erdemkose teknoloji meraklısı

The economic slowdown should benefit open source software but whether open source software will benefit its owners is up in the air.

That’s according to Gartner Group predictions for 2009, which claims that over the next few years most enterprises using open source won’t manage those assets correctly and most won’t achieve any cost savings over proprietary software. 

I’m late to the game here, but it’s worth pointing out two findings in the Gartner Predicts 2009 report, which was  published early last month:

Through the end of 2011, fewer than 50 percent of global IT organizations will have implemented a formal open source adoption and management policy.

And for the next five years, only about 50 percent of all mainstream IT projects using open source software will not achieve cost savings over closed source alternatives, according to the report’s author, Mark Driver.

The data serves as good warning for enterprise IT managers and CIOs, especially those who have stuck their necks out to support open source.

Gartner’s advise? In order to get a payoff, “move aggressively” to develop an open source adoption strategy and bring OSS and hardware under asset management systems.

“Do not expect to automatically save money with OSS or any technology without effective financial management,” Driver writes. “Do expect to carefully manage open source solutions in the appropriate scenarios to realize total cost of ownership advantages. ”

Imagine sitting down with your CEO in 2015 and explaining why the supposed cost savings of OSS never materialized with all of the energy and bucks put behind it?

Consolidation will vastly reduce the number of open source partners with whom customers do business.

Gartner predicts, for example, that by 2012, at least 50 percent of all direct commercial sales from open source products will come from projects under a single vendor’s patronage. Think about Red Hat, which scooped up JBoss. Think of Sun, which acquired mySQL? What’s in store for 2009?

On a good note, this may spread the use of open source (one throat to choke) and reduce the number of vendor relationships customers must support. But on the other hand, it may amass power into too few hands.

There was some good news in this otherwise  sobering report.

Through 2013, 90 percent of all cloud computing providers will rely on open source software to deliver products and services. this will no doubt stimulate more OSS sales and widespread use.

Gartner advises IT managers to manage their cloud and open source strategies together to maximize the potential of each. Tap into the ability of open source software to move workloads to the cloud, Driver also recommends in his to-do list for IT managers.
 

One of my great Eurofriends linked me to his 2009 predictions piece over the holidays, noting that companies like Acquia are “appropriating returns from the commons.”

This may be one of the great misunderstandings of the open source era, and a big part of the FOSS-open source split.

Commercial open source, some think, does indeed  “appropriate returns from the commons.” I, on the other hand, believe such operations are a net benefit to the commons.

Let me offer the example of Acquia, the commercial arm for Drupal, because I have both personal experience and news to bring to bear.

The experience came four years ago. I was asked to help launch an open source site for politics. I recommended Drupal for its scalability, but the company failed, in part because we could not develop the site quickly enough.

Since Drupal.org only provided a directory of possible assistance, we wound up dealing with an Indian outsourcer my partner was familiar with.

Their claim of expertise was false. I spent months trying to explain what we needed, and each iteration of the software grew worse. We finally got things rolling after another consultant turned us on to the new, stable Drupal code base.

By then it was too late. The business model was flawed in any case. I wound up blogging about politics, reading political blogs and summarizing their messages, but traffic was never more than a trickle, and interactivity was virtually nil.

Should I get another opportunity, I will know more of what to do. I’ll be able to get the help I need through Acquia. I’ll pay for it, but I will have an effective site in a short period of time, and technical management will be done by techies, not journalists.

There’s a second benefit to the commercial model, add-ons. An example is Kaltura. This makes any Drupal site immediately video-capable. (There are also versions for other systems.)

A commercial arm retains a project’s market share, and its development momentum, so that add-ons gravitate toward it. I am certain that Drupal sites launched in 2009 will be light years ahead of those from four years ago.

They have to be, because much has happened since 2005. It’s no longer enough to support blogs, or diaries, or to do them in a scaled manner. Now you have to support a host of other files, and social networking functions.

A CMS system, like any system, must continually progress to stay relevant. Commercial arms help open source projects meet this competition, at the same time they provide a business model which feeds the lead developers.

It’s not an appropriation from the commons at all.

I don’t think so, but then I read headlines like this, from the Manila Bulletin in the Philippines, and I wonder if such a boycott does not already exist.

(Search Google images under “unholy Microsoft” and this is the first image that you get. From Vishal Sharma.)

Pinoy open source firm, MS ink unholy alliance.

Unholy, Sparky? Really? The story describes a deal between Winston Demarillo’s Exist Global and Microsoft to “enable the creation of more interoperable programs.”

