Bruce Perens on the Status of Open Source

Lars Lehtonen writes to tell us that Bruce Perens has posted the text of his LinuxWorld press conference. In his talk he takes a look at many of the hot topics surrounding the open source community including ODF, NTP vs RIM, and GPLv3. From the article: "It's interesting to note that Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist implicated in scandal with Republican Tom Delay, was employed by Bill Gates' dad's law firm "Preston Gates", a political proxy for Microsoft. Microsoft succeeded in lobbying both Republicans and Democrats to oppose ODF."

Comments

No It's Not Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's interesting to note that Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist implicated in scandal with Republican Tom Delay, was employed by Bill Gates' dad's law firm "Preston Gates", a political proxy for Microsoft. Microsoft succeeded in lobbying both Republicans and Democrats to oppose ODF."

And this means what, exactly? Abramoff pleaded guilty to a variety of charges, but didn't have much of anything to do with Microsoft or ODF.

This seem to be a nice set of coincidences, but nothing more. If you are going to allege something sinister, please do it with evidence or proof. Throwing a bunch of random things out doesn't really mean much to anybody but gullible leftist slashbot.

Re:No It's Not Interesting

[Doc Ruby]

The biggest Republican lobbyist of the current generation, Abramoff, worked into his power position at the law firm of the father of the richest man in the world, Bill Gates. Gates was a certified monopolist, but the incoming Republican administration let him keep operating his monopoly. That takes a lot of lobbying and money. Abramoff has pleaded guilty to bribing Republican politicians for his corporate clients.

Those aren't random facts. That's not a coincidence. Those are leads. When we talk about them more, we work together to connect the dots by finding more evidence and logical connections.

What is sinister is an Anonymous Coward insisting we ignore such closely related facts as random, that they're a "coincidence", that they're important only to a "gullible leftist". An Anonymous Coward coincidence theorist. Just another soldier in the vast rightwing zombie army. Take a bow - and exit.

Re:No It's Not Interesting

[man_of_mr_e]

Hm, do we have no discovery process since Abramoff plead guilty? In that case we may never know what he was talking about. But he was working for Gates. Did he take a bullet for his boss by pleaing guilty?

It seems to me that, based on the amount of money spent on lobbying by Microsoft (some $360,000) they didn't hire abramhoff for much. They're well below average for abramhoff's clients, even though they were the #1 contributor to campaign funds.

Microsoft learned back in the 90's that if you don't contribute to politicians funds, you have almost no voice on capital hill. Since then, they've been pretty strong in contributing to various campaigns, but of a largely bi-partison nature.

Given the small amount of money spent on abramhoff, it seems unlikely that they hired him for much of anything serious.

Yeah, this is interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's interesting to note that Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist implicated in scandal with Republican Tom Delay, was employed by Bill Gates' dad's law firm "Preston Gates", a political proxy for Microsoft. Microsoft succeeded in lobbying both Republicans and Democrats to oppose ODF."

What is interesting about it is the fact that it is lobbying. Lobbying is only organized, legalized bribery! Microsoft lobbies both Republicans and Democrats because it really doesn't care who is in power as long as they can buy the legislation they want. The fact that it was found illegal is something they will probably take care of with the next round of legislation (and partly paid for by Microsoft along with all other companies looking for a special favor).

Republican, Democrat, who cares? What we must get rid of is the entire idea of "pay for legislation"!

Re:Conspiracy Theory 101

[MustardMan]

Oh yeah, just like any other slashdotter - who happened to co-found the open source initiative and found the linux standard base. Exactly like any other random slashdotter who's written 20 books on open source, under open source licenses, published by prentice hall.

Really, why is this troll modded up? How many slashdotters were project head of Debian or the first open source evangelist to work in top management at a multi-billion dollar company? You might not like perens' views, but he's a whole fuckload more qualified to make these kinds of statements than the average living-in-mom's-basement slashdotter.

Re:STFU Bruce and write some code ......

[kimvette]

Speak for yourself. Many of us DO want to read Microsoft news. I may choose Linux for my personal computers (unless hardware is an issue such as ATI tuner/AiW cards) and more and more so for the office, but I don't deny that Microsoft does produce some great products.

I run Linux for four primary reasons:

1. I disagree with Microsoft's anti-customer policies as of late, including no de-activation, their suing of customers, and their DRM-infested media player
2. I believe Microsoft has been abusing their monopoly status, especially since SmartSuite and WordPerfect have been rendered impotent in the marketplace
3. because I like the KDE desktop far more than I like Explorer (tabbed file browsing is great. *nix shell scripting is undeniably superior to scripting on Windows and konsole is a wonderful console manager)
4. Everything, and I mean everything can be automated on Linux/Unix/UNIX where maintenance is concerned. and nearly all maintenance can be performed live. Unix doesn't have to play the "let's redefine the term 'downtime'" game

With that said, I'm interested in what Microsoft is doing with their Linux lab. I'd be interested to see whether they release Visual Studio (Kdevelop is great, but it's no comparison to Microsoft's IDE) and Microsoft Office for Linux. I'm interested in watching the price of Microsoft Office now that OpenOffice is nipping at Microsoft Office's heels in terms of usability/functionality. I'm interested in whether or not Microsoft adjusts their marketing to indicate true TCO of each environment. I'm interested in what Monad has to offer. I'm interested in whether or not I'll be able to watch HD-DVD and Blu-Ray media at FULL resolution on my 2048x1536 CRT displays, or if I will have to downgrade to lower-resolution LCD screens.

