Via Kevin Kelly, I found this talk by games designer Jesse Schell speculating on the future of games. Kelly summarizes the talk:
"Schell begins his talk with very narrow concerns about Facebook games, which is not surprising since his audience here is other professional game designers. He makes the point that some of the largest and most profitable games today are not on game consoles but run on Facebook or other nonobvious platforms. He admits that most of these non-game platforms for successful games were unexpected -- even for pros like himself.
In the second part of his talk he notices how many of these unexpected hit games have the common element of "breaking through the reality barrier." The Wii, Guitar Hero, Webkidz, fantasy football, and so on all have one foot in fantasy and one foot in the real world -- gestures, plastic guitar, stuffed animal, football games -- and so are part of a greater movement towards artificial authenticity.
It's the last third of his talk where Schell really gets going. He offers a vision where ordinary life is gameified. Cheap tracking technology turns whatever you do into a "game" that accumulates points. As the gameification of life becomes ubiquitous, you go through your day racking up points and "getting to the next level." Instead of getting grades in school you graduate to the next level. It's a head spinning scenario, with lots to love and hate, but well worth considering."
I've been a gamer forever and recognize the patterns Schell describes. Though I've not personally been playing some of the games cited, I do have fair exposure to things like Webkinz and Club Penguin though my nine-year old boy. I see how naturally his generation has taken to the social side of Xbox Live gaming.
In particular, I see how obsessed he gets around his efforts to the "Acheivement Unlocked" crack.
As soon as I finished watching the video, I got ready to take the dog for a walk and asked my son if he wanted to come with me. "No thanks", he replied.
So I had an idea...I asked him a question: "If you came for a walk with us, how many Achievement points would the walk be worth?".
He thought about it. "About 200..."
"And then you'd come?" I asked...
"Sure"
I was floored.
How about I break my blogging “hiatus” by sharing some cool stuff the Intuit Partner Platform team has been working on for a little while that involves Windows Azure?
OK, then… :-)
This morning, Intuit and Microsoft have announced very cool news for Intuit and Microsoft developers and for Small Businesses…
From the IPP team blog post, Alex Chriss, Director of IPP (er…my boss):
“Today, we’re thrilled to announce an alliance between Intuit and Microsoft that brings IPP a giant step closer to our ecosystem vision. Starting today, SaaS developers can access the beta of the Windows Azure SDK for IPP - a set of tools, code samples, and services, designed to make it easy for developers of SaaS applications developed on Windows Azure to federate those SaaS apps on to IPP and sell them to millions of Small Businesses in the Intuit Workplace App Center.”
Connecting these two clouds has been fun and it’s just the start…the bits we’re releasing today is a beta…but fully functional: it provides everything an Azure developer needs to federate their apps on to IPP. In the v1.0 release of the Windows Azure SDK for IPP (expected to launch sometime in February) will also include built-in support for IPP’s Intuit Data Services, the web API that allows those SaaS apps to fully integrate with QuickBooks customer data and program against the common data model and cloud repository that all Intuit Workplace App Center leverage…this is how the SaaS apps from different vendors as well as Intuit’s SaaS offerings work together at the data level.
So the developer story is pretty awesome.
The other aspect to the news released this morning is about the plan to federate Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) on to IPP and become one of the great set of apps available on Intuit Workplace App Center. BPOS includes a set of messaging and collaboration solutions hosted by Microsoft, and consists of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online.
I recorded a short interview with Jeff Collins, Group Architect for IPP, and Jarred Keneally, Developer Support Engineer to talk about what’s in the SDK and what’s coming soon. Enjoy!
Some more info links:
--
Update - some reactions to the news coming in now:
Dennis Howlett - ZDNet - Intuit and Microsoft partner: more PaaS to put in your aaS environment
My take: Intuit is joining a growing band of apps vendors that see PaaS as a way of delivering all sorts of aaS functionality, expanding its reach, developing deep domain expertise and helping it accelerate growth. These are bold ambitions and fit well with the idea that a single cloud platform should provide the ecosystem framework needed to achieve these goals. There is no reason why the SMB market should not benefit from these initiatives so at this level it is good to see both Microsoft and Intuit step up to the plate of opening up access to a large group of developers.
Ben Kepes - CloudAve - Intuit and Microsoft Sign Deal to Serve SMBs
"This really is massive news for anyone involved in small or medium business – be it as a business themselves or in anyway selling technology products or services to SMBs....APIs are great – wonderfully valuable things that allow applications to work together. But a common data model of the sort that the IPP is built around, is even better, allowing applications to be built from the start around an underlying and consistent model of data."
