On Being Open

Being Open. Being Inclusive. Being Human.

stevecarl — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 02:24:41 GMT

Over the years I have had somewhat mixed results reaching people with various points in my blogs. I usually work pretty hard to set the stage for a position I am about to take. In some cases, I have written an entire series of posts before coming to the main point. Not everything is easy to say. Not everything can be functionally decomposed into byte size morsels.

A recent example was a post I did over at TalkBMC. I tried to set up the framework of what I was looking at and why, but I came across some comments in another forum about my post and it was clear that I had not succeeded. At least not for the people inspired enough to respond in the forum. The comments were all over the place: Anywhere from "So What?"(which is fine: The subject was specific enough that if one was not affected the post was probably not interesting) to one like "What a loser, he spent all his time saying this and that". i wondered if they had read the post I had written at all. I went back and re-read it just to be sure. Nope. I had not said what they thought I had. Yet other people had gotten the point. How had that happened?. The ones with the negative reactions often focused on the bad things, ignored the caveats and background info, and reacted. That was just what pressed their buttons.

For some people, The feeling was I was calling their baby ugly. No.. More like:

"Hi. I like your car" I bet that gets good gas mileage. Hey, I also like your iPhone, the case you have, the headphones, your nifty hairstyle, awsome sunglasses, and those shoes you have on. Wherever did you get those? Whats up with the socks though?"

"Socks! Why do you hate on my socks? These are my favorite socks. There are two of them and they fit my feet and ... and.... and... what is so great about your socks anyway? Have to chase that person far to get them?"

When I think about all the open source projects out there, and even just the ones here that are related to monitoring and managing systems, I sometimes wonder at all the energy that has led people to go off into so many different directions to solve the same problems. Part of it is simply that there is more than one way to solve almost anything of course. I am pretty sure that another aspect is human emotional needs entering into and interferring with the other goals of what is otherwise supposed to be an inclusive project. There seems to be a common trajectory (or maybe small set of possible trajectories) to Open Source projects. and it looks something like this:

Someone gets an idea, or has a need and works to create a solution to it.
They want to share their idea / solution with others
If it catches on, sooner or later it hits critical mass and enough people are involved that they start to pull different ways. They may do this based on their own needs, their own ideas not being accepted by the core group, or suddenly thinking they have some advantage heading off in their own way. Schism. Division.
Soon there are multiple solutions to the same problem. There are probably good things about each one, and also probably problems with each approach.
Maturity is reached where things come back together. Or Interoperate. Or things start to die.

Here are three examples I am thinking of:

Compiz / Beryl: They split, and Compiz created Beryl in the same sense that certain greek gods used to be born, spring from the cracked skull of a parent. But now they are back together than Compis Fusion is the result. We all won on that one.

Gnome / KDE: They could not agree on a core tool set and they split, with Gnome springing from to propritary (at the time) clutches of Trolltech. They did not interoperate well at first, despite both being X applications. Later they came to a peace and found ways to let each others applications run inside their environments. Again we all won.

Evolution / KDE PIM: Evolution created the Connector. The Connector let one attach to MS Exchange. KDE updated to Kontact to do a similar trick, but stopped half way through development. Connector was open sourced, but KDE did not adopt any part of the Connector code. Kontact stayed in its half way state, while KDE focused on other things like look and feel and integration of KDE and a new major release of the desktop. No one won there. There is still only one native application way of getting at your calendar from Linux.

But I bet you could point at examples of the same thing inside of Open Systems management. What are they, and how do we head them off at the pass? How do we make sure we work together now?

BarCampESM

stevecarl — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:33:52 GMT

The first ever BarCampESM has come and gone, and I have waited till now to post anything about it.

Part of that is that this was my first BarCamp ever of any kind. I have been thinking and mentally digesting what happened at the BarCampESM even, and trying to classify it.

Part of what I have been thinking about was “What part of what happened was 'BarCamp' and what part of it was ESM vendors / providers at any given technical conference”.

After some more thought I have decided one BarCamp does not give me enough context to actually know the answer to that one. I'll have to go to a few more BarCamps to know the answer to that one.

Why I was puzzling on that was to ask “Why would someone come to a BarCamp instead of a regular conference?”. Is there an advantage of some sort to the “Un-Conference”. I think the answer to that is easy, and is “Yes”. Here is why.

I have been to tons of technical conferences. SHARE, CMG, LinuxWorld, IT/360, BMC UserWorld, etc. The formal presentations are almost always useful, and the ability to mix up the tracks to create a customized education experience is valuable. But more valuable that that has always been th 'downtime' or 'whitespace' or whatever you want to call it around the sessions. The Q&A at the end. The talks in the halls. The talks over lunch or dinner with like-minded people. The opening up and sharing at a level one can not attain during a formal session.

BarCamp is that “down” time, except it is almost ALL that time. What takes some getting used to is that one has to be good on their feet. Impromptu presentations are the norm it would seem. By the end of the day, Heath Newburn got up to talk, and said that he had thrown away what he meant to talk about and instead wanted to talk about something else... and he had a brand new set of slides he had typed up while listening to others to go

with it.

This talk in turn developed into everyone sitting in a circle, and really “letting their hair down”. Part gripe session, part experience sharing, even Cote, who said at the beginning that he was there to observe ended up doing a fair amount of talking about what he had seen. For once, I was the quietest person in the room. No mean feat.

You can see the projects that this BarCamp kicked off elsewhere here on the OMC wiki. In his blog John Willis (http://www.johnmwillis.com/wp/barcamp/barcampesm-photos/) said that attendence was lower than he expected, but that it was a “can't miss event”

BarCampESM II should be very interesting indeed.

The VW Beetle Principle

stevecarl — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 03:57:09 GMT

First off… I admit it. I totally made that principal up. I needed a sort of reverse (if dated) example as a counterpoint for Whurleys “Bugatti Principle” post over at TalkBMC from last year:

http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-whurley/whurley/the-bugatti-principal

The VW beetle would seem to be the antithesis in most ways, at least in principle and concept, from the Bugatti Veyron. Not exclusive. Not fast. In fact designed to have the absolute minimum required and still be a workable car for the road of its day. I had a 1965 Beetle convertible with a 1200cc, 40 horsepower engine (which I admit I hacked. I “dropped in” actually shoved up a 1600cc, 67 horsepower engine to replace the original mill. It felt like a race car in first gear)

The car was not fast. It got fairly good mileage for the day (about 27 MPG: Ludicrous by todays standards). At about 65 miles per hour the shape of the car made it tend to want to lift off the road, and depending on wind direction 65 to 70 was all she would do. After that the wind resistance overcame the engine. The Beetle looked round but was about as aerodynamic as a brick. With its flat pan shaped bottom (the reason it actually would float for bit. I watched mine float till it sank during a hurricane once), and its arched body shape, it more strongly resembled a poorly shaped wing than a brick, but the principlel was the same. Its aerodynamic drag coefficient was .48, where a wall is 1.0, and a Hummer is .7.

Everything about the car was the minimum in late 1930’s-1940’s design. The heat for winters came from the finned exhaust pipes to the front two cylders of the flat four. Air was take from the cooling fan and diverted over these fins, and then into uber-hot but tiny floor vents. Once it was warmed up in the cabin, It was a pretty pleasant place to be in the winter, but it took forever to get warm. Plastic laid near the tiny vent would melt. I know.

