Milking The GNU

The butterfly effect takes Microsoft OOXML by storm

As of May the19th,  members of ISO (who ratified OOXML as an ISO standard) had only 12 days left to appeal the decision. No country seemed to be willing to budge when sudden, a tiny, almost imperceptible breeze started to blow: one of Microsoft butterflies had moved a wing.

• May 19, 2008 Jason Matusow, Microsoft director of corporate standards, publishes his view about open source on his personal blog: The politics of OSS still overshadow the benefits of collaborative development

• May 19, 2008 4:36 PM PDT. Matt Asay (citing Matusow's post) in Open Road, comments briefly about his friend Jason, in a Today's must reads post.

• May 19, 2008 9:48 PM PDT Milking The GNU (citing Matt Asay's Open Road) publishes Microsoft: don't get me started about (South) Africans a detailed and satirical comment about Jason's otherwise outrageous post

• May 21,2008 Alastair Otter (citing MTG) from South African magazine Tectonic, publishes South African don't understand OSS - Microsoft   and soon gets more than 22,000 views.

• May 21, 2008 The same day Alastair's story makes it first on Digg with nearly 1,000 votes.

• May 23, 2008  05:24 AM PDT Andy Updegrove breaks the news: South Africa has officially filed an appeal protesting the approval of OOXML by ISO..

• May 28 The Shuttleworth's foundation (go Ubuntu) launches a call in support of the South African Bureau of Standards in its challenge of the OOXML ratification process

• May 29, 2008 3:02 PM PDR  Andy Updegrove breaks the news again: Brazil too has  just filed an appeal to ISO approval of OOXML.

• May 30, 2008 4:00 AM PDT  PC world reveals that India has ... followed suit.

• May 31, 2008 2:00 PM EDT  Groklaw is reporting that Computer World Denmark has a scoop: Denmark too is filing a complaint regarding ISO's approval. (The official deadline for those appeals is end of May).

 

Will Jason get an offer from the FSF or from the OSI? I wonder ... will they let him blog?

Update (June 3rd,  2008): Venezuela is appealing as well.
Update (July  9th,  2008): It's almost over people. At the end only South-Africa, India, Brazil and Venezuela had filed. And here is how it seems it's turning out.

 

Call for Equitable Open Source

While more and more companies are adopting free and open source software -whether as a keyword, a commodity or a business strategy- their influence on open source projects has been steadily growing.

This is not bad as such since this resulted in many more companies contributing to the FOSS ecosystem. However this also resulted in a situation where the balance of power has somewhat shifted from community-centric to commercial-induced  interests.

And since commercial interests don't always correspond (why would they?) to the spirit and the principles of free and open source software, there is a  need to balance more equitably commercial and community interests through new initiatives.

The Equitable Open Source (EOS) is one such initiative, aiming at defining a label attached to companies producing software applications. Since many -including industry analysts- predict that in just a few years most commercially-produced software will encompass substantial pieces (hopefully entire projects) of free and open source software, it makes sense to focus first on large companies which business is to produce software and which influence is the greatest. This of course, doesn't preclude rewarding smaller companies for the quality and/or the novelty of their interaction with the free and open source software community.

Now such initiative cannot work without the active participation of FOSS developers or it will just turn into another marketing buzz that sooner or later will be exploited by somebody: Nature dislikes vacuum.

We need to start somewhere so I you want to participate in jump starting things, hopefully before OSCON, drop me an email mtg@milkingthegnu.org and we will start from there.

Also appreciated would be somebody willing to host a wiki and a mailing list. On a minor tone, if somebody who really knows about logo design could step in, the result would probably be better than what I've done above :-)
 
 

MTG's blog: 1 reader every 90s in just 90 days (Part II)

This is part II of 1 reader every 90s in just 90 days. The picture on the left represents some of the countries where MTG has feed-registered users.

Caring about your community and your ecosystem

Whether you like it or not blogging makes you responsible for a community. It might be small, it might be full of people criticizing yet reading every single one of your posts, it might be changing but it requires you to take care of it.

Knowing and interacting with your community

The first thing you should do is answering people commenting on your blog. Not only did they read what you wrote, but they took the pain to give you feedback. The least you could do is interacting with them. And by the way, don't make registration mandatory. You do need feedback if you want to progress. For instance (well-informed :-) ) people were nice enough to give me plenty of feedback on a post on MySQL. So much that I've decided to incorporate them directly in the original post (orange text).

