Slashdot Mirror
Lutris, Close Source, And The Open Source Community
sohp writes "Back in mid-September Slashdot ran the story "Lutris Closes Enhydra Source" regarding that company's decision to retract its open source licensing terms. Now George C. Hawkins has reconstructed the pre-closed source reality and discusses it at How Lutris betrayed the Open Source Community
. Short summary: blaming Sun was a smokescreen. Interesting use of web archive sites, too." There's definitely a lot of strong feelings against Lutris in the linked piece, but there's also a lot of validity as well.
While it really sucks that they would promote a product as open source and then change their minds when it became less popular, there really isn't very much that can be done in such a situation, as from my understanding of the article the code was never actually released under an open source license, so there really isn't any legally binding commitment to open source on their part, just a lot of hot air from various executives.
Duplicity isn't exactly new among the human race, the lesson to be learned from this article is that just because someone claims to support open source doesn't mean that you shouldn't be skeptical of them, particularly when money is involved. Suspicions should have been raised when the code never showed up, none of it was ever released. Other than vigilence, all that can be really done is remembering who's shafted you in the past and try not to do business with them in the future.
Why?
Another alternative to Lutris Enhydra Java/XML Application Server is Orion Server. This application server was one of the first fully J2EE compliant application servers, even before WebLogic. It is 100% Java. It supports both EJB and JNDI. It is FREE for development. I follow their list group and they seem to have a very good following. I find the product to be very easy to configure and deploy. It is worth evaluating.
OK.
Seriously.
How hard can it be to expect that the SUBJECT LINES in a story get at least a second look to make sure that there are not typos in the FIRST TWO WORDS?
But I'd say in all honesty that folks can distribute InstantDB free of charge. If someone tells you something in a form that can be verified somehow, and you base decisions on that in good faith, then there it's not as easy for the company to balk out as it might like to think.
That said, a concerted effort should be made to unsupport InstantDB. Contacting their customers directly can be usefull. I've already started with those that I could identify in a few seconds, and will be making the rounds when I get more info.
These are companies doing business with lutris and folks may want to be cautious doing business with them if they are working with what appears to be a con artist:
room33
indiqu
gravityrock.com
paremus
rarefire technologies
i-engineering.com
inet6/inetsys
mobiltee
eApps
eSavio
Lutris is also laying off employee's, sending the following email:
I am disappointed to inform you that you will be in the group of 35 employees being laid off
tomorrow. Sometime in the next half hour, a company executive will bring you a packet of
information for you to read this evening. Once you have received this packet, please take
the remainder of the day off. You must leave your computer here in your cubicle at Lutris.
--
Great to see someone pull together some pretty weasily threads, in the real world these folks would be scum. If someone could list the names of the folks on these threads that were in the weasel dept I'd appreciate that for future reference, you never know where they will turn up again, these scum have a nasty tendency to jump the ships they sink.
Please rember that the above is a rather uninformed opinion based on the information I read on the net, Do your own DD before basing decisions on it of course...
OpenDivX vs. DivX4
Use the open source community to test & improve your stuff for you, and then close things down and make money with it.
Hey, it seems to be a succesfull formula! Any more examples of stuff like this happening?
I know of one: http://www.freechess.org
Take GPL code, improve it a little, and then sell it off (to the USCL in this case). Doesn't matter it's a GPL violation...the author can't prove anything anyway, unless he pays $$$ lawyers.
--
GCP
Furthermore, nobody can make source "closed source" if they don't own it. So, if the open source community made valuable contributions and those became a key part of this software, the company can't make it closed source. The fact that they can suggests to me that few such contributions have come in.
Friends can betray you. But in business, and open source is part of the business world, what matters is contracts and licenses. If business partners violate contracts, you take them to court. Otherwise, if you don't like the license under which a piece of open source software is delivered or accepts contributions, don't use it and don't contribute to it. And if there is a possibility that some open source software with an otherwise OK license goes "closed source", you should keep frequent public mirrors of the open source versions so that open source development can continue when the need arises.
There are plenty of pieces of software that are semi-open where I have said "no thanks" (I won't name names, but I have complained about them enough on /.). I suggest others pay a little more attention to licenses as well before investing their time and effort in using or enhancing other people's software.
InstantDB is strange in that it was often referred to as an open source product by many (including Lutris employees), but no one outside Lutris ever actually got to see the source.
