Facebook and Firefox, Platforms, and Freedom

Very interesting set of conversations this morning at the O’Reilly Executive Briefing.

Tim O’Reilly interviewed Dave Morin from Facebook - they’re building on a LAMP stack, and have contributed some things back, but clearly the main core of facebook is not an open source project.

His basic response was that “We will continue to release as much as we can, when it makes sense.”

Two reasons why it might not make sense came up:

1. The functionality the code offers is so tied to your services as to not be useful to outside folks
2. The codebase isn’t mature or professional quality enough - not “ready” to be released

For example, he said “we want to make sure that when we release something it is something of value, and something that the community can use.”

Then O’Reilly interviewed Mike Shaver from Mozilla, along with Matt Gertner from AllPeers and Garrett Camp from StumbleUpon, talking about the Firefox platform for extensions.

The Mozilla approach, as I suppose one would expect, is entirely different: release everything.

We don’t provide a tightly controlled API we let people access a lot. If you write an extension, it is as though you were writing code in the browser itself.
What we did was we gave people possibility.
What you get with source access is a very rich, and sometimes messy, set of points of contact with the overall platform.

I wish O’Reilly had gone further down the path of this question. Rather than deciding on behalf of the community which pieces they are likely to find valuable, Firefox takes the approach of allowing the community to determine what is valuable. Rather than waiting for code to be “mature” to release it, they let the community help make it mature.

It’s the difference between a platform designed to be extensible - which really means developers can write applications to run on our platform, as in Facebook, and designing a platform to be an open platform for anyone to do anything.

Is the difference just that the Mozilla foundation is a non-profit community, and Facebook a for-profit company?

Freedom in a new context

Tim O’Reilly kicked off the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing this morning by talking about the need to “rediscover the values of free and open in a new context.”

He talked about a number of different freedoms, beyond the “free as in beer” and “free as in speech” dichotomy:

• Freedom to use
• Freedom to build on and adapt
• Freedom to participate
• Freedom to fork
• Freedom to switch

And then asked a series of thought-provoking questions.

How to we maintain these freedoms in a world in which “runnung the program” requires a data center? (It isn’t about programs I can run on my machine but global web services with enormous data needs)

How do we maintain these freedoms when applications are delivered as services and don’t distribute code?

Now, I want an iPhone

A few weeks ago, my blackjack suddenly decided to reboot itself, and in the process seems to have killed all the registry settings.

In Windows Mobile Terms, it’s like a self-induced frontal lobotomy. My phone no longer knows what applications are installed on it, doesn’t remember how to sync to our exchange server, etc.

After spending two hours last night battling the ActiveSync demons in order to connect my BlackJack to my laptop (in order to install the registry editor and certificate for our exchange server on it), uninstalling and resintalling bluetooth (twice!) in the process, and hacking registry settings to enable ActiveSync to work with our exchange server, I’m done.

Would an iPhone just work, or am I falling into the Apple hype?

Of course, what I really need is an OpenMoko. How long before I can run one of these on Cingular? Can I already?

So Many Conferences, So Little Time

Lots of great conferences going on right now - wish I could be at all of them.

This weekend is WordCamp, in San Francisco. Chz and Tofu from ICanHasCheezburger, one of my favorite blogs, will be there. (Yes, I have a doctoral degree in English and ICanHasCheezburger is one of my favorite blogs. Deal with it.)

The full schedule is online, and it many folks will use trackback to add their blogging about sessions they attended to the session’s page in the schedule.

Some sessions which look to me like highlights I will be sorry to miss:

• Getting Involved with WordPress, by Lloyd Budd and Mark Jaquith
• Kicking Ass Content Connections, with Lorelle VanFossen
• Blogs vs. Journalism, with John Dvorak and Om Malik
• Blogs at the New York Times, with Jeremy Zilar
• Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing, with Dave Winer
• State of the Word, with Matt Mullenweg

Definitely a high powered set of speakers and in a relatively intimate forum. I’ll definitely add WordCamp 2008 to my “hopefully attend list.”

Starting this morning is Ubuntu Live, which runs this morning through Tuesday in Portland. Their schedule is also online and also impressive.

(A Sunday morning keynote trifecta with Mark Shuttleworth, Stephen O’Grady, and Jeff Waugh, as the first session of teh conference? Impressive. In fact, O’Grady’s already posted his slides and script.)

Finally, the rest of the week will be OSCON 2007, which I will be attending.

As usual, OSCON is enormous (check out the schedule - there are literally 15 parallel tracks much of Wed and Thurs), and that’s just the official sessions, not to mention the parties and events.

Drop me a line if you’ll be in Portland next week too.

Convergence, Open Source Style

The Free Open Source Internet video platform sponsored by the Participatory Culture Foundation and formerly known as Democracy Player has relaunched as Miro.

Head over to GetMiro and download the Public Preview 1 (v. 0.9.8) release.

Miro is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and pre-packaged for a number of Linux distros (Fedora, Ubuntu, with Debian and Gentoo coming soon) as well as source code for the true DIY.

Miro lets you:

• Play virtually any video file, across different platforms
• Download and play full screen, high definition video
• Subscribe to video podcasts, video blogs, any rss feed with enclosures
• Locate new video content using the Miro channel guide
• Download videos from YouTube, DailyMotion, Google Video and others
• Download BitTorrent videos and watch them in the same application

Miro’s based on the Mozilla XULRunner framework, and is an excellent example of cross-platform, non-proprietary alternative approach to taking Internet-based applications beyond the browser context, without losing the open, standards based approach that made the web successful in the first place.