There were two moderately comfortable seats, a speedo, an AM radio, a glove box, a 10 or so gallon fuel tank, a full size spare, four 15 inch, skinny tires, and windows that rolled up and down with hand cranks. As basic as the beetle was I suppose you could go even more basic and delete the radio and the heater and the roll up windows and still have a useable car, but it was pretty basic. Very close to the smallest and fewest parts a car could be and still be a car and not something else… like a tricycle or a motorcycle. And yes, some Beetles have been made into both of those.

The Beetle was the low cost leader in the US in the 1950’s and early 1960’s: they predated Datsun and Toyota and all that. British Leyland cars were anything but inexpensive, especially once you factored in the Lucas Electrics (Prince of Darkness) repair bill. I remember seeing ads in the paper when I was kid for 1900.00 USD for the sedan. 1960’s money. Adjusting for inflation that is about 12,000 USD now. That looks about right too: A 12k car in the US is at the most basic end of the market, even if it is technically a much better car: more fuel efficient, less pollution, more crashworthy, AM/FM radio….

Related to Systems Management?

The Beetle was as basic a car as it could pretty much be and still be a car. Factored into that were all the things that it took to be a car, and all the costs that went into developing and manufacturing and updating the car. In fact the 1965 car looks positively modern when you compare it to the 1940’s prototypes. Those had mechanical flags rather than electric turn signals!

To support that car was a set of designers, engineers, QA testers, Sales and marketing folks, and all sorts of hidden costs like the cost of building and maintaining the steel stamping gear, the aluminum engine casting plant, and on and on. There was a minimum cost below which the Beetle could not cross and make any money. It had to make money. VW was and is a commercial car vendor.

Systems management is hard. On the high end (The Bugatti end), it takes a great deal of work to successfully manage large, complex, heterogenous systems and to do it well. Do it invisibly. Do it as if it were data tone.

At the same time, there is a lower limit below which a commercial vendor cannot easily cross. To maintain that manufacturing line and all the staff, the building, computers, and benefits. The travel budgets and comm gear. On and on. To go below a critical size is to move into the realm of unprofitability. No public company can be unprofitable for long before they board fires the executives and find some others that will make it profitable.

Size Works at Least Two Ways

One kind of “lower limit” in systems management would be number of managed nodes. A management system that is designed to “boil the ocean”, I.E. manage huge environments makes no sense below a certain level. How far a management system can scale down when it is designed to work for say 100,000 or 500,000 managed nodes. That puppy is Bugatti’ed to death. It is tested, built, designed, engineered, scaled, and everything is oriented around making sure that it can “go as fast” as is advertised. It would almost be silly to use it to manage, say, 10 systems. First off, 10 systems don’t even need that kind of management. If they are all in one place, you can sit and see all their screens at once!

Another kind of scale issue is the type of managed node itself. There are a zillion devices in this world, and IPv6 is going to make it so that everything on the planet sooner or later has an IP address. My fridge, my toaster, my stereo… everything. If an electron can run though it, the possibility is there that it might need an IP address someday.

All that diversity usually leads to a “Tower of Babel” though. As the wit once said, “The good thing about standards is that everyone has them”. Unless Open Standards are used, this is going to be a real problem for the widget in question.

On the one hand, out here at this edge is where a great deal of the innovation is going to be. The latest widget that sets the world on fire will come from here. Or Apple. ☺ Maybe I should have used the "MacBook Air Principal" here... But I digress.

While the widget is tiny, unless they are playing in a space where an Open Standard already exists (and if they are creating a category, it probably does not) then it may not be worth everyone supporting it I am not even talking about competition here, but time/effort to add support to an existing solution. This alleged world turning widget may come from a big vendor, a small vendor, or a child with the OLPC XO and a good idea. Whatever it is, while it is small… while it does not command enough market share to hit the lower limit of a management vendor to create a management tool for it, then its management is either created at the same time as the widget by the same creator, or by the first person who needed to manage it so badly that they gave up waiting for the vendors and wrote it themselves.

If it Were Easy, Anyone Could Do It

All of the above listed conundrums and complexities are just to underline the point that systems management is not easy. Even at the lowest end of things, there are things that any solution has to have, and has to deal with. They are not always technical. But that takes me to….

The Honda Fit (Jazz) Principle

Because my new car is a Honda Fit of course. I sit in the car and I marvel at it sometimes. How this tiny econobox (SuperMini actually) has benefited from all that came before it.

I have owned many Hondas over the years. A 1984 Prelude, and 1986 Accord, a 1992 Integra, and now this 2008 Fit. This is the best car of the bunch. It is low emissions (number three best in 2007), gets fairly decent fuel economy (38 MPG best tank so far), and is relatively quiet and comfortable for such a small car. It is a littler faster than I was going for, but in the US they don’t give us the option of the smaller, even better fuel economy engines.

I see the lineage of all the other Hondas I have owned here. The design, the way it sounds, the way it handles, the materials choices, the control layouts. On and On. This car has benefitted from all the 100+ years of car design before it. The best shape for the wheels being round. Low drag wheels and tires being better. The rubber material in the tires being both “sticky” and long lived. The way the tread is now designed with a computer to siphon off the water on the road. Radial belts to lower rolling resistance. Light unsprung weight of the wheels helping handling. Disk brakes being better than drum. A radio that has more computer bits in it than my first TRS-80. The new little chips that are better than the old bigger chips which are better than the older transistors which are better than the old tubes. The current generation of plastics having a longer life, nicer touch, and being more recycle-able. This could be an infinite regression.. The car stands on the shoulders of all the cars that have come before it, and not just from Honda… and for that matter, not just of cars.

All computer programs, including systems management software are the same way. Innovations in version 1 of Patrol (for example, since I know that one) and the way it allowed system programming knowledge to be captured and automated were picked up and improved by others (and therefore made Patrol have to improve too). Having to hand build and hand install management toolsets giving way to automated discovery and automated install and provisioning servers. SNMP standards started out too loose, were tightened up and further defined, and later releases were far more useful that the first, and then most of the system management tools started being able to use them.

Layer upon layer, one thing building on another. Capability growing, along with complexity. Open Source / Open Standards / Open Frameworks, etc. makes all this layering and building and improving far easier, and far faster.

Scale and Moore’s Law

In my VW Beetle principal, the 1.9k 1965 Beetle and the 12k economy car of today show what happens as technology improves and time goes by. The least expensive car for sale today in the USA is a bit under 10k, inflation adjusted less expensive than the Beetle was in its day. That car is in every possible way ( no matter which car it actually is, but a quick google makes it look to be the Chevy Aveo at 9955.00 USD ) the technical superior of the 1965 car. In fact, Tata just introduced a 2,500 USD, 2 cylinder, 33 HP, 50 MPG car called the Nano:

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2008/01/11/indian_automaker_u nveils_worlds_least_expensive_car/

All the feature / function of the original Beetle at a quarter of its inflation adjusted price, and double its fuel economy.

Computers are even “worse”. While Moore’s law is not infinite, nor even really a “Law”, The over the counter cheapie computer I can buy for 200 USD right now is technically better than the 1000 dollar computer of five years ago more or less. Point being, an inexpensive computer can now manage quite a number of other computers. Where one used to have to install a steamship full of computers in the data center just to centralize all the data from the managed nodes, now it can be a raft.

