Understanding Nothing

It seems like it should be quite the showdown. In the one corner we have one of Northern California’s “Top 100 intellectual property attorneys”, who has been published in CIO magazine advising software companies to build or purchase a portfolio of software patents, who has recently assisted a Global Fortune 100 company in “establishing an intellectual asset management program to exploit its patent portfolio”, and who lists Sony as a representative client.^{1 2} In the other corner we have the General Counsel of the Open Source Institute, the body responsible for stewardship of the Open Source Definition, and the certification of Open Source licenses.³

To many in the FLOSS world these two seem like they should be mortal enemies, but, of course, they’re both the same person: Mark F Radcliffe. Of course being pro-software patents isn’t necessarily incompatible with Open Source, but I’m a little surprised that I can’t find many people commenting on this, particularly when, as Larry Rosen (Radcliffe’s predecessor at the OSI) has pointed out: “as near as I can determine, there isn’t a lot of enthusiasm in the open source community for software patents anywhere in the world.”⁴

What is more pertinent to me right now however is Radclffe’s other strange dual role. Michael Tiemann, president of the OSI, in his recent well publicised vow to crack down on companies that abuse the term “Open Source” noted that licenses such as the SugarCRM License are not only NOT OPEN SOURCE LICENSES (emphasis his), but are a flagrant abuse of labelling from companies that think they can get away with it.⁵ What Tiemann doesn’t note here is that the author and/or proponent of the majority of these “Attribution Licenses” (including SugarCRM’s) is none other than Mark F Radcliffe. This particular conflict has been commented on before, and Radcliffe has explained that he recuses himself from such discussions when they come before the OSI.⁶ But whilst this was a strange enough position in the past, when the Attribution issue was merely the “primary issue” before the OSI Board⁷, it seems to be even more untenable now that the OSI have vowed to clamp down on the very “abuse” that their own General Counsel is actively promoting in his professional capacity.

Should be interesting to see what happens next…

A lot of people have been asking me recently what I’ve been up to for the past few
months, and when they’re going to get to see all the interesting stuff we’ve been up to with SocialCalc. Hopefully I’ll finally have something to point to in the next couple of days, but I’m embarrassed to say that it’s not going to be particularly interesting to many people yet, because the bulk of my time recently hasn’t been spent on making the product better, per se, but fighting over its licensing. In fact there’s been so much internal argument about license issues that there have even been calls from some staff to extend the RSS functionality of the wiki to be able to just block any update that contains the word ‘license’!

Several people have asked me what the big deal is, and whether we’re not just expending a lot of energy arguing over semantics. But yesterday’s post by Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Institute (OSI), spells out in more detail what’s at stake as the definition of “Open Source” gets eroded further and further. Although Socialtext aren’t mentioned by name in it, I think they may well be the “vendor [who] has pursued both lines of attack”. The official company position, as spelled out recently by Ross, our CEO, is that “we will refer to our products as open source as the STPL is consistent with OSD“.

This has caused significant problems for me (and indeed the entire SocialCalc team, but I don’t want to speak for them here, and they’ll have to tell their own stories) as I personally think the STPL is a terrible license, and certainly not in keeping with the spirit of Free Software or Open Source. I believe Socialtext does want to do the right thing, and I’m going to help with the process of trying to create a better license, but we couldn’t keep on waiting for that to happen to actually make progress with SocialCalc.

So, after a lot of great work by Dan, Casey, and Liz we finally managed to find a way forward. We’re still going to release SocialCalc 1.1 under the STPL until we have a better license. I don’t know that the official company line will be, but no-one on the team is going to claim that it’s truly Open Source. [Update: Ross isn't sure either]

However, we’ve also got agreement that the underlying core spreadsheet functionality can be released under the (newly approved) Artistic License 2.0, which is accepted as Free/Open by both the OSI and FSF, and is compatible with pretty much every other FLOSS license around. This includes the entire calculation engine, as well as the parts responsible for displaying and editing sheets. This isn’t quite enough to be a full application in its own right, and doesn’t include any of the publishing functionality, or the site/host/user management, but it is enough for people to embed working spreadsheets into other applications that already take care of all that. The Artistic License allows us to be as wildly promiscuous, integrating not only with GPL applications, but also ones that wouldn’t be compatible if we had gone for GPL (e.g. MPL). And we’re keen to work with people who want to do just that. The initial split between AL and STPL is a little clumsy, and it’ll take us a while to tidy everything up. We don’t even have a separate download yet for the ‘core’ that someone could easily work with. And there’s certainly no documentation of it all. But we can tidy that all up as we move forward, and we’re not going to hold up the release any longer.

