Marc Canter does not know the meaning of open source?

In looking for news about the status of Socialtext opening their source, I came across the following exchange:

  1. Anonymous Says:
    July 24th, 2006 at 3:51 pm

    So when do people congratulate you for going open source?

  2. Marc Canter Says:
    July 24th, 2006 at 11:58 pm

    source code available baby - all the way

Suggests that Marc Canter is not clear on what open source means or was trying to deceive or confuse. This intrigued me partially because I heard that Marc is a client of my friends at Citizen Agency.

Don Park seems to support this approach of confusing people

  1. Don Park Says:

    July 25th, 2006 at 4:56 pm

    I
    don’t know why you guys are arguing about silly terms when all it
    matters is whatever the market will accept. Whether you like it or not,
    open source is a general term now and nitpicking over definitions is as
    silly as trying to outline a could. If terms and conditions of Marc’s
    goods and services are acceptable his customers and he chooses to frame
    it as “open source”, I don’t have any problem with that.

The comments that continue in the thread suggest his confusion or that he may not be being honest with himself.

  1. Marc Canter Says:
    July 25th, 2006 at 9:38 am

    …

    As I studied the MySQL dual license approach - I felt that that wasa disingenuous approach - more or less “tricking people” into thinking MySQL was free. But its not.

    We feel our approach is more honest. But its not open source.

  2. Marc Canter Says:

    July 25th, 2006 at 10:51 pm

    4. Now back to terms and licenses. I didn;t want to come off like “I’m gonna use the term open source the way I want to, and ignore the “standard accepted definition”. So that’s y form of honesty. Call it weird - whatever. If SocialText or anybody wants ot call their code “open source” and have their own defintiion that derives from GPL or whatever - god bless them. We got our own answer - and as long as someone gets the source code - who cares what its called. I don’t see that muddying the waters.

Licensing is legal, and legal things are complex, and different people have different needs. MySQL approach is not dishonest, though they have had their controversies. MySQL being GPL‘d is an awesome commitment to open source and the commons. Their “approach” also works for people that are not comfortable with open source.

Marc’s approach also seems genuine and reasonable, as long as he is not suggesting it is open source. Surely he appreciates having as clear terminology as possible helps us all.

I wonder what “Open Social Networking” means given that dialog.

Friends at Citizen Agency, one of your client’s needs your help!

PS. Marc, I have also found myself in flame wars, but some of what you wrote may be perceived as attacking the anonymous commenter “5. So now that we’ve gone this far - and you;ve brought this
converstaion to this level - now let me ask you this “who are you?” Wy
do you challenge and say things to me like you do, while not unveiling
who you are. That’s really weird ot me. Chalenge my integrity from a
place of anonymity .”

Anonymous said it well:

  1. Anonymous Says:

    July 25th, 2006 at 7:11 pm

    Don,
    these aren’t silly terms. If Marc is going to make definitive claims,
    it would be nice if they are correct. I don’t get why he says its good
    for other companies to open course their products, but not his own. He
    said it’s because he can NEVER charge for it under an open source
    license, which is incorrect.

    If anything, this is a good discussion to have.

    Licensing issues are not nitpicking. They’re essential parts of fair
    use for software for customers and vendors. For example, many RTOS have
    source code available, but its not open source, nor do they ever claim,
    or muddy the issue. Licensing is very important to very big customers
    (Telecom vendors for one).

    Open source clearly states its not just about source availability.
    The way this term is generally used in the OS/FS community is well
    known. It may not be known to new customers. Muddying the definition
    for customers doesn’t help them.

    Marc, “require free distribtuion” means you are required to provide
    a means of free distribution of the software. This doesn’t prevent you
    from charging in other ways. You can still charge for it via other
    means. MANY OS vendoors charge (or they would cease to exist). You may
    be worried some customers (capitalist pigs?) may not want to buy the
    open source version. How does Redback and SuSE stay afloat.

    Marc brings up MySQL. I brought up SuSE and Redhat. It would be nice
    to get feedback on these open source based business models.

    Marc might have more customers and users if he actually did frame it
    (or change the license) to open source. Developers (who may work for
    potential customers) may appreciate this.

    1) It’s Marc call to open source or not

    2) It’s good not to confuse “source code available” with “open source”. They are clearly two different things.

    3) It would be nice to know Marc’s thoughts on OS vendors such as SuSE and Redhat.

    4) It would be nice to know why OSing of software for other companies is good, but not for Marc’s company.

