In his later years, the American Jazz Age author F. Scott Fitzgerald ruefully observed that "There are no second acts in American Lives." That now-famous verdict was based upon the personal experience of the once celebrated author, by then a self-described "Hollywood Hack," reduced to writing B Movie scripts for current income.
If there is a current exception to Fitzgerald's axiom in the world of technology, it must certainly be Steve Jobs. The company he founded in a garage with partner Steve Wozniak quickly seized the lead in the PC revolution, reaching $100 million in revenues by 1980. Later the same year, Apple launched the largest IPO since Ford Motor Company went public. But the introduction of the IBM PC and the rise of Microsoft wrought a reversal in Apple's fortunes, and in May of 1985, the man he had recruited to be his mentor ousted Jobs from his own company.
The rest, of course, is the stuff of which legends are made. Jobs attempted to vindicate his vision in 1985 by founding a new company that he unsubtly dubbed NeXT Computer. But NeXT never found its market: by 1993, it had sold only c. 50,000 machines. Then, at last, Jobs' fortunes began to improve.
In 1996, NeXT was acquired by Apple, which had itself been largely wandering in the wilderness during the intervening years. By acquiring NexT, Apple not only obtained the rights to a new operating system, but it reacquired Jobs as well. Moreover, not long after leaving Apple, Jobs had bought an animation studio from LucasFilms for $5 million, plus a $5 million cash infusion into the studio itself. He later renamed that studio Pixar, and it went on to become wildly successful, making Jobs a very wealthy man twice over.
With the fantastic success of the iPod and iTunes, the successful launch of the tectonically innovative iPhone and the rejuvenation of Mac sales, Jobs now seems poised on the cusp of proving Fitzgerald wrong to the point of stomping on the author's grave. But will he in fact pull it off, leading Apple to dominate the mobile platform of the future after surrendering the emerging PC platform of the past to his rivals?
Given Jobs' announcements of yesterday, I'm afraid that history may be about to repeat itself instead. Here's why.
If you've always been itching to launch a startup but just couldn't come up with a killer idea, well, your ship is about to come in. No, it won't be quite as good as the Internet Bubble years, when any fool could raise a few million (hell, $30 or $40 million) to sell dog food online - no, really - but not bad, either.
When things are more or less steady state, you have to do something new and original to have a viable business plan in the tech space. But when times and technology really change (one of those paradigm shifty things), then you don't actually have to come up with something new to do at all - you just have to be the first to do something old in a new way. If you look back, that's what 95% of the Bubble companies tried.
True, 95% of those companies also failed. But that's not likely to happen this time around. This time, things will be a lot different, because while the platform is new, almost all of the trial and error on the business models has already occurred, the users are already trained to eat the dog food (as it were), the money is primed to flow, the standards are in place - and here's the really new twist - open source software has made the scene.
I was pleased to see the formal announcement yesterday of the OpenSAF Foundation, a new open source project that I've been helping form for the past several months. You can find the the launch press release here, and I've also pasted it in at the end of this blog entry for archival purposes. The Web site for OpenSAF is here.
Here are the high level details, from the press release:
This organization is created to promote the development and adoption of an open source implementation of a high availability base platform middleware based on Service Availability™ Forum Specifications. The OpenSAF Foundation leverages the collective expertise of the telecom and enterprise computing industries to create a best-of-breed implementation. This open source project uses the widely accepted LGPLv2.1 license (Lesser GNU Public License). Membership in the foundation is open to all organizations interested in the development and broad adoption of the OpenSAF code base.
The goals of the OpenSAF Foundation include evolving a broadly adopted base platform middleware not tied to any commercial implementation. This includes support for the SA Forum™ Application Interface Specification and alignment with the requirements of the SCOPE Alliance. Additional services will be developed that may be leveraged by enterprise computing companies, network equipment providers, industries requiring high availability, and independent software vendors.