At the same time, not all the complexity is dropping out of the equation. Sure, the number of computers needed for management dropped, but unless there is a hugely aggressive turnover in the data center to match it, the number of managed nodes probably grows over time, and the complexity of the managed nodes is probably is growing too. Can you say ‘Virtualization”? How about “Vista has 20 million lines of code in it”?

Don’t even get me started on analogies about re-inventing wheels.

While there are incredible things one has to do to build a Bugatti, and certain other scale problems like high end systems management, especially when integrated into overall ITIL solutions, there are also a certain number of minimum things one has to do. That is where being O/open really helps.

The steam train becomes the first car becomes the Model T becomes the Beetle becomes the Fit. I might have skipped a few steps along the way there…

I think I have tortured this analogy enough for one day. See you at BarCampESM this weekend!

O/open S/source

stevecarl — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 05:41:24 GMT

I am always interested is watching and reading discussions around what Open Source or Open Standards exactly are. Some folks are very passionate that if a particular thing: Object, projects, whatever, does not meet their exact definition of open, then it is therefore not. Not good. Not Open. Not open. It is bad.

I was presenting at the Z Series conference 3 or 4 years ago, and during my talk about VM I mentioned the the OS was "open source". In the Q&A afterwords I was challenged on that characterization. Vm was not GPL. It was not Apache. It was not any "Open Source" license at all. It was and is a copyrighted work of IBM. It was also the first real Virtualization OS, but I digress.

In the early days IBM had no real use for VM other than as a migration tool. As such, they had an option where you could order the source code. It would show up on the tape, and one could load it to disk. In fact, to put on a patch required have the source code because the patch updated the source, and then rebuilt the module or nucleus or whatever.

The source code was open in the sense that it was there for all the world to see. And having access to it sparked all sorts of innovation. One example was the V/ line of products from then VMSI. VM had a problem. Several of them in fact. One of them was that IBM did not love it. It was always a step child to MVS. MVS sold hardware: it took 10 times as many resources to log in to TSO (Time Sharing Option) as a user than to VM as a CMS user. CMS was the end user interface bit to VM. The part that defined the editor and the file systems and so forth.

Since VM did not get a lot of development cycles from IBM, it did some fairly stupid things sometimes. One was that when it came across an internal error, it would abend. Even stupid little things would cause a complete system reboot. VMSI created a product that intercepted the abend, backed it up a step, then made an attempt to do something to fix the problem rather than just break. In most cases, VM could stay up, or at least limp along with only a partial disability until an outage could be scheduled.

Even better, they had another product that would take a dump of the OS before it started fixing things so that the problem could be looked at and shot while the system stayed up. There was even the option of a snap dump so that the whole memory core did not need to be dumped, just the relevant bits.

IBM added features like these to later versions of VM once they saw the wisdom of them. And of VM for that matter.

I would love to have features like this in Linux or BSD today. They came about because VMSI had access to the source code, even though VM was not GPL or whatever.

Amdahl was another company that benefited greatly by access to the source code to VM. VM was a virtualizer... and it virtualized the mainframe. Amdahl wanted to build Plug Compatible Mainframes, but the book the IBM had published, the 370 Principals of Operations or the "POO" was not actually 100% accurate. VM gave Amdahl all sorts of ideas. They created the predecessor to PMA called VMPE (VM Performance Enhancement) so that some virtual machines could get a little extra boost. PMA (Preferred Machine Assist) was IBM's late to market answer to Amdahl's innovation. Amdahl then created its tour de force product: MDF, or Multiple Domain Facility. Again IBM had to respond and created PR/SM. PR/SM (pronounced "Prism" usually) was... VM in the microcode of the mainframe. No. Really. IBM has always denied this, but I watched some CE's at the CE console once, and saw the error messages: that was VM in there. It was years before PR/SM could do what MDF did. I knew several folks at IBM back then that were deeply worried that folks would figure out just how good MDF was before IBM had something to compete with it.

Note: Updated 1/21/2008 to correct a technical point: Originally I wrote the IBM's answer to MDF was LPAR. It was in fact called PR/SM, and the "Domains" of MDF were called "LPARS" or "Logical PARtions". Thanks to Richard Meyer for catching that faux paux

One last point here: The best professional training I ever went to was Amdahl's VM diagnostics class. That class was written because they could look at the source and develop material about how to read dumps, and had the ultimate reference: they could show how the thing actually really worked!

Having open source... access to the source code, lead to these things, and they ultimately benefitted the customer.

It was not Open. It was just open.

Hey Steve.. is there a point in there? Only that openness comes in many flavors, and honest attempts to be open should not be greeted with derision and scorn if they are not 100% in line with a particular definition of open.

OOXML and the like can be as derided as one likes though. While I am for folks (I include companies in that) trying to be more open, It really gets up my nose when they start trying to use openness as a trap. I think there are several conversations about patent traps elsewhere on the forum recently: I am so not talking about that kind of "open".

Apps and Platforms

stevecarl — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 20:09:28 GMT

Originally published December 31st:

http://on-being-open.blogspot.com/2007/12/apps-and-platforms.html

"Anonymous" pointed out on my post called "Repairo" that one reason people still use MSWin is that running things like AutoCAD under WINE under Linux are fraught with problems. At best, it requires work and experience at this point in time.

As much as I am a fan of Linux and OS.X these days, I want to state that there is nothing magical about either platform. All computer operating systems are amazingly complex bits of code written by human beings, and at any point in time it is possible that one platform is better than another, and even the term "Better" would require one to state what they mean by "Better". Better at memory utilization? Easier to cluster? Less prone to crashes? More virus proof? Sells more hardware?

That there are currently more MSWin applications is also not magical. To repeat what I said in the comment to the "Repairo" post: AutoCAD started as a Mac app, and when Autodesk saw people were willing to pay for copies of it on MSWin they ported it. If Autodesk thought enough people wanted it on BSD or Linux or the iPhone they would make a version that worked there as fast as their fingers could code.

Phrased that way, the question would seem to be, do enough people want any given app on Linux to bring it there. But that is not the way Linux works either. Here is where companies get into trouble not just with Linux but with all Open Source.

The real question about any Open Source platform always is: Are there enough people that want any given type of application that they are willing to take the time and effort to create it. In the example of AutoCAD: Are there any technical people out there that want a CAD package on Linux bad enough that they will write it themselves?

To look very quickly into that, I googled up two search terms: CAD + Linux

http://www.tech-edv.co.at/lunix/CADlinks.html

Over 50 CAD packages for Linux, some commercial, many Open Source. And that was just one of many hits.

The problem for a commercial company like Autodesk is knowing when the market has moved enough to a new platform to make it worth their while to port to a new OS platform. That costs a fair amount of money, and if the product is not written in a portable fashion, then it costs even more money to either port it or better, redesign it to be portable.

The problem is worse than it seems though, because in this case the Open Source world will look, maybe ask once, get a response like " We are waiting to see which way the market goes before we decide if we are going to move to the new platform", and then the Open Source folks just move on without them. By the time they decide to enter the market, the field is crowded and they are no longer the number one choice. In fact, there is now probably a free, Open Source solution sitting there and now they have to convince people that it is worth money to pay for their newly ported version.

I pay for the best. I think most people are willing to. Since I don't use CAD, I'll switch to Office packages for a second: Even though I do not have to, I send money to OpenOffice because I use their product and I like it. I like it better than MS Office because it uses Open Standard file formats, and runs on whatever platform I happen to be on.

