SteveStreeting.com

The SourceTree 1.2 launch sale is now over, and I thought I’d post some indicative results. I went for a fairly large discount of 40% over a full week, and some people I know commented to me along the lines of ‘what about all that money you’ll be losing on each sale?’.

I decided on a large discount because SourceTree 1.2 was a major update that I was actually quite proud of, so I wanted to get it in front of as many people as I could. I was also aware that there might be people who tried SourceTree before, but who decided it wasn’t for them, and I wanted to encourage these people to try it again, since I’d made pretty big strides in this version on the overall appearance of the app and the smoothness of the workflow, in addition to all the normal new features. The way to do this of course is to make it worth their while to do so, by offering a discount that really grabs their attention. A 20% discount probably wasn’t going to do that effectively, but 40%? That’s almost half price! It’s this sort of gut reaction I was looking to promote.

The other thing I was acutely aware of is that you have to be careful not to have too many sales. If you go on sale too often, people are going to start assuming that there’s a sale coming almost any time of year, so will avoid buying unless there’s a sale on. In my opinion, sales need to be infrequent, but big and attention-grabbing when they do happen.

So actually my goal for the sale wasn’t necessarily to make more money than usual, but to get more eyeballs on the new version, and more active users, which I hoped would then translate to more awareness and more sales further down the line, because satisfied customers are the best marketing resources you can ever have. Solid reasoning, but as it turned out, things went much better than I could have hoped, so in the end I actually achieved both at once.

So for those people who were wondering whether having a sale is worth it, my results are on the right, in fashionable infographic form

As I said above, what I was really looking for was to reach more people, and I certainly did that – with a 793% increase in units sold in the sale week, that’s about 2 months’ worth of new users in one week. And as you can see, in value terms it also ended up a considerable net positive even with the 40% discount – now of course I’m expecting sales to be more sluggish immediately following since the sale will have caused people to bring forward their purchase, but I’m pretty confident it’ll remain positive even with that compensating effect.

So why am I writing about this? Am I doing it to strut around flashing my ‘wad’ at people? No, and if I’d included the actual $ values you wouldn’t think that anyway – they’re fantastic news to me but they’re in the ‘I can keep doing this sort of thing for a living!’ range rather than the ‘I can buy a Ferrari tomorrow!’ range I’m writing it to hopefully provide a data point to other developers who, like me, are still learning about selling their wares online, and are wondering about what kind of affect a sale might have. I don’t know whether it will be exactly the same for you, and there are no doubt a number of variables involved, but this was my experience, and I’ve been very happy with it. Maybe it will help someone else pondering a similar decision…

Since I’m trying to spread this news as far and wide as I can, I might as well say it here too

Since the approval light just went green on the Mac App Store, I’m happy to announce the launch of SourceTree 1.2! In celebration, I’m having a crazy-bonkers 40% off sale just for one week, so get it while it’s hot!

There’s loads of things that are new or improved in this release, but here are the headlines:

• Support for GitHub, Bitbucket and Kiln APIs, so you can see your hosted projects inside SourceTree, clone from them, link them as remotes, and even create new projects if you want.
• Streamlined and polished user interface – I specifically dedicated a lot of extra time in this release on making SourceTree easier on the eyes, and to streamline the layout and workflows better.
• Performance - I thought SourceTree was already pretty fast, but I managed to find quite a few more places to trim the fat, and also parallelised more activities to make things feel more responsive. Everything feels snappier, and complex repositories benefit especially.
• New Sidebar - I had previously resisted the need to emulate iTunes here, but once I had implemented it, I had to admit that I was wrong, and in fact this worked great. Provides lots of shortcuts to navigating and operating on branches, tags and remotes.
• Stashing and Shelving - oft requested, now delivered
• Customise Git and Mercurial – you can now use your system Git / Mercurial instead of SourceTree’s standard versions (which have been updated), and enable additional Mercurial extensions (at your own risk).
• French and Japanese translations – local versions for our friends in far away (and not so far away) places, likely to be more to come in future. Big thanks to tuan_kuranes and mzch for their help with these two!
• And the rest – just lots of little refinements too numerous to list. Examples: copying text from the diff panel, ‘git commit –amend’ support, close branches in Mercurial, switch tracking branches in Git

