The thing that may ultimately drag the open-source movement down into oblivion is a simple problem of social engineering: wildly divergent expectations of what obligations in fact are.
When Dave Winer finds that a server move gets sticky, messy, and difficult (and when there appears to be no possible rollback plan), his response is to pull the plug on websites hosted in the weblogs.com domain--hey, it's a free service, a free gift that he gave, and he has no obligation to provide notice or warning or anything beforehand before discontinuing it.
But people using weblogs.com--and people using other free and open-source internet services--may have different expectations about persistence and warning and notice and graceful shutdown, expectations that may well be very naive. But without those expectations of persistence and warning and notice and graceful shutdown, it's hard to see how anyone can justify building a system around free and open-source components. An internet in which open-source and free software are routinely used as building blocks is one in which expectations of persistence and warning and notice and graceful shutdown have to be validated. An internet in which you can expect persistence, et cetera only if you pay for it is a quite different animal:
Here's the story: as if thousands of weblogs cried out in pain and terror, and then were silent:
Wired News: Thousands of Blogs Fall Silent: By Michelle Delio | 12:00 PM Jun. 15, 2004 PT: Blogging pioneer Dave Winer unexpectedly closed Weblogs.com, his free blog-hosting service, on Sunday, leaving thousands of bloggers without access to their blogs. Blogs affected by the shutdown now redirect to a generic message posted by Winer.
Some bloggers are screaming that the shutdown is a serial "blog murder." Other bloggers slammed the people whose blogs have vanished from the Internet, saying that no one should expect continuity from a free service.... "So because it's free, people should bite their tongues about having their content wiped off the face of the earth with no warning?" responded another blogger, posting anonymously. "He couldn't even give them 30 minutes' notice to back stuff up?" And many bloggers simply posted messages thanking Winer for the memories and politely requested a copy of their blog's contents....
Winer, who has offered free hosting to bloggers for the past four years, has promised to make exportable copies of blog contents available to the blogs' owners at their request. He says it will take at least two weeks to provide copies of the blogs' contents. Meanwhile, the affected bloggers cannot access their work, a situation that angers many, who said they believed they should have been given advance notice that the Weblogs service would be terminated before their sites became inaccessible.
"The transition for the bloggers and the readers would have been far smoother and less painful if they had been warned," wrote David Weinberger, author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, on his blog.... Winer... [said] that he believed no matter how he had handled the shutdown, people would have complained. "On the Internet ... it hardly matters how well you do something, certain things happen and people will jump up and down. Just accept that," Winer said....
"This can't be a sudden whim, Dave had to know this was in the works." said blogger Nancy Velton. "I'd have appreciated a chance to make copies of my material, and move my blog to another service. My entire life is in that blog." Winer, a founder of Userland software, a provider of website and weblog publishing tools for organizations and individuals, had been hosting the blogs on Userland's servers. He left the company several years ago. After a recent change of management, Userland asked Winer to move the blogs off Userland's servers, according to Winer. Winer said that he tried to transfer the blogs to his own servers, but they soon became bogged down. "I can't afford to host these sites," Winer wrote. "I don't want to start a site-hosting business. These are firm, non-negotiable statements."...
"I just have my fingers crossed that my girlfriend gets her blog back," said software programmer Tom Gortell. "She feels like someone just sucked out her brains. I don't get it, it's just an online journal, right? But she feels like her entire life has been stolen."
UPDATE: Dave Winer writes:
Posted by DeLong at June 16, 2004 09:53 AM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this post...weblogs.com did offer a backup service, and we did ask people to back up their work. It's a feature of Manila.
I totally agree about the wisdom of using a service that does not provide you with an easy way to get your own data. I've been burned by this myself in the past, have learned it many times, the hard way.
It happens that data crashes and you don't have a good backup, and one shouldn't be too hard on oneself when that happens (it happens to pros too), but the last thing you want to do is blame someone else for your failure to backup.
If nothing else comes from this, let it be that...
I wouldn't have expected anything _but_ this type of behavior from Dave Winer.
Posted by: Jeffrey on June 16, 2004 09:57 AMWhat does a SERVICE have to do with open source software.
You seem to want to imply that, in the absence of money and legal responsibility OSS will not be reliable and won't have anyone to blame for fixing problems. HELLO --- have you ever read the warranties on the commercial software you use? They explicitly tell you to expect pretty much nothing from the seller, ever --- don't expect bug fixes, updates, ports to new hardware, tech support service in a year or pretty much anything else.
The difference with OSS is not that you don't spend money but that if you are willing, or need to spend money (eg to port the SW to some unusual hardware) you have some sort of garantee that your money will actually BUY what you want.
I think there's a big difference between Open Source software and free services.
First - the vast majority of the cost of software development is in nerd labor, which can be come by for free at least somewhat easily. The vast expense of providing services is in hardware, data center space, network access, and "trade" work, which are much much harder to come by for free.
