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Google makes Chrome OS open source
Google made the early code available to the open source community and claims external developers will have the same access to the code as internal Google developers.... Continued »
Category: GPL
November 20th, 2009
Oracle opponent cheers delay in mySQL decision
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
Terracotta buys Quartz
Open source Java clustering software developer Terracotta announced its intent to buy an open source job scheduler known as Quartz.
The integration of Quartz into Terracotta’s platform will ease high availability job scheduling and scaling applications to multiple nodes, the company said. Quartz is currently integrated into SpringSource and Red Hat products and counts Adobe, Cisco, Level 3 and Vodaphone as big customers. It eliminates the need for a central database to handle coordination, Terracotta reports.
Terracotta, of San Francisco, intends to support the Quartz open source project and will maintain the code under the Apache 2.0 license.
The job scheduling software will enhance Terracotta’s use in virtualized and cloud infrastructures, the company says.
“Quartz is ideal for creating simple or complex schedules for triggering application tasks such as driving process workflow and generating application data reports and recurring system maintenance checkups,” according to a release issued by Terracotta on Thursday.
“Now, with the acquisition, Terracotta will quickly integrate Quartz within the Terracotta platform to enable users to easily scale applications in large virtualized environments and private clouds and to distribute the massive workloads characteristic of these environments,” Terracotta announced.
November 18th, 2009
Where Microsoft is gaining in open source
The latest Black Duck Software figures on open source license popularity make it clear.
(The little black duck shown is copyrighted, trademarked, and has always been protected by Warner Bros., part of the Time-Warner media empire. He’s 72 but carries his age well. And Wikipedia knows his middle name.)
Microsoft licenses are now used on 1 in every 40 open source projects. That’s more than Mozilla. More than Eclipse. More than even the Lesser GPL.
Of course in the greater scheme of things 1 in 40 isn’t all that many. Nearly half of all open source projects are still licensed under the GPL v.2. Microsoft’s open source license market share is still less than half that of GPL v.3. (That’s why the cartoon duck is here rather than Black Duck’s little quacker. Think of GPL v.2 as being Bugs Bunny.)
But we’re talking about growing from a standing start. I’m impressed.
Much credit needs to go here to CodePlex, the Microsoft-sponsored open source site whose Foundation is headed by former Microsoft executive Sam Ramji.
NOTE: Ramji runs the Codeplex Foundation at codeplex.org, which is separate from Microsoft. The main Codeplex site is at codeplex.com.
In our recent interview, Ramji held out the possibility that the Microsoft licenses, and process, could tease a lot more code out of corporate repositories outside the software industry.
So there is room for growth there.
The Black Duck report also indicates there is room for growth in GPL v.3. There are now over 10,000 projects on GPL v.3, with many projects on Sourceforge continuing to switch over.
It’s this competition, between the Microsoft licenses and GPL v.3, that I will enjoy tracking most over the next year. What will you be looking at?
November 12th, 2009
Broadcom goes open source and hell freezes over
When the rock group Eagles broke up in 1980 they said they would get back together “when hell froze over.” They did get back together, in 1994. The album was called Hell Freezes Over.
Point is you can promise you will never do something — never, ever, ever — but business is business.
It’s with this in mind we find Broadcom making its BroadVoice voice codecs open source and royalty free under GPL V. 2.
GigaOM is wondering whether Broadcom isn’t just pushing for higher priced, higher quality voice from service providers using the codecs. I have another theory.
Broadcom saw its greatest success in pioneering relationships with Taiwanese OEMs. When other chip companies were offering these firms software and ecosystems, Broadcom offered them solutions, complete designs from brand names they could bang out for a quick profit.
What I saw at CompuTex this year was an enormous interest from these OEMs, whose ties to Chinese manufacturing are incredibly strong, to go “up the stack” of value, to own their own designs and create their own brand names.