It’s quite a big update – one user remarked to me that they’d normally expect developers to charge an upgrade fee for something like this, but like all other SourceTree updates this is free to existing customers. I have no plans for any paid upgrades for some time yet, I just want to keep making SourceTree better, and hope that more people come onboard. Maybe it’s my open source background, but I like to keep iterating and continually improving things, based on what I want to do (I’m a daily SourceTree user myself), and on what people tell me they’d like to see. SourceTree 1.2 certainly won’t be the last update by far

When I look back 6 months at SourceTree 1.0, it’s incredible how much better it is as a product now, both visually and functionally. I’ve learned a ton of things while I’ve been developing it, and I continue to learn more all the time, and I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing right now. Also, my wife Marie re-designed many of the icons for 1.2 (and I think you’ll agree they’re a lot nicer) – that was fun to do as a joint project, even if I am a picky ‘customer’

I hope you enjoy the new release!

We hear a lot about globalisation these days; how money, people and business move freely around the world (although that has had a few teeny problems of late) and how countries must therefore compete in that market for investment, and ultimately jobs and economic success in general. Much of this is true and common sense, however, I do object to the tone and emphasis that is used whenever this argument is made. There seems to be a preference of late for attracting external players to flirt with local economies for as long as possible before they get bored and move somewhere cheaper, rather than focussing on organic growth of businesses from within the existing local entrepreneurial base. You can do both of course, but in recent years I’ve observed that here and in some other places in the world, the balance is strongly in favour of the short-term plan of courting of large, external players, versus the long-term prospects of ‘growing your own’.

Of course, inward investment is a good thing, but too often this investment isn’t in new local businesses, it’s simply about grafting a globally mobile business to the local economy for a while, usually as a result of some kind of sweetener (a tax break, a public private investment, etc).  It’s a ‘quick fix’, injecting money into the economy quickly (perhaps most importantly, within the time frame of a politician’s tenure), but when viewed at a macro scale it’s also very much a temporary one which can be pulled out at almost any time.

Global companies don’t even hide their temporary commitment; in fact, quite the opposite – they are always exploiting this to lobby governments into making changes which favour them, the line is usually “You’re dependent on us now, so you’d better keep things attractive for us (subtext: at the expense of others if necessary), or we walk.”. You see this all the time – the shrinking of the UK games industry because the UK doesn’t  have tax breaks like Canada, and here in my local jurisdiction the introduction of a tax regime which shifts the tax burden to ordinary people and away from companies in order to appease the financial services industry. In the end, being so dependent on such fickle and demanding ‘friends’ is not the greatest of strategies. At times, it can almost be a protection racket – “Nice economy you’ve got here, it would be a shame if something happened to it” (see this Monty Python sketch).

Every economy needs a bedrock of locally-driven, independent entrepreneurship, made up of of people who do business in that economy because they want to, or because it’s their home, not because someone bribed them to bring their money here and are constantly looking for the next sweetener. There are countless success stories of businesses that went global from a local, organic base, such as Ben and Jerry’s and Specsavers, and these companies have kept their attachment to their origins. Such businesses are ‘stickier’ and less fickle, and I’m willing to bet they require only a tiny fraction of the overall cost (once you count tax breaks, subsidies, and other policy changes / deals) to attract and retain than an equivalently sized global player. It takes more time to get there, but when it does, it’s far less likely to be going anywhere.

I’m not suggesting that we somehow cling on to protectionism, nor do I deny the benefits of globalisation. What I am saying is that in my experience, the balance of policy making is way off in favour of the global players at the expense of others. Maybe if politicians weren’t so easily impressed by financiers in expensive suits with their short-term promises of wealth injection, and learned instead to see the long-term sustainable potential in that garage-dwelling startup, they’d be better at not skewing the economic landscape towards the ‘floaters’ rather than the ‘stayers’.

It’s actually why I shake my head when I see people claiming that the UK needs tax breaks for games companies, to compete with Canada and other places. Personally, I think that even if you gave a tax break to the companies that are relocating away from the UK because of this, they’d just be asking for something else next year. Where does the bribery end? I think that games companies that only go where the tax breaks are, are probably not worth trying to hold on to. I sincerely hope that the talented people who are sadly left out of a job because of this are able to start up or join independent game businesses of their own, and dare I say are likely to be a damn sight more creative in that environment too. The UK games industry has lost much of its individuality in recent years, and who knows, this process might well regain some of that.

So I guess my main point is that bribing and paying protection money is not a sustainable way to run an economy. Sounds obvious really?

