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The State of the Open Source Union, 2004
The biggest non-story of the year was SCO's legal efforts. So far SCO has not been able to make substantial headway with a single one of its legal claims, and indeed has suffered a number of significant setbacks in court.
This is certainly good news for Linux and open source. Going back five or six years, clearly one of the major obstacles to widespread adoption of open source software was the uncertain legal status of both the software and the licenses. While this aspect of open source is still an unfinished saga -- more on that shortly -- the inability of SCO, through either legal or PR channels, to undermine Linux gives reason for confidence about the future.
The real story about SCO in 2004 has in fact been the telling of that story. While mainstream media coverage of SCO has varied widely -- sometimes accurate, sometimes resembling coverage of the OJ Simpson trial -- Groklaw has emerged as a steady voice of reason and objectivity adeptly defusing all attempts at "FUD" PR around the case.
2004 has been, especially as an election year, a controversial year for the phenomenon of blogging. Whether blogging will provide a sustainable alternate voice in journalism is very much an open question. A few blog sites, however, have shown what a handful of dedicated individuals can do in the face of much larger, and better funded PR machines. Groklaw is an outstanding example of the positive journalism effect that blogging can have.
The legal front brought other good news for the open source community. Norway's Supreme Court acquitted Jon Johansen, and the Norwegian Economic Crime Unit opted not to appeal the decision. In the United States the Digital Millenium Copyright Act still remains the law of the land, but the Recording Industry Association of America has made little progress in forcing ISPs to disclose the identities of alleged file swappers.
A more troubling legal trend is the shift in debate about the intellectual property status of open source software. The principles behind the "copyleft" approach have gained continued acceptance, and have even been leveraged as an integral part of some business models. The debate now, however, centers more around patents that copyright.
IBM has been out in front of the patent issue. Their open source license was the first to explicitly address patent licensing as an issue above and beyond copyright, and they've taken steps, even recent steps, to see that open source development is unencumbered by patent concerns. IBM is not the only company putting patents in the open source domain. Sun Microsystems recently announced they will make patents available under their recently approved Common Development and Distribution open source license (CDDL).
All of this would seem to be good news for the open source community, especially given that Poland's objections have put a temporary halt to the Europan Union software patent initiative. Appearances can be deceiving, however. IBM is a supporter of software patents. Sun's gesture is in fact intended to create a competitive advantage for OpenSolaris over Linux, since the patent protection Sun offers applies only to work licensed under the CDDL -- in other words, not Linux. In a recent News.com commentary, Bruce Parens said, "So while claiming to make the patents available to open-source developers, Sun can sue folks who work on Linux rather than Solaris."
The biggest patent concern comes from Microsoft. In a speech in Australia, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer claimed that Linux violated more than 200 patents. While this may be more hype -- or hope -- than fact, it does tip Microsoft's hand in terms of what tactics they are willing to use to meet the Linux competitive threat.
PolicyAll other things being equal, customers prefer an open system to a closed one, and vendor choice over vendor lock-in. In the IT world in general, and between Windows and Linux in particular, all other things are not equal, which makes platform choice complicated. More and more, however, organizations are seeing Linux as a viable platform choice that
- Lowers up-front licensing fees
- Has the support and backing of significant technology vendors, whether small, medium (Red Hat), or large (IBM, Novell)
- Avoids vendor lock-in at both the platform and application level
These claims are independent of the more controversial claims about improving security and lowering total cost of ownership. 2004 has added an interesting additional element to the mix: the desire of government organizations outside the United States to not be dependent on a large, American technology company whose revenues exceed the gross national product of most nations.
This software declaration of independence has taken several forms. Sometimes it seems simply to be a negotiating tactic to force Microsoft to lower prices. India may be an example.
Sometimes, however, price is not the issue. Munich, for example, committed to making the switch to Linux despite direct lobbying efforts by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. In the case of a high tech country like Germany, this decision is probably influenced by the reluctance to be dependent on an American company guilty of monopoly practices.
