Open Source And Closed Standards?

jaaron writes "Can open source and closed standards work together? That's the question asked by Kevin Bedell in his O'Reilly weblog article. The issue springs from questions on an OSI mailing list, hinting that Sun Microsystems is looking for an open source license that would require derivatives to maintain test suite compatibility. Under such a scheme Sun could maintain control of the Java API but allow open implementations."

Comments

Bah

[ThoreauHD]

I'm gonna stay out of this one flame war. When diversity means less options, then I'm all for closed. Until then.. Darwin is in control.

Open Source Works with Closed Standards:1 Caveat

[reporter]

Open source can work with closed standards under 1 caveat: the open-source programmers may need to rename a variant on the closed standards.

The situation is analogous to building a chip that runs an instruction set architecture (ISA) owned by a competitor. The ISA is a closed standard in the sense that the company owning the ISA has trademarked its name. For example, MIPS technology trademarked the name "MIPS". A competitor, Lexra, then implemented a subset of the MIPS ISA, omitting 2 instructions. Lexra said that its chip is MIPS ISA compatible. MIPS sued and won. If Lexra had, instead, labeled its chip "MIPS ISA flavored", not "MIPS ISA compatible", then there would be no legal problems.

Another good analogy is Microsoft incorporating the Java runtime environment in its browser. The environment was not fully compatible with Sun's closed-standard for the Java runtime environment. Sun sued and won. If Microsoft had claimed that the browser was equipped with a "Java flavored runtime environment" or "JavaPlus[tm] runtime environment" (and trademarked "JavaPlus"), then there would be no legal problems.

I do not see a problem here.

Open source is now a credible movement. The open-source development lab (OSDL) and the free software foundation (FSF) have sufficient clout that if any team of talented programmers created a language called "JavaPlus", derived from and mostly (but not entirely) compatible with the closed-standard Java, there is the strong likelihood that JavaPlus would come to dominate the market for Java. Then, Sun would need to kiss OSDL's or FSF's ass. Sun would be forced to alter the Java standard to make it compatible with JavaPlus.

Sweet. Sweet revenge.

I think it's brilliant

[yaphadam097]

Maybe it's just because I've been doing Java development exclusively for the past three years. Or, maybe it's because I've been doing Extreme Programming exclusively for the last two and this gels extremely well with the idea of Customer Tests which are at the core of what I do. But, I think this is absoulutely brilliant.

Essentially, "Do whatever you want, but you can't call it Java unless it passes our compatibilty suite." Thus the core vision of "write once run anywhere" is preserved but the community is given the freedom (And, yes, I do know what that word means) to enhance and bugfix. BTW, it is already pretty easy and wouldn't become any harder to expand beyond core java by adding additional libraries. The difference would be that you could distribute the whole thing under a single open source license.

The one thing you couldn't do would be to change the language itself. But then, maybe I'm missing something, but if you don't care about compatibility why use java in the first place?!? It's not like there aren't good alternatives out there that will let you do whatever you want (Perl, Python, C++, etc.) The whole advantage of Java is that it is so prolific, and it is so because of it's rigorously maintained compatibility/portability (And strong advocacy by Big Blue among others... who like it because of it's portability across the many platforms they offer and support.)

Doesn't really mix

[joe_plastic]

If Bob Scheifler had read the Open Source definition he would have noticed that maybe criteria 8 and 10 contends with what he wanted to accomplish.

8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product: The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a particular software distribution.
His test suite would be another program.

10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral:No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.
The environment to be tested might not support all of the I/O that his suite might need in order to pass. IE maybe it has some combination of no writable filespace, no gui, no network connection, no terminal....

I wish the definition was more clear that the license itself shouldn't restrict the kinds of modifications that can occur. If that is impied then criteria 3 is abused as well.
The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software. You are allowed to make modification as long as the md5sum of the resultant file is cc4e48a5fe0ba15b13a98b3fd34b340e ;->

Re:Sun will Wither Away

[thisgooroo]

"Can open source and closed standards work together?

No they can't really

tell me, how open are posix, ANSI C, or the internet standards? are linux, *bsd, apache open source or not?

"Under such a scheme Sun could maintain control of the Java API but allow open implementations."

Sun never learns. When they got into fight over java with Mircrosoft the result was MS making .NET.

MS put out an incompatible java in yet another attempt to control the internet. in order to prevent that, sun had to do something. so MS didn't like the outcome and decided to do its own standard. fine, but at least we can pretty much rely on the java we have installed on our systems run whatever claims to be java

Re:This is BS

[Eivind Eklund]

You are repeating a lie.

As a developer with the FreeBSD project, I can say with certainity that there do come benefits from proprietary derivates of BSD-

Specific examples:

• The entire SCSI subsystem of FreeBSD (CAM) comes from a proprietary derivate
• The entire netgraph subsystem (network transformation system) comes from a proprietary derivate
• Many of our core developers are employed by companies making proprietary derivates
• The mpd multilink PPP daemon came from a company that made a proprietary derivate

We've also got a ton of other submissions, but bugfixes and feature enhancements.

Now, we can have an economics debate about which license results in the most contributions - but claiming that "if a company uses your source in a closed product you dont get any future benefit" is plain misinformation.

Eivind.