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NY Times: Taking Sides in the Napster War. BTW, August was a record sales month for UserLand. It feels really good to close the month with a healthy profit, and a killer app in the pipe. A hearty thanks to all our customers and testers for helping us be so successful! After a full week of intense politics, I'm getting a little time to write some code this evening. What a relief. The first thing I did was write a script that adds 10 random songs to the queue. When I browse through the playlist I'm not getting any new ideas. This script, which will certainly become a command is an idea generator. The first song it picked was Do You Love Me? Yes, I do! I'm kind of pissed that Tim O'Reilly is more popular than me, on my own damned site! What can I do to be more popular? Can I bribe you in some way? Is there a feature you'd like? Should I buy another server? Send flowers? Take some time off? Eat fewer beans? Right on. Sheila sent me a picture of her diggin in her garden. And a beautiful dahlia! My dahlias aren't doing so well. No no. But my night blooming jasmine is totally something else. Thanks for the flowers Shelia! More good news -- I'm going to Mexico in late November and early December, then to New Orleans for the Builder.Com conference, where I'm one of the keynotes. In Mexico I'm going to be a tourist and also will go to the World Economic Forum regional conference. Maybe we should have a Scripting News dinner in Mexico City? Would that work? Early this week eGroups changed the format of emails from ad-at-bottom to ad-at-top. This changed the service dramatically. It also changed my opinion, from thumb-up to thumb-down. To the people who run eGroups, now a subsidiary of Yahoo, it took a long time for them to build the trust they have with people who run mail lists. You're losing it right now, imho. Bad decision. Lance Knobel: "Calling Hugo Chavez communist is a distortion and over-simplification. He's in the Latin American tradition of charismatic, populist strongmen, generally with military backgrounds." David Adams has done an outline viewer that's compatible with Radio UserLand. News.Com: Hambrecht supports Salon stock. Apple and Mac OS X It had been a long time since I'd seen an Apple booth. They have one at Seybold. It's huge. But for the first time in my experience, there were no developer products there. At the evening session David Biedny asked if anyone noticed that there are no more user's groups. I hadn't. Did anyone notice that there are no more developers? That I noticed. At the same time, with Tim Paustian's help, we're getting close with the Mac OS X "carbonized" version of Frontier. Wouldn't it be interesting if we shipped a beta on the same day that Apple shipped the beta of Mac OS X? Isn't it interesting how the perception is still that there's no new development for Mac, when the reality is that there is? Look at how the Mac OS X Weblog talks about Frontier, as if apologizing to the people who read the site that they like our software and think it's cool. I wonder how many Mac users know about Manila? Wouldn't it be great if Apple were proud of what we did with their platform? (BTW, Frontier for Mac OS X supports SOAP 1.1, client and server. Even if you don't think serving hundreds of easy to use, browser-based content-managed websites from a single Mac is cool, think of the strategic options that are opened by having your system participate in the network being built by all the big e-commerce technology vendors.) Airbag conferences I asked some friends if there are any shows that are leading edge and exciting like the West Coast Computer Faire was in the early 80s, or MacWorld Expo in the mid-80s. A show where there are 20 new ideas, and when it's over you can't wait for the next one. Can there really be no exciting shows like that? Another way of asking the same question. Is it all about money now? I asked Lance Knobel who did the program last year at Davos if we could do an adult developer conference, one where there's some heat on stage. He asks if the market for tech conferences is over-crowded. I don't think there are many technology conferences. I see lots of airbag conferences. And pyramid scheme conferences. Tim Bray has something to say about airbag conferences. Micah Alpern says that MacHack is not an airbag conference. It's true, even though it has a little company-townness to it, or at least it did when I spoke there in 1997. http://www.airbag.com/ takes you to a suitably vaccuous site. And believe it or not there was an Airbag Conference, in Germany in 1998. The issue with O'Reilly Offlist I'm emailing with Tim O'Reilly. He says we should run a survey asking who's more popular. So here's the survey. Who do you like better, me or Tim O'Reilly? BTW, in yesterday's popularity contest, Jimmy Carter was the overwhelming choice for President of the last generation whose values most match yours. I feel good about that, because he was my choice too. Even though, when he was president I hated him. Go figure. (The same thing happened with Harry Truman.) BTW, if I ran a conference I probably wouldn't like it if people called it captive. But if I ran a software company I know I wouldn't like it if people called us closed or proprietary. I'm just giving the shoe another foot to be on. The other day I went out of my way to tiptoe around the central issue I have with O'Reilly, and took a direct uncensored shot at Microsoft. As usual, the conversation with Microsoft continues, in fact there are people at Microsoft who agree with me. We're still at Defcon 1 with O'Reilly. My request to O'Reilly is that they ease up on me. I will continue to say what I think. They're a big company with a highly visible leader. They're big enough and important enough that they will be criticized. It's possible that I'm the first to do this, it sure feels that way from the reaction I get from the O'Reilly people. But as your company grows, more people will have more to say about it. Some people think that's a good thing, I happen to be one of them. BTW, my company gets a lot of criticism. I know it can be hard to listen. But I try, the best I can, and even point to my critics, when it's not too uncomfortable. So dear readers, it's time to stop tiptoeing around the central issue with O'Reilly. I wrote a review of their "RSS 1.0" proposal on Saturday. The case is pretty clearly stated there. Imho, they want to take RSS in a direction that's counter to the goals of RSS. The last thing I wanted was an argument over this. I want to be able to continue to say that we designed RSS jointly with Netscape. That RSS is the continuation of scriptingNews format, first deployed by UserLand in December 1997 and joined with RSS in July 1999. The proposed syndication format takes a new direction. It should have a new name. Then there's no problem. Further, a new format is not bad or good. If there's a suitable new name, and if it gains traction, we'll support it, as we would any Web syndication format that has content support. With Microsoft, the issue of whether SOAP would be called XML-RPC never came up. Both SOAP and XML-RPC co-exist, there's no confusion, and both have a chance to succeed or fail independent of each other. When it came time to ship SOAP 1.1, even though it's a compromise design, imho, XML-RPC is closer to what I wanted, I put my name on it because it's a milestone in cooperative design, and one which I am proud to have participated in. Now, the trail of syndication technology is being obfuscated, the low-tech simple approach will not get a chance, if O'Reilly et al succeed in redefining what RSS is. That, simply, is my concern and objection. The GPL "poison pill" On Tuesday, I talked about the "poison pill" in the GPL. It's funny, when I went to look for it yesterday, I couldn't find it! What changed?
