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:
