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On License Proliferation (and Intel)

Imagine my surprise today when I saw an email from an Intel lawyer in my OSI license-discuss queue...inquiring whether OSI would allow Intel to withdraw the Intel Open Source License, their vanity license!

Way to go, Intel!

I haven't written on license proliferation here yet, but now seems a perfect time to do it. Must point out that this is my $.02 and not a statement on behalf of OSI.

Recently some folks who are interested in open source have been griping about license proliferation and claiming that OSI (disclosure: I have been a board member of OSI since December 2001) has done a bad job of keeping the number of open source licenses low. Interesting to me that these claims should come up now and that they should seem to be coming primarily from corporate voices. (Yes, I realize I work for a corporation too, but generally I don't speak from that point of view :-)). It seems interesting to me (and I'm not the only one) because corporate vanity licenses that have caused the bulk of the problem.

Of course a low number of licenses was not originally an OSI goal. We were trying to get more businesses to participate! And participate they have. Unfortunately nearly *all* of the large organizations who wanted to participate also wanted a vanity license. To be fair, many of the vanity license generators just wanted to use the Mozilla Public License model, and to do that they had to re-author the license because the MPL has hard-coded references to Mozilla. And as long as the license has to be changed, why not customize ...get a license with the company or project name on it...add a couple of extra clauses that meet the business goals more exactly....or at least change it so the company's lawyers like the wording a little better?

Over the years all of us at OSI have participated in conversations with vanity license authors trying to convince them that they don't need to write that new license. They have nearly all been pretty sure that we "just don't understand their unique needs". I was recently involved in one such effort on the corporate side...the much-discussed CDDL. I refused to have anything to do with CDDL until Sun agreed to actually try to write a generic license which could be reused without reauthoring. It turns out this was not a trivial exercise, but I still think Sun did a good job drafting CDDL and that it will be seen as a positive contribution to ending license proliferation because it spawned the debate and forever raised the bar on what can be considered an acceptable new free and open source license.

As an aside, let me say that it took a long time for me to come to the realization that lawyers are a lot like programmers...except license text is their "code". Like programmers they are inclined to re-write to "make it theirs". It takes a leap to deeply realize that re-use is an open source value, that its actually offensive to open source people to suggest that "my license is better than yours because I wrote it".

So in the end we approved a number of vanity licenses because they complied with the OSD, knowing that the effect of all those vanity licenses would be not much license reuse (why use the Apple's license if you are IBM for instance) and not much true community around those vanity projects.

Vanity licenses are their own reward since they seldom result in healthy open source communities. The MPL was arguably the first vanity license as it was written by a corporate team for a specifc project and tried to split the difference between the copyleft and "copy center" concepts (although notice that the hallowed MIT/BSD and GPL licenses are all referential of specific organizational affiliations). In 1998 MPL was as far as Netscape was willing to go in their maiden foray into open source. But after a few years the Mozilla community came to realize that they were ready to go further into copyleft, and so they added the LGPL to their licensing strategy. This is a natural progression which I believe we can expect to see in other vanity projects.

In my opinion moves like today's surprise offer from Intel are the best way to end license proliferation...to have the original proliferators step up and reconsider. There are still many large organizations who are only just coming to open source and they will probably wish to initially use a license that takes the same middle-of-the-spectrum approach Mozilla first took more than six years ago, but hopefully after this debate and resulting actions OSI can now take, we'll have better luck convincing them to re-use one of the existing "template" licenses instead of authoring their own. What would be reallly cool is if the Mozilla.org folks got it together to create an improved and templatized MPL v2 so that everyone could agree on a definitive expression of most imitated open source licensing model.

Gmail for Intel employees...tools matter

A week under my belt at Intel and I'm starting to figure out the internal systems...at least the common ones like email, calendar, phonebook and internal chat. I am struck again by how much internal systems reinforce culture, or is it vice versa? Of course such systems are designed to make workers more productive while protecting things like privacy and intellectual property. But in my experience corporate systems also contribute to a hive-mind effect that can be unintentionally limiting.

Years ago on my first day at Microsoft I asked for an Internet connection. Two weeks later they lugged in another physical machine, set it up on my credenza and hooked it to the outside world. In early 1994 at Microsoft you couldn't get an outside connection on the same computer as your internal email and files! As a result they weren't thinking much about the Internet...very few Microsoft people ever used it (I was only eligible for an Internet machine because I technically worked in the Research Library group). Microsoft as a company famously came quite late to Internet awareness and that fact was noticeable in their products as well.

