November 20th, 2009

Oracle opponent cheers delay in mySQL decision

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:41 am

Categories: Database Management, GPL, General, Government, Oracle, Strategy, Sun Microsystems, mergers & acquisitions

Tags: Oracle Corp., MySQL, Open Source, Databases, Enterprise Software, Software, Data Management, Dana Blankenhorn

Florian Mueller, coordinating opposition to Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems and mySQL, sent a note today cheering word that Oracle has asked for, and gotten, a six-day delay to answer European objections to the purchase. (Picture from Roberto Galoppini.)

Mueller, a former mySQL shareholder and strategic advisor, is working with mySQL co-founder Monty Widenius.

“Oracle is now apparently backtracking from previous claims that the European Commission has no credible theory of harm. If the EU’s objections were baseless, Oracle wouldn’t need more time now to develop its arguments. This is another sign of enormous weakness only three weeks after Oracle withdrew its antitrust application in Russia.

One more week won’t change the fact that MySQL competes fiercely with Oracle’s database products including its flagship ‘11g’ across all major market segments. One more week won’t transform a traditional company product like MySQL into a community project that could be developed by volunteers just because it’s open source. The best way Oracle can make use of this extra week is to think really hard about selling MySQL to a suitable third party.”

Mueller said the delay in Oracle’s response means a decision on the merger won’t come from the European Commission until January 27.

Widenius strongly disagrees with mySQL co-founder Marten Mickos on the Oracle-Sun deal. Mickos as written to EC Competition Commissioner Nellie Kroes asking that the deal go through.

My personal view is that Oracle could spin control of the code base into a foundation like Eclipse, with control based on investment, which would also enable money to flow in from mySQL stakeholders like Amazon.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison insists the delay in Europe’s approval is degrading the overall value of Sun, which also controls such important open source projects as Java and Open Office.

I do not disagree.

But due to its open source license Oracle is not gaining control of the mySQL code base, just becoming its commercial sponsor. So why not bring free money to support the code base and have something better to sell support on?

It’s reasonable that Ellison resents the interference of European bureaucrats in Oracle’s affairs. But personal feelings should not get in the way of business. This is business.

Business is just business.

November 19th, 2009

ChromeOS says tear down this network regulation wall

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:05 am

Categories: Cloud Computing, General, Google, Government, Internet, LANs and WANs, Legal, business models, mass market, politics

Tags: Software, Network, Chip, Wall, ChromeOS, Unleash Moore, Network Technology, Semiconductors, Networking, Hardware

An Australian friend wrote yesterday with a question:

I really can’t see the point of a cloud-based OS for the general user. The added cost in using it doesn’t seem worthwhile.

It would take me over 6 months to upload my data at my connection speed not to mention that ISPs here in Australia have now included uploads as part of your total usage which for me would be exceeded for those 6 months.

So can I ask - why choose ChromeOS ?

These are good questions. They have been vexing me ever since IBM and Ubuntu launched their Africa-only Linux, based heavily on network use, a few months ago.

It got me to thinking about the 1980s, the dawn of the Windows era.

Each new release of software pushed hardware beyond its limits. To get the latest new features, to review new software, I had to buy a new top-of-the-line PC every few years. Software sold hardware.

This helped make more than Bill Gates rich. It delivered fortunes to the entire semiconductor ecosystem — from box makers like Michael Dell to chip makers like Andy Grove of Intel to chip equipment makers like Jim Morgan of Applied Materials — everyone sold everything they could make at a fat profit.

All of today’s current trends — you can add clouds and the iPhone to this — are pushing demand for networking much as chip demand was pushed then.

What will meet that demand is just what met it then — Moore’s Law. Not Moore’s Law as Moore wrote it, but as it has been applied in networking technologies like optical fiber and radios.

Thanks to Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, a single optical fiber today can carry many times the data it carried a decade ago. Thanks to Digital Signal Processors we can do the same thing with wireless data.

What is holding back network capacity is politics. We still think of it in terms of telephony, a regulated industry managed for scarcity. It’s not that way, and hasn’t been that way for a long time.

Throw out the old rule book and write a new one, based not on scarcity but abundance. Let the competition to serve more-and-more bits drive entrepreneurs to new fortunes around the world. Open more spectrum to unlicensed use, like WiFi is regulated, demand wholesaling of the last mile, and the bits you unleash will make us all rich again.

That’s what today’s software is telling us. That’s the message of ChromeOS. Unleash Moore’s Law in networks, unshackle competition to provide faster-and-faster data services, and watch the economy of the world take off again.