Another example: I just paid for a copy of Scrivener recently. I am working on writing a few books, and found OpenOffice to be unable to do some things that I wanted it to do (Chapterization and organization). Some research found Scrivener, and I am extremely happy with it... other than I wish there was a Linux version. It's OS.X only. Guess what happens next? If someone comes up with a decent manuscripting program that is Open Source and cross platform, then I'll be retiring Scrivener...

All software applications are like that. Companies need to know and understand this new Open Source dynamic of platform, or find themselves playing catch-up.

Winning by Not Competing

stevecarl — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 03:08:07 GMT

Originally published on my personal blog on December 26th, 2007:

http://on-being-open.blogspot.com/2007/12/winning-by-not-competing-at-all.html

When I was very young, I used to fight with my younger brother. Well, from my point of view, he used to fight with me. I probably egged him on in some way that I don't remember now. I do remember being really frustrated because he would not leave me alone!

The point is that at some point he would get so riled up that he would dive bomb me, we wrestle to the ground and I'd proceed to pin him down till he gave up. I was two years older, and even as adults I was always taller and weighed more. of course he became a Marine, but fortunately we didn't fight anymore by then

One day, after being made to give in, he went to my mother and complained about the fact that I had been in a fight with him, and mom told him that if he didn't want to fight, he didn't have to. He could just walk away. After he said that he couldn't and that she just didn't understand, and he left the room, she also told me the same thing. That I was older and stronger and that while he was the one picking the fights, I did not have to fight back.

I then proceeded to drive my brother nuts, because I realized she was right. I did not care about the things he cared about, and I did not want to fight. I always felt a little sick about the fights. Even though I won, I did not enjoy it. Part of it was knowing that they were not fair of course, and kids have a built in fairness meter. But I did not enjoy the violence of them. I know some folks get into that kind of thing, but it is "not my bag, baby". My daughter has been watching Austin Powers again....

How I drove my brother nuts was that I did exactly what my mom said. I quit competing. I started working on my inner geek, while he was off trying to figure out why I didn't engage anymore.

This is why Linux makes MS nuts.

Linux / Open Source et al does not compete with MS. They don't care about the issues MS cares about. Sure there are certain corners of the Linux world... even entire distros that try to compete with MS, but at the end of the day Linux/OpenSource (L/OS) is about whatever they are interested in.

Where MS is in part about things like Digital Rights Management and piracy of their code and the like, L/OS could collectively not care less. The very beginning of Linux is a microcosm of the whole thing: Linus Torvalds needed an OS for something at school, and so he wrote one.

People that take their own precious time and talent and create open source are also a breed apart. For many, it is about the code, and the act of creation, and the filling of a need, not about being contract programmers writing code they could care less about.

Linux and Open Source end up getting better and better, and doing more and more because they are not competing with anyone. Only themselves.

I watch few competitive sports. Really, I do not understand why I should care if the green team or the blue team put the ball/widget/thingie in a special place more often than the other team did.

The sports I do watch are things like snow skiing at the Winter Olympics. I ski... I used to anyway, and all skiing for me was about getting a little better at it every time I went. I knew I would never be great (I started at age 29...) but I always felt great after a day on the mountain where I had learned a new thing. I watch the Olympics in admiration of these people that are just so good at this. I don't really care who wins. I just like to watch.

Linux and Open Source will always be better because at the end of the day, it is not trying to be anything other than the best it can be.

Just like Mom said.

On Being Open

stevecarl — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 01:29:07 GMT

This one comes from my personal blog, and was published August 28th, 2007:

http://on-being-open.blogspot.com/2007/08/on-being-open-in-my-most-recent-post.h tml

In my most recent post over at TalkBMC, "The Secret Linux Agenda", I spent a fair amount of time trying to think out loud about some of the disconnects in the world of Open Source. I am given a pretty hard time at BMC about the fact that I write long posts, so I worked hard to keep the "Agenda" post as short as I could, but still touch on at least a few examples of some of the disconnects people have when they talk about being open. Or Open. Or open source. or Open Source. I also mentioned the negative image some of this "open" stuff has because of the behaviors of some people in the various communities.

I wrote that post before I went to my first ever Austin Social Media Club meeting. Whurley was the speaker at the event, and he made a metric ton of terrific points about this during his talk.

Open Confusion

There was one particularly ticklish question from the room at the Austin Social Media Club meeting (Anne Gentle and I there) that I think really boiled all of this down. That comment / question was:

If people are doing "Open Source", why aren't they more Open?

It was a great question and really underlined the confusion about what the term "Open" means. Given the amount of audible agreement in the room with that question, for many in a social media club, "Open" in "Open Source" had connotations of "Accessible", "Easy to get along with", and "Willing to have civil conversations".

The Rainbow of Open Source

Spend any time in an Open Source product forum, and you can easily see what the folks in the social media club were talking about. Someone asks a question. Usually it is an innocent question being made by someone that does not know anything about the product. They, for their part, feel that they are doing the right thing. They are showing interest, and willingness to learn. They are being "open".

You know what happens next: In an un-moderated forum, some will actually try to help, and answer the question. At the very least, they will tell them where the first-timer documents are located, and some might even point out how to use the search facility to find every other time that question was asked, and the answers that they got then. All of those things are classifies as what we call "signal". Useful information.

The middle ground response happens when a response is given, but the person who asked the question has no way to parse the answer. That breaks down further as:

The answer was given in a way that assumed the person to have knowledge they did not.

The answer was given in such a way as to question whether the person is actually responding in the same language as the questioner.

Either of these examples are about communications styles, and whether or not the person who is doing the technical work can enter the requisite frame of mind (empathy, if you will) to have conversations with those less technical than themselves.

I had this experience growing up when I was talking to my Dad about math. He is a EE at NASA. A real rocket scientist. They exist! He knows so much math (some of it pretty esoteric and useful largely in his speciality of antenna design), and has for so long, that my simple frustrations with things like Freshman Algebra were in some ways a mystery to him. In one particularly memorable conversation, I asked why something worked in a particular way, and after a bit of time he said that once I knew a certain higher level of math this would become obvious. I was temporarily stuck: I would never see the next level of math till I grokked this one!

And Then Came Maude....

Sooner or later, intolerance strikes. Someone will post a response to the new person that contains anything from mild abuse to questioning their patriotism in a time of war. Something like:

"Are you NUTS!!! Why the HLL are you posting such stupid dumb** question. Why do you hate our troops? Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries (From the Monty Python Phrasebook: "Useful things to tell customers when they are calling and bothering you")".

It may be more ... err... sophisticated:

"We do not tolerate fools lightly in this forum. Please remove yourself to other places, so that you do not annoy us in the future, and so that we may concentrate on real issues."

This new, trying to do the right thing, be "open" person is now deeply confused and hurt. Is this not Open source. Is this not a public forum? Even if they don't know anything about this tool or product, they still need help on it.

In a forum for a paid product, no support professional would post such a response. If they did, their career would be at an end in short order. A company would not tolerate paying customers being abused by people from their company.

There are a lot of reasons why the maladaptive response to the newbie question is occurring in the Open Source forum:

I am doing this "for free"

This is not my day job

I answered that same question endlessly already

I only have so many hours in the day. I can spent them repeating myself, or being productive

PUUUULEASE!!!! They asked me why this didn't work the same as Windows!!!! AS-IF!!!!!