Don't forget that every time your posting on Digg or Reddit for instance, people do comment.as well. Answer them too if needed. Likewise, if yourself are commenting on somebody else's blog, other readers often answer your comment. Here too you should read and respond.

How do you deal with negative feedback? Well if it's constructive you can choose to answer by commenting yourself (even dedicate an entire page to that) or if the author has left their email, you can start a direct interaction. This is always useful when comments are a bit negative. A few back and forth with commenters tell you a lot about how your post or your blog has been perceived by your readers. Bonus, you will often have an opportunity to meet great people.

Of course you should not always listen but also sometimes do something about it. A few commenters had made this remark that MTG was a bit messy. I decided to organize the main page of  blog.milkingthegnu.org (typepad allows you to turn a regular page into the landing page of your blog) so that people could access all of the articles at once and decide what they wanted to read.

Subsequently, a reader complained that he didn't know where to find the latest article: I decided to add a few markers like this   gnew   and  that   most read   to make it more obvious. I have also decided to increase the font size after people complained that not everybody had a perfect eyesight.

In order to maximize those feedback opportunities, you need to understand your demographics better: this requires a little bit of instrumentation

• Website: You need stats displaying your blog access (Typepad does a very good job here)
• Feed: You need stats for your feeds (what's read, from where etc.). I use Feedburner.
• Post: Who's linking to you? Technorati tells you that much and Google too.

Overall, I have discovered that there are roughly 5 categories of people reading MTG's articles:

• Opportunistic readers: those who came because a post was advertised through Delicious, Reddit, Digg and other Stumble upon. This category will bring you the largest number of readers. But the goal is really to get them interested enough they will register to your feed. So there is no point putting the word "sex" in the title just to get them click on something they will not read. Although of course, a good provocative title is not always to be frown at. Similarly, I've noticed that humorous posts are doing generally very well.

• Information seekers: those who have landed on your site after a Google search. Here and then you will write a few reference articles. This important. Giving back to the community is worth the pain they are to write :-)  People who want to know more about choosing a license or about open source business models often come to MTG through search engine.  Never forget to update pages: this is even more important for reference posts. If people trust you for these articles they will distribute them, bookmark them and ultimately be turned into faithful fans. Don't forget: information seekers are often the first to disseminate information!
  

• Indirect readers: those readers brought to you because you were quoted or cited in somebody else's blog. There are a few things you can do here too. First read the post that brought them here: it might be an opportunity to comment and also to add pointers you have forgotten (in addendum) on your own blog. Nowadays people are less and less using automatic feedback features so explicitly quoting or citing back-linking posts at the end of your article ( like so ) seems to be a good idea.
  

• Feed users: those who are reading you on a regular basis. This is the category that tells you if your blog is really successful or not. Sure, you're going to have 20 registered bloggers interested in looking at what you've found to comment on it themselves. But what's really important here is to have genuine users reading you on a regular basis. Their number goes up? Everything is fine. It goes down or stagnate? You should reflect on what you have been posting lately. Did you forget to focus? Did you change your tone? Are you buried into a local minimum, ranting about the same subject again and again? Time to do a reality check. Look again at those comments!

Finally make your post attractive to people. The best way is to stick to your ideas and your tone while enjoying writing. Oh, and yes, you can add a few pictures here and there. Actually you can even have posts made entirely of pictures and still make your point.
 
 
Happy Blogging!
 

If you've found this article useful, maybe you could take a few seconds to register to the feed ? :-)

Confessions of an open source free rider

 
- Good morning everybody, my name is MTG.
- (all) Good morning MTG!

The first time I did it, I didn’t even know what I was doing. In truth, nobody in the team really did. It was in the mid 80’s. The pre-copyleft era. We needed to write specialized compilers for a distributed LISP and a distributed PROLOG. They would compile for dual-core CPUs embedded in blade-like boards each connected to a fast bus and sharing memory. Lots of work; good pay though.

We downloaded a LISP compiler strain from CMU. It’s public domain now, but we didn’t know it would be nor did we care. It was hard enough to deal with parallelism, special loaders, state-of-the-art Becker (ever tried to debug an incremental garbage collector?) and a common virtual machine (micro-coding is fun!) for LISP and PROLOG; we couldn’t have possibly done it without a good bootstrap to start from.

Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.

