Have you heard of the Artists-Museum Partnership Act? Probably not. It didn’t even have a wikipedia article until I wrote it. In a few words the act would:

amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to allow taxpayers who create literary, musical, artistic, or scholarly compositions or similar property a fair market value (determined at the time of contribution) tax deduction for contributions of such properties, the copyrights thereon, or both…

The artists put a lot of time, creativity, experience, and thought into their work, and then they donate it to museums so that the public can share in this art at a free or deeply reduced cost. This bill allows those artists to be justly compensated for their work. So its good for the public and good for the artist right? Maybe, depends on your political views I’d suppose. And just to be straightforward with you, this is only a proposed bill. It has not been made law yet despite the fact that it was introduced two years ago and has made it through the senate.

So the question is, if artists can work on their art only to donate it and receive a tax deduction, then why don’t open source project leaders and contributors deserve equal rights? Well first, there are some issues to consider.

Art is Understood

Actually art is quite subjective, but that’s not what I meant. Art has been around since the beginning of time, so when it comes to writing and developing federal laws, congress has time and experience on their side. There are hundreds if not thousands of laws governing art. Computers, software, and information technology on the other hand is still very new. Most of it is still not regulated, and the geezers who are writing the regulation don’t know the difference between broadband and a pickup truck. It will still be many years before they get a handle information technology.

Fair Market Value

How do you determine the fair market value of open source software? Lines of code? That is a pretty lame metric. How about prevalence in the market place - is more users equal to a great worth? What about cutting edge software? Usually those to enter the market first make a little extra something for the risk and the know how. Forget about the code. What about documentation? And the size of the community. It’s going to be extremely hard to apply any type of accurate value to most open source projects.

Many contributors

Open Source software typically has many developers. From the project leaders and major contributors to the developers who simple submit a patch or two. But also consider issues that are reported, documentation, mailing lists, and other support channels. They are in some way or another contribute to the software as a whole and are important to making the software useful. So how do you determine each individual contributor’s value and thus determine their share of the deduction?

Long development periods

With art, you have a creation period, then a final release. With software, we have  creation periods that can last years, with many intermittent releases - some of which add value to the software others of which may actually make the software less valuable. So you could take the value of this release less the value of the last release to come up with this releases value. Careful. If you introduce too many bugs, the value could be negative, and could owe the IRS. Wow.

Difficult to track

Artists produce a single artifact that is sold or donated. Software is reproducible and is almost free to do so an infinite number of times. The usage of the software is very important in determining its value. For example, a project with a couple of users probably is not worth as much as a project with hundreds of users. Your Pumpkin Path is no where near as prominent as Apache’s Web Server - or is it. How do we know? There needs to be some way to determine an exact user count or at least to determine what grade you might be in, be int 1-10 users, 10-100, users, 100-1000 users, etc. I run Architecture Rules and I honestly don’t know if I have 10 users, or 100. You could look at download counts, but maven downloads aren’t tracked. And what about when one user downloads the artifact and puts it in their organization repository. There could be 100 users from that one download. This would be a hard number to come up with, and even harder the more successful a project becomes.

Your Next 1040EZ

The bill is not law yet, but if artists deserve tax deductions for their donations, then so do open source contributors. But we are along way away from properly regulating the computer and software industries. I have also outline a number of major hurdles before us before we can even begin to determine how big that deduction might be. So next April when your filling out your tax forms (yeah, April, because you waited until the last minute) think about how much value you have created with your open source projects and how long its going to be before you see any of that value put back into your wallet.

The one thing that we can do from here is to keep an eye on this bill. If it goes into the books, then we have something to start fighting for and it might be time to call your less-than-computer-literate congressman or woman and start pressing them for your fair share.