With ChromeOS Google is making the same call on networks Microsoft made on chips two decades ago. It’s a call that demands a response, not just from the market but from governments.

Deregulate. Free the bits. Here and around the world.

Or, as Ronald Reagan might say, Mr. Genachowski, tear down this wall.

November 13th, 2009

The stupid network will get a hearing

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:07 am

Categories: Freedom2Connect, General, Government, Infrastructure, Internet, LANs and WANs, telecom

Tags: Network, Networking, Dana Blankenhorn

Advocates of transforming network regulation from Bell services to dumb bits will get a hearing from the FCC, as David Isenberg, author of the classic Rise of the Stupid Network, has joined the agency as an expert advisor.

(Picture taken in 2004 from Isenberg’s Isen.com Web site.)

Isenberg will be part of the team that will deliver the National Broadband Plan to Congress in February. He wrote on his blog that, as a result of his agency assignment his annual conference on broadband reform, Freedom2Connect, will be postponed.

A bit of disclosure. I covered the 2006 Freedom2Connect conference in Washington for ZDNet.

In the Stupid Network essay, which he wrote while at AT&T in 1997, Isenberg argued that the most efficient network is controlled at the edge, with a design based on the idea of plenty rather than scarcity, and transport based on the needs of the data.

The idea, he wrote, was that the network did not need intelligence at the center, that it should just “deliver the bits, stupid.” Hence the stupid network.

The problem is that while the stupid network is fine engineering, great for users and consumer equipment suppliers, it doesn’t leave much for the telephone company to do but move bits. And Isenberg wrote at a time when the bit-moving market was highly competitive, with prices falling every few months.

Thus the phone companies have argued against the stupid network. They have sought to install gear within the parts of the Internet they control to guarantee Quality of Service, to distinguish between bits based on protocol or what the customer is paying to move them, and to stop bad bits before they arrive at a user’s desk.

“Those are nice bits there, a shame if something happened to them.” And the phone company is Santa Claus, deciding which bits are naughty and which are nice.

The problem with this is it slows the network, and creates a barrier to entry for innovation, which must win permission from the network operator in order to reach the market. It is also redundant if customer equipment can handle tasks previously done by the intelligent network.

The Internet, as it exists today, is essentially a stupid network.

Cellular networks, you will note, are completely different from stupid networks. Such networks are all centrally controlled, with the carrier defining different bits as separate services, controlling who can sell what, and taking a cut on every transaction.

Isenberg left AT&T in 1998 as “Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff” but has been better known as mud, Voldemort and Who’s He at Bell offices ever since. (This is especially true for those who work as Bell lobbyists.)

Isenberg will just be one member of the agency’s National Broadband Task Force, one voice out of many. The FCC is also taking public comment online and holding hearings.

But at least his voice will be heard.

November 13th, 2009

Groklaw suggests Microsoft sue, do over authentication

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:05 am

Categories: General, Government, Legal, Linux, Microsoft, Patents

Tags: Patent, Prior Art, Lawyer, Microsoft Corp., Software Patent, Authentication, Groklaw, Dana Blankenhorn

Microsoft has won a patent that seems to cover an old Unix authentication scheme known as Sudo.

(Your honor, I would like to offer this t-shirt of XKCD’s classic comic as evidence prior art. Mark it as Exhibit A for the defense.)

Groklaw is using the case to argue against software patents, and in favor of the government in the Supreme Court case Bilsky vs. Kappos, in which oral arguments were heard last week.

Advocates of free software have used the case to urge the courts to eliminate software patents, although the appellate court In Re Bilski only limited them. Groklaw may hope the utter bogusity of the sudo patent will prod the Supremes to sing the song their way.

One might also argue, however, that the case argues for better funding at the patent office, and patent examiners with an understanding of prior art.

The Unix version of Sudo (pronounced sue-doo) is freeware. (Red Hat attorneys are probably thinking just that of Microsoft’s lawyers right about now. Oh sue, do.)

The patent describes how Microsoft does Sudo through a program called Runas, but then adds this:

Although the invention has been described in language specific to structural features and/or methodological steps, it is to be understood that the invention defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific features or steps described. Rather, the specific features and steps are disclosed as preferred forms of implementing the claimed invention.

This is lawyer speak for Clint Eastwood telling the bad guy, “feeling lucky, punk?” To which Linux lawyers might respond, “Go ahead. Make my day.”

My apologies for the puns. The whole issue makes me feel dirty, Harry.

