September 27th, 2004
War of the tech exec bloggers Round 1: Red Hat's Tiemann vs. Sun's Schwartz
In an entry that takes blog-based industry rhetoric to a new level, Michael Tiemann, Red Hat’s VP of open-source affairs, used his blog to castigate Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz for not open sourcing Java — and for being an open source hypocrite. Tiemann poses several rhetorical questions, including: "Would you create a fund to defend open-source developers against the predatory practice of other patent holders?"
Red Hat has indeed established such a defense fund, which — as I’ve said previously — tastes great but is less filling for the people who most need the legal protection from patent infringement suits: customers. When Schwartz responds (how can he not?), he will no doubt draw attention to the lack of customer indemnification as a standard part of Red Hat Linux. On the Java front, Schwartz will probably claim that open sourcing Java is something that vendors want (because it facilitates incompatibility-driven lock-in the same way it’s hard to switch between Linux distros), but that, in the interest of minimizing the barriers to switching, customers do not.
