Category: FOSS

This is just too much:

…because open-source Linux does not come from a company — Linux comes from the community — the fact that that product uses our patented intellectual property is a problem for our shareholders

No Steve, the fact that you launch a patent for loads of trivial and pre-existing technologies (I mean come on, the smiley!) is a problem for your shareholders. The software patent system is flawed in so many ways, and it is all coming to a crunch as people realise how ridiculous it is to judge the “innovativeness” of a company based on a big purse and the ability for its many lawyers to extract IP from pre-existing and completely trivial software “inventions”. People are also hopefully starting to realise that software patents have too long a life in an industry when perhaps 5 years is the longest life you have to extract value from a new invention. As Bill Gates himself said in 1991 with a confused message of foreboding and obviously the position Microsoft chose to take since then:

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today… The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.

Anyway, what started this post was Ballmer had an interview recently where he implied the deal with Novell is all about Microsoft getting “appropriately compensated… for [their] intellectual property”.

…because only a customer who has Suse Linux actually has paid properly for the use of intellectual property from Microsoft

Just when you think they are starting to get a clue. It amazes me the hypocrisy of the statement when significant chunks of the Microsoft software and infrastructure use FOSS, but it makes me even more angry for Microsoft to use this Novell deal to try to bully people into only using a version of Linux they will get compensated for. Novell, for all the good intentions I’m sure you had in this, witness the beast you have created.

Amazingly, Novell’s Open Letter to the community about the deal makes pretty clear that:

Importantly, our agreement with Microsoft is in no way an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property.

Then Microsoft responded again making clear they think Linux infringes on their IP, however:

Novell is absolutely right in stating that it did not admit or acknowledge any patent problems as part of entering into the patent collaboration agreement.

Ridiculous behaviour.

I’ve just watched a talk about “Community source”, a concept out of Charles Sturt Univeristy and the “open source” Sakai project. They have coined to term Community source to differentiate themselves from FOSS basically because they want “to retain control”.

This is yet another case of an organisation trying to get the benefits and public interest in FOSS to work for them without committing to the freedoms FOSS propogate. I’ve been talking about FOSS in terms of Open Source (an OSI/FSF approved licence), Open Standards (openly published and unencumbered by patents or royalites), Open Knowledge (openly documented, open content) and Open Governance (anyone should be able to participate and if worth according to the project rise through the ranks). I strongly believe that any project that claims to be FOSS, or Open Source should rank well in each of those 4 pillars of FOSS, otherwise they aren’t really FOSS. I outline this briefly in a previous blog post.

Community source is a controlled development environment that is certainly better than proprietary, and puts control back in the hands of those who participate, however it is NOT FOSS, even if they use an OSI licence. I know there are people out there that define FOSS just by the licence chosen, however I believe this is too narrow a view. What if a project is GPL licensed but a completely closed development model, no documentation, no ability for newcomers to participate and rise in the ranks, and based completely on closed proprietary standards? I think we need to as a community broaden our definition of FOSS to look beyond the licence to the other aspects that make it FOSS.

Community source is similar in my opinion to the famous “Shared Source” that Microsoft came out with. “It’s just like Open Source, no really! Just better…”

I get frustrated at the misinformation out there about FOSS. I’ve heard of schools taking FOSS out of working infrastructure because someone up the chain heard “if it is FOSS then the students can tinker with it”, which is complete bollocks! (They are confusing code with a running system)

I would hope that the Sakai project would at the very least remove the reference to it supposedly being “free and open source” on their website. I find it a little misleading, particularly when they so strongly advocate not being FOSS.

Note: Yes, I used the little o and s in the title on purpose as that is exactly what I’m seeing today.

Check out this fascinating article with quotes from RMS, Linus, Alan Cox and more about GPL3. It is a really good insight to some of the opinions out there 🙂