Weblog Without Honor or Humanity

There’s nothing that brightens my day like being called
completely insane by a self proclaimed “Fair, Balanced, and a Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community”, also an economist, a Berkley profesor and blogger with 1,249 bloglines subscription (compared to measly 100 that I enjoy). His post consist 50% of insults, but read it anyway, for the comments.

But enough about Brad, let me continue to publicly display my astonishing stupidity.

Today’s topic: abuse.

There’s a skweezer, a service created for users that have misfortune of looking at web pages on smartphones like Treo, MS Smartphones or Pocket PC based phones/PDAs. If you never did this, then let me tell you: it’s painful. Most websites are not designed for small phones. Web browsers on those devices are trying to come up with ways to display them well on tiny screens, but they’re severly limited by processing power and memory available. Skweezer is a service that reformats web pages in a way that is better suited for viewing on a mobile phone. It’s a proxy that intelligently re-formats html, removes the ads etc. People who use seem to like (I haven’t used it yet).

It used to be paid service but it seems that they switched to advertising-based model i.e. they add ads to pages they serve. Apparently they also remove other ads during page reformatting. That mightilly pissed Jason Calacanis and a number of other people.

Jason’s blog bloglines count is only 243, which is very disappointing for a blog mogul owning a host of blogs, including mightily popular engadget (7,490 bloglines subscribers).

Jason makes money by selling ads that appear on weblogs he owns. His point is that skweezer, by removing his ads and putting their own ads is essentially using his content to make money and none of this money is going into Jason’s pocket. It’s a fair point but I’m not going to talk about that.

What I find ironic, given Jason’s moral indignation on skweezer’s abuse, is that his next weblog post contains a very nice photograph of a skier. Jason didn’t take this photo, he took it from this article on someone else’s website.

In U.S. every creative work (a novel, short story, article, sculpture, photograph) is copyrighted by default. Unless the author of the work explicitly chooses to apply a different kind of licence for the work, you can only use it in your own creative work under the “fair use” doctrine.

Somehow I doubt that republishing the photo verbatim falls under fair use.

Most of Jason’s blogs are filled with photos that were not taken by his staff but simply copied from other sources.

Jason, being a blogger, understands the value of open and honest communication which probably explains why my sarcastic comment pointing out his less-than-sainthood in the abuse department was promptly removed from his blog. We like the truth but only if the truth likes us.

Jason, a stone is in the mail. Feel free to cast it at Skweezer’s headquarters.

Google’s Chris DiBona sent me this e-mail, which I post verbatim:

If you did follow apache or the linux kernel closely, you’d see googlers posting patches. That is why I called you lazy for not noticing this. I’m not really interested in outing engineers as working for google, but I know of at least 4 people in the linux credits file who work for us (with signifigant work, not for small things). These projects are not difficult to find.

I also think that Greg Stein wouldn’t mind being ‘outed’ as a googler. (Greg is the Chair of the Apache Software Foundation and is the co-developer of subversion and a great amount of code for apache) The open source world is quite large, I don’t expect you to know everyone in it. But if you plan on accusing us of parasitism….then you should do further research into our role.

Also, one other thing: You say I called you ignorant, but I did not say that. Ignorant is too strong a word…I chose to call you uninformed because only recently has google started to inform the public at large of our contributions to open source software development.

Please note my email address if you have any further questions about google and open source. Feel free to post this message in its entirety (but preserve the anti-spamming stuff, thanks!)

Chris (cdibSPAMona@google.com chrSPAMis@dibona.com)

An occuring theme in bloggers vs. journalists wars is lack of
profesionallism on the part of bloggers. I’m going to do my part in
raising the bar among bloggers by doing some fact-checking.

I can’t fact-check Google’s contribution to Linux kernel, because, as
I understand it, 4 people involved prefer to remain anonymous.

Greg Stein is indeed an established open source persona, ex-Microsoft and ex-collabnet
employee, now working at Google. Judging by mailing list postings for 2004, he is still actively
involved in Apache project, both in his role as the Chair of Apache
Foundation and ocasionally as a developer.

