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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: Software Licensing
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?
July 27th, 2009
Could open source have built Silicon Valley?
The failure of OSCON to make a splash in San Jose (expect to see it back in Portland next year) is leading to some general soul-searching which results in this question.
Could we have built Silicon Valley in an open source world?
In other words, to what extent is the wealth of technology a result of legally-sanctioned monopoly as opposed to open competition?
That’s what patents and copyright are, legally-sanctioned monopoly.
Let’s quote again from Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, enumerating the powers of the Congress:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Another term for an exclusive right is a monopoly, and it was with the term monopoly that this power was discussed by the Founders. It’s not intellectual property. It’s an exclusive right to an idea, a monopoly over its use.
But technology has always demanded more than what the Founders granted.
The Microsoft EULA is a direct descendant of IBM contracts from the 1950s, in which buyers gave sellers control over what they were buying in perpetuity. Long before the subject of software patents came up, IBM was fighting against leaks of knowledge about how it did things, and against reverse engineering of its inventions.
Without this power over its customers, could IBM have existed? Could Microsoft have existed?
Open source is really just a different type of contract, one that transfers power from the sellers to the buyers of technology. It places a time limit on those monopoly rents innovators depend upon, one that is earlier than what is offered by copyright, by patent, by other software contracts.
In Silicon Valley, innovation is the fertilizer that makes the crops grow. With open source, software is more like topsoil, and those who nurture that soil believe they will prosper longer than those who just throw fertilizer on it.
Invention is the plant corporations harvest for their profit. Software is the environment on which everyone’s survival depends.
OSCON, I think, is better off in Portland.
July 16th, 2009
Why Apache is not the bottom of the open source incline
Matt Asay is beginning to remind me of those people who, in the wake of 9-11 or Hurricane Katrina, found themselves questioning their political assumptions and switched sides.
Recessions are hard. Deep recessions are harder. The current recession is not sparing the open source movement. Money and partnerships are harder to come by.
So why, Matt asks, is the GPL still considered the bottom of the open source incline, and not, say, the Apache license?
Then, despite high praise for Eric Raymond and disquiet toward Richard Stallman, he pretty much answers his own question.
Did Stallman simply create an alternative way to release proprietary software?
Well, yes.
Any code you write is proprietary to you. No matter its license, you feel a proprietary interest in it. You may want contributions from others, but you also want protection for your rights as an author. You don’t want someone going around behind your back and turning your open source code proprietary with a tweak here and some marketing there. You want your interest in improvements protected.
If this is your attitude, an attitude both common and natural, then you will likely prefer the GPL to Apache licensing. Under the GPL your interest in getting improvements is protected. The power of others to fork your code and turn it to their profit is limited.
The equation draws a different result if you are a corporation, a group of people with marketing and support, releasing productized code. The code base you are releasing is likely larger and your infrastructure offers protection against rogue competition.
That is why corporate projects are often released under some type of BSD license. Google likes Apache. IBM likes Eclipse. These licenses protect corporate rights well, while the GPL’s focus is on individual rights.
Communities, however, generally consist of individuals, not corporations. If you truly want individual contributions, your best chance of getting them comes if you and they are on the same legal footing, and the same practical footing, regarding the code base. You want the GPL.
When businesses organize, with scaled contributions coming from what are essentially development partners, the protections of an Apache license make better sense. Apache offers better protection to corporate business models than the GPL.
My guess is Matt’s change of heart on these questions has much to do with his job at a corporation, one with infrastructure, marketing, and support functions that need regular feeding from license fees or something, in order to survive.
The size of a corporate code base, the work needed to maintain and support it, may make the protections of the GPL seem redundant, while those of the Apache license attractive.
But the bottom of the open source incline will be where individuals live, not corporations, and that’s where you will always find the GPL.
July 8th, 2009
Codeplex the measure of Microsoft open source street cred
Microsoft is trumpeting the success of its three year old CodePlex open source site, noting it now has over 10,000 projects and counting.
I agree that CodePlex is a fair way to measure the credibility Microsoft has with open source developers, or its “street cred.”
But one can also have different views on the same numbers.
For example, as my friend Roberto Galopppini noted yesterday, Google has become home to 80,000 projects in half the time CodePlex has been open. Numbers don’t just live in abstract isolation. They can be compared, apples-to-apples, and so Google’s street cred looks pretty good.
