Maxim Fridental

Christmas is an accumulator of childish happiness.

Children can be much more happy than adults. Adults have experienced death of dear ones, farewells or illnesses, or realization that some of their goals they wholeheartedly wanted to achieve cannot be achieved anymore in this life. This all remains constantly in the head and cannot make room enough for a full and absolute happiness. Though children do have this room, and therefore can be absolutely happy.

If you as a child were made absolutely happy on every Christmas (or other big holiday in other cultures), this holiday can become a “tag” for that childish happiness, which can be used later in the adult life to remember of those happy times and to try to be happy again.

For me, this happiness tag is triggered by the smell of the christmas tree and the mandarines. Yesterday I was in subway, when I saw one tiny fir tree brach lying on the floor and radiating its smell. And I uncontrollably laughed.

What motivates people to create open source software? On the one hand, efforts required for it are greater than those couple of days spent by students on solving their toy assignments, on the other hand it is almost impossible to sell, and it is very hard to do “consulting” kind of business around it. So why is it worth efforts?

Keeping in mind those 7% of strange altruistic people, the resting 93% of OSS developers are apparently developing it because of the following reasons:

• They are being paid for it by companies, who want to compete with closed source companies
• They want to find a (better) job, so they need both skills and publicity
• They want to be popular.

Web 2.0 and mobile apps have seriously disturbed the latter two motivations.

Several years ago, if you wanted to be a cool hacker, you created some OSS software worthy to be included in GNU or Apache repositories. Today, if you want to be a cool startuper, you just create a web service or a mobile app.

Open sourcing web services is useless, because their source is often trivial, and whenever it is not, it cannot be reused, except of creating an exact clone. And web service clones are not interesting, because the original service would usually soak up all possible user base, and without users, Web 2.0 apps are pathetic.

In this respect, uselessness of web services source code is quite similar to the source code of Adobe Flash Player or Microsoft Silverlight. Because it doesn’t matter what you can do with these sources, what matters is which version is installed on the most PCs out there.

With the mobile apps it is even more interesting. Apple’s license agreement is explicitly not compatible with GPL, and Free Software Foundation is understandable scolding them for that. Besides, source code of most mobile apps should be quite trivial, because the most of their added value lies in their interaction design / UX; and in the connected web services.

So, if you want to get better job or get popular, you can just create a web service (and a couple of mobile apps for it). And as a nice side-effect of NOT open-sourcing them, you can even earn some money (from the App Store or by selling the app/service to somebody big).

So what is the future of Open Source? Are we evidencing its peak today? Can it be saved? And… do we want to save it?

• A-Mei is surely one of the best singers of our generation. You don’t even need to understand her to feel her songs. #
• I favorited a @YouTube video http://t.co/r7VlgP2T 〔MV〕張惠妹 都什麼時候了 #
• Simplicity is beautiful. http://t.co/pOUK7Zlf #
• http://t.co/OKqI1gmN #
• RT @rands There is always an agenda in the building that is contrary to yours. Always. #

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The infamous internal-accidentally-turned-external post of Steve Yegge (now deleted, but saved for history in many places, for example here) is a typical rant. You know, that kind of rants where you start writing about one big topic, then jump to another unrelated one, and then bounce in-between trying to come-up with a resume reasonably combining them into something that ought to appear a neutrally-tempered educational article rather than an outburst of your accumulated emotions.

I like rants. I like passionate people, and I like watching them showing their world. And, as a rule of thumb, rants usually deliver a valuable insight or unexpected point of view.

This time, it was the Product or Platform story. Summing it up in a nice bite-sized paragraph, it goes like this.

Great products must hit the nerve of your users. Product managers are bad at predicting where exactly the nerve is, before their product hits the market. Thus, they often have to adjust the product (sometime drastically) in its further iterations. Therefore, you should develop not a product in the first place, but a platform for making products. This will allow for quick after-TTM product adjustments; and for external contribution into killer product features.

Just like with many right ideas, it is not new per se, new is only that is it written down so explicitly.

Take Axinom for example. Instead of creating yet another version of their CMS, they did a revolutionary thing: they have created a specialized UX platform — a collection of patterns, concepts, and technology allowing them quickly produce highly ergonomical and immersive information management applications. Having that, they have now all the means to implement really killing apps for their customers. And they’ve invented it way before the Mr. Yegge’s rant.

