Hard to fit the talk into 30 minutes with time for questions and roadmap – there’s so much more I want WPBook to do – hopefully I can find the time soon.

I also took the opportunity, naturally, to promote WordCamp Boston, coming January 23rd. See you there?

Looking forward to watching sessions the rest of today and volunteering this afternoon / tomorrow. If you’re here, stop me and say hello.

• comment moderation – including batch edit
• page editing – creation of new pages as well as changes to existing pages
• Landscape mode – the wider keyboard is much easier for fat-thumbed typists like me
• Easier link creation – separate entry of link and title so you don’t have to do the whole <a href="url" > title </a> nonsense while writing

The app already does basic post creation with photos (from library or upload from phone), local draft mode, and scheduled publish.

Here’s a video preview of 1.2:

Best of all, the app itself is open source – and they’re looking for help testing. So go get the SDK, which lets you run the simulator, and check it out.

As Mike points out, the fact that the Tamarin is an open source project, and that various people in the community have over time deciphered the SWF file format, does not make Flash anything other than a proprietary product.

In many of the presentations I give about rich Internet applications, I use a slide which looks something like this:

It’s intended to communicate two key concepts:

1. There are a huge number of mature, professional open source toolkits and frameworks for building RIAs.
2. There is strong pressure on proprietary, closed, commercial toolkits and frameworks in this space to open up, at least in terms of source code visibility and modifiability, if not in terms of redistribution.

I suppose one could argue about the relative placement of Silverlight (which coincidentally this morning is throwing classic “Server Error in ‘/’ Application.” errors), since there is will be an open source implementation of it (moonlight). Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) similarly is a very proprietary package although it leverages webkit and Adobe cooperates with / contributes to the webkit community. The Flex SDK is free (as in beer, not as in freedom), though my impression is that teams which expect to do serious Flex development work end up using the proprietary toolset and other closed-source pieces (AMF) in addition to what is in the open SDK.

Does it matter? Do you care if the framework on which you build RIAs is fully open, partially open, or not at all open?

As I argued in my discussion of Mozilla Prism versus AIR, I think it matters quite a bit in certain scenarios, perhaps less in others.

At a minimum, before you invest significant development time (and therefore dollars) in building on a given framework, you ought to have a clear understanding of what parts of it are open and what parts are not.

As the following image (from the Mozilla Labs Prism page) illustrates, the idea is that Prism splits apart the light coming from the cloud into separate apps. (I know, light doesn’t really come from clouds, but you get the point):

In essence, what Prism does is simply to create a single-url loading instance of firefox without all the browser chrome – so that the application gets an icon of its own, has an entry in the Start menu, is accessible via alt-tab application switching, and the like.

Its an interesting direction for WebRunner, and a good step forward for some specific use cases along the desktop application / web application continuum. Take an app which has offline sync via GoogleGears, run it inside Prism, and you’ve got a desktop application which syncs to the cloud but can also be accessed from other non-prism browsers when you are away from your machine.

(For more info on Prism, see Read/Write Web, Geeks are Sexy, Alex Faaborg’s discussion of its UI, feature suggestions on Prism Brainstorming, Mark Finkle’s discussion of changes from the existing WebRunner, and the forums at Mozilla Labs).

In the process of explaining what Mozilla Labs is up to, the (anonymous?) Mozilla Labs blog entry author said:

Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not building a proprietary platform to replace the web. We think the web is a powerful and open platform for this sort of innovation, so our goal is to identify and facilitate the development of enhancements that bring the advantages of desktop apps to the web platform.

This got the attention of Adobe’s Mike Chambers, who first posted in the comments on the Mozilla announcement, taking issue with the idea that Prism is fundamentally different from AIR. After all, he noted, AIR also runs applications developed on web standards and runs them in a desktop container with some additional desktop-like features:

So, is the main difference between something like Prism and Adobe AIR, that Adobe AIR is being primarily developed by a company (Adobe), and that Prism is being developed by Mozilla?

Later, he expanded on this issue in a blog post: “Mozilla Prism and the Disingenuous Web,” repeating the notion that AIR and Prism seem quite similar in goal and usage, and complaining:

Come on Mozilla, the web development community deserves better than that. Adobe has been an active supporter of the web development community, of open source, of web standards and of Mozilla (donating the ActionScript virtual machine from the Flash Player (Tamarin)). Adobe AIR leverages a number of open source technologies (including Tamarin, SQLite and WebKit) and we actively participate in both of those development communities, and we have been open with our development process for some time.

So what does differentiate Prism from AIR? (See also “AIR, and a Prism” at Technological Musings for another comparison)

Mozilla Prism, for now, is Windows only; Adobe AIR, for now, is Windows and Mac OS only. Both have promised Linux support in the near future.

As several readers pointed out in comments threads on both Mike Chambers post and the one at Mozilla labs, the Mozilla foundation has a better track record at porting applications to Linux than Adobe does. (Flash Player 9 notwithstanding).

(Note that Linux and MacOS X installers are already listed in the Mozilla Labs Wiki – I’m trying one out in Linux now, and it seems to work just fine).

Adobe AIR is based on WebKit (also used in Safari, originally from the Konqueror browser in KDE) for rendering HTML; Mozilla Prism is based on Firefox. AIR can handle flash content, pdf content, or Ajax (HTML/JavaScript) content; Mozilla Prism can as well, though it relies on the same plugins the Firefox browser does to support these other content types.

