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Red Hat Working w/UCITA Backers to Change Law
GroundBounce writes "Here's an article at NewsForge detailing how Red Hat is taking the initiative to broker deals with state legislatures to change parts of UCITA [?] which are damaging to open source software, such as mandatory warranties and reverse engineering. They are also working with the uniform law commission to try to change the prototype for the law." Good work by Red Hat - that's a necessary change.
In my experience, people who believe in approach #1 also believe that taking approach #2 is heresy.
In reality, you need both types of political agents. If a complete rejection of UCITA fails to happen - because MS et al are more politically powerful than your list - then you will hope against hope that the folks working from within were successful.
You have the same goals, you just have different approaches to reaching them. You are not taking the high road by trying to discredit Red Hat; you may be shooting yourself in the foot.
EULAs and the like are framed as contracts: you give up certain rights (such as the right to publicly criticize the software) in exchange for the "right to use" the software. The fact that you already had the right to use it, since you legally bought a copy, sets them on shaky ground under common law. (After all, you have the right to use what you've bought, whether or not you have the right to copy it!) That's what UCITA and its ilk give to Microsoft and its ilk -- the right to restrict use of legally purchased software.
The GPL, on the other hand, is not a contract: it does not ask you to give away any rights, or anything else for that matter. All it does is grant you new rights you did not formerly have -- specifically, the right to copy, modify, and distribute the software under certain circumstances.
You may perceive the GPL's restrictions as limits placed upon your rights -- but they aren't. Outside of a grant of rights by the author (of which the GPL is only one example) you never had the right to copy that software. The GPL grants you a limited right; unlike EULAs, it doesn't ask you to waive any rights you already had.
(In addition, the GPL does not grant a "right to use" the covered software, since it takes it as read that you already have that right by virtue of having legally obtained a copy of the software. The GPL explicitly states that it does not deal with "rights to use".)
I'm not at all certain I agree with your assessment of Quarterdeck.
Microsoft introduced MEMMAKER into DOS 6.x solely as a reaction to the introduction of a similar utility into DR-DOS. To claim that Microsoft did this to get QEMM infers that DR-DOS had the same reason.
I think the truth is that DR-DOS saw an opportunity to improve the DOS environment by requiring one less third party software purchase. Microsoft saw similar motivation, but they also had a goal of not allowing a competitor to be better than their own product.
There was certainly a bitter rivalry between MS and DRI at the time, and MS didn't behave ethically. But it was obvious even at the time that MS didn't do this to get Quarterdeck, they did it to get DRI.
Microsoft also didn't develop it, they licensed it from Helix Software. Most of the improvements to DOS 6 were licensed technologies, in fact.
Actually I fully suspect, they probably went to Quarterdeck and asked to license their product but couldn't work out terms.
Then not that it mattered anyway, as at the time even with Microsoft's MEMMAKER one still had to purchase QEMM. Go back in time and try to run Lantastic under DOS 6 on a early Pentium 90 system. With MEMMAKER you couldn't get near the free memory available(perhaps 475k) as you could under QEMM(more like 550k), so I highly doubt QEMM sales slumped that much except perhaps to the home sector.
No, what ultimately killed QEMM was Windows 95. But then Windows 95 also killed Desqview, OS/2, Lantastic, Stacker, etc. all in the same swoop.
But then isn't that progress? I often see OSS advocates claiming that Microsoft shouldn't fight back, they should just learn to live with change.
So shouldn't have Quarterdeck, IBM, Lantastic, Stack, DRI etc. all have just accepted change and stopped whining about unfair competition?
One of the things I find so fascinating about discussions with regards to Microsoft. It doesn't matter what happens, what the facts are, someone will always find some way to link a conspiracy to kill their favorite product to Microsoft.
Desqview was an interesting product, but it really died because nobody was all that interested in buying it at the time.
Sorry Brett, I normally like your posts, but I think your argument went off into fantasy land.