WorldLink: What if Amazon Fails? Salon: "The key to making money from online content is getting yourself bought by Microsoft (or an equally deep-pocketed competitor like America Online)." Research Disclosure is a "defensive-type publication serving the scientific and patent communities worldwide. The journal is published every month and contains abstracts describing new discoveries or inventions. The pages of the journal are available to companies who, due to the special nature of an invention, seek a low cost alternative, or supplement, to obtaining patents and require prompt publication whilst maintaining freedom for their own use of that invention." Don Hopkins takes on the Adobe patents. "When I was working on the NeWS user interface for UniPress Emacs during the summer of 88, I implemented tabbed window frames. It was the first version of Emacs that supported multiple windows, and all those windows were really getting out of hand (you could open every .h file in a directory with a few keystrokes), so we really needed a good way to manage lots of windows opened at once!" Joel Spolsky: Open Blueprint Companies. "By the end of the day, I was soaked. But this time I could rewrite the compensation policy from scratch based on everything I had learned." Last night's session Lots of great talk at last night's F2F chat session. Here's a survey we did. I didn't know that David Biedny was raised in South America. I also didn't know that Venezuela has a communist president. Andrew Wooldridge says his favorite feature in Radio UserLand is Update Radio.root. The open source conversation continued. There were some developers from the East Bay, I'm so bad with names, but they came from Transvirtual, and make embeddable Linux and Java. We're learning how to talk with each other, where the sensitive points are, and seeing how much we have in common. My hope is that we can cut through the labels we put on each other and see each other as developers. There are lots of ways to divide us, but we're more powerful if we look at ways we can join, and help each other, and make cool software, and most important to me, make each others' software better. Napster at Seybold Good morning! Rise and shine. Yesterday was nothing like I thought it would be. The Napster session was professional, thoughtful, and I think quite interesting and useful. I thought the Seybold people would be up in arms over Napster, in the same way they didn't like the Web in the mid-90s. At that time, I was the outsider, bringing them the bad tidings. "The Web is going to change everything you do," I would say. And they would say "We don't think so." And sometimes the voices would raise and the so would the tempers. So why didn't we go through the same experience yesterday when discussing music on the Internet? Well, one theory is that this is about someone else's intellectual property, not theirs, so what's there to worry about? However, if that was true, we wouldn't have covered all the bases, and we did cover them all. So here's what I think. The Web changed the publishing industry. All the stuff I write is on the Web, and if you write for a newspaper or magazine, all yours is too. The business model of the Web, which caused all the trouble in the mid-90s is still undecided. Ads on Web pages don't make enough money to support all the editorial processes used in creating a pub. But if you're in the publishing industry and you haven't come to grips with this, you're probably not in the publishing industry anymore. One comment from an editor of the Christian Science Monitor, whose name I didn't catch, was particularly poignant. He talked about the model for the newspaper of the future revolving around (what I call) amateur journalism. The power is with the authors now, and they will only get more powerful in the future, he argued. This is a dramatic change in pov from a few years ago. Even I, the radical in Seybold-space, wanted to temper that. People still want to know who said that. I explained what weblogs are, an Epinions user spoke, and we came to an agreement. Music will go the same way as print has. Dead trees and CDs are the old way. There's a new way coming. How will it work? We don't know. A father of a fourteen-year-old said the teens think they will get all their music for free. I said that may change as they get older, or it may not. Certainly our parents didn't think the world we were creating would work. We marched on Washington, many of us refused to fight in Vietnam, we didn't like the president and we said so. We had birth control, so we could have sex without having children. All these things stripped the gears of our parents' generation. So, following that pattern, how the music industry of the future will work, and the publishing industry of the future, will not be our problem, it will be theirs. BTW, the great thing about music at these conferences is that the AV guys get involved in the discussion. They're all musicians!
Today: Mind Bombs for Y2K. 7PM, Room 102, Moscone, 747 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA. Drinks and tapas at the Thirsty Bear following. Moving forward, anyway I had a dream about Cameron Barrett last night. He followed me everywhere I went, insulted by everything I did. I bend down to tie my shoelaces. He whines. I call a cab. He whines. I make a cup of coffee. He whines. Here's the deal, whenever you move, whenever there's a change, someone wants you to stay right where you are. It annoys me because a part of me agrees with him. "See I told you!" my subconscious says. Another inner voice sighs. "We're going to move anyway." To Cam and others who don't want me to change, sorry, control your own space. We're going forward. Rock and roll Things are really rockin over on the discussion group. Something shifted yesterday, I have a hard time putting my finger on why. I think it's that people are listening to each other. Finally. I said yesterday "I don't think we've been doing a lot of listening for the last few years." Brett Glass keeps bringing the discussion back to the evils of Richard Stallman and the GPL. I think it's more complicated. I couldn't support the GPL for MacBird because it's a poison pill for a person such as myself who makes a mixture of commercial and open source software. When I give away code, I want to give it away with no strings attached, for me or for anyone else. And when I put a price on software that's because I want to be paid for it. I've always done both open source and commercial software. To me it's an honor to get paid for something I create. I'm like a musical artist that way. Then the subject swung around to why the open source "movement" gained traction. For some reason this discussion happened off the DG in email. I'd like to give my thoughts some public air. Stallman's popularity is a result of what Microsoft did when the Web became a juggernaut. They attacked. Everything was a threat to Microsoft. They attacked relentlessly. They forced a choice. Become a captive Microsoft developer, or.. or what? Developers legitimately wanted WORA. Microsoft thwarted them. This was their mistake, focusing on Sun, and blowing off the developers. I expected Gates to get this, but he didn't. They call him a "developer's developer." Bullshit. Now MS is left with developers who are such pussies they could overlook MS's "company town" attitude about developers. The ones with balls went to Java, or open source, or are drifting around aimlessly waiting for the industry to restart. So don't say Stallman created this mess. No one would have cared if Microsoft hadn't forced a decision. If they had been more relaxed about the Web, let Netscape drift, and stay on the side of developers, Microsoft would have cleaned up and we wouldn't be talking about Stallman or open source now. My opinion of course. (And this isn't just good hindsight, it's what I begged Microsoft to do, publicly, starting in 1995.) Talking with Paul Everitt yesterday, the Zope guy, I said "We've acknowledged open source, now it's time to have balance." Let's have the open source developers acknowledge that it's a multi-colored world, that there are Macs and Windows and Linux, and open source and commercial software, and all levels of quality therein. Now, a lot of open source developers wonder what the big deal is. "We already acknowledge you," they say. They are our friends, and they tell us that most open source developers agree. That's cool! But the PR noise about open source is not in agreement with this message, and the users, press, and investors hear the PR message, and you wouldn't believe the kind of pressure it puts on us. When the initial rush of hype about open source came a couple of years ago, while all the PR leaders were basking in the glory, we were getting decimated. For us it was esp bitter, it came just as we were turning Frontier into a commercial product after having given it away for years, we were trying to get onto solid ground. Had we not been able to do this, there would be no Manila, no XML-RPC, probably no SOAP or RSS either. Or Radio UserLand, or the World Outline, or whatever else we come up with next. The open source hype made it much harder than it had to be. BTW, to the open source developers, all our innovations are without patents. We've been blazing new trails on a regular basis for the last few years, esp in the last few weeks, and documenting our work. Anyone who files patents in these areas, and you can be sure that's happening now, will find a trail of prior art blocking their greed. During the heat of the open source hype, every day our users would tell us Eric Raymond's bullshit about our intentions. They would demand that we release our source code, as if that had anything to do with getting them what they wanted. We were undermined. At the same time Bill Gates was fueling the fire by picking on Java developers, undermining them as we were being undermined by the open source PR. The opportunists on the open source side continued to hurl bricks at all commercial developers, as if we were all self-centered bastards like Gates. I'm sure they knew better, but it worked for them. Meanwhile open source developers, people much like ourselves, ignored the hype, but we couldn't. It was so in our face it couldn't be ignored. Now, I've tried to be an official open source developer. I gave away a beautiful program that would help the Linux guys compete with the Mac. It's gone nowhere. The leaders want to take the shortcut, instead of linking up with the Mac, they want to erase it. These are not our friends. They do unfriendly Bill Gates-like things. Well fuck that shit. Let's create a programmer's club, and let's help each other. And to Bill Gates, I'm totally happy to meet to talk with you too. Let's get the software industry going again. It'll be good for all of us. I'm willing to do my part, but you have to do yours. You hurt all of us by attacking the Web so viciously. The right thing to do is to repair the damage you caused. End of rant, for now. On O'Reilly I've been very hard on O'Reilly. I didn't realize how hard. Re-reading my message to Brian Behlendorf, I see it differently from how I saw it then. A statement of friendship must not have any bitterness in it. I also understand that O'Reilly is a high-quality company. And they have their own point of view, which is certainly a valid one. I had similar trouble with Apple, and eventually came to understand their point of view. (They hated the Web because it undermined everything they stood for. I didn't understand this, while I was saying publicly that they didn't get the Web, they did get the Web, they just didn't like it!) Apple also controlled the Macintosh developer community. This was a choice of Apple's and the Macintosh developer community. So when I say O'Reilly is running a captive developer community, the same applies. You have to be a friend of O'Reilly's to speak at their developer conference. I am not a friend of O'Reilly's. And the developers who attend the conference must know that, even if not at a conscious level. Their conference works, and will continue to work, whether or not dissenting views are embraced. I have wanted to be a friend of O'Reilly's, because we stand for many of the same things. First and foremost is technical excellence. That's also, by the way, the bond we have with Microsoft. Even though they play a piggish game with the rest of the industry, underneath it, there's a twinkle in the eye of Microsoft's technical culture. O'Reilly has that twinkle too. Tim has also personally come out against software patents, but the follow-through has been unsatisfying, given the urgent and escalating threat to intellectual freedom for software developers. Open source does not trump patents. The freeze in MP3-related technology is not just coming from music industry, it's also coming from a patent held by a German company who is ruthlessly enforcing it. Like Apple, O'Reilly plays a pretty nasty game, on a personal level. However I'm sure some of this is a response to the criticism of O'Reilly that I've posted here and elsewhere. Tim has told me as much. Even so, had they included our work in their show, they would have found that I give a professional presentation, and am open to other points of view, and don't force mine on others. I think Tim even knows this, he was delighted at the Web Apps presentation we did at Esther's. It's a shame we didn't do a repeat performance at the Open Source Convention, and also talk about how XML-RPC, SOAP and RSS can benefit open source developers. A missed, perhaps once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, imho. Y2K is the year that these technologies make it or don't. How much more powerful we'd all be if we could present all ideas, without fear. But we're not ready for that yet, clearly. And that's a great note to end my writing for the day. Today I'm going to lead two discussions. The first is on Napster. If you think the heat between open source and commercial developers is strong, it's nothing compared to the fire between Napster users and people who hate Napster. I'm walking right into the middle of this today. I have a very nervous feeling in my stomach! Somehow I'll probably survive. I'm going to remember to breathe. And remember that nothing is as serious as we sometimes think it is.
