Monthly Archives: November 2014

Twitter’s open source emoji success

Twitter’s approach to the problem of emoji provides a classic case study in open source best practice:

Many different applications have looked at the success of emoji and the various rights problems associated with the use of existing images and decided that the best work around was either to ignore the rights issues and reuse existing materials anyway or to create whole new image libraries which they would then have control over. Twitter on the other hand, has taken a different, more open approach.

After commissioning a new set of emoji graphics, the company implemented a library for parsing emoji tags and replacing them with read-to-render code strings for various platforms, including HTML. Now there are hundreds of emoji available to add to your tweets. Internally, the project was treated as open source from the off, with GitHub being used as the development repository. Now, both the code and the graphics of the project have been open sourced, using the MIT license for the code and CC-BY for the graphics.

Twitter has successfully managed to implement a feature essential for its global market, get it maintained in conjunction with others, and win broad credit. In order to learn from and repeat their success, its worth looking in a little more detail at how they achieved this: check out Simon’s InfoWorld article “Twitter emoji: 5 lessons for effective open source.”

Big progress in Microsoft’s open source journey

Microsoft’s recent announcement that much of .Net will become open source and that it will support both Linux and Mac OS X is fantastic news. Along with the additional, full-featured, no-cost versions of its developer tools the company is introducing (though they remain proprietary), this represents a large, positive step in Microsoft’s open source journey.

Simon’s spoken and written a number of times about the seven stages of a corporation’s journey into open source and used Microsoft as an illustration of his ideas. This new development puts the company very clearly at the fifth stage of Simon’s scale, which is impressive, but begs the questions “what’s next?”, “how does Microsoft’s open source journey continue to develop from here?”

The answer lies in a holistic view, in which respect for open source extends to every business unit of this famously divided company. While those business units that don’t yet respect open source continue to use tactics such as patent attacks on Linux community members and covert political moves to undermine the Open Document Format, further progress will be slow in coming. Microsoft’s gradual acceptance of the inevitability of open source however, seems to be in full swing. For more detail, check out Simon’s InfoWorld article.

Joyent open-sources core technology

The open-sourcing of its core technology is a bold move from IaaS/PaaS cloud company Joyent. With the potential to be both influential and disruptive in the budding clouds of containers market, Joyent’s move once again demonstrates the companies willingness to do things differently. With its newly open software competing directly with OpenStack and enabling high-performance use of container technology like Docker, Joyent has stepped up to the next level of open source in its business model. For more detail and analysis, check out Simon’s InfoWorld article.

Licenses for Everything

When it comes to software licensing, many seem to have their position all sorted out. Some are convinced that every restriction is wrong and that adding a license is a restriction. Others think that anyone who can stop software being open is in the wrong and that any license which doesn’t stop proprietary use is bad. A third group (particularly associated with 3D printing) is of the opinion that as things made by code are uncopyrightable, the code which makes it ought to be uncopyrightable too. When it comes to understanding open source licensing though, the problem with all these views is their emphasis on ownership.

In open source, the act of putting licenses on everything is never an act of aggression, of meddling or of unwanted control. No ownership is being claimed. Instead the open source license is a pre-emptive giving of permission. When possible problems or questions of ownership arise in the future, the answer is clear already, permission has been given.

Of course there are those who see this “stick a license on everything” approach as unnecessarily bureaucratic, preferring to simply proclaim that everything they produce is in the “public domain”. Unfortunately the concept is not one which is recognised in all parts of the world and continues to lead to legal confusion. By using OSI approved, open source licenses, you can guarantee the freedom to innovate without seeking permission first.

Read more in Simon’s InfoWorld column.