Archives for August 2000

Open Source Everything

August 25, 2000 by Dave!

Today a friend of mine and I were discussing some of the cool new things that we’d like to develop and got into an interesting discussion about the nature of work, what it means to be creative, and how it might be possible for creative people to make a living in the new economy.

You see, we’ve both lived and worked in the “Silicon Valley” start-up environment, and to be honest, neither of us cared for it much. At the risk of sounding hopelessly backward, we value our friends and our family more than our options. We’d both rather spend a lovely Saturday having a barbeque with our friends than having a catered lunch as repayment at the office for sacrificing a weekend.

So we left the valley, and we left California. Where we are doesn’t really matter now, because it’s immaterial to our business. We write software, it sells very well, and it makes us a good living. We sell it on the web and our customers are all over the world. They can reach us by phone, fax, e-mail, the web, and even traditional mail. It’s not hard to reach us, and it’s not hard for us to communicate with our customers. And yet, with this (albeit small scale compared to a tech IPO) success, we still have time for our friends and our families, and feel like we are living good lives that are separate from our work.

But I would hate to give you the idea we are slackers, far from it. We like to create, and we are always coming up with new ideas we’d like to work on. It’s been my experience, having studied theatre and fine arts in school, and ending up in technology, that software and hardware developers are some of the most creative and inspired people that I know. What drives them (indeed, us) to create is as diverse as what drives all artists to create, and it often has nothing to do with money. That would be hard for many marketing wonks and MBAs to fathom, but really, I don’t know many engineers who do what they do simply for the money. In fact, I know more than a handful who would do what they do regardless of the pay. Now, don’t get me wrong, these are very intelligent people, and if some VP whose contributions are all filtered through a focus group is getting rich, then the engineers who designed the thing in the first place deserve a cut!

But all too often, the creators get marginalized. What started out as a truly visionary idea goes through so many focus groups and marketing studies that the end result is a often a far cry from the original inspiration. I’ve seen a number of really great, awe-inspiring ideas be lost in organization churn, or obliterated by “mass market” ideals. This always makes me sad, not just for the developer who loses their baby, but for the loss of the idea itself.

Another way great ideas are destroyed is by the whole “venture capital” process itself. Take a look at great companies with great products. Then try to find how many of the original creators or innovators are still around after going through a few rounds of VC. Not very many. Most will be replaced by a stronger management team in the blink of a stock ticker. Those that manage to stay on in a role are often turned into dead weight, as a mouthpiece, or worse, relegated to some obscure management position designed primarily to keep them out of the way. The percentages of ownership that are retained by the creator of an idea is actually pretty sickening. In an article in Business 2.0, Jim Clark points out that the most common mistake entrepreneurs make is over-valuing themselves. What??! Have you heard such non-sense? I guess that’s true in the new e-conomy. Fuck the innovators; the only people who count are the ones who grow market share. Look, I understand the value provided by good sales and marketing people. However, when company founders end up holding less than 10% of the equity in a company, I think that’s pretty crappy. Hell, if you ask me, anything less than 50% is pretty crappy. What a way to be paid for you innovation: loosing control of your company. Yeah, yeah– 10% of a 50 Billion dollar company is better that 50% of a 5 million dollar company. But come on! How much money is enough? And is that money really worth giving up control of your vision? Your idea? And watching your idea become just another mediocre product in the already rotting pool of dead .coms?

After all, it’s not just the innovators who suffer when VC enters the picture. The innovations suffer too. Many great ideas are turned from something truly creative into just another B2B, P2P, B2C solution. Focus groups can provide valuable feedback, but then again, too many cooks’ over analysis of market trends can lead to bad choices and compromises in the product development cycle of a new business.

So the process of building a business in America today leads to the destruction of the innovator and innovation. How can this be changed? How can the creative still manage to create, retain control over their ideas, and still eat?

What could possibly be our salvation?

Open Source.

Everything.