"It's even worse than it appears."
Best wishes to Ric Ford and family. Ric runs MacInTouch, the authoritative Macintosh weblog. According to the site, "There has been a death in our immediate family, which has prevented us from maintaining regular updates over the past few days. We'll attempt to update the page on a semi-regular basis this week, and we appreciate your patience and understanding during this time." David Brown: "The problem with Communism was that there wasn't any money in it." After posting this pithy comment, David also joined the Leading Users Club. Coool!
Ooops, I just leaked. Matthew Barger is working with Andrew Wooldridge on a Radio UserLand node for Mozilla. The project is called Lute. I'm not sure exactly what it does. Must be a mind bomb. I'll let you know when I figure it out. I had a great phone talk this morning with Paul Everitt at Digital Creations, the leader of the Zope community. We both want to write using Radio UserLand for each others' servers. I want to do a weblog on a Zope server, and Paul wants to do one on a Manila server. We call this project "Golden Spike", we've wanted to connect our worlds for a long time, now it seems closer than it's ever been. Salon: Four Little Words. "It was very sinister at its root," says former Eagles leader Don Henley. "We never should have had to go through this. But the RIAA thought they had enough clout in Congress to make it stick. And they almost did." WSJ: "Mr. Pool's case is a dramatic example of a controversial new type of patent involving 'business methods.' Such patents, which cover a business process rather than a physical invention or a software program, leapt in popularity after a 1998 federal appeals-court ruling upheld their validity. The fastest-growing category of these patents involves the Internet, as companies race to get a lock on nearly every type of supposed innovation. Amazon.com Inc., for example, has patented 'one-click' shopping, and has successfully sued to keep archrival Barnes & Noble.com Inc. from using it." NY Times: "In a new report, the group, known as the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, will recommend that the federal government back 'open source software as an alternate path for software development,' according to a draft copy of the report, which will be sent to the White House and published in a matter of weeks." Tucker Goodrich points out that the US government has been using open source for decades. He says "This is a great example of a reporter with no context or grasp of history."
DaveNet: Michegas. Doc asks if there's a beer event planned for Tuesday. I'm glad Doc will be there. Maybe he'll bring Eric Raymond and we can talk about Mac users and developers being doooomed. I'm sure there will be a few of them at Seybold. About the beer, good question. I'm no good at planning these things. There used to be a Chevy's down the street from Moscone. I seem to remember it being torn down. I'd love to go somewhere for dinner and more schmoozing after talking about the Y2K Mind Bombs. Does someone have an idea? I'm open source on this. Easy to please. NY Times: "We have seen no bears around here, largely because of a busy road and horses and dogs and an electric fence. That does not keep the bees from being bear-wary in their ancestral way." Wired: Dot-Commers go home! Matt Wilson and Andrew Wooldridge join the Leading Users list in my directory. Blades of grass poppin through the fertile ground. We're figuring this out as we go along. That's the best way to go, imho. With apologies to Jakob Nielsen I thought this award he was given was pretty funny. Not sure I'd like to get one, but on the hand, maybe I would. Jeff Bezos was an early honoree, as was William Shatner and Lars Ulrich. You get what you pay for Dan Bricklin: The Software Police vs the CD Lawyers. "Look at who the recording industry is suing. Not the people who actually want the different use. Rather they are suing the companies that are trying to figure out how to get those users what they want." To Dan, we could teach them a thing or two for sure, but Dan, they could help us out too. At least in the music industry they let their artists stay artists. In our industry we have to become CEOs and CTOs. I think we both know, we aren't at heart those things. (To everyone else, Dan's first company was called Software Arts.) Another thing they could help with is giving us the courage to once again charge for our software. Trellix is, as far as I know, free. To me, this is sick. It cost money to make the software. Why don't people want to pay for it? Is anyone making anything comparable? People ask me why outliners went away. I think this is why. Somewhere the idea got out there that they could have as much software as they want for free. I'm listening to BB King singing The Thrill ls Gone. "You'll be sorry someday." To users who think software should be free, where did all the outliners go? Ultimately you get what you pay for. Think about it. Now that's pretty close to what the music industry is saying. See the connection? Even open source leaders see the wisdom of paying for music. Gotcha. Now maybe they'll show some flexibility and understand that, esp with user-oriented software, there must be a dollar value and competitive markets and user choice. In a way we've been living in the Dark Ages the music industry predicts. As in Atlas Shrugged, the people who we call thinkers are actually people who destroy thought. Now if the open source leaders want to help rebuild, and undo the damage they caused, they can start doing some of the thinking they're so famous for, and help us rebuild an economy where people are rewarded financially for hitting the sweet spot with users. Think about what open source can and can't do, trust me Eazel is a long way from matching the Mac and Windows, so get out of the way of people who want to give the users what they want. PS: If you don't get out of the way we'll drive right over you. PPS: And stop dissing the Mac! Heads up This morning a question came up on the Radio UserLand discussion group, and I want to get my response on the record so there will be no misunderstandings later. The file format used by Radio UserLand will be publicly documented. Others will be allowed to build applications that use the format, whether or not UserLand's software is being used. However the format's name, still to be determined, will be a UserLand trademark, much as the Apache name is protected by the Apache Foundation. This is clearly spelled out in the Apache license, see items 4 and 5. We were the first to get to this place, I'm sure most people don't even understand what we're doing. But you will, eventually figure it out. And then, if the past is a guide, some wiseass, or group of wiseasses, will want to take it over. They won't be able to do that. To me the most important thing is our frredom to move forward. I'm quite disillusioned about the Web as a collaborative development environment. The people who say it's a fair environment are often the most vicious. Watch out for the politician who says "I'm honest." He's appealing to your honesty, not telling you about his. Actions speak louder than words. I trust the universe, but I know there are pigs out there. Good fences make good neighbors. This is our format, we created it, our tools and servers make it work. We're open to competition, even seek it out, but on fair terms. So now, while we're still at the starting gate, it's time to make this clear. If you don't like it, compete at a file format level now, or later. We will allow people to make backward-compatible formats, that's clearly a good thing, but we won't allow you to use our goodwill, our copyrighted material, or our trademarks.
