Many have written on the loophole that Opera used to make this happen; Opera mini isn’t technically a browser, it can probably be more accurately described as a remote image viewer. The browser sends out a request for a URI to the Opera proxy servers who then pull down the requested page, and let Javascript run for up to 2 seconds to build out any Web 2.0 goodness on the page. The server then renders the resultant HTML (I assume, judging by the rendering discontinuities, with their very own layout engine) to an image which is then sent back to your mobile device as a pixelated rendition of the web page you asked for.

Questionable Recursion

More, however than an image is returned, data about active regions on the page are also sent back allowing you to when you touch links, or even “interact” with Javascript powered widget. Touch one of these active elements and the server again clatters into action, churning and whirring to grab HTML, execute script, and render a sepia image of the website for view through its dirty little port hole.

This does mean that even though you don’t get any nice sliding or swooshing Javascript animations they are replaced with a faithful approximation of the animation’s final state. This can, understandably, cause sites to have a jumpy and jarring, if fast, feel. However, touch a Javascript widget in Safari and you’re greeted with a nice slide or fade, not by a URL bar as your browser does, yet another, web request to have a server run the script only to show you the final frame of the animation.

Unfortunately, the last awards that this yesterday-tech browser received were before the epoch of Safari on the iPhone. Compared to the sorry state of the browser on my BlackBerry, yes, this is a nice change; but it just doesn’t deliver the experience that people expect on contemporary devices, let alone a Safari commensurate experience that is already present on the iPhone.

Now this is all fine and good, if this web experience speaks to you; but is this just Steve having fun with Opera? Something akin to the poison pill that he force fed Adobe and others in the as-yet-to-be-released iPhone OS 4 developer agreement?

The thing is, Opera, like any good software developer, likes to make maximum reuse of it’s code. Case in point, their Android version of Opera mini, instead of rewriting their software to work with the OS, they rewrote the OS; they went as far as implementing a J2ME translation layer for Android to allow their browser to run unmodified.

Now, it is difficult to tell if Opera Mini on the iPhone is using native widgets, they all have a kind of an uncanny valley look to them, but there is more explicit evidence as well. For one, try doing a copy and paste operation, this is definitely not the native iPhone OS cut and paste experience. This duality of experience is exactly what Apple is attempting to quash with their new developer agreement.

Cut and Paste

Are you; a user of the original iPhone with only Edge connectivity (or running the 3G variants hacked on T-Mobile, ahem); into a jolting, pixelated web experience; or an Opera fan-person? Don’t mind that this experience may end abruptly when you upgrade your iPhone to OS4? Then this may be the browser for you.

Philosophically, software is usually released under the GPL for the purpose of freedom, freedom for a user to do what they will with the software as long as they afford the same freedom to those who come after them. This precludes others from hijacking free software and embedding it in a derivative, proprietary, work. Not all FOSS licenses have these restrictions, but the GPL does for the purpose of meeting the goals of the Free Software Foundation.

A number of companies with open-source software released under the GPL have recently started taking advantage of a dual-licensing model to generate revenue. This revenue can be put to a number of uses including, paying developers to work full time on the project, building stock holder value, and generate cash for acquisitions and other investments. Richard Stallman himself even reasons that “selling exceptions” is not any more evil than releasing software under a noncopyleft license such as X11 or BSD.

However, one discipline is required of any organization that wants to use a dual-licensing model; they must require that the copyright of all code contributions be assigned to them. Without this assignment they would have no effective legal right to distribute the software under a proprietary license.

Michael Meeks talks a lot about the pros and cons of copyright assignment, and some of it’s fallacies and downfalls, in the article I linked previously. One downfall that he mentions is that no project that uses this model has a very vibrant community of contributing developers; most of the development is done internally by the organisation’s own developers anyway. If this is the case, then what value does releasing the software under the GPL really give an organisation?

Lets play the roll of a company has a piece of software IP that they want to bring to the market. We are a developer hostile company which is not interested in building a third-party ecosystem around our product. If there is a possibility to generate revenue related to our software, we want it. We’ll go through a couple of scenarios with this software to see how we can accomplish our goals most effectively by twisting the GPL.