John of Salisbury –Bishop of Chartres – 1159

Could we have given back to the community? Maybe. A couple of highly specialized compilers, working on a very, very specific architecture that nobody could access anymore anyway: the company was dismantled later on because the owners became cash-strapped after they bought a soccer team. The system guys published a bit on their distributed UN*X though.

The second time I did it I was when managing the developing effort around a very specialized networking box. It was built on Linux plus a few mod kernel patches. The idea was to experiment first and maybe to rewrite the whole stuff in BSD later on.

Whenever I was meeting with VCs, they were asking: so guys, what’s your barrier to entry?. Well, we have several patents filed. Which firm did you guys use? Good because we don’t mind you working on Linux and all but you know, we want our investment to be protected.

It didn’t happen quite that way. Part of the team split up and much later, chose to release it as an open source project. Good move? Right. This convinced me to do my part too: I killed the patents we had filed. Yup, the software patents. My ethic doesn’t scratch me so badly anymore. Except that certain times, I wonder.

Would have I released open source and subsequently killed the patents if those VC guys had offered us 3 or 4 years of funding? Probably not, at least not before they would kick me out anyway.

And what about all these slowly aging senior software engineers in medium-sized companies, pressured to get results or eager to show that they can “do it”? Do they really care about free software or is it just too overwhelming to manage? I’m sure some of them do, but how many?

How much is worth your open source ethic if a bit of denial helps you become say Engineering Director and subsequently rent or buy a decent house you know, now that your family is growing and all? Nobody will have to know, right?

 
Except that maybe your spouse or your kids will ... feel the difference?

 
This post was quoted or cited by:

• Linux today
• Dzone

 

MTG's Blog: 1 reader every 90s in just 90 days (Part I)

Milking The GNU is just 3-month old and its readership is growing nicely. In May, we had more visitors than in April and March combined, totaling more than 30K reads (well, hits) in May alone. MTG's feed now reaches more than 30 countries over 4 continents.

Others have already given useful tips, from starting-up to properly evangelize a blog. So rather than to list more boring numbers, it might be more interesting to elaborate on this experience.

Let's start by some advice. Although please remember, 3 months of writing is hardly enough to claim being an experienced blogger, so take it with a pinch of salt and feel free to comment heavily.

Four rules I found important:

1. Get a hosted blog solution
2. Get your own domain name
3. Write regularly on a well-defined subject
4. Care about your community

A hosted solution brings you focus, reliability and protection

• Focus: If you’re a developer you’re going to spend far too much time worrying about details and/or installation issues than you are about writing. So using a hosted service is a good way to keep the hacker in check.
  

• Reliability: If you’re successful, at some point you are going to hit a first page on Slashdot, Digg or Reddit. This means getting hit maybe 10,000 a day or even 10 times more if you’re Slashdotted. Even so this is not an enormous amount of bandwidth as such, this is really the wrong time to realize that you’ve misspelled some stuffs in an obscure config file of your WordPress/Apache or MySQL installation.

• Protection: If you’re speaking your mind (somewhat you shouldn’t fear to be a tad controversial if you want your voice to be heard over these 100 millions blogs out there) you don’t want to spend hours on the phone with your service providers explaining that they could help you fighting a DoS.

A domain name brings you flexibility

This is pretty simple. Should you change hosting or even decide for your own server farm you need to take those readers with you. Owning your own domain is the key to avoid infrastructure lock-in.

 
Write often, write with focus

Writing is the hard part. Doing it regularly is hard. Doing it really regularly is very hard. It requires all of your focus. And yes, the main topic of your blog should be focused as well and you should stick to it most of the times.

Don’t write about all the interesting stuffs you like from wine to cooking, rock climbing or paragliding. Pick up one and only one narrow subject. Ask yourself: which one would you rather read by accident?

• My Laundry list  by John Richard
• Linux news and other geek stuffs by Paul Unknown
• My Day-to-day life with Ubuntu by J. Smith,  Microsoft accountant

Care about your community and your ecosystem

     This really warrants another post: stay tuned for: 1 reader every 90s in just 90 days (Part II).
 
 

Why hackers FLOSS

A very good study from Karim R. Lakhani and Robert G. Wolf ( Why hackers do what they do: Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source Software projects ) has been around for a couple of years but didn't seem to get the exposure it deserves. Here is a brief summary.

