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As I posted on February 18, I was a little surprised that the Byzantine nature of the open source software (OSS) culture had made it into a major metropolitan daily newspaper, the Boston Globe, on the op-ed page. It is less surprising to find it on the Business page but I think it is more than coincidence to find OSS in the same daily paper twice within 10 days (subscription might be required except today February 27).I think we might have a semi-sophisticated PR campaign afoot (what some might call “spin”) and the Boston Globe is the kickoff point because it’s the hometown paper of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Of course, I still think there was a shooter on the grassy knoll.

If there is a PR campaign rolling out timed to the upcoming belated release of the FSF’s new GNU General Public License, Version 3, I hope the facts are reflected better than they are in this morning’s Globe. (Note that the Globe is part of the New York Times’ empire so this story may be picked up around the world, not to mention the ease of access via Google.) In the Globe’s defense, OSS, licensing and patent catfights is no doubt a tough issue to write about in the space restraints of a daily metro paper; they must also have to make some interesting assumptions about the technical level of their readers.

Whatever (PR campaign, coincidence) the story is full of one-sided “Microhate” right off of the FSF’s and associated web sites. Some of the problems with its slant include:

-- Linux is not made up of hundreds of pieces of software produced by the GNU project (the FSF-linked development “community”) as the story states. The Globe also says that Red Hat and Novell have a special service/product relationship with FSF and GNU. (IBM, HP, Oracle, etc., etc. always get left out of these stories because it ruins the big guy vs. little guy drama.)
1. As described here on January 24, Linux is an operating system kernel that has had many homes over the years and which is now sort of “resident” at the Linux Foundation . If you’ve been writing about high-tech since around 1990 like I have, you will find the Linux Foundation interestingly reminiscent of the Open Group, originally X/Open and the Open Software Foundation (OSF), to the extent that Unix was “resident” at OSF.
2. It’s hard to pinpoint where an OSS project “resides” but Linux does not relate to the FSF any more than it does to Fedora, Ubuntu, etc, all similar OSS communities such as GNU. In fact, even GNU tries to explain the relationship on its web site.
3. The real relationship between GNU and Linux is that the prime-mover developer of Linux chose the GNU license when he released it formally in the 1990s. If he had chosen any of a half-dozen other possibilities available at the time, the FSF would be a footnote in a computer history book.

-- What FSF is spinning (or the Globe is not getting) is that this “Microsoft-Novell vs. the good guys thing” is all about legalities, including intra-OSS infighting.
1. The last sentence of the story brings out the FSF’s real position. FSF is “anti-open-choice” in technology selection apparently because of a communistic aversion to intellectual property rights although I think that WTO-like position evolved in the FSF over time because it sounded altruistic.
2. A story that I like (just because it is a good story; I have no way of knowing its accuracy) is that the whole “free software” thing really started because someone kicked Richard Stallman out of an MIT lab where he had literally taken up residence in the early 1980s.

-- The rewriting of the 1991-vintage GPL has been ongoing for some time (and needed for a lot longer than that). It did not arise out of the Microsoft-Novell deal.
1. The GPL3 process is behind the originally announced schedule because many of the OSS movement leaders question the specific wording and others even question the need and/or intent.
2. The new wording only matters if someone other than GNU uses the new license on a new piece of software (see my February 5 post). Many OSS projects, including Mozilla, Berkeley, and Apache, use other licenses and the new GPL wording has no effect on any software licensed under the current GPL2 version.
3. MySQL, the leading open source database provider, just changed its licensing terms so that its “products” will not automatically be covered when the new license is released (see 12/22/06 entry in Arno’s blog).

-- “Renowned” open source programmer Jeremy Allison might have quit Novell because of the deal, as the Globe says he says, but he had been there two years already
1. The fact that he worked at at least 10 companies in the last 15 years (SGI, Vantive, Whistle Communications, IBM (when it acquired Whistle), Cygnus, Sun, VA Linux (‘downsized I think), HP, Novell, and now Google) and seems to switch regularly every two years might have had something do with it.
2. This of course only changes who signs his pay check. Like most “volunteer” OSS programmers, he is paid by a large IT supplier.
3. I don’t care that that’s the case but it must be taken into account when analyzing the OSS movement.

I am not qualified to comment on the legalities of the Novell/Microsoft patent agreements but I’m blogging so I will anyways:
1. They sound to me like the standard cross-licensing agreements in which many IT suppliers participate.
2. Only FSF really says that this November 2006 deal increases the threat level of patent infringement suits. The threat is longstanding; Ballmer has been talking about this for years

When I took up this blog I said I would treat contentious OSS isses case by case. I am as critical of Microsoft as anyone. But this will be the biggest "case" in OSS during March as the FSF GPL is formally released. What do you think?

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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