Some years later at Symantec I worked on a popular product called ACT!, a personal information manager. ACT! version 3.0 was a rewrite to support 32-bit architecture that included a new feature...support for email. During the years when ACT! 3.0 was written, Symantec's internal emailer system was "cc:mail". When I joined the team during ACT! 4.0 development I was given the task of re-specifying the email feature because I was coming straight from Apple and, like the majority of ACT! customers (but unlike the developers writing ACT!), I had actually *used* emailers other than cc:mail.

In fact, I had used many emailers because in those days Apple encouraged employees to use whatever tools made them most productive (in those days we even saw some PCs floating around because Apple laptops were insanely mediocre at that point) and I am naturally curious. My favorite was a beta tool which allowed aggregation of all your various mail accounts into a single local inbox. I wasn't the only one who loved that feature apparently, since you can find it in today's Apple Mail client.

Now there was nothing in the configuration of their intranet keeping Symantec employees from using other emailers, except for inertia due to familiarity with the approved tool. Because cc:mail included a centralized phonebook feature, most Symantec employees didn't actually know each other's email addresses (and they weren't standardized). And of course it was easier to continue to use cc:mail to get routine tasks done than it was to venture into the unknown. These days there might be more stringent corporate mandates in response to the proliferation of email viruses for instance, but those were halcyon virus-free days.

Did I mention that ACT!'s major competitor was the up and coming Microsoft Outlook, which had a rather specific email architecture that was very tightly integrated into the operating system. I reasoned that we could differentiate for ACT! by offering more flexibility and meeting our customers where they were at instead of forcing them to do work "our way".

My first official action as the owner of the email feature in ACT! 4.0 was to mandate that my engineering team start to use other emailers to discover how they might differ from the known. Oh, the complaining! But slowly they started to realize how cc:mail had limited their experience and their world view of email...and the resulting flexible email feature in ACT! 4.0 contributed to an award-winning release. Best of all was that most of those engineers continued to be curious about what was going on "outside" the firewalls, which was the real win because that curiosity is vital to designing better experiences for customers.

And speaking of a shift from tightly integrated desktop applications...I notice that I now have 50 free gmail accounts to give away. I'll give them to the first 50 Intel employees who ping me on corporate email :-)

Google and Remembering Easters Past

I'm a holiday nut...well really a holidy party nut. From the age of about 10 I've been organizing parties around holidays (any excuse to get everyone together in the backyard). I can throw a party in no time. Once when I actually forgot that I'd agreed to host a party until the first guest arrived...and still it was a great party.

I really love a good Easter party. Its so nice to be outside in the spring participating in vernal equinox fertility rites....like the hiding and hunting of the eggs. When my kids were small we used to pool families together and throw a really big Easter bash at Rancho San Antonio park in Los Altos. Some years we hid more than 300 eggs. Usually not hard-boiled and dyed eggs (nobody really wants to eat those, as it turns out) but colorful plastic or paper-mache eggs filled with candy and small trinkets and coins. Some years we did have some beautiful Ukrainian Eggs to hide, but they weren't for eating. In later years we filled the hollow eggs with colorful slips of paper that described what trinkets or candy the finder had won (insures that the chocolate doesn't melt before the eggs are found). We always hid several "special" eggs...really big ones with plush toys inside and "crystal" eggs with higher denomination money...and then there was the grand-prize "golden bunny". Finding him was worth $20 and gave you first pick of a partner for the raw egg toss!

If you were a grownup coming to our Easter bash you could choose to be a kid for the purpose of hunting eggs. We'd send all the "kids" off on a long walk together while we did the hiding. The ground where eggs were hidden was marked off with big pinwheels stuck into the grass. The little kids got to start hunting 10 minutes before the middling ones got to join for 10 more minutes, and then the big kids (some as old as in their 50s) could start.

The golden bunny was often the last to be found, and for some reason even though everyone looked hard for it, my son was most often the lucky finder. We were speaking today about how he went about finding it...he said he'd take a moment to "think like Mom" and he could usually figure out which hiding place I'd selected for the grand prize.

Many of the hidden eggs were cascarones (intact eggshells with the raw contents blown out through a hole in the bottom and then dyed bright colors and filled with confetti). So throughout all the egg hunting there would be periodic shreaks as somebody got a cascarone smashed on their head.

