The Goldfish Chronicles

[Publishing a draft from a few months back. Internet time is lovely - in the meantime SourceForge bought Ohloh and not Google as I predicted. Given that I was predicting it would be bought by Google Code as such, I’m feeling nicely prescient here]

How the Open Space became

Nathan Yandell - Year 12 - OSS101

In the last decade, the 10s, Open Source development has undergone yet another revolution.  The bazaar has truly come of age and the last Open Source cathedrals are torn down - there are no more ‘committers’.  Looking back, it’s easy to see how we got here - the only oddity is why it took so long.

The first step was the surprising popularity of Linus Torvalds’ Git project.  Written for the now gone Linux operating system, it took off, added recognition to existing tools and was emulated by others.  It’s unlikely to cause argument to say that without Git we would not have had dSVN.

The second step came when Google having bought Ohloh, decided to donate the company to the Open Source Initiative and signed Google Code up as the first user of its shared identity pool. Sourceforge and Codeplex soon followed - eventually even the hold outs at the FSF, Mozilla, Eclipse and Apache joined the pool.

Sourceforge’s ‘branch a non-sourceforge project’ feature made a high noise but low impact entrance - but over time it built in popularity and with the other open cathedrals following suit the Open Space was born allowing projects to be copied from one repository to another.

To an outsider - our new world looked like chaos. URLs to codebases were as fleeting as your parent’s tweets. Reputations were built up and torn down, code patches danced into view only to vanish into history. More worryingly, legal arguments between projects increased. We saw amendments to the popular Open Source licenses that defined the list of licenses which may be used on a patch branch, and trademark enforcement was used to keep terrible old software from being destroyed by this week’s new up and coming patch branch.

This all changed with the release of the Creative Commons Trademark License (Swaziland). Connected to changes in trademark law in Swaziland, it allowed for trademarked brands while enforcing that product names must be openly useable. A dusty project such as Firefox saw a name change to Mozilla Iceweazel - at long last able to build on the success of its descendants. GNU Java finally gained competitors in IBM Java and Codehaus Java, which led to much confusion in the aging Java development community.

Now I can take a project, fork it and apply my official IETF Brand name by signing the product’s Ohloh certificate with my personal Ohloh brand certificate. As a member of the OpenLoonies I can also apply the certificate for the OpenLoonie brand (”The most trusted brand in Open Source”) - once I’ve had 3 +1s from other loonies. Within an hour I can release my bugfix as OpenLoonie Lucene and it can start building up its trust rating.

How people used software before the community evolved the trusted open software system - my generation will never understand.  It must have been like flying your car blind.

Reading the BBC’s article on Getting inside a downloader’s head and one of the bits that sticks out is the popular advert which points out that you wouldn’t steal a car etc, so why are you downloading a film?

The biggest miss imo is that the alternative is not answered. If I own a car, I can sell it, rent it, lend it, show it off in public, customize it, rip it apart and build a motorbike from its parts. Or at least I could - I bet that nowadays there are patents in some black box in the engine and I’m not allowed to reuse it for a different use. Anyway… when I buy a DVD (or CD or audio book) I am buying something that I don’t own, instead I am paying for a license to it. I can’t do any of the above. That’s the mind of the downloader - why do I have to buy a DVD, then go online and buy the digital version with DRM v1, then go online and buy the digital version with DRM v2, then buy the same but for the iPhone, then…. Basically if the vendor starts to milk their customer, the customer starts to find their own milk.

What’s the effect?

With music I started to listen to the CDs I had. One of these days I need to buy a tape -> mp3 converter, but they’re not cheap. Generally I feel morally right to download any song I have on tape, the claim that it was a lower tech is weak as I paid the same amount then for the tape than I would pay today for the CD (inflation included). I wouldn’t be stunned to find out that I paid more. I’ve done it for a few, but a) it’s painful to find such things (or I don’t know how) and b) I don’t have that many tapes that I care about. My new music is either a couple of new CDs at christmas (and that is the limit of the CDs I get) or the occasional download from mp3.amazon.com. Usually for the case where I like a song but not the band. The Pogues for example. Apologies to fans of that band, but after getting their best of album, I immediately disliked everything but their poppy New York song. Same for the Undertones iirc. Lots of songs that underwhelmed me, and I’d have much preferred to have spent less on the one song I liked.

Movies. I don’t buy a lot of these. Mostly it’s DVDs for the kids. The Region thing has me very pissed off. We go to the UK, they see something they like, we come back to the US and you can’t get it in Region 0 or Region 1. Goto the store and the sellers have no clue Regions even exist. Sure I can research DVDs more to find one that can be unlocked, but given that I use an XBox and am not willing to risk its clunky old hardware with my soldering attempts, I have to find some other way to get the Flumps off of the DVD. I have some DVDs that are simply bricks right now. So mind of the consumer… stop ripping me off with your Region evilness.

And let’s not mention Disney and their “It’s our copyright, but we’re not going to sell it right now because you’ll pay more in 2 years for the ultra-double-super-amazing 80th anniversary edition”. Copyright hostage taking. If something is out of print, then it should be out of copyright. Which is a nice statement and it would be interesting to see how modifications apply. If Disney release Cinderalla 2, is that enough to keep Cinderalla in copyright? Or would it be more like Star Wars: Digital Edition with ‘Han shooting second because heroes have to be whiter than white’ keeping the original Star Wars edition in copyright? When does a modification stop being a modification. Presumably that’s a “I’ll know it when I see it” judge decision.