UPDATE Aug-30-2008

• added API package
• added Listeners
• added Configuration Properties
• added default-architecture-rules.xml

OK, lets lay out a road map for 3.0. I sent this message to the architecture-rules-user mailing list and the architecture-rules-dev mailing list tonight. I have a few things that I want to see put into it, and I’d also like to hear what you want in it.

org.architecturerules

First. The big change is the groupId which is finally going to be moved to org.architecturerules for the core project and the maven plugin. I don’t have the domain yet. I have a fund raiser page where I was hoping to get about $30 to secure the domain for 3 years. So far no contributions : \ Maybe if any of your work for a company that uses the project, and the company has donated money in the past, you could ask your boss for a small $30 contribution to this project. Regardless, we’ll get it eventually and the project needs to get off of com.* and the maven plugin needs to be the same groupId.

architecture-rules-ant

I want to refactor the ..architecturerules.ant package to its own jar so that:

• User’s who want to use the ant interface and include this jar.
• By including the jar, you get the Ant jars and dependencies. If you don’t use Ant, you don’t need the jar or the ant libraries.
• As we add new functionality to architecture rules someone else could take on the task of keeping the ant task up to date on their own schedule.
• This module also acts as an example of how to extend the core project.
• Allows us to develop new ant features and fix ant issues without doing a major release of the core. There are a couple of open ant-related issues in the issue list.

The downsides is that the API is broken, but I think that is OK given in the release  the packages are all changing to org.architecturerules so the API will be broken anyway.

Issue 59: DependencyConstraintException should report the violating class

This is sort of a tough issue. We utilize jDepend which only looks at packages. However, Mykola brought Classycle to my attention (which I included on the alternatives page) which looks at class dependencies rather than package dependencies. We could move off of jDepend and switch over to using Classclye to find dependencies, or we could continue to use jDpend, and when a rule is broken, we can jump over to Classycle to figure out which class is breaking the rule. Another benefit to Classclye is that it is able to detect static dependencies which jDpend is not. I actually got an email from SonarJ, a commercial competitor listed on the alternatives page who congratulated us on developing a good open source architecture risk mitigating project but pointed out that jDepend could not detect static dependencies. I think in the long term we need to support detecting static dependencies so this Classycle might have been an important find.

Looking to get involved? We’re looking for contributors for this task.

Issue 60: XML reports

The only other current issue that I would like to tackle somehow is the output of the XML reports. I sent out a pretty detailed email on this to the user and dev mailing list. I got little response. I put a copy of the email in the issue which includes a prototype for the XML output. The premise would be that the execution of architecture rules results in the output of an XML file that describes all of the rules, the packages that were investigated because of that rule, the dependencies of each package that match that rule, and a list of each violation. One major change would be that instead of throwing an exception when a rule is broken, the rest of the packages would be investigated first and then the XML output is written, and then an exception could be thrown describing all of the rules that were broken - not just the first rule.

The reason for this XML output is two-fold: first, it provides output for other developers to start processing and developing new tools for which could be good for this project. second: it provides a data source for our maven 2 plugin to use to generate a site report for. Or this could be a new project: maven-architecture-rules-report-plugin. Either way, this is a good stepping stone to new functionality and growth for this project.

Looking to get involved? We’re looking for contributors for this task.

FindBugs

We added the FindBugs report recently to the maven-generated site. We should be able to clear this list for all of our code.

Remove 3rd party org packages

I had created an Issue to remove unneccessary dependencies to cut down on the number of libraries that we depended on. But I think this was implemented poorly to the point where it caused a reported bug. Also, we have a pseudo maven repository so that makes this issue almost moot.

This list encompasses most of the open issues in the issue tracker that I want to see implemented. There are a couple of issues that I am going to leave on hold (such as inverting the project to expect the user to define the accepted packages rather than the exceptional packages) and some that I can not fix with out money (continuous integration server).

All of these tasks are up for discussion. And most any of them are open to user contributions. If you are interested in taking on one of these tasks, just reply to this email, tell us what you want to work on, what questions you have, and maybe describe how you plan on implementing it. If its a small task, you can submit a patch, if its bigger, we can make you a contributor (for a short term or longer term depending on circumstances)

UPDATE: Issue 68: Listener Support

Adding support for event listeners gives us a few different things that we either need or that would benefit us in the future.  This will hopefully invite other developers to begin extending the project. For example someone someday might make a GUI tool or an IDE plugin and want to provide real-time feedback to the GUI as packages are investigated. This also enables us to develop the XML report in a very modular fashion, without littering the services with code that is not related to performing the service that the class is named for. Listeners provide a great point for adding new functionality from too.