Second - if a developer says "screw it" and stops all work on his free software package, it's still available in its final state and can be picked up by anyone else. This actually happens on a semi-regular basis. With a service... well, we're seeing the results now.
Posted by: Jake McGuire on June 16, 2004 10:04 AMI agree. The point of free software, from the user's perspective, is to prevent just this sort of thing from happening -- to make it impossible for a vendor to pull the plug on you.
Whether the software is free or not makes no difference -- if you depend on someone else's server, without some sort of service-level agreement (or, at least, a personal relationship), you're asking for trouble.
Posted by: David Moles on June 16, 2004 10:08 AMThere was nothing about weblogs.com that had any relation to open source software.
Posted by: jim on June 16, 2004 10:08 AMfree speech not free beer
Posted by: blah on June 16, 2004 10:12 AMSLA aside aren't you supposed to keep you work on a development server, i.e. your laptop? and then upload the final content to the Web server? How else can they maintain successive iterations of their work?
Secondly, if their ramblings, that were not important enought to be preserved need to be retrieved, why not hurry to google's Web cache and retrieve it:
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:lAGWaLpkuO4J:www.weblogs.com/+&hl=en
Magic.
Posted by: me on June 16, 2004 10:17 AMWell, I'm not personally touched by the actions of Dave Winer (isn't he missing an "h" from his last name), but here is my take on this:
He is an unreliable asshole, and I wouldn't trust him with anything.
Posted by: Matthew Saroff on June 16, 2004 10:37 AMI third or fourth the comment that this has nothing to do with free software. This is a free service that got pulled. The exact same thing can and does happen with paid services -- the company goes bankrupt and the service goes away. One point of open source software is that the software itself cannot be made to go away, whereas proprietary software often goes away with a bankrupt company.
Posted by: Prof Dumb on June 16, 2004 11:21 AMOn the one hand, Brad has missed the mark by describing the weblogs.com shutdown as a problem with the "open-source movement". (Indeed, Winer has sometimes been hostile to that movement (http://archive.scripting.com/2003/12/24#editorial).)
On the other hand, there is a related problem with open-source software, the Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers problem (http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html): people are more interested in writing a Cool New Version of a package from scratch than fixing bugs in the old version, so if you don't keep up with the upgrade treadmill, nobody cares about your problems.
On the other other hand, Microsoft appears to be headed down the same road (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html); the "make absolutely every new version of Windows backward compatible" faction within Microsoft has lost to the "force developers to use our latest cool new tools" faction.
This is actually one of the best things about open software: if the individual or company developing a piece of software goes away, or decides to do something you don't like, you can simply pick up or fork the project, taking away whatever you have at that point. You have the source, and you can modify it to continue improving it. This has happened pretty often. Don't like that Red Hat discontinued support for old versions? Roll your own patches into old kernel packages, and start a website to disseminate them. Don't like the direction in which some egotistical programmer is taking your project? Fork it!
And if someone like Dave Winer pulls the plug, nothing is lost! You're exactly where you were before. You still have the source.
Services are different, of course, and as others have noted, this service was free only in name, not implementation. Open source has problems of its own (like the one Seth mentioned), but this isn't related to those flaws.
people seem to have covered the difference between free as in beer services and free as in speech code, so i don't want to flog that dead horse, other than to say this is one of the eventualities open source *and* open culture is best at preventing- enthusiasts keep things like code and books and films alive far longer than mere owners. (enthusiastic owners are even better, but that's an aside.)
what i really wanted to point out is that using a business is no prefect protection from this. when the bubble was bursting (and for a long time after) many of us found services vanish in a day, without any warning, both things we got for free and things we paid for. at the same time many free (as in speech about beer!) services run by interested parties have remained stable. others have vanished without a trace. unreliable people are simply unreliable, whether you pay them or not.
As other commenters have noted, this is an example of a problem with a free service, not open-source software. It may be even worse with some commercial software. See http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/05/annals_of_software_obsolescence_intuit_is_evil_quicken_dept.html
Posted by: Andrew on June 16, 2004 12:04 PMWhy oh why can't we have a better...
Just kidding of course but as everyone is saying above the virtues of free software are almost exactly protection from this kind of thing. You have the source and the programme is going nowhere.
Posted by: Jack on June 16, 2004 12:04 PMIs it possible Brad hath trolled us all? --M
Posted by: J. Maynard Gelinas on June 16, 2004 12:10 PMThings like this are exactly why I moved my little weblog from a free service to my own site that I pay for out of pocket. It's not a huge expense to pay for small site hosting, and I can do my own backups and make sure I have copies of all my software offsite.
But I still use an open source CMS, and I'm very happy with it. If I have to change hosting companies, my CMS doesn't have to change.
