SteveStreeting.com

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.

David Heinemeier Hansson is famous for being the guy that invented Ruby on Rails and running 37Signals; I  have mixed feelings about Rails personally (great for some things, not so great for others, but then that applies to pretty much every technology), but this presentation he did on making money as a tech startup is very good indeed - insightful yet very amusing.

He presents in an online context for the most part but as he says himself, the principles apply to all kinds of product. It also dovetails in nicely with what I was saying a few days ago about open source and business, in that there are similar arguments about not believing the hype we’re often sold by high-profile business news stories.


Found via Matt Asay.

Bruce Byfield wrote an interesting article (discovered via Matt ‘Alfresco’ Asay’s blog, which should be required reading for anyone in this field) about the sometimes unsteady alliance between open source and business that, on the whole, I agreed with - within a given context. I do think, however, that his context was weighted towards the larger players in market that are fusing open source with business opportunities though, and wanted to share some of my experiences and conclusions from the perspective of a more individual player in the business.

Apologies for the length of this article, I had a lot to say

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m finally back at home and beginning to return to normal, trying to iron out the wrinkles in my sleep cycles. I’ve done 12 flights in the last month (I’m trying not to think of my carbon footprint, although at least I rarely drive back home) with a time zone range of 10 hours and I’m certainly feeling it - I’ll be happy to be settled in one place again for a while!

Siggraph was fine, very hectic with some long hours on the booth and some very late evenings at the office - as such I was lucky if I got to check my email for 10 minutes in the day, never mind trying to cope with the OGRE forum. I managed to meet up with a number of people from various companies in between working for my client which was great (such as AMD, NVIDIA, IDV, FMX), and even got recognised a couple of times by people I didn’t know which was kinda cool. On a personal level it was also great to finally meet Andres Carrera, aka Lioric, oFusion creator and long-time OGRE community member & GSoC mentor, who turned out to be a really nice bloke who was a lot of fun to be around. He doesn’t like to travel much and getting a US Visa from his home in Argentina is stupidly difficult so I was really happy to get the rare opportunity to meet him. I was also very happy to run into Sean Morrison from BRL-CAD and BZFlag again, which I always seem to do whenever I’m in the US!

It might have been nice to have some leisure time in LA, but there really wasn’t any time prior to or during the show, and I literally went straight from the closing of the show in the afternoon to the airport for my overnight flight, because I needed to get back in time for my cousin’s wedding yesterday. Luckily I made it, although a combination of sleep deprivation and jet lag meant I needed precision doses of coffee and Red Bull throughout the day

So, I plan to catch up with my email today and perhaps brave the Ogre forums tomorrow, although ‘catching up’ with those is probably impossible - I’ll skim and try to pick out anything important. My focus for the coming week will mostly be OgreSpeedTree and getting Ogre 1.6 even closer to RC status. The Google Summer of Code also finishes this week so I’ll be on hand for that if any organisation assistance is needed.

Feel free to whistle the very appropriate but highly copyrighted tune that you’re no doubt already thinking of

I’ve wedged another business trip rather hurriedly into my schedule, sandwiched betwixt (oh, you gotta love that word) our recent holiday and my impending departure for Siggraph in about 10 days. It came up at really short notice and I didn’t know if I was going to be able to fit it around my existing commitments, but luckily I was able to organise it to happen over this weekend, which just about worked (although I still have to leave early Friday). This will be my first trip to Sweden, specifically Gotland, so I’m looking forward to it, although my time there will be short and I’ll spend an enormous amount of time in transit. It’s a bit of a tortuous route, requiring 3 flights and a coach in each direction (Guernsey-Gatwick-Heathrow-Stockholm-Gotland), plus a short transfer to Heathrow Terminal 5 on the way out (uh-oh). I can’t really complain though, living on an island myself I know all about having to shuttle through onshore international hubs, you just learn to live with it - but I have it at both ends this time!

Should be good anyway - with luck some business and/or future partnerships will come out of it, but at the very least it should be an interesting trip.