Digital Copyright Canada

I am not a programmer. I’m a journalist.

Journalists routinely write and talk about things they can’t do. Sportswriters can’t dunk. Business journalists aren’t entrepreneurs. And few political journalists could get elected dogcatcher.

So maybe I am not qualified to make the following complaint, but I’m going to make it anyway because it’s what I do.

Does open matter if you won’t or can’t play with it?

What brings this up is People Power’s launch of the SuRF Developer Kit (above), a $149.95 set of boards with TinyOS software that lets you build wireless applications under the Open Source Home Area Network (OSHAN) specification.

I have been fascinated with this idea for most of a decade. Applications that live in the air, using a wireless network as a platform. Home security applications like cameras and movement sensors. Home automation applications to control your heat and lights. Medical applications to measure your heart function and alert doctors to trouble.

When I first wrote about this, at a time when I was otherwise completely unemployed, I called it “The World of Always On,” in that these applications were always available, not dependent on a continual flow of electricity. They’re low power and can live on rechargeable batteries.

It’s the next market boom, I said. I gave a talk at Stanford about it, during their 2004 Accelerating Change conference. I drew almost no one. Everyone was more interested in getting David Brin’s autograph.

So now it’s six years later. We’re starting to see movement on the medical front, albeit in closed, expensive systems. And we have OSHAN, plus what looks like something Steve Wozniak played with in high school.

Trouble is, it seems no one wants to play like it’s 1973. We have grown accustomed to ready-made solutions. Our kids are users, not builders. (Well, mine are.)

Can new technology grow in such an environment? Yes, it can. Developers create, companies market, people buy. But in that environment, does it really matter much whether the resulting solution is open or closed, since you’re not going to open it anyway?

The old computing vision of client and server is being replaced by one of device and cloud.

(The picture is a greatly-reduced image from Smoothspan, which wrote about cloud keiretsu back in 2008.)

It is easy to tell if a device is open or closed. If you don’t know right away the media will tell you. The iPhone is closed. The Android is open. We can debate how open and how closed all day. That’s what journalists do.

But clouds? Right now the only really active business cloud is Amazon’s. You can make it pretty open. You can install Linux on it.

The idea of the cloud, however, was to make questions about open and closed irrelevant through virtualization. When it comes to the cloud, open includes the power to run closed.

IBM is big into clouds, more as a mainframe replacement than a service, and while its clouds grok open source, they still make a choice. They run Red Hat’s version of KVM virtualization. Dave Rosenberg says they will also support VMWare, but it’s clear that they align with Red Hat.

But is that all that matters? Matt Asay says whether your sync is open matters more than your cloud’s virtualization scheme. Cloud support for open sync systems like Funambol is what counts to him.

You start to see the problem. How can we demand an open cloud if we don’t know what open means? That’s why Microsoft can claim its cloud is open. Because it’s interoperable with open source. Microsoft has always defined open in terms of interoperability.

We have come a long way from last year’s debate over an Open Cloud Manifesto. We have come a long way in terms of the market. We have traveled less distance in terms of the debate.

Until open source advocates agree on what open means in terms of the cloud, clouds will evolve in ways that give lip service to open as an ideal, but still enforce vendor lock-in.

So what makes a cloud open to you?

The continuing conflict between Google and China, which may be a proxy for deeper conflicts over economics and values, could easily impact open source.

That’s because Google has become the U.S. company most identified with open source development. Google’s Android phones are mainly made in China — like nearly all phones.

Google insists its pull-out won’t impact Android, but can we really be certain? Can Google really be certain?

Hassling HTC, quietly putting out the word to others not to support Android, could delay Google considerably. If China wanted it could tell its courts to encourage Apple to file suit there, saying it was only seeking to protect patent rights. It could tell Taiwan that Android is provocative.

The plain fact is that the open source ethos of trusting people and accepting diverse opinions in the code stream is directly at odds with China’s Internet policy, which insists on shifting boundaries moved at the whim of Beijing’s mandarins, and absolute adherence to those boundaries.

