Category: Work

Is open source immune to bubble economics?

© 1999 CRC Press LLC, © 1999-2005 Wolfram Research, Inc.

Open source business models are booming in the software industry, a rapid rise that has some experts wondering if it’s a bubble that will burst.

Is open source a bubble ready to burst? – ZDNet UK Insight

Knowing full well that I’m adding to a meme that needs no help in spreading, I’d like toss out a theory inspired by what appears to be growing speculation about the Second Coming of the Bubble (y’know, since the first one (referred to as the “Dot-com Boom” back in the day) and its subsequent bursting sucked so hard).

My theory is based on absolutely no math and certainly no experience with economics. My background is in design fer crissake. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t make obversations and conclusions about the state of things from where I sit. Pffthb.

So here’s the deal. Bubble or not, it doesn’t really make much difference. Well, not in my corner of the world. In fact, I would be delighted if we are going through some kind of dot-org bubble — in which case, it would be certainly less like the first go round, when all these brilliant ideas got sucked up behind barriers of proprietary software licenses. No, a dot-org bubble would be more like the way things were back when no one knew or cared about the intarweb except for a few dorky blokes in sweaters and tight chinos pushing packets around and having one helluva good time.

But back to the previous bust. In spite of all the money that got pushed around, one of the few good things seems to have been Firefox‘s Athena-like explosion from the head of AOL. Which also incidentally seemed to be the tipping point that brought the entire house of cards crumbling down… but I digress.

See, the question on most people’s minds seems to be “Can something like that happen again?!” or “Oh my god! It’s happening again! …Isn’t it?”

Well, maybe the right way to ask that question is, “Shouldn’t it keep happening until we get it right?”

I mean, what if these bubbles are part of some grand Darwinianly organic weeding out process that will lead to all the source code in the world being released under open licenses! Wouldn’t that be great?! …Ah yes, but then there’s that tricky thing we call reality.

Foiled again.

So back to my theory. What’s really happening here is that the focus has been exclusively on the fact that some people are trying to make some make money using open source tools and methodologies and have pulled in some VC to support their efforts. Yet the real story is that open source has reached critical mass and is gaining widespread adoption — so much so that people with dollars are willing to make some serious bets on its future. Let’s get down to the brass tacks of the matter: you invest in something either to see it grow or because you’d like to reap some benefit from your willingness to take a risk. What’s being communicated is that open source is now a less risky business proposition and it’s cost-competitive too:

Ron Rose, the chief information officer of Priceline.com, said that the company has become “predisposed” to buying open source products because of the “economic benefits”. A vibrant community behind a product also ensures a long-term road map, he added.

So all this hubbub over an impending open source bubble is silly. Open source doesn’t work that way. Companies will make money building open source tools or fail trying, not simply because they’re part of the open source ecosystem, but because of the quality of their ideas, execution or people. So even if all this “neue bubble” money dries up, open source will continue remain as vibrant as it’s ever been. It survived the first dot com boom and bust. It will survive the next.

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Open source projects don’t have launch parties

I’ve continued to read over and ponder the varied responses to Flock’s initial release of the public developer preview. While we’ve had an overwhelming amount of positive responses, we’ve naturally had our share of detractors. There’s much to be had from hindsight and given that we’re two weeks from our initial launch, I tend to agree with and find sobering many of the comments, criticisms and blogs that have been written so far.

In particular, Jeff Croft seems to have picked up on the crux of the so-called Flock backlash:

After reading bart’s comments, I think the problem here is that the Flock folks think they have a vision for the way a new kind of web browser can work, but most of the rest of us aren’t really “getting it.” I don’t know if they’re not properly communicating the vision or we’re just too slow to pick up on it.

He elaborates:

But I think people are comparing the grand vision Flock seems to have and the promise of “a whole new web” with the product that has been released — which just doesn’t seem all that revolutionary. Ultimately, there’s a disconnect. I’m left to this it’s one or more of the following:

  1. The vision isn’t being communicated amongst all the hype.
  2. The current version of the product doesn’t play out the vision, but users expected it to.
  3. The Flock team’s vision just isn’t as “revolutionary” to me as it is to them.

This is really instructive and offers a good dose of reality from outside our little Silicon Valley enclave.

Jeff’s point is right on: we haven’t communicated our long term vision for Flock beyond a few quips about a more “participatory web” or one in which your browser helps you “talk back” to the web. Sounds nice and all, but where’s the substance of this thing? (While I’m on the topic, I might as well note that we’ve published our public beta roadmap).

It occurred to me that there are a number of things contributing to the current discussion:

  1. We’re viewed as a Web 2.0 poster child (and subsequently pegged for representing many of the things broken about it). Following O’Reilly’s Web2.0 Conference it seemed that the phrase became a dirty word — as a catch-phrase, once it caught on with a wider audience it seemed to lose all relevance or meaning whatsoever.. Not like it makes much difference, but we’ve had a ban on the phrase in our office stemming from around the same time.
  2. There’s talk of an impending bubble. It makes sense to rail against those things which smack of history repeating, doesn’t it? A Flock, unfortunately, appears to be part of the same lineage. I don’t think it is, but we won’t know for some time, will we? (Though some are already calling it game over.)
  3. Open source projects don’t have launch parties. I’ll elaborate on this one.

