Information freedom for open source users.

In the wake of Google’s purchase of BumpTop, with its unique user interface, and BumpTop’s decision to close down its work on Windows and the Mac OS, the question needs to be asked.

Will the Chromium OS remain open source?

As you can see from the video above, this has always been the promise. The Chromium source code is freely available. Just like Linux, on which it is based.

(Our Zach Whittaker saw BumpTop, which debuted at the 2007 TED Conference, last year, and was very impressed.)

The promise of open source has always been that it stirs open innovation, and no company believes in that more firmly than Google. But when Google needed something to get it over Apple, which had sued HTC over its use of multitouch, it bought the solution.

So now why should it share? Especially with Apple, which based its Mac OS on Linux.

Google launched the first version of Chromium late last year, but while Android has proven popular with manufacturers, no one has yet announced any plans to use Chromium. Some blogs, in fact, are already speculating that Android is the final destination for BumpTop. not Chromium at all.

Which leads to the larger question of differentiation. How does Google turn Chromium into something unique, something separate from Android, with its own value proposition? Especially if the Android team can just grab cool, new stuff like BumpTop and throw it onto a phone?

How does Google control BumpTop so it remains a unique experience? How does it keep out all the “baby Bumps” that may kluge parts of it together with other stuff and build incompatible, even proprietary, knock-offs?

The only answer to those questions is to close the code. I would dearly love to be wrong on this, but I don’t see another way for Google to maximize the value of the buy.

Tell me I’m wrong. (And tell me why.)

The FUD attack launched against Ogg Theora and VP8, the very idea that they violate patents, is not aimed at the courts, but at the W3C, which held a conference on the coming HTML5 standards last week in Raleigh.

While audio and video files are currently handled through object tags, HTML5 will support standard audio and video tags, support for which will be defined in the browser.

Microsoft and Apple are carrying the water of the content industries, which fear that losing control of the technology under which content is displayed results in losing control of the content itself. That control is expressed through the MPEG LA licensing body.

The $5 million license fee for the H.264 codec required by MPEG LA acts as a barrier to entry, both a financial and moral one. A licensee that doesn’t follow Hollywood’s rules could have its license pulled, and thus its product.

The money is chump change for Microsoft, and the barrier a good thing.  It’s a matter of principle for open source.

HTML5 is where that principle is being contested. The W3C policy is not to accept a royalty-bearing, proprietary technology into the Web standard. That’s why video has, until now, been a function separate from the browser.

The attack came now because Mozilla, makers of Firefox, only wants to support truly open codecs under HTML5. Google’s move to open source of VP8 is also said to be preparatory to making it the default codec in Chrome.

If open source becomes the default for HTML5 in Chrome and Firefox (and Opera too) Hollywood loses its technical control. Thus the dark claim by Jobs that a ” patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other ‘open source’ codecs now.”

The case is a nonsense.

If Ogg Theora were subject to patent, why would those patent holders allow nearly 160 million downloads (at last count) of the VLC Player, which contains it. Then there’s the question of whether any software patent is valid — we’re still waiting on a Supreme Court decision in Bilski vs. Kappos to settle that question.

Apple and Microsoft have made their money on video by doing what the video owners want. They want to control the Web’s video technology. So Microsoft will only support H.264, Apple darkly mutters about patent suits, and the W3C is supposed to knuckle under, making a proprietary technology part of the Web standard.

If pressed, I have no doubt that a suit would be filed. But even the filing of a suit does not always represent a desire to go to court, only a willingness to do so as part of a larger negotiation.

The suit would magically disappear if H.264 became the Web standard for video, and everyone who wanted to watch a video online were forced to have their software license that codec from MPEG LA.

That’s the issue squarely facing the W3C now.

Like Google before it, Facebook is now coming under increased scrutiny over the meaning of the term “open” in an online world.

Open software is good. Open data? Maybe not so much.

The traditional software argument is that unless you’re using the AGPL. unless everything is open including your secret source, that you’re not really open, that you’re just pretending to be. Open is just another word for nothing left to lose.

I have never bought that. Open source is not the same thing as free software, which was one of the first lessons I was taught when I took this beat. (Richard Stallman got on me personally about it.)

Open source is a continuum of choices, ranging from Stallman’s Free and Open Source software (FOSS) ideal through Microsoft code that is under tight restrictions. Open source was born in reaction to FOSS, and in opposition to it.

Early on I devised an open source incline to illustrate the range of choices available. As the need for community contribution increases you go down the incline. As your proprietary control over the code increases you go up the incline.

