WikiLeaks #FAIL

So WikiLeaks messed up. Unsurprising, sad, regretable. And Spiegel and the other news outlets who benefitted massively cry foul.
And the leaders (…) of the world, who let Al-Gadaffi run a whole country for 42 years, and let him camp in parks while people were getting tortured, they blame WikiLeaks and a handful of fools with a conscience for the now likely to follow pain and deaths they themselves caused with their machinations in the first place.
Killers running countries, hosted by our governments. Calling out murderers in helicopters now impossible.
Stinks.

web3.1

Current (January 2011) events in Egypt show that a distributed Internet will evolve. How so? Open data formats like microformats.org and HTML5 Micro Data will enable our perspectives on technology to reverse. From “how much money can Larry, Steve1 or Steve2 make?” to “how can I get an alternative to sharing my babyphotos with Zuck?”, from “what may I do in my corporate work environment?” to “here is the part of my stuff you may see, boss”.

And with that the configuration of systems and trust in data will also become available for true specs.

Today’s spec is “runs with Intel, Microsoft and some integration from one of our partners”. Future spec will be “here is my data, go figure, service providers. Make me some offers.”

Why that matters for egyptians you ask? If they could do this, they could easily pass on each others’ data, via their wireless antennas on their mobiles. Without being cut off centrally. Without censorship. Without the need to ask permission to raise their voices. The internet has the technology, the genie is out of the bottle. We won’t loose this sorcerer’s aprentice’s broom

Open Data formats like microformats.org and HTML5 Micro Data enable data to be free, any kind of data. Configuration, access and user workload data. Hardware already has become ubiquitous, and much of the required software for a truly distributed internet is available for free anyways.

It is only a question of time for peer 2 peer networks to evolve. If illegal application can stuff two thirds of the Internet, just think about the potential to organize rallies in north africa, north korea, north something else.

Why should a people with at least a handful of satellite phones and the ability to access download facilities the world over restrict itself to the whim of some self-centred megalomaniac?
Well, in more developed countries the investments of e.g. George Bush or Silvio Berlusconi would suffer big time from switching off the internet, so there the problem is on another level. But in evolving societies like in the middle east there is every demand for people to make themselves independent of government controlled infrastructure providers.

And the simple truth is that they will go for independence – eventually.

This is true for people confronted with extra smart German legislators as much as for dictators who have basked in the sun of US support for 30 years.
And there is no restriction of this truth to the more ephemeral underpinnings of the Internet. It is also true for the more abstract layers of solution stacks, like user data, and also for stuff you put into Google (look at their terms, section 8.3, to be found on Google by searching for “google” and “terms”, first found link …).
To make this liberation happen – and it will happen, and it will happen on a personal level, without a chance for any type of bastard to stop it totally – we have to start thinking about our data from our own perspective.

Not as vendors. Not as consumers of some software. But as the owners of ourselves and of our thoughts and ideas. And what else is it about, when Mr.Zuckerberg mused about the ownership of data? The same holds true for silly individuals in any government.

IT IS NOT YOUR BUSINESS TO SPECULATE ABOUT WHO OWNS MY DATA! BUGGER OFF!

Sorry. Had to be said.

Why conventional APIs don’t scale

or at least only with brute force.

This claim about APIs and their lack of scalability needs some context. Of course there is Google. And of course there is Facebook, and banking systems, and Amadeus CRS. But they are all rather boring.

Even map reduce needs – as the name already implies – to be spoon fed. The system is programmed to do its job. It is not like you give it something and it will do it efficiently. Not even effectively in many cases …

My point is that in all these so called high tech environments there is no complexity represented. Or only on a very low level. It all resembles more an avalanche and less the capabilities of a biological system.

Now why is that?

I believe (!) that it is because we highly underestimate the importance of empowering others. True for managers, and especially true for nerds.
Why would I go and leave it to somebody else to control their resources? Why would I just share the argument, and then give up control?

Humans fight back – or should – if others tell them what to do. Computers don’t. Given the right credentials any computer will go and self destruct. And many times even without the right credentials. Because geeks are people. Uhm.