If you're a FOSS contributor, you're about 30 y.o. almost exclusively male (sic) from North America or Western Europe, with 12 years of programming experience and spending about 10h/week  on 2 or 3 FLOSS projects. You feel strongly that the hacker community is the primary source of your identity.

• You're either self-taught (40%) of have been formally IT trained (51%).
  
• There are good chances (40%) that you're paid while contributing.
• Your primary motivation lies in your ability to express your creativity
• You belong to one of the following 4 clusters (names are MTG's not that of the study), identified along your secondary motivations.
  

[ 25% ] The Professional: (86% are paid) You need FLOSS for work-related issues
[ 27% ] The Hobbyist: You need FLOSS for non-work related issues
[ 29% ] The Intellectual: You like to improve your skills and need/like intellectual stimulations
[ 19% ] The Altruist: You like to give to the community and believe code should be free/open

Contrary to the mainstream sociological belief, extrinsic rewards (money) does not decrease your intrinsic motivation (here your feeling of creativity).

Finally something that should be pondered by all recruiting managers and which I don't think is specific to FOSS:

• Fulfilling your sense of creativity has the most impact on the numbers of hours you're spending
• Half as efficient is either being paid or liking the project team
• If you have a formal IT training, you will probably not spend as much time on the project

Yet when a project is going sour, the classical mistakes of IT managers are to:

• Increase the micro-management and thus decrease the sense of creativity
• Threaten to  decrease the  pay  and/or the  bonus if  objectives are not met
• Disturb the dynamic of the team by demanding more feedback and/or reshuffling tasks and/or responsibilities
• Hire more big "resumes" and thus hoping for a "providential" guy to solve the problems

Is the inexperience of IT managers the main obstacle to the quality engineering of proprietary software?

 
Also of interest: 
  
                 humor & fun    equitable open source     open source business models

 
Notes on the study

This web survey got 684 respondents from 287 projects (from alpha to mature, no individual projects selected). Those respondents represented about a 1/3 of all the developers pinged. All projects came from SourceForge.Net and the polling occurred in 2001 and 2002.

Here is another survey about FLOSS contributors: European survey of FLOSS developers

FreeBSD the most distributed Linux in the World

I know, I know, FreeBSD is not Linux. And for those who don't know here is a Wikipedia primer on FreeBSD.

Now that I’ve gotten your attention think about the following numbers: they are often known in the community but seldom really discussed.

By the end of the year FreeBSD(1) will be from far the most distributed UNIX-like OS in the world.

• The most distributed UNIX-like operating system for personal computer (10% of PC sales)
• The most used UNIX-like operating system embedded into portable devices (10 M)

Thanks to Apple who made FreeBSD-based OS X an incredible success through the Mac and the iPhone.

Now, look at those domains where Linux is traditionally doing well:

• LAMP: despite the L in LAMP, many high-availability server farms prefer FreeBSD. MySQL itself benchmarks often substantially better with FreeBSD
• ISPs: Large all purpose ISPs like Verio/NTT or Financial Industry ISPs like New York Internet (99.999% uptime guaranteed according to the brochure) are all running on FreeBSD.
• Security companies: Nokia (Firewalls) or TrendMicro (I know) for instance trust FreeBSD.
• Network appliances: From Juniper to NetApp or IronPort many providers run FreeBSD into their boxes. Addendum: apparently Cisco too is switching to FreeBSD (Thanks Oz)
• Largest web operation: Yahoo!, the largest world traffic according to Alexa, is built on FreeBSD.

Anent the development community, it’s all working fine and dandy. FreeBSD has near 300 core committers (many thousands more contributors), organized in a pretty flat organization (unlike Linux with its 3 or 4 hierarchical levels) relying heavily on mentorship. The entire project is under the supervision of an elected board of 9 members giving heavy delegation to specialty committers (security, release etc.)

The FreeBSD developer community has a median age of 33. This is especially interesting for companies hiring sysadmin talents since if BSD resources are rarer than Linux, there are far less chances to hire a guy who claims to be a sysadmin just because he re-installed Ubuntu twice while in junior high.

But FreeBSD people also have a not so hidden problem: they don't seem to know that they are part of the FOSS community.

On their website you can find a monument erected to FUD and bad faith attacking here and there the Linux community and the GPL (most used open source license).

• [about the GPL] you can charge as much as you want for distributing, supporting, or documenting the software, but you cannot sell the software itself.

