I realize that it is probably a long shot for O’Reilly to recognize a “fringe” language project as deserving of recognition in their open source awards. But I (and the rest of you!) would be remiss not to at least nominate Nenad Rakocevic a.k.a. @DocKimbel. He has spent two years of diligent work and organizing on Red…and that’s not to mention the broad open-source contributions to the Rebol community over the years!

Here’s the link where you can enter your nomination:

OSCON 2013 Nomination Form

And here’s what I wrote:

The closed-source Rebol interpreted language lived in the shadows for decades. Designed by one of the fathers of AmigaOS, it has impressed many…and is frequently cited by Douglas Crockford as his inspiration for creating JSON.

Nenad Rakocevic was one of the most prolific and high profile of open-source Rebol programmers. While Rebol and many of its clients were creating closed-source applications, he was BSD-licensing major projects like his web server Cheyenne, the Rebol MySQL driver, and the CureCode bug database.

In a classic example of how closed-source methods can hold back remarkable ideas, Rebol Technologies stalled development. So Nenad broke away with the idea of creating a “full stack” language based on Rebol called RED. But instead of merely having the same range of applicability as Ruby, Python, or other interpreted languages…his plan for Red was to apply the methods to create compiled (or mostly-compiled) code. This could just as easily be used for device drivers as high-level programming.

Nenad’s progress has been prolific over two years. Most suspect his speed and community inclusivity was the trigger that caused Rebol’s creator to open-source his own project in December 2012. Thanks to his efforts, the Rebol community has *two* strong codebases to build from going forward.

Red (and Rebol) are currently in the margins of the technology world. But it would impress me if O’Reilly recognized the efforts of someone working diligently to lead longstanding closed-source tools into the light, as well as eliminate complexity (rather than continue to build upon pillars of salt and sand.)

Read more at: http://red-lang.org

(Update: Since the time of this posting in 2007, many proprietary screencasting programs have grown by leaps and bounds, or new ones come on the scene like Screenflow. While the good ones aren’t free, they are importantly better-enough that if I’m going to use a proprietary program, then I would suggest one of them for those who can afford it. But since one of the premises of this site is to practice what constitutes good open source evangelism and outreach, here is my historical record of engaging TechSmith.)

I really enjoy using Jing. It is a quick and easy-to-use solution for making screen capture movies—like Camtasia Studio or Snapz Pro. But it has one-click publishing to a network service, so you don’t have to figure out how to deliver your captures to your friends.

It uses the SWF Flash format which—though not an open standard—at least is widely supported on platforms like Linux. Though not “free as in freedom” at the moment, the program itself is at least “free as in beer”. Plus you can save files to your local hard drive or ftp site if you want, so it’s not an obvious example of an attempt at locking you into anything. All signs point to “cool program made by cool people”.

Yet I almost never got started using Jing. I’d almost bought Snapz Pro for $65 to do the same demos and screenshots, which I would have published in Quicktime. It was a near miss at using an inappropriate tool for the task and spending a not-insignificant amount of money on it. Of course, the people who make Snapz almost certainly do know about Jing…yet don’t make an effort to educate you about it.

Don’t get me wrong at all—by our current standards in software, Snapz Pro is a great product. Yet I’m sure a lot of people who buy Snapz would be better suited by a tool like Jing. What I want to believe in my heart of hearts is that if money weren’t part of the picture, dialogue between the creators of these two excellent Mac products could create a whole greater than the sum of its parts… free for all. (I’ve written before about bribing developers to make their work free.)

Then I noticed that Jing was openly soliciting feedback comments on their weblog, where the world could read it. They end a blog post with:

So go ahead, download Jing and inform, entertain, explain, educate, and even rant. Just be sure to tell us what you think, or how you’re using it. We’d love to hear your story!

Hey—they asked for a rant, and that’s what I do best! So I decided to share some of my recent Jing videos that I made for my site, told them about a couple of Snapz Pro features I’d like to see added, and I threw in a little bit about the Hostile Fork mission:

Hi Jing project…! I have started using Jing on a daily basis to demonstrate some of my ideas, and it’s a great communication tool that I encourage others to use:

http://hostilefork.com/2007/11/25/lost-focus-placeholder/

http://hostilefork.com/2007/11/25/undo-single-user-event/

Before Jing, I tried Snapz Pro—which is a nice OS/X tool that I almost bought. But my bias for free software and specific target of a flash-based web player made Jing a better choice. Still there are a lot of features in Snapz Pro which you could implement.