DaveNet: Mind Bombs for Y2K. Mark your calendar: Tuesday 7PM, Room 102, Moscone, 747 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA. Here's the cool thing about HTML directories. They're groupware. I linked to Keola's outline from my outline, and rebuilt my directory, and there's his tree right inside mine. The next step is to get the editor name and email address to be his on pages he's the editor of. Important note, even though in HTML it looks like they're part of the same document, our trees are separate, linked by a URL to an XML file that's read over HTTP. You'll all be users of this someday, I'm sure of it. It's a strange world, as spacy as the Web, imho, in the early days. You're all going to love this one. Disney, a member of the MPAA, operates a search engine. It links to lots of DeCSS sources. What's their excuse? David Brown posts another in a series of screen shots as progress reports. O'Reilly Network publisher Dale Dougherty talks with "some of the core developers behind the new spec for RSS 1.0 about the background behind RDF, the need for a standard, and what RSS enables." Here are my comments posted after listening to the O'Reilly radio show. David McCusker: "It stinks whenever a group says, 'Our way or the highway!'" We got Slashdotted yesterday, which is interesting, because the page they pointed to was on one of our dynamic servers. It held up really well. Then looking at the rankings for yesterday, it took a normally inactive site to number three in the Top 100. What's interesting to me is that it didn't take it to the #1 spot. I thought Slashdotting would swamp us with hits, but not so. Dave Luebbert is using Radio UserLand's HTML directory feature on his website. Call for creative input. "We need a three or four character file extension for outlineDocuments, so they can be differentiated from other kinds of XML files that we may want to upstream and otherwise process with Radio UserLand." Also, it would be great if someone from this community could evaluate yesterday's mind bomb from MIT. Does it really work? How would we integrate it with Radio UserLand? Even if their approach is imperfect, just having something to interface with would help us finish up a bunch of the loose-ends in Radio UserLand, esp in the right-click menu for songs and on ourfavoritesongs.com. Tim O'Reilly comments on the base64 question. He says it is open source. Thanks for helping move the discussion forward. Edd Dumbill updated XML-RPC for PHP. Financial Times: "Leading Dutch newspapers yesterday failed to prevent an online news service from providing direct links to articles on newspaper websites, in a legal ruling that helps define the limits of internet copyright." NY Times: No words capture the fear. "The situation was deteriorating badly. None of the landing wheels could descend. We would need to fly around in circles at a low altitude, the pilot explained, to burn up most of the fuel so that the plane would not catch fire when we landed on its metal belly." MacWEEK: "Open-source advocate Eric S. Raymond, went as far as to describe the Mac platform as 'a noble but doomed cause.'" Of absolutely no significance whatsoever. A special survey for Unix geeks.
Another problem for Time-Warner DaveNet: Time-Warner steps in it, again. DaveNet: CNN drops the link. Ryan Tate has the story at Upside. Apparently other reporters are working on it too. The system is working! CNN took the link down, at 3:15PM Pacific. Here's a screen shot, with the link and its value clearly visible. And a screen shot of the full browser window so there can be no doubt which page the link was on. Thanks to Ravi Nanavati for the pointers. Today's Mind Bomb from MIT Tuneprint: "World domination through audio fingerprints." Is it open source? DaveNet: Open source is bigger? A story that raises an interesting question, perhaps. In April 1997 I needed handle-based C code to do base64 encoding and decoding. I looked around the net and didn't find what I needed. So I created the code, using the stuff I found as a starting point. I tested it to be sure it interoperated with previous implementations. Then I released the source code. No license agreement. Also no restrictions on what anyone could do with it. Now here's the question. Is this open source? Survey: Open source or not? HTML Directories
It does this by decentralizing, giving the power to create and join directories to the people of the Internet. Now the big question is, do they want this power? Evangelism will be a big part of this. Let the evangelism begin! If you do a directory, as I have, send me a pointer and I'll see where I can link it in. There's a lot of room at the top level, and since I'm using an outliner, it's really easy to reorganize. ZopeFish progress David Brown reports on progress in connecting Radio UserLand and Zope. He's bringing Zope culture into RU instead of trying to make Zope behave like Manila. This is totally the right way to do it. I don't want to write for a narrow corner of Zope, I want its real personality to show up in my writing space. Tom Kicks Butt Tom Fuerstner and Arne Graesser decided to connect the Palm Pilot to a Manila site. Here's a message he posted from his Palm. Most excellent! Open source discussion continues Doc Searls explores open source with Craig Burton. As usual, he adds a few twists and delicious food for thought. I had a long phone talk with Eric Kidd this morning. I thought I was ready to write my What Is Open Source? piece, but now I want to do some more thinking and talk with more people. There are some things I didn't consider well enough. It'll be worth the wait, imho. Tim O'Reilly Thanks to Queso for the pointer to Tim O'Reilly's response to my note about their investment in Pyra. Basically Tim posted a longish email he sent to me. Here was my response. My point of view hasn't shifted much in the last few days. BTW, it's nice to see that O'Reilly is still using Manila. I'm sure it is the best software for what they do, and it's my business to make sure that it stays that way.
An important linkup Radio: How to Edit Manila Sites with Radio UserLand. David Davies is overwhelmed with this feature. I was sure he would be. When I first used it yesterday I told Brent I hadn't been as excited by a demo since using VisiCalc for the first time in 1979. Double-clicking on a discussion group heading and seeing all those cowskulls made me giddy. It's the kind of experience I live for. I think it flustered Brent, to be the channeler of such god-like power. I said this about Bricklin and Frankston too, the Mind Of God does the work, the product designs itself, at best we get to serve Him. How do you get there, do a lot of hard work, breathe, and listen listen listen. Listen to what the product tells you. Sometimes, if you're really good at listening, you can hear it speak. Do what it says and shut up. Music on the Internet, a developing story Now you may ask what does editing Manila sites in an outliner have to do with music on the Internet? Where do you think the fan sites are going to live? I'm already playing my music in Radio. Make the website come to me, I say. BTW, remember the right-click menus from Saturday? Remember the first few commands in the popup menu for songs? See how they link up to community features. That's the other side of the connection. UserLand has all this great publishing, writing, organizing power. Music is the catalyst. So, what does the Internet add to music? "It's the community dummy!" Yeah it's a developing story, but the theme remains constant. The Next Mind Bomb I just saw a screen shot of the next Radio UserLand Mind Bomb. (R.U.M.B.) This one will complete a loop, when it works, for Windows users (only, won't work on Macs) the whole World Wide Web will run inside a single application. And people say the MDI window is a hack. Hmmmm. (I'm such a tease.) And to Microsoft people, it will prove in another way that the Web browser belongs in the operating system. Who and where are the open source developers? More great posts overnight. Highlights. Patrick Connors, a musician who also makes software, says that you gotta pay for his presence, and that making his work palatable for non-creative people is the hardest part. Eric Kidd provides links to open source weblogs, and notes that most of the discussion is technical, not political. Raph Levien, who kind of ripped me a new asshole and then wrote a thoughtful survey of open source philosophy is the founder of Advogato, a famous weblog loved by many open source developers. Since we're in horn-tooting mode, I toot for three open source developers who run highly useful sites on UserLand servers. Paul Merrell says that his experience with open source dates back to the PDP-8 and that commercial software is a relatively recent phenomenon. Seth Gordon explains why big Office users might realistically switch to Star Office. Brilliant! Bookmark this summary of the myriad of open source licenses as told by Ken MacLeod. Gina Business 2.0: Gina, Inc. Gina is one of "our girls". We basically grew up in the industry together. A lot of my friends are quoted in the piece. I'm glad she's doing so well. Go go go Gina!! PS: I'm sure she didn't sleep with Larry Ellison to get the job. Cam Cameron Barrett points to three messages I posted as evidence of what a rude person I can be. It just shows what a different point of view is all about. I re-read those messages and thought it was some of the best writing I've done, because I wrote it from a place where I totally didn't care what other people thought. I told you what I think. To me that's freedom, and that's where fun comes from. Big difference. If you spend all your time trying to figure out what other people want you to say you're playing the gatekeeper game. Just be yourself, that's the best way to go.