The situation in the developing world is somewhat different. Unshackled by significant requirements of backward compatibility, emerging economies like Venezuela's have a chance to make a clean start and avoid what they perceive as the pitfalls and inefficiencies in older IT infrastructures.
The policy approach in China is even more alarming to traditional technology vendors. China clearly does not want to build an economy dependent on outside production or services, whether it's factories or satellite launches. In the software world China has made it clear that it can and will build its own platform and application stack leveraging open source components, if that is what it has to do to maintain control of its software destiny.
BusinessThe North American market for computer technology has, in many ways, reached the saturation point. A Pentium 4, to say nothing of a 64-bit processor, is already overkill for most office desktop applications. Older versions of the Microsoft Office suite, and older versions of Microsoft Windows, are often quite adequate for business productivity needs. The problem for traditional technology vendors is aggravated by the fact that Linux, Open Office, and other open source software may now be good enough.
On the one hand this accounts for why policy issues and the international technology market have become so important: this is where technology vendors see the biggest opportunity to grow new business. On the other hand, open source is forcing some significant changes in the software market domestically.
The most visible effect of open source has been the commoditization effect. Microsoft, as we've seen, has been forced to acknowledge the competitive impact Linux is having, and to cut prices overseas in response to this competition. Yet even companies like BEA acknowledge that open source will have an increasing commoditizing effect, meaning that they will cede lower levels of the application stack to freely available open source software and seek to add value further up the stack.
The most dramatic concession to commoditization in 2004 has been the announcement that Sun is open sourcing Solaris. Said one Sun executive who asked to remain anonymous, "Do you think we'd be open sourcing Solaris if we had any other way to compete with Linux on price? Of course not."
If anything, the opening of Solaris reinforces that Sun has been unable to find a business model built around Linux. Given that competitors like IBM and HP have, with varying degrees of success, been able to integrate Linux into their business models, one suspects that there are deeper problems at Sun than the opening of Solaris can solve.
The bottom line is that Sun is still trying to compete with, rather than embrace Linux. The CDDL doesn't extend patent protection to anyone working under a different open source License, and the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL, meaning none of the Solaris code can be used to benefit Linux.
This move, of using a license as a competitive tool, is one of the more subtle but more important business trends to emerge from open source in 2004.
The most common approach is a dual-licensing scheme, utilized by Trolltech (for Qt), Sleepycat (for Berkeley DB), MySQL, and newcomer db4objects, among others.
In each case the company makes its core product available under the GPL, or else under a similar viral-type license. Since each of these software products is intended to be embedded within or combined with other software to create a derivative product, companies are forced to make their own product available as open source, or to approach the originating company about separate licensing under proprietary terms.
The result is a very low-cost distribution mechanism for the open source companies, as well as a cheap in-bound sales channel of pre-qualified leads.
Of course, to be able to dual-license, you must have created all the code in question, or have full rights granted to you for all the code in question. Thus this very successful open source business model is incompatible with the open source development model; each of the companies using the dual-license approach does all, or nearly all of their software development in-house.
TechnologyWhat then of the open source development model? Has it enjoyed the growth and widespread acceptance that open source business models have?
Certainly 2004 saw a number of significant releases for open source projects. GIMP 2.0 was finally released, as was Gnome 2.6. Large companies as well as individual projects made strides. IBM announced the release of its Java database, Cloudscape, as open source. Novell released SUSE Enterprise Server 9.
The year's most significant releases were the 2.6 series of Linux kernels, and the 1.0 release of Mono. With 2.6, Linux now has many of the features needed to compete as an enterprise-class server: better multiprocessor support, failover and hot-swap support, better journaling file system support.
Mono is absolutely critical if the open source community is to compete in the application development market. C# and .Net will be important application building blocks for the forseeable future, and Linux and open source need to be viable approaches.
The Debian Project has undergone an interesting evolution in the last year. Long-time Debian users have often complained about the slow pace at which Debian moves, favoring security and stability over feature growth. The result is a very solid server system, but one that, for the end user, often lacks support for advanced hardware.