Later I amended this into the open source development incline, taking a variety of development models into account.

The point about most code intended for online use is that it is not usually at the bottom of the incline. Even Google is not at the bottom of the incline, although it’s an open source citizen in good standing. Google does not support the AGPL.

But what about data? Who decides the status of online data? Does that decision lie with you or with the company hosting the data?

Facebook has defined data as software and released its work into the wild, saying it’s just following the tenets of open source.

When you look at open vs. closed in a software world, open sounds marvelous. Look at it in a data frame, as in your data is open unless you say not, and Senators spy a privacy violation. Especially if, until recently, you’ve been defining yourself as a private network safe for kids, not an open part of the regular Web.

It’s pretty easy for software to move up and down the open source incline. For data it’s proving problematic.

Open source is a product of the Internet, and its success rides on Internet values.

A key Internet value is low switching costs. (Well, no switching costs.) So when the costs of switching are low or non-existent, an open approach is going to win out over time.

(Amazon sells these wooden Maxim train switches for just $9.99. For two! How do you like those low switching costs.)

Google groks this. The secrets to their success are open. Everyone who wants to knows about their use of low cost PCs, about their dark fiber purchases, about their concern over energy costs. Many of their key algorithms are also open.

No, not the “secret search source” — but having that would just let outsiders manipulate results. Open is not a suicide pact.

Facebook also groks this. Its opportunity came when rival MySpace was bought by Fox, which wanted to tie the social network’s audience to its brands. With switching costs being zero, Facebook began benefiting immediately. They learned the lesson.

All of which makes statements like this from Mark Cuban, that Microsoft can benefit from buying Facebook, ridiculous. (As ridiculous as the Mavs falling 3-1 behind a seven seed.)

Switching costs are too low for any proprietary embrace to work. Open source credibility matters more than anyone imagines. So open must be the mantra, even when introducing something no one else has.

Traditional business analysis holds that switching costs are never zero, and that they are constantly rising. This is not true on the Internet, and this benefits those companies that are most open.

I can go to Bing right now. They do a good search service. And you can switch to Gizmodo just as quickly. That’s why I am dancing so fast.

This idea of no switching costs does not exist (yet) in the world of Internet clients. I admire what Jason Perlow is doing, switching entirely to Linux from Windows, but the market won’t follow because that entails high switching costs. Apple would likely benefit more from a rejection of Microsoft than Linux, despite its platforms being highly proprietary. Switching costs matter in that space.

But those switching costs can be reduced. What Google is really doing with Android is providing an iPhone alternative that is not only competitive, and similar in terms of usability, but also has open written all over it.

Over the long run a combination of being open with low switching costs is going to win. The question, then is how long that run is. After all, as John Maynard Keynes said, in the long run we’re all dead.

The battle between Google and government widened considerably this week, with Google seeking to identify evil policies for its users and governments calling Google’s own policies evil.

(Google-is-evil logo from Scroogled and TechRepublic’s GeekEnd.)

The battle is important for the future of open source, because as governments gain effective power over Internet resources they make it harder for open source collaboration to happen in all spheres.

Sometimes, as in collaboration between criminal gangs or terrorists, that’s government’s idea. Sometimes, as in the case of an autocratic government seeking to keep knowledge of what it’s doing from reaching the world, that idea is also evil.

The governments of 10 western countries called Google evil yesterday because its street view and buzz services lack what they call privacy protections. People are clearly visible on those streets, the governments charge. Google is violating privacy, but also “data protection laws and cultural norms.”

Cultural norms? That’s one of those phrases that can make a reporter go hmmm. If every government expects to police a global network so as not to offend “cultural norms,” defining those norms arbitrarily, do we still have a global network?

Iran’s cultural norms may tell bloggers they have no right to write. Burma’s may tell users they have no rights at all. Or so the governments of those countries might say.

Are the governments supporting the good of their citizens, or just their own prerogatives? Once the questioning starts, it doesn’t end, and Google can keep the questions coming with data.

For example. You want evil disinfected, you say? Sunshine is a great disinfectant.

Google’s government requests tool is primitive, it doesn’t show numbers from China, but it’s a demonstration of what Google can do, when it wants to, to blow the lid off government hypocrisy.

Who is evil enough to demand user data from Google? We are. The United States of America. Also the U.K.. And India. Who’s most active in demanding access be removed from Google servers? Germany, India, and the U.S. again.

But also, curiously, Brazil. Brazil leads both categories. Brazil likes to say it’s the best friend open source has. Is it really, or is that love a one-way street, where open source gives and Brazil just takes, then beats open source values whenever it gets into its cups?