"Open Source" isn't a trademarked expression, so people should watch out if someone is calling something "Open Source". There is a telltale sign: the source itself, and a licence attached to it, that gives anyone the right to do development of the source and distribute the source further under the same conditions. It should also ensure that this will continue to be so in the future. That license may be BSD or GPL or something similar, but it has to be there, together with the source. Unless that happened the thing is simply not open source.
This only serves as an example, that people should be more aware of the difference between marketing speech and what actually is reality. "Open Source" is a good 'brandmark' for marketing some products, even Microsoft tries to benefit from that with their "Shared Source". Now with Microsoft everyone understood the difference between marketing talk and what really happens. Why isn't the same scrunity applied to the rest of the business? If someone announces they will "soon" go Open Source the answer should be (more or less): "Fine, when?". When they fail to get their stuff together and fail to show some of the source (hey, we even have a term for that, it's vaporware) some scathing remarks and general awareness of foulplay should come up a little earlier than more than a year after the announced date, and a fait accompli, so the rest of the community knows them as the jokers they are and they get some negative publicity (after they cashed in on the Open Source "Trademark").
This is not meant to be critique about the article, it is asking, why the issue was raised so late and hoping the next time people will be more alert.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Please checkout GNU Classpath and GNU ClasspathX extensionsor the Gnu Compiler for Java if you are really interested in Free solutions for Java. Without those free foundations, Java programs will never be truely Free Software!
One quote from one of the emails:
- 2) Over the past year, several of us received explicit permission from Lutris to use InstantDB without payment. We have proceeded on that assurance. I don't believe Lutris can unilaterally and arbitrarily rescind that. Nor do I think Lutris can limit that approval to those to whom it was explicitly extended.
Uh, can we get a lawyer in here? If I'm not completely insane, it sounds like *any* venture that was operating under the understanding that InstantDB would be available free of charge could absolutely sue Lutris for the cost of migration? I imagine that this will not happen, just because the cost of migration will probably be a lot less than the cost of legal action. Isn't Lutris responsible for these sorts of assurances? Hell, is there a case for fraud?
I realize that the answer to all of these questions might be "no" but I don't see why.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Since Java is so incredibly easy to decompile
how about decompiling it, reconstructing the
source and distributing it as open source?
What licence did it come with when originally
distributed?
Those of us who use Zope are feeling much better than the Enhydra crowd these days. We've know for years that the rug would one day come out from underneath them just like it did with the Ars Digita community.
Zope Corporation has been moving in the complete oposite direction as Lutris and AD. They've recently opened their CVS to community check-ins, and are working with RMS to make their already open-source license GPL compatable.
When Zope Corporation hired the PythonLabs team, they heartily agreed to turn over the copyright of Python to Guido van Rossum personally, to be later transfered to the a community led Python Software Foundation a non-profit organization whose members consist of all of the developers who have CVS check-in ability.
It's obvious (to me, at least) that you can't build a sucessful open-source application based on a closed source platform like Java. Sooner or later, the virus of commercialism will invade the mindset of all the layers above it. Immagine if Apache, or Emacs were written in a closed source language. They would not be what they are today.
So, hopefully all those folks will learn their lesson and switch to a real open source object-oriented web application platform like Zope.
Yeah Yeah, I know, the open source community has a set of more or less unwritten rules which you should follow when you play in that arena. Not doing so is at the very least dishonorable. Unfortunately companies have their own set of rules and honor (And just about everything else, often including ethics and legality) tends to take a back seat to making money. You can't trust the corporate world not to stab you in the back because they will for a buck. The corporate world will use you while it's convient, fuck you the moment you cease to be useful and sue you if you try to bitch about it. Don't ever trust those assholes.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
'enjoinder' is the polite legal way of saying "you lied to me you bastard, but I'm going to hold you to your word". It basically is the principle that if someone got you to do something based on a lie, you can continue to act as if the lie were sincerely meant... depending on the jurisdiction, this may go as far as forcing the liar to live up to the lie. What this boils down to is that, if 'enjoinder' applies here, people should, at the very least, be able to continue to distribute the old binaries based on the public promises that they were, and would continue to be, free to do so.
It may even extend so far as to be able to get a court injunction forcing the company to release their current sources so that people can use it as open source.
Any real lawyers out there that can say what word I'm talking about?