Then the hunt would be done and we'd all tuck in to a big potluck picnic lunch sitting on quilts laid out on the grass and soak up the sun. By early afternoon a wind would come up and we'd scurry to get everything back in the cars for the drive home.

By now you're asking what this could possibly have to do with Google, right?

Well, I have a lot of friends working on getting hired by Google just now, and I heard a story which convinced me that I might want to work there myself someday. It seems there was a Vice President-type position open and an acquaintance was interviewing for it. He'd gotten pretty far in the interviewing when he got tripped up by the following hypothetical: "Say its your first day on the job at Google, and you have 100 employees reporting to you. So, how would you spend your first day?"....

Of course any seasoned executive would spend it profitably, right? Interviewing the liutenants, getting to understand the current structure of the organization...WRONG!!! The correct answer (at Google anyway) was "Throw a Party!". No wonder everybody wants to work at Google! Wonder what they did at Google for Easter?

More Apple Attribution

Coincidence it seems that somebody else was reading the Apple Folklore site recently and found a reference to the Quadra 660 Easter Egg which was a QuickTime movie un-marked on the System Install CD (recompressed for your viewing pleasure here of the team toasting the finish of the project in front of a Pirate Flag. The windows look like the Valley Green 6 building to me. They also show the motherboard (which had surface mount components on both sides! It ends after more harmless nonsense with a nice fadeout on the Pirate flag...

The deal with Easter Eggs at Apple in those days was that typically there was NO approval for them (management wanted plausible deniability), and if you got caught before ship (or sometimes after ship) you could get fired. Still, it was considered very cool to manage to ship one, and some of them were really clever. A true Easter Egg was only accessible if you did something specific (such as a certain keystroke sequence while launching the About or some other routine sequence). As an Easter present, here's a pointer to a nice list of Easter Eggs in MacOSX.

About Attribution

Re-opening comments, due to popular demand.

I had an email exchange this week that reminded me of this topic, which I've been meaning to blog about for a long time (thanks, Ben). Attribution!

I believe that fundamentally the best programmers in the world are artists. I'm not the only one to draw this conclusion, but I did draw it independently from Paul Graham.

Back when I started at Apple they had an ethic of attribution. Everybody signed their work. Some of the original Macintoshes even had signatures inside the case (I know because I've looked...I used to run the Apple Archives and we had several signed cases). For sofware there was the About Box. I've just found a link on Andy Hertzfeld's Folklore site about why we got to be in the About Box. Very interesting piece of history. As a result of Bill Atkinson, the About Box in the late 80s through mid-90s always included a list of the people who worked on the software, sometimes also what jobs they did and if there was room also a picture. Sometimes the picture was only accessible in an Easter Egg. For QuickTime Conferencing it was my job to create the About Box list. It was so cool to be able to tell your Mom and Dad how to look for you in the About Box.

In about 1997 it was decided that About Boxes would no longer include attribution, because Apple had noticed that every time a new version of software came out, everyone on the list got an unsolicited call from a recruiter.

Now, I don't know about you, but if obscurity is the only reason I'm still with my company....there's a problem!

If I was at Apple now you'd better believe I'd be arguing for attribution again. In fact I think every programmer should fight for attribution, no matter what company is writing the paycheck. Look at the entertainment industry. Who shows up where in the credits is a big, big deal...translating directly to job satisfaction and a way to track an individual's body of work over time.

This is one of the best features of open source in my opinion. I tell people all over the world that open source (and blogging) can help build them a reputation that will serve them when looking for employment. Why should that stop when you get a job? You should get credit for everything you do (good and bad)...responsibility and accountability come along with attribution too.

So sign your work! Sign your comments on blogs while you're at it!

First Day at Intel

So, I've had my first day (mostly orientation) at Intel. The building, in fact the very room, where they held the orientation was under re-construction (imagine hammering and sawing going on just behind those very thin partition walls they use to divide ballrooms into conference session rooms in hotels). Everyone was pretty good-natured and making the best of it, though.

Having orientation under construction makes me feel like I am coming into a company that is reconfiguring itself. There was press at the new year about Intel re-organizing its businesses (must confess, I've been reading stories about Intel more since I started considering this change :-) ). The switch to a platform focus must feel unsettling to old-timers here, but one of my big orientation take-aways is that Intel is about Risk-Taking. It is considered a core competency here. So I should fit right in, right ;-)?