It can also be useful to look at Microsoft’s own statistics and ask, how mainstream is CodePlex? The picture above, from Microsoft, tells that story.
It’s a pie chart showing the popularity of various licenses within CodePlex. The big wedge of blue represents the share held by Microsoft’s MS-PL license, and it’s about 36% of the total. The smaller red wedge below it is the share of GPLv2, about 20%. The light blue wedge to the left is the share held by LGPL, about 6.7%.
This is interesting. A fifth of the projects at Microsoft’s own CodePlex site are GPLv2. But compare that to the general market, as Black Duck did recently (however accurately). In the general market 65% of projects are GPLv2, and that’s somewhat down recently in part because of the efforts at CodePlex.
In other words, the CodePlex audience is still skewed toward Microsoft licenses, and is far from representative of the whole open source movement.
Why does this matter? Let’s use a political analogy. The same arguments are used against any small political movement, the idea that it’s unrepresentative of the people as a whole. Whether you’re talking about Howard Dean on the left or the Ron Paul troops on the right, such statistics are proof you’re out of the mainstream.
If Microsoft is evolving toward being an “open core” open source supplier, with open code at the center and proprietary extensions, that evolution still has far to go.
But it has begun. The Microsoft teabag has hit the water. How big a splash it makes has yet to be determined.
July 2nd, 2009
With clouds license arguments become fog
Matt Asay makes a great point.
When you are using a cloud software licenses don’t matter much. (Picture from NASA via Visible Earth.)
This has always been true, of course. Ever since the Web was spun, users of Web services have remained blissfully ignorant of disputes over software licenses. Licenses, we don’t need no steenkin’ licenses.
What is changing today is simply the balance of where client computing takes place. Power and responsibility are moving to what used to be called the server side.
Things I used to do on my PC, like get my mail and manage my calendar, are now done online. What matters is no longer who controls my software but who controls my data.
To Matt, this becomes a question of “data-driven lock-in,” with Google becoming Microsoft due to its “control” of my data.
But do they really control my mail? That’s not the deal implicit in the transaction. Just as with Google Health, I own my mail and my list of appointments.
What Google owns is not the data, but data about the data. They know I’m on those pages, and they have the right to sell ads against those page views. They can aggregate data about my use of the resource, both to manage it and to sell billboards alongside it.
You can argue it’s better than the deal you get here. When you post a TalkBack, that legally becomes the property of ZDNet.
This is not because ZDNet is greedier than Google. It’s convenience. Managing hundreds of licenses to the hundreds of comments on my controversial Steve Jobs post would drive everyone crazy. But it’s easy, once you aggregate all your mail in your inbox, to give you control.
What we’re entering, in license terms, is not a cloud era but a fog era. Clouds and fog are the same thing. The difference between them is in the eye of the beholder. If you can see clearly licenses and their terms are in the far distance. If you can’t, then you need a legal guide.
July 1st, 2009
Is the GPL losing its grip?
In the latest Black Duck analysis of open source licensing trends, it appears on the surface that the GPL has lost significant market share.
That is, until you look inside the numbers.
Versions of the GPL are currently being used by 65% of all projects, down from about 70% a year ago, with V3 licensing now on track to become the fourth most-widely used license by the end of the year.
The only non-GPL licenses to attract significant usage are the Artistic License and the standard BSD. But the GPV v3 should, at its present rate of growth, pass the latter in share within six months, the report says. Over half of all projects are still licensed under GPL v2.
The Artistic License, originally credited to Larry Wall, is the only open source license to have gone through a successful court challenge, specifically that of Jacobsen v. Katzer, where a district court is still considering an SFLC request for injunctive relief.
The best-known project under the Artistic License is Perl, but that project is dual-licensed under the GPL. There are also multiple versions of the Artistic License — Version 1.0, Version 2.0, and clarified. The Black Duck project did not break them out.
Black Duck’s analysis of its own figures, however, is that “open core” licensing is on the rise and that open source licensing is becoming more diverse, less “restrictive.”
So is the GPL losing its grip as the dominant open source license? I don’t think so but I can be persuaded.
May 20th, 2009
Can open source refuse to do business?
Let’s pretend I am an open source developer and I don’t like you.
I have control of some important open source project, so I write an addendum to the license forbidding you, or your institution, from using it.
Now not only are you not allowed to download my stuff, but you can’t update anything containing my stuff.
