November 7th, 2009

The real pros and cons of server virtualization

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Enterprise Policy, General, Linux, Productivity, Software Licensing, Strategy, Sun

Tags: Data-processing, Server, VMware Inc., Server Virtualization, IBM Corp., VM, System Utilization, Virtualization, Hardware, Paul Murphy

First, lets be clear: this comment is about server virtualization through ghosting - the business of using one OS to run one or more ghost OSes in lieu of applications each of which in turn is able to run one or more applications - it’s not about desktops, not about N1 type technologies, and not about containerization.

The pre-eminent examples of ghosting OSes are IBM’s zVM - an OS that originated in the late 1960s as one answer to the memory management and application isolation problems confronting the industry at the time- and VMware’s more recent rendition of the same ideas for x86.

Back then, IBM was caught between rocks and hard places: lots of people (including IBM’s own research leaders) were developing system resident interactive OSes aimed at using the computer largely as a central information switch, but its commercial customer base absolutely refused to countenance any advance on the batch tabulation and reporting model around which its management ideas had evolved in the 1920s and 30s.

Thus when the Multics design effort started at MIT in 1959/60, most of IBM’s people didn’t even know there were two sides to the argument but the research people lined up with science based computing while those who made the money for IBM almost unanimously choose the data processing side - and ten years later, after MIT’s people had first won their design battles and then lost the war (by letting data processing get control of the Multics development effort), IBM’s own fence sitting solution: VM, ended up roundly hated by nearly everyone.

Nearly everyone, that is, except people limited to IBM 360 class hardware who had no other means of achieving any kind of interactive use (this was before MTS and a dozen later solutions) - and they, essentially over the objections of IBM’s own management, made VM the success it still is.

All of which brings us to the 90s when available x86 hardware mostly wouldn’t run NT 3.51 and Microsoft’s emergency iVMS port, aka 4.0, contained a misconstrued uaf derivative known as registry that effectively limited it to loading one application at a time - thus forcing buyers to choose between a lot of downtime or rackmounts of dedicated little boxes.

The rackmounts won - at least for a few years; but then data processing got took control of the wintel world and VM, in the VMware incarnation of its ideas, soon became the preferred tool for reducing the rackmount count in the name of their professional holy grail: higher system utilization.

Unfortunately there are two big problems with this:

1. first, NT 4’s limitations went away with NT 4 - addressing them today with VMs achieves a level of absurdity no audience would accept in musical comedy -it’s right up there with using a licensed terminal emulation on a licensed PC to access a licensed server running a licensed PC emulation; and,

2. it is very nearly a universal truth that every gain data processing makes in improving system utilization produces a larger loss in IT productivity for the business paying them to do it.

The reductio ad absurdum example of the latter is Linux running under VM on a zSeries machine: data processing can get very close to 100% system utilization with this approach, but the cost per unit of application work done will be on the order of twenty times what it would be running the same application directly on Lintel; and every variable in the user value equation: from response time to the freedom to innovate, gains a negative exponent.

You can see the latter consequence in virtually every result on benchmarks featuring some kind of interaction processing. For example, the Sun/Oracle people behind their recent recent foray into TPC/C, both demonstrated their own utter incompetence as IT professionals by achieving less than 50% CPU utilization and the user value of this “failure” by turning in response times averaging roughly one seventeenth of IBM’s:

The counter argument I usually hear about all this is that virtual system images are more easily managed than real ones - and this is both perfectly true and utterly specious.

It’s perfectly true that VM style virtualization lets you bundle an application with everything it needs to run except hardware, and then move that bundle between machines at the click of an icon; but the simple fact that this applies just as well to Solaris containers as it does to VM ghosts shows that this is an argument for encapsulation and application isolation, not for ghosting.

Worse, the argument is completely specious because it bases its value claims on two demonstrably false beliefs: first that the only alternative is the traditional isolated machine structure, and second that virtualization lets the business achieve more for less. Both are utter nonsense: Unix process management has worked better than VM since the 1970s, and because virtualization adds both overheads and licensing it always costs more to do less than modern alternatives like containerization or simply letting the Unix process management technology do its job.

Again the quintessential example of this is from the heart of the data processing profession: when you take a $20 million dollar zSeries installation and achieve a 60 way split to produce 100% system utilization from 60 logical machines running applications or ghosts, what the business gets out of it is roughly equivalent to what it would get from four Lintel racks costing a cumulative $500,000.