Hopefully, seeing actions such as this will help to quell the "RedHat is no better than Microsoft" nonsense. I supose this is a little off topic, but I think RedHat ends up getting the short end of the stick more times than not by the very community that they routinely fight the hardest for.
RFC2119
What's wrong with using open source as a weapon against another company? In any case where a free price, open source product can be used to kill another product, a free price, closed source product could do the same thing. Your example (Microsoft's attack on Quarterdeck), shows this. Microsoft's release of a free price web browser to attack Netscape is indentical. This is common practice between businesses. At least if the attack is made with open source, the public wins by getting software they can modify and upgrade.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Yes, this can be bad for society because sending Company Y to hell deprives the marketplace of any subsequent innovations that it may have contributed to the state of the art.
A thriving, successful Company Y that is able to build its reputation on the success of its previous innovations is well-positioned to continue to push the state of the art and can be expected to (or at least, stands a good chance to) develop and distributed more innovate products in the future.
Quarterdeck is an ideal example of this -- had Quarterdeck not been starved out of existence by Microsoft, their DesqView/X product may have gained traction and been widely used. It was a phenominal product which could have accelerated mainstream acceptance of Unix as a consumer platform by many years. However, we'll never know what good effects may have come from a robust DesqView/X platform supported by a viable company.
Had, as the original poster stipulated, QEMM been demolished and Quarterdeck (Your Company Y) been sent to hell by an opensource alternative, the effects would have been the same. It would still have resulted in the death-by-starvation of DesqView/X.
Open souce development has proven to be a very efficient way of stimulating the devlopment of useful and robust code. It has not, however, proven itself to be at all useful at driving innovation and progress. Open source, as it exists today, is mainly a great tool for replicating the innovations we see being developed in the commercial marketplace.
Left with only opensource development, after all the Company Y's have "gone to hell", I suspect we'd see much slower and less beneficial progress.
Linux is not a bad thing, in and of itself, but if Linux displaces the alternatives then it is bad for the marketplace and bad for society.
Don't forget that an integral aspect of freedom is choice, and destroying commercial software removes an important and necessary choice. If our only choice is for "Free" software, then we're not free at all.
Exempting open source from mandatory warrantees is good in and of itself, but UCITA also makes legal those nasty Shrink Wrap "end user agreements" (in other words, you will be held to an agreement that you did not sign, nor did you have any say in the wording of that agreement).
UCITA is just bad law, and it is bad news for end users.
--
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
[W]ith Open Source, you don't need warranty because you can see EXACTLY what is going on. The source code perfectly describes the functionality of the software.
Years back electronics companies used to give a schematic with their product, yet those items still game with a warranty.
I think for a company like RedHat it is in their best interest to have a warranty of some sort to show that they have confidence in their product. Whether that warranty should me made mandatory by more laws is another matter.
grubTrolling is a art,
.. I understood it to mean that unless these things were explicitly disclaimed, they would be applied.
SO as long as there is a shrinkwrap license disclaiming everything.... the UCITA doesn't help the consumer out.
Or perhaps it means that the contract that disclaims these rights under ucita must be a *real* contract, involving signing papers, etc? As in large business software, etc.
Also.. regardless of disclaimers, or contracts, if software does not work as advertised, you CAN take it back. False advertising is illegal, and any sale resulting from it is fraudulent.
So with the GPL officially recognized as a valid license under the law a lot of GPL related concerns are greatly diminished. That doesn't necessarily mean that there can't be loopholes, but it does mean that it's going to be a lot harder for someone to say "The GPL isn't a valid license"
That's a step in the right direction. I think reverse engineering should be allowed no matter what. But then again, the more commercial companies try to limit how their software can be used, distributed, modified, copied or examined, the more people are driven to free software.