They see this as an impossible dream on the desktop, but very possible in the handset business, a Broadcom niche. Systems like Android, LiMo and Symbian are open source, so the components going into them should also be open source. It’s the most effective way to compete with Apple.
In taking this route, the OEMs are explicitly rejecting Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, and this is a very big deal. This has nothing to do with the sales world they desire. They gave Microsoft all of the Netbook market and stuck Linux in a corner.
This Broadcom announcement is the best proof yet that the future of the handheld market is Linux.
October 29th, 2009
Ubuntu Karmic Koala launches
Ubuntu 9:10, known as Karmic Koala, has officially been launched at Ubuntu.
Correction The original story incorrectly identified reviews for the release candidate of Ubuntu 9.10 as being for the final version of Ubuntu 9.10.
It comes in desktop and server editions, which have been getting wildly different reviews.
Reviews on the release candidate of the desktop version are negative, due to the fact you can’t run multiple drives with the current code base. This means a netbook user may be happy but a desktop user (my desktop has three hard drives) will not be satisfied at all.
The server version is getting stronger reviews thanks to its support for clouds. By using Eucalyptus the company has a decent cloud implementation that should make it more competitive with Red Hat, at least in Europe. (Canonical offices are close to the European mainland.)
Drop your own experiences with the new Ubuntu into the talkback thread below. We’ll be waiting.
October 26th, 2009
Open source scores small victory at White House
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 22nd, 2009
Did Stallman fisk himself?
Richard Stallman makes a good bogeyman for the proprietary software people because he’s not politically correct. He shoots from the lip, as they say, considering contradiction a hobgoblin for little minds.
But did he really fisk himself in arguing against the Oracle-Sun deal?
Ed Burnette certainly thinks so.
I am not so certain. Rather than bandy words, let’s talk about meaning.
The original deal between Sun and mySQL anticipated that mySQL would continue to progress as a direct GPL competitor to Oracle. (Has it really been over 20 years since Michael Douglas’ star turn as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street? Apparently so.)
That’s important because the enterprise-class database systems available under open source, like PostgreSQL, are only available under licenses other than the GPL. Licenses Stallman does not endorse.
What’s clear from reading articles by the deal’s advocates, including our own Matt Asay, is that this is no longer in the cards under Oracle. “The reality is that mySQL and Oracle compete in two different database markets,” he writes.
Fair enough. But let’s assume for a moment you have an idea that could turn into the next Twitter, the next Facebook. It’s a small idea, but these things grow fast if they’re good. Everyone rushes to the rail. You can get flooded with traffic.
So how do you scale? One common way is to switch from your mySQL database to a “big boy” database — Oracle. This is hugely expensive.
So you can either be constrained from the start or face the prospect of getting Oracle licenses before launch. Not an exciting prospect. Daunting enough that it could keep people from trying.
It’s called a barrier to entry and it exists in every business. Except the Web. Online you can still start from nothing, with nothing, and make something enormous in a very short time.
Stallman’s fear is those days end with the Oracle-Sun deal. He feels mySQL got suckered into getting bought with big promises, then Gordon Gecko swooped in and cut them off at the knees.
Is he wrong?
October 21st, 2009
Revolution gets $9 million and Nie
REvolution Computing, which is commercializing the open source R language, got a $9 million venture capital infusion and a new CEO, Norman Nie.
Nie, a political science specializing in polling, previously founded SPSS in 1968, and managed to have an outstanding academic career while running the company for nearly 40 years. SPSS was acquired by IBM for $1.2 billion this fall. North Bridge and Intel Capital would doubtless settle for that kind of performance.
Nie replaces Richard Schultz, who becomes an adviser to the company. R is the statistical programming language and part of the GNU project.
Given its nature as an academic project under the GPL, Nie said all the right things on taking his new job.
“I am keenly aware of R’s roots in the academy, just like SPSS before it. We will continue our close relationship with the academic community, even as we meet the needs of commercial users, and we will expand our commitment to the R community in terms of products, services and resources.
