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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."
But after reading the article, the one thing that sticks out to me is "What if the test suite is flawed, or has a bunch of bugs in it?" So then the test suite that has gone out to everyone unmodified, and then it circulates a few hundred times before people find the bug...then you have tons of stuff designed to work with a flawed test suite and when the test suite is fixed, there is the potential that previously working code (tested with the suite) will be broken! Maybe I am just a pessimist....
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.
Possibly.
It depends on just how "closed" the closed-source component of the partnership is. If it's something like Java, which is mostly open in its technological aspects, but legally closed, and there is an undertaking from the owner that there will be no GIF-style schenanigans, then why not?
On the other hand, if we're talking about, say, the MS Word "standard", then I just don't think that a partnership with Open Source is possible. There's no real reason why an Open Source project would need to use such a standard anyway, so I think the answer probably has to be "probably not"
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.
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.)
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
Actually, they work together all the time. A major example is Samba, which implements Microsoft's mostly-closed SMB protocol. Or the open-source implementations of Microsoft's video codecs.
But what Sun is after is different. They want an open source license that only permits those modifications which preserve compatibility with Sun's specifications.
Sun is suffering from a classic misinterpretation of what on open source license is. They're thinking if they can just get the right secret handshake, they can gain entry to the club.
The real secret is, there is no secret handshake. While it certainly helps if a license is phrased in such a way that it appears to match the Open Source Definition, the only real test of a license is whether it lets people do what they need/want to do.
Sun's problem is that they know that people want to produce non-conformant implementations. They feel they have to stop them doing that. This goal is, by its very nature, incompatible with an open source license. No amount of clever wording is going to change that.
fish and pipes
Sun should just take a lesson from the Python Software Foundation. Although I don't like how Python's current implementation basically acts as a de facto standard (there should be a real standard rather than just a reference implentation that doesn't really reference anything), Python's implementation and "standard" are both open. Anyone can take Python and fork it in incompatible directions. Just take a look at all the posts in comp.lang.python regarding Python-derived languages.
How has this affected Python? Not a bit. If anything, it's encouraged innovation through the Stackless and IronPython projects.
I think what Sun is really worried about is trademark dilution. If that is the case, why not just specifiy that any derivative works must be named something other than Java? The only practical effect this would have is to make the licence GPL incompatible, since most people will rename a fork anyway. However, it does preserve Sun's trademark.
Sun could still certify implementations as Java compatible, giving them the right to use the phrase, too. If there were a reasonable fee involved for certification, then Sun wins another revenue stream. It's a win-win.
Why is this so difficult for Sun to see?
http://neokosmos.blogsome.com
Linux conforms pretty closely to POSIX and SUS, which are closed standards. GCC conforms to ISO C99 (at least, when you tell it to). Firefox conforms to RFC 2068 and HTML 4.01. Most OSS programs conform to some standard or other. Most projects are not able to change the standard and unwilling to break compatibility.
The real issue is how much is left unspecified by the standard and available for innovation. Good standards will contain well-defined areas of uncertainty, where the behavior is entirely up to the implementation to specify, with good ideas coming to be required parts of later standards.
In the case of java, any option starting with -X to either java or javac is non-standard. So you just have to make your exciting new features depend on a -X flag and you'll pass the test suite (which, by definition, won't use any non-standard options).
The DoD retained the trademark for Ada, and you have to pass the test suite to call your implementation Ada. The GNU Ada Translator (GNAT) passes just fine.
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
I would have to say that my first impression is that your solution sounds like a great idea.
However...
Remember that Sun did get stung a bit back by a little Java-like offshoot that wouldn't have passed their test suites. Remember Visual J++? Trademark protection wouldn't have helped there, J++ != Java.
They are probably looking to avoid a repeat of the same "mistake".
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.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
This is exactly how OpenGL works.
...) All non-standard extensions just can't begin with glXYZ(). Official extensions begin with ARB_XYZ and in the next version(s), they turn into glXYZ() once they have been formaly approved.
There is an open published standard that any developer can use for free or non-free software. For OpenGL implementations, they have some sort of dual-licensing. FOSS operating systems have a free (free beer) license. However closed source implementations have to pay a fee.
No matter what kind of software is created, they *all* have to pass a compatibility test suite, created and managed by the ARB. With revison numbers, the OpenGL standard is fairly easy to follow and to extend. (1.2, 1.3,
While OpenGL has been criticized for being slow to face competition from Direct3D, the standard is here to stay, clearly defined.
IMHO, Sun should look into OpenGL type of managment. It looks very close to what they are trying to accomplish.