The solution, which seems so obvious now, is independent distributions that leverage Debian as a base but target the end user with ease-of-use features and hardware-support features that have yet to make it into Debian. Two successful projects heading down this path are Ubuntu, which follows the Gnome approach to usability, and Mepis, which follows the KDE approach to usability. Either distribution will give you an easy install, access to Debian packages and apt-based network updates, but with more advanced hardware support and an improved UI over stock Debian.
By far the biggest development story of the year, however, has been Firefox, the browser component of the Mozilla project.
Timing is everything. Security, privacy, and spyware have become major concerns in 2004. Microsoft has refused to significantly update Internet Explorer (IE) until Longhorn is released, which could be in 2006 (as in "Santa Claus could be real"). The Mozilla Foundation capitalized on this opportunity with a major fundraising blitz for the foundation and PR blitz around Firefox; this included a full-page New York Times ad.
In November, Firefox 1.0 was released, and to date downloads exceed 10 million. Mozilla has raised over $250,000 in its fundraising campaign. While IE's market share still hovers around 90%, Firefox has rapidly grown to 5% market share, and put a dent in IE's market share for the first time in years. Industry analyst Gartner Group has looked at the results of 2004 and declared the browser war open again.
Looking ahead to 2005, it's interesting to ponder the tech sector's differing response to open source business and open source development models. The business models are reasonably well understood and generally accepted now. Not everyone is leveraging open source as a business play, but everyone understands it is one viable strategy to pursue.
On the development side, however, the results of open source continue to confound the establishment. Why did no one see the Firefox phenomenon coming? Equally important, why isn't anyone (AOL) attempting to leverage Firefox's market success and technology advantages?
With Solaris, it's interesting to note that even supporters of OpenSolaris admit it sees no real development savings to opening Solaris; the benefits are all on the marketing side. Ben Rockwood blogs "It's going to take Sun more work to maintain it open source than it will to just leave it closed."
Yes, open source has become mainstream. But that mainstream presence needs to be more than a commodity benefit to companies willing to leverage the results of open source. Will mainstream technology companies figure out how to anticipate and collaborate with open source development as a deep part of their technology strategy? That's a big question that 2005 may answer.
Mark Stone is an open source consultant and freelance writer living in the Sierra Nevada region of Northern California. He can be reached at mark.stone@gmail.com.
I hope Hillary Clintons bill does go through. Although Diebold and the GOP will stonewall it, I think that this would be the PERFECT environment for OSS. Get a university to write it.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
We the People of the United Open Sourcers, in Order to form a more perfect Code Base, abolish FUD, insure programmatic Tranquility, provide for the common security, promote the general technological Welfare, and secure Blessings of Library to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United Open Sourcers of the World.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer claimed that Linux violated more than 200 patents.
Honestly, how do you take such a claim seriously??? If M$ wasn't such a financial juggernaut, this would be hilarious. As it stands, it's depressingly sobering...M$ has the financial clout to do a lot of damage in court, event if the cases are ultimately thrown out.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Been attempting apt-get install plone to work with no success.
So some freelance writer makes a store for /. and all of the sudden it's the offical F/OSS "State of the Union".
CmdrTaco, guys, nice try, but you need to quit stroking your egos now.
This is probably the worst article ever.
This is just a technicality, but it should be noted that the 2.6 branch of the Linux kernel started with 2.6.0, which was officially released December of 2003, _not_ in 2004 as mentioned in the article.
Well at least there weren't 68 clapping breaks and 22 uses of the word "Freedom".
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
It's interesting that the writer would describe Munich's adoption of more OSS-ish stuff as due to an urge not to be dependent on big bad Redmond (a political decision) where as he credits Venezuela (described as an "emerging economy") with embracing a clean start without being weighed down by the "pitfalls and inefficiencies" of traditional systems (implying policy making by technologists, something that doesn't really resonate with current events in that country).