A more down home illustration is provided by VMware itself - their competitive value calculator computes a cost advantage for their products over those from others on the basis of their belief that their VMs impose less overhead and allow you to get closer to 100% hardware utilization. Thus if you enter values saying you’ve got 200 applications running on NAS connected quad core servers, want to manage virtually, and have average infrastructure costs, they produce a table with this data:

All of which should raise a couple of questions in your mind:

1. first, if the consensus that ghosting doesn’t have significant overhead is right, where is VMware getting the third of the box it claims you can recover by getting its ghosting software instead of Microsoft’s?

2. and, second, wouldn’t the money VMware wants you to spend on ghosting ($241K in this example) be better spent on hiring people who can move these applications to free environments like Linux or OpenSolaris?

So what’s the bottom line? Simple: the real ghost in ghosting is that of 1920s data processing - and the right way to see this particular con job for the professional cost sink it is, is to focus on costs to the business, not ideological comfort in IT.

May 2nd, 2009

Oracle Office, MySQL, and other dreams

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Database Management, Enterprise Policy, General, Linux, Software Licensing, Strategy, Sun

Tags: Oracle Corp., MySQL, Sun Microsystems Inc., OpenDocument Format, OpenDocument Format (ODF), StarOffice, Open Source, OpenOffice, Databases, Emerging Technologies

Most people don’t know this, but at one time Oracle Corporation ran an extensive internal beta adding a pretty good word processor and spreadsheet to the Oracle Office communications product most recently renamed Oracle Beehive and now positioned against both Exchange and Domino.

At the time I didn’t see the combination as competitive with Applixware or even Q-Office, but recommended it for sale because it did one thing better than any competitive product I knew of: it stored everything as rows in the standard database.

Sun does not own OpenOffice.org and Oracle, accordingly, isn’t buying it - but because Sun does own the StarOffice product and is the primary contributor to OpenOffice.org, Oracle is buying both influence with, and responsibility to, that community.

If Sun and Oracle now recreate the full Oracle Office by combining Beehive with StarOffice, ensuring standardized database storage for all data, and open sourcing some of Oracle’s forms based development tools into the bargain, almost everyone stands to gain.

The obvious effect, of course, is to give OpenOffice a tremendous technical advantage over Microsoft Office while, at the same time, adding communications technologies and a real Access competitor.

I think, however, that two rather more subtle effects would dominate the future impact such a product would have.

First there’s the impact on the whole ODF scene. Right now, and for the past ten years, I’d argue that the eminently logical separation of storage from format is what’s enabled Microsoft to stall on ODF by keeping the brightly colored ball bouncing in the public eye while quietly and effectively selling internal integration as the justification for knee capping ODF at every opportunity.

Force content and format information to be stored in a single, consistent, way however and Microsoft’s wiggle room get reduced while accurate format conversions become easier - meaning that a new Oracle Office would ultimately have an enormous impact directly in terms of getting truly open document format standards widely accepted and used - and indirectly in terms of empowering the Linux desktop.

Second, for this to really work in light of Sun’s existing licensing commitments, Oracle would have to open source the database and communications components for Oracle Office. Since MySQL is well suited to the job and already open source, my guess is that the pros and cons of using it would then tilt in favor - meaning that my hypothetical Oracle Office would boost the MySQL community first by creating long term support commitments and secondly by putting it at the core of a lot of Exchange replacements.

One note:

1. I’m assuming that Oracle will neither want, nor be able, to sell Sun’s MySQL asset as a going concern.

   The reason I’m making this assumption is that Sun’s billion dollars didn’t so much buy an asset as deny IBM the chance to increase Sun’s dependence on Oracle for hardware sales - meaning that there isn’t much there, and simply spinning the commitment off into a tax exempt foundation would return far less to Oracle shareholders than using MySQL to gain credibility and support in the open source community will.

March 9th, 2009

RDBMS license costs and Open Source

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Enterprise Policy, General, Linux, Productivity, Software Licensing, Sun

Tags: Processor, Oracle Corp., Open Source, Sun Microsystems Inc., Hardware, Pricing Strategy, RDBMS, IBM Corp., Pricing, Sales Strategy

A comment by frequent contributor JesperFrimann last week caused me to take a closer look at licensing practices among major commercial database vendors other than Microsoft.