Anyone who thinks modern China is communist knows neither China nor communism. It’s an evolving amalgam of the mandarin, bureaucratic system that ruled under the emperors, and a centrally-controlled capitalism George Orwell wrote about in his journalism.

In America business is strong and government weak. In China it’s just the opposite. And the government process is an opaque tea party. (China was drinking tea when Sarah Palin’s ancestors (and Keith Olbermann’s) were living in caves.) Business has access to that tea party, but its interests are not controlling. Businesses are not people under Chinese law.

Right now China is going through an enormous internal struggle, similar to what this country was going through in 2007 and 2008. It’s looking for an economic soft landing while the economic ground comes up to meet it.

We own its bank. Its system of maintaining a strong yuan through purchases of U.S. government assets is a game that must end, somehow, which means growth must slow, which means dreams must be put off, which risks social unrest.

China fears disorder the way Germany does inflation.

Open source is a disordered state of software development, especially when contrasted with proprietary models. Individuals are free to see code, change code, and release code on their schedule, to their own specifications. To a Chinese bureaucrat’s eyes it must seem akin to anarchy. Someone might stick a Falun Gong fortune cookie in there.

We call it freedom. China calls it madness.

China has grudgingly accepted Americans’ rights to do and think as Americans will, but it has not yet accepted the idea of its own people thinking and doing as they will. Boundaries must be maintained.

Proprietary software maintains boundaries. Proprietary development can be controlled.

I can easily see China turning toward the proprietary model. Open source may be an innocent bystander in this great game, but innocent bystanders can be victims, too.

Hey, maybe the merger market isn’t dead after all.

I mention this because Open Logic has just announced an open source audit service for mergers and acquisitions.

The service will not only detail what open source your company depends upon, but what licenses you’re using. This can help an acquirer set an appropriate price.

In making its announcement, Open Logic quoted a recent study saying $36 billion in technology acquisitions went down last year, and 85% of those deals were done in the second half of the year. With the markets now opening wider, more deals are expected.

The technical means for the new product is Open Logic’s Deep Discovery product, previously pitched mainly for audit and census work.

Open Logic may be best known to those in the open source community for its support of the Open Source Census, which collected data on 433,640 installations, finding Ubuntu to be the dominant Linux distribution and Firefox the dominant application.

“If Apple wants to be a real leader, it should be fostering innovation and competition, rather than acting as a jealous and arbitrary feudal lord.”

Is that a quote from Richard Stallman? From Steve Ballmer? Some dirty hippie blogger like myself?

Nope, it’s Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Fred von Lohmann (right), responding to his own “get,” a copy of the iPhone Developer License Agreement, now posted on the EFF Web site. (Picture from ZDNet Government.)

How convenient of Tim Bray to land at Google on such a propitious day. This has to be considered an enormous opportunity for Google to attract developers to the Android platform.

In his own blog post about the document, called a legal analysis, von Lohmann says he got the document through a Freedom of Information Act request, after noticing that NASA has an app in the Apple app store.

What makes this relevant to open source is von Lohmann’s charge that iPhone developers are forbidden from even allowing interoperability with open source software in their apps. “If Apple’s mobile devices are the future of computing, you can expect that future to be one with more limits on innovation and competition than the PC era that came before.”

In early trading the stock was down one percent, a loss of over $2 billion in market cap.  That may have nothing to do with this story, however. Google was down a similar amount. Major averages were down marginally.

XML co-creator Tim Bray has joined the exodus from Oracle and landed at Google, as a “developer advocate” for the Android.

Bray, who like tech titans Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, was born in 1955 (as was this humble blogger), is now expected to be a much more familiar face to reporters, contrasting what he calls Android’s open development vision with the Apple iPhone’s “sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers.”

Bray made the announcement on his popular blog, which you will find on our blogroll.

Having a public, personal face on its Android efforts will be very important to Google, which faces both marketing and legal challenges to its growth in the mobile market from Apple.

Google’s share of the smartphone market nearly tripled in the last quarter, but ComScore MobiLens still has RIM’s Blackberry in the lead, followed by Apple and Microsoft. Microsoft’s share, however, has been falling faster than Lindsay Lohan’s career.