It’s not just Google vs. China any more. This battle between Google and governments is going to continue, on a global scale.

World War III is virtual.

There was lots of chirping this weekend about something called the WePad. (Picture from Neofonie Gmbh via our Crave blog.)

Our friends at CNET don’t even know if it’s real. The German maker, Neofonie,  does enterprise and Web 2.0 but is best known for its search system. It’s based in Berlin and says it’s hiring.

The WePad first surfaced in March, an Atom-based 11 inch pad running Android and standard Linux.

Is this the iPad killer? No, but it’s part of the process.

The concept of Google, and to an extent of Intel, which is running Android on Atom chips, is that anyone who can make Far East connections on one side and retail connections on the other can be in the iPad business.

This has always been a Japanese or American secret. Japanese perfected the mass production of quality electronics, turning America into their development and marketing lab. Americans financed better combinations and got around the Japanese by going to China via Taiwan.

Everything was wrapped up in Non Disclosure Agreements (NDA) and fancy contracts, then Apple perfected this business model. The success of Apple over the last decade — the whole “i” thing (Mac, Pod, Phone, Pad)  — is about making this proprietary business model work for the mass market.

Now it’s being opened up. So it’s fitting that the first outfit to pop up here is German. They are the tip of what I suspect may be a very large iceberg. Expect Singaporean, Indian, and even American entrepreneurs to be jumping in all summer, along with some coalitions whose provenance is murkily multi-cultural.

It’s going to be fun.

Yesterday’s discussion of DOS windows was stimulating to me.

(I think One Trick Pony, released 30 years ago, is one of Paul Simon’s most underrated works. It was written as a movie soundtrack, and when the movie disappeared it was forgotten. Check out the 2004 remaster at Amazon.com.)

Your talkbacks pointed to a key difference between the era when Ubuntu was developed and the era we’re in now, and why Ubuntu has trouble cracking the mainstream desktop while Google feels so confident about Android.

That is the difference between applications and apps.

Ubuntu was built for applications. Open Office is an application. Firefox is an application.

Applications are usually large, general purpose programs that can do many different things. They were built on top of operating systems as tools people could use to have their computers do what they wanted. (Small applications are often called utilities.)

The complexity of an application means you need to learn stuff to get value from it. Its high value also means you may be willing to learn that stuff. Ubuntu is strong in many small language markets where the time bite of customization is made worthwhile by that high value.

An app is different.

An app has limited functionality. It’s designed to do one thing, not as a means to an end but an end in itself.

Pull out your Android or iPhone. Turn it on. Go to your main screen. Many of the standard apps you will see are small bits of what a Web browser can do. Stocks. Maps. YouTube. Weather. Messaging.

On a desktop you have one program to do all that. The browser can be whatever you want it to be.

On a mobile device the app is limited to what its creator wants to let you do.

That is why Android may well prove to be a more powerful, and successful, Linux distro than Ubuntu was, within its target market. (There are many successful Ubuntu server set-ups. Ubuntu really makes a neat server.)

Android is based on apps. You download an app, the icon appears in your tray, you press it once, and it does its thing. It’s a one trick pony. (Hence the image.)

When an app doesn’t load or dies you toss it. There’s no great loss. An application is different. When it doesn’t work you have a big problem. Your device can become a brick. It may take real expertise to get you going.

This is the way people approach technology in 2010. It’s not 1980 anymore. (And the iPhone is more powerful than any PC then on the market.) The hardware is cheap as chips, the software is a utility.

Most people are no more willing to muck around inside their devices than TV viewers were in 1970 to open the back of their sets. ( I worked in TV repair then. Most never even cleaned the cases. Many were surprised to see their yellow sets come back from my workbench white.)

It makes no sense to condemn users as idiots. You follow the market in business. You do what the market wants.

They want apps. Let them eat apps. Linux can give them apps. Android apps. Meego apps. Chromium apps. Apps, apps and more apps.

Not applications. Apps.

Matt Asay suggests that Google and Sun made the same bets on the future, and so far only Google has won. (To the right, the best CEO ponytail evah!)

I would like to respectfully disagree. Not just that they made the same bet. But that Google has won.

Let’s review our history first.

Sun came to open source as a large, proprietary hardware business. Its revenue was, and is, driven by sales of servers, not software. And that business was sinking long before Scott McNealy made his dramatic turnaround on open source.