Sam Diaz - Between The Lines - Microsoft and Intuit become cloud partners
"The idea, of course, is to link Microsoft’s business applications to the financial data that’s found within Quickbooks to help businesses operate more efficiently. For months, Intuit has been working to push the cloud and open its arms to developers....In July, Intuit launched an open-source community where users could share information to enhance the apps on Intuit’s platform. Prior to that, the company announced Federated Applications, which allows developers to use any programming language, host those apps on any cloud infrastructure and connect them to Intuit’s platform, marketing them to business customers who use Intuit products."
Mary Jo Foley - Microsoft partners with Intuit to shore up Redmond's small-business cloud play
“Customers don’t want a one-point small-business solution. They want a whole suite,” said Walid Abu-Hadba, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of the Developer & Platform Evangelism. He said that this kind of partnership with Intuit was an example of how Microsoft plans to address the needs of small-business developers and customers.”
Dave Rosenberg, CNET,
“According to Alex Chriss, director of IPP, the technology took just a few months to build because the strategy was already aligned. The integration is based on a common data model that is an extension of Quickbooks data. The data model lives in the cloud and developers are able to use the SDK to integrate between the desktop, cloud, and other applications in the ecosystem…For well over a year I've been suggesting that Microsoft needs to take advantage of it's massive developer base to make any real progress with Azure. While this deal with Intuit is still a bit of a baby step, there are many other applications, both online and off, that could use Azure for a variety of purposes. This bodes well not just for Microsoft but for the cloud in general.”
The Microsoft Blog - Microsoft, Intuit team up to encourage cloud apps
“Azure is Microsoft's new platform as a service (PaaS) offering, designed to automatically manage and scale applications hosted on Microsoft's public cloud. Fueled by Microsoft's vast network of partners familiar with its programming languages, Azure will compete against similar offerings such as Google App Engine and Force.com.”
Oh...and we made techmeme :-)
More...
Phil Wainewright - Why Microsoft and Intuit need each other's clouds
“Cloud platforms share many of the ingredients of conventional software platforms, but they add several crucial new ingredients. One thing that hasn’t changed is the need to build momentum among developers and customers for the platform. Intuit and Microsoft have plenty of both, which guarantees attention for what they’ve announced today. But the tie-up between these two giants is important too for the light it shines on the special characteristics of cloud platforms and how they change the game in so many ways for ISVs, developers and platform vendors…
...the link-up combines Microsoft’s strengths in developer tools and functional scope with Intuit’s advanced skills and investment in service delivery on IPP”
So what have I been working on since joining Intuit? A bunch of stuff, but something I wanted to shout about is the release of “Federated Applications” on the Intuit Partner Platform.
Working closely with five new developers to Intuit's Platform as a Service (PaaS), VerticalResponse, DimDim, Rypple, Setster, and ExpenseWare, we've got some kick-ass apps federated into the platform.
Some nice coverage so far this morning, including:
Ben Kepes, CloudAve Intuit Launches the IPP Version 2
"After the briefing I have to say that it looks to me like IPP is finally offering to fulfil the promise of the end-to-end integrated small business software platform that I’ve been evangelising for a few years now – my catch cry of late has been that application integration should only be seen as the very first step in building a SaaS ecosystem. Much more important is the aggregation of applications. This may be data aggregation, UI aggregation, sign-on integration or billing integration – and ideally users and vendors would determine what parts of the integration they bought into."
Leena Rao at TechCrunch - Intuit’s Partner Platform Goes Multilingual With Federated Apps
“The “Federated Applications” functionality lets developers who have existing SaaS applications that are built with any programming language, database or cloud computing platform publish their apps on Intuit Marketplace. Applications won’t have to be rewritten to conform to QuickBooks but will instead go through a minor configuration process.”
Phil Wainewright, ZDNet: Intuit makes two-pronged PaaS and SaaS push
“The significant element of Intuit’s PaaS announcement is that it is a land-grab to capture mindshare among developers on other cloud platforms, who can take their AppEngine, Amazon Web Services or self-hosted applications and make them available using Intuit’s single sign-on, billing and QuickBooks integration infrastructure. Market reach being one of the key attributes developers look for in a new platform, perhaps the most appealing factor is that applications will be showcased within the Intuit Marketplace, with a potential reach to the four-million-strong installed base of QuickBooks accounting software customers and their estimated 25 million employees.”