The story adds that Microsoft is building two, not one but two, software labs in the country — in Quezon City and at the University of the Philippines.

Still, I couldn’t get that word out of my head. Unholy. Is open source really a holy business model, a holy contract? Is any company standing against it unclean, to be shunned?

Personally I just think they’re on the losing end, thanks to Moore’s Second Law. Software complexity increases exponentially with computing power. The only way to bring costs within reason, over time, is to share them.

So how do you feel when someone you know and respect in the open source movement announces they are doing business with Microsoft?

How do you feel when an open source friend says they are working with Microsoft?

• 
  Let me buy you a beer.
• 
  You buy the beer. Got a job?
• 
  Get your own beer. I’m busy.
• 
  I throw my beer on you, and it hisses like it’s putting out a fire.

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Matt Asay is not alone in wondering why EMC bought Sourcelabs.

Sourcelabs will now be part of a new personal storage unit of EMC called Decho, under former Microsoft executive Harel Kodesh, who has done a blog post heralding his own appointment.

What’s the strategy?

Will the SASH stack now become the management center of Decho’s online backup service?

Will Sourcelabs survive?

Does Kodesh have a special task in mind for Sourcelabs CEO Byron Sebastian and his team?

Or is it just possible EMC was looking for some open source mojo?

My guess is this was a rescue mission. The economic collapse was hitting Sourcelabs hard, the company was spinning in, and EMC saw a chance to get a good engineering team at a reasonable price. Sourcelabs and Decho are both in Seattle.

These are “Mr. Potter” days in the tech business. He who has the gold makes the rules. We dance to the tune of cash. While open source is based on principle, the principals can’t live on that alone.

EMC is shelter from the storm. We should all be so lucky in 2009.

Version 3 of the Cfengine is out, and as with Windows 3.0 a generation ago it claims this release fulfills the promise, in this case of a data center that can heal itself.

As part of the roll-out we have a commercial affiliate, Cfengine.com, with fireworks on the home page and binaries you can buy. An enterprise edition is promised real soon now.

What sets Cfengine apart is a language in which you can build-in the procedures you would take if things went wrong. The new version adds support for Topic Maps, an XML schema making strategic intentions behind decisions easier to follow.

Cfengine has been around since 1993, and the company said it is taking an incremental approach to upgrades, so as to minimize system disruptions, which are its business.

If the business runs as smoothly as the software this gives open source a new card to play in the battle to manage large data centers and clouds. If Linux wins the top end of the market, it’s hard to see where Microsoft goes from there.

The obvious can make anyone seem like a genius.

Back in October I suggested that the Android has to be more than an iPhone, has to be more than a phone actually:

What if someone built, say, a flash drive with the Android software that turned your PC into an Android device? Or turned your Linux-based Netbook into one?

It took an outfit called Mobile-Facts just four hours to get Android running on the Eee PC Netbook I reviewed last year. At the same time Google is rolling out a new version of the software, dubbed Cupcake, that is even more laptop-friendly.

This makes all sorts of sense. The key to Android’s success will be an innovative interface. Once you have that the platform is a matter of personal preference.

An Android Netbook would accomplish two things. It could give Linux market share inside the desktop market. And it would break Android from the death grip of the carrier business model.

As Jean Baptiste-Queru noted in a Google group discussion of Android, T-Mobile had HTC tweak its Android with proprietary components making it difficult if not impossible to upgrade.

This is standard operating procedure for both carriers and mobile phone makers. The more you can upgrade their kit the less kit you buy. Planned obsolescence is built into the business model.

But if Android is available in a Netbook form factor new worlds open up. Users can aid in development. WiFi becomes practical, indeed desireable. You can also have a continuing back-up of your Android data files.

You have a PC version of David Brin’s Kiln People, in that handhelds can now be made for specific tasks, then uploaded to the master and killed at will. In this case, of course, the clones live in the virtual carrier universe.

All these choices are up to you and available, when Android breaks free of a phone mindset.

Security and updates, which are often the same thing.

There is no longer any doubt that hackers and malware writers are going after open source projects as they once went after Windows. Vulnerabilities are being found, discovered, created, exchanged.

The best protection against vulnerabilities is to keep software updated, but most open source lacks update services. That’s one part of the Windows license that is worth paying for, and there does not seem to be an open source equivalent.

An exception is Firefox (above, from SecurityMike). But how many take advantage of this? And how tied is Firefox to updating for security purposes? Remember we’re talking about pushing updates, not asking users to pull them.

