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2004

  • 2 min read

Musings on Open Source licensing

As I continue to make rapid progress on BlogBridge, now with a significant amount of help, I am asking myself some tricky questions about licensing, which I thought I'd try out here. (By the way, BlogBridge is the blog reader that I've been working on and which is soon going to be available in beta form.)

BlogBridge is an open source application. The source code is all available on www.sourceforge.net for any and all to look at and play with. It's open source also because of the license that you'll see in each source file, the so-called "Lesser GPL." I would like to say that I chose that one after long and careful thought, but the truth is that I picked it more or less randomly because another project that I am contributing to was using it.

Now that BlogBridge is going to get some more visibility, the question is, what rights exactly do I want to give away and which ones do I want to keep for myself?

My current answers are:

  • I want it to be legitimately 'Open Source'

  • I want anyone to be able to look at the source code and play with it, for personal purposes and limited commercial purposes.

  • I want to reserve to myself the right to license or sell BlogBridge to a commercial entity for commercial purposes.

  • I want to reserve to myself the rights of invention and origination and patent.

Ok, let's refine that.

What are commercial purposes and what are limited commercial purposes? I guess in a vague sense I would like individuals to do whatever they like with it but if IBM or Microsoft wants it they have to deal with me (phat chance!)

So here are some questions that I am trying to answer , in that context:

  • Given that all the source is already out there, what are the considerations around changing the license. If I just edit all the files with a new license and post it out on the SourceForge server, is that kosher? And does it do the trick?

  • Is there a legitimate Open Source license that exists or that has been tested or that I can create, which achieves what I outlined above?

Looking for advice. I will post further musings on this as I make progress.

  • 1 min read

[Geek] Debugging focus problems

Struggling with debugging hairy focus and other UI problems in Swing (Java)? Here's a handy little tip that I just found out about:

When running a Java application, type Ctrl-Shift-F1 and the VM will dump the components hierarchy into standard output.

p.s. Editorial comment: I question whether I should enter these super- geeky-limited-interest notes here. In the end, as I am using this blog as my personal lab notebook I decided that it's ok even though it might put some people off. My new standard is that I will precede the title with [geek] to give early warning and allow people to skip it.

  • 1 min read

Funny American Idol commentary

Yes, I guess some of you have never seen American Idol, so you wouldn't appreciate this ironic and funny commentary:

"Finally, following a sax rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" by a former idol, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and John Kerry could stand up, holding hands, trembling but beaming encouragement to each other, as Ryan announced our next American president. "

In 'American Idol' Democracy, Fantasia Wins

  • 1 min read

Discovering RSS feed URLs

Scoble bemoans the fact that folks aren't all using the XML Icon, and he cites Random Bytes.

(Lucky Random Bytes for being mentioned by Scoble. As they say in Holleywood, you can say anything you like about me, just as long as you spell my name right.)

While I have always felt that XML icons, RSS, RSS Versions, and other geeky things should be hidden from regular users , for this point in time, Scoble is right.

Until we have nice 1-click subscribing with user meaningful gestures rather than rss.xml, some elementary standardization around a name and an icon is highly desirable.

Now to add insult to injury, using Syndic8's RSS Feed Autodiscovery lookup for Random Bytes yielded 3 different rss URLs:

What is a user to do now?

  • 1 min read

Fair Use of Share-your-OPML?

One of the core goals of BlogBridge is to give a newbie a quick and delicious taste of the world of blogs. One of the very first steps of course is to decide what feeds to follow. Other blog readers come with an initial set of feeds built in or offer the user to pick from a bunch of them. (I hear that the authors of those readers, once they become at all well known, are inundated with bloggers who would like their particular blog to be in the built-in initial list.

Here's a different approach. In BlogBridge I want allow a user to use someone else's subscription list as a base for their own. In other words, give me a subscription list that matches Jon Udell's. Or like George Bush. Or like Eric Clapton.

There actually is a fairly straightforward way of doing this, using Dave Winer's Share Your OPML service. This is a place where willing participants can publish their own personal RSS reading list for others to look at and use.

From my reading of the fair use guidelines, this use of the OPML is legitimate and fair. Still, before proceeding I will verify that using the Share Your Opml SDK for this purpose does not violate the spirit or letter of the rules.

  • 1 min read

BlogBridge – Major progress!

This is getting interesting. In the last few weeks we've added a bunch of new features and we are now in the final stabilization of this release to make it suitable as a beta. While it is still way less featurefull than for example FeedDemon, we do have some very neat wrinkles that others don't have. Try it!

  • 1 min read

Words DO matter

I was scanning Jon Udell's blog and came across the following:

" Plog is a brand-new word that's even uglier (if possible) than blog. But the words don 't matter. What's striking is how the art of storytelling -- our instinctive human way of making sense of the world -- has woven itself into the science of information technology. "

Jon, I am going to take totally the wrong point from this paragraph, so appologies in advance.

What strikes me about the word "plog" is part of Michael Schrage's genius, which is coming up with just the right, clever, memorable word that will make me and you remember what he said. The idea may not even be particularly profound, but picking just the right word can make such a difference.

Sometimes it is in just remembering the point, but often it 's sneakier: it's to misdirect by association and totally confuse the issue. That's not the case here, but, I am always fascinated and amused to see just the right/wrong word make all the difference in the point being made.

  • 1 min read

Can we charge for an open source BlogBridge

As you know we are developing BlogBridge, "a new kind of blog reader." As you may know, BlogBridge is open source (see https://sourceforge.net/projects/blogbridge/.)

With all our recent progress, I feel that pretty soon BlogBridge will be functional enough that it will actually be usable , and suitable for a beta. And after a successful beta, we plan to start charging for it, in some form or another.

The $64,000 question is: " How does it make sense to charge for a product, when all the source code is available for anyone to download for free?" Our theory right now, is that people who would be willing to pay for an application like this, are paying not just for the source code, but it's maintenance, enhancement, packaging, and evolution. And more likely than not, most of those people wouldn't know what to do with the source code, how to build and run it or deal with problems.

So the bet is that there will not be significant canibalization , at least initially. Over time, depending on how things go, it might make sense to have a different, non-open-source, commercial version of BlogBridge.