What I've found very cool about this new Federated Apps capability for IPP is that fact that these different SaaS apps are developed on a variety of stacks and hosted outside of the IPP platform.. One of the apps is built on Java. Another is built enirely on .NET. Another is a mix of RoR and LAMP. Another built of Flex (on their own hosting environment - not IPP). If an app was running on EC2, that would work too, as would an app built on Google's AppEngine. It doen't matter - the integration points for Federated Apps are just that and pretty lightweight (one of the partners was able to turnaround the work with 1 developer in less than two weeks, including time for the technical review of the app). We made a deliberate decision to make IPP agnostic to the technology that developers want to use. Yes, we have a "native" stack also, but the options we are providing developers now means there is no technology lock-in to speak of.
Here is some more information on the details of federation and how you as a developer can get started.
Oh, and a quick plug on the talk I'll be giving on how to federate applications to IPP at the Startups and the Cloud event next week in the Boston area.
This is an event I'm helping to organize...hope you can join! From the App Gap blog:
"On June 11th we’re organizing a gathering in Waltham, MA called Startups and the Cloud to talk about how starting a successful software business has changed now that cloud computing/ platforms have become highly viable, and in some cases, essential components of a startup’s strategy.
We’re keeping it compact at about four hours and we’ve been able to pack a ton of great content in. The agenda is here, but there’s a talk with Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, a panel of local Venture Capitalists, and a panel of local CEOs. In addition, we’ll be hosting a social event where you’ll get a chance to meet some of the top thought leaders in this new wave of innovation. It’s a great group of tech leaders and, even better, it’s free!"
See: agenda and how to register.
I should have probably blogged this earlier...now twittering @alexbarnett
Last week Tara Hunt
shared the news of her joining Intuit Partner Platform team. Very
cool...what talent!
In her blog post, Tara mentioned the opportunity to work in a large corporate context as one of her motivations in joining the
team.
I was reflecting on this yesterday morning and recalled a similar decision I
made a few years ago. Up to that time I had worked at small companies and
start-ups. Although I thoroughly enjoyed those scrappy,
fast-paced environments, I had wondered what it would be like in the "corporate
world" and if I could cut it there. So when the opportunity to join Microsoft
turned up, this similar motivation was one of the reasons I took the plunge.
What's the point of this post? Well, I was going to email the following
advice to Tara, from one person who is on the journey in the second large
corporate adventure (me) to another who is about to begin their first (Tara). And I thought,
hey - that could make a pretty nice blog post...
Before I shoot, I do want to make clear that this advice is not specifically aimed at Tara at all, nor should this advice be intepreted as some kind of snide commentary
about our team or my current employer (Intuit) as whole. It is simply advice that I
could have used myself a few years ago, learned the hard way and want to share.
Without further ado, here are my...
7 Tips to a Successful Landing at a Large Company
1. Drink the right water through the
firehose
Don't be like this
little kid who didn't see what was coming. Large companies are complex
beasts and in the first few weeks the sheer amount of information you
think you need to absorb and the often critical decisions you need to
make can easily overwhelm you. A good manager should help you filter what is
important and what is not and help you navigate the info-storm, but...you need
get used to the fact that for some time to come a lot of things just aren't
going to make sense to you that you really feel you should have a good grasp on.
It's OK. Don't panic.
Do avoid as much as possible the gazillions of meetings you'll be invited
to...people love to meet the new peeps and influence early...and that's ok to a
degree, but be very selective about the meetings you accept and don't
be afraid to turn a lot of them down. For those you do accept, insist on
understanding clear goals up-front before hitting "Accept". Failing on good
filtering here means less time on the things you absolutely should be focusing
on in the first few weeks (e.g. the right water).
2. Don't try to figure it all out yourself
Large companies cannot avoid process. And along with process goes the array
of tools/apps you need navigate and use to get stuff done. Self-help is fine
(praise the Google intranet search appliance!!) but at some point the effort to
find out and learn for yourself (due to lack of obviousness) reaches the point
of diminishing returns, fast. So save your sanity, swallow your pride, and ask a
peer or your manager or your HR bod for the right pointers. You don't know what
you don't know and that's OK.
3. Your first impressions count, so Ask Those Dumb
Questions!