One significant difference is that Adobe AIR applications are created by developers, who do some “extra work” to create and package their application as an AIR application, whereas Mozilla Prism applications are created by end users, who take an existing web application and tell Prism to run it.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, while AIR “leverages a number of open source technologies (including Tamarin, SQLite and WebKit) and [Adobe] actively participate in both of those development communities, and [Adobe] have been open with our development process for some time” (quotes from Mike Chambers’ blog post), Mozilla Prism is itself an Open Source project (Mozilla Public License).

What this means it that if the development community is unhappy with the directions in which Prism is going, they can fork, and take the existing code base in different directions.

Or, working in collaboration with the existing project, they can extend that code base, taking it to other platforms or contexts.

In other words, I’d say the difference isn’t, to answer Mike Chamber’s question, that one is developed by a company (Adobe) while the other is developed by a foundation (Mozilla), but that one consumes and participates in open source (Adobe AIR), while the other is itself fully open source (Mozilla Prism).

That’s not to say Adobe has not been a good open source citizen or contributed appropriately to WebKit, SQLite, and others – I believe they have contributed substantially to a number of projects. It’s just that an implementation which is fully open is preferable, for many folks, to one which is mostly open except for where it isn’t.

I’m surprised that is still so hard to understand.

I written before about both Dopplr and Tripit but never specifically to compare the two. Both track information about your travel as well as the travel of your friends, in order to let you know when you and your friends will be in the same place at the same time.

Well, next week I’m headed to Chicago for the Forrester Consumer Forum, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to compare the use of the two sites in relation to that trip. All the images below are thumbnails, click on them to see full size.

If you just want the conclusion?: The fight’s not over yet, but Tripit has become more consistently useful to me. Dopplr’s facebook app and existing userbase is all that keeps me there at the moment, and that is an advantage easily lost.

Adding Trips

Dopplr users add trips by just putting in start date, end date, and name of the city they are visiting:

It’s a simple, clean interface, which tries to autocomplete what you type. They use place names drawn from Geonames, and seem to have most major cities covered. (See posts here and here on how that autocomplete has evolved).

Notes are optional, and can help store things like airline confirmation numbers, hotels, etc.

Tripit users add trips by forwarding confirmation emails (from airlines, booking agencies, hotels, etc) to plans@tripit.com from one of their registered addresses. Tripit receives the email, parses out the information, and tries to assign it to an existing itinerary where that makes sense, or creates an “unfiled item” for things it can’t assign to existing trips.

Here’s what Tripit created based on my forwarding of email from the airline and the hotel:

Tripit recognized, since I sent the airline email first, that the Chicago Hotel belonged to my Chicago trip, and automatically added to my itinerary directions from the airport to the hotel, as well as a map centered on the hotel. (I deleted the generic “Map of Chicago” which had been added before I sent the hotel confirmation email).

In detail view, Tripit also retains things like loyalty program numbers, confirmation codes, seats if noted in the confirmations, etc. All of this can also be seen in a print-friendly format for carrying with you – very valuable if you travel alot and can lose things like confirmation numbers. I also like the “Help Us Improve Tripit!” section, which lets you give live feedback on how well their engine parsed the emails you forwarded to it.

Adding Friends

Adding friends in Dopplr can be done by inviting them to join the service (put in name and email and Dopplr will invite them), by allowing Dopplr to look through your gmail contacts, twitter followers/friends, and/or facebook friends. It can also import hCard format data. As Dopplr also has a facebook app, it has access to your friend information. For twitter, it doesn’t even need to log in as you since your followed/following relationships are public once it has your username. For Gmail, you have to provide your username and password, though Dopplr promises never to send messages without your specific approval.

In addition, you can also view “New Travellers on Dopplr” and “People You Might Now” – these use second order connections (people who were invited by people with whom you share trips, people who share trips with other people with whom you also share trips). This creates a nice mix of deliberate invite (I want to share info with a colleague) and synchronicity (I haven’t seen that person since last year’s SXSW but it might be fun to see if we’re ever in the same town).

Dopplr is still in private beta, meaning people do have to be invited, but invites are unlimited for those already in the system. (Want one, just leave a comment below).

On Tripit, which is now open to all users, you add friends simply by putting in email addresses and customizing the message – no links to your address book, facebook, twitter, etc.

What am I sharing?

Dopplr’s model resembles Twitter’s, in the sense that you have a bi-directional relationship (those whose trips you can see, and those who can see your trips – not necessarily the same people). You explicitly choose for each “friend” you’re connected to whether they can see your trips or not, and they control whether you can see theirs.

This is great, from a “not accidentally disclosing more than you want” perspective, but it actually can be a bit confusing – several of my colleagues thought they had shared their trips with me when in fact all they had done was accept being able to see mine – they missed the extra step. (If you browse over to connections this gets much clearer, as they call out who can see your trips versus whose trips you can see, but if you just glance through the setup process you can miss it).

Tripit, on the other hand, distinguishes between friends and collaborators. Friends can see your trips, and you can see theirs – destinations and dates.

Collaborators can view detailed info and can add plans to your trip – this is really designed for people traveling together to add details to the agenda – events, hotels, day trips, raw notes, data imported from the provided TripClipper (basically just a bookmarklet which adds urls to a given trip), and so on.

Feeds, APIs

Both offer various feeds of your own trips and trips you have visibility into.

Dopplr can give you an iCal format or ATOM feed of your own trips, or the trips you have visibility to. (In fact, the Atom feeds are geocoded, so you can do some fun and interesting things with them). You don’t seem to able to subscribe to specific fiends’ feeds, though.

Tripit also lets you get a calendar feed (iCal) of your trips, or specific friends’ trips, but not all your friends trips and yours in one feed. Their feeds are not geocoded.

What’s Missing?

Dopplr supports OpenID; Tripit does not.

Tripit allows for “collaboration” on trips, but Dopplr does not.

