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The FSF, Linux's Hit Men
PrimeNumber writes "Forbes has this story about the Free Software Foundation and its quest for Cisco and Broadcom to release the source of GPL'ed linux source used in routers. Forewarning: The open source community is not portrayed in positive light so you might want to skip reading this. However it did help me gain insight into software from a PHB and suit perspective."
The last several Forbes articles that even mentioned Linux were just plain old bashing.
Now, maybe I'll RTFA.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
1) Hah! Let's try:
There has been more than one story about Microsoft and IBM using licensing or patent disputes in order to screw competitors. SCO's entire existence seems to depend on wanting you "to burn down your own house". Oracle's in there for completeness. I'm sure there's other examples.2) And holy FSOF, since when did complying with the license the software is released under become such an onerous act? When it forbids you to release benchmarks of .NET software (MS)? When it
includes clauses saying "If you're in Europe, and you have the right to
reverse engineer this software, you explicitly give up that right even
though you don't have to" (Synplicity or Matlab, I forget which --
installed recently at work)? Evidently these crack-induced clauses are
perfectly acceptable; why, then, does Forbes' writer swallow a camel and
strain at a gnat?
Grr, this is going to bug me all day...
Carousel is a lie!
[Forewarning: The open source community is not portrayed in positive light so you might want to skip reading this.]
I only read what I want to hear and ignore others perspectives, right or wrong.
Remember "What SCO wants, SCO gets"? Same author. Don't expect any love from him.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
If you look at other articles that Daniel Lyons has written for Forbes, you will see that this man is more or less anti-free software. He wrote an article back in June about SCO vs. Linux. In that article he describes linux users as: "like many religious folk, Linux-loving crunchies [are] convinced of their own rightousness..." This is just another article written by a another man who thinks that Linux will go nowhere because it isn't backed by a major corporation starting with an M.
It's my personal opinion not to read too much into the article, and take it just as it is, an opinion -- someone else's view on what is happening.
The really odd thing is that the defence of the GPL licence will ultimately benefit companies like Cisco if they played the game correctly. These are commodity items, routers, switches etc. By moving to a GPL software base they reduce cost, risk in producing the software for their products, and then can concentrate on the value added parts. Config tools, reliability etc. For example, take the disputed Linksys router. I would have expected Linksys to have plenty ways of defending their product from competition rather than withholding the GPL updates (design rights, patents, trademarks etc). Ok, so it looks like they have messed up in this case with the way they have written their driver, but that shouldn't cloud the fact that *if* they had correctly written their driver they would be able to keep it proprietry.
I am surprised and saddened to see what appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding about the GPL in Forbes.
I am a technology expert with development and management experience, who has used and overseen the use of GPL software in a variety of very large, very recognizable organizations.
If you choose to use GPL software, the rule is simple and straightforward. You are choosing to take some work for free. The authors gave it away. All they ask is that you, too, give it away.
The GPL is the legal manifestation of the idea that it is wrong to take free work and sell it.
If you read some GPL'd work, and then threw it away and wrote something of your own, having taken nothing, you would owe nothing. But if you take this particular work, you must respect the wishes of those who gave it, and add to their collective efforts in the same way.
The popularity of the GPL is such now that many organizations begin to feel threatend by it. In some few cases, a response to this perceived threat has been a remarkably crafted item of disinformation: that the GPL is "viral."
This is a beautiful piece of propaganda, because it conveys, with gorgeous sleight of hand, that, like a virus, the GPL infects without your permission, or perhaps even without your knowledge.
This is a stunning act of deception. From the front lines, with the benefit of over a decade of experience, I can tell that it is unlikely anyone "accidentally" or "unknowingly" takes from this particular pool of free work. One _chooses_ to take it because it's there, it's free, it's been crafted by a community of people without regard for deadlines or profit margins, and because you can fix it yourself if there are problems. You do this only if you find the compromise of giving away any of your changes or improvements on it to be acceptable. Many places do not take this bargain - as well they should not! And many more places find this kind of cooperation is exactly what the doctor ordered.