One thing I learnt in the orientation...I need to make it clear here (and often) that this blog is mine and does not reflect the opinions of my (new) employer...but those of you who know me know that THAT has always been true.

Insulting Our Intelligence

What is the deal with the stupid comments that my last posting invoked? Either I'm incredibly popular, or Bill Gates and Steve Jobs don't really read my blog and instead its nasty trolls. You know about trolls, right? They live under bridges and only come out to be grumpy and rude. Guess I'd better turn off the comments for awhile. Pity. If you have something to tell me, link to me from your blog...

Leaving Sun

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/DaneseCooper and my new blog at http://danesecooper.blogs.com/divablog

After the flurry of stories on Friday and over the weekend (my favorites being Jim Grisanzio's lovely farewell, Matt Asay's surprising testimonial and the original blog written by David Berlind), it will come to no surprise that I'm leaving Sun. I'm off to see if I can have any influence at Intel, a company which has benefitted hugely from the increased popularity of Free and Open Source software around the world. I'm quite sad to leave the many good friends I've made over the years at Sun. Change it always hard.

I'm excited to be going to Intel, though! There will be fascinating challenges (like seeing if I can run my Intel life from a computer running open source software), new people to make friends with (84,000 of them) and hopefully good work to do for the open source movement.

Ciao for now, Sun! Although global, the internet makes this is a very small playground of an industry and I know I'll be seeing you continue to shine!

Its a Commons, Man!

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/DaneseCooper and my new blog at http://danesecooper.blogs.com/divablog

On the last day at eTech we were treated to the incomparable Larry Lessig speaking about the Future of Culture. He'll be at OSBC in early April doing a whole hour, and I highly recommend listening to him.

Also yesterday was also the "LifeHacks" talk. Cory Doctorow took better notes than I did. These guys are interested in helping make people more productive, and the talk focused on all the distractions that can come with some of the new technologies. I found myself disagreeing with much of their advice, however (although they did have some cool sites to talk about like 43 Folders) . Call me a weirdo, but I actually like having more than one thing going in my brain at a time. I am often seen knitting at conferences because it helps me listen for instance. So I have little friction from "context switching" on the computer or in my life (although increasingly my husband would take issue with that characterization). Okay, maybe I do need to focus more...:-)

Last (but not least), my pal Chris DiBona was there to launch the new Google open source site ! Chris and others have been working really hard on this for awhile and its so good to see it up and running. Open Source is just bustin' out all over the place :-)

And before I wrap up my notes on eTech 2005, I must commend my very good friend Duncan Davidson for his outstanding photo coverage of the event. It was so much fun watching him work (and checking the photostream to see what he'd captured). Hope he does a repeat in future!

But the absolute high point of Duncan's participation at this eTech (to my mind anyway) was his question to Larry Lessig. Duncan has been studying up on Creative Common's Licensing and he wanted to know whether they would develop a license that only grants rights to creative content to licensees who modify that content...except Duncan had a more shall we say graphic way to express it (and Larry's first response, "...I don't think I've ever heard it said quite that way...and if people choose to, ahem, do that with your content...that would be an interesting way to enforce remixing, yes..."). Duncan's an original all right :-)

And as long as Creative Commons is coming up, congrats are in order to the very cool Paula LeDieu who has evidently snagged the Executive Director job there. She'll continue to work for the BBC part time on the Creative Archive project that she has been directing for the last couple of years, which is a very good thin for them as well. Go Paula!

Make! at eTech

Floor space only at eTech the last couple of days...but its such a great conference that I don't mind sitting on the floor :-)

Last night was the Make! party at eTech. For those of you who haven't yet seen the fabulous Make! magazine, check it out.

So yesterday there were lots of opportunities to meet people who tinker. Like the fantastic Andrew "bunnie" Huang, and Natalie Jeremijenko from the Feral Robotic Dog pack.

The dog thing was perhaps my favorite thing from yesterday. Its not just a geek project, its an environmental activism project. As my only brother is an environmental attorney, I'm always interested in work that supports the Sisyphian task of fighting the good (environmental) fight. The modified robodogs that Natalie and her students build are fitted with a new nose that sniffs for environmental contaminants. They build a bunch of them and then release them into the "wild" at sites where people are concerned about pollution. The dogs roam around (on wheels...they are robots after all) and when they find pollution they stop and "do something cute". Some of them are networked as well and those send data back to collectors. How cool is THAT?