Bill Gates was widely quoted (and dissed of course) late in April 2008 for saying something about open source vs. free software and the GNU General Public License (GPL). The quote of what he supposedly said makes him look so ignorant of the open source software (OSS) movement that I wondered if he was misquoted or if he purposely mixed up the terms free software and open source to take a parting shot at the Free Software Foundation as he moves on to save the world in his retirement.

Around the same time, the NY Times Freakenomics bloggers posted on what leading thinkers think about innovation. I guess they didn't include Bill Gates in the great thinkers hall of fame. But John Seely Brown (of Palo Alto Research Center fame with other similar laurels) said he feels there are four types of innovation: incremental, architectural, disruptive, and institutional. Of the four he felt instituional is often the most important though least creative and said of open source:

"For example, consider the impact that open source software license B.S.D. used for Linux is having, or the copyleft (institution) used by Wikipedia, or the creative commons licensing regimes, or.."

My first thought about his mixing up Linux and BSD and copyleft was that maybe if Brown doesn't understand OSS terms and conditions, maybe Gates doesn't either. Maybe Gates quote was truly one of ignorance. My second thought was that rather than comment on the article, I'd ask Brown if he meant to get that detailed. The clarity of great thinkers is that they don't get down in minutia the way analysts like me do, not seeing the forest for the trees, etc. etc.

His answer to my email about whether he was misquoted or whether he was trying to draw some piercing copyleft/copyright distinction was insightful and to the point:

"I happen to believe each serious Open source project tends to have its own constitution/institutional form – sometimes even called a constitution – but in any case each is a miniature institutional innovation.. but on top of that, that CC, BSD, GPL are good examples of institutional innovations. Yes as you well know they are all different with subtle and not so subtle differences. I wasn’t arguing for any one form.. I was simply taking my hat off to the folks that crafted each of these and wanted to call them out as innovations in their own right with the belief that these will shape our future as much as any purely technological innovation.. "

We already know what the open source community thinks about Gates' point of view. Let us know what you think of John Seely Brown's?

As for Gates quote, definitely one last zinger!

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I ran across this very thorough and thought-leadership blog post recently by Paul Young, director of Product Management at Netstreams. Like me, he apparently is not directly part of the open source software (OSS) movement but analyzes its dynamics from his career perspective.

His perspective is product management, mine is marketing. His findings are similar to opinions I have posted on the need for open source developers to use marketing and market research techniques IF they want to provide software that will be adopted in the marketplace.

The IF is the key word. IF you just want to "scratch an itch," as Paul describes the issues currently ongoing in the Pidgin OSS community, that's OK too. Just let the rest of us know which it is.

But IF you want to "take it to market," whatever that means to you, you not only need the kind of marketing and market research I describe but the related product management Paul describes. And if you expect venture funding, the VCs will insist on it.

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As regular readers know, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) is our favorite non-profit on these pages. So when we recently got a “trackback” from the very readable “Law and Life: Silicon Valley” blog written by Mark Radcliffe, general counsel of the OSI, we invited Mark to sit in for a podcast.

Mark also ran the "Users" committee reviewing the GNU General Public License (GPL) version3 draft. He earned a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Michigan and a J.D. from Harvard Law. In addition to his OSI work (it is a non-profit) he has been practicing law up and down the 101 for over 25 years and is a senior partner at DLA Piper. DLA Piper has 3600 lawyers in 25 countries and 65 cities.

Of course lawyers can't pass out legal advice in a podcast setting but this 8-1/2 minute interview contains important information CIOs and staffers should think about as open source software begins to find its way into every nook and cranny of the enterprise.

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Here is an example of the cookie-cutter Microbashing from the open source software (OSS) fringe that I mentioned in a post on March 23. I thought it was a new thing but I have since found out that Microbashing has been going on for years. I am way behind the times, as I am with the move from rock to rap music. (Rock to rap: My parents complained that they could not hear the lyrics in “our music;” now my children as parents are complaining that they can hear the lyrics in their “kids’ music.”)

I received the following comment in response to my commentary on the ISO OOXML vote and the reality of the so-called international Open Standards (always upper case) movement. But this comment is typical of blogoblathering on all kinds of subjects related to Microsoft, be it about EU fines, or Vista, or SCO, or you name it.

"What a load of self-serving nonsense. Do you work for Microsoft by any chance?

"Your paper example is fallacious. The standard used to make the paper I store my information on is irrelevant, yes. But the format in which electronic information is made available is very relevant - especially when that format is owned and controlled by a proprietary vendor who can choose to make changes to it at any time simply to force users to spend money on an upgrade. Thanks but no thanks.

"And then there is the technical case for OOXML, or rather, the lack thereof: http://www.odfalliance.org/resources/The%20Technical%20Case%20Against%20OOXML.pdf

"Catch a wake up; you might learn something.

"brian"

At least Brian’s post is one I can publish because it is not full of expletives. The ones with expletives—or references to Nazism—I call Microhate.

Let's dissect the Microbashing blogpost formula. All Microbashing blog posts are like the form letters that perhaps one of your friends has suggested you send your congressperson (or PM or Delegate or whatever politicians are called outside the U.S.)