That’s what Bruno Lowagie of Ghent is doing. He is engaged in a legal dispute with Belgian authorities over taxes on his AdSense ads. So he is writing a “Belgian Restriction” into his next license, forbidding the government from using the next version of his program, iText.
If this were just one program there might be little problem. But iText, which is used to manipulate PDF, RTF, and HTML files in Java, is also embedded in a host of other open source products, including Eclipse BIRT, Jasper Reports, Red Hat JBoss Seam, and Windward Reports.
In theory, the next time some Belgian bureaucrat tries to upgrade one of these other products they will be in violation of Lowagie’s new license. Unless they want to settle the tax question.
So, on to the questions:
- Is this legal?
- Is this violating the spirit of open source?
- Am I really reading a story about Belgium?
Loading ...May 4th, 2009
SugarCRM launches express edition that comes with onsite and cloud accounts
SugarCRM has introduced an express edition and with it a two-for-one deal that includes an on-site software account and cloud account for one low price.
And it’s a good one: $7 per user per month. The express edition is based on the community edition, which, of course is free, but the express edition comes with additional services s well as commercial support.
The Professional Edition is priced at $30 per user per month and Enterprise Edition is $50 per user per month.
SugarCRM launched the Express edition on April 29.
”There’s been a big disconnect between the community edition and the pro edition in cost but we’re at a point where we could launch a mass market product,” said SugarCRM CEO John Roberts, noting that ther four-year-old open source multinational company has a mature code base and employs 160 people. “Before the cost went from zero per month to $30 per month and now it’s zero per month to seven dollars per month to $30 or $50 per month. We needed a product that fills the gap between community edition and pro edition.”
The Express edition gives users the code and functionality including a module builder to create custom modules and cloud connectors to integrate third-party data services from companies such as Hoover’s and Jigsaw.
Sugar Express is offered as an annual subscription at $499 for up to five users or $799 for up to ten users per year, the Cupertino, calif., company announced.
SugarCRM built out its internal cloud much like Amazon and Wikipaedia, using the Linux grid. It has offered on demand services for three years.
The two-for-one deal — which gives mainstream users and SMB companies a $7 per user per month subscription for on-site use and a cloud account – also represents a hardware savings since customers don’t have two servers for different services.
“Why have SugarCRM and Sugar On Demand as two separate products? We say you can have both for the price of one. You get an on demand and on site account at the same time and that’s unlike any other CRM vendor out there,” Roberts said.
“The net net is a convergence of on demand and on site products represents twice the value for a lower price,” ” Roberts added.
Roberts also noted that the company’s Sugar Open Cloud puts the customers in control of the software and the flexibility that allows them to customize on the cloud as well as on site.
“We’re bringing the method of open source to the cloud. Sugar Open Cloud preserves the attributes of open source where the customer is in control.”
April 29th, 2009
Apache or GPL?
Matt Asay today switched his license alliegiance, to Apache from the GPL.
Before anyone starts in with the Arlen Specter jokes, let me say that based on the criteria he sets out, adoption, his argument makes sense. (I also think Matt is better-looking than Specter, at right, from his own Web site, no matter what party you belong to.)
Once an open source product is released into the market, users don’t really care what license it uses.
If you are looking to businesses to fund further development, a good argument can be made for Apache or even the Eclipse license. Google likes Apache, IBM Eclipse, and your user-in-the-street could probably care less.
What counts on this question for me is not adoption but development.
If your company wants to release its own code, and control that code, if open source is mainly a marketing concept to you, then a BSD license such as Apache or Eclipse makes perfect sense.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for a community to extend your code, to build your code, and to defend your code with their bug fixes and forum support, then the GPL works best.
Communities develop best where rights and responsibilities are equal. But business and democracy are two different things. Business exists to exploit code for profit. Communities seek to exploit code for the shared benefit of all.
I think it’s possible that, over the last few years, many companies confused corporate projects with community projects. They made noises about community support, and supporting the community, but they were really in it for themselves, this was obvious to everyone, and besides their code wasn’t terribly exciting to anyone other than business allies.
On the other hand many companies have proven you can make a lot of money from the GPL. If you’re willing to really embrace the community you create, to nurture that community, and to take no more from the community than the community feels is your due.
Some are finding that a rather big if. It is this if that caused the open source movement to break away from Stallman and his FOSS advocates a decade ago. And that basic, ideological divide remains.