Seriously. I think it’s an idea whose time has come. Now stop laughing. To anyone skeptical of open source reading the article: I’m serious. To any open source advocates reading this article, I think you’ve only scratched the surface of possibility. Open source doesn’t mean free, it means open, and in the end I think it can benefit creators and business interests alike.

I think we should open up everything. Everything. Software. Hardware. All of it. Why? Because it’s good for you. It’s good for me. It’s good for us. And it’s good for the market.

But the market gods cry! How can we make money! How can we protect our “industry secrets!” Why do I care? Why do you care? And why did we get all secretive in the first place? Usually, secrets exist to protect bad products. After all, if no one else can make the same product better, your market is protected. That’s why I think open source has many people on the run; open source might actually provide consumers with choice in the market, and give them access to superior quality technology. Man, in that world, there are a lot of bad companies that stand to go under.
So how does anyone make money with open source? The creators and the companies retailing products? Here’s how everyone can make money: producing innovative things people want and like. So now let’s talk about specifics with an example.

I’m a media junkie. I take in as much media, be it television, radio, the net, as possible. But I’m also a mobile guy. I’m always on the run, and I certainly don’t bend my schedule for television. I want to be able to watch Nova when I want, damn it. Not when my local PBS station airs it. And speaking of which, I might want to watch it on my computer in the office, over the network, on my lunch break. Why not? There’s no real reason I shouldn’t be able to do this.

So, let’s say I get a real itch to have this kind of “media convergence” and I decide to do something about it. I go and I build a machine for my home, based on Linux, that can capture video, encode it and make it available on the Net via my DSL connection. Let’s call this my “Convergence Box”. Cool. I need to write some software to make this all seamless, so maybe I write a web application for scheduling the Convergence Box, and some other software for selecting shows to view, stream it, etc. etc. Now, all of this is some work, and I think it’s pretty valuable. Evidently, so do companies like Tivo and Replay TV (even though they still lack some of the cool features of the Convergence Box, like networking).

Well, now that I’ve gone through the trouble of building this box, I think I’ve got something pretty cool, I show it to some friends, and they want one two. So what are my options? I can:

1. Build it for them. Hey, I don’t have the time.
2. Start a company to build these things. Sure. And go through the hell of subjugating myself and my idea to MBAs and lose all of the cool functionality that was why I built this thing in the first place.
3. Sell it to a company direct. Yeah, if you have the connections, sure. Go for it.
4. Give my friends the plans & software. Hey, my friends are smart. They can make it themselves, and they get a cool box out of it, and I get credit. Neat deal.

In fact, the whole project could stop right there. I don’t have to do anything with it. I created it on my own, I own the idea, and I didn’t do it to get rich. I did it because its an idea for something I needed or wanted, and no one sold it, so I had to build it. But I know that many times, if it’s a product or something I want, chances are someone else wants it too.

So, let’s say I take this Convergence Box and “open source” it. I publish my plans on the net, with a license that effectively says “For personal use, all these plans and software is free. If you want to use it for business, write me.” Yeah, it might cost me a little to have a lawyer review this license, but regardless, that investment is pretty cheap.

Now anyone on the net can build my box if they want to. A great idea is shared with a community of people who can take something cool, build it, use it, extend it in any way they see fit. I like that. I personally think it feels pretty good to share. We all get a cool new toy, and those with the time, knowledge and parts get to build and use my good idea.

But what if a company decides this is a product who’s time has come? What then? Well, easy. They license it too. In fact, this is the best thing a company could possibly do! After all, I’ve done the R&D. I’ve built the prototype. I’ve established a market. Now, they could license my plans, for say a nice royalty, and everyone is a winner.

The company can take my idea, maybe make it more efficient, maybe dumb it down for the mass market, and they walk away with a product they can sell to the mass market of people who don’t want to tinker with hardware and software (and that’s a pretty big market). They can even remove features that might get them into hot litigation. Whatever. They are free to do so, and I still get paid and make money from the base idea. All of the technophiles who want a feature-rich, custom machine, well, they get what they want too, from my open source license. Let’s face it, those people aren’t eating into the company’s market at all, they wouldn’t want the dumbed-down mass market version anyway. If anything, letting these people use it for free is like an investment in community development: everyone wins.