• The GPL attempts to prevent orphaning by severing the link to proprietary intellectual property

• The GPL is an attempt to keep efforts, regardless of demand, at the research and development stages. This maximizes the benefits to researchers and developers, at an unknown cost to those who would benefit from wider distribution.

• Due in part to its complexity, in many parts of the world today the legalities of the GPL are being ignored in regard to Linux and related software.

• In other words, the BSD license [as opposed to the GPL] does not become a legal time-bomb at any point in the development process.

That might be the main drawback of having a completely decentralized and really democratic development process. Since nobody is really in charge, a few have taken advantage of the entire community to push some misguided agenda.

No wonder Apple, the largest FreeBSD success, don't even bother contributing financially to the FreeBSD foundation: that would be ...a PR time bomb? BTW FOSS enthusiasts apparently feel more and more comfortable on Mac.

 
How does it feel Beastie to be somewhat better than Tux and yet to behave like Microsoft 10 years ago?
 

(1) Actually the Mac OS X kernel is more of a Mach / BSD kernel functioning like the hosting OS of a VM setup. But it does contain substantial FreeBSD code: Darwin's source code is here and although some files and posts are sometimes not clear, unlike the previous version, the APL 2.0 license is free software.

Addendum: Just to be clear about  FreeBSD part into Darwin (in addition to the detailed "Mach / BSD kernel" paper quoted above)

If you like open source development, you'll love Mac OS X. This fully-conformant UNIX operating system—built on Mach 3.0 and FreeBSD 5—bundles over a hundred of the most popular Open Source. From Apple's developer site

Addendum: Some of you have asked links and references about Apple's market shares

• At any rate, sometime in 2008, Mac market share—and by that we mean growth, not installed base—will exceed 10 percent. That's right: according to the metrics derived from web usage as indicated above, one in 10 PCs will be a Mac. From Ars Technica.

• Apple is currently trying to reach a target of 10 million iPhones sold by the end of 2008, while industry analysts currently predict that Macs will be Apple's major source of revenue in the coming year. From MacNN reporting on analysts' projections

Microsoft: don't get me started about (South) Africans

Courtesy of Matt Asay, I found this post from  Jason Matusow, a Microsoft blogger (and director of corporate standards) whose prose I cannot resist to comment.

It has now been almost three years since I stepped away from working daily on open source opportunities for Microsoft.

Hmmm, working on open source at Microsoft... 3 years ago?! Boy, Jason it must have been hard being paid during all that time.

Or maybe were you part of the Microsoft Novell deal? In which case you should seriously consider replacing your on open source by a more appropriate against open source.

I've watched the team that took on Shared Source morph it into some extremely positive collaborative work that is exactly what OSS is all about.

And by OSS you do mean Office of Strategic Services, I presume?

The paltry few projects that were in place in 2006 have blossomed into thousands of

By paltry, do you mean trashy or despicable?

projects, and some of the core source release programs for flagship technologies are still operational today. All good.

Well indeed, it warrants attention. Without open source it would have been difficult to maintain anything Microsoft operational for so long. I'm bewildered. In awe. Really.

Unfortunately, I can't say that I'm seeing the same understanding about collaborative development when I go out and meet with customers, governments, partners...whomever.

Don't be shy, you could have added open source communities to the list. I'm sure they don't have the same understanding than Microsoft about collaborative development either.

I haven't been blogging much due to a great deal of travel, and the huge backlog of other work catching up to me following the close of the Open XML process.

Close? OOXML is a closed project? But Jason, even Office 2007 doesn't pass the OOXML compliance test...

Oh, wait. You closed it? It's over?! Definitively? That's really a good news!! At last. No need to pay people to edit Wikipedia anymore.

One of my most interesting trips was down to South Africa to talk interop, document formats, and yes...open source software.

Amazing. Such a long trip for such a ... short talk?

South Africa has taken a most unfortunate position of late - the government has sought to put a political mandate in place for the adoption of open source software.

Yeah well, I don't know why a government would recommend a given line of products for its administration. If it continues that way, even enterprises  will start having internal policies. Silly business world.

But wait,  they don't recommend open source directly. The text says: "The primary criteria for selecting software solutions will remain the improvement of efficiency, effectiveness and economy of service delivery by (the) government to its citizens,"

OK, I understand your point now. With such kind of goals, the dice are loaded. No way Microsoft is going to have a chance.

