Get lots of random people working on your tools for you!

I mean… both ends of the deal get something… but I could imagine this is the answer for “how do we leverage our community like an open source project does?”

go beavs.

So yeah, OSL FTW. If you are a manager/oss-lover type, and interested in joining the fun, you should check this out.

update: goto jobs.oregonstate.edu and search for #0000693.

I thought it would be appropriate to talk about my experience at Mozilla via a chronological “highlights reel”. So yeah, here it is…

Polvi’s Mozilla Highlights Reel / Shout-out frenzy

June 2005 - June 2006

• Being hired!
• Supporting and befriending Justdave (he was the only sysadmin when I started)
• Implementing the Linux Virtual Server infrastructure that powers www, addons, aus, and various other things
• Researching and purchasing an network wide backup solution
• Being a booth-babe at OSCON with Mary and Rebron
• Getting Mitchell and others kicked out of a bar at OSCON
• Realizing that Brendan Eich was Brendan Eich
• Trips to the colo with Myk, in particular our discussion about profit and cost centers
• Releasing developer.mozilla.org
• Making Deb happy by releasing developer.mozilla.org
• The hour of terror
• Tejava
• Watching 5 seasons of Buffy with Mac daddy Aas
• An all night bug triage with justdave
• Riding in Stuart’s Lotus, “Heyyyy, wanna take me for a riiiiiiiddddddde?”
• Sneezing so hard I broke my powerbook
• Being one with spreadfirefox (the performance, the hacks, and the community)
• Getting locked in my garage in Mountain View on a Saturday at 1am when my roommate was gone for the weekend, and having Chase pick me up and take me to the Office (no keys, shoes, phone, or wallet) for sustenance and an ssh connection
• Physically picking up and driving cvs.mozilla.org across town
• Interviewing Aravind
• Having an engineering manager be hired
• Having a IT manager be hired
• The hand scanner at the colo!
• Trembling as I put www.mozilla.com into production, diverting a majority of www.mozilla.org traffic to it during the Firefox 1.5 release AND having the most kind and gracious moral support from Paul Kim while I did it (I had not physically met Paul at this point… seriously Paul, that was awesome, thanks again)
• Meeting Paul Kim
• The run around the office saying hi to everyone during the first 10min being on-site
• Screaming out Steven Garrity (from acts of volition radio!!!) at an inappropriate time
• Working with morgamic
• Working with morgamic to stabilize addons
• One hardcore night of Perl profiling with Shaver
• Being honored as Oregon State University’s Student Employee of the Year
• Going to nVidia to a “what’s up” with Jensen, Stuart, Vlad, Jonas and Oremj
• Any interaction with Karen
• Justin’s calm and helpful explanations of hosted environments, dealing with vendors, ASPs, and life
• Learning python
• Meeting preed at a LUG meeting before meeting him at work
• Developing a big enough collection of mozilla shirts that I can be constantly wearing a clean one (thanks marcia!! :)
• Talkin’ shop with Lilly and Schrep
• Learning the innards of mysql
• Taking a first look at mozilla statistics
• Being given guidance while looking at mozilla statistics

Whew!

Surely I left plenty-o-experience and people out, sorry about that… I’m human! (heart)

So, what’s next? In a couple weeks I’ll be moving across the country (NYC) to work for Google. Why? Well, it’s an experience thing. Mozilla has treated me extremely well and it is really hard to just get up and leave, but I’m still young and impressionable, so I need diverse work experience. I’m excited about learning completely new things, meeting completely new people, and understanding a completely different company.

I have no idea what I am doing after the summer is over. Nor do I have any idea what I’ll be doing when I graduate from college (spr ‘07).

I would especially like to thank the “powers that be” at Mozilla for supporting students. My heart is filled with joy because this year we have more students than ever working for the project.

So yeah, thanks for the amazing experience!

PS: If anyone is in NYC this summer around July 16 — I’ll be having my 21er! Parrrtay

Open Source + Service
This model is based around the idea that software is a service industry, not a manufacturing one. Open source lends it self to this, so these companies follow the model. The software is free and the customers pay for service contracts. (RedHat)

Mixed
Using closed source addons to generate revenue on top of an open source product. (Tripwire)

Open Source + Buy Off
Licensing tricks so that companies can make modifications to ‘open source’ software with out disclosing their changes. (MySQL)

Open Source + Aggregation
Package up open source software so they are dead easy to use, then sell the package.