In any case, the enterprise market is more important here. Servers hold more secrets than clients.

Palamida is trying to build a model for supporting updates, as I described in November. Such a service could, if executed correctly, even give many open source projects a valid business model.

But until this ramps up (hopefully in a competitive market), enterprise managers have an easy way to say “no” to open source.

Regardless of how dangerous this is, the fact that managers feel it’s dangerous makes it so.

This may be the first challenge to open source’s growth in the enterprise since that growth began, and for some it may prove intractable.

There is a way forward, using the enterprise business model, but how many projects will be able to exploit it in a professional way and retain their enterprise credibility remains open to question.

It’s a story I’ll be watching closely as the year unfolds, and I suggest you do the same.

In writing about the open source rollup yesterday I added the gaming market almost as an afterthought.

The problem has always been that the graphics drivers needed for really high-end gaming just were not available through open source.

Yesterday AMD tore down that wall.

Thanks to some determined AMD engineers the company was able to release open source Linux code for its GPU series of graphics accelerators.

Nvidia is still holding out, but with open source AMD code available it may start feeling the pressure soon.

Developers need more, but these moves could bring AMD’s ATI subsidiary market share in more than gaming systems. High-end CAD and medical markets can now have “clean” Linux implementations free of proprietary restraints.

Linux netbooks may also get a boost if they’re encouraged by game designers to put ATI chips into their specifications.

I admit my first thought on hearing this was, “Oh, another market flailure tosses open source code over the side.” (Yes, the first l in flailure is intentional. They haven’t failed yet, but they are flailing.)

That’s not entirely true. In graphics AMD is quite competitive. Now, in 2009, it will be more so.

We hope.

Hard times make for hard choices.

The loss of control implied by cloud computing, which may have been inconceivable in 2008, may become much more appealing in 2009.

(My son took this picture on a hiking trip in the Smokies this summer. So credit John F. Blankenhorn.)

The Yankee Group sent over an e-mail recently predicting this will take the form of desktop virtualization.

Mass workforce consolidations as a result of
the economic downturn, especially in the financial services market, will force enterprises to look for ways to provision vast amounts of desktops to absorbed workforces in a fast, cheap and secure manner.

I, for one, welcome our new virtual overlords. The best way to make sure the new minions are on the same page is to push the pages to them. They’re easier to pull back when you later push the people out the door.

Open source is seen as very very good in the cloud, and the cloud is seen as being very very good to open source. It’s really an extension of the enterprise market, where professionals see the value in writing checks so they can play grill the coder.

So how much of the market will cloud computing take in 2009? And how much of the cloud will be on open source?

As a business reporter for 30 years I have made a detailed study of rollups. They come in all types:

• The buy-out rollup, as in Bernie Ebbers’ MCI. They started as a tiny long distance operator in Mississippi, LDDS, then bought everyone else out and sought monopoly profits.
• The organic rollup, as in WalMart (right) or any big box retailer you care to name. Kill your competitors with low, low prices, rinse, repeat.
• The conceptual rollup, a favorite of high tech. Think the PC in the 1980s, or the Internet in the 1990s.

Open source has all the markings of this last type of rollup. In 2009 that theory will be tested in the toughest markets.

• In mobile, where phone monopolies act as gatekeepers and decide what will or won’t run on the network.
• In gaming, where console makers act as gatekeepers and demand the same control.
• In laptops, where the Windows monopoly still holds sway and the main alternative is the Macintosh.

When I took on this blog in 2005 open source was mainly a server phenomenon. I wrote at length about BPM and ERP, about CRM and SQL. Those niches remain and competition with Oracle remains fierce. But the market has moved on.

Now Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin says Linux will sweep the laptop market, that it’s going to dominate mobility. Few are laughing at him.

Open source is a conceptual rollup because the concepts behind it are irresistible. Sharing development costs, making code visible, trying before buying (or trying without buying) all make perfect sense in a friction-free online world.

Now, can anyone make money at it? For me that is the big question of 2009. Show me the money, someone.

The most popular piece I wrote here during 2008 concerned the importance of the iPhone and Google Android. It was the fourth most-read post here during 2008.

I find this interesting because, as you’ll see if you click the link, the item drew just three talkbacks.

Maybe I nailed one and there was nothing left to say.

My point in February was, and it remains, that the iPhone, the Google Android, and all their competitors are not phones at all.

They are Internet clients.

There’s a huge difference. A phone is a low-bandwidth device. Digital cellular networks routinely compress calls into just a few thousands of bits per second of bandwidth.