Venezuela, of course, is suffering more from self-inflicted wounds than anything else, and certainly the companies doing business there (or trying to, without getting nationalized) are likely to be making their own IT decisions based on low-friction extensions of how they already do things. It seems more likely that to the extent Chavez' government is making any thoughtful IT policy decisions, it's going to be driven by simple cash, or the lack of it.
The writer's comments on China are also somewhat puzzling. He indicates that China clearly doesn't want to be dependent on outside entities - but that doesn't lead directly to open participation in the OSS-sphere. They (as a matter of government policy, anyway) seem more inclined to establish their own proprietary standards, aimed at making more people dependent on their own industry players' wares and standards. Whether China leverages OSS and plays along, or simply uses that low-cost foothold to build their own stuff and then become MicroChina - we shall see! I think the writer is looking back (and forwards) through a rose-colored monitor on some of this stuff.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Microsoft exists as a business entity. They offer an OS with arguably the most exposure of any OS, one many folks associated directly with general computer use. They offer a number of other products which tie in to, add to and build upon that OS and it's market share.
Why then shouldn't they go ahead and pursue a patent attack strategy in order to crush what they see as the competition? They are bound only to act within the confines of the law. There is no legal reason why they should play nice.
I'm not saying this because I like the possibility, but rather because if Linux supporters can come up with a cogent response to the question and present it to Microsoft in a manner likely to be received without substantial hostility (i.e. something different from "Don't use patents you m!@#$!@# a$$hatz"), then perhaps Microsoft would avoid this approach.
inevitable uncertainties
They've finally set a date - it's going to coincide with the release of Duke Nukem Forever.
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
While thinking philosophically, we see problems in places where there are none. -Wittgenstein
I'm going to JBoss World tomorrow and Wednesday.
Four yearas ago, if I'd said you could generate enterprise-level solutions with open source code, I'd have been laughed at.
Now, with JBoss, and all that goes into it, I can deploy an all-singing, all-dancing J2EE application, for only the cost of the hardware.
Drop in OpenReports, and you've got the complete package: Servlets/JSP/etc..., for the webby bits, JNLP and Swing for the interactive bits, and OpenReports for the bar-chart crowd.
Add in Eclipse as your IDE, and you're good to go.
The next challenge, will be to place this all in a neat little iconified environment so more-naive users can do really powerful things.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Groklaw was objective about SCO? You're joking, right?
/. thinking that for news to be objective, it has to follow your opinions...
Of course, this follows with the stereotypical
-DMZ
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
I think many people (including me) would take offense to this guy packaging Opensource in with Free Software. He also takes the libery to call witness to the greatness of the opensouce development model.
I realize that to many people, OSS and Free Software are synonymous. To those who fall squarely within either camp, the differences are meaningful enough to warrant the existence of two separate groups. This guy seems to fall into the OSS camp, which is fine and well, but one can't have their cake and eat someone else's.
There are fundamental differences.
"Why then shouldn't they go ahead and pursue a patent attack strategy in order to crush what they see as the competition? They are bound only to act within the confines of the law. There is no legal reason why they should play nice."
I think they would be afraid of the fall out that could possibly occur. Linux has gained enough support that an all out attack on it would very possibly bring about an all out attack on software patents and copyright law, as well as more antitrust suits. Their empire would slowly crumble if either of these two things were pushed very hard.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I predict that Open Source will come into its own in 2005. While it has hit some bumps and trouble along the way this year and in recent years, especially with microsoft's flagerant abuse of a number of linux patents, there is no question that the whole concept in general is gaining mass acceptance.
I work in Washinton for one of the senators from Virginia and its interesting to see how even the legislature is starting to look at open source seriously. My boss, who sits on Ways and Means (the committe which is in charge of the budget) and a few of his friends have been talking amongst themselves and they are planning a number of hearings this year to discuss open source in general and more specifically as a way to save goverement money from going to huge software companies like M$ as a way to help cut some goverement spending.
2005 will indeed be an interesting year to watch.
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
Yup, and citizens^H^H^H^H^H^H^Honsumers only exist to make the good people richer. They could have made Civics Class 5 minutes long and still been 100% truthful.
