U.S. Federal Government Embraces Open Source

The U.S. government is definitively over open source software fear.

First, though it’s no real surprise, they are switching whitehouse.gov to use Drupal. You probably heard about it on Boing Boing already. It’s not that big a surprise, because everyone knows Obama loves everything open, and Drupal is the content management system of choice for big organizations with big websites and little in-house expertise.

But more surprising, and more significant, is the Department of Defense’s memo clarifying its relationship to open source. Its preamble opens:

“To effectively achieve its mission, the Department of Defense must develop and update its software-based capabilities faster than ever, to anticipate new threats and respond to continuously changing requirements. The use of Open Source Software (OSS) can provide advantages in this regard. This memorandum provides clarifying guidance on the use of OSS and supersedes the previous DoD CIO memorandum dated May 28, 2003.”

So it’s now acknowledged that it is sometimes in the interest of national security to use open source, for precisely the reasons the open source movement has been talking about for so long: more eyeballs with fewer bugs, no vendor lock-in, and adaptability by your own coders to scratch your own itches, lower costs, etc.

Chalk it up to open source having “won the argument.”

Paul Ramsey’s FOSS4G Keynote on Open Source Business

Paul Ramsey did an excellent keynote at FOSS4G on the subject of the profitability of open source software. In it, he points out that the relevant produced unit of the software market is the “Whole Product”–a package that includes both software and services. He goes on to explain the shift in thought from “Buy Software, Get Services Extra,” to “Buy Services, Get Software Extra,” and the inevitable rise of open source as a result. Hilariously.

Everyblock, Nonprofiteering, and the Affero License

Everyblock, the successful, Knight Foundation funded, open source hyperlocal journalism site, was recently acquired by MSNBC.com. This has raised some eyebrows.

First, there is the question of “whether it is ethical to take foundation money and turn around such a high profit from a corporate buy out.”

Personally, I don’t see much of a problem with this. The foundation funded innovation that is publicly available through the GPL-licensed source code. The fact that the organization that did the innovation profited from its work for the public good should be a cause for celebration, not dismay. I could see how one could have nostalgic resentment against Everyblock’s for its fall from perfectly progressive grace, but otherwise I can’t think of a reason to ethically fault anyone.

(The Knight Foundation itself may look to get more of a piece of the action in the future. In the meantime it is devoting resources to developing the community around the GPL’ed codebase, presumably to maximize the value of its social investment)

Second is the question of the EveryBlock codebase and whether it will remain licensed as open source.

Adrian Holovaty, Everyblock founder, has announced with clarity that “The code as released on June 30 will continue to be available” (emphasis mine), which seems to imply a real possibility of closed fork. Software Freedom Law Center’s James Vasile points out that if Everyblock got all contributors to sign over copyright, then MSNBC.com could do a legally closed fork. But otherwise, Everyblock could run an effectively closed fork of their code because the GPL only requires code to be released if the software is distributed; but Everyblock’s code is instead primarily accessed as a web service.

These issues come up a lot for me personally as I am involved in incubating open source projects with OpenGeo. In particular, Vasile offers some advice that strikes me as unwise:

[I]f you contribute code to a project, don’t sign over copyrights unless the project agrees to always (or only) release code under a free license like AGPLv3. More to the point, if a company holds most of the copyrights in a set of code and controls what goes into the codebase, they can usually close its source over time.

My understanding is that diffuse copyright ownership may make it harder to change the license of open source software. But sometimes, change can be a good thing–for example when Wikipedia switched from the GFDL to a Creative Commons license. In addition, I’ve been told that having many people holding copyright on a project makes it harder to enforce the terms of the license.

From my own (admittedly conflicted) open source business logic perspective, full ownership of copyright also allows for proprietary dual licensing which, in the hands of a noble organization (like OpenGeo!), could be used to funnel money back into the development community. The safest, most reliable option for copyright ownership that I’ve heard of is entrusting copyright to a open source software foundation like OSGeo.

The other implication of the Everyblock acquisition is that the GPL is essentially a permissive license in the world where everything is a web service. The GNU Affero GPL (AGPL) closes that loophole by requiring those that host a web service make their AGPL licensed code available to their network (which, in the most relevant case, is the entire internet).

Thinking this sounded like a good thing to keep in mind, and recalling OpenGeo’s policy of preferring the more restrictive GPL to “applications” like GeoServer (and more permissive licenses to “libraries” like OpenLayers and GeoExt), I suggested yesterday that we have foresight and apply the AGPL to our new project, the GeoNode (which, like Everyblock, is a mapping application built using Django and OpenLayers, along with the rest of the OpenGeo stack)

To my surprise, there was some backlash against the idea. The immediate response from one colleague was that we should adopt it “only if we don’t want any collaborators,” that it was “way too restrictive and polarizing,” and a “bastion of extremism.” Since it doesn’t seem to go beyond the intent of the GPL, but rather just updates it to contemporary computing conditions, I don’t see the big deal. (The colleague mentioned that the GPL didn’t bother him as much.) So word on the street is that the AGPL is scary and somehow deters developers, even casual ones, who would otherwise be fine using the GPL. I’d be interested to hear others thoughts on the matter.