Believe me, although some of us hate Microsoft's current actions, we actually view software products as tools, and Linux is not the BFH that is right for all problems.

Big cheese, fatly melting

[FishandChips]

There isn't much to be learned from this.

We are given some rather improbable conspiracy theory around the ODF affair, a long wail about software patents, a few digs at Microsoft, some very tentative ideas about DRM and a slapdown of Linus Torvalds, something that now seems almost obligatory every time the big cheeses of the Linux world open their mouth. I wonder why they feel they have to run Torvalds down. Are they worried they won't be seen as following the correct right-on line and might be made to stand on their own in the playground? Frightened, perhaps, that Big Richard Stallman will say they are sissies and chuck them out of his gang? Whatever the reason it comes over as pretty darn unedifying.

Articles about how awful the patent system is are ten a penny. What is very hard to find are folks who have thought this one through, have some cogent and realistic proposals, and who are prepared to build support for change among those in a position to change things. Anyway, it doesn't sound as if Mr Perens will be one. Big cheese massage sounds more his gig.

Re:Big cheese, fatly melting

[jambarama]

Articles about how awful the patent system is are ten a penny.

Yep, everyone has one. Here is mine - copied from my blog http://jambarama.blogspot.com./ As a warning it is long (really long) but I really put a lot of thought into this and I think I've proposed some good realistic solutions (not the "eliminate all patents" bull that gets posted to /. so often).

What is a patent supposed to be?

A patent is supposed to be a well defined property right that gives an owner (not necessarily inventor) a monopoly, or significant competitive advantage, on a device. It should be clear what the patent covers, enforceable, innovative and temporary.

Why give monopoly power?

Innovation has positive externalities. Meaning it benefits more than just the creator. A negative externality means that it is under-produced. To get around this problem, we give away temporary monopolies so that creators capture more (not all) of the benefits they produce for others. The temporary monopoly with the new invention makes people better off than not having the invention would.

The trade off is that the workings of the invention must be public. Any expert in the field should be able to use your patent application to recreate your invention. That way, when the invention falls into the public domain, everyone may benefit. This is why the government offers patents.

What are patents currently?

Patents today are the right to TRY to exclude others from using a property right granted exclusively to you. They are not often innovative (prior art issues)1, often held invalid and most of the time not very well defined.

Why do we care?

This is actually a great question to always ask. So patents aren't doing what they were designed to do. So what? I argue there are many problems. Patents are designed to incent innovation. They may in fact discourage it (as we'll see later). Legitimate patents may be invalidated and the uncertainty with not knowing the validity of a patent has negative externalities (so it causes harm to many, so we have too much of it). Patents may deter entry into markets, so monopolies can be extended. Patents may harm consumer welfare. All these things are bad.

Why are we so far off?

In brief, because of a poor incentive system. It was designed just fine, but some problems crept up, weren't fixed and it has gotten worse. Don't believe me? Here are some statistics. In the United States there are 350,000 patents filed each year, and 200,000 accepted. That isn't to say that 150,000 are rejected, there is a backlog of about 750,000 patents as of 2004. Does anyone think there is that much innovation going on in the United States?

Over-Patenting

One of the biggest problems is over patenting. As the previous statistics should show, we are filing and receiving way too many patents. I don't know what the right number is, but we'll see that 350,000 a year must be too high.

Over patenting is bad for a lot of reasons. Worthless patents swamp valuable ones in the examination process. Which patents are worth carefully examining? Patents on non-innovative ideas are terribly harmful to competition. The value of a patent (and enforceability) is diluted with frivolous patents.

Problems with Filing a Patent

Because patents are first come first receive, there is the incentive to file early to beat out competitors. Many patents are filed just in case a discovery turns out to matter in the future. If the inventor (usually a firm) doesn't know the value of a patent, there really is no way the PTO can know.

The PTO bears the burden of proof. Meaning your application is considered valid until proven invalid. Patents are relatively inexpensive to file for (the fees differ on a number of factors) but since the PTO spends an average of 18 hours on each patent, they are relatively expensive to handle fo

Re:is this really necessary?

[Bruce Perens]

I found enough interesting things to talk for 50 minutes :-)

Re:Conspiracy theory

[Bruce Perens]

Even if Linux kernel violated SCO's patent, could anyone really stop Linux kernel development?

Well, they could do a pretty decent job of stopping you from distributing it or using it anywhere that is publicly visible. Now, the law doesn't stop meth labs, but I don't want those who choose to develop or use Free Software to have to operate like a meth lab.

It used to be that people thought that the law had no real mechanism that could touch the Internet. Enough people like Skylarov have gone to jail for writing the wrong software or have had their net worth made negative through the need to mount a legal defense against an unjust civil or criminal claim. I don't want Tridge or Jeremy Allison to go to jail for reverse-engineering Windows file and printer sharing or infringing on some improperly-granted patent. I don't want to go to jail for using it.

Bruce