Tripit doesn’t get trains. Sending an Amtrak confirmation just results in an error. I know trains are less common, but in the BOS-NY-WA corridor the Acela is a common mode of business transit, and I know many European travellers use trains frequently as well. It’s also easy enough to work around, since you can add details manually. (Dopplr doesn’t care how you get from one place to another, just what cities you are in on what dates, so it avoids this problem).

[Update: Per this blog post, Tripit is working on rail support]

I don’t think either of the sites is really leveraging the value of the historical data well yet – Dopplr lets you get a geocoded feed of all your trips, including past trips, but there isn’t yet any real way to use this data – # of days away from home in last X months, for example.

Tripit, if you forward a travel confirmation in the past, accepts it and creates a trip – but then it doesn’t show up in your “upcoming trips” list (well, it isn’t upcoming). If you view your list of trips in calendar view, you can go into the past and pull up details on an individual trip, but there’s no reporting on the trips you’ve taken in the aggregate or reusing former trips in a new trip.

Open-source software projects tend to be initiated and built exclusively by programmers and their focus usually lies, as it should, with core features and technology. But a project that is exclusively driven by programmers usually won’t have an elegant user interface.

This post started as a comment on his blog, but got too long so I moved it here instead.

Reville proposed fixing this problem, in part, by establishing a “Free Beauty Squadron” which would connect designers and open source projects looking to improve their interfaces:

Here’s how a Free Beauty Squadron might work. A volunteer committee of experts asks projects to apply, explaining why they are a good candidate for an overhaul and what they hope to accomplish. When a project is selected, a paid designer flies out to meet one or more team members in person and begins developing a plan. Over a 6 week period, the designer creates mockups and interfaces flows for a new user experience, all in consultation with the coders. When the designer is done, the project has graphic files, documentation of a new UI, and an implementation plan to quickly or gradually put the new interface in place. The designer reserves 2 weeks for future consultation with the project as issues inevitably arise during implementation. The committee then sends the designer to their next project.

While I’m with Nicholas on the problem, I think this is the wrong direction in which to aim for a solution.

It’s not just that it is difficult to add design to the surface of a fully formed application (while beauty may be skin deep, true usability goes right through to the core), or that the interactions between new designers and existing Open Source projects might be difficult, or that the projects would need to take time to implement the new designs (these are logistical problems which Nicholas admits and offers what he sees as reasosonable workarounds to).

The problem is that it sets up the idea that “design work ” (specifically he seems to be targetting visual design, which is only a subset of a broader set of design skills from which many open source projects could benefit) is so fundamentally different than other kinds of production that it requires a different funding mechanism to get produced.

Put another way, why pay the designers and not the coders? Or, perhaps more accurately, why attract and encourage designers differently than coders?

Is it just that designers don’t need the tools open source produces?

Are the varied and sundry motivations which drive coders to contribute to open source somehow not relevant in the design community?

Many contributors to open source are actually paid employees of large companies using the software in question – don’t any of those patrons have designers?

I would assume many designers might appreciate the opportunity to build their portfolios with design solutions to real world challenges – for which their compensation might be reputation and experience, rather than cash.

Part of the problem must be in the code-centric nature of many open source communities, in which your ability to hack is the (only) measure of your worth – but that has been evolving in many projects to include broader skillsets.

So how does the open source community broadly engage with the designers in our midst, without having to create a separate charity brigade?

My favorite pearl of wisdom from that talk: The best thing about JavaScript is that there have been no new design mistakes since 1999 (when spec was last updated).

In addition to being highly knowledgeable (Brendan Eich called him the Yoda of Lambda Programming and JavaScript, he “discovered” JSON) he’s also entertaining, funny, and thought provoking.

In this video, after about 10-12 minutes of broad background on why the fundamental nature of security on the web is broken, he dives into the specific problem of mashups, the same origin policy in JavaScript, the global namespace and shared DOM, and suggests a method for using Google Gears to craft a solution.

Not sure how valuable the slides will be in the absence of my commentary on them, but here they are:

• Two Steps Forward, One Step Back (4.3MB, in ODP format for OpenOffice)
• Two Steps Forward, One Step Back (3.3MB, in PDF format)

Thanks to those who attended and feel free to contact me with any questions.

Wasserman works with Carnegie Mellon West, and is the Executive Director of the Center for Open Source Investigation.

He covered a lot of the basics of what organizations need to keep in mind as they evaluate open source projects, and some resources (the Business Readiness Rating, for example) they can use to support those adoption plans.

His basic principles for evaluating software:

• Does the software do what I need it to do?
• Are there good sources of documentation and support?
• Is the software being maintained and updated?
• What do others think about the quality and performance of the software?

Good advice for open and closed source alike. People often get caught up in the details and intricacies of licensing options and miss the basics. Not that you don’t need to think about licensing, but you can’t let a focus on the fact that you’re looking at open source software distract you from the core questions you already know how to evaluate.

—

Another panel I saw was “Commercial Open Source: Beginning of the End or End of the Beginning?” by Brian Prentice.

He put the recent controversies this summer of SugarCRM’s attribution license and the CPAL in the context of a longer term divide between competing interests within the open source world – pointing to VC’s funding commercial open source companies, who hope to control the costs of sales and marketing by using open source as a distribution model but feeling the need to hold back some intellectual property to create a sellable asset.

He described the challenges inherent in the “functionally delineated” model, where there is a community edition which is free and an enterprise edition which is not. Users and organizations adopting this style of commercial open source must be careful to recognize the details of what is and is not included in the solution they’ve adopted. (Just as in a functionally delineated closed source model with different versions of a product each version must be clearly differentiated).