I bet that as more cases like Everyblock bring the limitations of the GPL to light, we’ll see more open source web developers come out of the woodwork against viral licensing. For me, this is further reason to think that open source needs an updated and compelling re-articulation of its values, because its going to soon be involved again in a struggle that is more cultural than technical.

In search of an “open” politics

The open source movement has trouble articulating a coherent politics.

On the one hand, we have people like Matt Asay. Asay does a good job of making open source palatable to the mainstream business world. But he depoliticizes it so aggressively that he sometimes misses the (elusive) point.

In his recent post, “Free software is dead. Long live open source“, Asay argues that the free software ideology is too uncompromising about proprietary software. Open source has succeeded–or will succeed (Asay waffles as to whether the victory is already manifest or merely inevitable)–because it has embraced interoperability with proprietary software.

The path forward is open source, not free software. Sometimes that openness will mean embracing Microsoft in order to meet a customer’s needs.

Free software has lost. Open source has won. We’re all the better for it.

There is a disconnect in Asay’s post between his benign praise of interoperability and the tone of his screed against the Free Software movement. Though it was likely lost on many readers, the best explanation for that tone, and for his break from his normal subjects of open source business news and strategy, is that the post (published September 25) was written in tacit response to Software Freedom Day (September 19).

As could be inferred from its “freedom” rhetoric, Software Freedom Day is an explicitly political event. It’s vision:

…is to empower all people to freely connect, create and share in a digital world that is participatory, transparent, and sustainable.

It’s objectives are to:

1. to celebrate software freedom and the people behind it
2. to foster a general understanding of software freedom, and encourage adoption of free software and open standards
3. to create more equal access to opportunities through the use of participatory technologies
4. to promote constructive dialogue on responsibilities and rights in the information society

The free software movement is alive and kicking. Meanwhile, the politics of free software have spilled out into Free Culture movement and others. The Software Freedom Law Center’s James Vasile, inviting everyone in that ideological space to NYC’s Software Freedom Day event, noted:

Our production model, our ethos, and our focus on transparency, running code and the freedom to share are spreading beyond software to other areas of culture, including government, media, science, and the arts.

In New York City, Software Freedom Day will mark the launch of a series of quarterly Open Source / Open Culture events designed to engage free software hackers, creative commons artists, open government activists, and open science innovators.

All this talk of ethics , activism, rights, and freedom gets in the way of selling open source software to businesses, which explains why Asay proclaims so vigorously that free software is dead and has lost: precisely because it isn’t and hasn’t. Asay is trying to shift discussion away from these philosophical concerns. As he explains in a later post,

The problem I have with free-software advocates like Richard Stallman is that they think freedom is the primary reason to use open-source software. It’s not. Utility is.

After all, we’re not talking about essential human rights here. We’re talking about getting work done with software.

The problem with the philosophical rhetoric is that it is not persuasive to consumers. But the problem with depoliticizing open source is that it alienates the producers, who are often politically, not monetarily, motivated to engage in the open source process.

Consider Ian Bicking’s soul-searching about what it means to be an open source programmer. He traces his 15 year history of engaging with free and open source software. His story starts with his discovery of the GNU Manifesto while poking around Emacs.

When I read [part of the manifesto] I was immediate head-over-heels in love with this concept. As a teenager, thinking about programming, thinking about the world, having a statement that was so intellectually aggressive was exciting.

It wasn’t saying: what are we not allowed to do, nor did it talk about some kind of societal injustice. It didn’t talk about the meaning of actions or their long-term effects. Instead it asked: what must we do, not as a society, not in service of some end, but what are we called upon to do as an individual, right now, in service of the people we call friends.

But after this era of moral attraction to free software, the FOSS community’s discussion shallowed and narrowed to a discussion of the production model and the particulars of licensing. FOSS ceased to be a matter of positive moral activity; rather, it became a list of things one was merely legally allowed to do.

What’s missing, Bicking goes on to explore, is the meaningfulness of identifying as an open source programmer. Acknowledging that the practical aspects of FOSS are ultimately more compelling than Stallman’s moral arguments, he asks:

The open source and free software philosophical divide: on one side practical concerns, on the other moral. And this is what I want to talk about later: can we find a moral argument for these practical concerns?

Speaking personally, I feel this dilemma. When I chose to enter the software industry, I made a deliberate political choice to work on open source software at a social enterprise rather than at a proprietary startup. And I see a similar tension among colleagues at OpenGeo, TOPP, and in the developer communities I participate in and hear about.

OpenGeo especially is aiming for commercial success, and is shifting its priorities and marketing message accordingly (heavily influenced by Asay, via our own pragmatic open source industry veteran Paul Ramsey). The question that seems to underly a lot of our internal angst and discussion is, “Are we selling out?”

The answer is, “No.” But it’s not a good enough answer. It’s not good enough because one of the virtues–both pragmatic and moral–of open source is that you don’t have to put up with the bullshit of having to say or do things you don’t mean. Part of the point of open source process is that it is open.

The solution to the problem can’t be an uneasy tension between snappy sales pitch and a hidden agenda. That undercuts both the sincerity of the pitch and the viability of the agenda. Rather, there needs to be an articulation of the open agenda that is compelling for both outsiders and participants, both producers and consumers, so that those distinctions can be ultimately extinguished.