Regarding Python, In my research I only found a reference to the fact
that Greg
wrote httplib, which ships with Python. A scan of python-dev mailing
list archives did not show up posts by him in 2004 (I admit that
the methodology used, i.e. eyeballing, isn’t too reliable). So I’ll
assume that those days he’s not an active contributor to Python.

Regarding Subversion, Greg’s past contribution there are undeniable
(he was one of the architects and core developers) but I wouldn’t call
him an active contributor during his Google days. No posts to Subversion dev
list in 2004, around 30 posts
to subversion-issues and subversion-cvs lists. Generously, that’s about
few days of work.

Greg started at Google around April 2004 (shortly after, in May 2004, he applied this patch adding Apache mime type mapping for Google-endorsed Atom syndication
format. I don’t really know why I mentioned that).

Starting date has relevance here since I’m looking for contributions
while being employed by Google, not before or after.

I’m not sure if the reference to Apache project is only referring to Greg or to more people. Not knowing their names, I can’t fact check it.

So that’s 6 people so far, 4 anonymous Linux kernel developers, Greg and Jeremy
Hylton (a core Python developer).

In case you were wondering, Google has 1,900+ employees.
Google’s market capitalization is 52.71 billion (compared to Microsoft’s 290.49 billion, yhoo’s 51.80 billion and Red Hat’s 2.45 billion).

Last quarter earnings were $805 million, $52 million of it being a profit.
The profit would be $125 million if it wasn’t for a patent dispute
with Yahoo. From which we can learn that software patents are a good way
to transfers large chunks of money from one company to another, with
hefty provision for lawyers and partially supported by me and you
(tax money used to pay for courts, judges salaries etc.) although I
don’t quite get what is benefit for me from that. Will Yahoo! service
will be any cheaper because they won patent war with Google? If yes,
doesn’t that mean that Google’s service will more expensive? What do I,
as a consumer, gain from this battle over patents?

I gathered most of this information using Google’s free search engine.
Market data retrieved thanks to free Yahoo! finance. I was able to
stay up till 5 A.M. thanks to tea which is not free but of negligible
cost.

And all of that has nothing to do with me being bitter about Google
not hiring me. Word.

Google saga, episode 204.

I really wanted to put this Google thing to rest but Adam’s
passionate
response prompted me to, once again, demonstrate my inability to
understand basic facts and demonstrate my narrow minded,
gasps-in-horror-invoking, world view.

In his latest post Adam
launches a desperate effort to show that Google doesn’t have
to contribute back to open source, despite enjoying enormous benefit
specifically from open source software.

At the same time Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager at Google,

commented on Adam’s weblog that Google does indeed contribute to
open source and we’re just lazy and uninformed if we don’t see that.

Seems that Google’s party line on that subject isn’t yet worked out.

Adam is about fourth person that made the following argument in response
to my post: it’s ok to not contribute back to open source because
Google contributes so much otherwise back to the world in general.

Google - it’s not a platform

I don’t understand what is, in the context of this debate, the
message behind the story of how building software becomes easier
because of improvements to Windows. As much as it’s true,
it’s irrelevant.

It’s true that improvements e.g. in Windows platform make writing software
that does more easier and easier. Switch from DOS to Windows made
it possible to write apps with graphical UI (something that was possible
but prohibitevely expensive in DOS). .NET also promises significant
improvements in programmer’s efficiency etc.

Google cannot claim to be such a platform. Oh, do I hear Google API?
Read their TOS
and pay attention to 10k daily limit and “personal use only” clause.
It’s as if Microsoft said that I can write Windows apps, but only for
my personal use and couldn’t sell them.

Google has an inherent conflict of interest. They make money partly
by licensing their search technology. It’s hard to imagine any service
that uses Google API and doesn’t compete with Google. By definition,
it would be a superset of what Google does. Google will never loosen
their grip on their search results. They will never become a valuable
platform for others to freely use.

Google - get free stuff, love us back.

What is more clear is that Adam wants us to just love Google
for all the free stuff they give us and don’t ask any hard
questions.

Except, none of this stuff is free. Google is in advertising business
and it turns out that it’s a very good business.