Nie said his goal is to make R the “dominant analytics platform.” Accomplishing that will mean doing a delicate dance between the needs of the market and the needs of academics devoted to open source. He has the right experience to do that job.
October 15th, 2009
Why prefer open source
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 12th, 2009
Netgear slammed for doing the right thing
Over the weekend a controversy erupted over Netgear’s shipping some proprietary software with its GPL router, the Rangemax Wireless-N.
This is one of those stupid kerfluffles that give open source a bad name.
Harald Welte, one of the good guys, got things started with a blog post titled Netgear trying to fool their users with “Open Source Router,” (Picture from Wikimedia Commons.) The text doesn’t match the intensity of the headline.
Welte’s complaint is that Netgear did not “study the Open Source market that they’re trying to address.” The company ships proprietary software with the router, then lets users download open source replacements if they wish.
This doesn’t please open source advocates, but they’re not the whole market for this product. Addressing multiple markets with one router is called marketing.
Netgear’s Pat Choudhury explained the company’s position at its Myopenrouter web site.
What makes the router open source is that Netgear lets you flash open source onto it. In fact they give you tools for this, and software. They’re happy if you do, and happy if you then build applications on the open source software you flash.
But if you don’t care, if you just want a super-fast router you can use out of the box, then Netgear wants to have its own software there, software it supports, software it understands. Yes, that’s proprietary software. So what? If you don’t care where’s the harm?
Santa Claus, who does his online business under the name megacoder, immediately chimed in under Choudhury’s post with an attaboy, but I wonder how many times open source advocates need to cry “wolf” when there is no wolf before people stop listening when there is a wolf?
Harald Welte has more power than I do, power he has earned over many years with good works. It doesn’t matter much when I shoot from the lip. It matters when he does.
October 6th, 2009
Netgear offers an open source router that is an applications platform
Netgear launched a new open source router called the RangeMax Wireless-N, a Linux-based unit with both Gigabit Ethernet ports and ReadyShare USB storage access.
The company is supporting the downloading of firmware and community development around the router at a site called MyOpenRouter.com.
This is precisely what I wanted to see when I started writing my blog posts about “Always On” at Corante in 2003.
The idea is that with storage and processing at the router, applications can live in the air independent of the PC. Clients on such a network might include security systems, RFID chips so you could find your stuff, and medical applications living on your body.
I was allowed to speak about this vision at the 2004 Accelerating Change conference at Stanford, and it is gratifying to see it finally being supported.
Unfortunately, router vendors resisted this concept for a long time. Early Linux routers seemed to emerge by accident, after programmers found they were using open source code without releasing it, and they were not supported by marketing.
Now things are changing. It will be fun to see where it goes from here:
- Security systems that can let police watch your break-in in progress, even from their police cars.
- Home automation systems that know when to water the plants and turn the lights on-and-off while you’re gone.
- Music systems that find you and deliver your tunes to the nearest speakers.
- A way to find your keys, your wallet, and your hat if you’re senile or just have ADHD.
- Systems that monitor the aged so they can age at home, not a nursing home.
- Medical systems that monitor your heart and blood sugar while you sleep, so ER techs are there as you have your heart attack instead of your getting the victory hug from the fellow in the brite nitegown.
All this, and more, can be developed on a platform where routers act as servers, wireless does the work of wires, and clients can be as small as a single RFID chip.
Now get to work and make yourself some money.
October 5th, 2009
What Everyblock owes Knight after its open source success
The Knight Foundation, as part of its efforts to improve online journalism, gave a $1.1 million grant for the launch of Everyblock in 2006.
Everyblock used the money to build a GPL code base that aggregates local information for use by news sites. Here, for instance, is its recent report on my home zip code.
Last month, however, Everyblock was acquired by MSNBC. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but should Knight get its money back, even a little of it?
A better question might be, is there any money to get? In making the announcement the Everyblock blog indicated it was really looking for a way to sustain itself after the Knight money ran out, and MSNBC’s investment will go mainly into making the site more valuable.
