vendredi 26 novembre 2004

'...He was pure act' I'm reading a marvelously written biography of Huey Long, populist governor from Louisiana during the 20's and 30's. More on the bio at another time. In the explanation of Huey, the author uses a perfect quote by Henry Adams about (my man) Teddy Roosevelt: "Power, when wielded by abnormal energy, is the most serious of facts and all his friends knew that his restless and combative energy was more than abnormal...He was pure act." Two books before this I wrapped up a bio on Gandhi, who combined those plus transcendent virtue. Nice juxtaposition. 7:13:39 PM   comment []

Plone Foundation governance The Plone community is undergoing an interesting process, in which a governance model is being bootstrapped after Plone has reached some critical mass. So far we've created the legal structure, defined membership criteria, bootstrapped the first voting membership, and elected a board of directors. I'm the PF executive director, which means I have a non-voting, part-time paid position to do administrative stuff for the board. For example, right now we are conducting a vote on a proposal for an FSF-style model of copyright ownership, where the group is the owner. (The proposal is called the "Conservancy Proposal".) It has been an encouraging process so far. We've confronted a potentially divisive issue, had a robust but respectful discussion, and the governance model is applying a vote. In this case, the Plone community gets to have a voice directly in the outcome, and will (hopefully) feel a stronger commitment to the future of the project. In the land of Zope, when this topic came up, the question was posed: "Why would the community be comfortable with an underfunded foundation protecting their rights?" This is a legitimate question. Issues of ownership and governance need an effective and legitimate response. However, I think the point this question missed was that, since companies around the world are investing in Zope, they'd like some participation in the governance and outcomes. The nasty challenge, though, was whether a community foundation could be effective. I think the ASF has demonstrated quite convincingly that a foundation can give as much a sense of future-proofness as a company. I think the Mozilla Foundation has demonstrated, over the last year, that a foundation was a better alternative than a MongoCorp backer, as Firefox is thriving more than ever. After some research for bootstrapping the PF, we found that many of the successful open source projects have a shared governance model with a community foundation. Ultimately, both the company-model and community-model have strengths and weaknesses. Like many other things in open source, the choice of an open governance vs. a centralized governance is one of culture and goals, just like choice of license. One size doesn't fit all. 2:28:43 PM   comment []

What isn't an open source business? In last week's keynote at the Calibre conference, I talked a bit about open source being a trend picked up by mainstream companies. They make an announcement: "We're an open source company", crank out a bunch of brochures, and update the website. Voila, an open source business! What makes a business an open source business? More specifically, how do you know when a business claims to be an open source business, but is just posing? 2:07:40 PM   comment []