"My opinion, we're all barking farting chihuahaus, with incredibly short lifespans occupying an insignificant part of the universe, pretending what we do is important when it has absolutely no significance." Tolerance for flames Anyway I don't like people taking personal shots at other people in space that I am responsible for. Cam and others make such a big issue of this, but listen, it's not unclear or unreasonable. If you want to ream someone at a personal level, send them an email, or do it on your site. I want to be left out of that loop. However, I don't mind if people are impolite, because that's so subject to taste. Just keep it impersonal or talk about yourself and no feelings get hurt. Also, my tolerance for flames has increased. I'm learning and growing too. Flames can be funny! Here's a flame about me, and I'm pointing to it because the writer put it on his own website. You can never say that I don't enjoy a good flame. I do! I asked why he says all those nasty things about me on his site and here's what I was told. Today's song Descramble. It's not exactly the highest production-value music, but it's total poetry, perhaps the most revolutionary MP3 yet. Is it a song or software? Talk about convergence. BTW, I looked, it's not on Napster yet. More trouble? Alta Vista has an MP3 search page. (Screen shot.)
What is open source? DaveNet: Are you an open source developer? A perfect example of how a gatekeeper takes advantage of open source. Is it open source if it's so heavily politicized or has it become something else? What if you believe in love not war? Can you be an open source developer without endorsing the death penalty for Microsoft? Why do so many agendas have to be attached to acts of simple generosity? Is it OK if your software is used in acts of war? BTW, thanks for all the great email. A lot of developers want to talk about this stuff for sure. I should have asked the questions a long time ago, but there are people who get angry with me for even asking what open source is. That's their problem, it used to be mine. I wrote a piece yesterday saying I'm going to ask all the questions I want to. Making it personal will only double my resolve to get to the bottom of the issues. Next question. Did open source software exist before the term was coined? Brent kicks butt I just used Radio UserLand to browse a discussion group for the first time. I saw a message that I wanted to respond to. I right-clicked on it and chose Reply from the popup menu. A window opens. Enter my response. Save. Edit. Save. I don't think it can get much easier than this. Voila. Two-Way-Web. Also, just to show we have a sense of humor, the default icon for discussion group messages is the cow skull. To the people who don't like it, you can customize it. The new features, and there are lots of them, will go out through updates to Radio UserLanders later this evening. After many fruitless hours I had to rewrite a tricky bit of code in the cloud to handle larger numbers of files and then forgot how everything was configured, but now I have the basic directory stuff working, and am going to start work on dressing it up visually and adding the rocket science. Here's the directory for userland.com. I know the URL sucks. Kind of plain Jane, eh? But here's why it's so cool. It's just an outline, the whole site is rendered in less than a second from one document, that's usable as a bookmarks file on its own. No scaling issues, everyone who edits one of these has their own machine. There's your P2P equation, it assumes the person using the machine has a mind. Intel should take note. The revolution that started Intel, the personal computer, is the secret. Hey Intel, there's a person out there! Don Hopkins "I'm trying to cause some trouble for Adobe's lawsuit against Macromedia. Turns out I've implemented prior art that invalidates their tab window palette, several times over. I've used tabs for window managers, for UniPress Emacs 2.20 (a commercial product), for a visual PostScript debugging environment, and published a couple of papers about them. "There is some irony in the Adobe's patent being invalidated by prior art documented in a paper about a visual PostScript debugging environment. Check out this software, which has a PostScript stack holding objects in windows with tabs that you can drag on and off the stack, and manipulate by opening up editable tree views of PostScript data structures." Morning stories Sony exec: "We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source -- we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC." Police state. Not to be outdone by David Brown's Zope-Radio screen shot, Brent Simmons provides a screen shot of Radio UserLand/Mac editing his Manila site and its discussion group. Brent says "When you expand a site, you can edit the home page, messages, various templates, etc. just by double-clicking. Everything is bookmarkable and re-organizable." On the FoRK list, Lane Becker, president of DeepLeap, says that after announcing they were going to shut down, they're getting offers to be bought! Go go go. Results from Monday's What is RDF? survey. The fallacy of wishful thinking WSJ: "Mr. Gelsinger, however, argues that people haven’t yet thought of the best uses for P-to-P, likening today’s situation to the moment Marc Andreessen created the first popular Web browser, then called Mosaic. 'Back when Mosaic came out, no one envisioned Yahoo! and eBay,” Mr. Gelsinger said. 'That’s where we are today.'" Most grand visions turn out otherwise. They said the same things about Push Technology and Java. He hopes someone else figures it out. Usually it doesn't work that way. BTW, the killer app is music. "Angry with me" Since there are an unusually large number of people reading this site who are "angry with me" at least indicated by emails and posts on the DG, I thought this would be a good time to post an invitation to revisit the TranceFest we had here in July. It can save a lot of time arguing about who's right, or who's upset, or who means well or not, to recognize that all of us are running different programs, even different operating systems. What you see from your pov, while totally valid, is almost certainly not what I see, which is also totally valid. If you liked that, here's another TranceFest asking why there are no women in the picture, and some funny stories, and if you poke around you'll find that there's a surprise. Radio UserLand's first badge
It's also available as a shortcut on any UserLand-hosted Manila site as "radioBadge".
DaveNet: Squeal with Care. "Today's technology leaders have been fed a steady diet of softballs and puff pieces, so perhaps they can be forgiven for expecting more of the same." This evening I learned that O'Reilly invested in Pyra, who makes Blogger, which competes head-on with Manila. While we were working with O'Reilly, at times very intensely, and always for free, they were betting on our competitor. Needless to say this should have been disclosed. Joel Spolsky: Three Wrong Ideas from Computer Science. BYTE: What the Heck is SOAP, Anyway? Salon: Why Scour is not the new Napster. Evening pointer, David Brown keeps diggin, and now Zope is doing some great tricks with Radio UserLand outlines. I sent an email to Paul Everitt tonight saying this feels like the meeting of the Transcontinental Railroad. It's an exciting day, we've wanted to get to this place for about six months. I think it might be a matter of a few days before I can write for a Zope site. That'll be interesting for sure. I'm head-down on the directory stuff. I'm doing the directory for UserLand.Com and as I do it I realize how sorely we need this. I should have something to show tomorrow morning unless Murphy has a problem with that. Milt Olin I had a long and frank phone talk today with Milt Olin, the COO of Napster. Still digesting it, no conclusions at this time, I'm working on the directory-building code for Radio UserLand, processing in the background. MSIE-lookalike K-Meleon, a Web browser built from Mozilla source, "tries to mimic the IE MFC interface as much as possible. For convenience, it also uses the IE bookmarking system." Sorting out RDF David Carter-Tod, a man with a strong mind, asks for help understanding all the terminology in RDF-space. Paul Snively, a man of many words, explains. Tim Bray: "All this inference and ontology crap is part of the problem with RDF, not part of the solution. I immodestly claim that the following still is the easiest statement of why anyone should care." The World Outline Mind Bomb Brent Simmons and David Brown have been kicking butt, connecting the World Outline in Radio UserLand up to the Web through Manila and Zope. David posted a screen shot, which has got people in Radio UserLand tapping their feet wondering wassup. Brent posted a similar screen shot on our private discussion group, so I can't show it to you yet. First we linked static outlines, and now they're getting pretty damned dynamic. The difference between what we're doing and what others are doing is that we have an authoring tool. That's going to make the difference between having something that academics appreciate, and something that users can use. BTW, World Outline Mind Bomb is a pretty good acronym. David Brown provides the two-sentence roadmap for Radio UserLand, and explains our philosophy as well. SuperOpenDirectory.Com We bought a great domain name yesterday. People say all the good names are taken. Wrong. None of the good names are taken.