And the code is still available, all of it, under the GPL.
Founder Adrian Holovaty is mainly involved these days with another open source project, Django, and his own post on the deal drew a string of attaboys from around the world. There are no reports of him tooling around his home town of Chicago in a fancy car, buying fancy threads, building a fancy home or buying Oprah Winfrey dinner.
It wasn’t that kind of acquisition.
Despite this some journalists who commented at the Nieman Lab blog posting about the deal seemed to have a feeling of seller’s remorse. One asked whether all the code was released. Another asked whether revisions to the code would remain open source.
All this upset Holovaty, who responded within the thread that the charges are not true. All the code was released, he said, and he has given Knight kudos in every interview.
At the Online News Association show in San Francisco, Knight journalism program officer Gary Kebbel said future grant language will change. Again, he was not specific.
Andrew Hazlett noted that when “The Civil War” became a huge hit producer Ken Burns repaid much of his grant money. But Everyblock is not “The Civil War”.
There is an assumption among journalists that when a company is acquired its founders become rich. This often happens. More often, founders just breathe a sigh of relief knowing they have survived the experience and their baby has found a new home.
Some statement from MSNBC about the financial facts would probably end the speculation, my guess being that they only paid enough to sustain the project. And MSNBC’s future generosity to the Knight Foundation might be worth a press release as well, whenever that occurs.
But this jealousy by journalists is unseemly and based on ignorance.
In the world of open source projects move from non-profit to for-profit sponsorship all the time. It is normally considered a good thing. It is not a sign the original sponsors are bad. It means they have a solid structure in place to keep development going.
It’s an illustration of just how far journalists live from the real world that they could get jealous over good news.
October 2nd, 2009
Open source is sold and FOSS is not
I have spent many pleasant hours with Matt Asay’s latest, “The wrong marketing for open source.”
I think I finally figured it out. Matt says that FOSS software can’t be sold while open source can be.
This is a feature, not a bug. It’s why the GNU smiles.
Much of my confusion involves the GPL and FOSS. The GPL was created as a FOSS license but it remains the most popular open source license out there.
I explained the reason in my 2006 piece The Open Source Incline. Giving outside contributors the same rights you enjoy is the best way to encourage their participation. For an open source company the GPL helps drive development and the construction of a community, which it needs to thrive.
So the GPL, while created for FOSS, is also used by open source. And there remains a key difference between FOSS software and open source, which Matt nails. Open source is sold and FOSS is not.
What marks a FOSS project is not its license but the motivation behind it. A FOSS project is not driven by dreams of financial gain. It’s driven by dreams of service, of shared effort helping all boats rise. The Mozilla Foundation is not about the Benjamins even though Firefox uses a Mozilla license rather than the GPL. Money keeps things moving but no one is getting rich.
Open source combines the shared effort of FOSS and marries it to the profit motive. Open source developers share code in order to sell support, or services, or products built using the code. The key word in the previous sentence is sell.
Open source is sold, FOSS is downloaded. Open source companies are looking for a profit, FOSS projects are looking to get by, to grow, to serve and to share.
Matt makes his living as an open source executive with Alfresco. Alfresco uses the GPL, but it’s an open source company, not a FOSS project. Alfresco wants to make money. Making money is good.
But how much money? To an open source company, the answer is as much as possible. To a FOSS project the answer is enough to get by.
There is nothing wrong with either model. Both can, in fact, use the same licenses, or different licenses. But if someone comes to you wearing a suit, a smile, and their hand out, it matters little what license their wares may carry. They’re still a salesman.
They’re open source.
September 28th, 2009
I for one welcome no overlords
Inside our own Matt Asay’s latest hymm to open source (as opposed to FOSS) is this simple message.
He accepts Microsoft as overlord. (Kent Brockman, right, from Wikipedia, famously welcomed “our insect overlords” in the episode “Deep Space Homer,” co-starring Buzz Aldrin as himself.)