Bray has always been known for giving good quote, and from his blog post looks ready to become the tech equivalent to James Carville, who is also known for giving good quote. Here’s a taste:

Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other.

I think they’re wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it.

This beat is about to get a lot more fun.

The Mozilla Foundation will re-write its Mozilla Public License to make it more compatible with Apache and more globally acceptable.

Mozilla is best known for its Firefox browser. (Picture from Wikimedia.)

Call it one small step by a licensor, one giant leap against license proliferation.

The most important result may be to make it easy for Google Code contributions to move into the browser. Google is a big supporter of the Apache license.

The Black Duck Knowledge Center currently lists Mozilla as the 10th most popular open source license with 1.22% of the market. Apache is 7th with 4.01%. The three main GPL licenses — GPL V.2, LGPL, and GPL V. 3 — together represent more than 60% of the license market.

Apache has momentum, however. Matt Asay called it better for open source businesses last year — he’s now COO of Ubuntu, which uses the GPL. Bruce Perens has written that only three licenses are really necessary — a “gift” license, a “sharing with rules” license, and a hybrid between the two.

Most open source license proliferation involves the rules under which sharing takes place. The OSI’s License Proliferation Committee says there are dozens of OSI-approved licenses out there but only nine (including Apache and Mozilla) have what it calls “strong communities” around them.

License proliferation is a big issue among big companies, since some licenses have terms that contradict one another, forcing corporate projects to be built with multi-license distributions that can be confusing.

Version 1.0 of the Mozilla Public License was written by Mitchell Baker when she was a lawyer for Netscape. The current version, 1.1, was written by the Mozilla Foundation and is a hybrid of BSD and GPL terms.

The new license, Mozilla Public License V.2, is expected to be out by the end of the year.

When a company gets bought out it’s natural top executives will be shown the door. And so the parade has begun at Sun, now part of Oracle.

This is a good thing for open source. Talent is returning to the wild with credibility and experience others can benefit from.

Take the case of Simon “Webmink” Phipps (above). The former chief open source officer is now free, and his personal blog (see the blogroll) is now filled with bloggy goodness.

Phipps had been with Sun for a decade, so he evolved alongside the company’s open source strategy, which moved over time from open defiance, to embrace, and finally to leadership.

During Sun’s open source heyday Phipps was the “Mr. Inside” to CEO Jonathan Schwartz’ “Mr. Outside.” Schwartz would set policy and Phipps would defend it in the trenches.

This made Phipps a regular on the open source show circuit, where he debated and learned from just about everyone in the business. He’s now like the caveman who returns with fire. He knows things. And he has principles.

As is now typical in these situations, Phipps is also in close contact with the ex-Sun underground, including Schwartz, who now calls his blog What I Couldn’t Say. This is another benefit of a corporate fail — the memoirs, the score-settling, the calling to account.

From his perch as an outsider, Phipps is also now a reporter, copying us on the move of the Drizzle team to Rackspace. Insiders have great sources, so for now make Webmink part of your personal blogroll, too.

The last question, one only he can answer, is what happens now? Phipps is running for re-election to the Open Solaris board, but otherwise appears to be unengaged. Will he skulk back to Australia or try again, this time (perhaps) as CEO of a start-up?

Who knows? Anything goes. I think he’ll find that now is when the fun starts.

Meryl Streep won the Oscar for Sophie’s Choice, a film that hinges on (spoiler alert) a woman having to choose which of her children will live and which will die.

Microsoft is for that kind of choice.

In a blog post later copied to GovLoop, Microsoft’s Dan Kasun lays it out.

“Choice has been one of Microsoft’s strongest messages for years,” he writes, and Microsoft loves freedom as much as anyone. Kasun is riffing here off a recent piece by Matt Asay, Software Industry’s False Choice. 

Matt now works as COO of Canonical (Ubuntu), of course, which may be why Kazun is so passionate on this score. He sees Microsoft and Ubuntu as equal competitors. In fact Microsoft is an elephant and Ubuntu just one of many mouse-sized alternatives.