October 28th, 2009

What the DoD now says about open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:33 am

Categories: Development, Distributions, Enterprise Policy, General, Government

Tags: U.S. Department Of Defense, Wennergren Memo, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Open source can be compared directly with commercial software and it offers unique advantages for rapid prototyping and sharing across the military.

Those are the key takeaways in a new memorandum now circulating the Pentagon from deputy CIO David Wennergren (right).

While it’s not a complete endorsement of open source, it does give people a green light to go get some.

The Wennergren Memo says that open source should be included in any market research on department needs, and also debunks some common myths that have been spread by commercial vendors:

1. Open source places no restrictions on who can use it.
2. Instructions against use of public domain code should not be interpreted to apply to open source, as government employees can fix bugs.
3. It is not true that any improvements to open source must be distributed to “the community” (including potential enemies). They can be legally shared throughout the DoD under any open source license and kept there.
4. Release of open source code can be controlled, and should be done when in the government’s interest, when the government receives “unlimited rights” on upgrades, and where there is no law, like an export control, that might stand in the way.

The memo says additional information will be posted at the Defense Department Web site and encourages use of the official military software forge at http://software.forge.mil.

Cut through the bureaucratese and you do have a remarkable turnaround in attitudes. Under the previous Administration contracting was the only way to go. Now officers are being allowed to try do it yourself solutions.

That’s a very big deal.

October 26th, 2009

Open source scores small victory at White House

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 8:31 am

Categories: Development, FOSS, GPL, General, Government

Tags: White House, Government, Open Source, Paula Rooney

Open source scored a victory at the White House this week with the government’s choice to switch to Drupal for whitehouse.gov.

The U.S. government’s technology team announced that it had selected the open source content management system to make http://www.whitehouse.gov more transparent to consumers and developers.

This will allow programmers to view, inspect and fix the web site’s code, government officials said. The news was reported over the weekend by the Associated Press.

Open Source for America has been pushing Obama’s government to embrace more open choice software as a way to reduce costs and drive open standards for more transparency.  Last week, ConsortiumInfo’s Andy Updegrove wrote a blog urging Obama to choose more FOSS.

October 25th, 2009

Drupal challenged as White House goes blog

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:59 am

Categories: Database Management, Development, General, Government, Internet, content, mass market, politics

Tags: Drupal, White House, Blog, Whitehouse.gov, Blogging, Government, Internet, Dana Blankenhorn

Whitehouse.gov has been relaunched as a Drupal site.

The switch was designed to be transparent, but even a casual observer will note the site now features five separate blogs, and that officials’ names are now listed on announcements that read more like stories, often with personal details.

So it’s one small step for Washington, one giant leap for open source. Sites like Whitehouse.gov are the ultimate honeypots for hackers and script kiddies around the world. This is true regardless of the party in power.

What that means is that government programmers, the Drupal team, and the folks at its commercial arm, Acquia, are going to be very busy with real and imagined bug reports. It’s going to test their systems as well as the software.

Officials indicated that if the Whitehouse site works well Drupal could be in line for other government work.

October 23rd, 2009

Bells give net neutrality the McCain two-step

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:52 am

Categories: General, Government, Internet, Legal, politics, telecom

Tags: Net Neutrality, Dana Blankenhorn

For over a century the Bells have been masters of the bureaucratic game.

Their failure in the Bell break-up, which delivered huge profits to investors, only taught them to fight harder. So after putting themselves together like the broom in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” of course they’re going to fight net neutrality like their lives depend on it.

Despite a unanimous FCC vote to start writing net neutrality rules, then, don’t expect an easy victory.

Democrats passed an actual law to rein-in the Bells in 1996, but the Bells finally won that battle, and $200 billion spent to upgrade America’s broadband went instead into Bell pockets. A unanimous FCC looks small by comparison.

Here’s how the two-step works. If the regulators say no you go to Congress. If Congress says no you go to the courts. If the courts say no you go to the states. If the states say no you go to the regulators.(Gee, golly, Officer Krupke.)

Meanwhile you hire every lobbyist you can, create every Astroturf organization you can so it appears your self-interest is the public interest, and contribute heavily to any politician, on any level, who will toe the company line.

Take John McCain (above). He says it’s all “mavericky” to stop net neutrality in Congress. Nothing mavericky going on at all.

McCain was one of five Senators who voted against the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee in 2003-04, when the Bells were consolidating into two companies owning local, long distance, core Internet, and wireless duopolies nationwide. What he called “deregulation” was, and is, monopoly.