“But hey!” you cry, “there’s nothing to stop another company from licensing the idea too! So who protects the first company’s interests?” Well, okay. Let’s take a look at that. We have two companies, Company X and Company Y. They both want to make the “Convergence Box”. Fine. Why not? There’s a good chance that the market is big enough for both of them, and that my extending the base features established in the original idea, they could actually develop different markets. One might even have a machine that would appeal to those tech savvy buyers out there.

But even if Company Y wants to make a similar product to Company X, they can too. People can then freely choose between product X and Y, and base their decision on minor issues, like say, customer service. Now each company has a reason to build a good product, because the better product will win in the market. What could be better for the consumer? And people who don’t mind technical info and want a supped up version of the product get to build one themselves for the costs of supplies, all thanks to open source. Technological innovation reigns supreme, the market economy does it’s job, and we all share. The company making the best spin off product wins the market, and the developer gets to eat! What could be better?

Now, I realize this idea is not without flaws. Greed always complicates matters like this. But I offer this little diatribe as encouragement to those of you out there that are tired of seeing good ideas go to waste. For innovators who are tired of seeing their ideas compromised. For developers who want to create, but want to eat. For companies with the vision to really adapt to a new economy, and not just want to slap an “e.com” to their name. This a chance to do some real outside-the-box thinking and profit. I think there are enough of us out there that we will survive. And if I’m right, we’ll prosper. And if I’m wrong? I’d rather survive on my terms than compromise my ideals to survive on theirs.

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: open personal source technology

I hope you know this will go down on your permanent record.

August 22, 2000 by Dave!

So what do you want to be when you grow up? And don’t tell me that you are already a grown up. I know better. You’re surfing the web, aren’t you?

This is actually a problem that seems to be facing a number of my friends lately: what do I want to do with the rest of my life? As if there is an easy answer. It’s a shame, we can’t feel free to try several different things and be free to fail without making us feel worthless as humans. I think that is a by-product of our society, and as we move into a information society, it’s only getting worse.

Do you remember way back in high school, or even earlier, when you met with a guidance counselor? Their sole purpose for existence is to help you get started on the right career path, so you can take the right classes and go to the right schools. And you’re expected to choose that career path in your adolescence. Of course, at that age they’d never trust you with sex education or dream of teaching you about condoms, but by golly, you should certainly be ready to choose what you want to spend the next 40 plus years of your life doing to occupy your time!

So, with parents and educators breathing down your neck, you choose your lot in life, and you are placed on a precipice called “your future” and then without warning, they shove you off the edge.

But never fear! There’s always time to change those horrible decisions of youth once you get to college. After all, that’s what majors are for: changing. So now, you are out of the nest, on your own for the first time in life and finally you are free to make your own decisions. So when you aren’t getting drunk, sleeping late, or selling plasma you are free to contemplate your future. And figure out how to summon up the courage to tell your dad that pre-med isn’t your destiny, you really want to paint. Good luck. Have another jello shot.

But now you’re getting older, the university is informing you that you’ve already changed your major four times, and if you want to graduate in four… five… six years, you’d better finally decide and stick to it. Good thing they have all of those easily accessible counselors too. Just take a number, wait for days, fill out these forms. Before you know it you can meet for 15 minutes with someone who barely has more education than you, and after reviewing your transcripts, will give you the best advice possible. For the university. You see, it’s in the university’s best interest for you to graduate in four years. It looks better in their statistics. And the counselor is paid by the university. Hey, you aren’t a student in this new e-conomy, you know, you’re a customer. They aren’t a learning institution existing for the pursuit of knowledge, they are a training facility, designed to crank out employable graduates in a four year program. Conflict of interest? You bet.