An Internet client is a broadband device. We’re accustomed to desktop clients that haul data at 1.5 Mbps, often faster, even in a WiFi-equipped coffee bar. Contrast this with the 3 Kbps of the average digital cellular call.

So-called 3G mobile networks are not equipped to deal with this demand.

When my wife was in Texas recently she borrowed her sister’s 3G card to do some work, having been assured it was “mobile broadband.” Hasn’t stopped talking about how slow it was.

You notice the difference when you plug in with a laptop. You didn’t notice it with a mobile phone.

With the iPhone, the lack of speed is noticeable but not annoying. Mobile apps use a lot of programming tricks to get around the problem.

They’re small compared to desktop applications, for one thing. And they take advantage of all sorts of RIA technologies, depending on software in the client to handle the presentation and moving only the data needed.

Still, AT&T engineers know who has an iPhone without having to see the ID on their network. The average iPhone user grabs 500 times more data each month than the average phone user.

With a single supplier keeping prices high this demand growth is barely manageable. As Android and LiMo devices hit the shelves this year, a firehose of demand will be unleashed.

That will be the big story of 2009.

Back in January I wrote that HTML 5 would prove one of the big stories of 2008.

You agreed and made it the 6th most popular post at this blog for 2008.

Maybe we were both wrong. As I write this in December HTML 5 seems no closer to implementation than it was in January.

This is not an overt criticism of the W3C. I suspect this is in the nature of the standards-making process.

There is a Moore’s Second Law effect at work here. As standards become more complex they take more time to coalesce. And as with other Moore’s Law artifacts this also tends to move geometrically, not arithmetically.

The same effect helps explain the motives behind the development of enterprise open source.

As software gets more complex it takes more time to write and debug. But the value the marketplace puts on the improvements does not rise correspondingly. Not forever at any rate.

If the value of software kept growing in relation to its costs we might be paying $1 million per copy for Windows, not a few hundred dollars. Open source makes this manageable by allowing the costs to be shared, as at Eclipse or Apache.

Standards seem to work similarly. Just the cover of the standards-writing document for HTML5 is daunting. Is this code or another O.J. trial? (Rimshot.)

What seems clear in going over the contents is that, assuming it’s ever implemented, HTML5 will be as different from current Web standards as IPv6 is from IPv4.

There is a warning in the preceding. IPv6 is still not fully implemented nearly a decade after being approved. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen here.

Just two months after a court, in re Bilski, demanded strict scrutiny of software patent claims, a small Michigan outfit has issued a direct challenge to the new standard.

Cygnus Systems, a 20-year old Midwest networking outfit, claims a March patent approval gives it control over all thumbnails used as icons on networks, and has filed suit against everyone.

Well, not everyone. Just the three biggest someones — Google, Microsoft and Apple.

At first glance this appears to be a Britney Spears claim — a desperate cry for attention. But let’s do some research anyway.

Wookiepedia (not Wikipedia) says the Cygnus B system contained a planet with giant sapient algae beds, and possibly the offices of Cygnus Spaceworks, which made shuttles and starfighters for the Galactic Empire.

Sounds like a dead end. What else is out there?

Pamela Jones of Groklaw is taking some time off, and Patent Law blog has not yet addressed the issue either. (They do wish us all a Merry Christmas.)

Revenews notes that even before Bilski patents such as this were dodgy, citing the fate of the Amazon One-Click patent.

If the Cygnus name rings a bell, an outfit called Cygnus Telecommunications LLC acquired a patent on callbacks in 1999. Their enforcement attempt against AT&T eventually failed earlier this year.

The inventor in that case was James Aleman, a researcher at Colorado University in Boulder, so this is as relevant to the present situation as Wookiepedia.  

Cygnus lawyer Matt MacAndrews told The Inquirer that Cygnus owner Gregory Swartz created the technology in his spare time back in 1998, filing for a patent three years later. Of course that paper also said Cygnus is based in Indiana. Not so.

Amit Chowdhry of The Pulse pulled a flow chart of the patented technology from Google Patents. It seems to cover how such thumbnails are created (by taking screen shots) not the thumbnails themselves.

The most telling comment, however, may be from MacAndrews, who works for a Chicago firm and admitted the defendants were chosen mainly for their deep pockets as “a logical starting place.”

Hence the picture at the top of this blog post. I hear this look is all the rage in the Cygnus B system. But the Wookie would know for sure.  

One of the big journalistic trends of 2008 was to call every new Internet paradigm open source.

