The internet was invented by Vint Cerf.
But it was made usable by Marc Andreeson. And what he did was simple:
He turned it into a VCR.
Now, it seems deeply ironic to me that most of the folks reading this post have probably never used a VCR, although they’ve most certainly used the Back, Forward, Stop and Play buttons on a web browser.
It was a powerful metaphor, and it made it possible for nearly half of the world’s population to grapple with the experience of traversing a directed, cyclic graph.
Where in the world is Joshua McKenty? October 6: SF October 13: Victoria October 20: Korea and SF October 27: Victoria November 3: Paris and NYC November 10: Victoria November 17: LA and Denver November 24: Victoria / SF December 1: Arizona December 8: Victoria December 15: Toronto, NYC, SF December 22: Victoria December 29: SF Jan 5: Victoria Jan 12: DC, Atlanta, Kansas City Jan 19: Victoria, Vancouver Jan 26: SF, Detroit, Tampa, Feb 2: Victoria, NYC Feb 9: Victoria, SF Feb 16: Victoria, SF Feb 23: DC, NYC, SF Mar 2: Austin Mar 9: Banff, DC, SF Mar 16: Victoria, Vancouver Mar 23: Victoria, Seattle Mar 30: Victoria Apr 6: DC, Cincinnati, Seattle, SF Apr 13: Victoria, SF Apr 20: Victoria Apr 27: LA, SF May 4: Victoria
tldr: Use equity warrants for open source trademark licenses. Long Version: Apache Software License v2.0 allows the free and unrestricted use, modification, and what-have-you of the source code. However, it protects the use of the name and brand of an open source project.
In the OpenStack world, we license this brand to vendors who agree to follow a trademark license agreement that includes, among other things:
Paying to be a corporate sponsor or member of the OpenStack Foundation.
Trying to understand the ecosystem of “Proof of Luck” based distributed systems.
https://www.stellar.org/blog/introducing-stellar/ Use observable phenomenon to time things: - http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.3693 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar#Precise_clocks
Use fancy algorithms: - http://pagesperso-systeme.lip6.fr/Marc.Shapiro/papers/RR-6956.pdf - http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/12/23/paper-crdts-consistency-without-concurrency-control.html - http://www.commsp.ee.ic.ac.uk/~mandic/dvv/papers/physica%20D.pdf
I love PaaS. Recently I’ve gone to great lengths to figure out a way to build applications using ONLY SaaS and PaaS platforms. I managed this with a mix of wercker, github, orchestrate.io and pivotal web services.
But with the commitment to any third-party platform, comes a certain kind of fear.
I’m a believer in open source. And I’m ALSO a believer in commercial software. As much as I believe in the rights and freedoms of the user, I also value the rights and freedoms of the developer - to license his or her work in the way that they see fit.
Projects Most of my projects fall within a few main themes:
OpenStack OpenStack.org : If you’re not familiar with it, you should be. Piston OpenStack : Turn-key OpenStack using math and magic. ElkStack.org : Monitoring openstack for fun and profit. RefStack.org : Interoperability tools for the DefCore committee. Browser Things ElderBrowser.com : Like reading glasses for the web. Social Infrastructure HasTwoParents.com : An email tool for parents.
I’m an early fan of the Baked, Not Fried concept behind static web generators. But somehow, getting all the tools in place to run one myself seemed onerous. A simple apt-get install mysql was always easier than the vaguely-mystical incantations required to get jekyll up and running.
Then again, there was my deep-seated prejudice against Ruby. (See my previous trolling of the ruby community when I accused them of being singlehandedly responsible for Global Warming.
Joshua McKenty I work on both open source and commercial software. I can probably attribute this socialist/capitalist mix to my dual American/Canadian citizenship, but I’m not that fond of introspection.
I am a cofounder of OpenStack.
The longer stories have been told repeatedly, but suffice it to say that some mix of Jesse Andrews, Chris C. Kemp, Devin Carlen, Vishvananda Ishaya, Soo Choi, Andy Smith, Manesh Singh and myself ought to be held responsible for the release of “nova”, while we were all affiliated with the NASA Ames Research Center.