Alfresco, on the other hand, was signaled out as a counter-example, or at least another way of doing commercial open source, since the community and enterprise editions are functionally identical, with the difference being support and services. (Disclosure: Optaros is an Alfresco Platinum Partner).

I suppose you could say that what we’re seeing is a period of experimentation as companies which would otherwise have been traditional proprietary companies trying to learn from and benefit from the open source ecosystem. It’s neither the end of the beginning nor the beginning of the end, just another chapter in the ongoing saga.

Many of the points Tiemann made about the efficacy of open source as a development methofology as compared to closed source were reported here in eWeek: “Is Open Source the Best Way to Unlock the Value of IT?” (which ironically enough had a big Microsoft VisualStudio ad in the middle of it when I read it).

Tiemann covered the approval this summer of the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), noting that the safe harbor provision – enabling a variety of mechanisms for handling the attribution – was the fundamental change that made him support approval of the license, and giving props to Ross Mayfield and SocialText for choosing to submit themselves to that process – very few CEOs would request validation from an external body over which they have no control and inside of which are many competing ideologies and interests.

He also discussed the GPLv3, talking about it as a small incremental upgrade, and pointing out that in the closed source software world, every minor point release may come with new licensing terms, where the GPL has only had three versions in nearly 20 years.

(See also “OSI Calls for Major Revisions to Microsoft Permissive License” for other discussions with Tiemann from the conference).

–

Again due to the overlap between the Open Source and Web Innovation Summits I missed the opportunity to see Ray Valdes talk about “Web 2.0: The Open Source Connection.”

I’ve often made the argument (to anyone who will listen) that the real engine behind Web 2.0 innovation is open source – not that every important web 2.0 property is itself open source or even uses open source, but that the explosion of new approaches, new techniques, and new properties would not have been possible without the mature open source stack, which let startups create real functional applications without such a high barrier of entry, and without the “success tax” of increased licensing based on user adoption.

The opening session was Wednesday afternoon with Mark Driver : Gartner’s Open Source Scenario for 2007: Risks and Rewards for Mainstream IT.

This was the session which led to this Network World article and corresponding Slashdot flame-fest. But both missed what I thought was a perfectly rational set of statements:

1. that commercial software vendors cannot ignore open source as a disruptive innovation
2. that commercial software vendors are increasingly incorporating open source in a non-trivial fashion, and
3. that this trend will continue to deepen over the next four years.

Driver walked through some basic definitions and argued that we’re in a Third-Wave of Open Source reactions from Corporate IT: whereas many people in Enterprise IT departments first reacted to open source with some mixture of indifference and irrational emotion (that is both pro and con), the current phase is one characterized by “realism” – which will lead ultimately to “leverage.”

I suppose one could argue it is because of the company I keep, but I’d argue a large number of commercial enterprises passed realism and have been enjoying leverage for some time – but otherwise I think the model is accurate enough in describing the process many organizations go through in learning about open source.

One interesting point Driver made was that open source tends to create “Investment Protection” where proprietary software creates / ensures Intellectual Property protection. In the open source world, the investment the user or adopting organization makes gets preserved, because there is real vendor independence. In the commercial world there is real protection for the investments of the producing organization.

In addition Driver showed Gartner research which demonstrated that many organizations are using open source in “mission-critical” applications – that the percentage of open source software used in a mission critical application was almost the same as the percentage of internally developed or commercially purchased (non-OSS) software used in mission critical applications.

Driver argued that the adoption prioties are changing as open source moves further into the adoption curve and becomes more maintstream or is adopted b more conservative adopters. Where earlier adopters (“technology aggressive adopters”) focused on open source because it provided flexibility and independence, later adopters will be more focused on cost savings and risk mitigation. (All four motivators are important to both audiences – in Driver’s argument it is just their relative priority which changes).

Driver talked about the possibility of an increasing bifurcation within the open source community between “community class open source” projects versus “business class open source” – differentiated not some much by their features or specific license but by the goals, aims, and cultures of project governance. For conservative adopters whose focus is cost and risk avoidance, community class open source may not be a viable option, whereas for technology aggressive adopters the business class open source may be too slow moving or non-innovative. Additionally, he described the emergence of “gated source” options, which lie somewhere between the open source and proprietary models,

Driver listed four factors enterprises should consider in planning open source adoption:

• Fitness of Purpose (does the software do what you need it to do, well)
• Maturity (is the software project well governed, and capable of reliably producing quality?)
• Your technology adoption profile (is your organization an early, mainstream, or late adopter of new innovations?)
• Deployment scenario (how will the app be used, in the context of the organization’s mission? Is it mission critical?)

He closed by noting that “ignoring open source is not a viable option” and that the days of “skunk works” adoption are over. Enterprises should be planning adoption strategies, just as they have corporate management strategies around procuring commercial / proprietary / closed source software.

—

Unfortunately, given the overlap of the Web Innovation and Open Source summits I didn’t get to attend Nikos Drakos‘ session on “Open Source in the Workplace: What it Promises and What it Delivers,” but based on the ppt from the session I think I would have enjoyed it . He covered the growth of open source outside the “infrastructure and development tools” categories – into areas like content management, collaboration, and customer-facing communications. He also went into the leverage of open source collaboration principles in other contexts – perfect lead up to Yochai Benkler’s Keynote on Thursday.

Unfortunately, no such luck (cue the “No soup for you!” clip from Seinfeld):

Was the problem that I was running Firefox rather then Netscape (Netscape? Really?), or that I was running Linux?