Lots of news coming in On 2600 News, Emmanuel Goldstein posts his personal thoughts on the DeCSS trial. "The kind of honesty you get by having individuals who aren't afraid to express themselves has always been a threat to those who imagine themselves in power. Until recently, the net was the only place where individual opinion actually had a chance. If the media wouldn't tell your story, you could become the media and tell the story yourself. The whole world could be your audience." The Napster briefing is on the Web, in PDF. DeepLeap: "It's with a sad heart that we tell you the bad news: Effective Friday, Sept. 1, 2000, Deepleap will be shutting down." Industry Standard: The Next Piracy Panic, Software. Jeff Bezos likes Scripting News Hey, it's true I didn't expect a response, but I got one. Now, if you ever want to talk about software patents and intellectual freedom for software developers, let's boogie. Red Herring: The fantasy world of Jeff Bezos. Maybe he shouldn't spend so much time reviewing sites? Eric Kidd keeps rolling Eric Kidd talks about Unix xenophobia, with quotes and examples from Richard Stallman and Miguel de Icaza. Eric reviews open source agreements. Eric and I have been exploring what we can write about, the opinions we can express, without getting entangled with slimeballs who try to shut us down. Eric, I think most of the barriers are inside ourselves. The slimey slippery types can't actually stop us from saying what we want to say. Eric man, you're a total inspiration to me. Keep on truckin, and think, if possible, of ways to put names on the silent shadows in your stories. Who's really immune from exposure? No one. Read the First Amendment. Live it. Take it seriously. Fantastic! David Davies has been reading the Radio UserLand XML files and has a dynamic website that shows you who's signed on, and what they're listening to. It's great that people are already developing on the Radio UserLand backend. It bodes well for the future, we haven't even started promoting the formats yet. Brad Pettit is rendering Radio UserLand playlists with XSL. RURemote allows you to "set up a remote copy of RU and use it as a streaming mp3 server. With RUremote, you get a playlist from the remote machine, build a queue on your local machine, then send the queue to the remote machine." Mike Donnelan, a crazy man from Mississippi says about Radio UserLand: "A GUI face-lift could do wonders! Make John & Jane Q. Surfer lust to embrace it's power, without being scared to hold it! The 'engine geeks' mentality still comes to mind when I think of the community surrounding Scripting News... and hey, that's what we are!" To which I say, help us trash-up the UI of RU! We need help. Jake does bitmaps, but no one does them like you Mike! Help help help. We need help. (You can quote me on that.) EE Times: OEMs ready to roll on jukeboxes for Net audio. Next stops on the Radio UserLand tour Jake is busy with chat, getting my one-day bridge-build to really work. Brent is connecting Manila to the nodeTypes structure (while David Brown is doing the same for Zope). Andre is working on MP3 streaming. I'm working on turning Radio UserLand into a tool for building DMOZ and Yahoo-like directories. Not too many people realize how closed these systems are, one uses paid employees, the other uses volunteers, but both have just a single hierarchy and give absolute power to people we don't know, yielding outages galore. We're going to open that up and let anyone organize any section and let there be lots of trees and let them join each other dynamically. Why should the Web just have two directories? There should be thousands, if not millions. (DMOZ came up in the context of Guha's RDF plans. I wonder if they know how he's using them? We'd work with them, but they have to get neutral on RDF for that to happen.) One final note, we will not be releasing the Napster client code we developed for Radio UserLand. To us it seems just like another protocol, but to the lawyers, it's special. We're going to watch carefully to see what happens in the courts with Napster's appeal. I hate having lawyers define feature sets for my software, but that's the way it is in Y2K. But Esther.. Esther Dyson: "Yes, it’s wrong to steal, and yes, the music companies have legally binding copyrights. But the reality is that it’s not good business to annoy both your customers and your suppliers -- especially if you’re an intermediary whose added value is questionable." I sent Esther an email thanking her for the piece, but asking her to look at the equivalent situation in software as an expressive artform. Patents, esp those of Amazon, who she cites as helping the creative process, are the biggest threat to free speech in software. I am optimistic that Esther will hear me. (I cc'd Jeff Bezos on the email to Esther.) What is RDF? Survey: What is RDF?
Today's Song: The Sound of Music. Eric Kidd posted a history of "Open Source" yesterday. Josh Allen posted an eloquent response to Eric saying that histories of the Internet are just stories. There are far too many lawyers involved in what people can and can't say on their own websites. NY Times: "Software programs like Napster and Gnutella have achieved a reputation for fostering a communal spirit of sharing among millions of music-loving computer users. The reality may be more selfish." Jakob Nielsen: Mailing List Usability. Is XML forever doomed? My pov: Only programmers comment on XML formats. Designers and writers almost never comment. Therefore all XML formats tend to evolve to please dedicated gutsy XML programmers, and freak out other folk, which imho defeats the purpose of XML, as a low-tech interchange format between applications written by programmers on all platforms, at all skill levels. One more thing, as a busy programmer, I also appreciate simple formats with simple docs. I read so many specs that I don't have time to understand. Unfortunately for most of the specs, the subtleties come right at the beginning, before I have a chance to get hooked. A little bird A little bird whispered in my ear that Disney and Yahoo are working on a merger. At the same time CNET and Yahoo are pretty close to merger agreement. Cluetrain and (we)blogs merge too? Evan Williams pointed to Doc Searls, a Cluetrain author who uses Manila. Now I'd like to point to Chris Locke, a Cluetrain author who uses Blogger.
I read Blogger sites and I read Manila sites. (I'd like to think) I read a site independent of what software they use, but I don't always live up to that. That's where I turn to the Cluetrain philosophy. Why should I hold myself back? Why shouldn't I learn from all people who have good ideas? I got a wonderful email from Chris yesterday. He found Weblogs.Com and discovered that he can ask which weblogs are pointing to him. I hadn't used that feature in a while. Since he's sure to read this, Chris, also check out the hotlist, the most pointed-to pages in the Weblogs.Com database. (Ooops, I notice that it hasn't updated since 8/14.) To people who criticize weblogs, yeah it's a great big circle jerk, and it feels great! Way down south Chris tuned into the tagline on Weblogs.Com, "Way down south in the land of cotton." If you search for that phrase in Google, a page on Weblogs.Com comes up number two. Not much help. I was looking for the lyrics to the song. My bandwidth story Yesterday I almost got thrown off the stage at the Bandwidth conference in San Francisco. I could hardly finish a sentence. Now I can.. DaveNet: My bandwidth story. It was a total Cluetrain experience.