Now what if we had computers interact more like humans? Telling each other the reasoning and then letting the other side do the maths?

Let’s suppose we had a bunch of services, and just for the fun of it let’s further assume they were based on GPLed code. Then to have the same data on all instances will trigger the same actions, right?

Now if I wanted to trigger something, I would not call an API saying “jump!”. I would rather say something like “money “. And expect the other node to move.

Motivation and trigger in the same entity will take software and networking a long way.

This concept will enable distribution of services on a different level to what we see today.

Falling In Love With Open-Xchange …

… is the least you can expect if you make the trip to http://ox.io – starting in about two weeks.

Aside from the really cool email address (yes, you may envy me for gecko@ox.io) it is all of the below and more: it allows you to get your data back. It makes networks like Xing, LinkedIn, Facebook etc. digestable as just another source in your personal information management.

It also breaks down the silo walls Open-Xchange has had so far. Like with all the other groupware solution offerings out there getting information provided to people in other organisations was a nightmare. Yes, we support vCard, and yes, we support iCal. But what if you wanted to link the two? What if you wanted to define a project context and share all documents, meeting appointment, relevant contacts etc.? With ox.io we move all this one step closer.

ox.io will start with importing and sharing addresses. We will evolve it to provide sharing capabilities for all domains we touch, like task management, calendaring, document store etc. .

In short, ox.io is the preview for what you can expect to show up at our partners.

Standardization Of Data Types. Finally.

There is a distinct difference between

• vendor conventions to keep production flowing (like introduced to the Japanese car industry after WWII by the Americans)
• vendor proposals to support their own offerings as a technology platform (eg. software APIs)
• formal specs by standards bodies (eg. OASIS)
• “industry standards” that just happen to be unique or bearable enough to win substantial traction in the market

The latter have the advantage that they are mostly “defined” as compatible with this or that offering, i.e., there is a well known source for the how things are. One could say this source just fell from the sky, no plans to approve, no external guidance accepted.
While this might sound selfish and non-democratic – well, that is what it is – it is highly efficient.

Like ARPANET, the Personal Computer, and Linus Torvalds / Linux have shown.

This line of thought has been a defining one for Open-Xchange’s Social Open-Xchange prototype. The thought that while standards processes are what we like to like and “selfish” individuals, corporations or governments are being criticized for not being open to everyone right from the start, it is the latter that have driven evolution in the field.

That is also the reason why the upcoming standard for the semantic web3.0 is not going to be established by OASIS or w3c.org.

It is going to come from all the vendors involved. Respectively.

Open-Xchange aims to be at the forefront of this standardization process. We don’t expect the vendor community to all of a sudden only embrace Open-Xchange formats for collaboration data. But to integrate address data, calendaring data, task descriptions, unified messages, managed subsets for e.g., mobile phones etc., there is no better data set than what an application supporting respective data types has to offer. And our GPL2 license makes the proposal a digestible one.

In other words, we support vCard, iCal, Microsoft’s various innovations (…), and anything else that makes sense to our users. And if not, then Open-Xchange is open source and we welcome everybody to join the effort and help out.

But the true wealth of functionality and the reflection of feature function in available data offered by a collaboration software solution is only available through the data formatted by the logic of the application. This is of course also true for Enterprise Resource Planning. Or Document Management. Or any other type of application.

And so we went ahead and defined a simple yet powerful data format that fully reflects what we do. And that is easily consumable for everyone with a browser. And that can be easily integrated into third party applications if they offer some basic support.

The basis for this format is, as stated in some former posts, microformatted html. What it reflects is all the content and structure available inside Open-Xchange. What it enables is peer to peer communication, 3rd party solution integration in SaaS environments, direct access to anything Open-Xchange from any browser, replication of data, … easily.

Open-Xchange aims to have 20mn users on our services by end of year 2009. This gives us the platform to wake up the industry. And we will!

Application Integration In SaaS

Social Open-Xchange will offer unprecedented capabilities to get application data – also in hosted offerings! – integrated easily.