I am out of caffeine, and I have no money to get fresh. I hate being poor and brilliant

I have not been on a date in a decade

Combinations of several or all of the above

The reason does not matter. In a customer support situation, if someone was thinking about trying the new "Open" thing, and gets that response, the damage is done.

Smug and Arrogant?

A post came out recently about Apple users being "Smug and Arrogant", and when I looked at it there was a poll. 2/3's or those who had read the post agreed that Applen were guilty as charged. You could take that post and change all the Apple references to Linux or other Open Source projects, and I think the poll would be about the same. And it is because of the same reasons. Well... maybe not the Apple advertising campaign part. But as smug as those ads may be, I like 'em. I think they kind of actually miss a point criticising the ads saying that John Hodgeman plays "PC" as bumbling. John Hodgeman gets all the good lines! In many ways, he is the more likable of the two. I have in fact often viewed the ads as being sort of a misstep for Apple because "PC" is more endearing in his own, can't stop blue-screening, kind of way. Maybe it's just me though...

Fedora and Ubuntu

Now I want to circle around to part of what I was trying to get at with my recent posts both here and at TalkBMC about Fedora and Ubuntu. Another aspect of "open", "closed", and the new users experience.

Fedora is a great Distro, if you already know what you are doing. Fedora, like OpenSUSE, lives in the middle of the road. It is not as challenging to install as MS Vista or rolling your own Linux distro starting with a download from Kernel.org. Fedora is easier and faster than installing GenToo. It is not as easy as Ubuntu or Linspire or Xandros. Yes: I know Xandros is in bed with Microsoft these days. See the bit above about arrogant and smug though: I know why the Xandros/MS deal is not optimal, but does the average person that just wants this stuff to work?

Fedora has an admirable stance on why they do not include any software in the Distro that is not really Open Source. My example in the other posts was Wifi cards like Intel and Atheros where even though the vendor has supplied driver code, they hold back the code to the cards driver loadable firmware and only provide a binary. With Fedora, you will have to work hard to get that card going, and their point in acting closed to closed source is to incent card manufacturers to be more open.

I love it. I think card manufacturers are wrong to think their microcode is all that splendidly different in a commodity market like Wifi, and that being more open and easier to install would be an advantage in the marketplace!

However....

Being hard to install for the right reasons means by default you are NOT after the casual installer. The person just trying to use the computer as a tool to get something or the other done. The person who heard that Linux was really cool and was willing to try it to see what it is all about.

The Spectrum

On one end we have the Xandros / Microsoft lashup. Xandros is licensing closed protocols from Microsoft that will allow them among other things to create programs to access content on MS Exchange. They call this mash "Mixed Source". If I sound a bit leery, it is because I used to run BMC's email system, back when we used HP's OpenMail, and I watched HP make a similar deal, and then not to long after that, see OpenMail sold to Samsung, where it later died. The problem from my point of view was that having the protocols was only half the battle. Someone still had to write all the programs to use them. MS has spent years layering all this stuff together, RPC's and Protocols like MAPI and CIFS so that it is no trivial thing to create programs that use them. Ask the folks at Samba.org. There is a reason MS Vista took seven years and billions of dollars in R&D, and came out looking like a gussied up version of XP with compatibility issues.

Middle ground is Ubuntu/Mint. Closed source, binary only bits are not only allowed but supplied. A message is sent to the person at boot that "Restricted Source" is in use, and if you click on it, a display of all the restricted source bits that the OS had to load to run on this hardware is displayed. You know who is playing nice, and who still keeps their cards close to their chest, source code wise.

Then there is the completely open. And Open. Supporting only that which is fully Open, and fully unencumbered, projects like Debian, Fedora and OpenSUSE reward openness by inclusion. Open is a wide world of things, where you can build whatever you need, as long as you know what you are doing and have the time.

Support

Stretched across the span of closed to open is another dimension. Support. Whurley likes to say that "people" (and these people include companies) have one of two things: Time or Money. I would add to that "Expertise", which came at least in part with time, and now costs money.

If you are paying for support, you probably have money, and you also expect that you will never have the conversation I outlined in the "Maude" section above. You are paying for the right to have a throat to choke. You can also spend money on a person who is your local expert, and whose throat you'll being squeezing. Or both.

Novell,RedHat and Ubuntu walks between all these worlds with their commercial Linuxii. Novell, like Xandros, has some sort of deal in place with Microsoft although I am not sure it is quite as "deep" as Xandros's. You can buy a Dell with Ubuntu on it, and it will be supported by Canonical. Etc. Etc.

But Its My First Time

I have been saying for a long while now that Linux is ready to take on the personal and corporate desktop. I base that on personal experience, not only of being a user personally and professionally, but in helping others to do the same thing. I watched my brother (who is not a computer person) look at an Ubuntu PC for the first time and say in some wonder "This is Linux?", clearly thinking it was going to be something much more mysterious than what it was.

If you are Open Source / Computer savvy, I'll wager someone someplace has asked you at least once: "What is the best version of Linux for me to run?". As technical people, we as a group like to answer such questions correctly, even if two minutes later their eyes are glazing over, and, like one of my blog posts, we are just warming up.

These days I just answer that question with "Mint" or "Ubuntu". If they asked me that question, they are not ready to hack device support in Fedora just yet. They may never want to. As good as Fedoras reasons are for being Open, and only Open, this rules them out for a beginner at least in my estimation.

As I was lamenting in "Agenda", that is too bad. Fedora has a ton of great stuff in it. By ceding the entry level Linux to Ubuntu, they are also ceding mind and market share. Since under the covers, Linux is Linux, Ubuntu can grow with the user. When it comes time to install their first Linux server, Ubuntu has one of those now too.

At the end of the day, it looks like to me that the way one goes about being open (or Open) is to be inclusive.

The Secret Linux Agenda

stevecarl — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 02:21:06 GMT

Originally published August 22nd, 2007:

http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-carl/steve-carl/The-Secret-Linux-Agenda

I know it says "Linux" on the title, but there is plenty about Open Source to make it relevant to the theme here....

Now it can be told for the first time anywhere: the secret agenda of the Linux community is... is... ahhhhhggg! They got me..... Its all going dark.... sinking....

OK. Fine. I lied. There is no Linux agenda. Well. Maybe one: to be the best Operating System the Open Source community can make it be. And even then the BSD and OpenSolaris camp are going to be wanting to voice an opinion....

Here is what got me to thinking about this.

I was doing the work on the two laptops that I posted about over at on-being-open. That post, in a circular posting kind of way , was a followup to my last post here here about installing Mint 3.0 on a Dell C400 trash-laptop. The post in turn was a follow-up to... oh never mind. Lets just say I have been on a theme lately.

I realized at some point along the install that the Dell C400, with it's Orinoco based TrueMobile 1150 Wifi card was a better Fedora 7 platform than the IBM X30 with its Atheros based Dlink PCMCIA Wifi card. That in turn had me thinking about the purity... or purism.. something... of one Linux Distro over another. Mint 3.0, which was on the Dell C400 hard drive would work just fine on the IBM. Mint would not care what the Wifi chip was either way. Of the two distros I was working with on the two laptops, only Fedora is persnickty like that. There is a reason why Fedora is that way. More about that in a bit.

I did what I suggested I might in that on-being-open post: I pulled the hard drives out of each laptop, and I switched them.

