Open Possibilities at the First CommunityOne Conference

On Monday, May 7, 2007, the day before the 2007 JavaOne conference, from 10:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. at San Francisco's Moscone Center, Sun Microsystems sponsored the first CommunityOne conference, a lively, open, and free event that brought together more than 600 developers, IT leaders, and emerging enterprises to gain detailed technical information on free and open-source projects.

Sun's Rich Green, executive vice president of software, opened the day's events by characterizing CommunityOne as the culmination of a growing movement at Sun devoted to "expanding the open-source community and driving further innovation through open sharing, participation, and collaboration."

CommunityOne was spirited, playful, hopeful, upbeat, and inclusive.

Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., and a leading activist for open standards, gave the CommunityOne general session from 10:00 to 10:55 a.m. A panel discussion followed with participants Rich Green, Sun's executive vice president of software; Ian Murdock, chief operating system platform strategist for Sun; and Tim Bray, Sun's director of web technologies.

Rich Green opened the proceedings by asking, "Why is Sun Microsystems hosting an event called CommunityOne?" He spoke of an enormous change in the culture of Sun in recent years as Sun has open sourced its software and attempted to reach out and partner with the software community. He proudly pointed out that the European Union recently reported that Sun is not only the number one contributor of source code to the open-source community, but that it contributes three times the code of its nearest rival, IBM.

Green then told a story about the early days of the World Wide Web and Mosaic, when he first sat at his SPARCstation surfing the web, delighted and fascinated. He recalled raving to a friend who ran the operating systems group for another Silicon Valley company about the Internet's rich potential. His friend, an operating systems geek, claimed that the web would never work because it had no concept of navigation or referential integrity -- links would get dropped and disconnects would happen.

What his friend was missing, claimed Green, was the centrality of communication for human beings. "There are lots of indications that when there's an opportunity to access information, the concept is overwhelmed by the opportunity to share information and communicate in a rich and powerful way. The desire to share and communicate information overrides technological limitation."

He referred to the audience of developers as "catalysts for innovation that enable humans to tap into the deep DNA in all of us who want to form communities and communicate." He emphasized the importance of CommunityOne as a place in which rich and dense face-to-face communication could occur, something not possible in virtual worlds.

Green then introduced Tim O'Reilly, whose talk focused on the origin and challenges of open source in light of rapidly emerging and shifting trends. As one gifted at keeping his finger to the wind, O'Reilly is often referred to as the creator of the name Web 2.0, which many believe would be a concept of great importance -- if only we could figure out what it means. O'Reilly's presentation attempted to deepen and clarify the meaning of the term.

He recalled that numerous times in the past when he asked his audience how many used the Linux operating system and how many used Google, far more audience members responded to the latter than to the former. That has changed rapidly in recent years.

"I've been trying to understand what open source means in the context of the web -- in particular the killer apps of the Internet," mused O'Reilly. "What do they all have in common? All of them use the network as the platform, not the PC. Sun was way ahead when John Gage first said 'The Network Is the Computer."

But O'Reilly clarified that although the current killer apps are often built on open-source software, few are open source themselves. People are not releasing the source code for the web's killer applications. He explained that the major web applications such as Google are services: They are not packaged applications but data aggregators -- far more than software.

He recalled an argument from 2000 when he asserted -- correctly, in retrospect -- that having the source code to Google would not enable one to run Google, because Google is not simply a set of software but a set of services and processes, a massive database and a cluster of hundreds of thousands of machines.

"If you look at the killer apps of the Internet today," O'Reilly insisted, "you find that network effects from user contribution are the key to their market dominance. We have to understand the new dynamics of network effects: how they are happening, what is driving them, and what makes people capture the benefit."

O'Reilly discussed how he came to the idea of Web 2.0 by thinking about open source. "The focus on software licensing seemed to me to be something of a red herring -- I think Sun also figured that out," he explained. "What mattered more is that modular architecture allows programs to cooperate. We see that on the Internet today where web services are the main focus. We see that with Internet-enabled collaborative development. What we can learn from open source is that developers can come together from around the world with collaborative tools."

He pointed out that users are now co-contributors with key ideas, that we see viral distribution and marketing and that web companies leverage the same principles in new ways.

O'Reilly claimed that many people have misunderstood the meaning of Web 2.0 and focused on certain buzzwords such as sharing, openness, and user-generated content and focused on blogs, wikis, and social networks as keys. "You might as well throw in peace and love," quipped O'Reilly.

"But in fact, Web 2.0 is summed up by what Clayton Christensen called the law of conservation of attractive profits. When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain, a product becomes modular and commoditized. Think of the IBM PC, a machine defined by a modular commodity standard. What happened? Value moved from hardware to software. IBM didn't realize this and signed away rights to the future to Microsoft. The opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary profits will usually emerge in an adjacent stage."

O'Reilly referred to a commodity layer in the middle, with Dell being perhaps the best exemplar of a company that assembles all these commodity parts. At adjacent stages, Intel carves off a proprietary piece of this ecosystem. And up the stack, Microsoft carves off another piece with software.

Open-source advocates pushed for the commodity PC and wanted to replace Microsoft Windows with OpenOffice and Linux and other free and open-source software. But what happened is that the pattern repeated itself, and software became a commodity.

"The real lesson from the IBM PC is that the commodity components today are software components," said O'Reilly. "That is what the Internet, open standards, and open source have done to us. The law of conservation of attractive profits still holds. There is subsystem-level lock-in based on data. There is the idea of proprietary software as a service -- Google is not giving away their crown jewels."

So what makes Google and a new generation of companies so powerful? The key, said O'Reilly, is community -- understood very broadly so that software systems get better the more they are used.