But that’s okay. You get the degree and you’re golden. You do the job search. You get depressed. You find the holy grail of jobs. You don’t get it. But another, acceptable job comes along and you are in the workplace. I hope it’s a good one, because changing your career path now is harder than swallowing broken glass.
Why is that? Because a “service” based e-conomy requires that the work being done is being done by a skilled worker. And becoming a skilled worker means that some company is going to have to invest time in training you, and once they’ve done that, they want a return on their investment. This is it– you are rapidly approaching the point of no return. That happens in your late 20’s. Here’s why:

1. Sometime in your late 20’s, for reasons unknown to biologists, you will actually want to stop living like a student. That means you might want furniture that isn’t plaid and smelly, and you might want a nice apartment that you don’t share with 3 other people.

2. You’re no longer “just out of school”. You know it, and any employer looking at your resume knows it. That means that they don’t think they can get you as cheap as a recent grad, because of your new lifestyle desires (see #1).

3. Any new employer will want to know what you’ve been doing for the last X years. They will automatically assume you want to keep doing something along the lines of whatever it was you’ve been doing.

4. If you inform them that you want to do something new, no matter what they tell you, they will think “Ah� they were bad at doing it. That’s why they want a change.” Seriously. That’s what they are thinking.

5. You’re getting old. Spare me. You are. Hey, I don’t think so. You don’t think so, but I guarantee your new prospective employer does. Unless you are trying for a job that requires grey temples, and you aren’t, those jobs exist for white men in their 50s, you are getting old. Said prospective employer is wondering why you fucked up your last position, why you aren’t “getting anywhere” in your chosen profession, and wondering why you’d want a change. Seriously. They are wondering that, you and I both know it.

So where does that leave you? Well, never fear, Dave is here with a way out: work for yourself. Seriously. It’s dirty, it’s grueling, it’s thankless. You will work long hours, for little money, the government will take more money from you, and it’s still the best job you’ll ever have.

There are disadvantages, many of them. The reason that they exist is because no one in our society seriously wants you to work for yourself. Corporations certainly don’t, but the government makes corporations look like Casper the Friendly Ghost. Seriously, Uncle Sam wants to stick it to you big time.

Here, in a nutshell, are the negatives. First, you will be taxed. Self employment taxes mean that you pay all of your FICA and unemployment, and all that good stuff. This is the same stuff that your employer normally matches you on, but now you are the employer, so pony up. The second, and actually by far the worst, is healthcare. You see, it’s virtually impossible for really small business, let alone a single employee to get decent health coverage. You’ll likely end up paying too much for a personal policy that will not even cover a fraction of what your former employee policy did. Why do we need healthcare reform in this country? Oh yeah, our healthcare system sucks.

Okay. Those are really the big drawbacks. But the benefits are worth it, they really are. For example, think about anytime you had a conversation with your boss, or a disagreement with your employer about procedure. Now imagine getting to do it your way. Not too shabby. Oh, and you need to leave the office for a while to run some errands? Go ahead. You say you work best coming in at 4am and leaving at 2pm? No problem. You’d rather come in at noon and leave at 8pm? No sweat.

But all of that pales in comparison to the real benefit to working for yourself: fail or succeed, you are the master of your own destiny. You make your own mistakes and learn from them. Or you make your own mistakes and fail because of them. But right or wrong, they are yours. It’s the closest thing to freedom you could ever experience. It’s hard work, and you have no one else to pass the buck to when you mess up. But those moments of success are so much sweeter when you know they are because you did what you wanted to do the way you wanted to do it.

So what is stopping you? That fear of being too old, or too inexperienced? Get over it. Let me clue you in on a couple of secrets that working for myself has taught me: it’s never too late to change your career if you step outside the “conventional” world of employment and write your own career guide. The only time it’s too late, or you are too old is in death. All mistakes can be learning experiences and help you succeed even greater, never be afraid to make them. There is no permanent record. They lied.

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: education personal

Me and My Motorcycle

August 20, 2000 by Dave!