The 40GB Hitachi with Mint 3.0 went from the Dell C400 into the IBM X30. Wifi chip went from Orinoco to Atheros

The Samsung 80GB went from the IBM X30 to the Dell C400. Wifi Chip went from Atheros to Orinoco.

Batteries in. Plugs in. Power on. Boot.

That was it. They both came up, they both figured out their new hardware situation. They both reconfigured what they needed to. They both found the home Wifi network, and auto-configured to join, even though they had just switched (among other things) the chip on the Wifi cards. It was brain dead easy. Hardest bit was keeping track of the tiny screws for the disk cradles when the cats were trying to help. It turns out all projects require cats to help, at least according to them.

Take That Other OS's!

I have developed a rep in some places as having gone over to the dark side. In this case, Apple and OS.X. I have certainly made no secret that I am a fan of many things Apple. I have been informed by those who dislike Apple that just saying that it has chewy BSD goodness at its OS.X core is not enough. Be that as it may, I never even considered an Apple before they made it's core something I trusted. Mac OS9 and its predecessors may have been perfectly good OS's but I never liked them much. I'm pretty old school. With no command prompt to ease my way in, I always was lost on a Classic Mac. One time in the early 1990's it took me over an hour to eject a disk out of a Mac. I ended up taking it apart. Turns out I was supposed to drag the icon of the disk to the trash can icon. I never would have done that, fearing it would delete the data on the disk. But I digress.....

This disk switching is a case where Linux does something that neither Apple nor MS Windows will. Not can: will.

Linux boots in the new hardware because it has no axe to grind. No master to please. No agenda. It can focus instead on trying to do the right thing... which in this case is merely to boot. It does more than boot though. After the two laptops are booted, things like the 3d desktop (Beryl) still works on both platforms. It not only works, it works well. It dealt with the BIOS change, the graphic chip change, the Wifi chip change... all of it. No muss or fuss.

I, as a customer am having a very nice experience here.

I noted in the X30/C400 post that despite coming from two different vendors, the hardware was similar. Same 1.2 Ghz processor. Same 1 GB of memory. Same 1024x768 screen size. Same general target market: the year of 2002's Sub-notebook market.

I guarantee that I could not have done the disk swap thing between the IBM and the Dell with MS Windows XP and had it work. That would have required all sorts of non-fun things, like re-installing the OS, or at least pre-running sysprep to undo the way MS Windows has tied itself to the specific hardware. OS.X would not have booted at all of course: it only works on Apple hardware (not counting some serious hackery out there).

It is not even that MS Windows can not boot on more generalized hardware: when one first installs MS Windows, a generalized version does the installation. There are many recovery disks like Bart PE that run generalized MS Windows OS stacks. In fact, I believe the Bart PE is a version of MS Windows called Windows PE.

The reason MS Windows would not boot in this example is that once installed MS Windows does not want to be moved till you can re-verify your right to install it anywhere. And that is MS's right. They wrote the EULA. Running MS Win means you agree to the hassle that implies should you want to change your hardware. Vista is worse in this regard by all reports. MS is not targeting people like me who do stuff like this as a customer anyway. Not any more. Maybe not since DOS days...

This non-booting without major incantations is not a premium end-hacker-user experience. Not like this hard drive swap of the X30 and the C400, where everything just works.

I have moved harddrives much further afield than these two similar computers, and had the same experience. From an ancient Compaq M300 to a eMachine 5312 to a brand new (at the time) Toshiba to the IBM X30. Now the Dell C400. That 80 GB Samsung drive gets around.

Whurley Gets It

If you listen to the videocasts Whurley recently posted, one of the things he and Cote talk about as it related to Open Source is that it is about support. With Open Source, the customer is always right. Even if the customer had to write the feature themselves. Open Source gives a customer options.

Example: If an Open Source tool does almost what a customer needs or wants, they can:

Ask the creator of the code to add the feature

Commission someone to add the features they really want.

Do the code work themselves, in house.

Since they wanted this new feature bad enough to write it, what are the chances someone else wanted or would benefit from the new feature? Pretty good, I'd say.

The funny thing was that, in most cases, Open Source is not about the customer necessarily wanting the source code. Whurley points out the discrepancies between source and binary downloads of most products as an example. Most downloads are of the binaries.

In my day job in R&D Support, having access to the Linux code has meant having access to the ultimate manual. We have not used it often, but if you look back in the early TalkBMC "Adventures" posts about some of the debugging we were doing with NAS, we were in the source code trying to figure out what the programmed behavior was so that we could have intelligent conversations about it with the developer.

I used to do the same thing with VM on the mainframe, reading the dump and the source code before I reported a problem so that I was sure what I was reporting actually was a problem.

Distro Focus

Another thing I have been thinking about and posting on a fair amount recently: What the focus of various distributions are. Here there are agendas, at least of a sort. Not hidden ones though.

Example: What does Fedora want to be?

I spent a great deal of time with Fedora over the years, and there are things I really like about it, but after using Mint 3.0 for a while I have come to the place where some of the purity really gets old when all I want is a working Linux computer.

I had hoped that Fedora 7, what with it's LiveCD and merging of the "Extras" with "Core" and all, was moving more in the direction of Ubuntu and other easy to use Distros. That projects that were "tainted" in the eyes of the Distro would be dealt with in some similar way as Ubuntu and it's "Restricted Source Manager". I was disappointed though.

Fedora views their stance about not including certain projects as being a good thing. Fedora 7 does not support either the Atheros Wifi cards, or the Intel Wifi cards out of the box but does support the Orinoco based cards because of the question of Open Source.

Huh? Didn't I just finish saying that Open Source was all about being easy and having nice customer experiences and all? Am I bifurcated?

Two Things Can Be True, Even If They Seem to be the Opposite

In Open Source, both of these statements about customer support are true. It is all about Point of View.

Fedora won't include anything that is not 100% open source, and in the case of the Intel and Atheros drivers, while the drivers are Open Source, the firmware of the cards is not. They are vendor provided binaries that the Open Source drivers load when the card is initialized. No source code to the card firmware. The card manufacturer has decided that having the firmware code would mean that their competitors would have too big an advantage on them. They are therefore not 100% Open Source, and Fedora wants vendors to get the message that not being Open means not being included. The Fedora FAQ says what Fedora wants to be when it says in reference to a closed standard:

"...we'd much rather change the world instead of going along with it."

I find that deeply admirable, and it is one of the reasons I stick with at least one system running it, despite the frustrations of hacking Fedora from time to time to get my Wifi cards going. As an end user, I can not really tell the difference between an Atheros chipped Wifi Card and an Intel one. Whatever market advantage vendors think they derive from having closed source firmware, from the end user point of view, it all looks the same. Wifi is a commodity item. It hooks up laptops and iPhones to Wifi access points. It lets me access the well known series of tubes we call the Interweb. In fact, the real value to me is not anywhere inside the commodity Wifi chip. It is how well the antenna is designed and placed in the case!

Mint does not get to claim such Open Source purity, and instead uses the Ubuntu Restricted Source Manager. It tells you that you have an impure system, but it loads everything up if you tell it to, and away you go. You, the end user, know which vendors are being sticks in the mud, but it does not stop you from getting going.

The core difference is that Ubuntu will supply things that are free and unencumbered, but do not have to be Open Source. This difference is making a big difference to Ubuntu and its kin. Ubuntu is always the top Distro at Distrowatch.com whenever I look, and has twice the download numbers Fedora has.

POV and Pol

Polarization that is.

