A couple of random photos that Shona took on a recent family visit.

Laura

Hannah

I liked this article in slate a lot because it does a good job at summing up the social security debate.

Democrats support welfare for old people, on the grounds that it creates a safety net for capitalism's losers, who might otherwise live in poverty. Republicans oppose welfare for old people, on the grounds that it reduces incentives to work and save, it gives the government too much money to spend, and it makes people overly dependent on the government for their retirement.

There's an excellent panel from the Center for American Progress about the state of the Social Security system. The video is available at C-Span, but I don't know how long their videos are kept up there. It's worth taking the time to watch this, since the only people talking, or at least getting press, are the ones interested in removing the social security system and replacing it with something else. Here's a good quote:

"We actually passed consumption oriented tax cuts in the face of higher terrorism and defense costs that actually created a hole three times as large as the intial social security problem."

Chris Arnold does an excellent piece on Firefox on NPR's Morning Edition.

There's an interesting report on internetnews about Sun getting ready to open source a large chunk of code, which may include forked copies of all the assets that Red Hat recently purchased from AOL. I haven't seen anyone from Red Hat talk about these in any kind of public forum yet, other than the usual set of starch-filled press releases, so I thought I might use this forum to talk about some of the specifics of what Red Hat is doing. It should be very interesting for a lot of people out there in the larger software community. Red Hat has a history of being a pretty open company, and I think that I've been too silent on this issue for quite a while.

Just a bit of background. The main items that were acquired, in case you weren't paying attention, were the former Netscape Directory Server and Certificate Server and a bunch of other odds and ends, including the Mail Server and the old Netscape Enterprise Server (NES was Netscape's web server. That isn't really obvious from the name.) The deal also came with a bunch of wonderful and motivated people to develop and support the software. They are at Red Hat now. For those of you in the Mozilla community - maybe the really old community - some of the names might be familiar.

So why spend this money on this software? The main reason is that it fills a huge hole in the software stack for Red Hat's product offerings. Think about it. One of the things that we, as software developers who care about whether or not we're using open source software, have been missing is a decent directory server. No offense meant to the openldap folks, but it's well known that openldap doesn't scale as well as it needs to and is missing some very basic functionality that competing proprietary directory servers include today. The Netscape Directory Server is fast. And is full-featured. It's already used in some very large deployments. The software in question has been under active development for the last few years, and is quite mature and enterprise-ready.

As an open source software developer, how many times have you worried about where to store your data? How will it be structured? How will you search it? If you do want to add ties to a directory server, have you been nervous about building ties to a proprietary DS, and openldap hasn't been good enough? Well, we've been asking ourselves those problems as developers inside of Red Hat for quite a while and we've never had a good answer. Until now. The Directory Server and the other pieces of software fill a huge gap. I think it's an understatement to say that a lot of us are pretty excited about where this can go.

It's important to note that open source ideals and a commitment to open source software is at the heart of Red Hat's business model. We care about it. We live and breathe it every day. So when we get a huge pile of software that's important to us and the rest of the software ecosystem as this is, one of the first questions that we ask ourselves is how do we take this into the open source community? How do we make it successful? How do we make sure that it doesn't just add value for our customers as a product, but how do we make sure that it becomes part of the larger software ecosystem? The most logical answer, of course, is to build a successful open source software project out of the source code.

More and more often it seems that Red Hat is seen as the 400lb gorilla in the open source world. At least this is what I hear from people I talk to. We make people nervous. Personally, I worry about this perception. I've worked at Red Hat for a long time by Red Hat standards. I've watched us go from a company based on a business model selling t-shirts and mugs to one that makes a living adding tremendous value to the lives and business of our customers. And at the same time, we've managed to keep our core values intact. Those of you on the outside might not see it, but it's still there and we try to make sure that everyone who comes through our doors to work for us is implanted with that DNA.

We know that the perception of arrogance can make it nearly impossible to build an open source project that works. We'll need to get past that perception in order to make this project a success. Companies that open source software expecting "free help" to build their products within the narrow scope of vision as that company sees it aren't going to get it. In fact, they often get what they least expected. From where we sit, open source is a delicate balance of balancing business interests with the larger interests of the community. In order to build a successful project, you need to have a vibrant community that includes a variety of different viewpoints and users. The marketplace of ideas must be open for business. This means that Red Hat's developers must be seen as competent peers, not as undeserving despots. This project must be no different. Simply put: Don't be evil.

I talk of Nirvana, of course, and the road to get there is long and rocky. We're working on how to get from where we are today to the green, green grass over there on the other side of the river. We'll be open sourcing components as we can. We've still got to talk to our customers and figure out what they would like to see. We need to try to talk to the larger community and try to come up with a structure that works to build a large, outward-facing and successful project. And we need to get the source code ready. None of these tasks are small. But we're working on them. Stay tuned.

The ever wonderful Luis Villa points me at another great DRM-related talk that someone gave to MSFT. There's some good stuff in there.

DRM systems are usually broken in minutes, sometimes days. Rarely,
months. It's not because the people who think them up are stupid.
It's not because the people who break them are smart. It's not
because there's a flaw in the algorithms. At the end of the day,
all DRM systems share a common vulnerability: they provide their
attackers with ciphertext, the cipher and the key. At this point,
the secret isn't a secret anymore.

P.S. Lots of people mailed me to let me know that this and the previous post are both from Cory Doctorow.

Great post about why DRM is pretty evil.