Watching the ebbs and flows of the game industry is simultaneously inspiring and outright depressing. As is usual for this stage in a console generation, we’re at the ‘consolidation point’ (pun unintentional)  - where the tech is pretty well understood, even if it is starting to look a bit dated compared to even a modest PC (how much hassle AA is on this console generation is a case in point), but that at least developers can crank out content in a more efficient fashion. This has led to some darned good games.

What’s depressing is what’s happening to the ‘official’ download channels – which were a bastion of independent content a year or two ago, and now are turning more and more into just another channel for the same mainstream developers & publishers we see at retail. XBLA has been the trend maker here, it was first to really embrace and promote downloadable games to a ‘core’ market, and has done extremely well. Now, however, we have a limit of 2 games per week, and all too often those 2 slots are being assigned to either major developers (Shadow Complex, Alien Breed Evo) or shovelware ports with brand recognition but little quality or innovation (I’m looking at Taito in particular: Bubble Bobble and Qix remakes were incredibly lazy, uninspiring affairs). It’s very clear that the team behind choosing which developers are published in XBLA has changed in recent years, and not for the better from my perspective. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with Shadow Complex and Alien Breed Evo, but if they’re using up the slots it means that publishing route is rapidly being cut off for small developers who are big on ideas and talent, but short on funds and established brands. Alien Breed Evo’s budget was supposedly around $2.5m for goodness sakes – although it’s looking like that’s going to backfire anyway since sales have been poor. Trials HD, ‘Splosion Man and Peggle are pretty much the only games from small studios with modest budgets that I can think of that made a splash on XBLA in 2009 – the rest just read like a whos who of regular retail channels. Indeed many developers who have had games published on XBLA are no longer welcome there, such as PomPom (interview) and Llamasoft. Clearly the message is ‘win big, or get your coat’. This isn’t the right environment for an indie scene to flourish, where experimentation and mistakes are part of the process.

Yes, I know there’s XBL ‘Indie Games’ but that’s the absolute opposite end of the spectrum, hobbled with a niche development environment that’s incompatible with the most established dev libraries and every other platform a developer might want to deploy on (barring PC), and so far almost totally lacking any way for a decent game to effectively ‘rise above the noise’, except via external review sites like XNPlay, which doesn’t work at all for targetting the majority of game players with information.  It’s just not a very good target for those I would call ‘serious indies’ and actually acts as a false argument for not opening primary download channels more; there’s nothing wrong with the concept, it’s just implemented completely wrong.

PSN got started later so has been earlier in the curve of promoting independent content, but they’re going that way too. I guess they’re all just ‘following the money’, and the games industry remains obsessed with hits because of its current top-heavy model. I’d hoped that the downloadable content channels would promote an equivalent to low-budget and art-house cinema, where content can survive and make a profit for the creators, without necessarily having to be the Biggest Thing Ever(tm), encouraging experimentation. But, the giant flaw in this plan is that independent cinema is able to be published and consumed anywhere – while most games consumers remain shackled to console platform holders, who just want to publish a limited number of the very biggest hits, everything else not being worth their time or risking ‘distracting’ the customer with choice. If you’ve read my blog before, you know my opinion of the effectiveness of closed platforms in the long term when it comes to broadening and deepening a medium, but I’ll say it again – closed platforms are bad for the industry in the grand scheme of things. Games will never be as big as film until this changes, they might compete on the blockbuster level, but that’s far, far from the whole story. But, until we’re further along the lifecycle of games when hardware and delivery becomes mostly invisible,  the vested interests aren’t going to allow that to change for a little while yet.

You really need to go to the iPhone/iPod Touch for more prolific indie content these days. But, how long will that last?

I honestly don’t know why platform holders find it so hard to manage an open publishing strategy. All you need is systems that:

• Allow users to rank content; and nominate ‘trusted reviewers’ such as those from major game review sites
• Allow wide marketing opportunities – both in-system and cross-site (such as to xbox.com, where you can buy in-browser too)
• Robust searching, on keywords, categories, user ratings, friends recommendations etc
• Cross-promotion, aka the ‘You might also like…’ lists

Hell, if Amazon can create a compelling buying experience with millions of products across a diverse range of departments, why on earth do platform holders think a console user can’t handle more than 2 game choices a week? It’s hugely patronising, and says more about the inadequacy of the platform to manage larger amounts of content effectively than about any limit on what consumers are willing to peruse. Saying “we can’t sell as effectively if we have more product available” actually means “we suck at organisation”. This argument stacks up at retail, where there’s a limited amount of shelf space, and customers don’t want to wander around a massive warehouse or to squint at shelves of tightly packed boxes looking for something, but not when you have unlimited shelf space and a cloud full of computers to index it in the blink of an eye for you (and make suggestions), and where a marketing campaign or friend recommendation can bring a customer instantly to the point of sale with the use of a simple link.

