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At least this is free. Or open. Or something. In his weblog piece on open source, Tim O'Reilly says this about open source licensing: But frankly, I've always believed that open source is really about way more than licenses. I've never been comfortable with the idea that the OSD captures the entire power of the movement. For me, "open source" in the broader sense means any system in which open access to code lowers the barriers to entry into the market. (OSD is the Open Source Definition of the Open Source Initiative.) Which brings an incident to mind. A few weeks ago I was contacted by a new company that planned to release some open source software. At least they called it open source. When I talked to the CEO on the phone, he explained that the source code would open only to customers. The software served a high-end B2B niche market, so he believed that this scheme would "map" to the market rather nicely. Code would be open only to its own market, essentially. This guy was new to the open source world, and understandably a bit intimidated by its politics and personalities. So I expalined to him that markets are conversations, and that if he wanted to operate in the open source market, he had to be willing to talk about the subject with others who were already busy talking about it. I recommended that he start by contacting the subject's lead talker, Eric Raymond. When the CEO demurred, I offered to bring it up with Eric myself, since Eric was going to stay over at my house a few days later. Eric had problems with it, of course. What this vendor planned wasn't close to any existing open source definition. But Eric also had a useful name for it: gated source. I liked that name for the same reason I liked open source when I first heard it. Both say what they are. They pass the obviousness test. Free software doesn't pass, because it needs that "think free speech, not free beer" qualifier. But if code is a form of speech, as many insist, the Free Software Foundation's favorite License, the GPL, contradicts that principle because it involves restrictions on the distribution of "free" code. And forgive me if I make no distinction between distribution and speech. I understand the need for licensing, just like I understand the need for patents, copyrights and traffic signals. But I also believe that every qualification compromises inherent meaning. It undermines the obvious. To me, open source is open. You can see it. After that we get to all the boring but necessary questions that make lawyers necessary. Whocan see it? Who can use it? How? For what? Oy. Anyway, I wrote back to the CEO and told him that if I covered his product rollout, I couldn't avoid reporting Eric's "gated source" definition. My advice, again, was to talk with Eric and think again about how to characterize the company's new products and services. We're all here to learn. The CEO agreed. It's interesting that Eric himself is sometimes referred to as a "gatekeeper" on the matter of open source definitions. This makes some sense. If it weren't for Eric, we might not even be talking about the subject at all. More than anybody else, Eric is the alpha source both of and in the open source conversation. Yet he is hardly closed. I can see my own influence in Eric's writing about open source business models, for example. He may be a great talker (I once saw him hold an audience in thrall for more than three straight hours), but he's also a terrific listener. I've never had a conversation with Eric that didn't seem to go somewhere for both of us. So if Eric is a "gate," he's both a flexible and an evanescent one. His power and his role are subject to the conversation's rolling agreement about who has power, who doesn't, and why —among countless other subjects. And here we are in the middle of that conversation. Why here? Because there's nothing more conversational than the Weblog movement. It's far more journalistic — literally — than anything else that goes by that noun. We are all sources, and Weblogs open us to everything and everybody else. It's free speech and free beer. Speaking of which, is there a beer event scheduled for Tuesday, by any chance? Hey, that's my tune! Did you pay me to whistle it? Yesterday's mind bomb on Scripting News was Tuneprint, the project of some geeks at MIT: Tuneprint is an audio fingerprinting algorithm. It takes the unique 'fingerprint' of a sound clip, which can then be compared to a fingerprint database to get more information about the clip, like title and artist, lyrics, URLs, related music, copyright status, or almost anything else. The fingerprint doesn't change even if the sound is compressed, converted to a different file format, broadcast over the radio, and so on. Here's what one of my favorite geeks emailed me about it: RIAA lawyers want this. Bad. The number 1 economic application for this is finding bootleg music on other people's servers.
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