As with maverick, deregulation is a brand. It’s just the name of the ranch. The cow’s still going to the slaughterhouse, not Wyoming.

This is actually a bipartisan rant. There are plenty of Democrats, at all levels, bought and paid for by the Bells. Do not listen to what politicians say. Watch what they do and follow the money.

Any form of net neutrality, wireless or wireline, remains an uphill battle.

October 15th, 2009

Why prefer open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:44 am

Categories: Development, GPL, General, Government, business models, management

Tags: Asset, Open Source Code Base, Management Attitude, Mandates, Asset Management, Open Source, Government, Operational Planning, Business Operations, Dana Blankenhorn

A preference for open source is based on a simple, easy to understand premise.

An open source code base is your asset. A proprietary code base is someone else’s asset.

Just so long as you understand what “your” and “someone else’s” mean.

(You will recall this picture from Arian Young. I used it in February discussing mandates.)

Now it’s true that an open source asset is shared. But that’s why GPL code may be the best open source asset to have, if you’re not a software company.

Everyone who has GPL code has an obligation to share their improvements. Other people are busy, right now, increasing the value of your GPL assets.

This calculation is true for businesses as well as governments. You don’t need a mandate, assuming you can sell the idea behind a preference to your staff. (Thanks to Matt Asay for his excellent essay on this subject.)

This is something managers in all kinds of enterprises — public, private, and philanthropic — often fail to do. There is a tendency everywhere to mandate. Business managers pass orders down the line without giving much thought to its impact on the people below them. It’s easier than selling.

Vendors take advantage of this to sell a preference for closed source to their customers. Employees are defending their jobs, and futures, by defending the vendor’s interests. Change vendors, even to open source, and your skills with Microsoft or Oracle code can seem worthless, your job may be at risk.

So there is a lot business can learn from the problems governments have in trying to mandate open source. If a Fortunate 500 company dumps Windows for Linux it can face the same resistance.

This can be a hard lesson for top management to learn. You advertise for technical help. You state the specific programs you want people to know. These skills are their assets, and if you make vendor changes — you will always make vendor changes — employees see their assets destroyed.

My dear wife of some decades talks about this all the time, in relation to her work. Her employers get new software and now only want experts in that stuff. The old people are vulnerable.

But people can learn, and people will learn if you give them the chance. The same minds that learned assembler can learn Java. The same minds that learned Oracle can learn mySQL.

Management attitudes are what need to change. Stop thinking of programmers as mere skill sets. They’re trained minds and willing hearts. Most are anxious to take on new skills. Give them a chance. Sell them, don’t just issue them orders.

That’s why preferences are better than mandates. Preferences begin a sales process, they give people a chance to learn new skills. Mandates are always a threat, or at least they are perceived as threatening.

Business and government aren’t really so different. Managing is managing, coding is coding. Treat people as they deserve to be treated and most will come good. Treat them as cogs in your machine and the friction will grind that machine down.

October 9th, 2009

The best protection for software assets

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 11:39 am

Categories: Government, Legal, Microsoft, Patents, management, marketing

Tags: Asset, Software, Patent, Microsoft Corp., Roberto Galoppini, Tools & Techniques, Open Source, Management, Dana Blankenhorn

Roberto Galoppini has an interesting piece running today on Codeplex, and how to improve it.

I can’t say much more than “attaboy” about it, but he ends with an interesting comment:

Software patents are not legal here in Europe, and Europe uses a lot of open source software.

As a commenter here wrote earlier today, much of the controversy surrounding open source involves patents, which he calls the “Fight Club” of software. (That’s what Brad Pitt is doing here.)

Without the argument over patents, what would Microsoft be doing that was controversial regarding open source? Some of its licenses are one-sided, but so are its contributions to the code protected by those licenses. The MS-PL license is also OSI-approved.

One point I have made many times — as have people much wiser than I am — is that patent protection isn’t that great a deal. You have to reveal your invention. The rights don’t last that long.

Contrast this with copyright and trademark. This story, and the logo above it, will have legal protection long after Microsoft’s so-called Linux “patents” are forgotten.

When people “pay” for software, what are they really buying? Support. They want to know needed updates will come in, that someone is back there stamping out bugs, protecting us from bad guys, and enhancing the code.

We convey this information through a trademark, not patents.

The difference between open source and proprietary software is visibility, nothing more. Why am I signing a contract for software I can see? To acknowledge your copyright on it, not your patent rights.

All the controversy between Microsoft and open source would be over if the Supreme Court followed Red Hat’s recent brief in the Bilski case, and stripped out rights previous courts had given software companies, rights that have proven to be little but trouble, protecting only monopoly and not innovation.