Posted by: Jennifer on June 16, 2004 12:13 PMPersonally, I gotta go with the "screw Winer anyway" camp. However...
80% of ANY customer-driven software project is expectations management. The difference with most open source software, however, is it is "scratch your own itch" software. It is developer driven, and there are no pressing expectations. However, an open service is definitely customer driven. If for some reason, say, SourceForge went away like that tomorrow, it would be absolutely devastating.
Posted by: cooper on June 16, 2004 12:16 PMI think it's just a matter of common decency. Mr. Winer had a personal relationship with these people, whether he perceived it that way or not. He hosted their most intimate thoughts and diaries. He behaved rudely. He should have given 48 hours notice.
It comes down to manners, in my view. That fellow must have been raised in a barn.
Posted by: Susan on June 16, 2004 12:31 PMI agree with most of the other posts here. First, Winer is a pud. Second through 10th, Winer is a pud.
11th Proprietary corporate America does not do a better job then free and open source developers.
The only protection is to have the source and to run your own servers...
But it costs money to run your own servers, and time, and work, and so the rational response is to use what works and when it stops working to figure out alternatives.
Posted by: Rich Gibson on June 16, 2004 01:08 PMBrad seems to be equating "open source" with "doing stuff for free, with no hope of compensation". There is no necessary connection either way, and this incident has nothing to do with open source in any way at all.
The code underlying Winer's service is not currently open source. And while Winer may now have plans to change that -- he's open sourcing something soon, but I'm not sure what -- he has been openly hostile to the open source movement in the past.
Conversely, quite a few key developers of various open source systems have arranged to be well compensated for their efforts; MySQL, Inc., for instance, is a going, commercial concern even though their main product is GPLed. Of course there are also stable, viable open source projects without any such financial support.
Posted by: Charles Dodgson on June 16, 2004 01:15 PMI think your confounding two kinds of free here.
Open source is free information. Information goods have assorted unique characteristics. Shutting down widely distributed pool of knowledge is an entirely different exercise than shutting down a public web service.
I might suggest that a more plausible analogy would be that the risks demonstrated by the story unfolding around weblogs.com should be projected onto the various "free services" we are all dependent upon: Yahoo Groups, Google, Verisign, Level 3, Akamai - all places were the system dynamics have tended to consolidate a hub. A hubs are susceptible to this kind of single point of organizational failure. One ponders what would happen to the national productivity if we pulled the plug on Google?
Weblogs.com was never an open system, it was a loss leader for Dave's commercial venture. If it had been an open system then the participants would have been more likely to collectively expended resources on insuring their exit strategies.
Open source projects do that work, the work of assuring an exit strategy and limiting the risk of a single point of organizational failure, for two reasons. First for a short term benefit. It significantly increases the willingness of participants to come to the party; we don't demand that they relinquish their freedom just to join. Second because the sophisticated participants (those with a CTO/CIO mindset) demand it for the long term.
One important way to look at the the licenses of open source is how they strive to a striking a balance between enabling contributors to exit the game, so contributors don't relinquish that freedom when the join in the collective effort. and striving to avoid capture of the public goods created collectively by private entities.
Those private entities are a risk because they introduce the risk of organizational failure triggering the implosion of the entire stack of open knowledge. Which is pretty much what we are observing at weblogs.com.
Posted by: Ben Hyde on June 16, 2004 01:29 PMOne more illustration of the difference between "free speech" and "free beer" in this particular arena: the good folks at livejournal, a blog hosting service which is, in fact, a going commercial business -- and which also releases all of the code they wrote to run their service under an open source license. To the best of my knowledge, Winer's weblogs.com differs in both respects.
See www.livejournal.com/developer if you'd like to take a peek at the code...
Posted by: Charles Dodgson on June 16, 2004 02:10 PMI'm a big DeLong fan, but this is just nuts. The reason Open Source software is a safe bet is precisely because if there isn't a vendor to go bankrupt/psychotic/monopolistic, constitute a single point of favor, and cut you off at the knees. Open Source is eminently more surviveable than most commercial software offerings, which is why it is achieving high penetration rates in industries generally considered as conservative.
Free *services*? Indeed, you'd want to run screaming the other way.
-Tim
Posted by: Tim Bray on June 16, 2004 02:22 PMWell, it certainly is typical Dave Winer behavior.
The real pity is that he suckered in a bunch of people into trusting him with their data. I sure bet he wasn't hosting anyone who had ever had any prior dealings with him.
He had every right to decide he didn't want to do it any more. But when he asked people to entrust him with their data (and he did, if he offered blogs, whether or not he used those words), at the very least he had a responsibility to notify them in advance and give them the opportunity to get it back.
I knew Dave back in the 80's. I thought he was a very smart guy. I also soon came to the conclusion that he thinks he's the only person on the face of the planet, and that everyone else is just a prop to fill out the space and support his ego. I can live without people like that in my space, and have avoided him since.