All three of the big guys (Oracle, IBM, and Sybase) follow the same basic sales model:

1. publish nominal list pricing only;
2. obfuscate package names, functionality, discounts, and prerequisites to the point that no customer can reasonably understand what’s where;
3. frown severely on anyone who even thinks about publishing pricing, performance, and/or functional information; and,
4. give the sales crew lots of leeway in dealing with customers who pass credit check.

Thus Oracle, for example, publishes its commercial price list and from that you can discover that licensing for Oracle’s Enterprise Edition Plus Business Intelligence Suite lists at $295,000 per processor - but if you want to know what’s in it or what it really costs, you’ll be doing some serious reading, and lots of guessing, before eventually sitting down with a sales guy.

I don’t mention that particular package here to pick on Oracle but to illustrate the impact licensing has on hardware choices:

1. first, the ratio of hardware to software pricing used to make some rough sense: when a processor cost half a million bucks, paying $100K for a license for the software on it didn’t seem unreasonable - but now paying $300K for a Sybase license to run on a $22K T2 seems absurd.
2. and, second, if you really had to pay $295,000 per core for an Oracle BI license, you’d feel a lot of pressure to run it on the fastest single processor box you could find - even if that machine wasn’t remotely competitive on its own.

Put these two things together and paying $260K for a pretty basic p570 running $600K in Oracle licensing on two cores doesn’t seem so absurd - and is nearly half a million cheaper than looking for the same delivered performance on a four license AMD machine.

On the other hand this kind of license pricing is about to hit two rocks: one a new processor from Sun, and the other Open Source.

Sun’s Rock processors will come with LDOM and hardware scout technology that should make a license purchased for operation on a single processor more productive than multiple licenses purchased for Power6 or Niagara gear - and that’s going to leave these RDBMS companies facing a lot of pressure from customers and hardware partners alike: all trying to leverage more realistic pricing on their gear by threatening migrations to Rock.

Once customers start to think in terms of possible change, however, change to open source may seem much less emotionally charged than hardware change - because people identify with their hardware suppliers but, except for wintel bigots, typically much less so with software suppliers.

In other words, most people who start by considering the cost of saving half a million bucks on licensing by switching from IBM to Sun on hardware, will soon jump to considering keeping their IBM stuff but saving all of the licensing cost by switching to open source - and most will find that sticking with IBM while abandoning DB2 for MySQL feels much more comfortable than switching to Sun hardware.

Equally importantly, the entry barriers to change are lower too. If you’re facing a $338K charge to put Sybase ASE on a T5120 and some consultant or blogger tells you that MySQl (or PostGresSQL) can do the job just about as well for free, your cost of finding out whether that’s true or not is largely going to consist of some staff time because all the tools you need for the experiment are free - and once the test system demonstrates feasibility you’re going to understand that the real bottom line here is simply that spending that $338K on staffing and support is a lot better than spending it on licensing.

November 19th, 2008

Dick, Jane, and MySQL: why recessions favor open source

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Database Management, Development, Enterprise Policy, General, Linux, Software Licensing, Strategy, Wintel vs Lintel

Tags: Recession, Information Technology, MySQL, Open Source, Paul Murphy, Bank, Accounting, Server, Times, Richard

Lets imagine that you’ve magically become the owner of a small business with just over a hundred employees. Times are tough and getting tougher: higher taxes, higher energy costs, increasing legislated entitlements, and serious inflation are all incoming - and you’re already getting squeezed on all sides because your bankers and your customers are living in the same climate of financial fear you are.

The bottom line is simple: if your business is going to survive, something’s going to have to give.

So what to do, what to do? Laying off people who make the money will increase unit costs while leading to decreased sales; reducing quality might work for a while, maybe buy some stuff from China, but it’s a death spiral and you know it. So what’s left is the overheads.

You can let the bank do payroll - they keep proposing that - and maybe layoff Sally, but somebody’s still got to enter the data and there’s no way the bank can give Jim, your plant foreman, the flexibility Sally gives him now in terms of managing time, advances, and special payments.

There’s no fat in transportation or purchasing either, they’re one man bands and you’re lucky to have them. Sales might be a little fat, but only Jack’s not really carrying his weight, but he’s new, and his customers are new to the company - and Anne says they’re not people she can switch to Jill without having them thinking about their suppliers some more.