In the context of the discussion, Kasun writes, Microsoft is giving users a choice on what data they want to keep and what they want in the cloud, while Google does not really offer that choice. See, choice. Choice is good. (By naming Google rather than Ubuntu, his real target, Kazun also makes this seem a choice between equals.)

Data is liberated, Kasun writes, because even though it’s stored in a proprietary format it’s “exposed” to other, more open formats and Microsoft offers an Open Specification Promise to guarantee it.

Open source is completely orthogonal to the choice discussion, Kazun writes, pointing to Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative as proof.

But here’s my problem with that, and here is why open source is not orthogonal at all, but part of the same dimension.

You get one choice. You buy Microsoft and you’re locked into Microsoft. You can’t go back.

In Microsoft’s world its formats and open source are the two children, and you get to make one choice. Then you have to move on.

You can argue that Microsoft and open source are two equally valid choices, of course, by noting that the choice has been made already. Every government is trapped, at least in part, in a world made by Microsoft. Every government, and enterprise, has already killed one of the children.

That may be true. And it may be that’s what’s orthogonal. Because only open source lets that dead kid live again. Because you can see the code, and change the code, with open source, you can recover your independence, all of your free will.

Even Microsoft’s open hand comes with a price.

SpringSource has announced a new lightweight edition of its open source application development and management server optimized for the virtual datacenter, cloud computing — and VMware products, of course.

VMware acquired SpringSource in September. SpringSource’s Apache Tomcat-based server is used by more than half of the Global 2000 companies.

The tc Server Spring Edition, which will be available as part of the 2.0 product line in April, gives customers a small footprint that is “ideally suited” for virtual server environments as well as public and private clouds. VMware said it is heeding the call of customers who maintain that deploying Java applications properly in virtualized environments requires a lean architecture.

The server is also designed to make it easier for customers running Spring applicatiions on Java -based enteprise servers to migrate to the Spring edition and for customers running applications on Tomcat servers to move to the more enterprise ready tc Server Sring edition, the company added.

As part of the rollout, VMware, has also announced a special promotion cutely dubbed “Spring on VMware” that offers two licenses of the Spring edition free and 60 days of evaluation support free for a limited time with the sale of select VMware products through VMware channel partners. The promotion runs between March 8 and May 8th.

The Spring edition SpringSource tc server 2.0 will start at $750 per CPU while the standard edition is priced at $500 per processor and the developers edition will be free.

The 2.0 platform also offers deeper visibility into Spring applications, an enhanced tool suite to speed code development and find performance flaws and a template-driven tool for configuring and deploying multiple application server instance per machine, VMware said.

It is also integrated with VMware Workstation and VMware Lab Manager, which allows for applications to be quickly debugged and deployed in virtualized environments.

VMWare featured in its release today a quote given by a portal webmaster for NPC International who said he was able to deploy dozens of application instances on one server virtualized by VMware and said he could not have deployed his web based applications into the private cloud he built without tc’s small footprint.

Once again, Google has bought something only to open source it.

This time it’s ReMail, first acquired, then put on Google Code as open source under the Apache 2.0 license. (It previously did the same thing with DocVerse.)

ReMail was more efficient in terms of system resources than Apple’s own mail.app, it offered full text searching, and it had other neat features, like autocomplete.

Founder Gabor Cselle now lists himself as just a software engineer at Google, the rest of the development team has also scattered, and Apple has taken ReMail off its app store.

What’s going on? Well, it’s not a bug it’s a feature.

For Google, open source simplifies vendor relationships. You can join the Google software ecosystem without signing a contract. You can exploit Google projects like Android and ReMail and profit from them, because they’re under an Apache license.

Just as the Internet takes friction out of the distribution and development process, open source for Google removes friction from the business process.

Why did this not happen before? One reason is you leave a lot of “money on the floor” by doing this. The other reason, of course, is that Google can afford it.

As I have written here many times, Google’s advantage lies in its infrastructure. It is the low-cost producer of full Internet infrastructure. This includes more than bandwidth. It includes all the tools and hosting needed to deliver Internet transactions.

This advantage can be exploited against any rival. In this case it is being exploited against Apple.

Until someone is willing to try and match this advantage, and even the phone companies seem for now unwilling to even try, Google will exploit this advantage against all comers.