Blogging was open source journalism. Social networks were open source crowdsourcing.

This was both a compliment and a warning.

Even journalists who wouldn’t know a Linux penguin from a Disney one (above) were giving open source its props. But as with e a decade ago (and perhaps i today) it’s the sign of a market top.

The fact is that open source, as well as the e and the i, are all fruit of the same tree, which is the Internet.

The Internet zeroes out distribution costs and nearly does the same to marketing costs. Any product or process that can be reduced to digital bits becomes subject to this economic process.

In many fields, journalism being one, the result is wrenching, more destruction than creative. In software, however, it has opened up many new opportunities for profit.

Many of those opportunities are given the software industry, but not all of them. People and companies of all sizes benefit from free code. They also benefit from being able to see and edit the code.

Open source, in terms of its work in developing new business models, may be the harbinger of many great fortunes to come in many fields.

Just remember that open source is still the fruit in this game. The Internet is the tree. Nurture and grow it if you want open source to prosper in 2009. 

Entrepreneur Dave Rosenberg has a Christmas wish for you.

(This is the first cat my wife and I owned. Mouse over to get the name for this Cat of Christmas past.)

Dave wants to make everyone pay for open source in 2009.

Money is the fuel that keeps things going. Entrepreneurs are in business to make money. It is reasonable for entrepreneurs  to dream of getting more money out of people.

But Dave is missing an essential point. In an open source world, business models must be voluntary.

This is the opposite of the way proprietary models work, and thus it’s difficult even today for people to get their minds around it.

Proprietary models are all compulsory. You want the PC, you buy the Microsoft license. You want the anti-viral, you pay for the daily updates. You give me money, I give you value.

What is wrong with this picture? In open source, code is eventually worth nothing. Once a program is out for a time and debugged to a reasonable degree it’s not even a widget.

It’s a cat. 

A cat has enormous economic utility but, for the most part, no economic value. Kibble is very cheap, and if the cat goes outside you don’t need litter either.

So what is necessary for getting and maintaining open source code is the equivalent of kibble. The cat earns its kibble by showing its owner love. Smart open source communities do the same thing.

If you want to build new code, of course, you need more than kibble. You need capital. Capital requires a business model. Business models don’t run on kibble, but the promise of a high return.

Still, the business model you choose must be voluntary. It must not be compulsory, because people are free to just go online and get an acceptable alternative at little or no cost.

The difficulty of this, the need to constantly innovate not just in terms of code but in terms of business models, dawned on many in this space over the last year.

As I said at the top, it is reasonable that an entrepreneur would wish this not be so. But you don’t build businesses on wishes. You build them by creating value people are glad to pay for.

This is what I will be looking for in 2009, value that makes me want to open my wallet. The days of compulsion in software business models are over. Build other dreams, and better.

If you haven’t heard this already it bears repeating. (Picture from the University of Rochester.)

Internet bandwidth is essential infrastructure.

Like freeway lanes, like sea and airports, the quality and price of your Internet bandwidth determines how much it costs to do intellectual business with you.

Open source and open spectrum are incompatible with monopoly gatekeepers. They create unnecessary economic friction. They make American intellectual goods increasingly non-competitive at a time they must become more competitive.

For a decade America has been stuck in what is increasingly the Internet slow lane.

Government-granted monopolies have allowed the Bellheads and cable head-ends to violate Moore’s Law, taking all improvements for themselves and hiking the price of bits to you.

The response to that by the market has been software, programs like LibTorrent, and applications using it like Miro. My January piece on the two was the 7th most popular blog post here for 2008.

In retrospect my praise was premature. The monopolists had another card up their sleeve, one they have now played. Bit caps.

By strictly limiting the number of bits you can transfer on your “unlimited” plans, the monopolists have made it plain to all that their agenda is to limit economic growth and demand rents from all 21st century economic activity.

OPEC has nothing on AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.

What was, at the start of this decade, a way to eliminate economic gatekeepers in intellectual activity has become, today, the equivalent of an early 19th century turnpike or canal monopoly.

These concessions, and later concessions given railroad companies, were necessary in order to construct what was deemed essential infrastructure.

Without government support such projects as the Erie Canal and the Transcontinental Railroad would not have been built when they were.

The Internet must not be subject to such economics. It costs less-and-less to move bits about, in fact, every year, as transceivers and radios improve. Those improvements are being denied the public, and the economy.

Monopolists have, so far, convinced people in both parties that they are essential to the maintenance of the Internet. They are not. The Internet was a network-of-networks from the beginning, and must become one again.