Help break Groupthink. This is applicable when joining almost all new
companies and teams, but this point is maybe even more pertinent in a large
company and large teams. The wikipedia definition article is a great description
of what I mean here:
"Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to
minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and
evaluating ideas. Individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking
are lost in the pursuit of group cohesiveness, as are the advantages of
reasonable balance in choice and thought that might normally be obtained by
making decisions as a group. During groupthink, members of the group avoid
promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus
thinking."
Being new to team, your first
impressions are critical and are likely to be "right" more often than not.
If something doesn't make sense to you, then do as children do so naturally, and
ask "why?"...it can
be an incredibly powerful word.
4. Get down and dirty, fast. Identify and pick the high impact and
low hanging fruit
The essence of this tip is not to lose the small company / start-up fire.
Effective teams and individuals at large companies often suffer from the analysis
paralysis syndrome that can be caused by working in complex environments.
Complexity and big companies go together (like Wallace and Gromit), so it can
become too easy to a) fall into the trap of overly accounting for all the long
term implications of short term action to immediate problems, and b) thinking
that the current "way" of getting things done presents too many obstacles to
getting those short-term things done that have high-impact. If you at are least
aware of these two potential traps, you are less likely to fall down the traps
and therefore more likely to achieve early wins. And early wins does wonders for
your own self-confidence (countering "Imposter Syndrome").
The second point on this one is to make sure you create opportunities for you
to get your hands dirty and therefore really understand the issues you are being
paid to become an expert and lead on, as well as getting to grips with
the practical mechanics of how to get things done at your new working home. I'm
sure different folks may have a different point of view on this one but I've
always found that some good old fashioned "DIY" under the belt makes one a
better architect.
In the context of showing up as the new manager of a team, I received two
bits of very useful advice provided by one of my mentors: 1. Find out where the
high priority pressure is within your existing team, then take some this work on
yourself and off their plate. They will appreciate your help and speeds up your
own ramping up on how to get things done...and 2. When doing this, don't take on
the high profile / star-status stuff, let them keep that - you should take on
the grunge / unglamorous tasks.
5. Read and understand the last annual report
It sounds obvious (and really should be done as part of the process when
prepp'ing for interviews), but the content of an annual
report is an absolute treasure trove in speeding up your understanding of
the nature and operations of the company and your place in it: overall
performance; cash-cows; strategies; priorities; risks; relevant markets;
trends and a whole bunch of other stuff that could take years to try and find
out through sheer "organic" means.
6. Research and use the benefits
Most large companies (especially in the tech sector) usually have a some
great employee benefits (Intuit is amongst the leaders
here). Learn about them, use them and don't feel guilty in doing so!
7. Find a Mentor
Find a mentor (and I don't mean your manager). Find someone who has a few
years under their belt at the company (and ideally not too close to your own team in terms of the company org) who can advise you on how to navigate the
wilderness, give your a historical perspective on why things are the way they
are, tell you about some of the characters you'll be dealing with and give you
objective advice generally.
-
There you have it. Just my 2 cents here. I'm sure many of the above tips /
lessons are likely to be applicable when joining a new company of any size, but
these are the ones that came to mind for me.
What do you think? Have you got tips to share with others? I'd love to hear
other ideas and learnings on this topic.
Firstly - thanks to everyone who has reached out to me in the last three weeks via email, phone calls and comments since I shared the news of my pursuit for the next adventure - I have really appreciated everyone's support and interest in my next steps.
The great news is I'll be joining Intuit as a Group Manager working in a fast growing start-up team responsible for leading the Intuit Partner Platform. Below is a snippet and some links to blog posts and articles that should give you a fairly good idea about where my focus will be a week from now.
Although I'll be working from the Orem office (Utah) to start off with, the plan is to ultimately move to the greater Boston area - another new adventure. I've visited Boston three times in the last year or so and have loved it more and more with each visit, so watch out Boston!
This is a fantastic opportunity for me personally - the team has ambitious goals and an amazing set of existing assets to leverage (see some of the numbers below) in becoming a significant player in the cloud computing space. I look forward to sharing stories of my new journey with you.
"The Intuit Partner Platform not only gives developers the opportunity to build Web-based applications, but successful SaaS businesses by taking the complexity out of managing infrastructure, hosting, user management, integration and billing. Now developers can focus on developing innovative on-demand software solutions that solve unique and important problems for the four million small and mid-market businesses across the U.S. that use QuickBooks and the 25 million employees that work in those companies.