What's viral is copyright law. Mixing anyone's code with yours "infects" your code because it creates a derivative work. The only way you can legally do that with any copyrighted material is if you have permission from the owner (or fall into a Fair Use category).
Some open source licenses grant a blanket permission to do that without any strings attached. Many (like the GPL) do not. Few commercial licenses provide that permission, and many of those that do require some sort of royalty payments.
The GPL isn't viral, it just doesn't allow you to ignore the viral nature of copyright.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
And Monodevelop is not, at it's current point, usable.
.NET. I actually managed to convince the brass that we avoid WinForms, and use GTK# to build our GUIs. I actually convinced them that we can support Sybase as well as SQL Server, being as the T-SQL is similar enough it won't involve any rewriting for us.
It works fine for little "Hello World" apps, but once my project got to a small-mid size (6 or 7 files, about 1000 lines each), it slowed to a crawl. It took minutes to register each keystroke. I turned off the command-completion engine, thinking it was to blame - it wasn't. It seems to be whatever code that constantly rebuilds the class tree?
Whatever it is, it's unusable. I had to migrate my project back to Windows-land and do my work in SharpDevelop. Now, for whatever reason, Monodevelop won't even open my SharpDevelop cmbx file.
This is a big, BIG deal. My company, like so many others, has tons of old VB/Delphi and other Windows-RAD based code, all powered by SQL Server backends.
It's time to migrate most of this stuff to
Did TFA mention FREE (beer) Sybase ASE for linux? A SQL Server killer - heck it is SQL Server - is HUGE. I've worked with MySQL, PostgreSQL, firebird, and they are all toy databases.
Sybase+Mono= a whole hell of a lot of people, and a whole lot of source code that was once very MS-specific, that can now be opened up to other platforms.
Anyhow, the brass were impressed when I showed them how the same executable runs under Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc, etc - and unlike Java, it looks and feels like our old application, not a kludgy pile of crap (Java evangelists need not reply, I've yet to be convinced. AWT sucks just like Swing. We simply have no use for the platform, get over it.)
The brass were blown away when I mocked up a little box, with Sybase built in, to run as a terminal server via NX - NX is cool as hell. Blows MS Terminal Services and Citrix right out of the water. When I told them the machine they were using was sitting at my home, and they were working over my home connections measly 128k upstream, hell - you just can't help but be impressed.
So now I'm at the point where they're actually considering linux. All of our apps on a linux-based self-contained blade server, complete turnkey for clients. It's about giving the client what they want, after all, and that's what they want. A box they plug in and does its job. (With a quarter mil per annum support agreement, and as we all know, once properly set up, there ain't shit to support).
So now I'm tasked with putting together an environment with which to work with the stuff/crosstest under linux. And I'm short one IDE.
It'll get there eventually, I'm sure. Just get your ass back to work Miguel. Actually, scratch that, finish your GTK# documentation first - or at least fix the goddamned hyperlink to it. There's plenty of great stuff in those namespaces (gtk, pango, etc), but to someone like me with no real prior experience with GTK, figuring it out can be a real bitch - though not impossible, but so far the process has been for me to read some C documentation, figure out the C# binding by way of autocompletion, and guess at the parameters.
This year was big, but IMO, Mono and Sybase were the two biggest things to hit the scene. I don't know if NX counts as this year or not, but if it does, it's a big thing too.
Note to any Gentoo users fighting to get Sybase to work: Nothing I found on google helped, installing Red Hat 7.2 under UML and installing sybase on that didn't work. ASE did nothing but segfault until I switched to NPTL, now it runs like a champ. (emerge unmerge linux-headers; emerge --oneshot linux26-headers; emerge glibc; reboot). This is probably applicable to other uncertified distros too.
Also, anyone know of any good free as in I'm-broke SQL Server->Sybase ASE migration tools? For years the flow has been 100% the other way, people ditching their big proprietary uni
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
With the number of government organisations, military, schools etc already using OSS, Microsoft would have a real shit-fight on their hands.
They'd also go down in history as being Very Bad People and attract even more ill-will, from regular computer users in above organisations.
