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The question, however, remains for all open-source projects: Is it fair or productive to close off the code after open source has made it popular?

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Commercializing open source is a tricky balancing act, as open-source Funambol’s name suggests (It means “tightrope walker”). For MySQL, it’s a “tightrope” it has been walking for more than 10 years, which decade has seen the company on both sides of the open source/proprietary divide.

Remember that Monty [co-founder of MySQL] chose to go open source only after the world totally ignored his work. There is a real value that goes along with being open source that lends itself well to adoption. If you have to pay, then that will deter adoption of immature products in ways that it won’t with free products.

This is the crux of the MySQL/Sun commercialization problem: They can’t make the enterprise version diverge or they lose the adoption benefit, and enterprise sales are still long, high ceremony and costly.

Ultimately, the only thing we know is that Marten, Monty, Zack, and team mean well and generally do well. They seem to balance better than most.

So for those of us that get caught up in MySQL’s decision to keep some extensions closed to paid subscribers, perhaps a refresher course in MySQL history will make it seem a bit less shocking. (Also be sure to check out the early 2001 brouhaha over trademark violations surrounding MySQL.org. Fascinating stuff.)

It’s not as if the grass is brilliantly green on the commercialization side of the fence, either, as my friend goes on to point out:

As I’m occasionally reminded, MySQL didn’t start out as open source. In fact, MySQL’s original license was very similar to what it is trying to achieve today: Free for noncommercial use, but not-so-free for commercial use. It didn’t decide to go open source (GPL) until 1999.

With that said, there’s an ongoing tension between commercialization and adoption that MySQL (and all commercial open-source projects) have to manage. As a friend noted in an email to me yesterday:

Perhaps a little empathy, rather than blame, is therefore in order for the MySQL management team as they try to figure out how to trade in some of MySQL’s popularity for a bit more cash. It’s a fair desire but it’s by no means obvious that closing off some extensions will accomplish this. The MySQL team is experimenting, as they’ve said. Let’s cut them a little slack (while still remaining open-mouthed and open-minded).

His take on Monty’s reasoning is a bit strong, and I don’t agree that MySQL had been ignored, but still he has a point: Open sourcing one’s code can lead to far greater adoption in a short period of time than proprietary source.

“This is where the advertising community has completely failed at adjusting and adapting and being creative,” Broes said, adding that if they did, “I think we would see a much higher cpm value for video.”

He criticized the advertising sector for being too slow to profit from these sorts of technologies.

Paramount Pictures' Derek Broes says advertisers have failed at being creative with new technologies

(Credit:
Greg Sandoval)

“The technology was very, very compelling,” said Broes, a former Microsoft senior director of global wireless. “Hey, if I can actually star in my own commercials, I’m going to watch them…If you look at a Facebook environment; if my face is in a database there, and I watch a…let’s say a Mountain Dew commercial (about) a rock concert and I’m the lead singer. Let’s say my friends have their heads in the database and they become members of the band. Then it becomes entertaining and it’s no longer a commercial.”

LOS ANGELES–A Paramount Pictures executive added to the chorus of positive reviews for Big Stage’s face-mapping technology during the Digital Hollywood conference on Tuesday.

Derek Broes, Paramount Pictures executive vice president of worldwide business development, was asked during a panel discussion about what interesting new technologies he’s seen.

Broes said he was impressed by Big Stage and the start-up’s system for manipulating digital recreations of a person’s face. The company snaps three photographs of someone’s face and processes the photos on its servers to create a digital model of the face. It can then make the image smile, wink, and change expressions.

Webware’s Rafe Needleman calls it an automatic avatar builder. Broes sees it as a potentially revolutionary tool for advertisers.

Yahoo investors who are hoping to get a glimpse into the company’s legal brief filed Monday to oppose holding a trial to remove its controversial employee severance plan will have to wait for an hour or so, according to a source familiar with the filing.

Update 10:30 a.m. PDT: Yahoo plans to unseal its court filing Monday.

Yahoo had unsuccessfully sought to keep the shareholder amended complaint under seal. The recently unsealed documents created a firestorm of controversy for the Internet search pioneer. The amended complaint contained e-mails and information from outside compensation consultants Yahoo had hired, who raised questions regarding the breadth of the severance packages that would be awarded to all full-time employees in the event of a change of control of Yahoo should employees depart the company or their duties or responsibilities change.

While the motion to oppose setting a trial date was temporarily filed under seal, Yahoo’s motion to dismiss the shareholder amended lawsuit–also filed Monday–was not, according to the Delaware Chancery Court, where both filings were submitted.

Yahoo’s brief seeks to oppose a motion made in a shareholder lawsuit, which asks the court to hold a trial to invalidate the company’s employees severance plans and to hold the trial before Yahoo’s annual shareholders’ meeting August 1.

Yahoo’s employee severance plan has been called a defacto “poison pill” by the plaintiffs, who allege it was put in place to make Microsoft’s earlier unsolicited buyout efforts more expensive, a claim Yahoo has previously rejected. The Internet company characterized the plan as an employee retention effort.

Like many clean-tech start-ups, Mascoma is moving from technology development to commercialization, which is very capital-intensive. It has broken ground on demonstration plants that should be operating later this year.

PEHub, citing a regulatory filing, reported Thursday that the Cambridge, Mass.-based company took in $30 million in equity and $20 million in debt.

