hgsubversion community, but the tradition of open source is that if you really want something urgently, you know where the code is Mercurial is really nice when it comes to hacking because it’s all Python; so there’s a nice unified API in one place that you can refer to – that’s one of the reasons I like it over Git which is far more fragmented in technology terms. I’m not a Python guru by any means, but I managed to implement both these features – I did the “mergemap” support a little while ago and added the “skipto” option today – it’s called that because “skipto” was already referred to in the hgsubversion code but it had no implementation.

The result is that the OGRE Mercurial repository with only the last ~3 years of history (back to when the v1.4 branch was created) is now only 74MB, rather than the 206MB of the original, complete conversion (in comparison Git was 116MB for the whole thing). By dropping the history I’ve removed most of the instances of reorganisation which is where most of the space has gone. I  hope eventually that Mercurial adds a utility to deal with stripping ancient history (right now, you can only strip branches) but this solves my primary conversion issue. Since this new repo can be kept in sync in a very lightweight fashion with the existing Subversion repo, I’ll be periodically updating it and doing more tests to reassure myself that the content really is ok.

If you’d like to get my custom version of hgsubversion with these features, it’s here: http://bitbucket.org/sinbad/hgsubversion/. I make no promises that it’s error-free, use at your own risk. It currently assumes that you’re using the standard Subversion layout, are converting from the root of that and have the ’svn’ command on your path.

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.

One of the things I love about open source is that there’s a huge amount of power in the idea that you can use, and indeed co-operate on, a whole ecosytem of generalised, robust, re-usable components, and then combine, configure and supplement them into something that is greater than the sum of its parts – into a final result which concentrates on being extremely good at a particular task. There was a time that to create something awesome in a particular space, you’d either have to buy in lots of expertise or you’d have to invent it yourself, before you ever got to the interesting bit that mattered. Open source totally flattens the landscape, and at a stroke makes the software world far more interesting as innovations can happen on the back of shared experience.

This also comes at a time when our use of technology is fragmenting – the PC isn’t the sole device through which we view the tech world anymore, we use all kinds of other devices all suspended in the Internet soup, and the devices that win the most favour are those that are again specialised for the task / environment in hand.

So what does this mean? It means making generalist software such as regular beige-box operating systems is rapidly becoming quite uninteresting, and not something you can sell much product based on (unless you’re in the position of being able to leverage a huge existing install base). Generalism belongs in open source libraries, lego bricks which while fairly uninteresting in and of themselves, can be built into vast arrays of much more interesting combinations. As a commercial outfit, being the generalist jack of all trades really doesn’t get you very much attention any more. Wowing people with how well you can address a particular problem is what gets you noticed.

I say all this in the context of Google’s release of the Chromium OS last week. While it’s not being sold in its own right, make no mistake that it’s definitely selling you something – specifically Google hosted app services. And it’s also a prime example of heavy specialisation – it’s only designed to work with hosted apps, nothing local. Some may scoff at that, and indeed it’s not exactly practical right now for all but specific cases, but that’s the point – it’s an angle, it’s a specific pitch at a specific audience, and as such it differentiates itself. Increasingly that’s what interests people about a product, even if they’re not in that particular segment yet. It’s not trying to please everyone, it’s just trying to polish the offering for a particular subset of the market. I see this becoming more rather than less common.

Many have observed that Google is basically just like Apple, but for hosted software rather than hardware. Apple give you a specialised experience which is a combination of hardware and software, mainly so they can sell you some sexy premium hardware. They specialise in making that particular experience the best they can, they don’t try to be all things to all people at once, and it works for them. People notice them as a brand and associate certain things with them inherently – sleek hardware, intuitive interfaces etc. The same goes for Google – they’re known for their free online services and want you to gravitate towards the commercial services they provide either yourself, or your company through the well-understood principle of employees nudging their company to use the stuff they already like.

So it’s interesting to think about where Microsoft sits in this environment. They’re still obscenely profitable of course, more so than a specialist like Apple, but they’re also  increasingly perceived as the ‘dull’ option. On phones, the consumer is raving over the iPhone, and to a lesser extent Palm Pre and Android, while Windows smartphones are increasingly overlooked. Windows 7 is trying to shake things up with some new features, but when it comes down to it, Windows is a workhorse at heart, as is their other flagship, Office. That doesn’t mean they’re bad products – in fact being a decent workhorse for a vast range of uses is hard – but they’re not exactly exciting; you don’t look at a Microsoft product and desire it like you do when you look at the latest Mac laptops or an iPhone (or maybe that’s just me), nor do they get as much community buzz as Google Wave did (deserved or not). Now, given that most of Microsoft’s revenues come from Enterprise users (for whom ‘dull’ is often a desirable feature!) and PC bundles anyway, they aren’t really affected by consumer aspirations, so maybe this lack of a sexy brand is not an issue. Despite years of people saying Microsoft is due to be made irrelevant by Linux or OS X, and releasing a pretty undesirable version of one of their flagship products (Vista), their influence has not waned that much, although it has come down somewhat from what was a frankly unhealthy peak of dominance a few years back. But, nothing ever stays the same forever. Are people in the boardrooms at Microsoft worried that they don’t really have an ‘image’ that ordinary people can relate to positively? The Windows 7 adverts would suggest they do care about this enough to spend quite a lot of money on it, and to create such astoundingly cringe-worthy content as the Windows 7 Party Guides. I hate to think what cocktail of drugs those actors had to take to get them through that particular horror, or what counselling they will need in the aftermath.