Perhaps Microsoft might add an “amen” to that brief. Can I hear an amen?

October 1st, 2009

America backs away from the Internet with a whimper

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:27 am

Categories: General, Government, Internet, Legal, politics

Tags: Network, ICANN, British Broadcasting Corp., Internet, Government, Vertical Industries, Dana Blankenhorn

It was fun to read government guy Richard Koman’s take on the U.S. government release of ICANN, the Internet governing authority.

That’s because it was completely different from that of the BBC.

Koman wrote that control of the network was being privatized. That sounds like spin meant for Americans.

The BBC wrote it was being de-Americanized.

The New York Times has it as a little of both. “Washington said Wednesday that it would give other governments and the private sector a greater oversight role.”

Which is more important? I’m going with the BBC on this one.

During the Bush years the U.S. government would often assert claims of Internet sovereignty, as when it ran all the network’s traffic through a closet and said it was going after spies. ICANN made no protest then. It might now.

Europeans hailed the move, which will let representatives of many governments — not just the U.S. — oversee ICANN’s work on security, accountability and competition.

When I covered ICANN in the mid-1990s the big issue was democracy, and whether individuals around the world might have a way to participate in network governance. This move means the model is being replaced by a balancing of interests among governments and private business.

It’s not democracy, and it’s not pure capitalism. It’s more like how the European Community itself runs.

I wonder how U.S. Republicans will react to that once they figure it out? Obama let the Internet get Eurocratized. Obama lost the Internet. You betcha. I can see Russia from my house.

September 22nd, 2009

Eurocrats killing open source softly, says Ellison

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:11 am

Categories: General, Government, Legal, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, java, politics

Tags: Oracle Corp., Larry Ellison, EC, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

American billionaires, and even America’s government, seem powerless against the big bad bullies of the EC.

So Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is trying another tack. Approve my deal or open source gets it.

Ellison carefully noted that Sun, not Oracle, is losing $100 million each month the deal is not done, and that its cash bleed is accelerating. No, he won’t unload mySQL, he added, and mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be IT’ers.

It’s a subtle game. The EC is not good at subtle. It can take the Eurocrats a long time to decide what to do, and technology does not work that way.

Ellison’s words were a reminder.

So is the EC’s refusal to rubber-stamp the Oracle-Sun deal, pending more investigation, really going to hurt open source? Do the Eurocrats understand what open source is, and what it takes to make it go? Or, by pointing out the possible damage it’s doing to open source, has Oracle found the key to making the EC move?

September 21st, 2009

Will the open Internet become a partisan divide

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:58 am

Categories: Applications, General, Government, Infrastructure, Internet, LANs and WANs, Legal, Network Administration, Network Standards/Protocols, mass market, politics, telecom

Tags: Net Neutrality, Internet, Dana Blankenhorn

The idea of an open and neutral Internet is about to become a political flash point.

The launch of a new site dedicated to the issue, OpenInternet.gov (above) was accompanied by FCC chair Julius Genachowski publishing his speech text at The Washington Post and a brief commentary based on it at The Huffington Post, a liberal site.

The regulatory regime he proposed is along the lines of a net neutrality bill offered by Democrats that got a hearing in the House last week. The agency and the House agree on their aims, the main differences being how and where the details will be fleshed out.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal, which hosted policy pronouncements from top regulators throughout the Bush Administration, ran a piece about Genachowski’s moves that was highly skeptical of both their rationale and their legality.

It said Republicans will oppose Genachowski on “free enterprise” grounds, and pointed to a suit by Comcast against previous attempts to impose a set of net neutrality rules.

At the same time the two Republican members of the FCC said they opposed any net neutrality for wireless, and support exclusive deals between equipment makers and networks like the AT&T-iPhone deal.

Add a little industry Astroturf and a plan depressingly like that in health care starts to become visible. Turn some insiders with industry money, work from the outside on ideological grounds, and the 2008 election need never have happened. Plus you can blame the Democrats if they fail to crush you — call them partisan and ideological.

My view remains that net neutrality would not be necessary in an environment where there is ample competition. If someone wants an ISP or cell operator that will block everything to the left of Fox News they should have it, so long as the market offers ample alternatives.

Unfortunately antitrust does not appear to be the ground the Obama Administration seems ready to stand on. Which could make the open Internet a partisan divide for years to come.