I am still trying to get my head around some of this.

As I have said here, I take it as axiomatic that open is better than closed (tm).

It can be deduced from the above example of Mint vs. Fedora that there are degrees of being open. Fedora goes for purity of Openness, and is lampooned in some corners because of how hard it is to get going on any hardware that does not match the 100% open criteria. The Dell C400 works great with Fedora because every bit of hardware in it has a totally Open Source solution.

Ubuntu and its kin like Mint work far more easily but some criticize them because they have given in to the closed source forces of darkness and evil, and shipped Binary bits.

This is not even a new issue: When IBM started to pull the source code to VM on the mainframe, a huge outcry from the customer base ensued. "OCO is LOCO" was the badge at SHARE. I still have mine.

Fedora and its goals are laudable and I support them. At the same time, when my brother needed a Linux computer, I built him one based on Ubuntu. He would not care one whit about the purity of the Open Source. He just wants Google Earth to run.

These POV issues all show up in discussions about whose Open Source license is better. Whurley is currently pointing in his blog at a poll and panel about that at SXSW .

I know this is not all that politically correct (but then, I rarely am)... but I think Open/open is better than closed. Any open. Any spelling or capitalization.

At the same time, I am always a bit dismayed by the signal to noise ratio of the Internet on things like this. I have said it before, and I say it again: I'm really old. I remember when you could read Netnews newsgroups, and get useful information, and help from a community of like minded people. A time before the noisy, just-like-to-tear-things-down-no-matter-what-they-are types moved in, and destroyed Netnews. The downside of being open on Netnews was needing to have a news client like Pan with a good killfile / filter function.

Spam certainly took (and still takes) advantage of the openness of the email transport of the Internet, reducing the value of email, and in some cases doing real harm.

I see the move to Open Source for anyone doing it as having an issue like this. No matter which license one chooses, someone...maybe many someones... maybe really loud and self righteous someones, will yell to the rafters about how using license X means one is being less than open, or less than perfect. Google said that a guiding principal of their company was to "Not Be Evil" and every thing they do now gets the "Is that Evil" yardstick hauled out and yammered about.

That high level of noise is not very useful, and can push some away in disgust. In my opinion only: A company does not announce an Open Source direction lightly. Not because of the business risk, but because no matter what you do, in some corner will be the voice saying "You did not do that right". No matter what you did.

Personal Example

To close this thought and post out: I was talking the other month to someone that was getting ready to open source some code they had written. A very useful tool. Their number one fear: that the code they had written would be savaged by the folks they were giving it away to. Sort of like:

"Hi. Here is this tool. It did this useful thing for me. If you want it, you can have it, and the code to it, in case you would find it useful."

"Oh. My. Ever. Loving. STARS! I can't BELIEVE you gave this away! What a piece of junk! Where did you learn how to code: A fish and tackle shop? Look at this DO loop! Have you ever seen such a thing in your LIFE. And these comments. What language is this?......" On and on.

Some build. Some innovate. Some tear down and destroy.

For everyone like that critic though, there will be those that thank you for taking the time, and being willing to share. One just has to have a mental killfile / filter.

For all its problems: many self inflicted, I still think Open is better. I'm a glass-half-full type. I also remind myself all the time that despite appearances, Open Source is not a computer religion. It is just a good idea.

And it is... The Secret Linux Agenda

"Who Do You Serve and Who Do You Trust?"

stevecarl — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 06:47:32 GMT

Original post from July 7th, 2007. Original post here:

http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-carl/steve-carl/ who-do-you-serve-open-source-and-community

This one, like Piers Anthony, made a trilogy of what was originally one post:

Proving I have moderately high geek points, the title of this post were the opening words of the "Babylon 5" spinoff series "Crusade". These words seem to work here for todays post, especially if you know the TV show at all. To be clear if you are not Crusade-saavy: It was not a show about the religious Crusades of 1095 to 1291. It was about a race against time to save Earth from a plague created by an alien species. In typical Babylon-5 tradition (and in fact, all good Science Fiction), the show was as much about current times as anything happening in the future.

I always wanted to get a Babylon 5 quote in here.

When this question (or is it questions) are applied to the topic de-jour: Open Source, today's post becomes a sequel to my previous one about “Egoless Programming”.

Common and Community... same root word.

Open source is at its core a community of the creative. The innovative. A community of people with common interests and talents. There are many communities kinds of communities of common interest. Sporting events are communities of people with a common interest in what sport in under way. The first time my new-at-the-time wife came with me on a ski trip, she found out she was not a member of the community of skiers. She did not know that when we were not on the slope that all we would talk about was skiing. Even though we had just battered ourselves all day long against a mountain, where the mountain once again won as it always does, we would sit in front of cheap TV set that evening after dinner (where we recalled the days events in gory detail) glued to Warren Miller films about people who ski way better than we do. She thought when we weren't skiing we might do other things. I don't think it was self delusion: I just don't think she understood.

Other communities: I have been to many Mensa events: my wife is a member. I know people in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). I literally knew rocket scientists when I was at NASA. Here at BMC I have met many product authors and product designers. Smart / creative people are still in need of the same things as anyone else. They need community. They need other people. It is just that what they are communicating with each other about can sometimes make ones brain hurt. When inside their community, they are in their zone of comfort, and they speak of things in ways that people outside the community just may not so easily grok. It is not meant to exclude, it is just a feeling, kind of like that one you get when you arrive home after a long trip. Kind of like the feeling I just got getting in a Heinlein reference and a Babylon 5 reference all in one post...

I used to date a waitress. When she was with me, and we were with co-workers and friends of mine from the computer world, she had no idea what we were talking about. She once asked me later if we were “being dirty” because to her ears, all the talk about bits and bytes had a vaguely obscene sound to it. She was an intelligent person with other interests: just had never been involved with computers at all. This was before PC's were commonplace too. Did I mention there is dirt younger than me? I did make an effort not to talk about computers after that when she was with me. She still dropped me like a hot potato. I'm pretty sure it was the computer thing...

Common... or maybe uncommon interests and abilities

Here is another bit of the puzzle: intelligence / creativity is not something that can be measured and expressed in a unitary number like IQ. See Stephan J. Gould's excellent book "The Mismeasure of Man" for why we humans are far too complicated for such simplistic ideas too have any application beyond that of party novelty. No believers in hogwash like "The Bell Curve" need apply here. That is a different community. The community of people that wish life was easier and less complex than it really is, where people all line up in neatly classifiable little rows.

I know this about IQ to be true because I am an example of it. Please do not interpret this as braggadocio or any other form of feeling self important, but I am not of average IQ. At any given point in my life though, I have taken IQ tests and returned scores that varied by over 30 points!

One reason is that intelligence and ability is about exercise: the more one uses their brain, the better it becomes. Another is that tests measure different aspects of ability will return different results relative to the average. If you were to measure my ability to perform math today relative to when I studied it in school, there would be a huge drop off. In my job I use math, but only parts like statistics and double entry bookkeeping and the like. Some geometry, for building houses. Anything else would require intensive study to refresh. All skills are organic when one is a human being.

This is deeply complicated: I am not even talking here about Savant talents, or cultural bias in testing. You have to read Gould's book or something like it to get ones head around the whole thing.

Add in now "interest". One is far more likely to gain skills or stay fresh and skillful if it is an area of interest. Over time I think this will tend to skew, so that one becomes even better at areas of interest, and even worse in other areas. This is probably further reinforced by community. When you are with like minded people, you tend to focus on your areas of common interest.