I clicked through, to find:

My SHC Community currently supports the following operating systems and browsers:
Operating Systems:

• Windows 2000
• Windows XP
• Windows Vista

Browsers:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 5.0 and higher
• Netscape 7.0 and higher
• AOL 5.0 and higher
• Firefox 1.0 and higher

If your browser or operating system is not supported by My SHC Community, we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

In this day and age, no Mac support, no Linux support? Why?

Is there some elaborate MS Silverlight functionality in this community? Some kind of Adobe AIR based application to install?

I assume there’s just some overzealous javascript useragent detection at work here, but won’t know until I find time to boot up my Windows virtual machine and check it out on IE on Windows XP. (You can actually click around on the site, but I don’t see anyone to join the community without the right brower user-agent. I suppose it might be faster to just spoof my user-agent, I know I used to have a plugin for firefox which would make it pretend to be on Windows).

Then I’ll likely never go back. Welcome to community!

Two recent videos stood out as worth sharing. Both focus on creative visualization, and are inspiring in terms of how some relatively simply changes in visual display of information can have a tremendous impact.

The first is from TED Talks, and it’s Jonathan Harris talking about “The Web’s Secret Stories“:

You can view We Feel Fine and play with it yourself – but I’ll warn you it is ponderously slow on my Linux machine – much more engaging in Windows or Mac OS.

It’s also open – at least in the “here’s an API, go mash up something cool” sense. (Free as in beer and free as in API but not as in Free software – Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike).

I wish I could spend a week just playing with what this API makes available, maybe using Yahoo! pipes to connect feelings to news stories about locations?

The second is from OSCON, and it’s Ben Fry talking about Processing, a design and prototyping tool:

Click To Play

Processing is Open Source – GPL/LGPL – so you can not only try it out and see what goodness you can make, you can also contribute to its development.

I find it nearly impossible after watching these to go back to standard office docs – but I think that’s a good thing.

Sounds like TripIT provides some of the features I wish Dopplr had – including the ability to pull travel information out of the confirmation emails generated by the airlines, as well as more granular (hour by hour) info about overlaps in your travel with friends.

All they’re missing is the obligatory elided-vowel-of-web-2.0, which I think would make them TripT.

Will this be enough to push a switch to TripIt? I’ll let you know once I get my invite.

First, check out the Presentation Materials page on the OSCON site. If you were attending, but couldn’t make every session you wanted to see (with 14 parallel tracks this is unavoidable) or if you were unable to attend, this page is the place to pick up slides and other materials.

(This being OSCON, some folks include code- but it is still mostly slides).

This year, the presentation materials page also includes video for some of the major talks – including James Larsson’s “Pimp My Garbage” – Leather Fetish Pong and all.

Click To Play

If you want just video, head to oscon.blip.tv where you can get just the sessions that were videotaped.

Or, if you’re using Miro (and you should be), just search Blip.tv (it is one of the choices in the search drop-down at the bottom of the interface) for OSCON and then save those search results as a channel.

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?

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.

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

In parallel, a group of developers working on open source PHP projects have created GoPHP5, a site and community of projects all of which have agreed to drive PHP5 adoption. In order to be listed on the site, the project must:

Make an announcement on your site that by February 5, 2008 you will accept PHP 5.2 features into your codebase and will no longer provide support for lesser PHP versions. (versions or branches of your software already released by that date may continue support for older versions; this resolution applies only to new development.)

The idea is that unless a certain critical mass of key projects begins to require PHP 5, most shared web hosts won’t upgrade the version of PHP they make available to their users. Because the web hosts still run PHP 4, the developers of PHP projects still have to support PHP 4 – but so long as the developers continue to support PHP 4 there is no incentive for the hosting providers to upgrade:

It is a dangerous cycle, and one that needs to be broken. The PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed software projects have all agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, any new feature releases will have a minimum version requirement of at least PHP 5.2.0. Furthermore, the listed web hosts have agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, they will include PHP 5.2 (or a more recent version) in their service offer.

WordPress, however, is not (and will not be) one of the projects on this particular PHP bandwagon. Ticket #4591 has been marked closed, wontfix:

This has been brought up probably half a dozen times, and our position is the same.

* PHP5 does not yet have sufficient penetration. On many hosts where it is available, it is not the default.
* We’re not going to turn WordPress into a protest piece at the expense of our users.
* We’re not going to set a date for the end of PHP4 support when there is no evidence to suggest that the hosting landscape will be any different on that date.

Matt Mullenweg also weighed in on the issue on his blog, arguing that:

Now the PHP core team seems to have decided that the boost their failing product needs is to kill off their successful one instead of asking the hard questions: What was it that made PHP 4 so successful? What are we doing to emphasize those strengths? Why wasn’t PHP 5 compelling to that same audience? Are the things we’re doing in PHP 6 crucial to our core audience or simply “good” language problems to solve? Will they drive adoption? How can we avoid releasing (another) PCjr?

(Tell us how you really feel, Matt.)

While I can understand the desire of the GoPHP5 folks to encourage web hosts to make available new language features, I have to say ultimately Matt’s right on this one. Explicitly choosing not to provide support to a group of users in order to force adoption of a new version is putting the cart (developer interests) before the horse (user needs).

That said, how can the PHP community get PHP5 more broadly deployed? (And deployed as the default at hosts which need to provide support for both 4 and 5, which will be the case at many shared hosts)? What do you do when the older version is successful people don’t see a good reason to migrate to the newer version?

I remember the bad old days of Netscape Navigator 4.x, and how terribly long it took for the number of users on NN 4.x to reach a low enough level that they could be “unsupported” from a web development point of view. Ajax would never have taken off so widely as a technique had it not been so easy to talk about supporting “All major browsers, 5.x or later” – dropping the old Netscape stack and supporting only Mozilla based browsers (and that MS thing). But that happened more or less accidentally – no one continued to develop NN 4.x as the company failed, and new and more compelling options (Firefox, Safari, Opera) appeared.