To my way of thinking Matt just figured out which side he was on all along.
April 17th, 2009
Common public license merged into Eclipse
I have written here often of license proliferation, and along the way have been overly snarky toward Michael Tiemann of Red Hat and the Open Source Initiative, as the number of licenses kept growing even after he held up his hand to say stop.
So it is only fair here to mention a success story, and to give credit where it is due.
The Common Public License has been merged into Eclipse.
An FAQ on the merger notes that the two licenses were already very similar. “A quick read of the two licenses will quickly show that they are very very close,” writes Mike Milinkovich, who heads Eclipse.
Our own Ed Burnette called Milinkovich “director for life” in his post on this, proving that I’m not the only snarky one at ZDNet. At minimum Mike wants the chance to take the Madden way out.
What this illustrates is an important lesson in fighting license proliferation. It takes two to negotiate any solution. And this is not something the OSI can do all by itself.
It takes a village and a negotiator.
March 24th, 2009
What does Europe have against GPLv3?
My recent story on EUPL, the European Union Public License, drew some interesting reaction and this follow up question.
What does Europe have against GPLv3?
Roberto Galoppini, who first drew my attention to the issue, drew a response to his post from Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz of Unisys, who helped draw up the new license. He wrote, in part:
GPLv3 is about 3 times longer, is full of technical details, is complex (even for a lawyer) and as it is officially valid in English only it may not be the most persuasive license for a German or French administration.
The EUPL, by contrast, is valid in 22 countries, and 22 languages. It’s also compatible with the GPLv2 and Eclipse Public Licenses, among others. But not, so far, the GPLv3.
The trouble is that GPLv3 has proven popular. Its adoption rate was well ahead of projection when tracking was halted in the wake of economic trouble. Tracking is now moving ahead again and self-sponsored, writes Ernest Park, who manages it.
So let’s say you’re an earnest, honest, and scrupulous Polish software developer. You adopt the EUPL because you understand it but keep GPLv3 code in your repository. Then you write a great bit of code and put it online, under the EUPL.
The result, I believe my Polish great-grandmother would say, would be “klopotu.” In Yiddish, tsuris. In English, trouble.
The problem Schmitz has with GPLv3 is that it’s ideological. He doesn’t like the preamble. But the GPLv3 preamble deals with software patents, which are illegal under European law.
Also, Schmitz feels, the GPLv3 contains specific terms and technical jargon. EUPL is not based on simple “principles” which local courts may interpret under their copyright laws.
That is sort of the point. The GPLv3 was developed following several legal disputes where lawyers sought to twist what the Free Software Foundation considered the GPLv2’s idea of copyleft. GPLv3 dealt with this through specific language.
Schmitz writes that the Free Software Foundation “was unable to deal with linguistic diversity.” It was also unable to deal with bureaucratic and legal mumbo-jumbo aimed at subverting the intent of the GPL’s authors. Which the EUPL seems to encourage.
I’m not the only person who objects to what Schmitz is selling. Galoppini is also not amused:
What I object to [from] the EC is that you decided to go your way, instead of participating [in] the GPLv3 process, managed with a public and transparent consultation.
What I object to is your adversarial approach. I believe that opening to FSF licenses is your concern, since you are trying to convince European public administrations to use the EUPL.
Show them that is convenient, that they can still stand on the shoulders of giants, and try harder to consider GPL, and software licensed under the GPL, as your best friend, not a foe.
All I want is some help for my little Polish friend.
March 20th, 2009
Europe gets its own GPL
Europe now has its own version of the GPL.
It’s got copyleft, but it lacks the extra language found in GPLv3 meant to enforce that concept.
The European Union Public License is an effort by EU government services to codify a Euro-centric view of copyleft, in 22 languages. (Nathan White has a giant version of this Tower of Babel image on his Shepherd the Flock blog.)
Roberto GalloppiniGaloppini writes from Rome that the Open Source Initiative approved the new license on March 4, but complains it has yet to show up on the OSI Web site.
In fact a quick check shows a link from the OSI Web site list of approved OSI licenses back to a copy of the EUPL hosted in Europe.
A set of slides on the new license notes that it groups its protection into “principles” but leaves their interpretation up to judges in the EU member states. The GPLv3 effort was meant to strictly limit how the license could be interpreted.