We’re just waiting for the final go-ahead and then we’ll flick the switch to release. Ross has been hugely supportive of this approach (and even thanked us for having refused to take “no” for an answer) and many thanks are due to him for that. I’m not sure we can change his entire philosophy just yet, but hopefully we can use this to show that doing proper Open Development of truly Free Software can work in a business setting. And hopefully I can now get on with helping turn SocialCalc into something great.

Feel free to follow our progress on the mailing list or blog if you’re interested in how we get on or (even better) want to play along.

In his latest post, Joel explains how creating great software involves finding, and fixing, the tens of thousands of tiny things that should be better. The unfortunate side effect he describes is familiar to all who know me: “It takes a mindset of constant criticism to find them. You have to reshape your mind until you’re finding fault with everything. Your significant others go nuts. Your family wants to kill you.”

As an example (as if one were needed), just yesterday I was ranting to Casey about the Ikea website. Take a moment to visit it, and see if you can guess what drove me mad about it.

I’ll give a clue. It’s in this list:

• Norge (Norway)
• Österreich (Austria)
• Россия (Russia)
• Polska (Poland)
• Portugal (Portugal)
• România (Romania)
• Schweiz | Suisse | Svizzera (Switzerland)

Read more…

Almost anyone who lives outside the US but who has had to deal with US-based websites will have stories of hate about registration forms that complain that your state/zipcode/phone number is invalid, solely because it falls squarely outside the sphere of understanding of the parochial programmer who created the form.

When I still lived in Northern Ireland, I occasionally encountered sites that went one better than this, by giving me no valid option for the ‘country’ field. The list they provided had a fatal flaw: it offered ‘Great Britain’ but not ‘United Kingdom’. As a rule the Customer Service responses to my emails about this problem were less than satisfactory, with most not really having a clue what I was talking about. Occasionally, after pointing out the large clue right there in the name (the part of the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” that isn’t “Great Britain”), some sites would actually change their registration form. Most, however, never did.

It’s well accepted these days that websites should be kept “fresh”, particularly if you’re trying to sell things. You can’t just throw together a site, forget about it, and watch the money roll in. But I decided to do a little experiment to see how many sites keep their registration form up-to-date.

One year ago today the Republic of Montenegro declared its independence from the confederated union of Serbia and Montenegro. Iceland was the first country to recognise Montenegro as an independent nation, quickly followed by Switzerland and Estonia. Within a week it had been recognised by the EU, all the permanent members of the UN Security Council, and, crucially, by Serbia. Before the end of the month Montenegro had been accepted into the United Nations. Not everything moves quite so quickly: it took until January this year for it to be accepted as a full member of the World Bank Group and the IMF, and it wasn’t until last month that it became a member of the Council of Europe.

On the web, however, where things are meant to move more quickly, the Republic of Montenegro still barely exists at all. I surveyed the registration forms of 50 websites that I use or have used to see if they offer Montenegro as an option in their ‘address’ form. The results were horrifying.

After working my way through a variety of DVD and/or CD retailers to no avail, I moved on to the literary world. After ABE and Bookmooch let me down, I thought that Amazon would be different. Unfortunately, not. In fact none of the standard “consumer goods” sites at all, in any field, seemed to believe in Montenegrin independence. Astoundingly eBay not only don’t recognise Montenegro, they never even got around to recognising Serbia and Montenegro, still only offering “Yugoslavia” as an option.

After a little thought, I realised that the airlines must surely be up to date, but neither Easyjet, nor even British Airways (home of the infamous 200 options for the Title field) provided any relief.

Estonian Air, rather interestingly, in a trait shared with Google, offers options for “Serbia”, “Montenegro” and “Serbia and Montenegro”. It’s unclear whether in each case this is a political statement, a simple case of forgetfulness, or an inability to assign users that were previously registered to one or the other, and thus needing to keep the combined entity as well.

In several hours of exploration, the only site I’ve found so far that has actually removed “Serbia and Montenegro” and added “Montenegro” as a separate entry is Dell. One year on, and only one (and I’ll give Google and Estonian Air a half point each) of the 50 sites I checked have caught up with the state of the world today.

The world is a fluid place. In the last 75 years the number of independent nations in the world has risen from under 70 to almost 200. There a number of places that are de facto independent, but aren’t widely recognised yet. None of the sites I checked offer ‘Transnistria’ or ‘South Ossettia’ as options yet, for example. This is hardly surprising, but I’m stunned that one year after independence, almost nowhere online has bothered to update their registration form to recognise Montenegro. Shame on all of you.