The platform-as-a-service offering allows developers to combine the powerful open source Flex framework and Adobe Flex Builder and the proven database of Intuit QuickBase to build rich Internet applications that work with QuickBooks data. They can also leverage Adobe AIR to provide additional desktop-like functionality in their applications, such as pop-up notifications, local file system access, local data storage, and the ability to create a fully branded user experience.
"We have now accepted more than 1,000 developers into the program and it is exciting to hear their ideas and energy about what they want to build," said Alex Chriss, business leader for the Intuit Partner Platform. "Customers will benefit greatly from the imagination and expertise that developers use to solve problems facing their specific industries." "
Well, the great Bungee Jump has come. Martin Plaehn, CEO of Bungee Labs has shared the news of the company the letting go of 15 regular employees and contractors. Unfortunately, I am among this set of affected Bungee Labs employees.
A Voyage of Discovery
As Martin explained in today's post, Bungee Labs has been on a voyage of discovery. There are many lessons for me and the company to take away from the whole experience of the last year or so, but the bottom line is that we were overly optimistic about what it takes to achieve the rate and scale of developer adoption - real traction - and therefore the development of killer apps by the developer community that would drive the platform and the business forward at the velocity that makes a VC-backed venture "interesting".
So where does Bungee Labs go from here? Well, I think Martin eluded to the key clue:
"Over the next several months, Bungee Labs will lay out the course for a business object solution framework for user configurable enterprise-class applications that demonstrate these principles"
It'll be very interesting to see how this manifests and the impetus it will provide to the platform's adoption.
No Regrets
No regrets, none at all. When I considered the opportunity of joining Bungee Labs (and by doing so leave a relatively safe harbor in order to do so) I knew of the risks involved. Bungee Labs' mission was - and still is - of the kind that aims to "change the world". To have been a member of the team tasked with realizing the company's hugely ambitious mission has been nothing short of an entirely worthwhile and educational pursuit.
In my mind at least, Bungee Labs has made its mark in the brave new world of cloud computing. It has opened the eyes to many in the industry about what might be and can be. It has made cloudy ideas and visions more concrete and helped to define the concepts a (Platform as a Service, or PaaS) and memes that are contributing to the next generation of cloud computing platforms.
I've learned a great deal in the past 16 months working closely with a very talented, smart and creative set of teammates. And although it is probably unfair to call out individuals - for it implies those not mentioned weren't of similar caliber (which is not the case) - I do want to thank Martin Plaehn, Bungee Labs' CEO in particular for his mentorship during my tenure at Bungee Labs' and from whom I've learned an enormous amount management and leadership. I'll also miss the inane banter with Ted in those podcasts we put together (and the "Shushee" lunches).
What Next?
And so...on to my next adventure. What will that be exactly? Frankly, I have no idea yet...but whatever it is, I need to know I'll be trying to change the world :-)
I'm open to ideas...so if you have some, please get in touch.
Pablo Castro has recounted some of his timelined memories about how "Project Astoria" evolved from a lunch time conversation to bits in .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 now known as ADO.NET Data Services Framework). Nice write up.
Three memories of my own to add to the story:
1. I was reading up on the whole REST thing in the summer of 2006 - its origins, philosophy and design patterns. I knew there was something interesting going on and some potential dots to join, but I wasn't sure which dots...So I collated and circulated a bunch of research / links to the team, then blogged the links (I liked How I explained REST to my wife. More recently see Explaining REST to Damien Katz). I got a few proverbial (and some literal) blank stares as I shared my enthusiasm for REST, asking how we could apply the ideas to the various projects we were working on. It was Pablo, and (as Pablo attests) Britt Johnston (now a PUM for SQL Business) who were able to develop the initial conceptual leaps into something more concrete like a Think Week Paper and a prototype demo.
2. When it came to brainstorming the code name, the team agreed on a "cloud" theme. A number of proposals were floated around along with their rationales, including "cumulus" and "cirrus". We were then advised that city and town code names were legal-safe. So there we were, struggling to agree on some city or town name we all liked (or at least not hate nor be confused by..."how about Nameless?"...), and then Mike Pizzo's proposal came in: "Astoria - hey, it's the cloudiest city in the USA!" (at least it was in 2006). Sold.
3. I think my favorite memory of all is the reaction Gary Flake provided (of Microsoft's Live Labs) to the prototype Pablo demo'd at one of the pitch meetings: "As God himself would have designed it!" Dr Flake exclaimed..."Cool", I thought to myself - "but does that mean no REST for the wicked?"
