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.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 1:04 pm and is filed under ASF, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.