We’ve released our software into the market as a closed-source proprietary product and it enjoys some success. As it becomes successful the userbase grows enough that another company, Toolco, sees a market to provide some complimentary feature to our customers. This company uses APIs (public or private) and other integration methods to create closed-source, proprietary plugins or tools that extend the functionality of our product. DMCA Section 1201(f) protects their right to this program-to-program interoperability even to the extent of reverse engineering. Beyond a constant cat and mouse game our company really has no way to limit the distribution of these extensions or to take a piece of the pie, as it were.

Our board of directors sits down for a strategy session and after a couple hours someone recommends something radical. “Lets release our code under the GPL, require copyright assignment for any contributions, and use a dual-licensing model to continue generating revenue. In fact, I expect that most of our development will be done by internal developers still, though users may be able to provide more in-depth help fixing odd bugs.” This may not be so insane after all; there are a number of things that our company gains from this, including some built-in perceived good will and publicity by releasing our large product as an open-source project.

Hey wait, you remember the Toolco guys right? They’ve used some undocumented function calls in one of our libraries to create a backup tool for our product, it works better and has twice the penetration of our own module for which we charge an additional fee. Well, Toolco now has technically created a derivative work of our GPL product by linking to one of it’s libraries. We now have a number of legal recourses to force Toolco out of the market and to also prevent any other companies from creating a product that interoperates with our software.

This may sound tantamount to conspiracy theory but this is exactly what MySql has done, intentionally or not they have slowly been tightening the leash on their open-source software. Internal developers do almost all of the development and any outside contributions must have their copyright assigned to MySql. Around version 4.1 their client libraries were changed from LGPL to GPL only; to distribute software that even has the ability to communicate with an MySql instance you must now either release your source code or pay for a proprietary license. The copyright assignment has allowed them to do this without so much as a query to the MySql community.

Aside from the dual-licensing revenue, they have also begun making a profit from proprietary management and monitoring software. These applications use interfaces to MySql that would make any third-party’s similarly functional package a derivative work and only releasable under the GPL. This has effectively created a legal haven for Oracle as the only company in the world that can make a profit by writing closed software that interoperates with MySql.

The GPL, with a goal to provide software that is free-as-in-speech, has been effectively used as a legal muzzle to strip freedom and competition to an extent that even closed-source proprietary software would have difficulty accomplishing.

I’ve found Jeff to be rather level-headed and analytical during discussions, Joel on the other hand is quite often disruptive. This I’ve found to be a lot like their blogs though I don’t read them often. I also see these traits surface to varying degrees through Jeff and Joel’s joint venture.

I feel that Jeff has been an exceedingly gracious proprietor of the StackOverflow community, balancing monetization of the site with respect for the well from which their success flows. The well obviously being the thousands of users that spend their time providing content and moderation for the StackOverflow site.

Visitiing the site recently — not logged in — using a family member’s computer I found that the StackOverflow site is totally different for the drive-by Googler, the advertisements are much more prominent and inline with the content. Jeff has had the presence of mind to squelch the advertising for their most loyal and content-providing users, this is brilliant and show that the Golden Rule is in full effect at StackOverflow. And why wouldn’t they do this? It is my understanding that their traffic is somewhere around 80/20% anonymous/member mix, it’s a small tradeoff in revenue to take care of their content stream to ensure it will continue to flow.

Unfortunately with their latest attempt to monetize StackOverflow it seems that Joel’s traits (as PM of the venture) have surfaced more than Jeff should allow. Being the consummate businessman, with an office in New York and a home in The Hamptons, Joel wants to monetize on the traffic and content of StackOverflow with more than advertising. Who can blame him, StackOverflow receives millions of page views a month and is ranked in the top 1000 sites on the internet.

Where else would Joel think to go than his tried and true job listing service. This is comfortable ground for Joel, for years he has been providing employers visibility to a well defined demographic of potential employees for a somewhat standard industry rate of $350 per listing. He has been able to make a good living monetizing his blog traffic for years through advertisements and these job listings and extending this service to the even more laser focused programmer demographic of StackOverflow is a no-brainer.