Your IT department is two people first hired as office clerks who talk a good talk about Windows and know how to use the latest cell phones - but they pretty much don’t do their original jobs anymore and instead generate a never ending stream of requests for more money for computers: new gear, upgrades, licenses, services - it just never ends - and just last week the bank didn’t get its inventories log on time again - and you know they’re looking pretty closely at every outstanding penny right now.

The web sales stuff the accountants sold you on hasn’t panned out - but Anne says it takes weight off her people because customers get information from there she’d otherwise have to hand feed them, and it has generated a few good leads -one of which led to Jack and couple of decent volume sales- so it’s early days and probably a mistake to shut down and anyway it doesn’t cost much, does it?

So now you look closely at IT costs. It’s kind of surprising: an almost daily nuisance that’s built up a lot more than you thought. You never realized, for example, that with 26 desktops and five laptops you had nine “servers” - two of them less than six months old; or, that 19 of your 31 PCs haven’t had anything changed on them for two years - three nobody can find, and the other nine have an average cost, just this year, of nearly $4,000 in new hardware, upgrades, licensing, and professional support.

Richard says the older desktops and the inventory management servers will need to be replaced pretty soon - but he’s asked for the money before, and they’re still working.

The accounting system runs on nine PCs and two servers - and the software on those two servers cost you $11,000 each just on installation -apparently upgrades needed to migrate from the old gear. That’s coming up for renewal in another six months too.

Looking more closely, you discover two of the eight servers are being used for the materials management and procurement system, but have no charges against them this year; two more being used for your web presence are costing a few hundred dollars a month to lease in some co-hosting center, but aren’t on your books at all - one is in your office supporting email and word processing, and four others are on the books but disconnected and in storage - Jane says that’s because they’re over two years old and useless so they’re just keeping them till the depreciation runs out and they can be thrown out. Probably where the two laptops and the PC went too.

Add it all up, including the two salaries salaries plus overheads, and it looks like you could be spending over $140,000 a year on IT.

According to Richard and Jane, (and a guy you asked at your accounting firm), this is all good and reasonable - just a cost of doing business, they say; but there’s a niggling doubt: a guy you know who runs a small law firm was just telling you about how he’s saving a bundle by switching everything to Linux. It’s free, he says - and free sounds pretty good.

Explore that a bit, and you’ll see that recessions are great for open source because you can layoff off Dick and Jane, hire an IT professional to switch everything to Linux, save over $6,000 a month for the next three years, and end up with a pretty good chance that the bank will get its inventory change logs on time every week.

June 1st, 2007

Your license, or mine?

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: General, Software Licensing

Tags: Software, Intellectual Property, GPL, License, Here, Paul Murphy

Here’s an excerpt from a comment on software licensing by Joerg Moellenkamp

..as everyone tends to have their own targets and needs, there is no right and wrong about licences. There is only a “does-the-license-fit-or-not”. When you look from an economic standpoint CDDL is surely the more sensible license. For a joint development on a open source project, that existed before it´s relicensing (perhaps even with licensed 3rd party code), CDDL is the more sensible license. But to prevent the take over of a code base developed by a community from almost the first line of code, GPL is definitely the license of choice.

I think that states the question every software developer faces when considering license choices: “does the license fit or not?”, and raises the possibility that there may be some generic set of circumstances in which one kind of license is clearly preferable to another -i.e. that each license carries within it an implicit definition of the business structure to which it’s appropriate.

As I mentioned on Wednesday, the free software foundation differentiates 32 licenses “GNU compatible” licenses from over a hundred other open source licenses mainly on whether or not they allow the commercialisation of intellectual property - with the GPL holding all rights within the community, the BSD people inviting use by anyone, and a hundred or more others compromising between these two extremes.

On the surface, this makes the first part of the licensing question fairly easy to answer: the type of business implied by a GPL compatible license is one in which somebody else pays the bills - and, conversely, businesses in which software development helps pay the bills, should use non GPL compatible licensing.

More subtly, take another look at the last sentence quoted from Moellenkamp above:

But to prevent the take over of a code base developed by a community from almost the first line of code, GPL is definitely the license of choice.

In effect what he’s saying. and I think he’s right whether he meant to say this or not, is that the GPL asserts intellectual property rights in a negative way: explicitly trying to prevent the commercial exploitation of community effort -and that the FSF is therefore exactly what it is most opposed to: an intellectual property rights organization.