But whatever, Microsoft would be right to be concerned about their image, which remains rather vague (mostly because MS seemingly tries to have its fingers in every pie just in case it misses something, but doesn’t excel in very many) . Regardless of all the lengthy and dehumanised procurement procedures, the general inertia which is present at the heart of every large organisation, the inherent resitance to change and dependence on paternalistic vendors that worms its way deep into IT departments; having large numbers of people desire your products on an individual level still matters. It might take a bunch of years to filter through, but that’s where the trends are, at the grass roots – eventually they will drag the enterprise kicking and screaming in that direction too. I’m sure Microsoft knows this, but so far hasn’t really got to grips with a genuine ‘identity’ that appeals to regular people. Arguably the 360 has done best at this, but it’s unlikely that there’s much of an image halo (sic) effect to Windows/Office there, in the same way that you get with the iPod/iPhone and the Mac. Microsoft don’t have much to worry about just yet, but like a trickle of water that carves a canyon eventually, it’s something they must be concerned about long term. Being a decent generalist just doesn’t make waves; it’s time to find a specific vision people can get excited about, then drop everything that’s unrelated to that and concentrate on doing it ridiculously well. Only then will people really know what Microsoft represents versus Apple or Google, or anyone else, and know whether they like that or not. Inertia can only take you so far before you need some more momentum, and that requires direction – which implies a specific direction, not in all general directions at once.

What a difference a few years can make. For a long time, Microsoft was seen as public enemy #1 of those who liked to promote, produce and consume open source (I’m deliberately not describing it as a ‘movement’ here – that implies political motivations which I assert that only a vocal minority have). It was entirely their own fault of couse; blustery, really quite bizarre tirades from the only two CEOs their company has ever had cemented their position as the McCarthy’s of the modern era. It wasn’t helped, of course, by extremists on the opposite end of the spectrum, but still – the way the company behaved in previous years has at times been utterly shameful.

The reason it wasn’t sustainable is that they started to lose the very people they’ve always done a pretty good job of nurturing – developers. Even reasonable, level headed developers who have few extremist tendencies but who could see the many benefits of open source  (I count myself among them) began to turn away from the company as they seemed hell-bent on protecting their vested interests using whatever means possible, and irrespective of the collatteral damage – mostly through lies and threats.

I developed my early career around the time that Microsoft was rising, with their software replacing the mainframes and minis that were so tricky to work with at times, and I really appreciated them for it. They made my life easier as a developer in the 90’s. In the new millennium though, when they started rattling sabres over open source, and trying to bind me and my products into ever more of a restricted, Microsoft-only environment, they did precisely the opposite. The notion that you could use their really nice tools, so long as you only targetted Windows & Office, and with constant posturing over whether using open source was ‘communism’, drove me and probably plenty of other developers in precisely the opposite direction.

For as long as Steve Ballmer is in charge, I’ll have a healthy amount of skepticism about whether Microsoft can really, genuinely change its stance at its core. Like Bill Gates before him, these are agressive 80’s-style businessmen who  I can never hope to understand or remotely trust. But what’s clear is that either he’s learned how out of step he is with his potential customers, or he has been forced by others in the company to accept a changing stance on open source.

2009 is for me the year that Microsoft became a regular citizen of the open-source environment. Sure, before that they set up Port25 and CodePlex, but these were mostly self-serving and didn’t necessarily demonstrate MS’s ability to play well with others, which is precisely what open source is about. What really changed in 2009 is that Microsoft began to use external open source, intentionally and unintentionally, and crucially played it squarely by the rules with little or no fuss. This is a very big deal.

One of the first steps was Visual Studio using jQuery, which is entirely sensible. Historically Microsoft has had a terrible tendency to reinvent the wheel unnecessarily, which ends up being more hassle for everyone. Re-use of mature components for everyone’s benefit is what open source is about.

This year though, Microsoft has issued code under the GPL, something I’m sure many people thought would never happen. Firstly there was contributing code to Linux for Hyper-V, and most recently they (unintentionally) used some GPL code in a USB/DVD boot tool for Windows 7, an issue that was raised by a third party but which on investigation Microsoft confirmed – leading them to commit to releasing the full code under the GPL to customers.