For instance, I often wish to type in a fixed size for the capture rectangle and then position the rectangle by dragging it to the right place. That is important. Also, I like to be able to send screen captures directly to the clipboard sometimes.

Yet the biggest thing that I’d like to see is for Jing to become an open source project. That would open a lot of doors to using GPL libraries for things like image and movie encodings (PNG only is a bit limiting…) Although I know you might not be planning to give away Jing free forever, you could have a pledge drive through Fundable (2013 Update: I would now suggest the more popular and well-known KickStarter) where rather than buying copies of the program, the Jing userbase would buy the source?

This is what happened with The Blender Foundation, and I would consider it personally satisfying to see great tools like Jing doing the same thing. What do you think?

The comment was not immediately published on the site, rather it was put into a moderation queue. That meant I got this screen:

I waited until the next day and looked to see if it had been approved. Although I didn’t receive any email or feedback saying my comment had been rejected, I got a clue that it was being shelved and not going to be approved. That clue was the appearance of another comment that had a later timestamp—which showed that someone was reading the queue and approving comments…they just hadn’t approved mine.

If my comment was inappropriate, then what met the bar? Well, this is what they approved from the next day:

Could you make it on jing so they come out as mov file?

But… never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by site malfunction. Also, perhaps they wanted to wait to publish my comment until they had pondered a response. (Unlikely, why wait?) So I decided I’d follow up on this by sending a note through the feedback form on their website, and explicitly ask what was going on:

Hello there!

I’m a fan of the Jing project who posted a comment on your blog yesterday morning. Yet it was awaiting moderation, and has not been approved. In the meantime you have approved a comment saying “Could you make it on jing so they come out as mov file?”

(Which isn’t a terrible idea or anything, but I think my comment was more insightful and represented a bit more of an sincere investment in dialogue!)

Would you mind either approving it -OR- writing me a note about why you won’t… with what changes would be required before you would consider it appropriate content for a comment on your site? (e.g. removal of URLs to my own jing videos, the mention of a competing product by name, etc.)

Though I disagree with such policies, I can cope with them as long as they are made explicit and public. Thank you for your consideration, and I’ve attached another copy of the comment for review:

—original comment—

Hi Jing project…! I have started using Jing on a daily basis to demonstrate some of my ideas, and it’s a great communication tool that I am evangelizing to others:

http://hostilefork.com/2007/11/25/lost-focus-placeholder/

http://hostilefork.com/2007/11/25/undo-single-user-event/

Before Jing, I tried Snapz Pro—which is a nice OS/X tool that I almost bought. But my bias for free software and specific target of a flash-based web player made Jing a better choice. Still there are a lot of features in Snapz Pro which you could implement.

For instance, I often wish to type in a fixed size for the capture rectangle and then position the rectangle by dragging it to the right place. That is important. Also, I like to be able to send screen captures directly to the clipboard sometimes.

Yet the biggest thing that I’d like to see is for Jing to become an open source project. That would open a lot of doors to using GPL libraries for things like image and movie encodings (PNG only is a bit limiting…) Although I know you might not be planning to give away Jing free forever, you could have a pledge drive (through Fundable?) where rather than buying copies of the program, the Jing userbase would buy the source?

This is what happened with The Blender Foundation, and I would consider it personally satisfying to see great tools like Jing doing the same thing. What do you think?

So there’s the story, and I’ll follow up with any updates if they happen. It does perhaps hint that it may be difficult to engage in public dialogue of whether there exists any price at which companies would be willing to open-source a proprietary product. I’ll keep thinking about improving the methods.

(UPDATE: On December 14th, 2007 I received a response from Betsy Weber, who is the Technical Evangelist for Jing. She mentioned she couldn’t find my first comment but approved the second one.)

Hi - Sorry about that…I’ve been on the road most of November and part of December so I’m way behind on email and blogging. My apologies.

I’ve found your 2nd comment and approved it. Not sure what happened to your first comment though. Sorry about the delay. Thanks for your patience.

I appreciate your feedback and comments.

Betsy Weber, Chief Evangelist
TechSmith Corporation
www.techsmith.com
(MSN IM, Skype, cell omitted)

It doesn’t really address my suggestion itself, but it at least puts my idea out there. And it is a good reminder that following up can be good, and that one shouldn’t assume that failure to get feedback indicates a response to the message.