I'm really confused. I'm hoping not to get flamed by this, but honestly, why was the portion of the law which said "free software doesn't need a warranty" changed to "Open Source software doesn't need a warranty"? There's plenty of "free as in beer" software out there that for some reason, they didn't (or couldn't) release the source code. Why should they have to provide a warranty? They're releasing it simply because they think it would be of use to the community - they might not have the time or money to support it.
Or did they just change it to "free as in beer" and "free as in speech" are both exempt now?
seriously, there is some need for good infotech transactions law.
We can't have shrink-wrap licences dubiously enforcable.
One measure
I'd like to see is strict liability enforced on closed-source
programs. No weaseling out. The logic would be that since they hold
the source secret, their customers cannot fix any problems themselves, so
the publisher must be liable for all losses.
I would allow publishers
that release their source [and ability to recompile] to customers the
carrot of reduced liability. After all, at this point the customer can
patch the source, or hire someone else to do so.
UCITA has been opposed by:
26 Attorneys General Software developers
Every consumer advocacy organization that has looked at it
Large software customers
Librarians
Other independent information content developers (writers, photographers)
Entertainment industry
Magazine and newspaper publishers
Many law professors.
(end snippet)
Additionally, it has been sharply criticized by the United States' Federal Trade Commission, http://www.ftc.gov/be/v990010.htm.
So many companies against UCITA, yet RedHat would look credible in the eyes of the same pundits attempting to pass the bill. Laymen terms: RedHat thinks they'll join the "paper-based" elite profile of a company like MS, so they turn around and shaft the OpenSource community by sleeping with the enemy. How thoughtful.
More UCITA opposition info
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Currently, there's no Open Source industry group that deals with legislative issues, although Webbink says Red Hat's efforts have been received well both on Capitol Hill and in Maryland's statehouse. Red Hat worked with the Open Source Initiative to craft the change in Maryland's UCITA.
For God's sake, why don't they create this! Right now we rely on the EFF to represent our interests to lawmakers. This needs to be supplemented with a group with a business perspective, for a one-two punch. The open source movement needs to start doing more PR work with legislatures. Red Hat's work here is great, but this has to be about more than just one company. The open source community is offereing tremendous value to consumers, citizens, and corporations that use our software and pay for our services. We need to move our community into the mainstream in the minds of the Congress critters.
Especially with Microsoft making it clear they are going to bash us as "intelletual property destroyers", we need to proactively present our pro-business face to lawmakers and set the record straight. Open source brings programmers, software companies, and software consumers (corporate and indiviual) together in a community that is focused on minimizing waste in the global software market, especially that caused by artificially created barriers. This makes sense from an individual rights perspective and it makes sense from a business perspective, once you focus on optimizing the creation of value within the entire system. Voluntary cooperation out of mutual self-interst for mutual gain is the EPITOME of the American way. In fact, this is little more than a statement of the concept of trade.
No party engaging in trade in a modern society creates products solely for self use. We are all dependend on trading those goods we create for something created by someone else. Open source is simply a different value proposition within software trade. Recognizing the cumulative value in compounding innovation, the open source value proposition says that instead of trading your IP rights for money, you trade those rights for permanent access to the valuable intellectual property contributions of others whose work extends your own.
IP is valuable precisely to the extent it is useful. To trade IP you create for access to the useful IP of others is in fact a profound statement about the value of use for software and intellectual property generally. The open source movement not only deeply respects intellectual property, it is in fact is critically dependent on it, since it is only by the open source copyright licences that we are secure in our ability to work together without fear of being ripped off.
In sum, the idea that open source destroys IP or stiffles trade is not just wrong, it is profoundly wrong-headed. Work released in an open source licence IS intellectual property. What open source will destroy is the barriers to directly trading IP for IP. For companies that survive by trading IP by the drop directly to consumers in exchange for cash, this is no doubt troubling because it paradigmatically challenges their value proposition. As with any situation where different value propositions exist, the market will choose how to distribute total resources among the two rival models to provide the system that is globally most efficient. That is the american way, and we embrace it.