Open source embraces interoperability, whereas free software takes a hard line that even Microsoft, despite its preference that customers use its complete software portfolio exclusively, won’t take.
This has always been true. FOSS is idealism, 80-proof distilled idealism, and the open source movement was born in 1998 as a reaction against that.
It’s not news. So why is Matt acting like it is? Here’s why:
Sometimes that openness will mean embracing Microsoft in order to meet a customer’s needs. After all, fierce partisanship and an unwillingness to compromise in software accomplishes is just as pointless, distasteful, and useless as it is in government.
Note our difference in emphasis. Matt put italics on “in order to meet a customer’s needs.” I think the more important message here is embracing Microsoft.
I do not think Microsoft is an evil empire, by the way. I accept the premise of the book “Burning the Ships,” that its IP policy is aimed mainly at letting Microsoft compete in growing markets than at demanding monopoly rents on Linux.
But Matt’s growing distaste for Eben Moglen and Bruce Perens and (especially, even personally) Richard Stallman is both unseemly and silly. Free software advocates have always been transparent and upfront on what they were trying to do. Microsoft, by contrast, has often been opaque, sometimes deliberately so.
The argument between FOSS and open source has never been about economic systems. It has been about the meaning of freedom.
It revolves around Stallman’s fourth freedom, the idea that when you are given something and you improve it you have an obligation to share the improvement so that the realm of freedom can advance.
Stallman calls this patriotism. Matt now seems to think it’s communism.
BSD licenses like Eclipse, Apache and Mozilla let people take more than they give and profit from it. Microsoft’s MS-PL license lets it do this on a massive scale. The fact that Matt now embraces this idea, and embraces Microsoft’s overlordship over everything it has copyrighted, doesn’t mean he’s a hero of capitalism and the rest of us are dirty rotten commies.
It means he’s a businessman. Business is not about ideals of any sort. Businessmen exist in every country, under every form of government. They even existed under Soviet Communism, even if they didn’t call themselves businessmen. Business is about seeking advantage, taking it, and building on it.
You can mix business with idealism, but you don’t have to. This is the revised bargain of open source. To the extent that Microsoft accepts this bargain businessmen involved with open source are free to accept Microsoft. Always have been.
Just don’t expect FOSS advocates to kiss your ring for it, or give up their ideals because you’ve made a deal. They have their values, you have yours.
Let’s leave it at that.
September 18th, 2009
Does Oracle matter to open source
Analysts looked at Oracle’s stack of chips for the last quarter and called it a bit light. (Thus this picture of Oracle’s headquarters.)
Should followers of open source care?
Maybe they should. Once it acquires Sun, Oracle will be the largest sponsor of open source projects people use every day. We’re talking Java, we’re talking mySQL, we’re talking OpenOffice.org.
Once Sun’s portfolio is in Oracle’s hands, the projects’ budgets will survive on Oracle’s sufferance, and if Oracle is fading those budgets will decline.
On the other hand maybe they shouldn’t. The big alternative to Oracle in today’s marketplace is IBM’s DB2, which has an alliance with Oracle rival SAP. IBM may be the best friend open source has, with its sponsorship of Eclipse and proof that open source can make a profit.
What is clear is that big open source projects now live in a land of giants. After years of growth under independent leadership, or under the leadership of lagging sponsors, open source managers now find themselves reporting to small divisions of giant corporations.
There is a way out, but it will take work. Building companies that fork projects outside the control of the big boys is legally possible. Linux has all sorts of forks. I reported on one, ClearOS, just the other day.
Another way out is to build open source around foundations independent from any single vendor. Think Eclipse, Apache, and Mozilla.
So long as an open source project lives under a single corporate sponsor, its fate is tied up with that of the sponsor. When the sponsor is bought, the community can either live in the new house or go out into the cold cruel world, alone.
That’s an important lesson from the Oracle-Sun story. It’s a lesson that may be hard for other corporate open source companies to accept, but there it is. If you must rely on others, the best thing to do may be to rely on a collection of them.
