Helping Tomorrow's Innovators Today
Here at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU, all freshmen have to take the "Innovation & Technology Forum" course, a 1-credit course about innovations today, yesterday, and teaching us how to be innovators, inventors and entrepreneurs in the future as part of the i2e program, which NYU-Poly prides itself for. Part of this course includes biweekly lectures by leaders in today's world, one of which I have already written on once.
Last week, Tom Rolander attended and talked about his experience as an innovator and inventor, including his most recent venture with CrossLoop. CrossLoop is a peer-to-peer screen-sharing application designed to connect those with knowledge of how computers work with those less enlightened in order to provide live help for tech problems. For example, as their front page advertises, you can find someone to help with the upgrade to Windows 7. This person would be certified to help you, unlike others (like me) who would just stick an Ubuntu 9.10 CD in your drive and pat you on the back.
CrossLoop™'s logo
The reason CrossLoop seemed interesting to me, though, is because of how it was built. Sure, it's a desktop application that allows connections between two computers using the VNC standard in order to allow one user to help the other out, but it does something special. It isn't using its own VNC client/server application. What CrossLoop essentially is is a layer around TightVNC - a wrapper to utilize TightVNC for other uses, if you will.
But wait a minute, what gives? TightVNC is an open source VNC client/server, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Why is CrossLoop closed source, pay-for, and not even available for Linux? What the heck!
For open souuuuuurce!!
Before anyone goes bananas, though, I would like to point out that CrossLoop does nothing wrong with regards to licensing. The GPL requires that derivative works be also GPL'd, and CrossLoop is technically not a derivative. It uses TightVNC in unmodified form, while only working with the connection between two TightVNC instances. I'll explain it with images. Here is what usually happens when using plain TightVNC:
Plain TightVNC connection.
Of course, there will be some readers who point out that I'm showing just the simplest TightVNC solution ever, and that it can work with a VPN or go through firewalls using port exceptions, etc. I know. But I'm talking about out-of-the-box (or download). If you tried running TightVNC across two arbitrary computers over the internet, you wouldn't even know where to start, because of firewalls on both sides, routers not allowing each computer to have a unique IP, and other problems. This is where CrossLoop comes in. It wraps around the TightVNC connection, and allows it to pass through all that stuff with no problem:
CrossLoop connection.
The reason the GPL doesn't affect it is because the TightVNC source and binary are unmodified. CrossLoop does nothing to modify it or make a derivative work out of it, and does nothing to prevent its distribution of binaries or source code for free. Therefore, it is an independent work, and it can do whatever it wants with its license.
This leaves a bittersweet taste for open source advocates like yours truly. While it's nice to see that open source software is being appreciated as a building block by closed source solutions, especially because of its cost (nothing) and the fact that its inner workings are laid bare, it sort of hurts to see that they basically take the ball and run with it, producing something the community can't build on further, filling their proverbial coffers while not contributing to the collective knowledge.
What other projects of the same sort do is contribute back to the host project by either monetary aid, or releasing semi-open libraries for others to build on. I hope CrossLoop does so too, even if it's not advertised on their website.
It doesn't take compromising business secrets for today's innovators to help tomorrow's innovators out. Just a little consideration, and community thinking.
I, being the neighborhood "corporate tool," admire the ingenuity of Crossloop's developers in legally getting around the GPL. I feel like posting a paragraph or so on my guess as to WHY the company got around the GPL in the first place, simply because it has not been said.
As you said, companies could easily "help tomorrow's innovators today." Alas, from a business standpoint, that rarely works out well for the company providing the "help" with innovation. If you catalyze innovation, you bring it about earlier. This means that a better product will come around sooner. Better products are only welcome if you made them. The only time that it will work well for the helping company is if either, 1) the company actually innovated upon their own product, or 2) the company bought license to the new, improved product and/or hired the person who improved it. I said previous that helping innovate rarely works out well for the helping company. That is because both cases 1 and 2 will happen almost exclusively with large companies with good business models (Google comes to mind). Google has enough good programmers that they can sit around making their own shit better, and they do. They're pro enough that they churn our new stuff too.
Essentially, in order for a company to make the most money, it needs to have as close to a monopoly as possible. This is achieved by limiting others' access to the market share. How is this done? Either reduce access to tools that help others get a better product or simply reduce the pool of innovators. For the software industry, a step towards the first of those tactics is closed-source - if a potential competitor doesn't know the code of what he's competing against, he has to start from closer to scratch. The second is done simply by hiring the competition (or as some might suggest, killing them...).
That is one of the problems with open-source as a principle. There isn't enough incentive for a majority of IT business to go open-source. It requires either a large company (which by definition, no start-up is going to be) or a good business model. A sizable chunk of small businesses fail within the first 5 years - they have more to worry about than open-source vs. closed source.
Dear God. I just wrote over a page if it were double-spaced. I now wish you had a preview button on your website (*nudge nudge wink wink* know what I mean?). Side notes:
I didn't list some statistics exactly because I'm lazy but feel free to check them yourself. (ask Craig if you want to know how much I hate my Research Topics course this semester...)
- I forgot what else I wanted to post here, now I just want to use this to see if I'm using BBCode correctly
- One more reason you need a preview button - for those of us that haven't memorized BBCode as well as we've memorized HTML (or those who aren't proficient at either)
Good Post!
Just letting you know, Fillip, that your site's new layout requires horizontal scrolling on screens that are 1024px wide (such as netbooks). You might not really care about this, but the top black bar does not extend when you horizontally scroll. I suggest that you keep the black bar extending across the whole page, or center the black bar. Not a sermon, just a thought... =D
"This person would be certified to help you, unlike others (like me) who would just stick an Ubuntu 9.10 CD in your drive and pat you on the back."
Or unlike some, who would stick a strange looking disk in your drive and start telling you about emerge.