Another key difference is that the GPLv3 preamble does not appear in the EUPL. The slide I was shown called the preamble “ideology,” stating that the intent of the EUPL is merely “to reinforce legal interoperability by adopting a common framework for pooling public sector software.”
While the OSI under Michael Tiemann went on a tear a few years ago about reducing the number of open source licenses, its Web site now lists about 63 such licenses, by my count. Mission not accomplished, Mike.
The problem with all this, as Roberto himself noted when I chatted with him about it, is that any open source user needs a law degree to track the various legal technicalities under which various bits of code are licensed.
The EUPL seems designed to enable sharing of code among European governments, which is great. But when those governments take code covered by, say, the Nokia Open Source License, or the Eiffel Forum License, or the new EU DataGrid License, headaches can result.
These headaches cannot even be relieved (anymore) by referring to the GPL, since there are now four different GNU licenses, plus the new EUPL, which I guess one could call GNU-ish.
The folks working on the new license seem aware of the problems, as noted by Bruce Perens last month, but added this seeming endorsement of the new license by Martin Michlmayer, who runs FOSSology and FOSSBazaar:
There are obviously vanity factors involved when a license happens to bear the name of its issuer. But one new license is bound to be of true value in the near future: the EUPL [European Union Public License]. For the first time we’d have a license available in all European languages and valid everywhere, that is, all translations have been legally scrutinized.
He added, “EUPL code can be converted to GPL code.”
Sure, but what type of GPL code, Martin? GPLv2? V3? Affero? LGPL or greater?
We’re right back where we started, at the bottom of the Tower of Babel.
March 13th, 2009
Is the new open source Eurolicense eurotrash?
The Open Source initiative updated one of its licenses this month, the EU DataGrid Software License.
This turns out not to be eurotrash. Instead it’s an important example of negotiating credit in a multinational corporate environment.
The EU DataGrid is a distributed computing environment designed for use across the European Union. This means it must work in many languages, and any legal agreements must not only be available under all those languages, but applicable in all those countries’ law courts.
Given that the system is designed for use by corporations and government employees, this is even more imperative.
The license does this by requiring attribution, and by taking advantage of laziness.
If you publish enhancements or derivative works from the software without notifying receipients they need a separate license agreement, you have in effect given your rights in that software over to everyone who signed the original license.
This does not keep companies from making a commercial distribution from code created using the datagrid. It’s just a “no backsies” clause. If you’re going commercial with something you have an obligation to tell us.
As more corporations get involved in open source, and consider their obligations under open source licenses, I hope they will have their lawyers look at this license. Not to copy it. But in appreciation.
If corporations across Europe can settle agreements under an open source license approved by the OSI, maybe you can too.
March 7th, 2009
Who should Software Freedom sue on FAT32?
Once upon a time I was going to be a lawyer.
One reason I didn’t go that way was to avoid running down rabbit holes like the one our own Jason Perlow offered us Thursday. (This puzzle called Down the Rabbit Hole is now on sale over at Legendary Toys.)
Microsoft owns FAT32, but it didn’t appear to pursue its rights against companies that supported FAT32 in their Linux thumb drives and consumer electronics.
Until the TomTom case. At which point Jeremy Allison of Samba says Microsoft had secret cross-licensing deals with all those other guys which violate the GPL.
So the question becomes, who should Software Freedom sue?
- Go after Microsoft and we crank up the “Star Wars” music. Software Freedom may win but it will take years.
- Go after all the Linux licensees who signed the secret cross-licensing deals. But then what is the remedy? The natural response of a licensee would be to drop Linux, and if Microsoft is offering a better solution you’ve just sued yourself out of business.
- Sue both Microsoft and the licensees over the issue of the secret cross-licensing agreement.
- Go after both sides through regulatory agencies like the FCC.
I’m inclined toward number three myself. If you and I sign a deal to violate someone else’s contract I don’t see how a court could allow that deal to be enforced. But I do have to prove secrecy — I can’t just claim I didn’t know.
These are not questions for a patent lawyer, which is what Software Freedom is looking to hire. It seems more a matter of contract law and discovery. But if you can’t prove secrecy you have lost time and money, which Microsoft could then take action against you to recover.
This is not something you can just innovate around. Microsoft clearly invented the technology at issue. Linux created a way to support it, and Microsoft chose to sign deals with those who put that support into hardware.
TomTom can easily find itself between a rock and a hard place. Make a deal with Microsoft and you violate your deal with Linux. Refuse and Microsoft sues you out of business.
