[OWW-Discuss] Google HuddleChat vs 37 Signals Campfire: When Open Source gets... trumped?

[Bill Flanagan]

When is Open Source turned into the minion of the "Not-DoEvi"l Empire?

It's hard to not want to mention this one. Consider this as it relates to
OWW, Open Source, Open Science, Intellectual Propert, Innovation, and
Sales/Marketing Tactics and Strategy.


We're having a lot of internal discussion here at OWW re: our chat app. The
old one was a great concept but didn't scale well. I really mean this.
Austin wrote it and I really like the concept of it. The scaling issues came
from the use of a free chat program that is a bit flaky and sucks the heck
out of our server's capacity when in use. We've been working to use a
Jabber-based chat as a replacement. We're having scattered connectivity
issues with it, but it's the way we're headed. We'll get there sooner or
later. Again, Austin is moving this one along. I think we started this
effort based upon comments from Mr. Bishop some months back.

I'm really not asking for solutions in this message. Please use OWW to
discuss chat here:

http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Software/Projects/Chat/Discuss

There are a number of dimensions that have recently popped up that
cumulatively put Huddle/Campfire chat  in the middle of a more general
discussion related to Open Source and everything else. Oddly, the tone is
very similar to the way Microsoft used to get called out for adding
functionality from other company's apps into the base Windows OS. I've lived
through a lot of this well before open source was a specific focus of the
discussion. The names have changed. I'm also pretty sure the story has
changed in this case.

37 Signals, everyone's favorite Web 2.0 developer (Ruby on Rails and
BaseCamp for instance), was very critical of a decision by Google to release
the source to a Python/Django app called 'Huddle Chat'. The app was a very
close approximation of 37 Signal's Campfire, a really nice chat program that
works flawlessly. It's close to what we at OWW would like our free HTML chat
to be.

37 Signals does their work in Ruby on Rails : they pretty much wrote Ruby on
Rails. They're funded by Amazon. You can't even buy Campfire: you have to
rent it per-month from them. It runs on Amazon's S3/EC2 backend.

Google released this as part of their free Google Web App initiative. For
now, you don't pay for the design tools, the apps, the source code, or even
the cycles and bandwidth the app uses. It's all free. The source was Open.

Google soon (within a few weeks) dropped the Huddle Chat source code
example. If it were there, I would have lobbied to try it out at least for
OWW. Instead, we can use another chat app or an ad-supported version of
someone else's chat app. We know there are a few other services offering
free chat: we may still go with the best of the lot if we need to.

This is al that now remains (http://www.huddlechat.com/):

Hi, a couple of our colleagues wrote Huddle Chat in their spare time as a
sample application for other developers to demonstrate the power and
flexibility of Google App Engine. We've heard some complaints from the
developer community about it and because of that we've decided to take it
down. If you'd like to see more sample applications written on Google App
Engine please check out our documentation and our App Gallery.

Thanks,
The Google App Engine Team


This is a discusion question re: OWW: what was right and wrong here?

Did Google try to kick the little guy (37 Signals) to signal the big
competitor (Amazon)?

As far as I know, you can't 'steal' the look and feel of an application. I
worked for Lotus Developement when the company tried to sue Microsoft over
Excel. The judge said copyright didn't cover the expression of an
application or the set of features. He said the only way to do that might be
the patent process. Thus came the deluge. In this case, 37 Signals had no
patent protection to trumpet their rights. Instead, they pretty much pointed
a finger at Google and called them thiefs.

As we get more involved with making features from other sites also part of
OWW, what would people here feel?

I'm very interested in this incident as a way to look at some of the ways
Open Source can best be used to do more for biologts and biology.

By the way, I use an Open Source version clone of 37 Signals BaseCamp for my
own internal use. I can't afford their price for the app. If we were to
deploy something like this in OWW, how would it be received? Please package
all tomato and vegetable throwables into styrofoam and send to me.

We can use the pasta sauce more than you can use the monitor cleaning
issues!

Here are a few references:

*37 Signals
*http://www.37signals.com/
*
BaseCamp:
*http://www.basecamphq.com/?source=37s+home

*Campfire: *
http://www.campfirenow.com/?source=37s+home

*Huddle Chat:
*http://www.huddlechat.com/

*Google App Engine:
*http://code.google.com/appengine/

*Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3):
*http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261

*Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) - Beta*
http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=amb_link_5164072_1?ie=UTF8&node=201590011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=auto-sparkle&pf_rd_r=09EMV56PKHPQG1SARREE&pf_rd_t=301&pf_rd_p=299027501&pf_rd_i=EC2
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