As I’ve said, I think a lot of the criticism we’ve weathered so far has been somewhat warranted due to the disconnection between the general hype, where we see Flock going and with what we’ve delivered so far. But evaluating what we’re doing based on the difference between the expectations people had and what the developer preview represents isn’t a useful metric other than proving that the hype — and not the release — was premature.

Consider it this way: historically, open source projects often don’t do “product launches”, least of all when they’re just getting started. Furthermore, in lavishly launching our company at the Web2.0 conference, we generated confusion about the state of the product versus the incorporation of Flock, Inc. The company was ready for public consumption, the product was not, and we tried to make that clear (I mean, it’s not called a Developer’s Preview by accident).

But regardless, we were coming out to the world and saying that we’re building a revolutionary browser and oh, by the way, you’ll be able to play with it in a few days. Not the final thing, mind you, but an early release to give you an idea of what we’re doing.

The excitement built, the buzz became deafening, we were burning the midnight oil at both ends and sleeping in the office. And we didn’t get a chance to stop and consider, hey wait a sec, is everyone really going to be as excited about our code being released as we are? What expectations have been created for what we’re really releasing?

And in that, we missed a critical opportunity to take a step back to prepare people for the difference between what we were giving them to download and where we are actually going.

See, the way open source development seems to happen is that you get some kid tinkering in his college dorm for some time, building up a community of users that offer ideas and fix bugs. The project evolves and grows organically. It takes a long time and many person-hours, but ultimately costs little in the way of hard dollars. It’s a labor of love that depends on the selfless dedication of people around the world. Both WordPress and Drupal (among many, many others) have followed this model.

Now Flock took a different tact. In budgeting a project, Jason Fried typically offers his clients three options, of which they must choose two: good, fast or cheap. Flock chose good and fast, knowing that an investment in an open source ecosystem would both provide the means to improve our product and over the long term, actually keep our costs manageable. It might seem counter-intuitive, but this has been an intrinsic element of our strategy from the beginning. John Battelle summarizes the reasons why:

Open sourcing your IP and using open source technologies is no longer even trendy. It is becoming the decision you can’t get fired for. This is a techtonic shift that has been underway for several years. Proprietary software vendors that don’t adopt to this new world are road kill, pure and simple.

So when Flock launched, we were all psyched to be a funded startup working on a cool project and most of all, doing it open source. But somehow our enthusiasm for being open source caused us to lose sight of the part about ensuring that our product must also work well from the get-go, even if it’s pre-alpha primarily because people will try it out and make judgments about you no matter how hard you message it’s immaturity.

In hindsight, I don’t at all regret launching the Flock code as early as we did. It needed to get out there to start cultivating the open source community that will drive this project forward.

However, the next time I’m involved with launching an open source company, I’ll be damn sure to hold a few Bar Camps before migrating to the self-congratulatory bar crawl.

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Upcoming Flock Cocoa Radio podcast

cocoa radio logo Sometime between now and Sunday, Andy and I will be interviewed for Cocoa Radio about Flock. If you’ve got questions you want answered about Flock, now’s your chance! Go drop off your questions and Blake’ll choose the best for the show.

Granted, we’re not exactly building a cocoa app, there might still be something of interest for mac developers interested in building a cross-platform app on the Mozilla platform.

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Houston, we have a solution without a problem

Houston, we have a problem

According to Scrivs over at Whitespace we’re building a solution without a problem.

This isn’t the first time the 9rules guys have attacked Flock.

I’m having a hard time understanding what their intentions are. On the one hand they lament the state of web publishing software (concluding to build their own) and on the other, lambast a tool that aims to at least make the publishing part easier. I’m all for constructive criticism and feedback (to answer one of their points, our pre-launch hype was really a product of the fact that people are still hungry for a better browser), but I don’t see much in their posts that’s constructive. It’s almost as if they’d prefer us to just take our gloves and baseball and go home.

Which is admittedly somewhat disappointing since I would have expected a little more engagement from them before writing the whole thing off. We’ve particularly gone to great lengths to make it quite clear that we’re just getting started and are looking for feedback! And yet they’re essentially taking what come across as cheap shots. Where’s the substance of their critique?

As I’m considering this, I guess there is one thing that might not make sense about how we’re building Flock — and why we released Flock as we did. We’re not, for example, keeping everything closed up and super-secret, going after the first run experience and trying to blow your socks off (like Apple typically does). So for most Mac users, this is probably a strange departure from the norm.

I know that when I download a Mac app for the first time, I go through a process similar to Ryan’s. Typically if I’m not impressed or the value isn’t made obvious to me in first 10 seconds, it will end up in the trash. That’s just how it is.

If I were to apply that metric to Flock 0.4.9, it would probably meet a similar fate after a day or two. It’s just too buggy and too slow to be used as my primary browser. And quite frankly, if I weren’t on the dev team, I’d have no idea when to expect new features, when performance might be improved or when my pet feature might show up. As a result, it would be very easy to pass on Flock (at least for the time being) and stick with what I’ve got.