If, as a manager, you discovered that GPL code has "appeared" in your program against your wishes, you will never find, in the history of the "Free Software Foundation" any situation where, like SCO, all redress is deemed impossible, and blackmail is demanded. (Indeed, metaphorically speaking, SCO demands it not just from you, but all your customers!) Rather, you will find a patient, polite group of academics and engineers, who are eager to avoid conflict, and happy to let you simply correct your mistake, if that's what it is, by removing the free work from your own.
And you will find that this is so even when, though the obstinacy, momentum and ignorance of a large organization, some people dabble with the idea of stealing this free work from and then not giving their changes back - breaking the rule.
There are, as the author points out, many "open source" organizations and licensees that are less restrictive than the GPL, from which an individual or company may choose from in the event that they still wish to get software for free, yet find the GPL rules unsuitable.
But there is nothing more normal and harmless than the GPL, or the people who enforce it. And I must say, none of their actions do damage to the GPL or its continuing, widespread adoption - in fact, they enhance it, since by making people follow the rules, everyone feels more comfortable in sharing their work. Everyone knows that their contribution won't be simply appropriated by SCO or another unscrupulous party and charged for. Only articles like this, which through what I'm sure are a series of honest misunderstandings, can convey a mistaken impression of how the process works, that might give pause to the concept of sharing labor.
Thank you for your time.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Or maybe it just has something to do with it being easier to cross-reference records stored in a database with a unique key, huh? ;)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
No, they just hate copyleft. If one goes along with the assumption that "intellectual property" is just like private property in general, copyleft might indeed seem like a communist plot to promote a concept of The United Soviet States of America (or something like that).
It's one reason why "intellectual property" isn't such a good word. Where I live, there is a rather widely understood word for copyright, patents, trademarks, trade secrets and other similar things. It's immaterial rights and it would be great if it caught on to wider use. Speaking of immaterial rights is rather neutral and doesn't carry any positive or negative payload that I could see.
Forewarning: The open source community is not portrayed in positive light so you might want to skip reading this
Does this statement strike anyone else as idiotic? If someone doesn't agree with "the community" we just ignore them? Talk about sticking your head in the sand.
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
Yes, he does:
He thinks that releasing the code is a far worse penalty than having to pay money. And, here's the scary thing: he's right. Most companies would much rather spend a couple million to make the license problem go away then have to release any intellectual property.Granted, they should have known what they were getting into before they used the license. Because they are using a product that has a license for use, and they implicitly demonstrate agreement with that license (by distributing the work), then they should follow the terms of that license. It just happens that in this case the terms of the license may require them to do more than they really want to do.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
The sour slant of this article and its sympathy towards intellectual property theft does great harm to the integrity of Forbes Magazine.
The GPL license is very clear and up-front in its terms and conditions, and is far more permissive than traditional copyright licenses. However it does state clearly that if you do not abide by the limited restrictions it does enforce, you cannot distribute the covered work.
This article, in the face of all reason, appears to suggest that readers should feel sympathy for companies who break copyright law by distributing copyrighted works without ahering to the terms of the copyright license.
Furthermore, the article goes on to lambast the Free Software Foundation, a non-profit watchdog group, for attempting to enforce its own copyrights.
The author ludicrously justifies his hostility towards the FSF by stating that the FSF is more "dangerous" than other businesses holding copyrights, because it is insists that violators of its copyright stop distributing its covered works.
The FSF is also derided for apparantly having a limited budget, as if its limited funds are somehow justification for others to violate its copyrights.
The FSF are referred to using terms associated with communist propaganda, which add nothing to the intellectual quality of the article.
The language the article uses appears to make the FSF appear suspicious and nefarious for attempting to come to an amicable resolution with other companies before seeking legal protection.
Finally, the article ends with the authors opinion that it is a "pity" that companies will settle with the FSF when they are caught distributing covered works without a license, instead of going to court.
If this is the kind of article one can expect to find in Forbes these days, I don't know how much longer I will be a reader.
The problem is that the engineers are deciding that Linux is a great way to save time and money in embedded environments without realizing that the viral nature of the GPL is going to screw their company.