Hmmm... I seem to have committed a mindo, and left out a key step in my thoughts...
My view: open-source software will only flourish as long as there are at least some deep pockets--think IBM--willing to fund it in the sense of paying people for spending serious amounts of their time on it. For that to be the case, open-source software has to help IBM sell consulting services, which means that users must be comfortable with it, which means that users must anticipate that the open-source software will continue to be developed and improved, and that the implicit contract the open-source-writing community has with non-programmer users includes provisions for warning, notice, graceful shutdown, and migration assistance.
That set of social expectations is clearly not held by everyone. And I think that is a danger to the long-run health of the open-source movement.
Posted by: Brad DeLong on June 16, 2004 03:14 PMwell i still disagree, brad. its true that a customer has an expectation that the product will continue to be developed. but i don't see how open source is any more vulnerable to this than closed source.
companies go out of business all the time. (i've certainly had the experience of seeing my company purchase a mostly unfinished program, deploy it with promises to add features and fix bugs, and then have the company go out of business leaving us stuck with a piece of junk) its true that many of the smaller projects depend on the good will of a small number of developers and can therefore be risky. but so do smaller programs developed by small companies. large open source projects like apache attract large communities of developers and have about as much of a chance of dying off as ibm or microsoft.
also notice that many of the larger open source projects do attract corporate funding as there is a an interest in keeping a stable project going.
and as noted in previous posts, open source projects have greater sustainability, because if you must, you can engineer you're own graceful migration/product termination/continued development/etc because you have access to the source code. in many situations thats an unpleasant option, but it is one more option than is available to you when the company who writes the program you purchased goes out of business, or decides they don't want to support you anymore.
Posted by: eric on June 16, 2004 04:36 PMI think Brad's looking at the weblogs.com situation too shallowly. Here is what seems to have happened:
Free hosting at weblogs.com was initiated by Userland Software. Userland sold weblogging software, so this was part of the marketing budget. Dave Winer was CEO and majority shareholder of Userland Software. Two years ago, Dave Winer had open heart surgery, after which he rethought his life and stepped down as CEO of Userland. Eventually new management came in.
Last month, there was a fairly complex corporate transaction. A new company, Userland Corporation, bought most of the assets of Userland Software. Userland Software promised not to use the name "Userland". All the Userland Software employees went to work for Userland Corporation which now does business as "Userland Software." Got that? Assets which the new management team at Userland felt wouldn't contribute to the new company, including weblogs.com, were left with the old company, in effect with Dave Winer personally. Dave Winer is still a major shareholder in the new Userland. The CTO of the new Userland is one Peter Winer.
After a decent interval, one month almost precisely, Dave Winer announced the shutdown of weblogs.com. He did so, whether intentionally or not, in such a way as to direct attention to his actions as a private person in the last week or so and his forthcoming actions as a private person over the next few weeks. As a consequence, whether foreseen or not, the opprobrium for the shutdown has been directed at Dave Winer personally rather than at Userland. Which is surely good for the shareholders of Userland.
When we look at the totality of the circumstances, there seem to be fewer implications for open-source or for Free Software than Brad thought at first sight.
Posted by: jam on June 16, 2004 08:15 PMHaving been a customer in the past of ISP's that suddenly just went tits-up and without notice quit providing my domains, I fail to see what's different about the Userland ISP going tits-up as compared to those other ISP's. Commercial or "free", your site is still gone unless you have a backup.
As far as I know, the Userland software was never free. Mr. Whiner sold it as a commercial product, while whining about the evils of open source.
- Badtux the Open Source Penguin
Brad has it exactly backwards.
When commercial software goes, it goes like Winer's hosting service did: no warning (since warning would drive potential customers away before the final shutdown has occurred) and with no chance to salvage anything. When Acme Corp. decides to stop selling/providing support for AcmeWare, that's it: there's no one to turn to.
When open source software goes, it goes softly, like people wish Winer had done: plenty of warning when a developer gets overloaded or doesn't want to continue developing something anymore, and all of the code is available to anyone who wants to pick up the ball and run with it.
"An internet in which open-source and free software are routinely used as building blocks is one in which expectations of persistence and warning and notice and graceful shutdown have to be validated." Brad, this is the exact reason that open-source software is so popular today - because this expectation is NOT met by commercial software and IS met by open-source. The exact reason. Nobody is EVER left in the lurch when they're using open-source - by definition. You have somehow got things exactly 100% backwards.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on June 17, 2004 07:56 AMTo defend Winer, it sounds like a what developed was the tragedy of the commons. Many people using the server were very demanding of service, and since it was free there was very little limit on their demands. When demands for service expanded to point greater than Winer was willing and/or able to bear, it collapsed, and even those who made few demands suffered.
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