While you and me don’t have to pay for Google’s search, gmail, Blogger
or groups, there are people who pay. A lot.

It’s simply Google strategy
to give those things for free to general public (in the advertising
industry known as “eyeballs”) and making money from ads they embed
within search results, gmail or groups. I don’t know what’s the
business behind Picasa or Keyhole but there’s someone inside Google who
does (or thought he knew and is not looking for another job).

Google’s products and services are not free, we pay for them dearly,
with our eyeballs.

Google - the selfish Giant.

Adam evokes Newton’s humble admission “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” Newton knew
that we all benefit from what
came before therefore the value of our own contributions, as big as they
might appear, is relatively small. But to Adam it’s not about modesty.
In his re-interpration of Newton’s words, the open source software
is the giant on whose shoulders Google stands.

I’ll go with this analogy and point out that it’s one thing to be
Newton, who made invaluable contributions to pool of knowledge
and offer it without restrictions to all of humanity.

It’s quite another to be a corporation that stands on shoulders of others
but does not allow others to stand on their shoulders. Google might
be a giant but it’s a selfish giant.

The gentle art of insult.

Notice that I did equate Chris and Adam with Google. You would think
that I would respect
Adam’s request not to do it. You would think
that Adam would respect his own request not to do it. He starts his
response by not so subtly labeling Dare as “Microsoft apparachik”
(a really good one) and me as an “open source denizen”. He does that to
imply that all we say comes from either Microsoft or open source agenda
as if we had no brains of our own and were unable to utter one
thought that is not meant to further the goals of our corporate masters.
Believe me, I worked at Microsoft and it doesn’t pay *that* well.

The ironic thing is that Adam worked at Microsoft longer that me and
Dare combined. I worked at Microsoft longer than Dare (although I no
longer do). And Dare wrote much more open source code than I or
Adam did.

So who exactly should be called Microsoft apparachik and who deserves
to be called open source denizen is a matter of dispute, but you should
never let facts stand in the way of an insult.

It’s not about Google.

It’s too bad that all Adam sees in my post is criticism of Google.

The reason I wrote it was Adam’s unfortunate plea to open source developers
to write, for free, very specific piece of software that would benefit
mostly large companies (as opposed to you and me). Companies that have
enough cash and resources to fund such software. That just crossed
decency line for me.

If it was written by Amazon’s employee or Microsoft’s
or Yahoo’s, I would frame my argument as criticism of Amazon, Microsoft
or Yahoo. I enjoy kicking, who’s laying on the ground doesn’t really matter.
In case you haven’t noticed, this is a weblog without honor or humanity.

The real point, if you can see it.

My real point was that those companies, instead of shamelessly asking for free
lunch, should strategically invest in open source products that are vital
to their business but are not their core business. For example,
I wouldn’t suggest Google to open source their crawler, because that’s
one of their competitive advantages. But if they use Python often
and it has flaws, they should pay their people to fix them and release
fixes back to public, so that everybody can benefit.

That’s how open source is supposed to work, but, according to the
real world, doesn’t.

Please tune in next week for another episode of Google saga. Am I really Adam’s twin brother, separated at birth? Are we both in love with the same girl, Ada, who vanished 2 years ago, changed her sex and her name and is now best known for her involvement with XML community?

The Robot Co-op launched 43 things - a new social web-service where you can record things you want to do. The social aspect of this service is the fact that you can see what other people want to do, see what goals are most popular, comment on goals etc.

The site is very well done but I think that a service has a self-destruction timer built in. At some point in the future, people will stop using it because it’ll be too depressing for them.

We all have a lot of goals. We also complete less than 5 % of our goals. We don’t kill ourselves over that only thanks to impressive ability of our brain to forget things. I know I’ve made plenty of great new year resolutions last year. I’m also pretty sure I didn’t do most of them. But guess what, I don’t remember what they were. I can happily make new resolutions that I’ll forget in a few months.

If I remembered what I wanted to do last year and compared it to what I actually did, I would now be very depressed. If I start using 43 things, I’ll never forget. I’m not taking my chances.