As the story mentions, the BSD licensed products provide an easy alternative without the licensing issues. It just takes an awareness of the options to realize that using Linux in the first place is a silly idea for commercial products.
--
Use Vobbo for Video Blogs
I hope someone reads it.
t'nera semordnilap
Exactly, the whole "Linux is a shadow/communist conspiracy" thing annoyed the heck out of me. I wrote the editor this letter:
FSF ombudsmen, not "hit men"
Dear Editor,
In response to Daniel Lyons' piece, "Linux's Hit Men" dated October 14, 2003, I respectfully disagree with the author's conclusions.
Lyons seems to take offense that Cisco should be required to release the source code for the router software used in their Linksys wireless router, which was derived from GPL-covered code. When the Linksys engineers sat down to design their product, they had three options for the software. They could either a) license router software from another vendor, like Microsoft, which developed the Windows CE embedded operating system, b) write their own software from scratch, or, c) take advantage of code developed by the open-source community. Since option a) would require them to purchase a license for each router they sold, and thereby eat into their profits, and option b) would surely cost millions of dollars and months if not years of development time, they chose option c), with full knowledge of the requirements of the GPL, which are completely up-front, and in no way "onerous," as Mr. Lyons describes them. Where licensing Windows CE from Microsoft requires you to pay Microsoft money, licensing GPL software requires you to contribute back to the pool of open source software from which you benefited.
Lyons mentions that: "the $129 device has been a smash hit, selling 400,000 units in the first quarter of this year alone," and then goes on to say that the "the Free Software Foundation doesn't want royalties--it wants you to burn down your house..." The problem with that conclusion is that Cisco didn't build the house. Their $129 device, of which they have sold 400,000 units of, would have cost much more, and taken much longer to develop and get to market if they hadn't leveraged the free software provided by thousands of volunteers over the past ten years. Is it too much to ask that they make a small contribution of software back to the community, which provided them with software that allowed them to make millions of dollars?
Finally, I question the author's motives and biases. I wonder how Mr. Lyons would have reported this story if Cisco were distributing Windows CE on their devices, without paying royalties to Microsoft, or failing to abide by the far more restrictive policies in their license? The author states that "For months, in secret, the Free Software Foundation...has been making threats..." when, in fact, it has been widely reported in the technical media that the FSF has made requests for the source code from Cisco. The language of the article makes Linux sound like some of shadow-communist conspiracy. "Linux's Hit Men?" "The dark side of the free software movement?" "Comrade?"
Some objectivity and a modicum of research, please, Mr. Lyons.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I'd suggest it is very important to read this. I think it's a bit simplistic to say that Forbes is a "Microsoft shill." Rather, Forbes is heavily invested in the status quo of business circa the early 21st century, and is naturally threatened (and apparently not a little confused) by open source and what it represents.
Anyone who bothers to give it a little thought realizes that in the modern economic system, the wealth of the 5% that own 85% of everything is protected by a business environment where the barriers of entry are too high to permit the appearance of significant competition from below. Every once in a while, emerging technologies can be harnessed to create an Apple or a Microsoft to challenge the more traditional, say, IBM.
Now, it's plain enough that we among the 95% are largely responsible for all of this wealth getting shuffled around. We do the work, we buy the products. Our retirement plans sit around for 40 years, a nice capital base in the market while the fat cats try to speculate their way to another billion. In general, we aren't able to muster sufficient organization or marshall enough of our resources together to have a conscious, guided effect on these things.
It's little surprise, then, that Forbes falls back on the rhetoric of Communism and revolution to characterize the Open Source movement, because it represents a similar kind of threat to that system. Labor unions, for example, represent an attempt to collectivize the theoretical power of a group (workers are required for business to be done, workers can choose to see themselves in a collective bargaining position opposite those that own the business) to shift the balance of power between labor and management. Communism represents the attempt to acheive this reordering on the national scale through conventional political means (democratic processes and conquest). Open source has succeeded up to this point by a similar route - harnessing the distributed power of a group of individuals to achieve results normally available only to major players.