About 10 years ago a friend gave to me a book as gift. We were sitting on the deck of a canal boat on a Friday late afternoon set for a weekend of lazy meandering with friends and family along the Thames, when he handed me his own copy of Godel, Escher, Bach. "You'll love this" he said.
Willem was was right. Godel, Escher, Bach not only tickled my penchant for self-referentialism and recursion ("It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account"), it also reinforced an odd conviction I've held that "magic" happens where these oddities exist (all around and within us).
Last week, (thanks to Nick Carr), I was alerted to Douglas R. Hofstadter's latest mind-bender, I Am a Strange Loop. The book arrived today, unpacked and on the table when I got back from work this evening...inviting me to another voyage with this great mind:
"Deep down, your brain is a chaotic seething soup of particles. On a higher level it is a jungle of neurons, and on a yet higher level it is a network of abstractions that we call "symbols." The most central and complex symbol is the one you call "I". An "I" is a strange loop where the brain's symbolic and physical levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down so that symbols seem to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.
For each human being, this "I" seems to be the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real--or is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics? These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas R. Hofstadter's first book-length journey into philosophy since Godel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is the book Hofstadter's many readers have long been waiting for."
I'll be taking part in one of the Cloud computing panels at Web 2.0 Expo New York this September, details below. If you want to meet up, let me know.
Building in the Clouds: Scaling Web 2.0
Jason Hoffman (Joyent, Inc.), Alistair Croll (Bitcurrent), Alex Barnett, Dwight Merriman (10gen), Jinesh Varia (Amazon Web Services)
10:30am - 11:20am Thursday, 09/18/2008
Performance & Scaling
Location: 1A23 & 24
Cloud computing is self-serve outsourcing for web companies. Clouds give even the smallest startup access to world-class infrastructure that can grow as needed. And developers build apps faster because they start with the building blocks of online applications: authentication, storage, messaging, and the social graph.
But the range of Cloud offerings is daunting. From self-contained development tools to virtual “bare metal,” selecting the right layer of Cloud offerings fundamentally changes how you run your business, what tools you can use, and ultimately how much control you have over your future.
Join this panel of Cloud computing innovators for the silver linings—and dark sides—of the Cloud.
Two new interview podcasts to share (recorded by me and Ted) for the Bungee Line:
Nate Bowler, CTO of @Task
@task (or AtTask) is a Utah-based tech company providing a comprehensive, web-based project and portfolio-management package delivered in both a SaaS and on-premise model with a very rich web API set. We talked with Nate about the evolution of their web services design and @task's future product plans in light of the market opportunities presented by the availability of the increasing number of 3rd party programmable web services.
Steve Bjorg, Founder and CTO of MindTouch
Prior to founding MindTouch Steve worked in advanced strategies at Microsoft focusing on distributed systems and web services. We talked with Steve about the MindTouch platform, its rich set of web APIs and the implications of a programmable wiki. MindTouch goes beyond providing open source wiki collaboration and content management - it's delivering a leading edge application integration and development platform called MindTouch Deki. Michael Coté, an industry analyst with RedMonk (analyst firm) picked up on both the podcast interview and news of the latest release of MinTouch Deki.
(About The Bungee Line: The audio podcast for web developers, covering web API's, software development, and the creation of (extremely) interactive web applications.)
About a year ago, I took part in a meeting where the question: "What does open source "mean" in a SaaS world?" came up in conversation.
A year later, that same question is becoming increasingly pertinent as the IT industry's move to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud-based computing accelerates.
For Bungee Labs (I work there), where
- we provide an entire platform-as-a-service (PaaS)
- developers create, share and re-use code and deploy apps in the cloud
- developers "consume" and program against third party web apis and will create their own
...the "meaning" of FOSS is central within these different contexts and has many possible answers with many non-trivial implications...Three dimensional chess as it were.
For this post, I want to share some of the considerations relating to # 1) above: the context of open sourcing Bungee Labs' own system (Bungee Connect). Last month we stated that:
"Bungee Labs is evaluating several Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) licenses for the software components that comprise the complete Bungee Connect system. However, the task of reviewing the various FOSS licenses, and then identifying which of them best aligns with the software components and subsystems created by Bungee Labs–as well as ensuring compatibility with third-party components upon which Bungee Connect relies–requires considerable review and source code preparation. And we want to do this right, with the community’s involvement."