UPDATE: Introduce API Package

Interfaces will be moved to a new org.architecturerules.api package so that developers who wish to extend the project have someplace to start from. This will break backwards compatibility. But so will migrating to org.architecturerules, so if this is going to be done, it should be done now. Sorry everyone.

UPDATE: Issue 64: default-architecture-rules.xml

The initial state of the Configuration entity will be created by reading default-architecture-rules.xml. This essentially just allows us to define the default values via XML rather than defining them with java constants which is what we are doing now. This XML file is easier for the user to read to figure out the default values, is easy to add new default values to as we develop new features, and may be used to demonstrate a sample XML configuration or how features are configured.

UPDATE: Issue 67: Configuration Properties

The listeners require some configuration. Some other tools that have yet to be written may also require configuration. We’ll be adding support for arbitrary properties. These allow you to define a set of keys and a values that can be handed off to the Listeners and to other features that may be created in the future. This provides a pretty robust mechanism for providing configuration values for classes that extend the project.

Maven 2 Plugin SNAPSHOT

And while I have your attention, Mykola has released a 0.0-SNAPSHOT of the maven 2 plugin. Has anyone tried it yet? Anyone want to try it out?

Thanks everyone.

http://72miles.com/architecturerules (and someday architecturerules.org)

Introduction

The aim of this post is to explain how open sourcing a proprietary tool under a duel license can be more profitable than a solely proprietary venture. With such a license you could generate more revenue and share your code and software with the world.

Dual licensing is a strategy that combines open source distribution with proprietary licensing. I don’t want to spend too much time explaining duel licensing and would rather point out its benefits and how it makes money. But if you don’t know what duel licensing is, wikipedia describes it as

In this model, one option is a proprietary software license, which allows the possibility of creating proprietary applications derived from it, while the other license is a copyleft free software/open-source license, thus requiring any derived work to be released under the same license. The copyright holder of the software then typically gives away the free/open source version of the software at no cost, and profits by selling licenses to commercial operations looking to incorporate the software into their own business.

So, in order to use the free half of this duel license, the using organization would have to contribute back anything they develop using your product. This means their proprietary trade secrets are potentially being made available to the public. Many organizations would rather pay a small fee to protect their competitive advantage.

So lets review some of the ways that duel licensing grants an advantage to business that release their products under two or more conditions.

Low Cost Distribution

Open source software depends on the Internet for distribution. The internet is cheap, ubiquitous throughout the world, and fast. There is no need to mail a product to the other side of the world, there is no packaging, Usually the customer uses 100% of their own efforts to get the software. That is to say, the find your site, they download it, and they install it. It doesn’t get any cheaper than that.

Product Marketing

First, your product is potentially free. That’s some awesome marketing. So right away you have eyes looking at your tool so you’re way ahead of your proprietary competition. You’ve got the Internet which is almost free to promote your software tool on. And with a good product, you’re going to have advocates around the internet talking up your tool.

High Margin

Duel licensing provides a means for producing a very high margin for your product. With a service based offering, in order to offer more services, you need to spend more money - for tools, personnel, time. Duel licensed software requires no additional resources, just enough time to generate and mail out a new license. Once the code is created and ready for public consumption its all profit from there.

Market Entrance

You may be able to capture users that you never would have had a chance with if they have not found your product to be free, and then determined that they needed to change it, and thus buy a a license to protect their proprietary information.

Learn More

I learned all about duel licensing open source products from a great book called Open Sources 2.0. From amazon:

“Open Sources 2.0″ is a collection of insightful and thought-provoking essays from today’s technology leaders that continues painting the evolutionary picture that developed in the 1999 book “Open Sources: Voices from the Revolution” .

These essays are very well written, cover a very broad range of topics, and is written by open source contributors that we have all grown to know and love. Buy the book and check out Chapter 5:Duel Licensing.