Unlike these things, though, while the Open Source "movement" may be informed by an ideology, the integrity of its product is maintained by an adherence to the strictly capitalist, legal definition of intellectual property. What is truly offensive to the Forbes set is that the grubby horde would have the audacity to coopt one of THEIR legal power tools to create a product that nakedly opposes the dynamics of the status quo.
The basic argument of this article, if you strip away the snide asides about the irony of those open source commies suing people for violating their I.P. just like regular businessmen, fercryin'outloud, is that by legally defending it's licenses, the Open Source community will discourage people who don't wish to abide by those licenses from adopting software released under them. Uh, yes, that is correct, sir. Businesses which wish to develop proprietary technologies with closed source software should not use GPL code.
Is Forbes genuinely incapable of understanding that the whole point of Open Source is that it represents a parallel software development strategy that is opposed to the conventional business paradigm of proprietary I.P., or are they engaged in conscious propaganda in defense of the status quo? In the end it doesn't matter, the result is the same. The principle of open source licensed software is a genuine economic threat to the conventional I.P. business paradigm, but it is completely impotent if the licenses are not enforced. So I'd say, don't skip this article - study it carefully and learn the strategy of your oponents.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. BB
What I've never understood is how people can object to the "viral" GPL, yet have no objection to propriatary licenses, which are equally viral. Linksys needed an OS for their router. They could have paid SCO huge bux for the rights to the Unix source. Presumably MS has its source available for embedded apps, also at high prices. Had they chosen to use SCO's Unix they not only could have kept their changes secret, the license would have required that they do so. So the secrecy license scheme is also "viral".
Modifying GPLed code is an exchange, just as much as using non-GPLed code is. With non-GPL stuff, you exchange money for code. With the GPL you exchange access to your changes for code. What is with this pathetic whining: "But we wanted to keep our changes secret." If you want to keep your changes secret either build your own damn OS, or license one of the propriatary ones by paying lots of money. The FSF is about exchanging access to code for access to code, not about giving away code
More to the point, of course the FSF sues people who violate their license, just as MS and SCO sue those who violate their license. Likewise, the FSF thinks that its system is superior and would like to see it supplant the propriatary system. Why is this bad? MS and SCO certainly would like to see their system prevail. Apparently, Forbes can't stand to see actual competition...
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
Nowhere in this article is it mentioned that the people who choose to use GPL code are obligated by the rules of the license - it's not as if this is somehow hidden from public view. The author of the article treats the FSF and the GPL as if they play some sort of 'gotcha!' game. Nothing could be further from the truth. The GPL was designed by people who hated the thought of being ensnared by proprietary software - a real 'gotcha' if there ever was one. The way GPL code got to so usable and stable was because it was shared by design!
Why not focus on the fact that these criminal corporations are STEALING from thousands of individual contributors of GPL code worldwide? Linksys didn't code what they're using and they're not even being asked to PAY for it! The bargain is - they need to share what they've modified - end of story. The FSF has an obligation to stand up for the 'little guy' because... Well... Who else would? You can bet that if I took a piece of Cisco router code and put it in a "Chordsoft Router" they'd sue me for everything I had - and rightly so. I deserve to be sued for using proprietary software under their license agreement. Can't hack the terms of the agreement? Simple. DON'T USE IT!
The FSF was doing things 'in secret' - not for some dark motive, but because they didn't want to make a specticle out of corporations they are in negotiations with. Contrast this behavior with the BSA who routinely lines up companies and individuals for public inspection. Ask Ernie Ball (music manufacturer) about it sometime.
But everyone in the industry knows that GPL'd code - particularly network kernel stuff is the best there is. With so many eyes viewing, fixing, modifying, and tweaking it, it's as perfect as perfect gets. It's also very tempting for companies like Lineo and Linksys to appropriate it because it's so easy to do. But when you do the crime, shouldn't you do the time?
And pardon me, but I don't see $65,000 as a big settlement - these are reasonable costs associated with having to do this research in the first place. It's certainly not like when you have organizations like the BSA demanding MILLIONS for violations of their copyright holders.
How about a little more balance Forbes? Truly horrible 'reporting'.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."