These advantages lean in favor of anyone with ideas, but they also put a limit on the degree to which you can profit from those ideas. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lone programmer in your pajamas or Steve Jobs — Google’s advantages both enable you to bring your ideas to market and squeeze your potential profits like the view of buildings you see on Google Earth.

It’s easy for Google not to be evil in such an atmosphere. There is no one for it to be evil to.

But it does make open source start to feel a bit like Orwell’s Animal Farm. All pigs are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Apple’s suit against HTC could end one of two ways.

Either Apple becomes the next SCO, which ran itself aground claiming rights to Linux, or it becomes the next Microsoft, which is prospering while claiming to own Linux.

The answer depends on how hard Apple presses its case.

You can get a clue by looking at who Apple has sued. While the suit is actually about the Android operating system Google sponsors, the company has been careful to only go after one of its OEMs, a Taiwanese one at that.

That’s a strike-at-the-weak strategy. You get the best deal you can with a weak player and then use that against the strong. The emphasis here is on the word weak.

On the other hand there is every indication Apple is willing to go to trial. As Larry Dignan noted last week, this could quickly put it into court against both Google and Microsoft. It would be a legal Vietnam.

Jason Perlow wrote last week about a technical cure for any problems caused by the suit — virtualization. You can’t sue what’s common, and virtualization could make a fight against rivals like trying to grab clouds.

The real cost in going to trial and claiming to own the smartphone space is more subtle. Apple could become a laughing stock, as SCO did. The intent of our patent and copyright regimes is to encourage innovation, not discourage it, and seeking control of the whole smartphone market does not encourage innovation.

There are enormous public relations risks in becoming a public plaintiff in patent court. Many people will, as a result of such a suit, avoid the plaintiff’s products as a way of weighing-in. This is what really happened to SCO — its sales dried up.

Had Apple sued Google directly, I might give credence to this. SCO sued IBM. You go after the strong when you seek to run the patent table.

Could that happen to Apple? Yes, I do. At least one market researcher thinks Android sales could pass those of the iPhone in two years.

Which brings me back to Microsoft.

I have written here that the way Microsoft views its own patent efforts, like its recent agreement deal with Amazon, is as a way to take patents off the competitive table. Microsoft is using legal threats to create patent peace between it and its rivals, freeing its engineers to concentrate on creating things, not dealing with lawyers.

Apple doesn’t really innovate. Apple doesn’t really litigate. Apple markets.

If Apple can settle these suits under favorable terms it can also win patent peace with Microsoft. This would free it to create iPhones as the market directs, rather than within constraints of lawyers and patent rights.

That’s the way I think it will play. Apple will settle. Apple is not stupid.

The 10-year-old Mozilla Public License will be updated by the end of 2010.

At the open source organization’s weekly meeting Monday, Mozilla Corp president Mitchell Baker announced that the MPL needs to be refreshed. It’s not clear if there will be any major league changes to the hybrid license. It appears that the higher ups want the language updated, the terms simplified and the license modernized.

Execs on the call said they expect a “release candidate” of the new document to be ready by November. The plan was officially announced on Monday and a web site will be launched this Wednesday to accept feedback and input.

“Open source is well understood now and … we want to make it much simpler,” Baker told the staff during the meeting today. “We want to have a much better document going forward.”

Baker noted that the open source project — which launched in 1998 –spent just two months creating and vetting the hybrid license (before the leading hybrid license, the Apache Public License, debuted). It’s been very successful since but some of the best practices and language in the license are outdated and need a refresh, the Mozilla president said.

Mozilla Corp and related Mozilla Foundation, which develops the leading open source browser, Firefox, as well as Thunderbird e-mail client and Sunbird calendar software, is based in Mountain View, Calif.

The low-hanging fruit in the renewable energy business still lies with efficiency. Cutting your energy use without crimping your lifestyle gives you a faster payback than turning into Ed Begley Jr.

It’s still good to be a little Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) on energy use, even if your politics are to the right of Rush Limbaugh, because there’s money in saving, money you can spend on cigars or vacations. Or food.