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
But it seems to me that Lutris made a verbal contract with developers that they would open source the product. They went so far as to put that verbal contract in writing in various emails and on the web pages that this guy was able to pull out of his cache (pun intended).
Perhaps Eben Moglen would have an opinion about this?
Dan Barber
Mojolin: Linux, Unix and embedded jobs and resumes
My understanding is that J2EE comes from Sun in basicall three parts: specification and other documentation in natural language; the Java API; and a sample implementation. I think these parts are fairly distinct. I want to know which of these is the "problem".
Obviously, every implementor must make use of the documentation. Normally, this does not taint an implementation, but Lutris claims that "reading the specification for J2EE forces the reader to agree to the SCSL". The J2EE specification license I can find doesn't say that. Though it is fairly restrictive, it doesn't seem to prohibit a free implementation. So is the specification a problem or not?
The JBoss response says that JBoss uses "seven jars" from Sun. I'm guessing these jars define the API, ie, they consist entirely of interfaces, abstract classes, and (maybe) trivial classes. Is this necessary? Most free implementations of proprietary API's include their own header files as free software. Does Sun claim a copyright on the API itself? What is the legal status of such claims, since there is basically only one way to express an API? Or did JBoss simply choose not to write their own versions?
Finally, does Enterprise Enhydra use essentially the same Sun classes as JBoss, or do they borrow some of the sample implementation as well? Do they claim that their commercial nature, or some pre-existing agreement with Sun, makes their situation different?
Thanks if you can untangle this.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
There is an anternative RDBMS to instantDB. It's called HypersonicSQL and it's been implemented in Java. I don't know if it has as many features as IDB, but you have an open alternative. HSQL it's BSD'ed BTW.
Wow. Talk about clueless. What do you think Oracle is written in?
A) Using it to build sites for customers
B) Charge support fees from anyone else who picked it up, used it, and needed help. C) Continue to serve as sole arbeiter of development on Enhydra, which conveniently discourages competing parties from doing the same.
Not a bad model, really, just that the bottom fell out of the e-tailing industry wasn't in their plan.
I knew some day this would happen. Development of internet enterprises would begin consolidation, as there's still a lot of money in it, and we would end up with a few large companies holding sway. Microsoft has been working in this direction for years...too bad for them they don't have a decent server.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
> What do you think Oracle is written in?
C++. Possibly C. Oracle has been around a lot longer than Java. It contains a JVM now, it certainly doesn't run on one. If it's written in Java now, you bet your ass it's compiled, in which case it's almost identical to C++ (object layout and vtables and all).
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
GNU Classpath and its related projects, while trying to fulfill the noble goal of creating an open source implementation of the Java Runtime Environment, has nothing to do with Litris' "predicament". Sun's JRE (and a number of others, notably the IBM's JRE) can be used freely to execute any kind of software, and is fully compatible with open source.
As the article and many people here have pointed out before, it is easily demonstratable that the whole issue is a smoke screen -- equivalent open source projects (e.g. JBoss) have never had problems with Sun.
Sun's policy in respect to Java (including the JRE) has been to provide a mechanism for the definition of standard specifications via the Java Community Process, and let players in the market provide different implementations of those specifications. The JCP is also obliged to provide a reference implementation and a compatibility testing suite to ensure that different implementations work well with each other. The whole idea is precisely to avoid vendor lock-in and to promote excellence via competition between different implementations (compare this with .NET). This policy plays very well with open source, since it allows the open source community to create competitive and highly compatible implementations of those standards. JBoss (an open source implementation of the J2EE specification) is excellent example of that.
I've been using JBoss for over a year now. It's full featured, is very fast, has a small footprint, and is just generally a brilliant piece of work. Enhydra Enterprise was a long-term vaporware effort -- at least until recently. There were alphas and betas for over a year, but it just never seemed to become ready.
In addition, JBoss is elegant. It is modular and based on JMX. You can plug in new modules and your own code ridiculously easily. JBoss also requires no assembly/deployment phase for EJBs. It's just brilliant.
JBoss has a very active, dedicated bunch of J2EE gurus building it and answering questions in its forums and on mailing lists. The development activity on JBoss seems very high, and the users and developers are very accessible. Enhydra's forums always seemed stale and not very helpful. To me, it has always looked like all of the best people were working on JBoss while Enhydra was just sort of sitting there.
