To Evil!
by Danny O'Brien

Let me offer a new law of the Internet, a corollary to Godwin's Law. 'As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of it becoming about evil approaches one.'

And I'd add, that the length of time is shorter, but the effect on discourse is the same. It stops all rational discussion immediately."

- Dave "Beyond Good and Evil" Winer

Hear that? Hear that blissful silence? That's the rational discussion ending, and this month's ceremonial purging of the evil beginning once again.

By the end of today, we'll all being able to speak in the careful tones beloved of Internet discourse. But until then: here's March's contenders of evil.

De.lirio.us vs Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a popular site, whence your favourite URLs may be stored and shared with others, and ascribed with "tags", which are just like metadata, only you don't have to spit quite as forcefully when you say the word.

Del.icio.us isn't open source, although its creator, Joshua "Memepool" Schachter has, until recently, worn all the finest hackerish garb in which open source traditionally dresses itself. He has worked devotedly on the site for nothing. He wears a cawl made only of hessian, and requires nothing from visitors but that they stop complaining about there being no site-wide search, and keep their badly-behaved spidering programs outside the premises. Perhaps a sip of brackish water is indulged in from time to time.

Enter de.lirio.us, a site created by Steve Mallett, running an open source clone of the del.icio.us model.

Much gnashing of teeth among del.icio.us users ensues.

Is it really appropriate to use open source when building social software? Would it not be better to work to improve the existing site, rather than clutter the namespace with a divisive imitation, and shatter the usefulness of the URL collection by starting a competitor?

Are we not, in other words, facing purest evil here?

Well, if there's one thing that the open source community knows, it's that communities are ever fated to fracture. (Or maybe it's the free software community that discovered that one, I forget. I'm sure someone will mail in and tell me.)

But the fight between de.lirio.us and del.icio.us isn't to do with a fork or a damaging split in the community. It's to do with two communities not being riven *enough*.

Mallett never seemed to be a splitter from del.icio.us. He's someone who saw del.icio.us, found the Rubric code, and thought something like "Okay, this stylesheet looks fine, and, hey, if I give it a similar URL, people will know what I'm about." He hasn't so much wandered from the mothership, but turned up from far away, landed in their garden, and set up a tent.

But even Mallett didn't see himself as a splitter, he is honour-bound to follow the rules of forking. Which is: don't cross the streams. When you set up a site based on the same ideas, or even the same code as another, immediately run as far away through the noosphere as you feel comfortable. Change stuff as fast as you can; improve as fast as you can. Establish a new identity for yourself.

And don't, for goodness' sake, choose a domain name that's a handful of pixels away from the original.

Especially when it was such a terrible URL in the first place.

Mallett's error was compounded when - almost to the day of Mallett's new site - Schachter revealed that he was quitting his job to work on del.icio.us, and had scored external investment.

So now the problem becomes even more pressing. In the commercial world, where it's all about "competitors" and "defending the mark", you really don't get to sit that close to your neighbour. Look and feel, fine. Reverse-engineering, fine. Open source clone. Go right ahead. Changing a single character in the name? Not that many McDanolds still selling a Bog Mic around my neighbourhood.

I'm not entirely sure that's what del.icio.us's investors, who include Tim O'Reilly, Esther Dyson, and the Lord God Almighty (minority holder, Class C Shares), would do. But all the same, it seems a rude thing to do to someone legitimately moving from cawl to business suit.

That, worrying though it is, is not Mallett's most pressing problem at time of going to press. He faces a much greater danger: one that may, ironically, provide him with his salvation.

You see, Steve Mallett is the editor of this column.

And, thanks to the section of the To Evil! rules - which state that no employee of this column, or their families or their families' families' employees, may enter any competition or promotion run by this column, Mallet's evil - while heinous beyond compare - is forfeit.

And before you scream about bias, you have no idea how galling it is to have the chance to throw an editor into the furthest pits of Hell, and then be thwarted. Trust me, this hurts me far more than it hurts you.

So, begrudgingly, we'll say once again: change the bloody URL, Steve.

Then ask: Who's next?

That WordPress Guy

Some time earlier this year, Matt Mullenweg, chief developer on Wordpress, the GPL'ed content management system, received an offer from Chad Jones, of Hot Nacho Inc, to put up a few articles, with advertising, on the Wordpress site. Wordpress has high page rank, and Jones' articles were customised to be full of tempting Adsense keywords.

The articles themselves only appeared if you stumbled on them via Google (as Andrew "Waxy.org" Baio, the first detector of these pieces, did) or spotted the link from WordPress's front page.

Pursuing the front page option would would be tricky, as Matt had used CSS to move the text about three foot to the left of your monitor's screen.

In other words, these articles were more like google-spamming ad revenue generators than bona fide bits of WordPress-related content about asbestos and mortgages and diabetes. Hot Nacho paid Matt a monthly fee to upload them to the Web site. Matt took the money, but hid the content - from the thousands who link to Wordpress' site, from donators to Wordpress' development, and from everyone but those with plank-shaped browser windows.

