Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Babes on holiday - half term; up later, mail chew, wrote up some analysis. Bus to Cambridge - lots of fun with the Collabora folk at the Cambridge Beer Festival variously.
A number of people have asked about how I feel about: Mark's latest advocacy for to-corporate contributor agreements (CCAs). I have a number of thoughts.
- I agree - that there is a 'spike-filled canyon' between proprietary software and open development of Free Software. However, I don't blame this on ideologues, but on the sheer economics. If you try to choose some middle ground - where you open up slightly, and 'harvest IP' into your commercially licensed products through CCAs there are many dangers. First - others will ship your product without paying you a cent, but worse - since there is an asymmetric barrier to entry you struggle to build a community, certainly fail to get other companies involved and have to do all the work. Thus you capture the worst of all worlds: no money, and no co-development - perhaps analogous to Miguel's comic "Part time vegetarianism". As one of those supposed ideologues - I want to get companies to choose clearly, not half-heartedly, and get across the canyon quickly without expending their initial goodwill and into a place that works well both for both their business and the wider community.
- As someone who has advocated circumspection (not fear), of companies vs. well governed non-profits - I don't believe that view is 'childish'. Companies have mixed motives, but they also have fiduciary duties wielded by those very distant from the communities they are (not) involved in. These can lead to some perverse outcomes: of business people over-ruling and ignoring all the better advice from their technical staff, a trivial example might be around the questionable wisdom of pushing the use of CCAs at all.
- Then we have an extended section pitching a nice vision of companies owning pieces and layers of the Linux stack, and playing nicely together. My skepticism of this is documented with a nice diagram too. I don't believe it can or will work, and I've seen it fail severally. The example with MySQL vs. PostgreSQL is not a great one - the latter is not a CCA project, with the same (very liberal) license available to all. Certainly no-one is arguing against corporate contribution, (I work for a corporation at least), instead they argue against corporate ownership through CCAs.
- It seems that Mark's view is that - the thing holding back the world from providing him with a desktop that he can achieve 200 million users of Ubuntu with is: other people's bad attitude to assigning rights to Canonical (and others). It is an interesting thesis. Personally I have a couple of thoughts on that.
- First - the simple point: it is curious to see the organisation that has set the price-point for preloaded Linux, and enterprise updates at near to zero is suddenly concerned about the lack of money, and hence jobs in Free Software. It is a great realisation that the economics of the ecosystem matter, and that it is important that the answer to "where can I get a job writing Free Software that everyone benefits from" needs to include Canonical, as it increasingly does.
- Second - my counter thesis: Collaboration is key. which has many corollaries such as Diversity of contributors is a strength. Clearly CCAs result in single companies owning pieces of the stack - Mark appears to implicitly agree with this, apparently believing that this sacrifice will allow them to invest, and there is perhaps a grain of truth there. I believe this single company outcome is just a recognition of business reality, and not a result of my (and others) pernicious lobbying. Set against this presumed benefit then, is the inevitable stifling of collaboration, which creates systemic risk (via unrelated corporate failure), while breeding conflict. It is hard enough to get opinionated individuals to work together, and take the risk of re-using others' code. That is worse across company and group-think borders, and practically impossible if one company has to assign rights to another. Take for example GNOME Shell vs. 'Unity' - the problem (of having two teams of half the size, tackling twice as many bugs) is ultimately one of collaboration. This seems transparently obvious (and foolish to me), but is by no means unique - quite the opposite, it is replicated dozens of times. Though I can well believe the blame for this instance is quite evenly spread, and complex, the issue of a single company owning the user experience and strangling collaboration is quite serious, and something GNOME's guidelines on CCAs would rightly forbid. Indeed - we all need to work hard to ensure that we are as diverse, and open to new entrants, ideas and contributors as possible. Creating more excuses to not-collaborate is not wise even if they were immaterial (which CCAs are not). Indeed I had thought that working hard to help people collaborate is/was a key thrust of Mark's thinking underlying launchpad, bzr, etc. My concern is that, by making collaboration around CCAs much easier, it will inevitably create more, and ultimately substantially hinder the laudable goal of greater diversity and collaboration around each piece of software. That in turn will multiply duplication, conflict, and wasteage of resources, which in turn will slow our progress further.
- In sum total, despite the bus-load of barbs: immature understanding, idealogue, childishly afraid, idea-less (no proposals), uncool, fundamentalist, radical, factionalists, claptrap, non-generous. I am mostly just amused - it seems a good sign of the strength of an argument that such an abundence of patently absurd ad-hominem is needed to articulate it. Simon Phipps has a nice article addressing the LibreOffice related sillies that will pop out of LWN sometime soon too.
- Anyhow, despite much diverse contribution to many communities, discussion, thinking and advocacy on the topic, I would love to debate the issues with Mark personally, perhaps I'm wrong after-all; and I hope that he will deign to show up at the scheduled Desktop Summit panel on CCAs to defend both his ideas and adjectives, if this is indeed the issue blocking our success, it is a discussion well worth having.

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In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE, Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International), or anyone else. It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy. Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences or fun.

Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2011-05-27: Friday.