How do we get beyond PHP4 without leaving users behind?

More generally, how do you crank the adoption cycle to move faster, without forcing end-of-life?

Ubuntu‘s LTS releases “will be supported with security updates for 5 years on the server and 3 years on the desktop” – part of a deliberate strategy to reduce user’s risk of obsolescence and increase adoption of Linux. But PHP5 is already three years old – PHP4 was launched in May of 2000!

(Update: Just coincidentally came across this: 4 Years Ago Today – Netscape Corporation Killed, Mozilla Foundation Born. – I thought netscape’s death was even longer ago than 4 years. How quickly time flies).

Andy Peatling at Blaze New Media posted about a recent project: Chickspeak, a social network for female college students.

In their words, it’s is “an organization for young women created to inspire big dreams, strong values and success in the world”:

Our website exists to be the most entertaining and engaging reflection of women’s life in college, while also providing the support and information necessary to stay healthy, grounded and achieve great heights while in school and well after graduation. We are your voice- your interests and passions, your unique journey and experiences. Updated daily articles are written by women currently in college and cover everything from health and beauty, to relationships, travel, entertainment and much more. We also feature guest writers and columnists who are recognized experts in their fields and who act as advisors to our members. Members can post comments on articles and build relationships with other members and the ChickSpeak Team through forums, personal blogs and private messaging. We are an evolving concept and welcome any woman who’s excited about this to get involved!

What’s most interesting about it for me (not being a femail college student) is how it was built – leveraging WordPress MU as the core, changing the theme to de-emphasize the “blog” functionality and bring member profiles front and center.

From Andy’s blog post:

To achieve the desired change it was down to making a new WordPress theme. The theme would have exactly the same look and feel as the core site – making it look like the new member home page was still part of the core site itself.

Within the theme, I removed the code that usually makes the blog posts front and center, and changed it to the code that outputs the users profile. The blog code was moved to the sidebar so it could still be accessed as the members “journal” feature.

Finally, the code to output the users new private messages was added to the sidebar, as well as some code to output polls, photos and other smaller bits and bobs.

The project also incorporates BBPress for forums / discussions, has links into myspace and flickr, and so on, as you might expect from a social network circa 2007. (The facebook app can’t be far behind, if they don’t have one already.)

This new online community continues and extends the work Optaros did on the print version of the Open Source Catalog at the beginning of 2007, enabling community interaction.

The directory site includes blogs, forums, and case studies

As Seb said:

The EOS Directory bridges the gap between corporations seeking solutions through the Request for Proposal (RFP) process and the open source community which does not participate in expensive and time-consuming RFP processes. Instead, open source software organizations provide free downloads for companies to begin working on a solution. The EOS Directory fills the gap by proving expert and user ratings, case studies, forums and requests for advice for organizations to better choose the right open source software based on functionality, community backing, project trend and maturity of technology.

(Lukas, Matt Asay, and Jack Loftus have blogged about it as well).

It’s in beta, and very much a work in progress – we hope to broaden the community involvement aspects especially, as well as provide better coverage across all categories.

Please do check it out, and provide feedback – here in the comments or (better yet) on the EOS Directory site itself.

They discuss a project Optaros did with Swisscom Hospitality Services as an example of the impact next generation Internet applications can have customer interactions, as well as how we think such applications are most effectively delivered.

The presentations from the webinar are now available:

• David Douek, Product Management, Swisscom Hospitality Services: Swisscom Hospitality Services Room 2.0 (Case Study) (pdf|899.27 kB)
• Joel Gardet, Project Manager, Optaros: What it means to assemble next generation internet applications (OptAM) (pdf|4.05 MB)
• Bruno Von Rotz, VP Strategy & Research, Optaros: The Evolution of the online customer communication and interaction (pdf|3.46 MB)

The title of the BBC story to which they link is even more dramatic: Warning of data ticking time bomb

Both are borrowing the phase used by the chief executive of the UK National Archive, who say “the growing problem of accessing old digital files formats is a ‘ticking time bomb.’”

The BBC cuts right to the point:

The root cause of the problem is the range of proprietorial file formats which proliferated during the early digital revolution.

Technology companies, such as Microsoft, used file formats which were not only incompatible with pieces of software from rival firms, but also between different iterations of the same program.

Only in the early years? Seems to me the problem continues, and perhaps deepens.

Save your data in open, published standard formats and the worst scenario you’ll get in is the need to write a translator program to migrate old files into a new format – but at least you’ll know what format they’re in, and know that format’s specifications.

Accompanying the beta site, they’ve launched a blog, Behind the Scenes at CNN.com, where they are encouraging discussion of the redesign.

It’s a great concept – specifically highlighting what the team is trying to accomplish in the redesign, and going beyond the constraints of carefully chosen focus groups under NDAs for a far more transparent and open forum.

Not all the comments will be terribly valuable, of course; the first comment on the first post says in its entirety: “It’s too white. Not enough color. print is too small. Make it more colorful like USA Today. com or MSNBC.com.”

But when all the comments are taken together, they will undoubtedly get insights and guidance from their most vocal constituents which will help guide their evolution, and which they would only have received too late (or not at all) under the old “design and build under a cloud of secrecy, then reveal only when it is all complete” approach.

They’re also explicitly working on what Dermot Waters characterizes as “being a good web citizen” by pointing to local news sources and blog posts which are outside CNN’s domain.