We use JBoss as our main J2EE development platform and deploy either on JBoss or one of the commercial J2EE servers. JBoss starts up fast, hot deploys web applications, EJBs, and connector resources with lightning speed. It comes with standard, easy integration to Tomcat. We're very happy with it.
I think JBoss just won. I also happen to think it would be a great addition to any standard Linux distribution... but that might be offtopic.
As noted in the original story, the old version (perhaps a link to http://enhydra.enhydra.org/ would have been more appropriate) is still free. This license perpetuates itself in the code:
So they let you know that this source must remain under this license, and that any derivatives must carry it, and that they can revise the license at any time (for future versions of the code). They even said that they could do that to you, but you went and spent time and effort on it anyway.
The only thing really keeping anyone from basically ignoring this license is the following paragraph:
As long as you keep code compartmentalized, you only have to keep *their* code (or any code which has been submitted to them) with this license agreement.
Anyway, what all this boils down to is that they gave all the rights you could ever ask for, but that includes their right to take it back. They could also revise the license in future versions to say "From this point on, all code is the exclusive property of Lutris, and will be closed for all of eternity, and used by us as we laugh and spit in your face." Because they reserve the right to revise the license at any time, this is what you asked for, and what you got. Oh sure, at the time they change it, you can fork the existing code under the old license, because they said you could continue to use the old one, but that doesn't change the fact that they can (and apparently will) railroad your code at a moment's notice. Your code is after all required to carry their license now that it's a part of their project, and submitted back to them.
So while closing it might be sleazy, it's completely legal, within their rights, and you all should have expected it. Corporations don't have souls, or morality. Sometimes its members do, but it's rare that the people with morals (or at least those willing to exercise them) are the people in power.
Put another, blunter way; If you grease yourself up and bend over, someone will f*ck you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's just not true. The API is licensed from Sun under the Sun Binary Code License (or something like that) which allows you to download the Interface jars and the Javadoc for them and to redistribute them as part of a packaged whole. You can redistribute them with code you have under your own license - such as BSD or LGPL. The combination of two licenses in a single product is weird - what happens if Sun decides to revoke the license you have to redistribute the API classes? Well, then you'd have to go to a two-part distribution process - part 1, download the API jars, part 2, download the Open Source project. This would be annoying, but not fatal. The fact is that just looking at the Sun API itself in no way pollutes you from being able to write an implementation of that API. So the concept of "clean-rooming" it is irrelevant, frankly. Just don't look at anything that's SCSLed, like some of their implementations of their APIs.
As far as I'm concerned, free as in speech is always preferred to free as in beer (Because free as in beer can always be taken back by the provider- free as in speech has some room to move (As in I think it's time to Fork Enhydra...)).
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I missed the part where anyone outside Lutris contributed to the code (after its acquisition). How could they contribue when the source was never released? Could you point me to this please?
He's not naive. It's what they taught (and was in sway when it was probably taught) in school. I know- it's part of what they taught me in school. It's just that things have changed (or is that corrupted) over the years so that many can't recognize what we were here in the US.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
So Enhydra may have other intellectual property problems.
I didn't see any mention of such code contributions in the article. My understanding from reading the article is:
I agree with you about the problem of pseudo-free licenses, but that does not seem to be what is happening here.
Most people did: SunOS was widely available, with sources, it worked reasonably well, and it ran on good and fairly cheap hardware. Linux took off because nothing quite like it existed for PC hardware.
I agree, though, about Java and the risks inherent in Sun's Java license. But the biggest problem with Java and open source is that Java is used so little in major open source projects. If the open source community used Java widely and developed their own standards (say, an "xAWT" or a "jGTK"), Sun would either become irrelevant or they would be quick to "donate" their libraries. And existing open source Java implementations will only get better if people actually use them.
Incidentally, Intel ORP is an open source and rather efficient Java VM, beating Sun's JVM on many numerical benchmarks.
>As the poster states, he has no exposure to Java RDBMS systems, so he obviously has no clue what he is talking about.
FYI, kid: I've dealt with databases in some very high-demand applications (such as supporting derivatives trading operations, where the database was the legal "system of record"), and if you're defending the idea of writing an RDBMS in Sun's travesty of a programming language, then you're the one who doesn't know what he's talking about.
Java has no business running outside of a web browser.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
From the article:
InstantDB is strange in that it was often referred to as an open source product by many (including Lutris employees), but no one outside Lutris ever actually got to see the source.