So I was pleased to see my little business interrupted last week by a Georgia Power contractor installing a new digital power meter on my house (right).

For the power company the benefits are obvious. No more tramping out to Winter Avenue every month to read the meter, waking up the neighbor’s dogs and putting the Neighborhood Watch on edge.

For me the benefits were less obvious until later in the day, when Google announced they would open source their PowerMeter API.

The API lets companies like The Energy Detective integrate their offerings directly into meters like the bad boy Georgia Power has just delivered.

While I have invested a lot of money in insulation over the last five years, this could let me find where my remaining heat sinks are. The power company itself might now want to offer that service.

Whether this comes to me as a device or as a paid service, open source is providing an incentive for it to be offered. This won’t provide the savings of insulating your attic, but it will cost you a lot less, and thus its return on investment should be quicker.

Google’s Android code will assume its rightful place in the Linux kernel — in good time, the company’s top open source guru says.

The Android code was stripped out of the last kernel release, version 2.6.33, after Google reportedly failed to provide necessary changes and subsystem code required by kernel.org.

This led some to claim Google had forked Linux, a charge that was debated in a long thread among developers.

Google’s top open source program manager Chris DiBona said he doesn’t think the Android phone operating system code is any more a fork of Linux than Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Nevertheless, Google will be providing more code upstream to Linus Torvalds’ kernel.org going forward, he said.

“I would be comfortable saying that we’ll likely merge into the mainline in the next couple of years,” DiBona said in an e-mail response to this ZDNet blogger’s questions about the controversy. Android is “no more [a fork] than Red Hat Enterprise Linux or any other distribution vendor. All kernels are in some way a fork for some amount of time, the trick is keeping that delta small. We’re trying to do a better job of keeping a small delta.”

Controversy erupted after the decision to remove Android code from the latest Linux kernel.

DiBona, for his part, maintains that the Android code is a lot different than traditional Linux code and more time is needed before the mobile system is integrated into the kernel.

“For the work we do on our non-mobile systems (our production kernels and the rest) we stay pretty close to the mainline nowadays, but android is not the same as some server sitting on the internet, and thinking Linux on mobile is the same thing as Linux on the server or on the desktop is why, until android came along, Linux on mobile phones was nearly totally unsuccessful,” DiBona wrote in a thread defending Google’s position on Linux 2.6.33. “Also, this whole thing stinks of people not liking Forking. Forking is important and not a bad thing at all. From my perspective, forking is why the Linux kernel is as good as it is.”

So when will the Android code make it into the Linux kernel?

In his online debate, DiBona said he expects to see it done by the time Linux 2.8 hits the streets. But in his email to this blogger, he was wary of framing it that way.

“2.8 is a concept that not all kernel developers embrace, so it may never occur,” DiBona wrote. “I would be comfortable saying that we’ll likely merge into the mainline in the next couple of years.”

“A better question might be ‘”Will we continue to work from the mainline for android?” and the answer is an unqualified, “Yes.”

The 311 service has been a “red headed stepchild” for American cities practically since it was launched in the mid-1990s as a phone service.

(Picture from Moonbattery, a conservative blog.)

The idea was to make 311 the 911 for non-emergency calls. A burning building call 911, a burning question call 311. But that charge was so broad that most cities did not know what to do with it.

Since it required Bell cooperation to implement, and did not deliver the Bells revenue, many cities (like Atlanta, where I live) ignored it. Many ignore it still.

The launch of Open311 as an open API by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (right) and Obama CIO Vivek Kundra will not change this right away.

Think of it instead as a last chance to interest cities in something the phone companies tossed over the side long ago.

There are several reasons for past 311 failures, some of which the open source API addresses, some of which it doesn’t:

• The choice of what to offer on it is often a political decision, and inertia rules cities as well as Washington.
• It takes money to publicize and draw consumer interest to a 311 service.
• Political boundaries. Should individual suburbs have their own 311 services, or should they get together and make it a county service? Politics again.
• Implementation still takes money. An OpenAPI can help here by lowering costs and drawing interest through applications.

Mainly, 311 takes political leadership, and requires that someone invest political capital that might better be invested elsewhere.