September 14th, 2009

Would you march for Internet privacy?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:31 am

Categories: General, Government, Internet, Legal, Security, identity, mass market, politics, values

Tags: Law, Internet, Government, Vertical Industries, Dana Blankenhorn

It’s marching season again, time for the political opposition to take it to the streets, and show its strength in numbers. (Picture from CBS News.)

But this article is no tea party. It’s about another march that happened over the weekend, in Germany. Over 10,000 people marched in Berlin marched for data protection.

They were protesting a new law meant to guarantee police the right to track back Internet traffic, with tamper-proof IDs and special police.

Germany has long been a world champion at seeking to monitor its citizens online, its avowed goal to make  online law conform to what is allowed offline.

So if the German law says the government has a monopoly on gambling, so should it be online. If German law says thou shalt not speak of Nazis, so should it be online. If sharing files is truly a copyright violation, the law must halt it, regardless.

The American reaction to such government actions is generally to engineer around them, or to laugh them off. My spam folder says they have apoint. Yet even here there are magic words that cause most voters to surrender any zone of privacy once offered by someone in authority. Watch.

Child pornography. (Open your laptop.) Terrorism. (Take off your shoes.)

The Internet, being based on computing, is a binary sort of place. To be effective, laws must become absolute. Which means, at some point, we’re trusting the government with the medium’s future.

In Europe, it should be noted, data privacy marches are the property of leftists, Greens, even pirate parties. In American, right now, it’s the right that’s out of power, fearful of an intrusive government.

Anyone expecting a tea party for the Internet?

September 9th, 2009

OpenID biggest government boost yet for open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 1:31 pm

Categories: Distributions, General, Government, Infrastructure, Internet, identity

Tags: License, OpenID, Government, Vertical Industries, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

In the biggest government boost to open source yet, the U.S. government has endorsed OpenID.

OpenID is a confederated identity system meant to let you enter many sites without worry about passwords. The code libraries needed to implement the system is available under a number of technologies, and a number of different licenses.

The most common license being used now is Apachev2, but there are also implementations under the MIT, BSD, and even the MS-PL licenses. The OpenID site lists the license for SqueakSource as unknown.

The program announced by U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra is a pilot program, which will let citizens with OpenID authentication to use government Web sites.

Chris Messina (pictured from his Web site) wrote the blog post announcing the government move, which includes examples of where it can be useful, as when you want to book a camp ground or save a search at the NIH concerning a loved one’s cancer diagnosis.

“Do you really want to create yet another account (that you’ll probably never use again) just to reserve a campsite? Probably not,” he writes.

Of course, all this means opponents of the current Administration are bound to see OpenID as some sort of “mark of the beast.” But if Bush did it Democrats would feel that way, so you can’t win.

Personally I’d love to have a stable digital identity that did not require me to memorize hundreds of different passwords, and whose implementations were covered by open source licenses. Would you?

September 8th, 2009

Europe can stick a fork where its mouth is

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:01 am

Categories: Database Management, GPL, General, Government, Legal, Oracle, business models

Tags: Foundation, Roberto, Open Source, Mergers & Acquisitions, Databases, Investment, Finance, Enterprise Software, Software, Data Management

My Italian friend Roberto Galoppini has a post up describing the complaints of European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes regarding the Oracle-Sun merger.

He offers this quote from her:

Databases are a key element of company IT systems. In the current economic context, all companies are looking for cost-effective IT solutions, and systems based on open-source software are increasingly emerging as viable alternatives to proprietary solutions. The Commission has to ensure that such alternatives would continue to be available.

Roberto suggests a public tender. My Eurocratic is as bad as my Italian (so I may be saying much the same thing) but if Europe really feels a need to protect competition through mySQL, why not just stick a fork in it? (England’s iCoste sells this lovely fork from Dobbies for 18 pounds, or roughly 21 Euros. Plus VAT.)

Either establish a foundation, or designate an existing one, based on something like Apache or Eclipse. Take a copy of the mySQL code — which lives under the GPL — and place it under the foundation.

You can probably make acceptance of foundation a condition for approving the merger. Oracle could sign easily because they are not really giving anything away.

The foundation might start work by creating documentation for the program in every European language. You can establish forges in every language as well, and use input from those groups to direct code enhancements.

You collect donations and other forms of support just like a U.S. foundation. You choose other important code bases to complete your stack.

The difference between proprietary and open source competition is that you have to use the force of the law to guarantee control in a proprietary market.

In an open source investment you just invest.

September 7th, 2009

Why open source remains an ideological divide

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:17 am

Categories: Development, FOSS, General, Government, business models, management, politics, values

Tags: Matt Asay, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Matt Asay has a piece today that is the tech equivalent of a Barack Obama speech.