Given that TomTom is Dutch, the dispute also goes before the U.S. International Trade Commission. Does that mean it can also go before the European Union, which has proven itself unfriendly to Microsoft in the past?
So we have a choice between contract and patent law, a choice of jurisdictions, and a choice of recommended remedies.
Which way would you go, if you were Eben Moglen?
March 6th, 2009
Nokia puts out help wanted sign on Qt
Continuing its effort to get by with a little help from its friends, Nokia released a new version of its Qt user interface framework and Qt Creator, an integrated development environment (IDE).
The new software is offered under the Lesser GPL for the first time, as well as the main GPL and two commercial licenses dating back from Qt’s days as Trolltech.
The QTSoftware.com site has the code, and Nokia also promised a new community site soon, called QT Contribution.
Yes, it’s hard to make programming tools interesting, as our Dave Rosenberg says, but there are some important points to make here.
- Nokia is doubling-down on the open source development process.
- Nokia is betting heavily on the cross-platform aspects of Qt, the kind of “write once, run anywhere” mantra Java was first known for.
From the user point of view, you could technically have a Qt application that ran on your phone, on your Mac, on your Windows box, and under Linux. How far Nokia can get with that promise remains to be seen, but it’s nice to see it being made.
Oh, and don’t confuse this Qt with the gasoline retailer. Their QT is all-caps and red. This one has a small t and it’s green. Theirs sells donuts, while working with the Finnish one may make you hungry for donuts.
February 11th, 2009
Happy days for Black Duck
With people losing their livelihoods left and right, it’s gratifying to find someone with unalloyed good news to report, especially if they come out of the open source movement.
So let’s hear it for the little black duck. No, not that one. Black Duck Software.
- Bookings were up 42% year over year, and service revenues were up 65%.
- Black Duck has secured $9.5 million in new financing, including $4.5 million in loans.
- Black Duck recruited Tim Yeaton, once vice president for worldwide marketing at Red Hat, as its new CEO. He was given credit there for driving the acquisition of JBOSS, still one of the biggest open source merger deals ever.
Black Duck’s business is tracking the use of open source, and complying with all licenses, in the enterprise. This helps break down one of the key objections to open source, by automating what would be a substantial legal hassle.
Black Duck also owns Koders, a database of open source code used by many companies around the world. This makes open source code highly attractive by making it highly available.
All of which, apparently, means money, profits, and jobs. Happy days. I know it’s still mid-February, but I needed a little Christmas.
January 29th, 2009
Microsoft makes a real open source move
Whenever Microsoft does something involving open source, look at the fine print.
Sometimes it’s under a bogus unapproved license written by Microsoft lawyers. Sometimes it’s under a Microsoft license its lawyers got through the OSI, after much wailing-and-gnashing-of-teeth.
But this is the real deal. This is Apache 2.0 licensing.
And this is pretty cool code, too.
Specifically we’re talking about Web Sandbox, which aims at securing Web content through virtualization. OK, that’s not a cool thing, but wait.
As Ray Valdes of Gartner Group has noted, this can also protect against cross-site scripting, an increasingly common attack of hackers against Web sites of all types. So it is a cool thing.
It’s a framework that works under Javascript, requires no plug-ins, and offers consistent support for Web objects, writes Peter Galli. He also notes that Microsoft is a sponsor of Apache and Sam Ramji delivered the keynote at their last conference.
If this move is followed up by others along the Apache line it will be a very good thing. It would not help my traffic if Microsoft becomes a non-controversial word in the open source community, but it will help open source.
January 6th, 2009
Will Cisco-FSF lawsuit make it to court?
Unlikely.
Since filing its GPL violation suit against Cisco last month, the Free Software Foundation has grown very quiet.
Christmas was a good excuse. New Year’s too. But the holidays are over, yet still not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse.
Thus reporters have been ordered to investigate the case. They called some lawyers, even some good ones, and see trouble ahead for the FSF.
Cisco has good lawyers. Any decision, even on the FSF’s terms, will then be used to limit rights under the GPL.
My guess is negotiations are continuing because neither side has a real incentive to go to court.
The language of any legal decision would likely be less clear than the clear language of the GPL 2. But if the GPL can be challenged successfully, so can every EULA out there — including Cisco’s own.
In my view the GPL 2 is one of the clearest legal documents ever written. As clear as the Constitution itself. Which has been litigated continuously since its adoption, with court decisions that often turned plain language into its opposite.