If you have never ridden a motorcycle, you are truly missing out. There have been times it’s better than sex. Well, a really great ride can be better than really bad sex. Well, it can come close!

There is something about a motorcycle that I think makes it a more special machine than a car. There are other special machines–airplanes. Nuclear missiles. These are both special machines as well. And airplanes might be cool, but motorcycles are decidedly better than nuclear missiles.

So what is it about motorcycles that I like so much? Well, I like speed, but honestly, I don’t ride my bike like a rocket. My mother will be glad to read that. I have a “cruiser” which is built for comfort, not a “crotch rocket” designed for raw speed. So yes, there is some element of the wind rushing through my hair that I really enjoy, but that isn’t what makes it so special. After all, I could always just roll my window down in the car and stick my head out like a dog, oh and if you need help on the road just go here !

What I really love is balance. Balance. A motorcycle left to its own devices at a standstill, will fall down. That means that a rider has to have some sense of balance, and that is a very important part of riding. But what most people who’ve never been on a motorcycle don’t know, is that when the bike is in motion, it doesn’t want to fall down. In fact, it wants to stay up. You can thank physics for that one. When you get the two wheels of a motorcycle spinning, they exhibit some gyroscopic tendencies, and one of those is that when you lean over, and apply some power, the bike will straighten up. Now, obviously, you can’t lean over too far, they aren’t anti-gravity devices, but the result is that a motorcycle has a pretty unique sense of balance that I have yet to experience anywhere else.
Another key difference is the 360 degree view. Oh sure, in a car you can look forward, back, left, right. But whenever you look, there are those pesky support beams and “windows” getting in your view. When I turn my head on a motorcycle, all I see is the world around me. I feel much more in touch with the world around me, and I honestly think it makes you a better driver. We’ll get to the better person part later.

Okay, there is something to that whole “wind in your hair” thing too. That is, you are much more in touch with your environment on a bike. You smell everything you pass, fields, factories, cows. Yeah, you smell them in a car too, but it is just not the same. And I even like riding in foul weather. Rain is cold and prickly in a way that you’ll never experience in a car. However, in a hail storm, I’ll take the car. But the taste of bugs, and the sticky air on a hot summer night on a motorcycle–that is something truly wonderful, and nothing you will ever touch in a steel cage on four wheels.

Okay, so you are wondering, what about being on a motorcycle makes you a better person? I mean, after all, you’ve seen all those dirty bikers and their scruffy beards. Certainly they aren’t better people because of road grime! Well, as a matter of fact, I think they are. Bikers wear leather because it protects you from the elements and the road. Spend some time in the sun and on a bike, and see what it does to your hair. But mostly, every biker I’ve had the pleasure to meet has been an honest, hard working, friendly person, who would simply rather care about riding than care about an Armani suit. And I’d rather know them than your average lawyer any day.

For example, when I’m riding around in my car, just out and about, how many people in cars do you think wave at me when I pass? None. Really. In fact, I tried it the other day, and I actually had a person flip me off after waving at them. Friendly bunch, those car drivers. But this weekend, I took out my bike, and I encountered 14 riders out on the roads. And do you know how many of them waved at me? Every last one. In fact, many of them waved at me first. I love that. I love the camaraderie and friendliness that I encounter whenever I’m on my bike.

But most of all, I love the combination of all those things. Gliding gently down some forgotten country road, past the double-wides tucked away behind a hill or behind some trees, as the sun warms my arms and back, and as the air cools my face. Over the hills and around the curves I feel like my bike and my body are one, and as I lean left and right with the machine, I achieve a perfect sense of balance. I can smell the fresh cut grass and sweet sticky juniper, and as I see another rider approaching just over a hill, we can both raise our hands as we pass, and know that even as we ride on alone, we’ve shared something that very few ever will.

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: motorcycle personal

Archives for August 2000

Open Source Everything

I hope you know this will go down on your permanent record.

Me and My Motorcycle

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