He tries, once again, to remove ideology from the discussion of open source vs. proprietary software. He urges consensus, the best of both worlds, and asks can’t we all just get along?

As in politics the answer often turns out to be no, because there is a basic ideological divide here.

Proprietary companies succeed by imposing a top-down structure on software development and using sales revenue to keep everyone in line. I mean everyone — marketing, legal, support, development, and customers, too.

With proprietary software you’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus. Leave the firm and you lose access to your code. Leave it as a customer and you lose all your past work, along with much of your knowledge.

You become the business equivalent of David Brock or John Dean. (This is not a political point. Think Dennis Miller or the late Ron Silver, who went the other way.) In religious terms you are apostate, exiled. There seems to be no middle ground.

Open source offers a bottom-up structure of development but money is something of an afterthought. By that I mean you focus first on the job at hand, then build a business model around it, rather than the other way around.

You gain freedom but lose money. The marketing money, the distribution money, all that lovely gelt that bought the lawyers and the trade show booths and the incentive prizes to exotic destinations, is out of your life.

Unless you consider Portland exotic.

This divide between money-is-all and money-is-not-all is baked into the system. You don’t want to turn into Richard Stallman when you take the open source road, you may even reject him personally, but you soon find a daily shave is not necessary, and that broken-in sneakers are really quite comfortable.

Open source, as distinguished from FOSS, is an attempt to marry the best of both worlds, to build a business around a free model.

But no matter how capitalistic you may sound your hippie business heritage remains, and the best way to build a community around your software may still mean the GPL. Development will still require transparency.

Here’s where we turn back to politics.

When conservatives want to attack President Obama the first epithet they usually sling is “socialist.” What they mean is a demand economy, as in Cuba or the old Soviet Union. They don’t usually mean Sweden, or the Netherlands, or England or Canada, where life seems quite comfortable.

If you think of Stallman as Cuba and a company like Red Hat as Sweden, you get the ideological dilemma both Asay and our President face today.

I like shopping at Ikea. The solution for open source? Accept the limits and be proud of what you are. As to the President? Tune in Wednesday, but don’t expect it to be followed by a Republican chorus of Kumbaya.

Point is, Matt, in the end you have to choose a side. I say stand proudly with your friends or you get run over. Be open source, recognize the difference between that and the proprietary model, and go forward. If they want to give you the black hat for that, wear it proudly.

Stand for something.

August 27th, 2009

NHIN code-a-thon may change government attitude toward open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:09 am

Categories: Development, Enterprise Policy, General, Government, Infrastructure, politics

Tags: Behlendorf, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Tomorrow, the Department of Health and Human Services will host its first “code-a-thon” dedicated to the National Health Information Network and its Connect software.

About 80 programmers, led by Apache developer (and Collabnet employee) Brian Behlendorf, will spend about four hours trying to stamp out bugs in the open source software gateway, which is based on National Health Information Network (NHIN) conventions.

Behlendorf’s presence is not ceremonial, as CollabNet runs the military’s forge.mil open source forge site.

The code-a-thon, and the resulting code, could be a great demonstration of the power of open source in dealing with big problems like health care. The participation of Behlendorf offers hope the open source movement will have a great success.

While open source code has won approval from the Obama Administration, the processes by which such code is developed have not fared as well.

While the Veterans Administration is still working with its open source VistA platform, for instance, it has placed a moratorium on accepting code from local VA facilities. Instead of developing VistA through a network of collaborators, open source IT advocate Fred Trotter writes, “it will be centrally developed by a single, controlling entity.”

The decision may improve security and manageability of the code base, but it’s also going to slow down development, and give one contract holder control of the software.

Whether Behlendorf and his code-a-thon can give U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra a little open source religion may be an open question. As Virginia CTO Chopra outsourced development work to India under a master contract signed with Northrup-Grumman which has since become highly controversial.

Are open source projects that are centrally controlled by single vendors really open source projects, or are they proprietary projects using open source as a feature? That’s a question the Obama Administration needs to answer if it’s to get full value from open source.

August 19th, 2009

Writers who call MPAA or RIAA awful need to look in the mirror

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:24 am

Categories: General, Google, Government, Internet, Legal, content, mass market, publishing

Tags: Google Inc., MPAA, Advertisement, RIAA, Christopher Buckley, Internet, E-books, Personal Technology, Dana Blankenhorn

Powerful interest groups representing musicians, movie moguls, and even TV have been fighting the copyright wars for years and losing.