Google, by contrast, is a product of the open source ethos. It has no proprietary baggage. More important, its constant emphasis on cost reduction in delivering Internet services has made it enormously profitable.

In open source Sun bet on tools, on Java and mySQL. It bet on the business side of the open source market.

Google is betting on the consumer side. Its Android and Chromium projects are designed to enable mass market Linux devices of all types — handheld, tablet, and laptop.

Finally, and most important, we don’t yet know whether Google has won its bet. The different financial pictures of the underlying companies make it impossible to see any result.

What’s clear in Sun’s case is that open source was not the business. Hardware was always the business. Open source was a way to put lipstick on that pig and have it dance hoping someone would want to buy  it.

That someone was always assumed to be IBM, but it turned out to be Oracle, which lacked IBM’s commitment to open source and didn’t see the lipstick, only a barbeque.

What’s clear in Google’s case is that its revenue is still driven by advertising. Open source is an even smaller portion of its revenue stream than it was for Sun, back in its ponytailed heyday.

Ads still subsidize everything Google does. The acquisition of Doubleclick turbocharged Google’s results, because its technology and sales efforts were combined with Google’s low infrastructure costs. Android is still not “accretive” to earnings — as the Wall Streeters say.

And it’s hard to tell when that might happen. Google’s intent here is to increase Web traffic, to widen mobile data streams so they are no different from fixed, and know it will get its share of the increased wealth that generates.

So to summarize. Sun was about hardware, Google about services. Sun was sinking when it came to open source, Google was rising. We don’t know that Sun’s open source efforts brought it anything more than a suitor, and Google’s success with open source may always remain opaque, impossible to measure in a bottom line way.

Other than that, they’re identical.

Google’s apparent decision to open source the VP8 video codec will mostly be discussed today in terms of Google’s ambitions, about Google TV, and about HTML5. (Image from CNET.)

But there’s another reason to celebrate, something not considered remarkable by the rest of the media.

An open source codec is no longer that big a deal.

It’s hard to believe that just a couple of years ago, the idea of a truly open source codec, like Theora, was considered a sign of the apocalypse by Hollywood.

But after this favorite of the FSF found its way into the VLC Player (with 152 million served and counting) the world did not come to an end.

All the predictions of doom from having an off-patent codec that did not have to follow Digital Rights Management rules turned out to be wrong. In fact it’s easier to put a video into a blog post today than a photo or other flat image.

As X264dev wrote back in February, the war against open source video is over and open source won. Even Microsoft now enables a free competitor to its Silverlight, called Moonlight. Adobe’s decision to fight the power rather than get in line with it was the wrong decision.

By making VP8 open source, Google has a good chance of getting it included in the final HTML5 specs, which will finally embed video into basic Web standards. Open source — free, unencumbered open source — is going to become the default for basic Web video.

And what about Hollywood? Well, they’re going to do what all smart industries do, when the low end becomes a commodity. They’re going up-market.

The rise of 3-D, with such movies as Avatar, Alice in Wonderland and Clash of the Titans, is causing new investment by and new interest in movie houses that were dropping like newspapers last year. It’s the biggest thing since Cinemascope, the widescreen format from the 1950s aimed at fighting off TV.

It will be interesting to see what happens to Avatar when it drops as a home video on Earth Day. The studio is putting as much technology as it can into the home version, but it’s still a 2-D movie. Can the excitement of 3-D create 2-D sell-through?

My guess is it can. So Hollywood will survive VP8. An open source codec is no longer a big deal.

And that’s a big deal indeed.

The U.S. Appeals Court has kicked the idea of net neutrality, as applied by the FCC, to the curb.

(This was Google’s logo on April 1, 2010.)

The FCC says it will fight on. Congresscritters insist they will be heard from.

Big deal. The Bells can beat both with one wire tied behind their backs.

There’s really only one reason why Comcast, AT&T and Verizon aren’t handing out bandwidth with an eye-dropper and telling you what Web sites you may or may not visit right now.

Google.

Mike Loukides at O’Reilly was among the first to grok this truth. As I have written here many times, Google has a huge cost advantage when it comes to creating Internet transactions of all kinds — search, file transfers, you name it. It has spent its corporate life fighting this cost battle, and its victories give it the whip hand in the core of the network.

But if monopolies exist at the edge, and if the monopolists at that edge choose to press home their monopoly, then Google’s cost advantages in the core mean nothing. If a monopoly ISP wants to make Bing searches look faster they can. If they want to slow YouTube to a crawl they can. If they just want to demand bribes to allow access to “their” customers, they can.