The financing was led by General Catalyst Partners, and included existing investors Khosla Ventures, Atlas Venture, Flagship Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Pinnacle Ventures, and VantagePoint Venture Partners.

Mascoma, which makes ethanol from wood chips and agricultural wastes, has raised an additional $50 million, according to a published report.

To get out of the labs and move toward profitability, many new energy and fuel companies need to raise a substantial amounts of money, on the order of $50 million or more, to demonstrate that their products can be made economically.

Spun off from Dartmouth College, Mascoma is among the wave of new companies trying to convert biomass, other than corn, into the liquid fuel ethanol. Its technology uses special enzymes to break down cellulose into sugar before fermentation. Its goal is to condense that two-step conversion into one.

Mascoma has already raised $40 million in venture funding and gotten state grants from Michigan, New York, and Tennessee.

Now, the mere presence of such a quote from an analyst who was part of these Pentagon briefings should make it obvious to anyone that no amount of influence can turn every analyst into a puppet. The Times article was hopelessly, breathlessly hysterical over a simple fact of life… a fact that is familiar to everyone who deals with analysts in politics or the private sector.

A wise analyst is aware of these blind spots and simply refrains from offering opinions on them. For example, I doubt the Pentagon gave the analysts in the Times story any statistics on unauthorized corporal punishment of detainees by Guantánamo staff, and I doubt any of the analysts interpreted this lack of data as indicating such contact never happens. (I certainly have no idea whether it happens, so I’m not saying it does or doesn’t.)

Sources– whether in the public or private sectors– have a very limited ability to influence these biases. Their best way to influence an analyst’s opinions is to make sure the analyst is aware of all the facts that are favorable to the source’s position. That’s what the Times says the Pentagon did in this case. For example, in attempting to counteract bad publicity generated by criticism of the Guantánamo facility by Amnesty International:

Analysts also bring in certain biases and preconceived ideas. I have my own, of course. I believe the companies I cover (or work for!) ought to do useful new work, respect the intellectual property of other companies, and deal honestly with its customers, partners, and competitors alike. I approve of technical monopolies– those created when a company is first to develop a technology– and I don’t approve of monopolies created by predatory trade practices. That still leaves room for plenty of hard competition, and I approve of that, too.

(Thanks to my friend Elf Sternberg for bringing the Times story to my attention, although I don’t think the story is anywhere near as significant as Elf does.)

It’s certainly useful for the Times to periodically remind us all of how analysts develop their opinions, but it isn’t so useful to provide a view of the process that is as biased and misleading as this one.

On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages — how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.

And it usually doesn’t even matter what opinions an individual analyst holds. Reporters simply find analysts who will deliver the kinds of opinions they want. This “quote shopping” is inevitable and ubiquitous, and I’m not even going to say it’s wrong; reporters have to have this freedom. But it means that reporters– including David Barstow, who wrote this piece for the Times– are trying to influence their readers the same way this article claims the Pentagon is trying to influence military analysts. Barstow included dozens of quotes in his article to support his position, and only twice did he quote a military analyst defending his objectivity– although I’m pretty sure most would have done so if Barstow had given them the chance.

The New York Times ran an article over the weekend (here) describing efforts by the Pentagon and the Bush Administration to influence the opinions of military analysts, primarily retired military officers, who contribute to coverage of the Iraq War and other topics by newspapers and TV news programs.

The Times article also suggests that it’s inappropriate for analysts to try to help their sources craft their public messages. Given that analysts are paid to have opinions, it should come as no surprise to the Times or anyone else that analysts like to share these opinions with everyone around them– sources as well as reporters. That’s the difference between analysts and reporters, after all; analysts are held to have enough relevant experience to justify having and expressing opinions. Reporters are not.

The analyst business works the same way for all kinds of analysts– military, political, financial, and (as in my case) technology analysts.

There are similar biases among military analysts. For example, some believe Islamic extremism and anti-American terrorism ought to be met with military force. Some believe the US ought to reserve the military option for more immediate or substantial strategic threats. I don’t even know any military analysts, but I can see their biases. Presumably military reporters at the New York Times see them too, and shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

Does the New York Times really believe that this was inappropriate? The article doesn’t attempt to claim that these briefings, or the opinions later voiced by the analysts, were misleading or wrong. Apparently the Times believes it’s damning enough that the analysts accepted the Pentagon’s claims. But I have seen few if any cases of outright deception in my experience with analyst briefings (literally hundreds of them over the years). More commonly, spin is applied by withholding unfavorable facts and by withholding briefings from analysts who hold fixed and unfavorable opinions.

Ultimately it has to be up to the reader to critically evaluate every line of every news story. Readers shouldn’t assume analyst opinions are unbiased any more than they should assume that the facts in the story are complete or truly representative. But facts and opinions usually do have some basis in reality, and a critical reader can usually learn something about the truth of the matter in spite of all the biases that went into the story.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you.’”

The Times article claimed that the Pentagon’s influence turned these analysts into sock puppets, a claim supported by this quote from Robert S. Bevelacqua– a military analyst himself:

(Credit:
US Department of Defense)

Within any community of analysts, there will be some who can be bought, some who can be brainwashed, and some who can be bamboozled. Any given analyst will have some ability to think clearly and independently; each analyst decides whether to exercise that ability or simply regurgitate the spin offered by his or her sources.