Open Source Software Up the Stack

So what kind of open source software (OSS)/IT investment research analyst am I that I didn’t blog on May 14 about the Microsoft/OSS “patent happening?” Instead I played golf May 14. It was the first great day of spring here in New England: low 70s Fahrenheit, the grass has grown enough to be cut for the first time; the trees are now leaved so my ball can’t go so far into the woods.

So I am coming late to this blogfest. It’s just as well. This is old news to you if you have been reading my blog these last three months.

Here are five reasons why this is not new news.

As noted here multiple times, when FSF says “free” they don’t mean software “at no cost,” they mean “as in free speech.” The FSF earnestly hopes that the Microsoft patent assertions will lead to defining legal cases that will confirm its position. But there are no cases filed anywhere yet. And the FSF itself never seems to want to file one itself (no Thurgood Marshalls there).

Second, as for “free” as in “at no cost,” even the FSF says software is not free “as in free beer.” It doesn’t matter if users rented a mainframe bundle in 1970s, leased a preloaded mini in 80s, acquired CD’s under a perpetual right to use license with annual subscription maintenance in the 90s, or went Software as a Service (SaaS) this decade. It ain’t free.

Third, community was important when the OSS movement began with IBM COMMON, Share and Digital Equipment’s Decus in the 1960s and there’s some of that community flavor today in many of the special interest groups revolving around OSS. But in general, the IT top 12 has taken over OSS development as I described here.

Fourth, with the happenstance exception of Linux (admittedly a big exception), the FSF’s GNU General Public License (GPL) is not a big licensing factor in OSS. There are dozens of other licensing structures without the FSF’s patent limitations. And the major users of OSS—like the major creators of OSS, the leading IT companies—will gravitate to them because these users have nothing against patent limitations. That’s the way they run their enterprises. Ditto for academic institutions that want to set up future revenue flows based on intellectual property.

Fifth and most important, the mainstream media glosses over a lot of key product subtleties. To keep it simple but not glossed over, remember:
• Linux is not OSS. OSS is thousands of pieces of software other than operating software.
• Much if not most of these thousands of pieces of software runs on Windows as well as and even instead of Linux.
• Basically, Linux is UNIX. In a sense, Linux is almost 40-year-old technology.
• Linux is not an FSF product.
• The FSF’s GNU is not OSS but mostly thousands of typical “low-level” (no pejorative intended) utility software that every operating system like Linux needs to do anything useful. We’re talking down in the stack here. For example, here are the 10 most recently (as of 5/15/2007) updated entries in the directory:
o Jest, a software project estimator.
o Konch, a versatile KDE system tray proxy for scripts.
o Shell Directory Manager, a small tool for managing often-visited directories using a shell
o USBAuth, a passwordless authentication method for USB storage devices.
o CLISP , an ANSI Common Lisp compiler, debugger, and interpreter
o CLN, a C++ class library for numbers
o FFCall, which builds foreign function call interfaces in embedded interpreters
o Gettext, tools to produce multi-lingual messages
o GNU libsigsegv, a library for handling page faults
o gnulib, the GNU portability library
• Most of the GNU stuff that surrounds Linux probably dates back to utility activity that supported UNIX (from which Linux sprung) or even earlier operating software since the GNU project was started long before Linux (when the FSF was in the process of writing its own operating system called Hurd). If you’ve ever read through a Share, COMMON, Decus or similar catalog, you’ll find the similarities striking (once you substitute tape drive for USB storage, Algol for C++, and make other such time-conscious conversions)
• Most of OSS is neither Linux nor GNU and grew out of 1990s-era requirements to get things working together over the Internet, a development that GNU/Linux did not anticipate

So there is a lot of ancient history in this tempest in a teapot. Microsoft is taking it slow on this issue. The IT blogging world best chew for a while on the Microsoft claim that OSS as a group violates over 200 of Microsoft patents.