Before they ever attempt a patent attack, they have to win over the hearts and minds of the public to their view of software patents. I guess Gates' stabs at 'Communism' among the OSS movement were an early step in this direction.
Internet Explorer 7 will be available for Windows XP.
Perhaps they should. However, a common theme on slashdot is how broken the patent system is. Trivial things are patented every day that demonstrate the system not working the way it was intended. Sometimes companies fight over silly patents and it can be fun to watch one big company screw with another one (which might have done the same if it could) and comment on the system. Free software (and OSS too) are usually not corporate developments, a full Linux distribution is the product of thousands of people working for over a decade to develop. FLOSS represents a lot of different things to a lot of people, so to see it crushed by MS utilizing the broken patent system would be a travesty on a global scale.
My guess is that's one reason MS hasn't tried to actually play the patent card against linux. It wouldn't be money attacking money, it would be very big money attacking the people (really bad PR). This would be unprecedented, so there is great uncertainty with it. Also, with governments and business around the world considering OSS, this kind of attack would make legislators question the very patent system such an attack would rely upon. Imagine using patents to go after Linux, with the result that the rules change - or get repealed - so that you can't use them against other companies either. No one knows what would happen if MS attacked Linux with patents, but all effects other than defeating Linux would likely be negative.
Either that, or they are waiting for legalization of software patents in Europe...
That's a real shame because it means that they have genuinely taken in the watered-down message the open source movement promotes--that we should weigh software issues not on ethics or freedom, but on cost of development, distribution, and even (ironically) settle for proprietary software when it is technically more functional than an "open source" competitor. The open source movement pitches this message because they're chiefly speaking to businesses and they believe any freedom talk will interfere with conveying their development methodology message to businesses.
As such, if the US Government is doing what you describe, they're probably just using that talk to get Microsoft to drop its price on the software it licenses to the US Government. Other countries and US states have done this before, and it will be done again. Lowering the cost of Microsoft software is probably the reason why Massachusetts allowed Microsoft's proprietary Office formats to be included as an "open format". There's no part of the open source movement's message a proprietor can't cater to, so proprietors love to frame the issues at hand as the open source movement discusses them.
Better to focus on software freedom, which the free software movement has been pitching for over a decade longer than the open source movement has been touting their message. Those who want software freedom for its own sake never have to settle for stumping for non-free software because the free software message doesn't focus on a development methodology to make development cheaper, faster, and produce less buggy software. The free software movement centers on giving computer users the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify computer software. The open source movement's goals are fine as far as they go, but they don't go far enough. They say nothing about the most important question we can ask: how should we treat other people? This is an ethical question which demands an ethical response.
Digital Citizen
- a license issue that prohibits redistribution entirely
- contradictory licensing in the Linux kernel (e.g. a GPL-incompatible license in a Linux driver) that causes a driver to be removed from the Debian kernel
- DFSG issues such as binary-only firmware forcing the package into non-free, even if it was otherwise freely redistributable and had a compatible license with whatever it linked with (since Debian policy requires freely redistributable source code for all programs in the archive)
Other distributions have more liberal policies with respect to software that supports hardware devices, but Debian's conservative stance attempts to guarantee that nobody further down the distribution chain can end up screwed by a license problem. In other words, it's a feature, not a bug.I have had a few problems with the interpretation of Debian policy in the past.
The first was that the proposed firmware loader really sucked for certain applications. I'm not sure if this has changed. Because of this, I was originally really pissed off with the interpretation that the DFSG "program" applied to microcode and firmware because of the technical limitations of the loader interface. Eventually I came to the conclusion that this really was for the better though, but only after the following issue was also resolved:
There was a huge push to eliminate non-free from the archive around the beginning of last year. This sounded like a great idea at first, because then the FSF would endorse Debian as the reference GNU/Linux distribution (aside from the GFDL conflict). Unfortunately, once everyone started moving firmwares and microcode to non-free, it was becoming increasingly clear that if Debian was going to continue to support modern hardware, non-free was here to stay. Certain zealots continued to push for the removal of non-free, even when it was apparent that doing so would not serve the interests of free software in the long term due to the reduced mindshare growth of people not being able to install Debian on their existing systems. Eventually a GR was made, and non-free was kept around. This political decision, coupled with my realization that the long-term benefits of free firmware outweighed any temporary technical difficulties with a crappy firmware loader interface.