For Christ’s sakes platform holders, wake up to the opportunities of the channel. Stop being blinded by what works at physical retail, it’s really not the same. There are people out there already doing it leagues better than you (see pretty much any of the e-commerce leaders), and putting your fingers in your ears and saying it can’t possibly work  is both ignorant and doing a massive disservice to both customers and content creators.

So, I’ve been a little quieter than usual since the new year, and that’s because I’ve been in  a rather reflective mood as I plan out how I’m going to spend my time in 2010. That’s right – planning! Talk about the final frontier

Basically, as you may have gleaned from my previous post, I’ve been looking to make some significant changes to the way I do things in 2010. I spent 2009 reeling from a back injury and trying to figure out how to deal with that given that I’m self-employed (ie I don’t get paid when I’m not working, regardless of the reason), and a leader of an open source project (with the inherent time requirements that comes with). This meant working out on the fly how to stay afloat financially, and still keeping my own interests and open-source plates spinning, without slipping back into the ‘permanent voluntary crunch mode’ style which triggered my back problems. I can’t stress enough how difficult that transition has been for me – it’s not like anyone was forcing me to work/live that way, I did it because I wanted to, but then it suddenly had to stop. When you invest so much of your time and perceived identity in something, backing away from it is very, very hard.

Of course the economic climate wasn’t great either, meaning I spent a lot of time jumping around between many small projects, leading to more overhead dealing with admin & business relations. I ended up just going almost month-to-month on-demand, not  planning very much and just being grateful to be able to work a decent amount at all – which given how unwell I was at the start of the year was definitely something to be glad about. But, now I’m back on my feet and pretty confident of my future health again (within reason – I’m not going to be bungee jumping any time soon!), I’m ready to start being more pro-active again and to map out some plans.

One thing is for sure, there’s no going back to how I used to do things. My days of saying ‘yes’ to almost everything and being at the keyboard until past midnight most days, and most of the weekend, are gone forever. I don’t regret doing it, despite the pain it ended up causing me, because OGRE wouldn’t be here otherwise and I learned a vast amount and had a ton of fun – but I’ll leave that to the under-35s in future; have fun guys From now on, I’m being ruthless and somewhat selfish about what I work on, and concentrating on things that maximise my personal love-growth-cash triangle. It means I’m passing on a lot more projects, and concentrating far more on things that are strategically significant to me, rather than anyone else.

I’m still planning to lead OGRE, so long as the community is happy for me to do so, but by necessity I’m stepping back a bit to let other people take more responsibility where they want to, and to refocus my time on mentoring and advisory roles rather than trying to be everywhere at once. We have some great people in the team and in the wider community, and I hope our MIT license will foster even more in future. Both I and the community have gotten used to perceiving me as the ‘go to guy’ in the first instance, with responsibility for pretty much everything, but in practice for some time now it’s been very much a team & community effort, just one that I happen to lead (and financially support where needed). In fact one of the things I’m quite proud of is the way so many others have picked up on the way I do things, and taken things forward themselves in a way that I wholly approve of. That’s open source in action, and I’m glad to be part of it, even if I can no longer have my fingers in absolutely every pie with an OGRE symbol on it

Here’s to 2010 anyway. It’s going to be different, but change is good.

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?

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 read with some interest Matt Asay’s blog on TWiki, and what has happened over there as the company associated with the open-source project has basically decided to ‘reorganise’ everything, it appears in order to make itself more attractive to venture capitalists.

To be honest, I really don’t understand the motivation at all. All open source projects live or die by the strength of their community, and to suddenly break from it in the interests of attracting investment is crazy. Personally, I’ve never wanted to take VC money if I can help it – I’d prefer to run a small, self-funded and organically growing ship that I can stay in control of, and which I can apply my own brand of ethics to in balance with the need to make a living. Balancing open source and commercial necessity (we all have to eat after all) is tough, and it’s very different to running a regular proprietary software business, so you really can’t apply the same rules without undermining the very basis of the business.