SaaS is the new kid on the block when it comes to IT ecosystem integration. The unloved truth of browser based applications is their inherent weakness when it comes to exchanging data with a desktop environment and 3rd party applications. Open-Xchange changes the gameplan by doing the integration on the server. With an interface that is about as open and accessible and extensible as it can be: html with semantic markup.

Web2.0 was an attempt to get over data silos and the heavy duty integration business by gluing it all together in a nice and shiny GUI.

The results were often impressive, but did not really substantially help integration. Getting SAP to work with an Oracle stack (above the database that is) or something from IBM or something else talking to one of them requires integration work. The result were these posh consultant people who always used to fly business class, remember? … Browser based integration will not suffice to make them redundant.

One could now argue that getting the big guns aligned is not necessarily the first and most obvious goal in application integration. But if a concept like Web2.0 does not allow for people to think along bigger lines, where is the relevance of Tim O’Reilly talking about Web2.0 making inroads to the enterprise? Web2.0 addresses a small part of the problem. It is a step in the right direction. We need to evolve much further to really meet user requirements.

Integration of applications must be through data from one app becoming reusable in another one. And to do the integration within a browser based application has limitations, just as SOA integration projects do from the sheer financials: it latter will get you results, but at a prohibitive price tag for small companies.

Open-Xchange’s sweet spot is running one installation for millions of users, segmented into virtual partitions for dedicated clients of 5 to 500 people.

There is no inhibition against a single user firm subscribing to our service via one of our partners or a 10.000 people bank deploying Open-Xchange in house. But smaller teams is what we excel in. The objective for all our users is to get their data ecosystems integrated. They must be able to access one address book from all their applications. The same applies to all other types of data, from calendars, to resources, to task management. In many companies  a zoo of applications sprouts features repeatingly implemented by many vendors because integration is hard in an IT world without standards.

Enter Semasntic Publish Subscribe.

Some of the points that took us to embrace microformats as the communications channel of choice for Open-Xchange data have been

• data should be easily accessible by users first and foremost
• no development black belt requirement should stand between a user and data, eg. a web designer must be capable to consume it all
• barriers to entry for ISVs must be minimal
• data formats are defined by the application defining / digesting them, onthologies are a dead end.

Data becomes available in an easily consumed, fully marked up format, all it needs to provide an Open-Xchange address book inside a 3rd party application is a parser for Open-Xchange Microformats. It is important to note that this parser is a generic parser for microformats in html. The tags we use are specific to Open-Xchange because the format must be well defined and rich enough to really eventually transfer the whole context around a piece of data.

The requirement of being well defined is ensured by a rather blunt aproach: the code is the spec.

Of course we will make sure that there is proper version information available, and also test cases to check for the integrity of code and data container. But eventually it boils down to us marking up our users content in the way our program works. By using a container powerful enough to span Open-Xchange and any number of partners by simply defining and adding support for new tags (all starting with “company / project name _” there are no limits to the ecosystem this can carry.

We will get into issues like naming conflicts, but expect branding to help a lot – how many companies with exactly the same name do you know? – and things like zoning can be resolved in later versions.

For now it is all about getting a handful of partners to embrace the concept, display Open-Xchange calendaring and address book information in their UIs, referencing respective mappings in their databases, aligning the use of tags between systems etc. . The same of course holds true the other way around and we will grow the types of data from other applications we will be able to consume over time.

There will be arguments made – in fact, we had a lot of discussions along these lines – that we could have used vCard, iCal, hCard, hCalendar etc. . After all, we have most of the code to do just that already. But that would have meant we restrict ox2ox communication to these standards. And that would have meant we leave out at least parts of what our application brings along. Like tagging of filtering results. Such tags can as easily be put into markup, just as the datatypes themselves. As a consequence eventually full replication of user contexts will be possible.

Let’s take this one step further. As internal triggers will respond to data, and as the code evaluating the data on either end of a communication between instances of Open-Xchange is identical, data should be sufficient to replace a fully fleshed API for ox2ox communication.

Where does all that relate back to Application integration?