The final struggle for me is that certain zealots in the Debian community are still insisting that all strings of bits are to be interpreted as 'programs' under the DFSG, and thus the 'source' must be required. There are two gaping problems with this. The first is the level of abstraction (FA theory) at which one must view things in order to claim that, for example, a video file is a program - I think that's utterly impractical. The second follows from the first - what is the 'source code' for (for example) a video file? Raw DV? Raw uncompressed frames? Who determines whether a particular package is in compliance or not? What if the author deleted the raw source after processing it? What about the effect on the mirrors who suddenly have to host multi-GB raw video files?
There is some practicality to having such high-quality source files for multimedia, because it encourages reuse of the content, so I think making such things available whenever possible should be encouraged. But the idea that a piece of software could be placed in non-free because it included an intro AVI without a raw video source files is ludicrous and counter-productive, IMO.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
I am not at ALL sure you can 'get the facts anywhere'. I certainly can't. And even the 'public record' can be censored after the fact depending on the settlement of the case. If you could get the facts anywhere, there would be no such thing as FUD.
I agree with another poster. Objective, and Balanced, and Neutral are not always the same thing. When it comes to facts, I think Groklaw is objective. They present what is there. This is NOT true of most media, especially mainstream media.
When it comes to opinion, they are honest; they disclose their biases up front. This is also not true of most media, especially mainstream media.
The article above is clearly biased against Sun. Sun has said openly they are not out to sue anyone, and that their intents with the CDDL and patent grant is to actually prevent lawsuits. Slashdot really needs to cool off over this.
Also, Bruce Perens has numerous conflicts of interest in the matter, so his opinions should be read in context. For example, he works for OSRM, which is an insurance company who stands to make money from inflating the perceived risk regarding patents. He will say otherwise, but the timing and veracity of his comments surrounding the announcement of OpenSolaris are quite a coincidence. He also has vested interests in two or more Linux distributions, so of course he sides with the Linux fanboys on issues beyond patents.
Groklaw has been more balanced, in that they at least posted articles following up their initial set of questions about the CDDL. Of course, people commenting on the articles at Groklaw generally sound like JFK conspiracy theorists, so don't take them too seriously, either.
Let Sun prove themselves in their actions over the next year. OpenSolaris should be out around June or July, so they need a good year for people to get a feel for how all that will work. If Jonathan Schwartz were to ever pull off a mask revealing a big green patent ogre, then you can say I was wrong. But the likelihood of that is nil.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Once upon a time, MS exposed the GDI to Java, and Sun threw a fit and sued them. They tend to do that whenever anyone tries to "extend" their precious language.
.Net, and here we are.
.Net CLR are actual ECMA standards, are more open than Java, and are actually extensible.
.Net.
Look, back at the end of 1990s MS and Sun signed a contract which said MS could use Java on Windows, use the Java trademark etc, IF and only IF MS agreed to follow a few simple rules. For instance, was perfectly free to add functionality, if they, like everyone else, did this in their OWN library (com.microsoft.java.applet...) They were also free to do their own implementation, but then they could NOT call it Java.
Microsoft did not do this. They continued to claim that they used Java, and at the same time deliberately attempted to break it by adding Microsoft specific behaviour to the core java classes. The goal was obvious - once enough people were programming to the Microsoft target, users on all other platforms would start to complain that Java was broken and only Microsoft did it right.
A blatant breach of contract, and pretty dirty tactics to boot. Sun sued, they won, Microsoft cloned Java the language, called it C#, cloned Java the platform, called it
C#, and the
I can join the JCP and vote on how Java will develop in the future. Show me where I can do this with C# and
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die