May 31st, 2007

The CDDL example

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: General, Software Licensing

Tags:

The original BSD licenses applied well understood academic principles of free academic information exchange to the age of software as understood in the sixties and seventies. They applied, therefore, to the world before today’s patent rulings and intellectual property litigation -and Sun’s community license can correspondingly be seen as an attempt to evolve those original licensing ideas to fit today’s world.

The
CDDL license V1.0 has 10 main sections starting with definitions and ending with a commitment to fairly allocate responsibilities “between Initial Developer and the Contributors” if claims against either party should arise.

The terms, by the way, mean pretty much what you’d expect: an initial developer is the first to offer a particular bit of code for license, and contributors are people who help improve it.

As a non lawyer the text looks like a straight forward presentation of a lot of carefully dotted legal i’s and crossed t’s all of which seem to come down to an agreement among community participants to follow four commandments:

1 - thou shalt not claim another’s work
2 - thou shalt not restrict others
3 - thou shalt not sue thy brother in coding
4 - thou shalt accept full responsibility for thine own actions

The first commandment is directly BSD derived: you can use any community code you want to, but make sure you properly credit both the original code developer and any subsequent contributers whose work is included in the stuff you use.

That’s the academic tradition: you’re expected to stand on the shoulders of giants, and to acknowledge that their contributions make your success possible.

Number two says you can use the other guy’s code any way you want, but the other guy gets similar rights with respect to your code.

This has some subtle applications - including the key one that makes this license attractive to developers with significant investments in research, development, and coding because it conveys the right to use community code within proprietary products.

It’s also, therefore, where CDDL is most different from the GNU GPL (light or otherwise) because you’re not just limited to linking under some conditions, but can actively sell a compiled product incorporating third party, open source, contributions.

The CDDL has created a lot of excitement among commercial developers, but in the longer run I suspect that its greatest single impact will lie in bringing stability to the peripheral hardware and related software side of the industry - because the license allows those involved to design hardware to utilise community code and then fork the evolution of that code to ensure that the product isn’t obsoleted by the next third party change to come along.

Number three is the simplest to express: sue a fellow community member over a related patent and any rights granted you under the CDDL disappear - but rights you’ve already passed on to others under the CDDL continue.

It’s also the most important, because Sun put essentially all of its Solaris code base under this license - and thereby gave community members both an accessible infrastructure anchored by the leading commercial Unix and a legal umbrella under which they should be reasonably safe from predatory patent litigation.

Notice that what’s important about this isn’t that big companies like Motorola can partially shelter some software activities, it’s that tiny start-ups can largely postpone the million dollar, often indeterminate, patent searches otherwise needed before the product is first sold.

Number four is the obvious one: this is a community that shares responsibility right along with code. Thus section 10 is headlined “RESPONSIBILITY FOR CLAIMS.” and nominally deals only with initial developers and later contributors:

As between Initial Developer and the Contributors, each party is responsible for claims and damages arising, directly or indirectly, out of its utilisation of rights under this License and You agree to work with Initial Developer and Contributors to distribute such responsibility on an equitable basis. Nothing herein is intended or shall be deemed to constitute any admission of liability.

but actually expresses a larger ideal -the same one expressed by the patent umbrella and the rights sharing terms: a commitment to fair dealing in a community of equals.

May 30th, 2007

FSF political discoloration

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 1:00 am

Categories: Software Licensing

Tags:

One brutally simple way to categorise the difference between the BSD and GPL derived licenses is to say that the BSD people don’t care what you do with their code as long as you’re honest about where it came from, while the GPL people originally saw Adam Smith as the enemy and used licensing to fence out businesses which might want to rip-off community contributions.

Since then, of course, people have matured, things have changed, and the combined technical and managerial abilities of those involved with the FSF have made it a huge success -with the combination creating enormous internal strains only partially expressed in terms of increased, and largely defensive, stridency on the political side.

Their use of the term “copyleft” as they describe it below: is symptomatic - because it’s really not a meaningful term at all, just their attempt to sidestep widely used terms whose political connotations they don’t like: terms like copyright, trademark, patent, or intellectual property.