But we’re not Apple and we’re not building Flock that way. We’re doing something different. We have a vision: to build a world-class browser that focuses not only on bringing information into the browser, but also encourages engagement in web-centered dialogue and discussion. To do this, we’re not going to hole up for a year and then spit out some fantastic product. Our process of designing for inclusivity is nearly as important as the product itself and will, we believe, lead to a much more interesting, usable and powerful tool.

We’re starting first with a fairly simple collection of tools for now. But over time, they will grow into the story of a more interactive, more human-friendly online experience. It’s not enough to say that Flock could be replicated with a bunch of extensions and themes; doing so ultimately ignores the problem that we’re working on. Flock isn’t being designed to be static or to sit on your desktop for years without changing. It will be a product that will change and evolve according to how people use the web to communicate and interact. Firefox did an excellent job of smoothing out the Internet Explorer model of the web. We’re working on what happens next.

So those wishing to share and shape this vision are incouraged to get involved (even if all you have for now is constructive criticism). I firmly believe that the best ideas for Flock will not come only from us, but more importantly from our community.

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“They showed [the mayor] ‘Flock’ and he went crazy,” Farrah said. “He loved it.”

So what if San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom wasn’t referring to Flock, the browser? It still looks cool.

And not only that, but apparently the artist is expecting similar reviews for his ‘Flock’:

“It won’t be so readily accepted and people will say, ‘What the hell is that?’ which is always good,” he said.

Kindred, misunderstood artists — aren’t we all?

Flock on the BBC

Flickr Photo

Here is why Flock is interesting: over the past two years, the way we use the internet has started to change.

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | Internet Part II: Return of the geeks?

There you have it. The BBC’s Paul Mason sums up the reasons why Flock makes sense.

Of course, it’s really not that simple. Firefox does and will continue to be the best browser around for most people. But for those who want a little more – who want to use the browser to directly engage with the people and ideas they encounter on the web – maybe Flock can help make that process a little easier and a bit more exciting.

Anh, we’ll see.

Flock Postage Stamp Contest

Now that Flickr is offering all kinds of new services (including stamp printing!) I thought it’d be fun to do something about it!

Flickr PhotoSo how about this? You design some kind of way cool Flock-inspired postage stamp and we’ll print it. I can’t say how many we’ll print, but chances are it’ll be a few (since we’ll need stamps to send out the shirt we’ll give you in exchange for your entry!).

Let’s say this little contest goes until Nov 5.

Here’s how to play: create a stamp using this template (borrowed from Postal Shirow). Upload it to your Flickr account and tag it “flockstamp” and add it to the Flock Art pool. Based on interestingness and some good taste, we’ll pick a winner and print the stamps and give you some other cool swag.

Questions? Just drop me a message!

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Take a gander at Flock (pun intended)

Flickr PhotoIt’s still pretty early on in Flock‘s history, so a Slashdotting now and then certainly isn’t a bad thing. Not to mention homepage coverage on BusinessWeek and a great write up by Stowe Boyd, who I had the pleasure to meet today.

But the feeling that I’ve gotten from Slashdot and around the blogs surround two things:

  1. What the heck is it? … and …
  2. Why do you have such an ugly website?

Well, the first answer would take forever to explain, so I’d rather just show you.
For the second one, hey, it took me like 2 hours on the day of our initial private launch. I was focused more on the browser and less on the site and if you don’t like it, well good – more time to spend using Flock on other sites!

Anh, no, seriously … I’ll be taking another whack at it eventually but at least as far as I’m concerned, I’d rather have it be super simple, super plain and super lean. I’ll tone the volume down in the next release but at least the design, for whatever reason, seems to have inspired some kind of derivitive work.

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Supah Cheap CSS Dropshadow Hack

Flickr PhotoSo I came up with my very own stupid CSS hack to do dropshadows in Flock (and by reverse extension, Firefox). It’s very much a hack and not one that I would generally recommend unless in very small quantities, but I like it because a) I invented it and b) it works for meª.
So how does it work? Well, it’s fairly simple, actually (and would work even better with a little Javascript-foo).
So take any block level element, something like an h1 or h2, give it a class of “dropshadow” and (ready for the hack?) add a span tag inside the block with a title that is identical to the text of the object. Something like this:


<h1>And another for good measure</h1>

Now here’s the CSS you need (add it to the head of your document:


    .dropshadow {
      color: #fff; 
      margin:0; 
      padding:0; 
      position: relative;
      z-index: 1
      }
    .dropshadow span { 
      position: absolute; 
      top: 1px; 
      left: 1px; 
      color: #000; 
      z-index: -1; 
      -moz-opacity: 0.50;
      }
    .dropshadow span:after {content: attr(title);}

It works by taking your original text, positioning it relatively and then elevating it to the Z-index of 1. Then we generate the same text from the title attribute of the span, sets the Z-index to –1 and absolutely positions it snugly beneath the the original text. Give it a –moz-opacity of something between 0.00 and 1.00 and you’ve got a crisp dropshadow! You can of course also change the top and left values to move the dropshadow around.

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