The results of the community that is Open Source are tangible, if not easily measured. Results like Linux, Gnome, KDE, Xorg OpenOffice, GIMP, Beryl/Compiz, On and on and on.

How does one create an environment of creativity ?

If you look at some of the most successful companies these days it is clear that they have internal environments that encourage creativity and innovation. Apple is clearly one of them: I am writing the first draft of this entry on my iPhone in an antique mall while my wife does ... something.... in a cabinet full of antiques. Not sure exactly what she is doing: I am not a member of the community on antiques. And I'm blogging on my iPhone, so I am not paying attention either. In that world of antiques I have found that my tastes run to either the very cheap or the very expensive. I can not tell the difference between one or the other when I am looking at it. I do know that most of what I like is often called "Art Deco". But I digress.

Another example company would of course be Google.

I admit freely that as a manager I have stolen freely from Google, specifically their 70/20/10 "rule". I have been around creative geniuses all my life (my dad has something like 17 patents he can talk about at NASA) so I know a good idea when I lift one. I have written to some degree about some of the creative things we are up to inside R&D support, but since I adopted this rule, some major changes have occurred in the team. I'll get into those in future posts. Some really good things happening here though.

Most corporate environments are not so flexible as to be able to deal well with the needs of the creator. Humans being what they are, needs are met one way or another. A stultifying day job is a recipe for creating all nighters, and weekends of creative frenzies. Or drinking. Sometimes both. They are not mutually exclusive.

Intersection

I was reading a very interesting article this last weekend in the New York Times about amateurs contributing to the Space Program (subscription may be required) . The article was interesting, and well written but at one point the author was essentially going to sleep during an in depth technical discussion that was occurring between those he was writing about. Even though the author was interested enough in the topic to do the research and write the article, they could not quite hang in there for all the detail that was required to make the project work.

I hit this phenomena again recently. I was talking for more than four hours with someone I had never met before. In the course of that conversation I found out that they were deeply intelligent, well traveled, well read, and had some truly original and fascinating insights into some things : things I had thought about for years and never picked up on. Then another in the room mentioned the idea that they kept a laptop by their bed, for late night computing needs, and they got the oddest reaction. This person could not believe anyone would do such a thing as have a laptop near their bed. I keep two there : a Linux laptop, and an Apple laptop, so I thought nothing of it.

Somehow this crossed some line for this individual between intelligent and geeky and it is always an education to find where that line is. It is completely individual, just like we all are. I am sure when I quoted Babylon 5, geek alarms went off for some, and for others it was more like “Hey, I didn't know he liked Babylon 5 too”.

My next door neighbors have a sort of mixed marriage. He is an engineer and a homebody. She loves to travel and I am insanely jealous of all the places she has been. She has seen the Taj Mahal twice! They are in their 80's now, so clearly they have figured out how to make that work. They are both intelligent, creative people. He likes to create from his home, in the world of his mind. She likes to learn new things, meet new people, and is trying to see everything that can be seen. He walks the dog while she is away. What is clear is that part of staying young is staying interested in things.

Meeting the needs of the creator

My theory about why there are so many Open Source projects with so many people so good at such complicated and esoteric things as writing operating systems like Linux or FreeBSD or amazingly sophisticated graphical applications like GIMP (or, any of the other 21,000 projects in Debian alone) then is this:

This is their interest

This is their community

This is who values them for what they want to be valued for

I know when I used to talk to Rick Troth about things like “suloginv” or “CMSFS” or any of the other Open Source things he was working on while he was here, there was always a special note of affection in his voice. He truly loved that work and that community of people. It was not just that they valued and love Rick either. it was that they were in a position to better understand exactly what it was he was doing, how hard it was, what it's value would be... and they valued him for that which he wanted to be valued for. I used to get a warm glow just standing next to him.

There was an interesting article I read today about the number of contributors to the Linux kernel growing. For the purposes of this posts focus, it was especially interesting that the total number of people contributing code to the Linux kernel just since the 2.6.11 kernel came out has doubled. Change rate is doubled too: from two changes an hour to four. Per hour!

Moving back to a personal example: what about oneself does one wish to be liked for? Does it feel better to have someone say you look good today, or that they really liked that patch you checked into the repository, or that you really made a great play in the game... what about you is what you want to be appreciated for? I was very gratified when I started this weblog by the response to it. As personal an act as writing is (a virtual putting your heart out on your sleeve if you will) it would have been hard to have had a huge groundswell of "You Stink" kind of responses.

Swimming against the needs

Companies that do not get this are going to be in trouble. The power of the creative / innovative is stacked against them. They will be facing companies that do get it. Entire groups and communities. Literally millions of smart creative innovative people motivated by common interest and community.

This is not even really a we-versus-them scenario, as much as some would personalize and demonize. To utterly torture a metaphor: This is a drive your stake in the ground and resist change thing, only to find your stake is really a sand castle, and that thing moving at you is wave. Big or little, fast or slow, the wave will win.

I said it was going to be tortured. But I like the mental image of the wave slowly lapping at the sand castle and think it appropriate. If you have ever been to one of those build a sand castle competitions, and then gone by the beach the next week you see all that remains, you get the picture. Beach. Waves. Skin cancer. Ok. Fine. Moving on.

Coming back then to the Babylon 5 quote at the top of the column. People always serve themselves. Their needs must be met. Look at any company in crisis, and most of the people that are leaving first are the good ones. They are not rats abandoning the ship, they are talents whose needs are not being satisfied.

My Brother spent his life battling alcohol. In the recovery programs he attended they talked about the fact the he had to work on himself before he could help anyone else. A sort of self protecting self involvment that was required to make progress against the disease. They had a saying: "You have to work on yourself before you can work on anyone else.". It may seem odd to say it that way, but it was and is based in a very solid bit of understanding about the way we humans work. If one does not take care of ones self, one can not have enough resources, mentally, emotionally, whatever, to be there for anyone else.

Call it enlightened self interest, or whatever you want. Creative and innovative people need to create and innovate. It is part of who they are. This is true of any subject: not just creation of Open Source programs for those gifted with talents in the area of programming, but any artistic endevour. And those of like interests tend to form communities: Just take a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico or Marfa, Texas or Jerome, Arizona. Three places that pop to my mind whenever I think of the term "Artist Colony". There are many others....

Writers must write. Coders must code. All are acts of creation. All creative needs must be satisfied.

It is the way we are. Oddly, few companies really understand this about their creative talent. Some may even actively work against it.

Many companies fight a delaying game. They throw up as many obstacles as they can to try and slow things down. See SCO for details on how that worked out.

Here is another example: MS is seeing a drop-off in third party apps for MS Windows. This report says 10%, with another 2% this year. I am sure it will be denied as being true though. What I will be curious to see is if Ray Ozzie "gets it". Signs are not good: the patent deals with vendors like Novell and Xandros and Linspire look like another delaying action to me.

People will met their own needs. They will ultimately serve themselves, and their creative desires. They will go to where they feel good about what they do. They have to. They are people. That is just how people work.

As for the second half of the B5 quote: They will trust those that think and feel and act the same way they do.

That would actually be a whole other post I think.[Egoless Programming|http://beta.openmanagement.org/blogs/stevecarl/2007/05/16/egoless-programming-an d-open-source]