It means that 3rd party application providers can simply access any and all relevant content inside an installation of Open-Xchange. By parsing published websites, ie. microformatted html at a URL. The same holds true for transferring data back to Open-Xchange. All it needs is a respectively marked up website where third party applications eg. provide address book or calendaring information to make them accessible from within Open-Xchange.

The setup of such an integrated environment is simple enough: just cut and paste respective URLs from the application’s frontends to the other system and off you go. Or provide a script to do that, or a plugin, or a widget.

This is all very much consumable for end users.

From a conceptual angle it is server side mashups. Aligning the data on the server gives users persistence of data intergration and services, the abilitiy to talk to as many servers and clients as necessary at the same time, and generally speaking the same level of integration they would expect in an enterprise environment.

Looking at the marketing terms the evolution of the internet has gone through it is probably only the web2.0 hype we need to consider. In this perspective the early web and all there was before – irc, gopher, ftp, telnet, … – where probably web1.x. Web2.0 was this great phantastic new idea to have code in the browser and do integration within the browser.

So what we are looking at now is a web where all clients also can become servers. The code is GPL and can simply be installed locally. And if this does not happen the hosted copy of Open-Xchange is still managed by the owner of its data. The important part is that these instances, local or hosted, can talk to each other. And to other services from other applications.

One could call it Web3.0.

The Open Cloud Manifesto And First Steps @ OSBC 2009

Last week, at OSBC2009, we demoed a prototype of Open-Xchange with social capabilities.

The feedback was great, we seem to be on the right track. As soon as we are done with some housekeeping it will become available as a hosted service at ox.io, more below. The objective was and will be to show rather then to try and explain what we are up to. So, what are we up to? Here is the long version.

Open source has come a long way since the early days of Linux. Nevertheless, what Linux has achieved, nothing less than to unite players like IBM, Intel, AMD, Oracle, SAP etc. on one standard for an operating system platform. For me, this defines the power of open source.

The GPL has proven its power as a means to align development by taking individual exploitation out of the equation for a defined context. Only in a group of people (society?) that has regulation for the foundations of cooperation can competition go to the next level and business thrive. A commodity waterlevel has been rising from the hardware interface upwards into solution stacks. Database and application servers are layers that have become available for free for many standard scenarios. And then Oracle has been really successful in complementing this available free layer horizontally with optimized high end versions.

In a way that’s about the situation we would like to also see right at the top of the stack, where user data becomes directly digestable. Why – aside from Larry Ellison buying yet another jet or a bigger boat – would we really care for the inner workings of computer stacks when we set out to define a new and more open type of ecosystem?

Or in other words, we must be radical and show consequence in our thinking if we want to build a better, more open type of environment for user data.

All that users care about is their data. And in today’s IT this data resides in silos. One type of silo is what we call collaboration solutions (yes, including Open-Xchange. And Microsoft Exchange. And Lotus. And so on.). They simply don’t collaborate. Or take social networks. They too are only social on the inside. In case of the social networks this is largely due to the fact that the companies who pay for the respective Akamai bills try to monetize on owning user data. Wrong aproach, folks! User data belongs to users. Period.

With collaboration solutions the situation gets more interesting. There are simply no standards to exchange groupware data. vcard and ical? Yeah, right.

Let’s face it, these are least common denominators that only transport marginal subsets of the structure the data inside collaboration software carries. Who edited a piece of data and when? And what were the access rights? And the authentication? And who else might have tampered with it? And what meetings did the person in the vcard attend? And via which other email addresses did I receive mail from this person? And via which twitter account? Or skype? Or Google Talk? Or IRC, ICQ, XMPP flavour xyz.

Data is defined by the code that uses and produces, digests and publishes it. Software is much too complex to spec. The code is the spec.

If the Semantic Web as defined by the w3c really worked, the onthologies would become the next implementation of whatever they attempt to describe. Mr. Berners-Lee, I adore you for what you achieved in the past. And I cannot fathom how blind you are when it comes to understanding applications as the source for the meaning of data. At http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ it says:

“…

The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is lots of data we all use every day, and it is not part of the web. I can see my bank statements on the web, and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar. But can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank statement lines in a calendar?

Why not? Because we don’t have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself.

The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.