Open Source + Hardware
Use an open source platform on hardware. (NetApp)

In my eyes, the model that stays closest to the mantra of free and open source software is “Open Source + Service”. However, this model is also weak. As the article pointed out, “venture capitalists don’t like the service-only model because the margins on service are invariably lower than those for proprietary software.” (p.56) On top of that, it does not seem like it would be that much fun to be in the service industry.

“Mixed” and “Open Source + Buy Off” are clear evil. A mixed model is nothing more then a free trial. Sure, it may be a robust trial, but the developer is holding code back. It seems like a self created conflict of interest. The buy off method seems like a cheap trick in order to make some money. If a company is sold the right to not distribute changes, they effectively became a leach. If companies using this model are successful, the communities will not be, and everything is lost.

What is a good model? We need a model that does not stomp on the contributors, promotes community, and is not a support shop! How do we do it? Not really sure. I am in love with the Ubuntu model (Ubundel), but they have yet to show a sustainable future. This is sort of expected, since they are forging the way. New models will be followed out of their ambitious lead. But what’s next?

I purpose a model that applies open source practices outside of the software industry. This time we do not take Open Source and tack on some money making revenue, we use open source itself.

The Open Source Model
The communities are the core, in fact, they are the company. Start a community that is a revenue generator. Anyone can work for the company, and the individuals are paid via contribution, not via hour. The company would list what projects they are working on and any one interested could come on board.

What sort of projects would this work for? Only the rewarding ones. If this was a development shop creating boring software, nobody would participate. However, if we were working on projects that supported humanity, had people think outside themselves, or were straight up sexy, it would be unstoppable. The pace would accelerate as it grew. The bittorrent of business models!

Free Code (for sale) exemplified that open source models are still limited to one off successes. The models that they and I proposed are not perfect, and will not be, but they are a step in the right direction. Free and open source software has so much inherent value that it has already solidified its future, we just need to do a little backwards thinking to get there.

The sweater was custom made by a local emblem shop in Salem, OR. It features a tux, mozilla, and a gnu (oh, the irony).
Go Beavs! Go F/OSS!

Katrina, the lovely model.

More photos.

The Ubuntu community provided all the framework for the discussion. Also, I really think they can pull it off.

• Launchpad (ubuntu thing)
• Wiki page (long detailed version)
• Ubuntu-devel thread (not sure if anyone is going to care)

However, in the final paragraph they quote me, “We don’t really have education for open source software here on campus,” he said. “I can go to my computer science classes and learn nothing about this software.” This is not true. For example, I have a class that focuses on the Linux operating system.

The intent was for it to read more like:

“We don’t really have education for open source software here on campus,” he said. “I can go to my computer science classes and learn nothing about this process.”

So yeah:

s/software/process/

EECS is being very receptive, and progress is being made. We are already leaders and it seems like we are leveraging that.

If this money is spent well, I have a hunch that it will be the first of many such donations.

Read the press release: http://governor.oregon.gov/Gov/press_102505.shtml

Go beavs!

A play-by-play: The user requests a file from mirror C, and it does not have the file, so before sending a “File not found” it checks the master staging mirror if it has it, and it does! Mirror C then happily grabs the bits, passing them on to the user as it gets them. The mirror keeps a copy of the data for itself so it does not have to bother the master the next time a client comes around. Mirror C is now a cache for the master, and follows all rules governing contemporary caching.

Wait, this just convoluted things. However, if you combine the model with a few other tools, you create a grand unified mirroring toolkit (gumt, not guft :). In particular, lets throw bouncer and sentry into the mix.

As you probably already know, bouncer is the tool that powers the “download now” link on www.mozilla.org. Bouncer is a database back ended request-to-random-mirror distributor, for joy. Sentry is a script that checks mirrors integrity and adds/removes it from bouncers database.

The new way (using Firefox 1.5 as an example):

• 0: the release lands on the staging server
• 0.02 seconds later: Sentry sends off requests provoking each of the mirrors to grab the freshest of data
• 7.23 or so minutes: Sentry finishes its checks and updates the bouncer database.
• 7.24 minutes: The favorite news site picks up the link, and all our happy users download the latest release at ultra snappy speeds.

Well, look what we have here! After roughly 10 minutes (in theory) we have gotten our bits out the mirrors, made sure the data is legit, AND have records for where each users got their release (for the most part).

Technically, this all is achievable. Bouncer and Sentry are in use right now, with 2.0 coming out soon. The only non-trivial part is turning mirrors into pseudo-caches. Probably could be done with a mod_cache/proxy combo… maybe another mod_foo is in order for apache.

I meant this to be an RFC. Thoughts? Is this loony? Or is it already being done somewhere?

Oh yeah, forget about true FTP users.