    No arguments here, just a discussion.

technorati tags:, , , , , , ,

Blogged with Flock

Possibly Related Classroom Projects From DonorsChoose.org Powered by Social Actions
This entry was written by Lloyd, posted on July 26, 2006 at 6:01 pm, filed under Open Source. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

7 Comments

  1. Avatar Chris Messina
    Posted July 26, 2006 at 6:56 pm | Permalink

    Hey Lloyd, I’m right with ya. I think I get where Marc’s coming from — in terms of his concerns about licensing and so forth — but he comes from a position and an understanding most of us do not.

    Without speaking for Marc or getting into a legal situation, my understanding is that the source code is freely available and downloadable. You can look inside and see how everything works. You can even modify it and run it on your own servers. In that sense it’s “open”.

    It doesn’t, however, inherit much of the legacy of other open source licenses from that point forward. (I don’t even know what the license he’s using would be called).

    Essentially, if you use his code for anything where there’s more than 100 user — you pay. From what I understand, it’s something of an honor system. And the way he makes his money is, well, from selling services customizing and building out installs of PeopleAggregator (which is where BroadbandMechanics play a role) and from those folks with more than 100 users.

    That’s about as simple as I can make it — and how I understand it to be. I might have some of the details wrong, but that’s part of our task working with Marc — to clarify how he communicates what he’s doing, who should use PeopleAggregator and why and then to help build out a developer network of sorts who can work on custom installs.

    Does that make more sense?

  2. Avatar foolswisdom
    Posted July 26, 2006 at 7:07 pm | Permalink

    Thanks Chris, yes that makes good sense, and I admire Marc’s approach and work.

    Marc, just leave open source out of it ;-) I wish you all the success in the world on solving hard and interesting problems.

  3. Avatar Marc Canter
    Posted July 26, 2006 at 8:46 pm | Permalink

    Ah - uh hum - let me clear my throat and get this straight.

    1. It’s called open social networking because we’re making it possible to inter-connect social networks together and we’re supporting open standards like OpenID and Sxip. We’re also going to be (not quite yet) importing and exporting end-users data between social networks and we’re proposing a whole raft of NEW open standards to inter-connect social networks together. That’s called open social networking. Since no one has ever done this before - we get to invent terms. If you have another term for this - let me know and we can debate that.

    2. It is OK to use the term Open right. I mean Tim O’Reilly hasn’t trademarked that - yet - right?

    3. This argument that “if I like others OSing, I have to do it myself” is like saying “if I like chocolate than all I can eat if chocolate”. I can like chocolate, but produce vanilla - right? Or I can even be in the Yogurt business and still lice chocolate? Where does it say “if you like chcolate, you can only eat chcolate?” There really is a difference between what other people do - and what you do yourself. And I’m sorry - hiding behind anonymity and complaining about me NOT doing something - is just - well you’re just being a trouble maker. But obviously it’s working, cause I’m sitting here defending myself, instead of working on fixing bugs and improving our software.

    4. Oh - BTW we’ve done open source projects before. That’s called StyructuredBlogging.org. Check it out. We make nothing off of it. And we also did ourmedia.org to. Total revenues = ZERO - Total costs $50,000 So I don;t have defend myself to - oooops there I go again - defending myself.

    5. I had several conversations with open source zealots who INSISTED that open source means “you can never charge”. Whether that’s legally true or morally true - what I DON’T wanna get involved in, care about or quite frankly care about - is whether or not our license is “officially open source”. And why would anyone care about that - anyway? We have made it clear what the deal is for our software, I think it’s a fair and equitable deal and that’s that. If you don’t like our terms - than find another ‘open source’ social network or spend the $1M yourself and do it yourself (hopefully better than we have!)

    6. Now if you caught me lying, fooling people or saying one thing and doing something else - that’s one thing. But I challenge you to find anything I’ve done or said - to be untrue. The nearset I can get from Mr. Anon - over at my blog - is that he’s complaining that I like and respect people for going “open source”, while not swallowing the pill myself. I find that argument and source of complaining to be absurd. I can pick up on that later. But for now - lets’ leave it at this: “if open source means one thing, and that’s not what we’re offering, then we CERTAINLY are not gonna call what we’re offering open source!” Right? Or am I insane?