Unfortunately open source poster-child examples like Ubuntu don’t help in many ways. Ubuntu manages to do everything the ‘right’ open source way while still having gazillions of dollars to spend on premises, staff, servers etc – but that’s only because it’s backed by an interested billionnaire who doesn’t really care how long it takes to turn a profit (and probably wouldn’t be too fussed if it never did). So in some ways Ubuntu makes it hard for others because it’s often held up as an example of how things should be done, when in fact almost no-one else can afford to do it that way, unless they can find a billionnaire of their own. Perhaps that leads to cases like TWiki for some projects, where ‘Ubuntu envy’ leads them to chase investment, but at the detriment of the reason they exist in the first place.

All I can say is that this will never happen to Ogre while I’m in charge. I obviously have to seek commercial opportunities related to Ogre, but I have a very deep line in the sand drawn many moons ago that I will never cross. At times people have asked me ‘what would happen if Ogre got acquired?’ – and I have to patiently explain to them that even if I wanted that to happen (and I don’t), it’s actually not possible in a traditional sense, since my company doesn’t own all the code. It owns a lot of it for sure, but the rest is community-contributed and licensed by TKS based on the contributor agreements – which in our case don’t ask for copyright assignment, just permission to use & relicense. This means that no-one could come along and ‘buy it up’, or at least not in the traditional sense. They could buy the domain from me I suppose, and the rights that TKS has, but could not fundamentally change the licensing conditions without approaching the contributors for permission. It’s commercially resticting, but I also see it as a key factor in reassuring the community about the intentions of my company.

When it comes down to it, in many ways having this restriction there is unnecessary – even if I was able to ‘sell’ Ogre, or suddenly change the licensing, I would be stupid to do it, because it would immediately destroy the community, which is what has made it great. Someone would fork a new project from it, and with a bit of time, that would become the ‘standard’ version. There might be some opportunity to ‘milk’ the codebase with custom commercial versions for a little while, but it wouldn’t last. The whole idea is self-defeating in the medium to long-term, as TWiki.net will probably discover shortly.

I’ve talked about business models and open source before, and that it can be necessary for companies like mine to mix in some proprietary aspects sometimes (e.g. optional add-ons) to make ends meet. However, maintaining the absolute integrity of the central open source project and its community at all times is absolutely vital. That’s the heart of it, and any business destabilises that at its absolute peril.

I’m here in Sweden again for the rest of the week, working for an interesting client who is making a sizeable investment in creating a long-term strategy on Ogre, which is obviously a good thing. It’s a little under the radar for the moment so I’ll leave it at that until a more appropriate time

Luckily my back held up for the trip, despite carting luggage and 3 flights with fairly small connection windows in between. I was really sore this morning, but I didn’t snap in half so that’s an overall positive.

I had to pass through Manchester airport this time, which was in many ways better than going via London and having to switch between Gatwick and Heathrow. I used to travel through Manchester every other week a few years back, either on my way to Dublin or to get into Manchester itself, but I can’t believe the place is still being renovated – it was last time I was there too.

Bizarre experiences while travelling:

• Watching a woman trailing about 100 metres of wool as she wandered through Manchester terminal – a ball of it had fallen out of her bag without her noticing and made it look like she was trying not to lose her way back
• A motion-activated recording on the entrance to the baggage reclaim that went off literally every 15 seconds as people passed it, explaining the very same thing over and over and over again. I was a hair’s breadth away from picking up the nearest fire extinguisher and smashing the speaker into tiny little pieces before it told me not to forget my baggage for the 376th time (after all, I had heard it this many times precisely because I was still waiting for that baggage she kept banging on about)
• Escaping from a labyrinth of booze and perfume – Manchester airport’s new layout involves a sign saying ‘Gates’ with an arrow that just leads into a sprawling mass of duty free perfume and alcohol stores. Sure most airports have these, but other airports at least have a ‘corridor’ around the outside or through the middle that leads to where you want to go (i.e. the plane) – not so here, you literally can’t see the exit, it’s just a chaotic maze with assistants hovering around every corner. Eventually I managed to find my way out, and without a single bottle of gin or Yves St Laurent. Lucky escape.
• As I was boarding my final plane of the day, the wife of a couple who were directly in front of me in the aisle suddenly started projectile vomitting everywhere. Literally spraying all over the place like she was auditioning for a part in the next Exorcist remake. Luckily her husband was in the way otherwise it could have been a Mr Creosote incident for me too. Nasty. This delayed my final hop while the poor cleaners got called in to deal with it.

I’m back at the weekend, anyway.