Don't scoff at it too quickly, now -- Those shrink-wrapped licenses stand on the same legal ground as the GPL! After all, neither is written on paper, and they rely on implicit acceptance through the actions of the end user.
Let me explain why this is a concern. Suppose Company X makes Product A. Company Y competes with company X by making Product A and also makes Product B, which provides the bulk of its income and finances the development of its competitive Product A. Company X can sabotage Company Y by fostering the development of an open source equivalent of Product B so as to cut off the revenue Company Y needs to compete with it (and, perhaps, to survive). Its "air supply" -- to use the word of Microsoft executive Jim Allchin -- has been cut off.
This isn't an abstract example. In the early days of the Windows environment, Microsoft destroyed Quarterdeck, which made DESQview, by giving away a free knock-off of Quarterdeck's QEMM memory management software (which was used to support its GUI and multitasking development). The result: Quarterdeck, without a "cash cow" equivalent to Microsoft's MS-DOS, could not compete. DESQview -- the best multitasking environment available for PCs at the time -- and DESQview/X -- a brilliant GUI based on X Windows -- died because there was no money for their future development.
While Microsoft's free equivalent didn't happen to be open source, it very easily could have been. (In fact, had Microsoft not been rich enough to bankroll its QEMM equivalent itself, it might have been the only practical way to go.) In any event, it always takes much less effort and money to develop a knock-off than the original, because Quarterdeck blazed the trail by developing the technology and feature set, solving all of the knotty technical problems, and dealing with the tradeoffs that are always inherent in new products.
Richard Stallman and others have specifically touted open source as a way of attacking companies they do not like (which, in the case of RMS, includes any company that publishes commercial software -- even those which, unlike Microsoft, act ethically).
To prevent open source from being used in a predatory and unfair manner against them, companies that develop new technology need to patent it. This is precisely what patents are intended to do, and they're especially urgent in an age where open source can be abused to prevent people who honestly advance the state of the art from being deprived of rewards for their labors.
Richard Stallman once told me, personally, that one of his motivations for opposing software patents is that they would make it more difficult for the FSF to "wipe out" (his words) commercial software. Stallman's statement underscores the danger.... And the need for software patents. We might argue about the optimal length of these patents (there are many merits to the argument that 20 years is too long), but few of us with a sense of justice and fairness would say that open source should be allowed to be used as a weapon in a malicious agenda.
If you've heard Bruce speak, or read his writing, you know that he shares some of RMS's animosity toward commercial software companies and frequently rattles his saber, "demanding" that they forfeit their hard work. Could this be the reason he opposes software patents? Just food for thought.
--Brett Glass
Linux advocate- Hello, I'm from RedHat Inc.
Law maker- Who?
Linux advocate- Hello, I'm from the Linux Industry Consortium. Our members include IBM, HP, Sun and RedHat.
Law maker- Hello. Pleased to meet you. Would you like a coffee?
Such a group would be able to excert pressure in other areas. For example, whilst Andre Hedrik's effort in the IDE standards committee are greatly appreciated, he has himself said that his influence is limited since he is just a lone consultant and can't officialy represent Linux.
I agree that creating such a body is going to produce numerous problems such as keeping it small enough to be responsive whilst not excluding people who feel they should be represented, and defining its role closely enough to prevent it from influencing things like kernel development. I also accept that we already have groups like FSF and Linux International, but if RedHat are having to go and lobby lawmakers then these groups clearly don't have the required clout. Obviously they could be members of the "Linux Industry Consortium" (I am sure we could find a better name).
Do you suppose... "Software" or "Program" could mean "instructions for watching a movie "programmed" onto a DVD, thus making DeCSS legal in Maryland, no questions asked? Hmmmmmm...
I think UCITA is a bad law, and needs to be blocked where it hasn't passed, and repealed where it has. People shouldn't abandon these efforts. In the meantime, let's support RedHat's efforts to keep this carnivorous beast at bay until it's put back in its cage.