Let 2009 begin the task of breaking this monopoly, of freeing the bits, and of getting economic growth going again.

As I noted earlier in this review of 2008 one of the best ways to get traffic and talkbacks among open source readers is to say the magic word. Microsoft.

But as our 11th and 12th most popular posts of the year demonstrate the real key to success lies in casting Microsoft as the villain.

It’s also best if you’re specific, and on top of the news.

Take this May post on Microsoft patent claims, which drew 205 talkbacks. I illustrated it with a still from a musical troupe in Allentown, Penn. performing The Emperor’s New Clothes, and the point was that bowing before a mere claim is silly.

Claims, not just of patents but of how they are germane to a competitor’s offerings, must be proven in court. Which takes time and money. Microsoft has both, which is why competitors steer clear, giving even false claims power.

I sometimes think of Microsoft as the Richard Nixon of open source. It has no evil intent, but the hatred of its enemies can cause it to lash out.

Thus I found a picture of Hillary Clinton, whom I’ve compared elsewhere to Nixon, on my March post examining Microsoft-hatred. It drew 149 talkbacks, and 39 of you voted on it, most negatively.

My criticism here was of Microsoft’s attempts to have it both ways, to attack yet be seen as the victim, which I found Clintonesque, even Nixonesque.

I’m not sure what to make of the negative reaction. Did y’all just disagree with the comparison, were you saying Microsoft should not be a target of abuse, or was it the Hillary picture?

Either way, if you really want to get a conversation going here, Obama is not “the one” as Oprah so famously called him.

Nixon’s the one. And Microsoft is open source’s Nixon.

Oh, one more fun fact to know and tell. Bill Gates is still younger than Nixon was when he was elected President. But not for much longer.

Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, father of the Creative Commons license and author of the classic Code is Law, has a modest proposal to help open source and open spectrum make progress in the Obama Administration.

Abolish the FCC.

Newsweek’s headline writers call it a “reboot” but Lessig is clear.

You can’t fix DNA. You have to bury it. President Obama should get Congress to shut down the FCC and similar vestigial regulators, which put stability and special interests above the public good.

I have written against the FCC here in the past, but they merely ran the spectrum auctions that made government co-conspirators in the AT&T-Verizon monopoly program. The spy programs that were the quid pro quo were run out of Justice.

They didn’t start the fire. They were just the firemen who looked after the fire.

Much of Lessig’s piece is a jeremiad against monopolies, which are under the Federal Trade Commission as well as Justice. His real goal is the creation of an innovation EPA (iEPA), a new agency tasked with reducing roadblocks to innovation.

That’s the problem. Any government institution can be corrupted, any set of safeguards overrun with time and money. There are plenty of existing positions and agencies from which science might find ascendency, starting with the science adviser.

I am not certain we need to always build government while we’re tearing parts down in the name of reform. Some parts of the FCC’s mandate (assuring against spectrum interference) are also necessary. They could be moved to other (smaller) offices.

Critics will claim Lessig is merely seeking the appointment of an “innovation czar” and applying for the position. Again, a good man can always be replaced by a worse one. A President McCain might have put Carly Fiorina in this job.

Open source is thus left with its constant choices. You can put your faith in men, you can put your faith in institutions, or you can put your faith in laws, and those who serve the law.

What say you? Which offers innovation its best protection?

Which offers open source its best protection within government?

• 
  Laws
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  Institutions
• 
  Men (and women)

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One point I must constantly make to PR folks and others is that there is a big difference between writing a blog and writing news stories or a column.

News stories must be double-checked and just state what happened. Columns must stand alone, like a sermon or a jewel.

Blog posts are the start of a discussion. You are not a reader with a blog post. You are part of the creative process.

This is especially true when I ask what seem like stupid questions, like in my June piece “Do we need two open source office suites,” which was the 13th most popular post here in 2008.

I was wondering out loud whether open source advocates were dividing their efforts, thus weakening themselves in a competition with Microsoft Office, by having both Open Office and Symphony.

You let me have it, 147 times, offering not just contrary opinions but a correction in fact. (Symphony is not descended from Ami, but shares a code base with Open Office.)

I hope in the future I wouldn’t write such nonsense before double-checking each fact, or at least looking at Wikipedia. But I know that should I screw up again you’ll be on top of it like Chicago Bears on a Green Bay fumble.

(The fumble shown above is from a 2007 game. The more things change…)

That is a very comforting Christmas present.