This should have been a great big flashing neon sign right there folks. If no one outside the originating company gets to see the fsckin' source, it AIN'T OPEN SOURCE. How much more simple can you get?
This strikes me, not as a case of an open source program getting closed off by a greedy company, but as a greedy company, who had been lying and calling their (up to then) freeware (not in the GNU sense of free, free as in beer), "open-source" in order to get the warm fuzzy reputation that brings, then backpedalling when they couldn't turn a profit with that. Lutris's deceit was not in closing off the software, but in lying and saying it was OSS in the first place.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
If you think Oracle's written in Java, then you've been smoking too many Sun brochures.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I have a somewhat different take on this.
It was clear to me -- as an Enhydra developer and partner on my current project -- that Lutris was seriously committed to the open source movement. I can't support the idea now circulating that its open source commitment was a bait and switch manever to get free volunteer support from the community. They walked the walk as well as talking the talk. They were firmly committed to ESR's principles in tCatB. Their business model was to give away the software and make their money on services.
The only problem is, the tCatB principles don't work. They haven't worked for anyone. Services revenues don't scale in the nonlinear way that is required to support the extremely high costs of professional-quality software research and development. Everyone who's tried this on a larger scale than the "Dave's Software Shop" four-person consulting business has failed or is currently in the process of failing. Lutris was just one of many groups to be led down the garden path by this unworkable business model.
They started to realize this earlier this year and were thrown into great confusion. Open source isn't just a movement, it's a religion, and it's always painful when your religion turns out to be false. For a while they thrashed. Finally grim economic necessity forced them to what is here being called their "betrayal," which was, to abandon the tCatB business model, and to return to a business model that has historically been successful for many developers. This was a visibly painful transition and they were reluctant to make it, but it was that or go into bankruptcy. (I get the feeling that some zealots here think Lutris should have just marched joyously into martyrdom!)
Their problem was not that they abandoned open source. Their problem was that they believed in it in the first place, without setting up any rational business model, based on ESR's numbers-free hand-waving and on media buzz around the Linux bubble. Had they just worked from a conventional business model to start with, their product would have been just as good (and it is pretty darn good), even more people would have used it, and they would not have become the whipping boy for the remaining (but shrinking) core of religious believers.
The true betrayal was in people who didn't have any understanding of, or concern for, business realities selling Lutris's founders the open source bill of goods and encouraging them to go into business in a way that was foolish and self-destructive. The true betrayal was in proselytizing for a false religion.
Tim
FRAUD: noun: specifically a : intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right (See DECEIT, TRICKERY) b : an act of deceiving or misrepresenting (See TRICK)
The true betrayal was in people who didn't have any understanding of, or concern for, business realities selling Lutris's founders the open source bill of goods and encouraging them to go into business in a way that was foolish and self-destructive. The true betrayal was in proselytizing for a false religion.
I believe you are confusing two fundamentally different things here: 1) the "truth or falsity" of Open Source as a religion (a description that has much merit, BTW), and 2) the viability of a business model based on Open Source.
Evaluating the Open Source Religion's "truth" is waaay tricky: it all depends on how you define its premise. I think your implied premise, which clearly involves building profitable business models on Open Source software, is inapplicable. IMHO, the most applicable premise is something along the lines of, "Open Source produces technically superior and socially desirable software". This premise is demonstrably "true", at least in technical terms; it is also closer to most geeks' ideas of Open Source, and it has nothing whatever to do with making money. By the premise I described, and which I argue to be applicable, the Open Source religion clearly works, hence it cannot reasonably be described as "false". In the final analysis, Open Source and Making Money are no more inherently linked than Christianity and Making Money.
ESR himself has, in my hearing, publicly described what he thinks makes Open-Sourcing a software package a good or a bad idea for a business, and he was crystal-clear that NOT every project can or should be Open Sourced on business grounds. I cannot reconcile the presentation I heard ESR give, OR my reading of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", with the idea that he has sold someone a "bill of goods". I see no evidence of misrepresentation there. To blame ESR for a corporation's starry-eyed rapture with the dot-com fashion is to misassign responsibility that properly belongs to business planners who failed to realistically analyze their business model (and in the dot-com bubble, there have been LOTS of those).
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Lutris is starting to send people unsolicited mail claiming that JBoss may not be a reliable solution. These are unfounded, and JBoss is posting a response on their site.
It's disgusting.