Up to this point the site at jobs.stackoverflow.com has basically been a mirror of the joelonoftware listing, but in true StackOverflow spirit Jeff and Joel have just recently released a much more in-depth whack at the problem of finding and hiring good developers. I think their idea is genious; leveraging the StackOverflow content and infrastructure (tags, profiles, Q&A) to allow developers to effectively cash-in on the time spent on StackOverflow to woo potential employers, and for employers to get invaluable information about developers that could never be communicated on a simple résumé.

But one word with Unicode characters wasn’t enough, so Jeff and Joel decided that developers should fill out a Curriculum Vitæ (CV) instead of a résumé. I find the distinction that they’ve made here to be refreshing and a great fit for the synergy of a developer’s passion, past experience and StackOverflow répertoire. Besides the time, filling out and publishing a public CV is a no cost proposition provided by the StackOverflow team.

Their plans for monetizing the careers site is two-fold. For the first revenue stream — like the jobs listing — there will be a subscription fee for employers to get access to search developer CVs to the tune of $500 per week up to $5000 per year. If you’ve ever tried to find and hire good developers using the standard method of newspaper/dice/monster, you know that this fee is worth every cent. A recruiting agency will charge you 10-25% of a placment’s salary to send people your way, and more often than not they just use the wet noodle approach and throw developers at you until one sticks. For someone that makes $80K it will cost you $8-20,000 for that single placement.

“So wherein does your quibble lie?” you might ask. Well, it’s in the second of the two revenue streams for the careers site, for the measly pittance of $99/year they’ve decided to throw out the baby with the bathwater. On the other side of the employer’s looking glass developers will need to pony up hard cash in order to “file” their CV to be searchable on the StackOverflow careers site. This is an affront to the content providers of their community and I can’t believe that this token filing fee is worth the bad will that it could generate.

It is done under the guise of filtering out those “who knew that they had no reasonable chance of getting a job”[1]. I think Jeff even believes this, but it’s really just an unfortunate scapegoat for making money at the expense of your content providers.

In their latest podcast Jeff was pretty adamant that the job seekers not be sortable by their StackOverflow reputation, he wants people with little or no reputation to have an equal visibility to those that do. This bodes even worse for their plan of charging job seekers to file their CV.

The kind of people that are passionate and give of their time to answer other’s questions are exactly the kind of developers that I want to hire. And these are exactly the same people that are less likely to view this filing fee in an unfavorable way. These are the kind of developers that program at home, are constantly learning new things, work on OSS projects, and are not 9-5 just-for-the-paycheck programmers. Their loyalty when treated well is often unmatched.

Then there’s the other kind of developer; you know the guy I’m talking about, the smooth talker, usually the “Team Leader”. The guy who drives his Audi to work and knows how to play the corporate game better than he knows how to cut-n-paste code from Google. Their loyalty is usually suspect and their main goal is to either climb the corporate ladder (hence team lead instead of in-the-trenches programmer) or jump ship at any time for a higher salary. StackOverflow is a godsend for these types of programmers as it’s rife with snippets free for the taking.

If their goal was to vet potential job seekers, to provide more value to employers, then money is definitely not the way to do it. Even the “smart hiring managers”[1] will have a hard time filtering out these smooth talkers that are always on the market for the highest bidder. These are exactly the people these “smart hiring managers” don’t want, it is expensive to bring people into a company just to have them bail 60 days later.

At my current job we really, really need some talented developers, and there are 5 job seekers on careers in our area. The Salt Lake job market is a small world, I’m sure that I know a third of the people on the list and that’s what scares me; I know a lot of smooth talking “Team Leaders”. With the current criteria to entry I don’t think I can justify finding out who they are for $500.

So in effect Jeff and Joel have ignored they’re best formula for vetting job seekers and instead have opened the doors for anyone who is willing to pay $99/year. If they were really hard up to make money through this channel they could easily provide free filing for anyone who has generated over X reputation on the site in the last rolling year. Similar to their banner advertising this serves the 80% of people who are willing to pay $99 and pays respect to the 20% truly exceptional developers who they owe the success of their site.

Jeff, please doff the cybernetic business suit!

1. http://careers.stackoverflow.com/faq#pricing