The idea, which sounds almost self-evident but isn’t always well understood by online media sites, is that:

. . . by being a good web citizen, we fulfill our core mission by doing whatever it takes to help you get the full story — even if it takes you away from CNN.com. If we do that well, we believe you’ll keep coming back.

It will be interesting to watch the site (and the discussion about its goals and their fulfillment) evolve.

(In the interest of full disclosure, Turner Broadcasting is an Optaros client – but that doesn’t influence what I’ve said above except that I’ve had a chance to meet some of the folks behind the effort and know that they get it and mean what they say.)

I don’t normally blog here about projects Optaros has been involved in, but I think this article in the Current is too good to pass up sharing: “It’s public radio, but with nearly everything different, including the name”

It describes the new station/site (in which Optaros was involved) from Chicago Public Radio called :Vocalo.

There will be a website, but it would be wrong to say that it’s the station’s website. Really, it’s the website’s radio station.
The name, :Vocalo, is an invention, essentially “Vocal” with an “o” at the end. It rhymes with “Zocalo,” a Spanish word that in Mexico refers to a town plaza and in Colombia refers to the infrastructure that stabilizes a large building. The colon before the “V” is intentional — a trademarked emoticon.

The part that I think is most interesting is how involved the potential audience – not the current CPR audience, but the residents of the area the station could potentially serve – were in the process:

In eight focus groups, we gave special attention to the people who had, for various reasons, rejected us but were potential listeners—people who were committed to the area, who volunteered in the community, who follow the news and use radio. We asked them to listen to WBEZ for a week, keep diaries of what they thought, and meet for two-hour group conversations. Then we took questions that arose in the focus groups and surveyed listeners by mail.
These potential listeners were intensely interested in information and discussion about our shared place, the Chicago area. African-American, Latino and Asian-American non-listeners in our surveys and focus groups placed their highest value on local service. They sought it in our broadcast day and held it to high standards—not of production quality but of accuracy and relevance. They were highly critical of what they heard.

Taking the results of the listener (and non-listener) research, which the article sums up as “Nearly all felt the station was not for them – and was not trying to be inviting,” the CPR team went through a sustained and quite strategic effort to make honest changes – not just to rest on their traditional audience but to reconnect with their strategic mission.

One of the results of that work is the new site and station:

This new station will be built on community radio sensibilities but without the characteristic schedule of special-interest shows. In fact, it will have no shows at all. It will air a continuous, seamless talk-based stream completely devoted to Northwest Indiana and Chicago metropolitan area culture, issues and selected music.

It’s also available as an online stream, for those of us outside greater Chicagoland.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out over time as a format and as a concept – reclaiming public media by reconnecting it its core mission.

Involving your community in creating your product has lessons that go well beyond public radio, of course – we all have to be open to reimagining what it is we “do” and how it does or doesn’t meet the needs of current users and prospective users.

The irony for me is that, having been a Flickr user for a long time, I was only last week looking into using Yahoo! Photos because TiVo offers built in access to Yahoo! Photos (top service on that page).

I can’t find anything online today about whether TiVo will get an update that will enable TiVo users direct access to Flickr.

But they won’t have to. There’s already a solution: the Flickr/TiVo Viewer.

Haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but will hopefully do so this weekend [2]. It takes advantage of TiVo’s HME Software Development Kit, which lets users create Java applications to run on TiVo Series2 DVRs.

One more reason TiVo and Open Source are cool.

[1] Actually USA Today says:

Users will be directed over a three-month period to transfer their images to Flickr or other photo sites such as Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish or Photobucket. Yahoo says it will make the transition easy, with a one-click transfer process.

If I were Yahoo! I’d make the process one-click, but only for Flickr.

I’m not suggesting they should hold photos captive – I’m a big fan of the users-own-their-data meme – but I think it’s ok if the one-click transfer within the family is easier than the several-click export necessary for other sites.

Does that make me less customer-centric?

[2] My flickr photos

Also posted to Tech Crunch: Breaking: Yahoo to Shut Down Yahoo Photos in Favor of Flickr

This week, add Microsoft’s Silverlight 1.1 and Dynamic Languages Runtime to the mix alongside Adobe’s Flex SDK.

Jeff Gould argues that open source has “jumped the shark,” and that:

the magical words “open source” have come to function as the software equivalent of carbon offsets. . . . some software vendors are cleverer than others, and have learned to buy indulgences for their sinful profit-craving ways by selectively building open source components into their stack. . . . Their own software remains every bit as proprietary as the Microsoft products they compete with.

Interestingly, his argument comes the same day that Microsoft announces the Dynamic Language Runtime at MIX 07.

The DLR will enable developers to code .NET applications in Python, Ruby and other dynamic languages to come (alongside JavaScript and VisualBasic) in addition to C# and VB.NET.

Adding in Silverlight 1.1, which will be a browser plug-in, this means that “developers building browser-based applications can now use their preferred language even for client-side code.”

How does this relate to Gould’s argument? The DLR, along with IronPython and IronRuby, will be made available under the Microsoft Permissive License, which they characterize as their “BSD-style” license. (For now code is available as part of IronPython ).

What isn’t clear is what this will mean in terms of deploying applications. Silverlight so far has only been described as “cross-platform” – and a specific version of cross-platform at that. As Gavin Clarke notes in his reporting from MIX 07:

. . . while Silverlight works in Safari, Firefox, and Mac versions 10.4.8 or higher on PowerPC and Intel in addition to Internet Explorer and Windows, support for Linux and Opera – to name just two other popular alternatives – is missing, with little prospect of support coming from Microsoft

In other words, you can develop with whatever dynamic languages you like, so long as you are working on a .NET platform. You can even deploy those dynamic language applications to browsers, so long as it is IE or Firefox on windows or Safari for Mac OS X, and using the Silverlight 1.1 plugin, which itself may or may not be open source.