As you can see, OpenSAF is an implementational chicken to an already existing, open standard egg developed by the Service Availability Forum, as well as a continuing buildout of an important telecommunications system where other organizations (such as the SCOPE Alliance) are already active. The need to create such interdependent organizations working on a collaborative, additive basis is increasingly important in today's converged and expanding, telecom and Internet based world.
Yesterday, the Linux Foundation posted the first in what will be an ongoing series of podcasts with open source leaders, visionaries and pioneers. The interviews will each be conducted by LF Executive Director Jim Zemlin, and naturally, the first interview is with Linus Torvalds. Appropriately, the series is called, "Open Voices." In this first podcast, Linus shares his thoughts on Life the Open Source Universe, and Everything. Here are a few samples (I'll add more later in this blog entry):
Regarding Linux on the desktop: “The Linux desktop is why I got into Linux in the first place. I have never, ever cared about really anything but the Linux desktop… I don’t worry about the desktop on a technical level because I think that’s the first thing that most kernel developers will really put their efforts in.”
On patent trolls: “Yeah, they’re kind of like the terrorists that you can’t bomb because there’s nothing there to bomb. There are just these individuals that don’t have anything to lose. That breaks the whole cold war model and seems to be one of the reasons that even big companies are now starting to realize that patents and software are a really bad idea.”
Other topics include the Linux development process, including internationalization; the commodization of the desktop; cracking the code for Mobile Linux; GPL3; OpenSolaris, the future of Linux, and much more.
That's the title of a press release issued yesterday by the Linux Foundation (the full text, as usual, also appears below). Given the number of conferences that are being held on open source licensing issues all the time, you might understandably wonder why LF feels it's necessary to have two more. In fact, there are some pretty good reasons, and hence this blog entry.
One reason is that most open source conferences are organized by and for lawyers, and concern themselves with the arcana of licensing, offering an infinite number of rat holes to disappear down, but not much opportunity to look for solutions, talk about strategy and get creative. Another is the fact that many of those that set up and speak at such conferences love to hang out the crepe and focus on gloom and doom. A classic example held under the auspices of the AILPA (the American Intellectual Property Law Association) in August of this year was alarmingly titled The new GNU General Public License – A Direct Attack on Software Patents and Patent Licensing? (most of the organizers and speakers shared a certain common affiliation).
After all, it's good for business when you're a lawyer to make everyone think that absent high-priced counsel and careful legal supervision, your business will surely evaporate before your eyes. All too many of the topics that get talked about at such affairs are intended to perform the purpose of what we used to call an "Oh No! article in our firm newsletter – a story about a common mistake clients make, and that would therefore be likely to inspire a predictable number of readers to pick up the phone and give us a call.
It was not so long ago that most kids in school experienced a predictable "Oh Wow!" moment when they learned about atomic structure (that's "Oh Wow!" as in, "What if our solar system is, like, you know, just an 'atom' in this, like, really big 'molecule' thing called a galaxy and…").
Today, of course, that Oh Wow! moment is more likely to be sparked by a video game or, more recently, a visit to a virtual world. And after all, it was time for a change anyway, what with the discovery of subatomic particles, and the assumption that there's no physical "there" there at all – just electronic charges. Or whatever. Personally, I've always found the video game day dream more appealing and amusing than the atomic theory in any case. After all – how much difference is there between energizing a monitor and the Big Bang? Oh Wow!
The old concept of life as being something other than what we suppose returned to me just now while checking in at Bob Sutor's Open Blog, where I read about a Virtual Worlds Conference held at MIT on June 15 and find a live blog entry at Virtual Worlds News on a panel that Bob moderate. And yes, there's (of course) a standards hook in here somewhere.
Updated 7:40 AM June 22: Dan Bricklin has now posted his own blog entry on the event here, which includes not only multiple audio podcast segments for the entire event, but also his 1 hour and 10 minute video podcast of the OLPC demo (follow the URL at Dan's blog).