(Who is reading the paper? Find out at the bottom of this post. Picture from Expedient Means.)

They win in court, and governments are aligned with them. Individuals who stand against them on grounds of principle are slapped down hard.

But that hasn’t stopped the Internet or Moore’s Law. These powerful interests have had to realign their business models to deal with the new reality.

There is a micro-payment model called advertising and if your stuff is not online and available it does not exist.

This has not stopped some writers, some agents, and some academics from tilting at Google’s windmill.

After years of negotiating with the Authors Guild and publishers, Google last year offered the authors of “orphan works,” copyrighted but no longer published or sold, free money.

For $125 million it won the right to digitize books, and while it will offer excerpts free, the whole books must be paid for, with 63% of the money (including ad money on the free looks) going to publishers and authors.

Google takes the risks, Google pays the costs, Google does all the marketing and distribution, while you get more than half the money for sitting on your rear end. Pretty sweet, huh?

Too rich, say some University of California professors. Not rich enough, say some authors, and you’re giving Google a monopoly, complain librarians. You should have negotiated with us instead, claims the William Morris Agency.

Trouble with all this is you can opt out. If you don’t like the deal for the old crap you can’t give away along I-75, say so and it will be taken down. Publishers of orphaned works, which aren’t making money, can’t opt-out en masse, because they relinquished a lot of publishing rights when they stopping publishing.

Christopher Buckley says he opted out because he’s ornery. He’s also still selling books.

This isn’t about your stuff anyway, Chris, but keeping alive such classics as pup’s God and Man at Yale.
How are tomorrow’s young conservatives going to discover what is eventually out of print? And when Google sells a copy or sells an ad next to the good parts, you get a cut. Free money.

Far from settled? Of course. A judge has to approve it. But if you expect Google to negotiate with you individually for your out of print crap you’re just being silly.

Any other e-book publisher — Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, Apple, etc. — can easily negotiate with Google to pay a share of its costs and get the same deal. If Google balks sue. This deal is non-exclusive.

I should add that my own out-of-print magnum opus The Blankenhorn Effect is presently available at Google Books, and when my update is done (later this month) I very much hope to do an Internet publishing deal for it and save a tree or two.

The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan said, and the message of the Internet is pretty clear. Make it available and maybe, if you’re lucky, someone will learn something from it. Don’t make it available, and it will cease to exist. (McLuhan still exists. That’s him behind the paper.)

August 13th, 2009

When will Microsoft admit the truth about software patents?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:40 am

Categories: General, Government, Legal, Microsoft, Patents, Strategy

Tags: Software, Patent, Microsoft Corp., Software Patent, Tools & Techniques, Management, Dana Blankenhorn

The truth being they are more trouble than they are worth.

Ever since the State Street case set off a gold rush to patent software, and software concepts, Microsoft has been tieingtying itself in knots.

(Here is a fun game. Invite your favorite Microsoft employee to lunch and then show up in this snazzy t-shirt from Zazzle.com. Inspiration for Insanity indeed.)

In Burning The Ships Microsoft lawyer Marshall Phelps, who previously developed IBM’s successful IP regime, described many of the machinations.

He writes Microsoft felt forced to abandon the Non-Assertion of Patents (NAP) clauses in its standard contracts, then patented every strand of code it could, then tried to use those patents to push itself into new areas like Linux.

Not only has its reputation been shattered by all this — Microsoft is routinely satirized as a force of implacable evil — but 10 years later it remains subject to patent blackmail.

As the i4i case shows Microsoft remains Gulliver in Lilliput when it comes to the patent bar of the Eastern District of Texas. The i4i code was originally an add-on to Word and when Microsoft added native support for this XML functionality the plaintiff pounced.  Its litigation team rolled Microsoft’s lawyers the way Mexico’s soccer team rolled over the USA yesterday.

Microsoft does not need major changes to patent law in order to make this nightmare end. Despite the adjustments made by in re Bilski, the problem remains what it has been for a decade.

Software patents are more trouble than they are worth.

In every other area of invention, companies can easily invent themselves around patent claims. You build a better mousetrap. No one can protect the idea of hating meeses to pieces.

Copyright is the best protection for software. It lasts longer, you don’t have to make a big filing on it, you don’t have to open the kimono to win in court.

Just file a case to overturn State Street, or limit your lobbying to a call for an end to software patents. Eben Moglen will give you a victory hug. The medical boys won’t object. You’ll get some of your reputation back, and you can go back to doing business instead of running a law firm.