With the SilverHD DRM product, we went along the similar path. Based on our know-how about all kinds of typical business models used by different VoD shops in the European market, we’ve created concepts and technology allowing to securely define entitlements (who is allowed to consume which media under what restrictions). The concrete DRM mechanism to enforce these entitlements was purposedly left variable; we’ve started with PlayReady and WM-DRM; and it will perhaps be adjusted in the future with other DRMs such as Widewine or Marlin.

Switching jobs is always stressful. But changing from web development with Microsoft technologies to embedded Linux development is like bungee jumping. Not that I’ve ever jumped bungee. But I like overstated comparisons

Seriously, judge for yourself.

Before, I was proud that I’ve ever compiled Linux kernel from its sources before (which is untypical for a hardcore Microsoft fan). Today, I re-complile the kernel several times a week.

Before, I was proud that I know what DirectShow filters and the graph are (which is untypical for a normal Silverlight developer). Today, I fix bugs and develop own filters for GStreamer, the open-source alternative of DirectShow.

Before, I thought http and TLS are parts of operating systems. Today, I’m fighting with gnutls trying to cross-compile it properly.

Before, I thought 100 Mb of source code is “a lot”. Today, I’m working on 6 Gb of sources.

Before, I’ve heard about TS files, which were mysterious creatures coming out from content providers and had to be transcoded ASAP into a more usual format. Today, TS is my common denominator, and I juggle with all these PATs, PMTs, SCTs, PCRs, PIDs and PTSes (per stream).

Before, I’ve thought 1Gb of video file is a full-length movie, and 8Mbps is a lot of a bitrate, and 720p is HD Video. Today, 1Gb is a short 5-minute Full HD clip.

Before, I feared of JavaScript, because you inevitable have to deal with HTML when working on JavaScript. Today, I fear of JavaScript, because when I cross-compile source code of WebKit with too much optimizations, its JavaScriptCore engine will expose all kinds of weird errors.

Before, I was ironical about how low-level the .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 were in comparison with Smalltalk. Eventually Microsoft has promoted C# to be a reasonably-high level programming language in .NET 4.0. Today I work in an environment where they think C++ is a high-level language, but is overly complicated, while the pure C is just the right level.

Before, I thought Windows 7 is on the verge of getting old. Today, my colleagues think Windows XP is not yet outdated.

So, in some aspects, this is a pretty much “upside down” experience, but I hope I will find my place in this new world, just like I’ve found myself in the web development seven years ago.

• 在《百年孤独》已经每个字都认识。 #

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• Googled all-vegan restaurants in Zirndorf: 0. In Fürth: 0. In Erlangen: 0. In Nürnberg: 2, and one of them is closed. JFYI. #
• This SHOULD be some kind of hoax. I can’t believe it has really happened. http://t.co/Izu9Q3rX #
• I liked a @YouTube video http://t.co/9diWyZQ4 Marlene Dietrich — Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind #
• RT @sinosplice Translation fun: “thank you” = 10Q (English abbr.) = 3Q (Chinese abbr.) #
• I favorited a @YouTube video http://t.co/61kxYGK3 ORIGINAL Elephant Painting #

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• Taiwan is in ultrabook competition now: both Acer and Asus have released very sexy ubooks recently. #
• Facebook is currently down. I wonder if twitter and Google+ were also down, where would we post about it? #
• 鸡尾酒《单恋》：十分热泪，一分委屈，一分畏惧，三分损失，五分孤独 都混合，用希望滴装饰。喝两多年。 #
• @XaocCPS нет. Просто не спится. #
• simply epic strip, love it. http://t.co/KFB9yePY #
• Edelste Rohstoffe, massiert noch lange nach dem Putzen, biologisch wirksam, wissenschaftliche Zusammensetzung: http://t.co/OHzemlXu #

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• Amazing menu design and impressive typography with color coding. If it was a cookbook I’d ordered it right now. http://t.co/fO9bgLnN #
• Кошка Мёбиуса гуляет сама по себе. #shortiki http://t.co/xHn8XsnR #
• Детство — это та счастливая пора, когда бежишь ночью из туалета и радуешься что тебя не съели. #shortiki http://t.co/JhOojME5 #
• “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” #
• “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.” #
• “And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.” #
• RT @TechCrunch Upcoming Film Could Be Litmus Test For Theater And On-Demand Release Strategy http://t.co/vqjQ6Rv1 #

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