…”

Wrong. This is the kind of thinking that gets us architectures that become more and more complicated. An OS, a database, a layer of services, an onthology. World defined. Done. Bullshit! This is about as far from reality as the plans for all of society in the former socialist part of Germany. And about as cumbersome to overcome. To asume that standardization of data belongs into infrastructure and databases is grotesque. Data formats that matter, formats that define the meaning of solutions, are what users interact with. Microsoft understood that a long time ago, and without Google stealing the data formats, and the data, and the asociated usage rights, and hiding all of it in a googleplex this Microsoft move would have become a problem. Google outshines Microsoft like a supernova.

Kant wrote it all up a long time ago, people like Ernst von Glasersfeld took it a step further.

Humans define the meaning of what they hear. Of what they see and what they make language to be for themselves. It is us who make the world around us apear to be what we see. Ever tried to imagine a world of atoms? And waves that double as particles? … Along the same lines there is an argument to be made to come out as:

Applications define the meaning of data.

And only open source applications will be able to make this meaning shareable. Only as the underlying code for basic data types becomes available freely, only then does a truely semantic web become possible. Onthologies are a dead end. Wake up, guys.

We as groupware vendors are trying to support users in complex day to day situations with non-complex, but really, really complicated solutions. PAs have become Voodoo-type specialists in dealing with Microsoft Menue bars. Not because users would want to, but because the environment they are forced to embrace is not good enough to support them apropriately.

The answer cannot be to be more and more loaded with features nobody gets. The answer for a software product must be to become much much easier to integrate with. And to share data with other applications easily. And be seamless in the support for all kinds of data an application is concerned with. And to collaboratively build an ecosystem that shows complex capabilities from rather simple building blocks.

Groupware is a dead end.

Collaboration Solutions must become personal. Managing groups of people is not possible apropriately without understanding the constraints imposed on individuals by significant others (lol, what a term), local public holidays (hey, it’s good to be in Germany!), private functions (get more than three Germans in a room and they found a club …), 3rd party contract work etc. . And this is not possible from a central, communistic, regulated, rigid environment like a groupware. We sell one, we know. Good thing for us is we are not alone. Everybody does. Today.

Personal information management requires for information to become personal.

How do I manage my daily routines in a world of

• iphone client for twitter x
• iphone client for facebook y
• webinterface for linkedin
• blackberry
• laptop with Outlook(tm)
• laptop with Splashtop(tm)
• private email at GMail (beta)
• …

if all these things don’t talk to eachother? And how do I get them to talk if standards are not good enough?

I go back to the beginning of this post. Linux came to bloom in a similar environment. Just way way down in the solution stack. Why not use the same mechanisms to get data standardized? Why not just put some code out there that does things. Useful things. Stuff people like. Like getting their data out of silos.

This is what we are going to start with.

Right at the bottom of oxpedia.org we have started to talk about and document the prototype that is about to run at ox.io – beware, it will take some weeks to get the infrastructure to the point where it can really provide the kind of end user experience we are expecting of it. Until then the link will just point to our website.

So we joined the open cloud manifesto. Why? Simple. A quote says it best. It is from page 5 of the open cloud manifesto:

“… Cloud providers must not use their market position to lock customers into their particular platforms and limit their choice of providers. …”

APIs vs. People

There is a fundamental difference between humans communicating — and computers trying the same: the accepted way to talk in a mannered way is to show respect, accept opinions, be humble rather than show off.

If we were computers this would flip completely: we would expose an API (German Language, English Language, Chinese, …) and somebody else would call on this API and just tell us what to do — about as friendly and effective as the political system in eastern Europe 30 years ago.

So where do we take this thought? At Open-Xchange we are going to start with a more respectful approach to computers talking to each other. In fact we will take it to the extreme:

Within the next few weeks we will have a prototype of Open-Xchange Server running at http://ox.io (nice domain, right) that can publish all its content as micro-formatted html. This would not be special aside from the fact that users can directly read in their browsers what their OX is publishing.

The beauty of the prototype only unravels when the subscription capability and of course tagging and internal filters weigh in. All of a sudden the distribution and aggregation of any and all data in OX is no longer restricted to the system.

