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October 21, 2006

Two weeks ago I nearly had a heart attack when a friend tossed me an email to that certain new music website that looked a whole lot like the RoadSound demo I spent shopping around to the music industry and VC firms throughout the first half of 2006.

I couldn't believe it. I shouted the obligatory "WTF?!" , and then tried to figure out what the hell was going on. The first thing I did was call my lawyer, but he was busy so I had to wait for a callback. And then my anxiety got the best of me...

I wasn't just amazed that someone seemed to have ripped me off ( I don't have proof that it was a direct rip , or that this company focus grouped people I demo'd to - but since its the music industry, I really wouldn't be surprised ) -- but out of all the things I've worked on to get pilfered, RoadSound makes no sense.

Sure-- *I* believed in RoadSound. But *no one* else did. It took me forever to get the system up and running -- I even quit my day job and spent my entire life savings developing it -- but not a single person I demoed or pitched it to truly understood it. Everyone (and their mom) was enamored with MySpace. I was constantly asked "But doesn't MySpace do that already?" to which I'd reply "No," and go into the aspects of portability, syndication, and collaboration. Then I'd try to make people realize "It won't last" and "you need to be promoting your space- not mine, or his, or hers, or theirs-- but your own space". It rarely sunk through. MySpace served their current needs-- and that was that. A syndicated robust system was the least of their thoughts. Supporting another music site, or integrating into their own site with widgets or hosted solutions was not a concern.

Still, I tried to sell it in, because I knew it was the future of online music-- and I was fully invested in it. Literally.

By April things weren't looking so good. I was having trouble finding early adopters, and VC companies wouldn't return calls or emails. Once solid connections at labels and agencies across the globe had all been laid off in the great music downsizing of 2005.

I realized that I needed some gimmick to get users, and fortunately realized what it was-- RoadSound had a links section called 'find me on' that managed and verified other online identities. I put it in there so users could just show their profiles on networks they used more often-- and it would help people buy/trade/sell tickets with one another.

By a stroke of luck, the findmeon domains were all available -- com, net org... So I snapped up all 3 and opted to break out the link and profile management into a widget site , and toss the artist website verification code into its own open source project. All the elements were there: external ids, friendships and profiles -- I just needed to make that standalone.

I figured that if people wouldn't use RoadSound , and no one would blog about it ( god, i tried ) - I could get users off publicity for the findmeon component.

Slowly and surely, FindMeOn grew into a beast of a project and started taking up more of my time than RoadSound was. To make it a solid open standard, I abandoned id hashing for public key cryptography, and rewrote so much of the framework it shared with RoadSound, that I had to take the RoadSound beta off line. Instead of keeping RoadSound up to date with the current state of the framework, I focused my energy on meeting with financial advisors to try and find some backing. There were some leads by late June , but they all fizzled. Thankfully there's renewed interest now.

Along the way, numerous components of RoadSound and FindMeOn started getting split out into open source projects/contributions. findmeon became a full spec (it should be released any day now), TurboGears (which I abandoned after 2 months) got an email system and a slew of bug fixes (though not enough, which is why I abandoned it), CPAN got a new (and what I think is a way better) captcha system and an updated/improved reverse proxy cleanup system under mod_perl-- and I can't even think of all the testing and bug checking on Apache / lighty / libapreq etc I did.

Which gets me to the subject of this post's title....

I was f*ing pissed when I saw the RoadSound derivative. I kept thinking "If I weren't contributing to open source... I would have had so much more time! I might have used that time to find investors who could have hired marketers & ui designers-- and RoadSound would have been on a full release in April."

And then my IP lawyer finally returned my call (after 5 minutes of HELL) and started to calm me down- he's been on top of all my IP concerns for a while, and knew what to say. US IP law lets people file patent applications up to 1 year from first public disclosure/marketing- I was still well within the time limit and had nothing to worry about.

And thats when I started falling in love with open source again. I was bitter ( at FOSS in general ) after speaking with my lawyer... and started angrily going through RoadSound's db, and my calendars, phone records, and email correspondance looking to chart who saw what and when -- hoping to find a leak of sorts. I came up with an exhaustive list from my inbox alone, but when hit my mailing list directory-- BAM.

Archived all over the place, on many of the 14+ open source lists I'm on, are either messages where I'm explicitly talking about RoadSound or have my business .sig (which talked about RoadSound) that was mistakingly added to messages when I was having issues for a few weeks with a version of Mail.app on my laptop.

And, well, thats just awesome. Open source took a ton of my time away... but it also gave something back -- and not just the notion of making the world / computing a better place, but it gave me a slew of public records and to add to the rest of the "I done that thing there first, before they even existed" proof I may one day need to furnish.

In that single breath, before that little switch inside my head flipped, I swore I'd never touch open source again... but once I saw how it could save my ass, I started to love it all over again.

Posted by Jonathan at October 21, 2006 11:12 PM

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