    7. Now back to the issue of: “is what we’re doing confusing people”. I have a measly 25 years in the business under my belt (which is under my chubby tummy.) As many times as I’ve been explained the MySQL dual license - I just don’t get it. I’ve asked lawyers about it, open source nerds, and I get different answers. I’ve asked Marten Mikos of MySQL about it and he says different things to different people. Dudes - where I come from - that’s called confusing. I’m calling that disingenuous as well. You can chose to accept that criticism or not, but it’s my opnion and I have the right to have my own oinion. I think it’s possible to be clearer. If MySQL is GPL - coolio. But how can you be GPL and commercial license at the same time - with the same code? I just don’t get it.

    8. Not sure if you know Lloyd - but we also have a consulting company. And we consult large companies on whether they should USE open source code. I encourage them, while at the same time warn them of the trappings and things that could happen. So what often happens is we conclude “well OUR VERSION of open source is X, Y or Z”. In other words - many people and companies come up with their own defintion - to suit their own needs. I really don’t think its fair to say that there’s ONE definition of open source in the market today. But that said - I went to the OSI site and read their official definition of it - and that’s what caused me to want to create our OWN license - which is NOT open source. That way no one would ever complain about us calling ourselves open souce and we’re not.

    9. So what happens? Someone complains about me LIKING someone ELSE going open source. Lordy lordy you just can’t win. What am I supposed to do - HATE open source - just cause we have our own license. That’s absurd - too!

    10. Does that mean we don’t want folks to have our source = NO! We give away our source - and if you’re NOT a commercial vendor - you can use that code - FOR FREE - FORVER! What’s that called?

    11. The ONLY people we ask money from - are people who will commercially exploit our code. Period. And we have liberal and extremely reasonable terms for these folks. (Like it’s aone time fee, free updates for life.)

    12. Min. $2,500 - max. $20,000 (and that’s only if you have over 500,000 people in your network - and you’re MAKING MONEY OFF OF THJOSE PEOPLE. What’s called?

    13. We call it the “PayAsYouGo” license. Which (BTW) will be available under a Creative Commons lciense - for free - at PayAsYouGo.org. Once we’ve finished with it.

    14. And to clarify what Chriss says - up to 100 has nothign to with our source code license. That has to do with our hosted versions of our code - which will be runnong on our servers with US paying the bandwidth bills. The source code is FREE to anyone who isn’t one of those (I’ll say it nicer now) members of teh capitalist elite.

  4. Avatar foolswisdom
    Posted July 26, 2006 at 9:48 pm | Permalink

    Thank you Marc for the very thoughtful response. I do think we are mostly successful in having a consistent meaning of open source, or if we are not, I do appreciate you helping make it more consistent.

    10 - I would probably currently consider it “shared source”, as your code is incompatible with open source code and I would have concern with “taint” if I used any of your code.

    I look forward to seeing how the term and environment of “open social networking” evolves with your commitment to openness, and to using PeopleAggregator.

  5. Avatar David Gratton
    Posted July 27, 2006 at 9:38 am | Permalink

    Marc said:
    “we’re supporting open standards like OpenID and Sxip”

    I’m curious, which standards body has certified either of those? ISO, IEEE, or?

  6. Avatar foolswisdom
    Posted July 27, 2006 at 11:19 am | Permalink

    David, ouch, both open and standards are also sticky terms. Are you concerned with his word choice, or with either of those technologies?

    It does seem that the specs have historically been moving targets.

    I know little about the area, but if Sxip and OpenID are good for my friend Boris Mann, it is very likely good for me.

  7. Avatar Boris Mann
    Posted July 28, 2006 at 12:23 am | Permalink

    I’m not jumping into the mass of comments about what is and isn’t open source. Well…actually, I am. “Source available” is the term, and it’s commonly accepted.

    It’s good to support open standards that theoretically lots of people are working on, whether they are “official” (what does that mean?) standards or not. RSS is one example (sort of a standard but not really, but, hey, it works, right?). SXIP was attempting to go through the IETF with DIX, although it now looks like that will not go through.

    As I mention in Lloyd’s linked post, I believe SXIP and OpenID are the two leading efforts in this area, and they are also moving to converging together. Both efforts have agreed upon specs and central reference points, as well as several sample implementations. Good enough for me as far as a “standard” goes.

    Aside: The IETF and W3C are two bodies that are probably most relevant when discussing Internet standards. The SAML spec, which is also part of identity, is governed by OASIS.

One Trackback

  1. By Marc Canter is building his heart out | B.Mann Consulting on March 25, 2007 at 4:40 am

    [...] in my only discussion Submitted by Lloyd D Budd on February 6, 2007 - 11:14pm. Yeah, in my only discussion with Mark, it was clear that he "feels burned by open source". I have a lot of respect for his [...]

Post a Comment

Your email is never shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*