(2013 UPDATE: The original blog link is no longer valid, so I updated it above to a link to the Internet Archive’s version.)

Some developers of closed-source/commercial software are holding onto the idea that a program they have written is going to make them a lot of money in the future. Yet by and large, many small software projects—even very good ones—will not ever make money if they are held on to tightly. Some do make a few hundred dollars a month, but it’s usually a fantasy to believe that it will make the developer rich and famous. This fantasy keeps them from sharing their source and possibly merging ideas with other similar codebases and generating something even better for the public.

One possibility would be to convince the developer of a piece of good software to hand over their work by giving them a lump sum. This sum may be less than the hoped-for long-term revenue in the dreams of the recipient, but sufficient to fund the hours of their hobby, and offset the loss of the residual income. This has happened on at least one instance I know about. For 100,000 euros, the makers of Blender were willing to transfer ownership of their project to the free software community rather than let the project disappear when the company went out of business.

Can more people be paid off? If so, one helpful tool would be a project called Fundable. It lets you pledge funds to a pool for a specific purpose—and then the funds you donate are only billed in the event that the total donation goal is reached.

(2012 UPDATE: In 2007 when I wrote this, Fundable sounded like a great idea. Apparently, questions into the legitimacy of the people who ran it and some other issues drove that company out of business and into a bad reputation. However, the runaway success of a very similar idea called KickStarter suggests I might have been prescient in realizing this idea–which now is labeled crowdfunding–was something that had the potential to really take off!)

Something that might help people be more willing to offer money would be if developers presented a reasoned rationale for why they needed it. Discussing one’s budget in an open way and putting it under the scrutiny of investors may not appeal to most independent developers. But the experiment has been conducted by at least one individual—Jason Rohrer—who has disclosed his personal expenses and concluded that it would take less than $1000 a month to allow him to pursue free software development full time.

It’s not clear that he has been successful in this, but it’s a brave idea. I do not personally use the software he develops and so I am hard pressed to determine if this represents a good value proposition compared to other efforts. But it’s a fascinating precedent that might make people more willing to donate to buy public rights to the code of a particular developer (especially if it’s on an ongoing basis where their commitment to doing further work can be assessed).

One of the key things that needs to be able to happen in order for open source projects to be aware of each other is some kind of database which the community can edit, linking related items together. The goal should be to help prevent someone from accidentally (or intentionally) obscuring the awareness of a competing effort. It could also be a tool for mitigating the effects of web scraping, by pointing to canonical versions of content direct from the author.

Wikipedia is actually serving this fairly well, and it’s one of the reasons why I tend to link to the Wikipedia page about products rather than (for instance) the download site or the corporate page. It may be true today that Ableton Live is the most outstanding audio software package on the market—but Ableton Inc. is unlikely to be linking to a formidable competitor’s homepage if that ever ceases to be the case. Users of Wikipedia have the opportunity to put in a “See Also” link.

Of course, search engines and review sites can do this—but often reviews are more stagnant than the corporate site. Still, something I tend to do when I’m investigating a new product or service is to type into a search engine the simple string “better than [PROGRAMNAME]”. This generates some possibilities to check out. But when I’m done, that information is lost, unless I write another review page.

This gave me the idea of creating something relatively simple—a small application which lets users express “A is better than B” relationships and upload those into a central database. Moreover, it would be able to track who holds those opinions and allow them to be lobbied to change their allegiances if new information comes to light. The concept is to create community pressure on the efforts that everyone thinks is inferior to (at minimum) place a notice on their web page informing visitors that there is another more popular option which is favored for particular reasons.

I imagine that the “better than” relationships could apply to nearly anything, though the intention is to compare things that are direct competitors. For instance, an MP3 file with a skip in it can be considered surpassed by an MP3 file that does not have a skip in it. By storing the Cryptographic Hashes of the items being compared (whether they be names of things or entire giant binary files) it would be possible to efficiently store these relationships in the database. A browser plugin would constantly hash downloaded content and URLs and give you tips when you were looking at something that had a better version.

The basics of this program is not necessarily difficult to write—but there are many details to be thought through in regards to the management of vandalous contributions or blatant falsehoods. A similar set of issues was brought up by the Mindpixel project—which was similarly trying to build up a repository of consensus knowledge using lots of tiny facts contributed and rated by various people.