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A kinder response to a response to "What is open source anyway?"

A week ago at almost this same time in the morning, I was crafting my rebuttal to Stuart Yeates's blog entry titled "What is open source anyway?"  A few days later, Jenny was catching up on her blog reading (which I think only includes my blog) and said to me, "Wow, you were really harsh on Stuart."  Her reaction surprised me so I went back and reread my rebuttal.  I decided Jenny was right.

Stuart, I'm sorry.  I shouldn't have been that harsh.

I can come up with all kinds of excuses but deep down I believe that the harsh edge in my response came out because I felt like I had to defend the WiX toolset's status as a real and continuing Open Source project.  That, of course, gets pretty close to personal.  So, while I stand by everything I said, I do wish I would have used kinder words in many places.

Anyway as conversations go in the blogosphere (does anybody still use that term?) Stuart posted a response to my response.  In it he first clarifies that the "Utopian view of open source" was just a straw man argument.  I totally missed that in the original blog entry.  Yet, despite my colored response Stuart did an excellent job of extracting the salient points of my argument and posted a few points of his own.  I still disagree with a few of his points that I'll just touch on here:

1.  "That the non-applicative and emotionally loaded Utopian definition of open source with which I opened the post is completely unsuitable."  We're all in agreement here.  The only thing I found weird is that Stuart labeled the company I work for as "Rob's Microsoft".  I've never looked at it that way and it just sounds funny to me.

2. "That I was unjust in singling out WIX as an example of open source which fit the Utopian definition of open source very poorly and when I did single out WIX my characterization was unfair."  Again, I mostly agree with Stuart's position here.  Based on my reading and rereading of his original post plus the comments, I'm a little surprised that he now says he was trying to "disabuse readers of" the notion that Microsoft is in opposition to open source.  But I do agree with the sentiment.  Additionally, while Stuart is basically on target about my employment agreement, I don't agree that makes all my work "on company time".  The volunteers that work on WiX are certainly not directly rewarded or recognized for their efforts on the WiX toolset.  You can argue the semantics and say it is all "company time" but in reality it doesn't work out that way.

3.  "That it was unfair in saying that WIX does not support open standards because there are no open-standards in the software packaging world."  Stuart's points on standard installation mechanisms are interesting.  Unfortunately, the information he linked to reinforces my already negative perception of standards. 

In particular, the few standards that I've interacted with seem to be a "lowest common denominator" functionality.  In fact the Wikipedia link actually states, "While the shar format has the advantage of being pure text, it poses a risk due to being executable" and "'unshar' programs have been written for other operating systems but are not always reliable; .shar files are shell scripts and can theoretically do anything that a shell script can do (including using incompatible features of enhanced or workalike shells), limiting their utility outside the Unix world."  Stuart does admits the standard POSIX solutions don't provide a polished look-and-feel.  But, personally, I'm less concerned about the polish and more about the lack of reliability built into this standard.

Also, the reference to the Linux Standards Base seems to support my statement that "the WiX toolset builds the closest thing Windows has to a standard installation package".  The RPM format seems to have been adopted as the "closest thing Linux has to a standard installation package".  Since Linux has many different distributions, you probably need to lay out a standard to encourage interoperability.  There are only (let's say) three distributions of Windows (Win 3, Win9x, WinNT) and the Windows Installer fully the most recent two (seriously, Win 3 has been dead a long time, did anyone really expect support).  IMHO, that makes it a pretty decent standard.  Greater standardization isn't particularly interesting until a group of people get together to drive interoperability across several operating systems.

But, really, standards bore me and I think that in the end Stuart and I agree that standards don't really have anything to do with Open Source.  What defines Open Source?  Everyone seems to agree; call the OSI.

 

The WiX toolset isn't Open Source? Someone better call the OSI.

While I was cleaning out some of the the latest weekly releases of the WiX toolset, I browsed around for the recent stuff talking about WiX.  In my search, I came across this blog entry titled "What is open source anyway?" by Stuart Yeates. Go read it completely cause I'm going to chop it up here.

First, Stuart presents a "Utopian view of open source" with the following disturbing quote:

The source code is readily accessible to all, enabling open standards and undermining entrenched monopolies.

What do "open standards" and "entrenched monopolies" have to do with open source?  The Open Source Definition talks about free redistribution, source code, derivatives, and several other legalese items that try to prevent licenses from negating the first three things.  IMHO, "open standards" are independent from open source.  You can certainly implement a standard using open source and there are people that argue the merit of doing so but you don't have to do open source to have a standard.  Similarly, there is nothing that says open source projects must battle "entrenched monopolies." Products built from open source can certainly go out and compete with all the other products in the marketplace but in the end may the best product with the best business plan win the most customers.

Stuart's "Utopian view" of open source is extremely black and white and, IMHO, too simplistic to be useful.  If you want to read people that are really interesting in this space then check out Jason Matusow and Stephen Walli (sorry, Stephe, Jason's name comes first alphabetically <wink/>) and the many others they link to.

Now, I probably would have skipped the whole thing if Stuart hadn't specifically called out the WiX toolset.  I already disagree with the "Utopian view of open source" but Stuart made a number of incorrect statements about the WiX toolset.  First, I'll copy his comment here then I'll enumerate the things he got wrong about our community:

WIX is not a good fit with our Utopian view of open source, because it is not built by a community, but by employees of Microsoft Corporation on company time, it does not enable open standards but is tied to Microsoft Windows operating systems on a small handful of hardware platforms, and far from undermining Microsoft’s entrenched monopoly on operating systems, appears to be specifically designed to defend Microsoft Windows from open source rival Linux.

(I just realized that whole paragraph is one sentence so breaking it down is going to be a bit tricky).

1.  The WiX toolset is very much built by a community.  Granted the most active developers work for Microsoft but that over looks three very important facts.  First, development is only part of what makes an open source project go.  You need people to find and file bugs.  You need people to make suggestions and validate new ideas.  You need people to answer questions.  You need people to talk about the project and welcome new people to the project.  We have a great set of people participating in our community and we are still growing. 

Second, Stuart missed the fact that we have a very large code contribution to the WiX toolset by Fredrik in the COM+ and MSMQ CustomActions and Gabor manages the very large and incredibly important WiX tutorial.  Personally, I am upset that those contributions were so undervalued in Stuart's comment.

Finally, the failure to get a large number of non-Microsoft contributors to the WiX toolset is all mine.  I have not done an excellent job in making the code approachable to new developers and attracting new developers to write code in the core toolset.  IMHO, the WiX toolset project isn't any less open source than any other project simply because I haven't found a bunch of volunteers that don't happen to work for Microsoft.

2.  That brings me to my second point.  The WiX toolset is a volunteer project for myself and any other Microsoft employee that works on the code.  Any time I spend on the project during business hours is time that I will have to make up on my "day job" later.  That's why you see so much work getting done from 6:30 PM - 3:30 AM Thursday nights.  The group of us in Redmond get together and bang out a bunch of code late at night.  I am not and never have been paid to work on the WiX toolset for Microsoft.

3.  Next I don't see why the fact that the WiX toolset builds the closest thing Windows has to a standard installation package would disqualify the project from being considered open source.  AFAIK, RPM packages only install on Linux distributions (and I don't really know how to classify the Debian packages and Gentoo emerge stuff).  DMG files only install on MacOS.  Does the WiX toolset have to build both of those package types to qualify as an open source project?  I sure as heck hope not because I don't really care about writing code for those platforms right now.  I struggle enough with just getting everything working on Windows.

Personally, I find Stuart Yeates's blog entry offensive because it suggests that the WiX community is somehow less of an Open Source project because it was released by a Microsoft employee and that we must somehow be a shill for the company. 

Stuart, before suggesting that some active software project released under an OSI approved license is any less open source than other projects, please think about the thousands of people that are part of the community and the hundreds of volunteers that that participate in the project.  Remember, it is less about the source code and all about the people.

Open Source Business Conference and green light means go.

I just got back from a successful trip to San Francisco and I'm very glad to be home again. However, I really wish I could attend the Open Source Business Conference 2004 in downtown San Francisco. It'd be really interesting to listen to speakers address the issue I've highlighted from their introduction:

Open Source Software (OSS) is rapidly coming to dominate certain areas of IT. Despite this advance, few beyond hardware vendors have developed solid models for leveraging OSS to boost margins or revenues. This inability to monetize OSS is perhaps its greatest inhibitor to thriving beyond the commodity server.

I'd also love to see what Stephen Walli talks about at the conference. He and I have been doing a fair bit of work together lately on "the toolset" (see below for an update). He's turned out to be the coolest bizdev guy I've ever met (not that I've met many). I guess I'll just have to get him to fill me in when he gets back. It'd also be good to finally meet Jason Matusow since Stephen keeps saying I should. Besides, it'd be interesting to see if a couple Microsoft guys at an Open Source conference get heckled.

Finally, speaking of "Microsoft guys", the opportunity to hear David Stutz speak again would be awesome. I had an hour long conversation with David a couple years ago when he was still working on Rotor. He is crazy smart and very entertaining to listen to. I was extremely bummed when I heard he left Microsoft. Probably the thing I remember best about him (besides the distinctive "Unix-guru beard") was that his Microsoft business card showed his title as "Free BSD Sympathizer".

Anyway, it would be a cool conference to hang out at but I wasn't even close to invited. Instead, I'm back in Redmond fixing bugs in the System Definition Model core and back to getting "the toolset" ready for public exposure. That's right; today I got the final green light. I am 95% sure that by the end of this month "the toolset" will be available for you (assuming I don't have to save Jenny from an addiction to Burnout 2).

There will be more information very soon. Until then, keep coding, you know I am.