In their press event Newsom and Kundra emphasized mobile apps. There’s an app for city government. But believe it or not smart phone penetration isn’t that enormous, especially in the poor neighborhoods that most need quick access to services.

Web interfaces are going to be important here. So may be the cooperation of schools and libraries, cooperation that may come with a price. The schools and libraries may want the bulk of the services without investing heavily in development.

The risk is that open source may be labeled, as Kundra himself has been, as a phony if things don’t work out.

I’m personally more jazzed by the participation of  Newsom, because the San Francisco mayor is term-limited and looking for a place to land his career. There are ongoing reports he may run for Lt. Governor, maybe even for President.

But rather than run for anything at a time when being in public service is assumed to disqualify you for it, he might be better served seizing the opportunities Open311 affords. A foundation to run the .org, a company to run the .com, and the same charismatic gentleman on top of both. Government’s answer to Dries Buytaert, with better clothes.

Sounds like a better political plan to me. He can gain standing without taking responsibility for running anything, since actual implementation remains in the hands of local governments. He can take credit for success without risking much blame for failure. And he can make money doing it.

So along with the question of open source making 311 relevant, could it also make Gavin Newsom relevant?

In all the talk about New York financier Paul Singer’s plan to go all Gordon Gecko on Novell, one word has not been mentioned nearly enough.

Microsoft.

Microsoft needs a viable Novell, and Novell’s Linux business was on the verge of becoming viable when Singer’s Elliott Associates swooped in with an offer to break up the company, seize its cash, split off the old NetWare business, and auction off Suse Linux.

I doubt Microsoft wants to actually buy that business. Owning a Linux would be a real complication. Suddenly all those patent cross-licenses that claim Microsoft has patent rights to the software take on a different odor, and Microsoft is forced to go down the SCO road to prove its claims.

Microsoft has been doing well against Linux through bluff. What the Elliott move does is threaten to make Microsoft show its hand.

Even the due diligence process could threaten Microsoft. Singer is going to get a look inside that 2006 agreement.

It’s a prime company asset and, even though it’s protected by a non-disclosure agreement, things get out. Stuff leaks. Knowing exactly what Microsoft claims to own in legal documents would tell open source advocates what must be changed to eliminate the threat.

In the Wall Street ocean Novell has become a minnow and Microsoft remains a whale. (Singer’s a shark, and isn’t it gratifying this big GOP contributor now thinks there are greater opportunities here than the Congo.)

Feel free to advise Microsoft in the comments. For now I’ll leave you with Gecko’s greatest hit, from the IMDB database:

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.

Just change Teldar Paper, the fictional firm at the heart of the 1987 movie Wall Street, to Novell. (And here’s a trailer for the sequel.)

Dries Buytaert of Drupal and Acquia is warning that Software as a Service is becoming a threat to open source and that clouds could create the same vendor lock-in customers sought to avoid with open source.

(This is Dries at last year’s Drupalcon in Paris, in a close-up of a photo by Pedro Lozano. From buytaert.net.)

Even where SaaS companies let customers take back their data, they often don’t let them take the code underlying it, he wrote in a blog post. Data without software is useless.

One of the main open source concerns about SaaS in the past has been that the largest open source outfits, like Google, don’t support true copyleft through the Affero license. Google itself prefers the Apache license to anything copyleft, and this is fast becoming the norm.

Buytaert believes open source companies can disrupt this model through services like his own Drupal Gardens, which allows exporting of codes, themes, and data to any other Drupal hosting environment.

My own problem with Drupal Gardens is more prosaic. It is entering what has become a mature space. It would be tough for me to move my current Typepad blog over there, for instance, or this WordPress blog. It would take technical expertise most users don’t have.

Also, the online excitement has moved on. Blogging, as a frontier, is so last decade. The talk today is all about social networking, about tweeting your tweets, either as part of a dialog or just for publicity. The lock-in, in other words, has already occurred and the world has moved on.

The good news is there are many areas of enterprise IT, like healthcare, that on the whole remain frontiers. SaaS is a big player in these frontiers. If users can be made to understand the issues they might press for the changes Dries seeks.