The two major categories of free software license are copyleft and non-copyleft . Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL insist that modified versions of the program must be free software as well. Non-copyleft licenses do not insist on this. We recommend copyleft, because it protects freedom for all users, but non-copylefted software can still be free software, and useful to the free software community.

That political agenda gets expressed, for example, pretty much throughout the FSF’s discussion of about 32 GPL and over 100 non GPL compatible licences. Five examples, picked because the licenses discussed are widely used, illustrate this:

GNU General Public License, or GNU GPL for short. This is a free software license, and a copyleft license. We recommend it for most software packages.

…

FreeBSD license

This is the original BSD license with the advertising clause and another clause removed. (It is also sometimes called the ?2-clause BSD license?.) It is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.

If you want a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, the FreeBSD license is a reasonable choice. However, please don’t call it a ?BSD? or ?BSD-style? license, because that is likely to cause confusion which could lead to use of the flawed original BSD license. …

Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL)

This is a free software license which is not a strong copyleft; it has some complex restrictions that make it incompatible with the GNU GPL. It requires that all attribution notices be maintained, while the GPL only requires certain types of notices. Also, it terminates in retaliation for certain aggressive uses of patents. So, a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the CDDL cannot legally be linked together. We urge you not to use the CDDL for this reason.

Also unfortunate in the CDDL is its use of the term “intellectual property”.

…

Apache License, Version 2.0

This is a free software license but it is incompatible with the GPL. The Apache License is incompatible with the GPL because it has a specific requirement that is not in the GPL: it has certain patent termination cases that the GPL does not require. (We don’t think those patent termination cases are inherently a bad idea, but nonetheless they are incompatible with the GNU GPL.)

…

Modified BSD license

(Note: on the preceding link, the modified BSD license is listed in the General section.)

This is the original BSD license, modified by removal of the advertising clause. It is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.

If you want a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, the modified BSD license is a reasonable choice. However, it is risky to recommend use of ?the BSD license?, because confusion could easily occur and lead to use of the flawed original BSD license. To avoid this risk, you can suggest the X11 license instead. The X11 license and the revised BSD license are more or less equivalent.

This license is sometimes referred to as the 3-clause BSD license.

Notice that everything is either good (copyleft) or bad (non copyleft) - but review the actual licenses described here and it becomes obvious even to a non lawyer like me that the real difference between what Gnu thinks of as GPL compatible and non compatible licenses is respect for the financial value of intellectual property - a term Stallman explicitly attacks in the essay linked to from the CDDL summary above.

Two key paragraphs from that attack illustrate the emotional resonances driving the use of “copyleft:”

The term [Intellectual Property] carries a bias that is not hard to see: it suggests thinking about copyright, patents and trademarks by analogy with property rights for physical objects. (This analogy is at odds with the legal philosophies of copyright law, of patent law, and of trademark law, but only specialists know that.) These laws are in fact not much like physical property law, but use of this term leads legislators to change them to be more so. Since that is the change desired by the companies that exercise copyright, patent and trademark powers, the bias of “intellectual property” suits them. The bias is enough reason to reject the term, and people have often asked me to propose some other name for the overall category — or have proposed their own alternatives (often humorous). Suggestions include IMPs, for Imposed Monopoly Privileges, and GOLEMs, for Government-Originated Legally Enforced Monopolies. Some speak of “exclusive rights regimes”, but referring to restrictions as “rights” is doublethink too.

And two more paragraphs from near the end give some good advice:

As a result, any opinions about “the issue of intellectual property” and any generalisations about this supposed category are almost surely foolish. If you think all those laws are one issue, you will tend to choose your opinions from a selection of sweeping overgeneralizations, none of which is any good. If you want to think clearly about the issues raised by patents, or copyrights, or trademarks, the first step is to forget the idea of lumping them together, and treat them as separate topics. The second step is to reject the narrow perspectives and simplistic picture the term “intellectual property” suggests. Consider each of these issues separately, in its fullness, and you have a chance of considering them well.

I’m sure he’s right about most of that, but unfortunately the over-simplification he warns of is also precisely the one GNU relies on to distinguish politically acceptable licenses from unacceptable ones. Basically, inventing a synonym for a term you don’t like doesn’t change its meaning; thus what the FSF says is that “the two major categories of free software license are copyleft and non-copyleft” but what they mean is that the two major categories are those which recognise a right to capitalize on intellectual property and those which don’t.

