Last year New York City announced that it would begin paying students for attending school, taking standardized tests and getting good grades.  In spite of criticism – Barry Schwartz said the external rewards would not replace showing kids why it's good to do well in school – and no known lack of results, New York City has decided to push forward with a new reward plan.  New York City school kids that get good grades can now earn cell phones and free minutes. 

I wonder why they didn't say how the first program, paying for attendance and grades, was working? 

Chris Anderson has written an excellent article, Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business. Go read it. Send it to anyone who is having a hard time understanding how you can make money off of free stuff.   

He starts with the Gilette razor example, "give away razors, sell razor blades" and walks us through how that model has evolved to Google and Flickr and others.

Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you're in an entirely different business, one of clawing and scratching for every customer. The psychology of "free" is powerful indeed, as any marketer will tell you.

Some of the business models he describes for free products and services are:

• "Freemium". Sell a pro version like FlickrPro versus Flickr.  1% of the users support the other 99% and this is possible because supporting 99% is really cheap with digital technology on the web.
•  Advertising. Sell two things: ads and placement in search results. This is the "third party" model. A third party (the advertiser) is paying to participate in the free relationship between the service provider and the users.
• Cross-subsidies. Giving away something to sell something else. For example, giving away CDs to sell concert tickets.
• Labor exchange. This is Tim O'Reilly's architecture of participation idea. You rate books on Amazon (provide a service) and get recommendations.
• Gift economy. He lumps wikipedia and open source software into this category which I think is a bit of a cop-out. This category could be flushed out in to multiple more categories. 

I copied a bunch of quotes, but two points that I think sum up a lot of it are: 

First, a free lunch doesn't necessarily mean the food is being given away or that you'll pay for it later — it could just mean someone else is picking up the tab.

Second, in the digital realm, as we've seen, the main feedstocks of the information economy — storage, processing power, and bandwidth — are getting cheaper by the day. Two of the main scarcity functions of traditional economics — the marginal costs of manufacturing and distribution — are rushing headlong to zip. It's as if the restaurant suddenly didn't have to pay any food or labor costs for that lunch.

He alluded that businesses should give away things for free, focus on getting reputation and user attention, and then figure out their business model. Personally, I think businesses should have at least an idea of what their business model is, but they definitely need to understand that their product is not the most valuable commodity anymore. Reputation, mind share, respect, user attention, are all much more valuable these days.

As costs go to zero, the value you can offer to users goes to infinity.  One of the reasons we have made our knowledge base free.

Matt Asay says Twitter is "mindless" and "useless".  I'd say he doesn't know how to use Twitter.

• Twitter's not a blog – it doesn't give you useful insight or commentary.
• Twitter's not a news feed – it won't give you all the latest news on any topic.  Although there are news feeds in Twitter.  If you follow a news feed or the new Pulse of Open Source, you will get more of a feel or "pulse" than the authority voice.  You'll know what news riled up the community.  You'll get a feel for how they are reacting to news like when Microsoft wanted to acquire Yahoo!.
• Twitter's not a way to keep in touch with friends.  I follow my twitter feeds sometimes.  I do check all my @'s.  It's not that I follow too many people to read them all – it's that it just doesn't make sense.  They didn't write all those twits for me to read everyone.  That's what blogs are for.  You don't have to read everything all your friends twit. The best way to keep in touch with me, and many others, is the traditional email, text message, phone, etc.  (Did I just say text messaging is traditional?)

So what is Twitter good for?  To me it's like a coffee shop.  I'm working in a room full of people interested in the things that intrigue me.  I can work quietly in the corner for a while and then when I need a break or I find something interesting to share, I can pop my head up and see what's going on, see what people are talking about, chat for a few moments, check out a few links, share a few witty comments, laugh about something, gripe about something, and then get back to work.  

If you enjoy Twitter for what it is, a coffee shop, a gathering place, it's a great tool.  Just don't expect it to be something it's not. 

Matt Asay blogged this morning about our announcement today covering our results and learnings from last year.  We covered our significant growth in customers as well as the trends we have seen in customer usage over the past year.