Since and before that announcement, Ted Haeger (who runs the Bungee Connect Developer Network) has been discussing some of the issues at hand and some of the options we see before us with some very "FOSS savvy" communities at events such as Socal Linux Expo, LugRadio Live USA and LinuxFest Northwest and of course with Bungee Connect's own growing developer community.
Today there's an interesting conversation going on between Ted and Simon Wardley, ex-COO of Zimki / Fotago who resigned last year over the company's decision not to open source their platform (the video of his announcement at a OSCON 2007 talk he gave "Commoditisation of IT and What the Future Holds" makes for entertaining and informative viewing all of its own...Simon discusses open source in a SaaS context. Update: Simon let me know of this video which also includes the slides
Anyway, back to the thread:
All three posts (and more to come no doubt) make an informative and interesting read, but I want to highlight one of the key issues in discussion.
The SaaS Loophole
The issue goes back to the question: "What does open source "mean" in a SaaS world?" and specifically the licensing issues. I'm going to quote and edit from Ted's post somewhat liberally (Ted owes me a Sushi, so we're quits now :P ) and isolate an (if not "the") open source licensing issue in the context of SaaS (my emphasis):
"Personally, I think that GPLv3 is the wrong license for freeing any SaaS or PaaS offering. The Free Software Foundation has a better license for this purpose.
GPLv3 is inadequate because it does not mandate that modifications that others make be opened. Originally, GPLv3 was planned to close up the “SaaS Loophole” (a.k.a. the “ASP Loophole”) in GPLv2. However, as I understand it, several large companies pressured the FSF to remove the key clause that would have closed the loophole.
What is the loophole? It’s this: if you take free software and offer it as a hosted service, then you are not conveying the software, and are therefore not obligated to reciprocate your modifications to the original code. In the context of service providers, GPLv3 is effectively the same as the BSD license. Many companies, Google among them, live inside this loophole. (For now, Bungee Labs is also in that camp.) Some remain there deliberately. Others are in it simply as a matter of course…that is, where they are in their business development process."
So that's the "SaaS loophole". Where's the loophole now? Ted explains:
"Perhaps the argument could have been made in the age of GPLv2 that the SaaS Loophole was an oversight, but now that GPLv3 has the loophole by design, it’s really no longer a loophole. The latest version of the license supports the practice. (And just to be clear, I am not advocating this for Bungee Connect.)
...Say Bungee Labs opens Bungee Connect under GPLv3. Is there a danger that small companies could replicate our offering? I don’t think that’s the case. But could a well-funded company do the same, fork the code, and then fund an engineering team to outpace the original inventors?
...The Free Software Foundation also provides the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, or AGPLv3. AGPLv3 specifically closes the SaaS loophole. Instead of being triggered by conveying the software, AGPLv3 is triggered by accessing the service. This helps to reduce the risk that a company could not branch the code and then out-engineer the originators, as the vulture company would be obligated to share-alike terms with their derivations."
So, is the AGPLv3 the right license for Bungee Labs to pursue? Is it the right license for SaaS providers? Is it enough on its own? (back to Simon Wardley's point in his post). Each company has their own unique circumstances and they each need to think through the 3D chess game. We're still working it out at Bungee Labs.
For us at least, I think some of the potential answers are becoming clearer, and others not yet. But it is the kinds of discussions that Ted is having with Simon that are a critical part of Bungee Labs' decision making process around FOSS. It cannot be an insular process.
I'm thoroughly enjoying David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous (The Power of the New Digital Disorder).
Weinberger has a canny knack for taking a subject matter I feel I'm already familiar with and yet illuminating and expressing facets of it in such a way as to greatly further and deepen my understanding of it. I'm storing the following quote from the chapters "Lumps and Splits" as I'm sure I'll want to reference it again - a great description of how knowledge and information is being transformed in its organization and interface:
"In the third order of order, a leaf can hang on many branches, it can hang on different branches for different people, and it can change branches for the same person if she decides to look at the subject differently. It's not that our knowledge of the world is taking some shape other than a tree or becoming some impossible-to-envision four-dimensional tree. In the third order of order, knowledge doesn't have a shape. There are just too many useful, powerful, and beautiful ways to make sense of our world."
If you haven't already done so, I recommend reading Weinberger's two other books, Small Pieces Loosely Joined and (co-authored) The Cluetrain Manifesto. And that reminds me, I need to update my LibraryThing.
More Posts
Next page »