It’s like the difference between writing for a paper (or a blog) and writing an academic paper.
The latter may be dry and turgid, but it is specific, nailing down what prettier words might obscure. Most litigation seems to have the goal of turning plain language into academic language.
The difference between legal writing and academic writing is that the former always has wiggle room. Decisions depend on what the meaning of is is.
My guess is neither side wants to go down that rabbit hole. Cisco wants to save face, but the FSF won’t be played for a fool.
It’s time for Cisco to make a decision, because every day now costs the FSF money, which will raise the cost of a final settlement. Unless it wants its contribution to the economic stimulus to come in the form of legal fees.
January 5th, 2009
Benefits of a commercial open source arm
One of my great Eurofriends linked me to his 2009 predictions piece over the holidays, noting that companies like Acquia are “appropriating returns from the commons.”
This may be one of the great misunderstandings of the open source era, and a big part of the FOSS-open source split.
Commercial open source, some think, does indeed “appropriate returns from the commons.” I, on the other hand, believe such operations are a net benefit to the commons.
Let me offer the example of Acquia, the commercial arm for Drupal, because I have both personal experience and news to bring to bear.
The experience came four years ago. I was asked to help launch an open source site for politics. I recommended Drupal for its scalability, but the company failed, in part because we could not develop the site quickly enough.
Since Drupal.org only provided a directory of possible assistance, we wound up dealing with an Indian outsourcer my partner was familiar with.
Their claim of expertise was false. I spent months trying to explain what we needed, and each iteration of the software grew worse. We finally got things rolling after another consultant turned us on to the new, stable Drupal code base.
By then it was too late. The business model was flawed in any case. I wound up blogging about politics, reading political blogs and summarizing their messages, but traffic was never more than a trickle, and interactivity was virtually nil.
Should I get another opportunity, I will know more of what to do. I’ll be able to get the help I need through Acquia. I’ll pay for it, but I will have an effective site in a short period of time, and technical management will be done by techies, not journalists.
There’s a second benefit to the commercial model, add-ons. An example is Kaltura. This makes any Drupal site immediately video-capable. (There are also versions for other systems.)
A commercial arm retains a project’s market share, and its development momentum, so that add-ons gravitate toward it. I am certain that Drupal sites launched in 2009 will be light years ahead of those from four years ago.
They have to be, because much has happened since 2005. It’s no longer enough to support blogs, or diaries, or to do them in a scaled manner. Now you have to support a host of other files, and social networking functions.
A CMS system, like any system, must continually progress to stay relevant. Commercial arms help open source projects meet this competition, at the same time they provide a business model which feeds the lead developers.
It’s not an appropriation from the commons at all.
December 12th, 2008
Free Software Foundation calls Cisco a leech, in court
I had just finished defending Cisco on charges of being an open source leech when I learned the Free Software Foundation has sued the company for multiple GPL violations.
Blagoyevich, I said to myself. (Gesundheit.) (Picture from Alfred Capital Management.)
Cisco’s Linksys unit has a long history of violating the GPL. But I assumed they had learned their lesson, that they had, as I put it in my own newsletter, gotten A Clue.
Apparently not. Now they have David Dan Ravicher, Software Freedom Law Center legal director and law partner of the legendary Eben Moglen, going all Patrick Fitzgerald on them.
At issue, according to the 38 page complaint released as a PDF today, are basic elements of the Linux operating system licensed under GPL V. 2. The complaint says Cisco’s Linksys unit failed to provide source code.
This is the first time the FSF has had to go to court for relief in its 15 years. Previous violations, mainly over Bruce Perens’ Busybox, were filed through GPL Violations and settled out of court.
As noted earlier this is not the first time Linksys, which Cisco acquired in 2003, has been accused of a code violation. When I researched the 2003 case sources told me Linksys was running very independently of Cisco.
UPDATE: Perens was an original author but writes the suits were filed by later developers. Also, GPL Violations was not involved in the initial complaint against Linksys.
That may still be the case. But five years on this is no longer an excuse, just an explanation. Cisco may have defenses in fact, and it may seek to argue the law.
Either way its image still takes a hit, just as it is trying to gain wider public acceptance by launching a small business technology group and opening an innovation center in Singapore.
Cisco stock is currently trading around $17 per share, down 38% since the start of the year.
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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