So despite the fact it’s a cash sink, Google must be a threat at the network edge, at least until rules are in place banning its disenfranchisement or until some other form of competition arrives.

I have written to the point of boring you that wholesaling the last mile would assure competition, provide market incentives for more bits (rather than fewer) at the edge, and bring Moore’s Law to your doorstep, faster than anything else.

Most political analysts who have looked at the question have concluded that this is politically impossible. The Bells are just too strong.

That’s another reason why Google’s presence at the edge, or the threat of that presence, is vital. Its fiber contest set state regulators and urban leaders scrambling to create conditions that would help them win. Google’s relationship with Topeka is just one illustration of just how far cities will go.

In taking that journey, state and local authorities learn just how much of a stranglehold the present broadband monopoly has on their economies. That’s a political message no amount of contributions to a candidate can match.

The best response Bell shills like Scott Cleland can offer in response is that the Google is in bed with the Obama Administration (as if the Bells and Bushies weren’t closer than circuit lines on a RAM chip).

More important, however, is that the charge does not address the threat, which is that local and state authorities will learn the link between more bits and growth, figure out they’ve been had, and demand change. Every city and town applying to Google for fiber is learning this lesson.

Google isn’t trying to bring fiber to every home. It doesn’t have to. Its threat to compete has broken a political monopoly, making people think of broadband in a different way, and encouraged the idea that market competition is our best protection in the net neutrality debate.

Which it is.

Despite all the efforts of Canonical and Ubuntu, desktop Linux remains a non-factor n the market.

Fewer than 1 in 100 desktops in the U.S. run Linux, and most are in the hands of developers, not consumers.

Application developers who want to support Linux are now getting the message and, reluctantly, dropping their support of consumer desktop applications.

On its blog, Songbird developer George Auberger called the decision to drop Linux support from the open source music player “painful.”

Some of you may wonder how a company with deep roots in Open Source could drop Linux and we want you to know it isn’t without heartache.
 We have a small engineering team here at Songbird, and, more than ever, must stay very focused on a narrow set of priorities. Trying to deliver a raft of new features around all media types, and across a growing list of devices, we had to make some tough choices.

Some analysts will be quick to call this the death knell of Linux outside the server, and when it comes to the traditional desktop — keyboard, big TV, mouse on the counter, box under the desk — they may well be right.

But Android phones run Linux. Chromium netbooks will run Linux. Meego phones are Linux. Handheld Linux is going strong, and those applications will filter into other types of devices over time.

It’s not just the dream of desktop Linux that’s ending. It’s the desktop era.

One of the last big hits of the pre-PC gaming era was Ogre, which came out in 1977. Production costs were slashed as one player had one piece, the Ogre, and the other player had all the rest.

Apple played its own hand of Ogre at about that time. Its Apple II was the Ogre, a closed ecosystem. Its array of opponents supported the late Ed Roberts’ S-100 bus.

The game ended in 1981 when IBM combined the marketing of Apple with the open architecture of the S-100 in the IBM PC. It was like mom calling us all inside to put on our suits and go back to school.

Flash forward 30 years and Apple is playing a second round. IBM is in its rear-view mirror, Apple now almost $40 billion ahead in market cap.

The other player in this case is Google, with its Android. They’re the next generation.

As open source, the Android has all the advantages of Ed Roberts’ bus, and more. Google is responsible for making the base technology competitive, and the other players can twist it into any shape they choose. Combine everyone’s marketing budgets and the game is about equal.

ComScore has the Android at number four in the market, but as Dick Clark would say, with a bullet. Apple has a quarter of the market, and (believe it or not) President Obama and his Blackberry-wielding friends still hold a steady 40%.

But I must question whether the Blackberry really is a smart phone, in the way that the iPhone and Android are. It’s about high-volume messaging, quick hits of data, and a keyboard. The iPhone re-defined the architecture, the Android followed, and with the iPad that architecture is now all grown-up.

Our own Matt Asay and the great Cory Doctorow insist the debate is about “hackability” — the power of users to customize the device and make it their own.

I think they’re both wrong. I think this is about the power of ecosystems.

It’s the same argument we had in the Ogre days, back when I had hair. It’s a battle between centralized power and decentralized competition.

There’s not a snowball’s chance in hellfire Apple’s lawyers can stop the game — Blackberry survived a worse patent nightmare.

This game is going to play out to the end. Mom’s not calling you away to supper early this time, Mr. Jobs.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to get down my Bowie, Costello and Steely Dan LPs, fire up the old 8-track in my AMC Pacer, settle down and enjoy the show. The question that began the PC revolution is still out there, waiting to be answered. Will it be?