Like most people I’ve been following the current economic news with a mixture of morbid entertainment and mild trepidation. I’m not likely to be out of a job soon (my employer and I are on very good terms), but inevitably my work is part of the global economy, so I can’t expect to be completely unaffected.

There are a few interesting lines of thought in the blogosphere that I thought I’d share with you. Open source and related business models weren’t really around in any great quantity during the last big recession, so what precisely will happen in this area is subject to some speculation.

A Boon?

On the one hand, there’s the argument that when money is tight, companies will be more likely to investigate less high-profile, cheaper alternatives to the usual IT purchasing they do, which actually means that open source software actually stands to do better. In the good times, it’s easy to justify buying the majority of your technology from one very large vendor (Oracle, Microsoft, IBM etc) because it’s ‘easy’ – everything has a better chance of working together out of the box, you can expect common terminlogy and tools, that kind of thing. However, when funds get tight, people inevitably start examining all these things in much greater detail than they did before, searching for a budget to cut. There is an argument that says that staff are the most costly resource, and therefore if a suite of technology is familiar and easy (but more expensive), those costs will be recovered in staff efficiencies. However, there’s a problem with this argument – even if you accept that expensive proprietary software is easier to use than open source software, which is not always the case, savings in staff efficiency are non-tangible, compared to licensing and annual support costs which are very much tangible. Cashflow is also a big deal in almost any company, and the open source model of ‘use now, pay later (maybe)’  is highly attractive. And, when it comes down to it and your CIO needs to cut the budget, I’m sure you’d rather he/she cut the license/support contract expenditure rather than your job. That also makes sense for companies too – when the recession ends re-skilling is a pain in the ass, it’s much better to hang on to your good staff and save money elsewhere.

So in fact open source projects and the companies that provide products and services around them may actually be one of the few winners in a downturn. That’s certainly the impression I’m getting from bigger open source companies, and in fact even I have seen a modest upturn in business in the last month. It’s too early to tell whether this is a trend or just a coincidence, but I can hope.

A Drought?

Another opinion is that as the economy gets tougher, and people start to lose their jobs, they will start becoming more ruthless about earning money, and will stop contributing so much for free to open source projects, and to other volunteer activities. This is the view put forward by Andrew Keen – that the culture of ‘free’ only works during a boom, and that that will affect numerous Web 2.0 companies, open source projects and user-contributed sites like Wikipedia.

Personally I think the trouble with Keen’s argument is that he fails to acknowledge the widely different types of ‘free’ contribution / project, and the wide array of motivators people have for being involved. I can definitely see that in a downturn, companies that have significant burn rates and are built on the ‘attract people by the million now, figure out how to pay for it later’ will finally have to undergo significant reality checks. I’m all for this – the days of companies like Facebook attracting stupendously highly capitalisations without having anything close to a viable business model should be finally over, and not a moment too soon. Twitter have announced that they’re going to ‘find’ a business model next year – right, good luck with that.

However, the viability of these money-pit Web 2.0 companies is a completely different matter to the more organic open source projects and companies out there. I’m sure those that have grown their communities gradually and sensibly, rather than on the back of some ‘get rich quick later’ scheme, will be entirely unaffected by an economic downturn, because the communities are made up of people who want to be there. Sure, there will be cases where a community member is there only because of their current job / project, and the demise of that may cause them to cease being involved, but I’m confident that’s not a huge number of people. And besides, those leaving because of economic conditions may well be compensated for by the people that lose their jobs using open source involvement as a good way to network, keep their skills sharp, and to build a portfolio / reference work which they can use when obtaining their next employment.

Overall, although a recession is never a good thing, I think open source and related businesses are in a position to come out of it stronger, rather than weaker. Open source is no longer a pipe-dream – I remember having an argument with my (then) boss in 2000 about the viability of running some core functions on Linux instead of spending money on more Windows servers (with the inherent upgrade requirements, licenses etc); his opinion at the time was that Linux and open source were always going to be amateur and not ready for prime-time, and that the only sensible option was to buy into more Microsoft tech. He thought I was crazy to suggest that something non-proprietary might be viable for business – I challenged him that in 5 years he’d be proven wrong, and I kinda wonder whether he ever acknowledged that I had a point. There are many real, viable options in open source, and even Microsoft acknowledges this now, despite years of ranting and FUD about it from their blustering executives. When we come out of this recession, I think the scales will have tipped even further towards open source as a core component in the IT strategy of many companies.