If open source is corporate property, how big a difference is there really between it and proprietary software? Something to think about during a long football weekend.
September 16th, 2009
If you liked Microsoft CodePlex you will love MySpace FoxForge
OK, the new MySpace open source project is not called FoxForge.
Just because News Corp. owns something does not mean everything on it gets the Fox logo or the Fox attitude.
(After writing this I decided to check out the Web address FoxForge.com and found this cute little guy next to an “under construction” sign and an address at Lycanthrope.net. At last check Foxforge.org was still available.))
In fact the MySpace open source offering is called Qizmt. It’s a GPLv3 MapReduce project aimed at building distributed applications for large clusters of Windows servers.
The software is already being used in a MySpace feature called “People You Know,” writes our own Dave Rosenberg, and MySpace has plans to expand its use.
While this story started with snark, however, I do have a serious question to ask, which relates to both MySpace and Microsoft’s CodePlex. That is, does the ownership of a project color your view of it?
Would Facebook have overtaken MySpace had Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. not bought its parent company, Intermix, in 2005, with a prediction that MySpace would drive traffic to other Fox sites.
I believe the answer to that is no.
The reason is the nature of this medium. You may not care whether a movie comes from 20th Century Fox, or whether the Fox TV network is broadcasting your favorite NFL team this week. But on the Internet it’s easy to walk out. The exit sign is just a mouse click away.
Thus reputation is a crucial asset online, far more important than in the offline world. If you like someone you are inclined to stay with them despite their faults. If you don’t like them you are inclined to not give them a chance.
This colors attitudes toward all Microsoft projects, including CodePlex and its Bing search engine. I take that for granted on this beat. You’re either pro-Microsoft or anti-Microsoft. Middle ground is scarce.
The same is true for Murdoch. People either like his products or hate them. They rush toward them or avoid them. There is little middle ground. This defines a strong niche market, but also makes other parts of the market off-limits.
I believe this colored attitudes towards the music-oriented social network and, unfortunately, most of the target for that product lived in an “anti-Murdoch” world. The question is how that might color reactions toward Qizmt (which I assume is pronounced Kismet, like the Rogers & Hammerstein musical).
Will you think of this as a FoxForge? Or not?
September 14th, 2009
Open source loves profit
The biggest lie told about open source is that those who practice it hate making money, that they are anti-capitalist.
(Picture from those dirty commies at Wikimedia Commons.)
Some people within the FOSS community do feel that way, of course. They are idealists first, developers second. It is thanks to such people that software is now a hollow mountain, the insides visible and little bits of open innovation pushing through the crust here and there.
It’s just silly to tar the whole movement with that broad brush, as Matt Asay does in tracking the attitudes of some to recent moves by Microsoft and Oracle.
He uses a pushquote to note the words of cartoonist and wine importer Hugh MacLeod, that “It’s easy to spot a purist. They’re the ones without any skin in the game.”
That’s some nice snark, but the reply is it depends on what you mean by skin.
GPL programmers, those who contribute code, have lots of skin in the game, real skin, skin that is more important to them than money. To disparage those in open source who value something other than a bank balance is to call the bulk of it anti-capitalist, when it’s just not.
Lots of people support the GPL because it’s the bottom of the open source incline. They operate transparently because that’s at the bottom of the open source development incline. They have skin in the game, but their lives have fewer zeroes than yours, Matt. They get by with a little help from their friends.
Marc Fleury did a $350 million deal for JBOSS, still one of the largest open source deals on record, and that was for GPL software. Come to think of it, so is mySQL, which came out with $1 billion from Sun.
Marc is now backing another open source project, Open Remote, not because he’s gone Communist but because he knows the best way to clear an impasse of proprietary agendas is to take money out of the equation and move forward.
If you want people to help you develop your software, give them equal rights to yours. If you really want them to help you, play as straight as possible with them. You can still make money. Your community will be thrilled if you do, because they want jobs.