In the run-up to today’s move by Google to switch Google.cn to Google.hk and get around China’s content filters, I have been struggling to understand talkbacks indicating many of my countrymen appear to be rooting for China.

The obvious answer is they fear the Google. Google will give you as much power as you give it, take as much data as it is given, asking only to run ads against the results.

But for many Americans this is too much. They see Google as trying to profit from their private data and (more important) see it as destroying privacy. How can you have secrets when Google can reveal them?

That’s an interesting point, but it seems to me it’s aimed more at the Internet itself than at Google. The vacuuming and sorting of data has always been inherent in the Internet promise. You have little choice but to obey the call. If an employer can’t Google you hard questions are asked. (I’m looking at you, John Smith.)

There is a second reason for cheering on China.

Google is soft power. The hallmark of Obama Administration foreign policy is using “soft power” — that is, everything we have short of war. Our words, our financial might, our style, our sassy.

Many Americans don’t believe in soft power. It’s a political stance. They believe in hard power, in guns and “the troops.” They see any success of soft power as threatening troop levels and military budgets.

Here is a third reason to hope Google loses.

Many don’t want it to win the argument. And there will be an argument. The real argument may be hidden behind rhetoric, “freedom” on one side and “order” on the other.

But disquieting questions can be asked. You say we try to manage the thoughts of our people — what about your Texas School Board? We don’t filter out Thomas Jefferson. They do. All governments and societies do such things. Australia does.

You say we prohibit bad thoughts. What’s wrong with that? You like child pornography? You want to give free rein to Islamic terrorists? Neither do we. The location of these borders are questions of national sovereignty.

The struggle between freedom and order, the border of freedom and license, of order and tyranny, is not a black-and-white struggle, the Chinese will say. It is shades of gray. Denying us our color palette is an assault on us.

These are hard questions. But they are worthwhile questions. An honest discussion of them could be beneficial to everyone, Chinese and American alike.

If Google is really smart it will sponsor such discussions. Given the deep opposition of so many in America to what it is doing, dialogue seems to be its only hope of victory.

The central question driving consumer markets is brand. What usually drives the business market is reputation.

Apple represents brand. A brand is more than a picture and a slogan. A brand is an assurance of value and protection for the customer. (Picture photoshopped by Brandon Perlow of Spidermonkey.com for Jason Perlow of ZDNet.)

The American flag is a brand. It brings with it certain values, values worth saluting. The values themselves lie in the Constitution, and the brand can fall short while maintaining its value.

Apple is the same way, just like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. Buyers choose these brands because they fulfill expectations, they deliver what they promise, they are safe choices.

Google depends on its reputation. Reputation carries some assurances of a brand, but it’s more delicate. Reputation can disappear (Tiger Woods) in a flash. Because maintaining your reputation requires credibility. It means you walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

Open source is not a democracy, it is an assurance of fair dealing and equal rights. It’s reputation. That’s a lot harder to maintain than a mere brand.

Corporate reputations mean a lot when businesses look to do business with you. Intel Inside is an ingredient brand based on reputation. You have an assurance when you align with Intel that goes beyond the co-op money. Reputation is a brand you can carry into a boardroom, that can sign contracts and stick by them.

Most of the struggle between open source and proprietary models this last decade has been about reputation and brand. Open source is about reputation. Small things that won’t bother a brand, like changing your license to demand attribution, can destroy your reputation and must be walked-back in open source.

A brand can smile in public and conduct hard dealing in private. That’s what Apple, and its branded content partners, have done with the iPhone and will do with the iPad. A brand is safe for children, meaning it follows the law rigorously, and enforces its own version to protect itself and its customers.

The question of evil is in the eye of the legal department with a brand, it’s in the eye of the PR department with a reputation.

Reputation is more adult. It’s less about value than about values. Google’s work on TVs is of a piece with its decision to walk away from China. It really had no choice. It defined the term evil, it staked its reputation on the definition, and it would have lost that reputation had it acted differently.

A brand does business, in other words, while a reputation is more of a political thing. Barack Obama and Sarah Palin may appear to be brands, but they are in fact reputations. They could disappear tomorrow while their brands, Democratic and Republican, would remain intact.

What open source and the Internet have done is force reputation to the fore, threatening the flexibility of brand with daylight. I don’t know how that struggle will play out, but it’s fascinating to watch.

I know to many readers all this may seem airy-fairy, theoretical, over your head. So apply it to your own life. Think about what your brand means, what your reputation means, and how you would respond against threats to either one. Then put them in the talkbacks.