"What distinguished 2.0 is the design of systems that harness network effects -- a broader way of saying community -- to get better the more people use them. You wouldn't think of Google as a community site, but you would think of it as a site that harnesses network effects."

He referred to craigslist as a site built through user self-interest.

"Is that community? Maybe not," said O'Reilly. "But it's a system that gets better the more people use it. If you now tried to create a rival to craigslist, you wouldn't get anywhere near the volume of listings." He pointed out that Alexa rated craigslist as the seventh most trafficked site on the Internet -- amazing for a company that has only about 25 employees, far fewer than other major media companies. Time Warner, for example, has approximately 85,000 employees.

O'Reilly told a story about a friend who had once worked at Microsoft and then moved to Google. The friend described a project he was completing. O'Reilly wanted to blog about it, but his friend told him to wait a day until it was finished. His friend was thrilled that he could finish a project in just months or days at Google and see it show up live the next day. At Microsoft, he had been used to waiting three years for his work to appear on the next CD. O'Reilly referred to this as "live software" that shows up rapidly.

Also, O'Reilly called for web sites today to share their data with others. Web 2.0 applications are built out of a network of cooperating services, which are apparent in the mashup phenomena, such as housingmaps.com, the first mashup that pulls data from craigslist and Google Maps.

O'Reilly closed his talk by challenging Sun with some questions:

• How do you help developers in this new style of development in which you harness collective intelligence?
• How do you help developers create live software that learns from its users?
• How are you thinking about open source and open standards in a future in which lock-in may come from the size of the database that someone owns and controls?

Rich Green, Tim Bray, and Ian Murdock joined O'Reilly onstage for the panel discussion. In response to O'Reilly's questions to Sun, Green advised O'Reilly to stay tuned to Sun's coming announcements during the JavaOne conference. His questions, Green insisted, were of paramount importance to Sun.

Tim Bray made the general point that O'Reilly's language was alienating and misguided. To speak of "harnessing user-generated content" reflected an entrepreneurial attitude that was symptomatic of a problem. The language hid the human reality, said Bray.

O'Reilly readily admitted that Web 2.0 was a terrible name, even if he did promulgate it. But he insisted that people are in fact "users" who "generate content."

The group turned to some of the many thoughtful and relevant questions that audience members sent in by text messsage. One person asked whether there was a limit to what Sun will open source. Green said that Sun would open source everything. "From a business and rising-tide perspective, open sourcing our technology under licensing conducive to sharing and participating in the community is only good. Having more eyeballs watching what we do and contributing to what we do, and having it done in the public and offering values beyond the core intellectual property itself fits our business model."

Another questioner asked O'Reilly what Web 3.0 is likely to be like. O'Reilly responded that, although it was impossible to predict, when we stop typing and use speech and gestural interfaces, and when cell phones have sensors and GPS has wider applications, the web will change again. The key point for O'Reilly is that applications will be driven by what humans do and not by what we say we want. Our daily interactions will be central.

NetBeans Software Day, now part of CommunityOne, began with a presentation from Jeet Kaul, vice president of developer products and programs at Sun.

Kaul reviewed the wealth of awards that the NetBeans IDE received in 2007, which included the following:

• InfoWorld's award for IDE Innovation
• Jolt Awards for best development environment, along with productivity awards for mobile development tools and web development
• JAX Community Innovation award for NetBeans GUI Builder

Kaul offered a brief preview of NetBeans IDE 6.0 and underscored the wealth of NetBeans content available, which currently includes the following:

• 72 Flash demos
• 27 Podcast episodes
• 82 Bloggers in nine languages
• 77 Sample applications

Kaul encouraged developers to contribute their ideas and insights to NetBeans IDE 6.0, which is scheduled for release later in 2007.

He then introduced Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green, who engaged in a casual, unstructured conversation. Both were struck by the fact that they were sitting with hundreds of open-source developers, and that earlier in the morning, more than 600 people showed up at the CommunityOne Start up Camp. Both facts reflected the major changes taking place in Sun's culture in recent years.

"We've worked hard to make sure we are both a reflection of the community and a part of the community," explained Schwartz. "And that we are genuine in trying to build and invest in the community and not litigate against the community. We have done a reasonable job. The tools group is perhaps the most strategic group in the whole company." Schwartz went on to say that what developers do affects the entire marketplace. He claimed that what both consumers and employees experience ultimately drives what happens in the data center.

In words that echoed O'Reilly's earlier comments, Schwartz observed a transformation on the network. "The folks who write for the New York Times are their employees, but on the web, the market for user-generated content is growing. YouTube doesn't employ any of the people who create the content that they distribute across the world. So there is a dichotomy between those who employ everyone who creates their content and those who employ no one. We look at that and say that it cannot be sustainable.

"If you are the hip provider of a great video on the Internet, you will eventually say that everyone else is making coin off of your artwork and you will want to be rewarded. At Sun, we've gone from employing all the people who create the content that Sun delivers to the marketplace to a situation where open-source developers make contributions. We can't expect everyone to always do this from the benevolence of their hearts."

Green agreed vigorously: "A lot of people are creating innovation that other organizations are benefiting from. I think this is unfair and unsustainable. It's Robin Hood backwards. We are stealing from the poor and making other people rich, and this seems very bad. Humans will not do this, nor should they have to. We have to look closely at working with those who contribute to the open source but whose contributions generate revenue for Sun and share that wealth. I'm sure we are going to do that."

2007 CommunityOne  
2007 NetBeans Software Day  
Jonathan Schwartz's Blog  
NetBeans IDE  
OpenSolaris Community  
GlassFish Community  
OpenJDK/Mobile & Embedded  
RedMonk