Worse, it [Mandating open source] is pushing CIOs into decisions that they don't want to make - essentially taking working environments representing huge investments and moving to untested, more expensive solutions.

Untested solutions? Yup, when you think they could have chosen Vista instead ... What a band of losers ...

But, the most serious issue to me is that they are not looking at the real benefits that OSS can bring them. Politically, every conversation about the OSS mandate is really a Windows vs. Linux discussion.

Windows vs. Linux? Ahem but Jason,  Open Office does run on Windows! Try it here.

This is in no small part assisted by the local presence of Ubuntu. There is absolutely no comprehension that the Linux they will deploy on an enterprise scale will be completely locked down by commercial services agreements and version controls by the apps vendors (e.g. SAP).

And of course, if they were to use  Windows they would not be locked down at all. BTW Microsoft should really sell their method for brain washing. Exceptional.

This is absolutely fine from a decision point of view for enterprise systems, but it is most certainly not any gain due to open source.

The real value of OSS to a government that is looking to:

• save money
• bring development skills in-country

Yeah, I know, Ubuntu is sooooo much slower than Vista. Poor Africans,  they don't  have any sense of technology.

is to apply OSS development and licensing methodologies at the app-dev and tools layers, rather than thinking of the core OS as an OSS opportunity for them.

Deep dev of the core OS is not likely to happen in South Africa today on any large scale.

You're right those small countries, they don't have the skills! What could come out of  a small country like say, Finland? A penguin?

Also guess what, Theo de Raadt, the benevolent dictator (and NetBSD co-founder) of the remarkable OpenSSH and OpenBSD (now about the size of Solaris) was born in Pretoria

Students at the university still grappling with coding skills are not going to dive into the inner-working of Linux.

You're so right. I have always been amazed by the number of  students diving into Windows source code to learn more about operating systems. That must be the reason why they recommend Windows when they are joining a company afterwards. Good move!

The developing world still views OSS as "free as in no money," and that is widely known to not be the case.

I think that's the 3rd instance of Africans are --if not stupid- at least sub par: Everybody knows but them.

I heard this same point of view for 5 years all over Asia, parts of Europe, and Latin America.

Ok, that's not a racial problem then. It's just that when you're poorer you're a bit dense. I hate poor people too.

I saw governments try to incubate OSS businesses solely because "OSS" was in the title and mandate.

Yeah I know it always comes as a surprise when a government follows a mandate. Don't they know better? Couldn't they implement proper lobbying?! Stupid paupers.

Then, those businesses failed, and the mandated solutions turned out to be far more expensive than other commercial alternatives.

I agree, we keep hearing about those reversals of fortune all the time. So many organizations are leaving  Vista for XP.

Ahhh...it feels good to blog again. :-)

Same here. :-)

Update: More insights about Microsoft visit in South Africa from Boycott Novell

Equitable Open Source

Roy Schestowitz Free Software Credibility Index is somewhat inspiring. It made me realize that rather than to rant at leisure about the shortcomings of various open source companies and their business model, it would be better to do something about it. Here is an idea.

Build an independent  organization

• Founded exclusively by non-profit organizations or individuals
• Which finances are  accessible  publicly at any time (what's the Internet for?)
• Which board members would be elected by open source contributors (w/ a little help from main repositories. Minimum contribution may apply to avoid trolls)
• With as much as possible an equitable election process (e.g. same number of video interviews)

Attributing yearly an Equitable Open Source (EOS) label  based on a common charter that would have to be discussed and defined. 

Some key issues to take into account:

• Patent policies (how many patents, what's your policy, bonus when using no-patent licenses)
• Open source access effectiveness (how hard is it to find the source, to compile or to run it)
• Open source licenses (no proliferation: bonus points if your licenses are among the top 5)
• Ration between open source and proprietary code (what do you sell?)
  
• Ratio between paid and non-paid open source in the code
• Recruiting practices (e.g. more than 50% of one project key contributors is not good)
• Level of control of open source projects (trademarks, licenses etc.)
• Relationship with other open source companies and their EOS (e.g. if your business and contractual relationships are mostly with high EOS companies it should reflect on you)

But first we would have to agree on  a clear goal: for instance making sure that commercial organizations aren't unfair to open source developers and their communities but at the same time  giving companies an opportunity to improve.

Comments, suggestions, offers to fund?

PS:  Detailed answer to a long comment from James Dixon (Pentaho)

Creative come on!

A brief slide show, Lessig's way