Of course, this is precisely what they are bound to do legally. But the fact that it is being resolved in an open and completely unemotive manner, in the same way that any other responsible company would deal with it, is quite significant. This is Microsoft, the company that said the GPL was anti-American and borderline communist – openly and contritely resolving a GPL issue in the correct way with no sleight-of-hand or posturing. I respect that a great deal.

Welcome back to the community Microsoft, it’s about bloody time. Congratulations to all the reasonable people inside the corporate beast who are finally managing to turn the supertanker. I really hope you convince Ballmer to retire soon though, he’s a relic of a bygone age and an impediment to the new image you’re trying to create.

Before 2009, I’d never set foot in Germany before; not for any particular reason, I just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. However, thanks to gracious invitations to conferences I’ve now been twice. In May I went to Stuttgart for FMX, and last week I went to Munich for Qt Developer Days.

It was an enjoyable conference, as always the best part is just meeting other delegates, the sessions themselves are merely the icing on the cake. I shared my presenting slot (in which I showed a couple of applications that use Qt and Ogre together) with two other open source veterans from projects which I have a huge amount of respect for: Bill Hoffman, CTO at Kitware and the founder of CMake (which of course we use in Ogre now, so it was great that I had chance to have quite a few discussions with Bill), and Jean-Baptiste Kempf, Chairman of VideoLAN which is of course in charge of the excellent VLC.

It was also nice (not to mention flattering and somewhat humbling) to have random people I’ve never met before spontaneously say nice things about Ogre. One of the major curiosities of open source is that you never really know quite how many people have encountered & used your software; you get a sampling of that through your community forums etc, but it’s also clear that that only represents a portion of your user base. On the day I was wearing my Ogre T-shirt I had a number of people who were more peripherally involved in the community but who had had a good experience with Ogre, and were more than happy to tell me about it. Definitely a good feeling.

Perhaps most surprising of all though was getting a sizable donation to Ogre in person from a community member while I was there (I won’t mention who just in case he’d rather not be identified, he can post in the comments if he’s happy to). We had what I thought was a theoretical discussion at one of the dinners about how much we get charged by PayPal for donations, and I’d said that although it’s undesirable, any kind of electronic payment mechanism has a cost (merchant accounts, bank transfers all come with some kind of charge). I jokingly said that the way you’d avoid the most charges would be mailing cash in an envelope, although that had it’s own risks. I thought nothing more of it, until I saw him the next day when he presented me with an envelope with a donation in it! Way more than I expected too, enough to push him straight to a Platinum sponsor. Turns out he’d just got his deposit back on a flat he had been renting, and decided to donate that to us in the absence of any code contributions, since Ogre had helped him at university and subsequently in getting a job. I have to admit, I was a little lost for words at that! His donation will definitely help cover the server running costs in the coming few months.

Back to the conference subject, Qt, the conference reinforced my opinion that it’s the best cross-platform UI system out there for C++ developers. It was great to see the range of applications that were being developed on it these days, including a coffee machine which was serving custom beverages in the dining area via a Qt interface. Obviously the Nokia acquisition has meant that they’re keen to move into more dynamic, touch-based interfaces too now, which will obviously power new phones in more interesting ways, but it was clear that they remained committed to a huge range of application targets. Well, except iPhone anyway, that was definitely the elephant in the room – occasionally mentioned but mostly avoided

Obviously Qt’s switch to LGPL this year will have a huge impact on adoption rates. One of the things that had concerned me though is that there’s a clause in the commercial license for Qt that requires you to decide between using the commercial license and the LGPL before you start developing. The reason given for this is that Qt is licensed on a per-developer basis, so if you could wait until deployment to choose the commercial license, you could scale back your team and pay less than you really should have done, which is why you have to decide up-front. I could understand this argument, but in my experience, perfect foresight is impractical and conditions can often change, so making a once-and-for-all choice before a line of code is written did not seem realistic in some cases. Also since the principle was that the entire team must use the same license, I was wondering about the practical implications of say, a commercial outfit leveraging some pre-written code by people using the LGPL version (such as QtOgre). Qt want to encourage greater community involvement (which was the reason for me being invited to the conference after all), so not allowing this seemed to go against the kind of broader adoption they were chasing.

To try to answer these questions, I went to the legal presentation and put this question to the speaker afterwards. Luckily, she mostly allayed my fears on these two issues. On the ‘circumstances change’ issue, the principle must remain that, because of the per-developer licensing, you should make your decision up-front, but if for whatever reason, and in good faith, conditions change (such as suddenly having to target a platform where LGPL is not practical), then some kind of agreement can be reached, such as by paying commercial fees for all developers historically on that project so it comes out the same as if you had opted for the commercial license originally. In addition, she didn’t think there would be a problem with community code re-use for commercial licensees provided this was mentioned during the commercial licensing process; she accepted that greater adoption is what they want, and community development inherently complicates the previous assumption that one team will be responsible for absolutely every aspect end-to-end.

So, a good conference overall. Now, I’m back to continue work on Ogre 1.7.