In his blog, he asked some questions about OpenLogic’s commitment to giving back to the open source community as well as vendors.  I know that our business model is different than a typical commercial open source vendor, so it’s sometimes not as visible how we give back to the open source community.  Here are just a few of the ways that OpenLogic supports open source:

      We pay open source developers.  Unlike a commercial open source vendor, we don’t just hire committers on one particular open source product.  Instead we pay many open source developers across many open source projects to resolve issues, fix bugs, contribute fingerprints or work in other ways.

      We donate to open source communities.  We add a percentage of the amount that we pay individual committers and contributors and donate that to open source communities.  

      We create open source projects.  We have created and released an open source project called OSS Discovery to help companies find installed open source in their organizations.  We are also contributing a significant number of resources to The Open Source Census, which will help all open source vendors and communities by counting and publicizing the use of open source in the community.

      We partner with and share revenue with commercial open source vendors.  Whenever possible, we like to partner with commercial open source vendors behind the projects we support.  These partnerships involve some type of revenue share arrangement between us and the partner to jointly provide support for an open source package.

      We provide a channel and revenue options for the 95%+ of open source projects NOT backed by a commercial vendor.  Of the top packages used by our enterprise customers, the vast majority have no commercial vendor.  We focus in the middleware and infrastructure portion of the stack, where there are fewer vendors than in business applications.  For these projects, we provide developers with revenue opportunities by paying them to resolve customer issues. 

Matt raises the question of competition between OpenLogic and a few commercial open source vendors where there is overlap of offerings – such as RedHat (around JBoss) and MySQL.  His concern seems to be that we might take some revenue from these vendors without money going back to the community.  In fact, we prefer to partner with the vendors involved whenever possible.  When that is not possible, we do pay community members directly to resolve issues.  In either case, money is going back into the open source community that creates the project. 

As open source continues to evolve, we will find a greater diversity of business models that support the open source communities we all depend on.  The industry won’t be limited to business models where there is a one-to-one relationship between a commercial open source vendor and an open source project.  Because OpenLogic is pioneering a new business model, we are committed to continually developing new ways to give back to open source communities and create profitable partnerships with other vendors in the open source ecosystem.

Avoid the Find.find method if at all possible if you are working on an app that may need to be deployed with JRuby (instead of a native version of Ruby).

See this issue (specifically the comment that starts with 'This description is not actually true.') for details.

When I mention that I work from home occasionally, there's always someone who says, "That's great! You get to spend more time with your kids."  Either they don't have kids or my kids are not normal kids. Here's what a day at home would look like for Caleb, my 18 month old, if I tried to work with him at home.

From Caleb's point of view:

Mom's toys are the most fun, especially "mommycomputer". Try to bang on the keyboard. If you can't reach the keyboard, climb into Mom's lap and bang on it. If she leaves, hit all the keys. Cool things happen. Mom won't let me play with "mommycomputer" anymore – oh, what about the dog! Sit on dog – whoops, he stood up. Grab his tail! Hang on for dear life and scream! This is fun, flying around the house, hanging onto dog's tail! OWWWW! The wall hurts. MOOMMMYYY! Ok, Mommy looked at my head and said I'd live. Check out the kitchen. Pull everything out of the drawers, turn the knobs on the stove, open door. Oh, Mommy finally came to play and she said no. Go to bathroom. Door is closed – no problem, I know a door I can open! Run to living room, climb on sofa, stand on sofa arm, lean way over, grab front door handle, twist! Front door is open! Now … 

That would be the first 30 minutes. Eventually I'd either get fired for not working or arrested for child abuse or both.

To be fair, I do get to spend more time with my kids when I work from home because I don't have to commute, so my day has two extra hours in it. But I don't spend time with my kids while I'm working. Maybe when they are older? 

From the SCALE list:

Stormy Peter's Sunday keynote speech at the 6th Annual Southern California Linux Expo will be streamed live over the Internet.  It will happen Sunday, February 10th at 10 o'clock a.m. PST on ustream.tv.

The URL for the stream is http://ustream.tv/channel/scale-keynote-stormy-peters .  It will go live approximately 09:55.

Tune in to see Stormy discuss, "Would You Do It Again For Free?", where she'll consider whether commercial companies are killing the open source software movement by paying people to work on it.