Not even restricted to users of OX.

Because I can have ANYBODY — or rather anybody I decide to allow — to look at the published data and digest what my OX provides. Addresses, calendars, stuff from our InfoStore (think CMS) etc.

And I can also subscribe to such feeds myself. I can put together all the addresses, calendar content and whatnot that I need on my mobile.
And just publish them to myself.
And markup the bits and pieces I really want to lug around.
And then subscribe to them and push them to my mobile device. Or my mailxchange.com account.
Or vice versa — replicate all the stuff I have on my hosted account to the one on my laptop.
Or aggregate professional life 1 to n with my private life 1 to n to my laptop.
And then filter it all out again to all the people I interact with. But by context.

The tagging system mentioned above can of course easily publish all these categories via microformats as well. So I don’t lose all context like when I go and overwrite all my address book on my iphone after I downloaded a csv-file from xing.com …

Thanks to the folks at microformats.org. Without your work we could not have been as open. And of course thanks to GNU for the GPL2. Without it we would have a hard time explaining why this will not lock anybody in.

Social Open-Xchange is coming. Hold your breath! Or not

What’s The Cloud Anyway?

Cloud computing will be hard without open source. And distributed systems like the Googleplex or Yahoo’s servers that run in house are all the more reason for that. And only an open cloud environment can counter the likes.

Let’s take one step after the other:

The industry and press are talking about it. And they will continue heating up to talk about it until it is about as well defined as AJAX (…). But then, what is Cloud Computing and the Cloud in the first place?

Here’s an opinion.

Cloud computing is when you distribute your workload so that only a computer can find it again. And distribute your data so that the same applies. And then you call it Google (or Yahoo) and keep all your customers data on your servers. Right? Well, most people seem to like the approach without even thinking twice.

I think it is dangerous.

And the pickup cloud computing companies currently experience seems to support this opinion. With companies like Nirvanix or cohesiveFT or Amazon or … it becomes a breeze to put your workload onto the net and keep control of your most precious good in an online society: your data. And cloud computing offerings give you the building blocks to do just that.

It takes no wonder Microsoft(tm) is all excited about Yahoo. How come everybody is bashing them over their ISO stunt around document formats (hey, wouldn’t it be ISO to blame here? And governments like the German one, allowing the teaching of Microsoft Apps on public television, without offering any such support to open source alternatives? …)? True, it is bad. Bad for the industry, bad for consumers, bad for business, to have one company set the standards. But then there is another kind of beast loose on the internet, and people seem to like it: with Google and Yahoo, and now Apple joining and Microsoft trying to sort out their positioning vs. their in-house business, customers data just sits on servers owned by companies. Think about it. We are all wound up about a data format being proprietary, what about the whole service – including data, data format, application – EVERYTHING being proprietary? As with Google.

Sure, there is plenty of figg leaves. All the relevant players pay big dollars for being the good guys in the public. And they release plenty of commodity code, getting the open source community to even help them. What marvelous strategy!

Open-Xchange mainly goes to market together with hosters. The data resides on hosters’ servers, is maintained and backed up by the hoster and it takes some cunning (beware, I am being geman and cynical … so the necessary effort is really about 15 minutes of reading the manual) to replicate your online life in a local instance. Which is possible, because Open-Xchange is open source. Client and Server.

What has all that to do with the cloud? The answer is fairly easy. The server can be extended to run against any place on the internet where you want to store your data. Workloads become runnable by any one service provider with a virtualization facility. Amazon EC2 or anyone in that space. And the data will reside where its owner decides.

This might be looked at as counter to hosters current strategies. The contrary is true. Because hosters sell bandwidth. And storage. And service levels without pain. And so on, and on, and on. And a replicated repository of an endusers most critical business data will become a given. Multiplying the opportunity in an already exploding market.

Open-Xchange is offering exactly the same thing like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple etc. – well, our hosting partners like Network Solutions or 1and1.com do – but it is fully well possible to migrate / copy / replicate your data with all features in-house today. And replication will become seamless, automatically. Manually it is there today already.

Quite a difference.