If you wanted to make money whose side would you rather be on, the guy with 64% market share or the guy with 15% market share.

Open source developers want to be with the 15% share, according to a new analysis from Black Duck Software. (Picture from Quantcast.)

Are they a bunch of daffy Donalds, or do they know something?

Many are no doubt standing on principle.

That principle got a human face when Tim Bray joined Google recently from Oracle (Sun). Ol’ Tim came in  filled with piss and vinegar, calling Android “an unambiguously good thing” and saying of the iPhone, “I hate it.” It’s not Mel Gibson in Braveheart, but we’re hoping this movie turns out differently.

Apple’s suit against HTC, focused on its introduction of multi-touch technology, has hardened hearts on both sides. If there’s one thing open source developers like it’s a crusade against an easily-identified villain. Bray’s appointment was well played.

For developers, Android is the momentum play. The iPhone market is still growing. It’s just that the Android market is growing faster.

Android also lets developers play with multiple vendors on both the carrier and phone fronts. You can support the Motorola Droid as well as the HTC. Your data can go through Verizon as well as AT&T. Developers like that.

But for Android to keep this momentum among developers it needs to keep its momentum in the marketplace. Google needs more carriers and more manufacturers, people who worry about things like lawsuits.

And it needs to expand beyond North America. Quantcast says the iPhone is actually stronger in Europe, a more mature mobile market, than it is here.  Mobile market trends don’t usually start here and flow outward. For years they have been starting in Asia, moving to Europe, and then sweeping through the Americas.

Still, this year is going to be fun.

“If Apple wants to be a real leader, it should be fostering innovation and competition, rather than acting as a jealous and arbitrary feudal lord.”

Is that a quote from Richard Stallman? From Steve Ballmer? Some dirty hippie blogger like myself?

Nope, it’s Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Fred von Lohmann (right), responding to his own “get,” a copy of the iPhone Developer License Agreement, now posted on the EFF Web site. (Picture from ZDNet Government.)

How convenient of Tim Bray to land at Google on such a propitious day. This has to be considered an enormous opportunity for Google to attract developers to the Android platform.

In his own blog post about the document, called a legal analysis, von Lohmann says he got the document through a Freedom of Information Act request, after noticing that NASA has an app in the Apple app store.

What makes this relevant to open source is von Lohmann’s charge that iPhone developers are forbidden from even allowing interoperability with open source software in their apps. “If Apple’s mobile devices are the future of computing, you can expect that future to be one with more limits on innovation and competition than the PC era that came before.”

In early trading the stock was down one percent, a loss of over $2 billion in market cap.  That may have nothing to do with this story, however. Google was down a similar amount. Major averages were down marginally.

Apple’s suit against HTC could end one of two ways.

Either Apple becomes the next SCO, which ran itself aground claiming rights to Linux, or it becomes the next Microsoft, which is prospering while claiming to own Linux.

The answer depends on how hard Apple presses its case.

You can get a clue by looking at who Apple has sued. While the suit is actually about the Android operating system Google sponsors, the company has been careful to only go after one of its OEMs, a Taiwanese one at that.

That’s a strike-at-the-weak strategy. You get the best deal you can with a weak player and then use that against the strong. The emphasis here is on the word weak.

On the other hand there is every indication Apple is willing to go to trial. As Larry Dignan noted last week, this could quickly put it into court against both Google and Microsoft. It would be a legal Vietnam.

Jason Perlow wrote last week about a technical cure for any problems caused by the suit — virtualization. You can’t sue what’s common, and virtualization could make a fight against rivals like trying to grab clouds.

The real cost in going to trial and claiming to own the smartphone space is more subtle. Apple could become a laughing stock, as SCO did. The intent of our patent and copyright regimes is to encourage innovation, not discourage it, and seeking control of the whole smartphone market does not encourage innovation.

There are enormous public relations risks in becoming a public plaintiff in patent court. Many people will, as a result of such a suit, avoid the plaintiff’s products as a way of weighing-in. This is what really happened to SCO — its sales dried up.

Had Apple sued Google directly, I might give credence to this. SCO sued IBM. You go after the strong when you seek to run the patent table.

Could that happen to Apple? Yes, I do. At least one market researcher thinks Android sales could pass those of the iPhone in two years.

Which brings me back to Microsoft.

I have written here that the way Microsoft views its own patent efforts, like its recent agreement deal with Amazon, is as a way to take patents off the competitive table. Microsoft is using legal threats to create patent peace between it and its rivals, freeing its engineers to concentrate on creating things, not dealing with lawyers.