How evil is that?

It is perhaps appropriate that Chad's company is called Hot Nacho, given that the highly-ranked, super-expensive keyword here is "cheesy".

In many ways, cheese is the Net's primary bulwark against rampant evil. It's a finely honed sense of cheesiness that keeps you from being besieged in ads on every blog you pretend to read; or placing them on your own, for that matter.

You know there's nothing wrong with adverts (nothing that your ad-filters can't fix, anyway). There's certainly nothing *illegal* about ads.

It's just that... well, they're cheesy. Cheesiness is what keeps you from referring to your LiveJournal as an "information resource", or what you buy at Starbucks as a "beverage". Or, indeed, dressing your one-person garage software operation in a rich dressing of corporate stock photography in order to look bigger than you are. Cheesy, cheesy, cheesy.

But, at the risk of sounding a little like an advertising jingle ourselves, is cheesiness evilness? Matt did something that a lot of Wordpress users would disagree with. By not telling them, even as the linked to WordPress's site, in their own small, google-juice donating way, they were silently dragooned as
co-conspirators.

How much transparency must an open source developer give to the world? There's nothing that says one should reveal all your financial interests. But if you're telling tales to the Google Bot, the chances are they'll get around (the Google Bot is not known for his indiscretion).

And when that final judgement comes, it is best not to be the one found hiding the cheese.

Then again, apologies have been offered by both Chad and Matt. And in the closest thing one gets to the arbitrary justice of fickle Gods in our world, Google removed Matt and Chad's Googlerank for a while.

The cheese was punished, and is apparently penitent; and perhaps because of that, we should move on.

M.G.M, et al

Regular readers will know that, when faced with contestants who probably are a teensy bit evil, but who we're too cowardly to indite, the third alternative will usually be picked from our standard grab-bag of the super-bad. The meta-wicked. A bit of the old ultra-nasty.

And so, to help fend off open source civil war again, comes now that horseman of the infocapalypse, the Recording Industry.

The scene: March's Grokster oral , at the United States Supreme Court.

(To improve the courtroom drama feel, close your eyes, and imagine the lawyers and judges as badly-drawn artists' impressions.)

We join, as Justice Souter is asking pointed questions of the Recording Industry's attorney, Mr "Milli" Verrilli. He's trying to establish whether, if the Recording Industries win, whether any innovator will be safe from their lawsuits.

JUSTICE SOUTER [IDLY BOUNCING BASKETBALL OFF MR VERRILLI'S HEAD]: You're not answering the question. The question is, How do we know in advance, on your test, anything that would give the inventor, or, more exactly, the developer, the confidence to go ahead? As was said a minute ago, he knows he's going to be sued immediately. There isn't a product performance out there, as there is in this case. So, on your substantiality theory, why isn't it a foregone conclusion in the iPod, that the iPod loser — or developer is going to lose his shirt?

MR. VERRILLI [WAVING FINGERS IN MANNER SO AS TO "SPOOK" THE COURT]: Well, first of all, I don't — I think it's just counter factual to think that there is going to be overwhelming infringing use of the iPod in the way that there indisputably is here.

It's a captivating duel, for a few reasons. First, the questions about the iPod show that the Justices understand the threat to innovation posed by the Grokster case. It also shows that the Justices are "hip" to the street technology. My guess is they exchange playlists with Bono and the President. Reinquist probably has a Shuffle.

Secondly, it's fun watching the recording industry claim that the creator of the iPod wouldn't get sued. When, in fact, they were sued. By the recording industry. In 1998.

The Diamond Rio was one of the first MP3 players to appear on the market. So terrified were the music industry that the RIAA attempted to forbid the manufacture and distribution of it, saying that they were "digital audio recording devices" and therefore required DRM (the same DRM that killed DAT tape devices so stone dead in the market).

As it is, Diamond fought off the suite, with the ingeniously true claim that an MP3 player isn't a "recording device". It's a "playing device".

Now, if anyone "invented" the class of devices that would eventually be dominated by Apple's iPod, it was Diamond, and the other innovators who braved the RIAA's ire at that time. Without them, the iPod truly would not exist.

Although perhaps we are being insufficiently generous: if you've ever wondered why there's no decent microphone input into the iPod, or an option that lets you record off the radio, the chances are it's because following the Rio case, Apple's lawyers are still ultra-cautious about having their innovation sued out of them.

Like any successful technology, the iPod has many fathers. But the limits on what an iPod can do were invented solely by the Recording Industry.

And for that, and for acting quite outraged in open court at the very *suggestion* that the Judge Scalia's Black-Cloaked Special Constitutional Edition iPod was ever under threat, they get this month's hefty gavelling.

[Always the Bridesmaid, never the bride. -Ed]

Somebody done you wrong? Mail 2evil@osdir.com with names and category of wrong-done-ing, and your assailant could win a valuable punishment gift.

Danny O'Brien is the co-editor of NTK incarnate.

To Evil! appears monthly.