(Elizabeth Montalbana at IDG says here that “Microsoft will release the source code to part of its Silverlight technology at MIX 07 this week,” but the Silverlight site merely says “Microsoft will make the Silverlight browser plug-in freely available for all supported platforms.” It looks to me like some of the DLR will be under the Microsoft Permissive License, but not the Silverlight plug-in itself).

This resembles / echoes Adobe’s recent move to open source parts of the Flex SDK, and portions of the ActionScript interpreter used in the Flash plug-in, but without opening the key portions of Flex (Flex Data Services, for example) and without opening the Flash player itself. (As well as not open sourcing Apollo, though they have promised Linux support at some future date).

While I think it will be interesting for .NET based developers who want the ability to flex their Ruby or Python skills on the platform on which they arleady develop, I don’t see any vast migration of open source developers into the Redmond camp, any more than I see Adobe’s gestures in the direction of open source moving those accustomed to open source ajax frameworks and libraries.

In fact, perhaps this becomes a way to expose even more .NET developers to joys of Ruby on Rails, Slingshot and Django.

Related posts:

• Talking Ruby and Dynamic Language Support with John Lam (Video, at Port25)
• Python, Java, Ruby, Oh My! Silverlight Alpha 1.1 ships with Dynamic Language Support (video, at Port 25)
• Mix ’07′s Sleeper Announcement: Cross-platform CLR
• Silverlight Glow Dimmed by Cross Platform Concerns
• Mix 07, Silverlight, Dynamic Language Runtime, and Open Source (Miguel de Icaza)
• Microsoft Adds Open-Source Twist to Silverlight
• A conversation with John Lam (Jon Udell) points out that the DRL-based Ruby can’t run Rails
• At Mix07, is Microsoft bottom-trolling for developers with weak knees?
• Silly Season – wonderful rant at Dive Into Mark about Silverlight and Apollo

Today Joyent announced the public release of Slingshot, a framework for (their words) obliterating the distinction between the web and the desktop.

Slingshot lets developers take Ruby-on-Rails applications and deploy them to desktops (Windows, Mac OS X).

Is it just me, or does the red rock in the slingshot graphic look a bit like the Adobe Apollo logo? Ok, so maybe not a direct version of the logo, but certain the Adobe Apollo red.

Is this a cheaper faster way to get to sent to the moon and back, or just another David vs. Goliath myth?

More on Slingshot, including a quick tour.

Although I am certainly happy to see Adobe moving in the direction of open source, it is good to more closely at the overall picture: what is being open sourced and what is not, which is exactly what Burnette does.

I guess it’s really just a question of “getting it” relative to others. The Flash player is still a closed platform, but at least it is available for Linux, unlike Silverlight.

</update>
—
Adobe seems increasingly to “get it” when it comes to enabling the modern web application environment, leveraging the strengths of the Flash player on all those dekstops, and allowing enough openness for creativity to flourish.

The latest example of which is the announcement this morning that they have open sourced the Flex SDK – compiler, libraries, and all. (Everything but the Eclipse-based IDE, which remains under a commercial license).

In the following video from the PodTech network, Ely Greenfield and David Wadhwani discuss the announcement with Robert Scoble:

Related links:

• Adobe to Open Source Flex (Adobe Labs)
• Adobe to Open Source Flex (press release at Yahoo! Finance)
• Adobe to Open Source Flex (at John Newton’s Content Log)

He’s posted a video of the talk he gave at the expo: “Creating Offline Web Applications Within the Browser.” It describes in quite a bit of detail how to use the Dojo Offline Toolkit to enable offline use of Ajax applications.

If you’re not looking for the tech details I still think the first 15-20 minutes is worth watching as he outlines why you might want offline web applications and what characteristics a good framework should provide for such apps.

or ?

Adobe wants you to believe that the name Apollo is a reference to the Apollo project, the series of NASA missions aimed at landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth, a goal set by JFK that’s the point of the Apollo icon, with it’s orbital circle.

But I’ve decided the codename “Apollo” (Kevin Lynch has said that there will be a real release name which is different) is a disguised swipe at Ajax.

Ajax, in Greek mythology, was not a god, but a human hero and King. Interestingly, in the Illiad, he is the only major warrior who receives no assistance from the gods, suggesting “the virtues of hard work and perseverance.”

Microsoft called their Ajax platform (now more prosaicly known as ASP.NET AJAX) Atlas – a Titan and brother to Prometheus who held heaven and earth on his shoulders as a punishment from Zeus for leading the Titans in a revolt against the gods.

(Side note: This is the same Atlas who retrieved the Golden Apples of the Hesperides for Hercules, who tricked Atlas into taking back up the burden of the world on his shoulders).

So why does Adobe choose Apollo? Well, the god Apollo unites art and reason, and is the god of beauty, the sun, music, light, truth – the ideal of beauty. Perhaps Apollo plays in both senses here – rather than holding up the earth (like Atlas) Adobe’s Apollo is taking us to the moon and back, and providing beauty. Ajax was merely human, Apollo divine. Atlas tried to usurp the gods and was punished; Apollo brought order, music, and poetry.

Perhaps it’s time for an open source web/desktop framework named after Dionysus? (See Apollonian and Dionysian)

p.s. The Microsoft codename for what is now called Windows Presentation Foundation was Avalon. Why does Avalon sound familiar? It’s a mythic island associated with King Arthur – where Excalibur was forged, and where Arthur’s body rests. It’s also, though, famous for its beautiful apples. Microsoft admitting to the inspiration for their focus on improved graphics capability?