Microsoft doesn’t play that way. In part this is natural, because their code base cost a fortune to develop and so their contribution to open source extensions will always be out-sized compared with those of small developers, as will the benefit they derive.
If you accept those rules. Matt, by all means play by them.
Just don’t throw stones at those who would rather take their software efforts elsewhere.
September 9th, 2009
OIN outmanuevers Microsoft, buys Linux patents
The Open Invention Network seems to have one upped Microsoft. Or has Microsoft one upped OIN?
Either way, it’s win-win for Linux.
Yesterday, OIN, whose mission is to defend Linux and open source from patent trolls, purchased 22 Linux related patents Microsoft recently sold to Allied Security Trust.
OIN chief executive Keith Bergelt would not say how much OIN spent on the patents but said it was a “meaningful amount.”
He said the open source community lucked out because the seller, AST, is not a patent troll. AST, not an investment vehicle, recently purchased the patents from Microsoft to “ensure that they did not fall into the hands of non-practicing entities that could seek to assert the patents against Linux products,” the press release stated.
Bergelt does not take issue with Microsoft’s rights to assert and sell its intellectual property but he did question why the software giant blocked OIN from the bidding.
Was it an overight? Or an attempt by Microsoft to circulate potentially dangerous IP bombs into the patent troll community?
The patents covered open source software related to operating systems and desktop and broader applications, Bergelt said. Some of them were purchased from former Unix vendor SGI.
“I don’t begrudge Microsoft’s opportunity to generate a fair return on their IP but I’m concerned about a strategy of selling Linux related and open source software patents to trolls,” Bergelt said to this blogger. No, they have not done this before and I’d hope it doesn’t happen again.”
He said it’s possible that leaving OIN out of the bidding was an oversight on Microsoft’s part — but not probable.
“I can’t imagine how they could justify it,” Bergelt said about Microsoft’s IP execs not being informed about OIN. “It [appears to be] an elegant way of insulating [the company] from criticism by [trying to]sell it to a troll.”
Again, AST is not a troll, Bergelt emphasized. But did Microsoft know that?
Sure, Microsoft made some money on the Linux related patents. That has to be annoying to OIN members who paid for them.
But this is a win-win for Linux. It demonstrates that Microsoft has not been able to cook up an uber mega legal case against Linux (maybe?) if it is selling Linux related patents to smaller entities.
And the more Linux related patents Microsoft sells, the fewer it owns.
It also demonstrates that OIN is functioning very well in the marketplace. For the money it paid, the Linux defense organization — which is backed by IBM, Novell and Red Hat, among others — has gained more patents to its own growing portolio and prevented the trolls from gaining control of 22 linux related ones. The OIN protfolio is now just south of 300 patents and more are coming.
OIN created 45 of its own and has another 45 patent applications in the works designed to protect the Linux roadmap over time.
September 8th, 2009
TomTom launches OpenLR open navigation project
TomTom, the European GPS company that got into a patent battle with Microsoft early this year, is now launching an open source navigation project called OpenLR.
(The map to the right, from the OpenLR site, is part of a demonstration showing differences between OpenLR coding and that of the Traffic Management Science (TMC) system, which uses FM radios.)
TomTom settled the suit by agreeing to pay Microsoft based on its claims, which involve FAT file names, and to take the “offending” technology out of its products.
In July a Linux patch was released supporting long file names, which all vendors are being urged to use to avoid future litigation.
The idea of OpenLR is to open source overlays onto GPS databases, placing weather or traffic information on a system for instance. The system is map-agnostic so lots of vendors can use it.
TomTom is inviting other vendors into its sandbox to enhance the system. The code will be licensed under GPL v2. The technical documentation is under a Creative Commons license.
TomTom plans a presentation on OpenLR at the ITS World Congress in Stockholm September 21-25.
September 8th, 2009
Europe can stick a fork where its mouth is
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.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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