Apple doesn’t really innovate. Apple doesn’t really litigate. Apple markets.

If Apple can settle these suits under favorable terms it can also win patent peace with Microsoft. This would free it to create iPhones as the market directs, rather than within constraints of lawyers and patent rights.

That’s the way I think it will play. Apple will settle. Apple is not stupid.

The low-hanging fruit in the renewable energy business still lies with efficiency. Cutting your energy use without crimping your lifestyle gives you a faster payback than turning into Ed Begley Jr.

It’s still good to be a little Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) on energy use, even if your politics are to the right of Rush Limbaugh, because there’s money in saving, money you can spend on cigars or vacations. Or food.

So I was pleased to see my little business interrupted last week by a Georgia Power contractor installing a new digital power meter on my house (right).

For the power company the benefits are obvious. No more tramping out to Winter Avenue every month to read the meter, waking up the neighbor’s dogs and putting the Neighborhood Watch on edge.

For me the benefits were less obvious until later in the day, when Google announced they would open source their PowerMeter API.

The API lets companies like The Energy Detective integrate their offerings directly into meters like the bad boy Georgia Power has just delivered.

While I have invested a lot of money in insulation over the last five years, this could let me find where my remaining heat sinks are. The power company itself might now want to offer that service.

Whether this comes to me as a device or as a paid service, open source is providing an incentive for it to be offered. This won’t provide the savings of insulating your attic, but it will cost you a lot less, and thus its return on investment should be quicker.

The announcement by Twitter that it is switching to Cassandra for its database lookups puts new attention on a project that has yet to reach Version 1.0.

Cassandra had been underway long before Oracle bought Sun and mySQL. Facebook first launched it in 2008 to power their inbox search feature. It was released on Google Code in 2008 and became an Apache Incubator project last year.

Apache describes it simply as “a highly scalable, eventually consistent, distributed, structured key-value store, not a database.” It rides as an interface between a relational database and a high-traffic Web presence. The latest release is 0.5.1,

Cassandra itself is not a database. But it does allow someone to use a variety of open source databases and deliver a consistent, high volume write function to a Web page. The project is not ruling out working with a variety of proprietary databases, including Oracle.

While this does not mean a direct replacement for mySQL, Cassandra does perform the goal of mySQL opponents in liberating them from dependence on the underlying mySQL code during implementations.

Since I began writing this blog in 2005 I have watched open source move from a fringe idea to something embraced by the IT mainstream.

But there are still extremists out there who want to destroy open source. Some of their names may surprise you.

What they have done is retreat into a group where they seek not to be identified.

The International Intellectual Property Alliance dates from 1984, before open source began, and is thus the perfect front group for this activity.

It’s a coalition of seven groups that together comprise the copyright industry:

• The Association of American Publishers (AAP)
• The Business Software Alliance (BSA)
• The Entertainment Software Association (ESA)
• The Independent Film & Television Alliance (IFTA)
• The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
• The National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA)
• The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)

Most of these groups are not involved in software, except as users. The exceptions are the BPA and ESA.

The IPAA’s focus is on so-called Special 301 Reviews. It’s an annual review of our trading partners’ policies conducted by the U.S. Trade Representative. This can result in countries going on a Watch List making it harder to trade in these goods.

Most of the countries the IPAA wants on the lists are either havens for piracy or have laws that don’t give as much protection to American movies, music and TV as the industry wants. Industry is apparently especially suspicious of Canada and Mexico.

But Edinburgh professor Andres Guadamuz has learned the group is now also going after open source, urging that countries go on the watch list if they merely encourage the idea.

This is not something that came from the music or movie industries. Both benefit enormously from open source, both in the creation of their products and in opening new markets.

This comes from the ESA and BSA. Let me focus on the BSA.

The BSA has long focused on piracy. Piracy is a problem. Piracy is bad.

But open source is a cure for piracy. It brings programmers from other countries into the software creation process. Its contracts let poor countries use software legally.

If the BSA’s position has reversed, if it now wants to use the force of the U.S. government to drive open source under, then its members are also against open source. But the BSA’s membership includes IBM, HP, Cisco, Adobe, and Dell — some of the biggest boosters and biggest beneficiaries of open source on the planet.

It’s time to ask these companies. Do you agree with the position of the trade group you belong to? Should you continue to support a trade group that is acting against your corporate interests?

Or are you playing a double game, supporting open source in public while trying to destroy it in private?