What this reveals, I think, is a very deep conflict within the free software foundation’s intellectual and emotional foundations. On the one hand, they’re an idealistic organization whose work has generated enormous benefits to software developers and users everywhere. On the other they’ve failed in their primary political mission: to restrict the benefits to the community of contributors by taking capitalist motivations out of the picture.

Thus there are people who argue that Red Hat and Novel don’t contradict everything the FSF stands for and that IBM’s commitment of most of the money now driving Gnu/Linux doesn’t amount to a takeover, but I think they’re wrong. On the contrary it seems to me that the expression of IBM’s corporate commitment to Linux through consulting and marketing represents the very definition of intellectual capital exploitation; that Red Hat’s license is exactly what it seems: a proprietary license covering open source code; and, that Novel’s patent agreement with Microsoft directly contravenes the spirit of the GPL.

Basically it seems to me that money corrupts, and money coupled with good intentions corrupts absolutely. Thus the FSF might have recovered its ideological purity after blinking for Red Hat precisely because Red Hat’s intentions were broadly seen as good for the Linux community, but subsequently let itself slide into a far deeper pit by failing to respond to effectively when IBM used the GPLV2 rules to end run the FSF in support of the Linux System 390 port done at the Bvblingen skunk works.

What happened there was that the port extended proprietary hardware to make a proprietary system in exactly the way the GPL forbids the use of GPL’d code to extend proprietary software - something that’s completely within the rules for hardware vendors and common among people who make, for example, custom handsets or Linux based embedded controllers.

So, bottom line, what? On the one hand nothing: IBM’s actions were completely within the rights, obligations, and traditions associated with the GPL. But, on the other the entire GPL construct, because what this produced was an intensely proprietary system whose sole obvious purpose was to make money for IBM’s shareholders by riding the wave of Linux support generated by the open source community and the myth of Torvalds.

And on balance? On balance I don’t think anyone intentionally broke the letter of the licenses involved, but that the Bvblingen porting effort will go down in history as the straw that broke the FSF and correspondingly that the FSF needs to deal with these issues -probably in the end either by abandoning its political principles or by excising the Linux kernel from the FSF/GPL community umbrella.

May 29th, 2007

Licensing and open source beliefs

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Software Licensing

Tags:

Unix experience at the University of California in Berkeley started in 1974 on a
PDP 11/45 shared between several departments, one of which wanted to run
DEC’s RSTS operating system instead and had the clout to make it stick for about
16 hours per day. The remaining eight hours a day were enough, however,
to grow a research commitment to interactive Unix processing leading, by the fall of
1975, to the purchase of a PDP 11/70 dedicated to “instructional Unix” and the appearance
on campus of UCB graduate Ken Thompson, on teaching sabbatical from Bell Labs.

Thompson brought both the latest Unix release and full source with him. In doing
that he continued, despite muted objections from some in AT&T management, the academic
tradition of free information exchange - a tradition
that, for Unix, went directly back to MIT and the original Multics
designers but more generally goes back
all the way to the freedom of information corolary
to the re-invention and formulation of the
scientific method in Elizabethan England.

The results at UCB, of course, speak for themselves; but there was conflict over
the software’s commercial value even then and much of open source licensing’s subsequent evolution
has been driven by people taking different positions on the same
“morals versus money” and “current versus futures” trade-offs made then.

At that time the academic, open publication, tradition became the clear winner; but the trade-off
was that the source materials would only be open for teaching and research
uses in academia - so the University of
Alberta later got a Unix tape for a PDP11/44 but I couldn’t use it in work for
an aerospace contractor.

Since then the generic BSD license has evolved largely to ward off attacks
on its basic premise: that anyone should be able to use the knowledge gained
in research provided that sources are both fully acknowledged and correctly
represented.

Thus when Sun released their Network File System the licensing and related
contractual restrictions were largely designed simply to head off Microsoft’s
generic embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy - a success Sun later repeated
with the first Java licenses and agreements.

Richard Stallman forked this process in the late seventies with what has since become
the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) Gnu Public License (GPL) by adding riders intended
to deny people from outside the open source community the opportunity to use open source
for corporate commercial advantage.

Since then many things have changed - particularly with respect to the application of
patent law to software in the United States, through
intellectual property fatwas by bureaucrats in Brussels, and because of the accumulating
effects of litigation and sharp dealing by players ranging in scale from the
government of communist China to the lawyers representing Red Hat.