Today's News: Polar Icecap is Melting. "The last time scientists can be certain the pole was awash in water was more than 50 million years ago." Today's event: Bandwidth Conference in San Francisco, 435 Broadway. One of our panelists had to cancel, Liz Brooks, VP Marketing at Napster. Too bad, Napster's view of the Fan of the Future is something I wanted to talk about. Today's new feature: Right-click Menus in Radio UserLand. I gotta say this. After six years of developing Web apps, what a joy to be working on software that's just for one user. Simpler scaling issues. No race conditions. And HTML, while I love it, isn't nearly as rich or flexible as the UI toolkits on Mac and Windows. Another reason it's so much fun, the security issues are so much simpler. There are all kinds of open customizable interfaces in Radio UserLand. You can add your own commands to the right-click menu. We could never do this in a Web app, because of security issues. In general, we don't even allow people to delete things in Web apps, even the commands we use to "delete" things, don't really delete them. Disclaimer: The icons in the screen shots on that page are just placeholders. Jake Savin, a musician and programmer, the guy who did them, loves his Mac. Apologies to Apple, we will change the Apple-inspired icons asap. I didn't know Jake was doing this. We move really fast and independently at UserLand. Keep up the great work Jake! One more thing, the first few commands in the right-click menu for songs are placeholders too. When you choose them you get an alert that says Not Implemented Yet. We will certainly implement the commands that allow you to comment on a song, and see other comments. (There will be an open architecture for implementing a comment server.) We will also implement a command that helps you find other fans that love the song too. Imagine that, using the Internet to find love. Not a trashy kind of love, but the love that you feel in your heart. About the first command in that menu, I hope we can implement that soon as well. It should be clear to all that UserLand supports artists, because we are artists ourselves. We want to be paid, as musicians want to be paid. In our industry it has become fashionable to believe that good software is worthless. What a terrible turn for the creative art of making software. It would be hypocritical for us to support a similar trashing of the value of music. Our users will be reminded that if you love someone else's creativity, you must support it, in meaningful ways. In our society, this is implemented with money. It's pretty simple. Other people, some honest and some not, try to tell us otherwise, but we know better. Finally, for today, it warms my heart when Evan Williams points to Doc Searls' weblog. The Web makes us all brothers, imho, even competitors; and sisters too. To Meg, I really liked that you trusted your Mom to edit your home page. I found out she's a geek, and that she loves you. That's so cool! The Web is more than HTML and HTTP, it's a philosophy that has integrity. To be of the Web, means being vulnerable. Music is now part of the Web, to our friends who create music, this is something you have to recognize, if you want to create art around what's real. Let's take the next steps, we're all in the same boat, creative people want to be appreciated without being invaded. Let's encourage generosity from users. But first we must trust them. It hurts when people violate our trust, I've experienced it myself, but we have no choice, we must trust people every day. The world wouldn't work without trust. Think about it. If you chose to be creative, you also chose to be vulnerable. That means you're going to be hurt. There's no way to avoid it.
Today's song: Let It Be. "And when the broken-hearted people living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be."
News.Com: Napster pleads with court for survival. "If the decision of the District Court is permitted to stand, every new technology used to transmit, route, or exchange data subject to the copyright laws using the Internet--and many existing technologies--will be affected," the brief read. Red Herring: Lawyers in Napster suit go after deep pockets. "Some lawyers, including one suing Napster, now say that Hummer Winblad could have more than its investment at stake. Because of the quirky nature of copyright law, the possibility of going after Napster's investors may soon be an option for the music companies and recording artists involved." Tipster is a "protocol which aspires to enable easy, voluntary payment for digital content such as music." Nodetypes Here's a screen shot of our newest Radio UserLand framework called nodeTypes. There's a narrative in the rightmost window that explains what's going on. Be sure to expand the window fully, don't miss the narrative, it's key to understanding. This is the intersection of HTTP, XML and outlines. This is the unification I've been searching for for 20+ years. Everything on the Internet fits into a hierarchic view. Websites, email, chat, buddy lists, music playlists, presentations, script libraries, syndicated Web pubs, discussion groups. We have a formalization that allows new types to be defined at runtime with user-level overrides. First we're covering all the big standards. Then we'll have a great playground to invent new modes and services. It seems now that all the hard problems are solved. It's time to sharpen the edges, do a few deep knee-bends, stretch, and then go down the double-diamond slope, with confidence! Background pointers I wrote a backgrounder on nodeTypes for advanced Frontier programmers. Please read it carefully, and please no newbie questions! Another point not to miss, it's a writing tool too. And through upstreaming, writing for this medium is as easy as using the File menu and the Finder or Explorer. (If you recall, at one point I thought we'd have to change the File menu, but then figured out how to get two-wayness with a standard File menu. That's what upstreaming is about.) All the XML files it creates are in outlineDocument format. We're discussing a couple of changes in this format with people who are using Radio UserLand. Whatever changes are made, all our software will continue to read the current format, for perpetuity. I still have to figure out how to link this up with Manila and Zope and other "cloud-level" content management software. I want it to build off users' understanding of the File menu and how the file system works. It almost certainly will involve special sub-folders of the www folder, that route writing to specific Manila or Zope sites through an XML-RPC interface. I also want to teach Radio UserLand how to get to websites, through an outline interface, and through its Bookmarks menu. I write for about a dozen sites. I want to be able to go to "the site" by choosing a bookmark. I'm getting pretty close to figuring this out. New terminology BTW, in writing about the Radio UserLand scenario, I get into trouble when I talk about servers. Since the user's machine is a server, I can't talk about "the server". What's the difference between the server on my machine, running at Exodus; and the server on their machine, running at the end of a DSL line or cable modem, or T1 line or whatever? So I've taken a clue from AT&T, General Magic and LoudCloud, and I'm calling the common space "the cloud". It's the common space where all our stuff co-exists. We plan to allow an option where the user chooses not to upstream at all, this might make sense for people with persistent IP addresses and big pipes, who want the full-metal experience of having a workstation that's also serving the public. But upstreaming is there because at this point, most users would be wise not to open their machines up so fully. Openness and competition BTW, we've reserved the name musiccloud.com. It'll stand alongside ourfavoritesongs.com, and other interlinked music fan communities. We will specify all the formats we use, they're all XML and simple, and easy to support. We don't want an exclusive on operating clouds, we want competition, but we insist that be fair and respectful, as I discuss below. Other UserLand domains we're going to use for music communities. playingintheband.com and contactthedead.com. A flawed decision About the decision in the DeCSS trial. The judge associates distributing a program that breaks copy protection with political assassination. That's a an extreme and unrealistic point of view. In the 1980s, when copy protection was common in PC software, there were popular commercial products whose sole purpose was to circumvent copy protection. To a software developer, I'm sure it felt like assassination (I'm very sure about this). But to a user it felt differently. There are legitimate legal uses of the DeCSS program. How are Linux users supposed to use DVDs? As far as I know the movie industry has not provided a way for people to do that. Naked emperors On the flipside, about open source developers. I'm happy to work with people on a "Let's Share Our Ideas" basis, as long as credit is given. Open source has become a haven for people who, like patent abusers, have no respect for the creative process. There are naked emperors in our midst. They don't want you to see their nudity, that's why they get upset when I talk about them. They want to do all the talking. Makes sense, because if we look at them we'll see that they talk the talk, but don't walk the walk. (One reason some people want you to release the source code is so that they can claim it as theirs.) As Woz warns, the new bosses may not be any better than the old. On the other hand, there are good honest people who choose to make open source software. But their leaders are attaching all kinds of selfish "riders" on their work. In their naivete, the hard-working open source developers are contributing to the creation of another hardened fortress that we must route around. Watch out for middlemen So, in software, as in the music business, watch out for middlemen. If a leader doesn't write software, or generate ideas for software, or respect the creative process that leads to software, stop following. You're selling out your brothers and sisters when you do that. Ask the questions that pop into your mind. Listen to the answers and decide for yourself. Don't believe hype. Trust what you see. If they ship software that you love, respect that. If they talk a lot but don't deliver much, switch stations. It's possible to be an open source developer with high integrity, I'm sure of that, I know people who do that. But it's not inevitable that all open source developers and middlemen have high integrity. Sorry, I didn't make the world that way, I wish it were otherwise. It can hurt to trust integrity that's not there. It's best to trust your gut, and ask questions and listen to the answers and use your mind.