Open source summits seem to be all the rage these days, so I'm blogging from another one this week. In this case, it’s the second somewhat similar event staged by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, the largest and oldest technology membership association in the Commonwealth. Rather than repeat the dance card, you can see my prior entry on the program here. Dan Bricklin is taping the event, so I'll add a link to the podcast here when he posts that. Interestingly (or incongruously) enough, the event is being hosted by Microsoft, consistent with its somewhat schizophrenic strategy of both moving cautiously into the open source marketplace while at the same time seeking to protect its core products from erosion. (Dan is also doing his usual Happy Feet routine, dashing around the room with a microphone to capture every question.)
I arrived somewhat late, due to the even more than usually villainous traffic this morning on Route 128, but caught most of the first panel (the legal one) which overviewed events of note over the past year, as well as first-hand accounts from members of some of the GPL3 committees of what it's been like in those venues as the parlous process of consensus building proceeded in the run up to the imminent release of the final version of GPL3. Karen Copenhaver did a great job chairing the panel, and the presentations were interesting and informative, but didn't inspire any particularly provocative comments or questions from the floor. The good news here is that the emotional stage of GPL3 creation is over, and consensus has been reached. The fact that there are no new suprises to be learned and no arm waving to be engaged in means we should be able to look forward to a smooth release and roll out of the final text of the new license.
Things are picking up now, with vendor panel, chaired by a puckish Jay Batson, a VC from Northbridge Ventures, and one of the event organizers.
I'm attending the Linux Foundations' first annual Linux Collaboration Summit from the Google campus in Mountainview California today and tomorrow, and will add periodically to this post as the day goes along. 
We're set up in one of the many Google buildings in what used to be the Silicon Graphics campus. As a result of its reinhabiting someone else's space, it's not quite as opulent as you might think from the reports one hears. There are plenty of accoutrements around to make the point, though, from what appear to be communal fleets of bikes that you can take from building to building, electric scooters, and the occasional corporate Segway tootling along or plugged into a wall socket. Strangely, though, it seemed as if a malign presence was always just outside, like some horrible monster from a cold and damp northwestern state. We could feel in our bones that it did not wish Linux well.
Be that as it may, at the Linux Foundation board meeting the day before all was quite cozy – we had Kobi steak garnished with lobster tail, so I assume that Google provided us with a typical recruiting lunch. Later, our collective mob will descend on one of the Google cafeterias, to sample the sushi bar and other selections. Together with the spectacular Silicon Valley weather and the funky accommodations at the Wild Palms Hotel where many of us are staying, it makes the East Coast scene feel pretty drab in comparison because, uh, well, I guess in comparison it's pretty drab.
For those of you in the Boston area, or not too far away, there's an event that I've helped plan that I think you'd find quite worthwhile. It's even cheap, as such things go, at $20 a head for members of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, and $40 for non members. It's titled the Open Source Summit, and will feature quite a few excellent panelists, including the following folks that I've known for quite a while and respect greatly:
- Karen Copenhaver, an open source licensing expert who's also a member of one of the GPL3 committees. Karen was formerly the General Counsel of Black Duck Software, before returning to private practice at local law firm Choate, Hall & Stewart
- Scott Peterson, the Senior Counsel, Intellectual Property, Hewlett-Packard Company / Andover, MA. Scott is an "expert's expert" on both open standards as well as open source, and the guy I call when I want the opinion of someone I can rely upon
- Bob Sutor, VP Standards & Open Source, IBM, who regular readers of this blog will know is the top guy at IBM on ODF strategy, as well as much more formidible blogger.
One of the principle topics will be the latest on GPL3 and What it All Means, which is to say what it all means up to that minute in the unfolding story, as told by quite a few folks that are very much in the middle of things, not only on the drafting side, but on the market side as well, such as (in addition to Bob Sutor):
- Larry Alston, VP of Corporate Strategy, Iona
- Don Fisher, VP of Online Services, Red Hat
- Justin Steinman, Director of Linux Marketing, Novell