And the licenses, of course, have had to evolve with external change - thus
Sun’s CDD license now represents the state of the art on the BSD side,
the GPL3 proposal represents leading edge compromise at the Free Software
Foundation, and the dozens of other widely used variants represent the trade-offs,
customisations, and accommodations appropriate to their proponents.

I want to discuss one aspect of the FSF’s political agenda tomorrow and the
CDDL on Thursday, but two things are clear: the differences are much less important
than the similarities, and both evolved from the same base, under the same pressures,
and in support of broadly similar goals.

October 6th, 2005

Linux Support: the market share killer

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 3:00 am

Categories: General, Linux, Software Licensing

Tags:

There are two seemingly very different classes of Linux support: home and business, but both lack for the same thing: emotional and decision support, not technical support.

For example, I got involved in an email exchange recently with the director of a government office in Ottawa, whose IT troops maintain multiple racks of IBM Xeon servers running Red Hat Linux. In Canabucks (currently about $0.86 US) he’s paying Red Hat about $120,000 a year in licensing, has contracted client side support from an outsourcer, and has five of his IT staff committed full time to babysitting the applications, mostly trivial (from a complexity and load viewpoint), running on these machines. Now the outsourcing contract is coming up for renewal in the next budget year, the hardware is almost three years old and overdue for replacement, his IT head is insistent that going back to Windows Servers will reduce costs and downtime, and he’s feeling real pressure from above to fund a study on switching to Linux on an IBM mainframe.

So what should he do? I told him to go all Windows. Why? Because the social and political support

Read the rest of this entry »

October 5th, 2005

Linux Licensing: barriers to developers

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 3:29 am

Categories: Distributions, Enterprise Policy, General, Linux, Software Licensing

Tags:

There are dozens of different software license structures ranging from the legal structures of the GPL and Chinese government policy on the one hand to nextgen DRM and Microsoft’s end user licenses on the other.

The GPL is a beautifully designed implementation of a social idea in the context of an existing legal system - the notion that those who celebrate free as in freedom by helping themselves to the work of others with their left hands, have a responsibility to pass on their own work, and the GPL view of freedom, with their right hands.

The GPL works, and works well, to empower innovation - but also represents a peaceful implementation of Karl Marx’s famous dictum that the state should take from each individual according to the individual’s abilities, and give to each individual according to that individual’s needs. Indeed the GPL doesn’t different in principle (although it’s certainly dramatically different in practice!) from the communist Chinese policy of state confiscation of intellectual property for state use.

Microsoft’s EULA, in contrast, takes the polar opposite approach: it represents the ultimate in the exploitation of the existing legal system to retain the company’s intellectual property rights while collecting an economic rent on whatever benefits the user may be able to obtain by using some current manifestation of that intellectual property in Microsoft software.

Now look at this as a simple either/or choice for a developer with an established code base and you can see the problem. He’d like to get into the Linux market, but to do that he might have to use some GPL’code and is certainly looking at a significant legal bill to assess not only his obligations under the various licenses his application development and release work might touch on, but also his risks with respect to real and alleged patents and/or ongoing or probable litigation. So what’s a smart developer to do? for the risk averse the answer is obvious: Microsoft is the low risk choice, Linux the high risk choice - so what if Linux works better? you don’t get sued going Microsoft.

The best answer so far, at least in my opinion as a non lawyer, is Sun’s community development license. Basically this is a have your cake and eat it too deal: developers keep proprietary code proprietary, participate in the free as in freedom world being built up around openSolaris, and work inside a patent umbrella held up, not just by Sun, but by mutual agreement among participating developers. In other words, Joe developer can adopt openSolaris and the CDDL ( Common Development Distribution License) without spending a nickel on legal fees and be reasonably confident that not doing something criminal (or just criminally stupid) will suffice to protect himself from legal action.

Combine the CDDL with the fact that Solaris is the best OS around, and it’s easy to see why the openSolaris community is exploding –and that’s great, but the biggest source of developers is the Linux community not the Microsoft one, and more internecine warfare is one thing the Unix community as a whole does not need.

So what to do? What I think is that the Linux community has to play catch up ball here: adopt the ideas behind the CDDL and create the requisite patent umbrella to remove both the real and perceived legal barriers to Linux.