DaveNet: Dionne. AP: Movie Industry Backed in DVD Trial. "Computer code is not purely expressive any more than the assassination of a political figure is purely a political statement,'' Kaplan said. Atlantic Monthly: The Heavenly Jukebox. It's nice to see that eBay users have a sense of humor or are extremely entrepreneurial. Given the choices in this year's presidential race, it seems pretty rational to offer you vote to the highest bidder. Today's song: The Long And Winding Road. Salon: To hell with hubris. "Priceline.com CEO Jay Walker has built a business around the 300 patents that he's been awarded or is expecting, demanding that we ignore the fact that most of his 'inventions' are nothing more than traditional money-making schemes with a dot-com twist. 'Expert-based commerce' is novel and unobvious? Tell that to my local hardware store owner, who's a licensed contractor." Amen. News.Com: Jeff Bezos wants your help. Tell him to shove it up his ass. BTW, have you noticed how the categories in News.Com comment feature are all very corporate. How about a few artistic titles? I commented on this piece using my stage name. My title, this time, is Group Director of Architecture. Has a nice ring to it don't you think? Hey I had a great idea. Jeff Bezos is a smart guy. I always like to get advice from smart people, so I sent him an email asking for his help with my site. He's a community oriented person. Let's get him to help us with our sites! New feature: How to send email in Radio UserLand. "When you're browsing the user list, you may find you have something to say to a person that's quick and simple, and it would be too much trouble to start a chat, or bring your emailer to the front. So we made it really easy for you to send a quick email message to another Radio UserLand user." New feature: How news feeds work in Radio UserLand. "Now we can bring the wealth of information available through RSS to people who browse and write with the outliner." Matthew Barger is using the GNOME icons in Radio UserLand. Robert Woodhead: Tipping. Looks like Inprise really stepped in it when they opensourced Interbase. Katie Hafner: In Praise of the Mom-and-Pop ISP. "My milk comes from a local dairy, and my Internet connection comes from a small company in Santa Rosa, Calif., called Sonoma Interconnect, or Sonic. Few people outside Sonoma County have heard of it." Josh Hoover sent a pointer to a post from Steve Hindalong, drummer for The Choir. New.Com: Banking on the need for weed. "We had a coffee moment one day where we realized that our contemporaries are basically the biggest wealth-generating generation of all time and they're all tokers," said Freccia, 35. Great publicity for Alan Deutschman's upcoming Steve Jobs book. Nothing like a little controversy to create interest. The Register: Hertzfeld spills all about Eazel. Eric Kidd takes us on a tour of Nautilus, which is Eazel's desktop for Linux. (Eric's post already has 1400 reads at 7:30AM. He's the master flow-builder. Totally in awe.) Reading Eric's description, and the Register article, it's becoming clearer what Nautilus is, and at the same time it's clearer what we're doing with Radio UserLand. They seem pretty close. A difference, we're bringing the power of the Internet, as a browsable editable hierarchy, to Windows and Mac users. At least for now, they're focusing on Unix users. Eazel probably does icons better. (Although we have users who can do icons, hint hint.) We do outliners pretty well. And we have an object database running behind it all, which is a important but largely secret ingredient. I'm sure they have some stuff we don't. (Yes, they're open source too, thanks for pointing that out. I love that this medium is so interactive, even at 4AM. My opinion, that and 50 cents won't get you on the subway anymore.) One thing they will have is tight integration with the filesystem browser, because they *are* the filesystem browser. At one point I considered taking Radio in that direction, but punted. It's a lot of work, for not much gain, because people generally prefer to use the filesystem browser that comes with the OS. That's what Microsoft and Apple do, and Eazel. (Does Eazel have competition?) The icon-capable version of Radio UserLand for the Mac is released. Brent works late. I started early today. Dan Gillmor: "It's hard to argue with the customer,'' Dell said dryly. "Generally that's not a good idea.'' The Register has another Hertzfeld article. On a mail list earlier today someone said we don't know that we exist, but that's the one thing that is not a mystery. Everything else, of course, *is* a mystery. Now I discover that unbeknownst to me, this exact topic is being discussed right here at UserLand. I gave myself a lot of grief for revealing personal feelings on this site yesterday. "People don't come here for that," I said to myself. Wrong. Some complain about me doing that, that's for sure, and some tell me to stop, but they keep coming back. If I were to always paint a pretty picture like "Everything's always great!" then you might as well watch TV, the production values are better. The interesting thing about a weblog is that a little humanity might slip through. Ooops, they caught me being human. Shit happens. No pain, no gain.
Trawling around My.UserLand I'm building an upstream file for RSS people, browsing My.UserLand and finding lots of new channels. I found a channel for Xerox PARC, the place where GUIs were developed in the 1970s. Paul Nakada submitted several channels that were queries on Yahoo, including one for SOAP, one for UserLand and XML. I am inspired by Black Hole Brain in a whole new way. So what was the purpose of all this trawling? To see how RSS integrates with the World Outline concept. It works pretty well. Then Brent released the new app with the color icons, it looks a lot nicer with a bit of color. BTW, it loads the icons from a folder, so users can change the icons easily. Please do! Doc at LinuxWorld Doc Searls: "Eazel is a Finder. It fills the same role for Linux that the Finder has for Apple since Andy wrote it back in the late Pleistocene and Susan gave us all those pixel-perfect icons." Manila docs in PDF Ken Dow has converted the Manila user's guide to PDF for easy printing. Thanks Ken! Today's feature New feature: How chat works in Radio UserLand. Now you might ask "What's chat doing in a music-aware content management system?" Just ask Thomas Dolby.. Today's song Thomas Dolby: She Blinded Me With Science. Tomorrow's features Murphy-willing tomorrow Radio UserLand will have news feeds, in outlines, of course. A kind of personal aggregator. How to visualize it. Look at this page, and imagine the same content in an outliner. This could also be the test-bed for new publish-and-subscribe features for syndicated content. I have an inkling this will be easy. We'll see how it goes. At 4PM, it's working! Another new feature coming in the next few hours, customizable color icons. We look forward to passing this version on to people who do colorful icons. The future of RSS There's been discussion on the Syndication mail list on eGroups of new formats to succeed RSS 0.91. There's been a specific proposal which I pointed to on Monday. I asked for an A-B comparison, so here's Flavor A, and here's Flavor B. Comment on the Syndication mail list. I had some comments here on my role in the continuation of RSS, at the end of the day, all I want to say is this, I have no idea where RSS is going, and I want to take some time away from it, keep doing the music stuff, new content tools, and play with some ideas, and get back to you in a couple of weeks.
New feature: How links work in Radio UserLand. Economist: Son of Netscape. More evidence that the open source bubble has burst. Eric Kidd's open source dilemma. Next Radio UserLand feature: Chat. (Using the outliner of course.) I did my first chat at about 8:45PM with David Brown. I'll write more about it tomorrow. Today's song: Dream A Little Dream Of Me. Jeremy Bowers has done something very innovative with Radio UserLand. He's turned his history.xml file into a weblog. It's time for a callback so users' scripts can catch the history flow and turn it into any kind of XMLization they want. BTW, this is what I meant the other day about having a tool to go with every XML format. The outlineDocument format puts the power in users hands because there's a tool with an easy hood-lift, you don't need a degree in rocket science to figure it out, it just sneaks up on you. "If he can do it, so can I." OK, now here's a screen shot of Jeremy's history.xml file, integrated with the user hierarchy on OurFavoriteSongs.Com. The XML is a constantly changing, so don't expect to see exactly what's in the screen shot. It's an exciting time! Our users are trying things before we thought of them. Yesterday Aaron Swarz tried to open Scripting News in Radio UserLand. It almost worked! BTW, Aaron is 14. He's the next Wes Felter, imho. I got an email from Aaron correcting me. He's 13, not 14! I told him that I first met Wes when he was roughly that age. I didn't meet Woz until he was in his 30s. (He just turned 50 last week.) WSJ: Writers sue Web publishers. "Free-lance writers, long among the least powerful and lowest-paid members of the media, recently have taken a more-activist stance in trying to get paid when one of their works is downloaded over the Internet." Edd Dumbill thinks that RSS should become RDF. Michael Rose: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
An example, Cam doesn't like me to use terms like "barking, farting chihuahuas." I got a really great compliment on that from David McCusker. It strikes a note. We are all insignficant dogs that make a lot of noise (or appear to) and we smell pretty strong if you get too close. So what. If you think your shit doesn't stink, I recommend getting a second opinion.