1. All Microbashing starts by accusing people of "working for Microsoft." If Brian had read my research, he would realize that I am one of Microsoft’s major critics. I work for myself. The particular post he is commenting criticizes the so-called International Open Standards (always in Upper Case) movement and has nothing to do with Microsoft. But Microbashing never lets logic get in its way. It also does not bother Microbashers that Sutor works for IBM, Schwartz works for Sun, DiBona works for Google, Tiemann works for Red Hat, and so forth. There aren’t many of us virgins out here on the boulevard.

2. The second act of every Microbash play begins with the debating trick of stating something as if it is patently obvious and not in need of proof, a rule of nature. Typically it is the breathless canard that someone is forcing them or someone else to buy Microsoft products. Where is that happening? I do major statistically significant information technology (IT) market research. I would love to dive into this phenomena. Except that I cannot find any instances of it. Please send me an email Brian (or anyone) at dennis@ebizq.net telling me when and how Bill Gates held a gun to your head and made you buy a Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) product. I will investigate it in the impartial manner I use in all my research and publish the results. (Consider this the Bill Gates Held a Gun to My Head challenge.)

3. Next in every Microbash rant comes the reference to IBM (NYSE: IBM) or Sun (NASDAQ:JAVA) or Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) propaganda. In this case it is a reference to a document on the web site of a consortia funded by--guess who?--IBM, Sun, Red Hat (NYSE:RHAT), Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), all the guys that gain more market share if they can restrict government purchasing of document software. What they cannot achieve in the marketplace, they attempt to achieve through government edict. IBM and Sun tried to railroad such a policy through the bureaucracy here in Massachusetts a few years ago but received such an immediate howl of protest from the legislature, state records repository personnel and the disabled that their in-house IT guy was run out of town on a rail (he was run out for alleged T&E improprieties actually but I always wanted to use that old cliché, “run out of town on a rail”). In fairness, I am pretty sure that writers like Brian do not know they are being manipulated by Sun and IBM.

4. Finally (or sometimes for openers) is the ad-hominem attack. I was not sure what "Catch a wake up" means but I assumed it was along the lines of "your mother wears army boots." So I asked Brian and he tells me it simply means “wake up and smell the coffee.” Kudos to Brian for his civility; typically Microbashers accuse me of being on drugs or some such thing (which people of my generation don’t actually think of as an insult to be honest; we think of it as a fond memory of youth).

What causes these people to get so riled up about Microsoft? Since open source software terms and conditions have been so prevalent for more than 10 years, there is no reason that they would ever have to see a piece of Microsoft software.

(By the way, I think the paper analogy is perfect because paper size is also a document format standard on which ISO wastes thousands of man years. But I won't argue with Brian about that. It is the only legitimate non-personal-attack, non-Microsoft-attack, non-IBM-propaganda sentence in his comment. I have “published” his comment on the ebizQ site where he made it but if he would really like to have a discussion about the International Open Standards movement—which is what I am talking about—try it again without the Microbashing. Use PDF as an example if you cannot write about the standards subject in the abstract.)

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I have not posted on the OOXML International Standards Organization (ISO) vote here on my ebizQ open source software (OSS) blog in 2008 because, in my opinion, open source and standards (lower case) are not related.

Open source and standards are different animals

Open source is about three things: a community/culture, a development model, and a set of software license terms and conditions. That’s what I blog about here. Despite conventional wisdom, my research says there are no OSS business model and no separate OSS market.
• There is no OSS business model because most OSS offerings that are monetized are monetized with subscription maintenance in the same way that has been used for years to sell non-open-source software.
• There is no OSS market because I find very few enterprises that procure OSS because it is OSS; they deploy a piece of OSS because it does some function well and, secondarily, they do not object to the accompanying terms and conditions (in a few situations they like those terms and conditions). Because OSS is not a marketplace motivator, there is—by Marketing 101 definition—no OSS market.

Standards (lower case), on the other hand, are retroactive recognition by the marketplace that some widget facet is the best widget facet of that type in the marketplace so everyone else that wants to compete in the market should have that widget facet or something like it if they want to succeed. Typically the widget facet that everyone agrees on is not a competitive factor in the market (actually I cannot think of any example where one is a competitive factor but in good analyst fashion, I say “typically” so as to hedge my bet.)

But no self respecting OSS blogger can go through the last three months—and especially the last month—without at least opining once on the OOXML standardization subject. So here you go:

Standards and so-called international Open Standards are different animails

1. Surprise/surprise—all international Open Standards organizations are effectively run by large commercial companies with skin in the game. They are nominally government entities but nominally and reality are two different things. By the way international Open Standards are always expressed in upper case, like all good propaganda, and are not the same as standards in lower case.

(IBM (NYSE:IBM), which probably has an employee on just about every one of the 87 national standards bodies that could have or did vote on OOXML, didn’t disagree on Thursday March 27 when an anlyst asked it to comment that the proposed standard had already passed. An official announcement is due on Wednesday 4/2. The lastest leaked count I saw before I posted this commentary claims OOXML was approved handily--but other reports said the approval was only by a whisker. My opinions here are the same, PASS or FAIL.)

2. Governments care about lower-case standards for good reason—but it is when they start picking winners and losers in the marketplace by legislating or edictizing international Open Standards (always upper case) that they become dictatorships.

(For example governments should not and as far as I know don’t care whether your auto has left or right-hand steering. But they have the right to care whether you drive on the left- or right-hand side of the road.)

3. Large commercial companies employ lobbyists to influence governments—I know it is not the same everywhere in the world but here in the U.S., the right to petition the government is constitutionally guaranteed to all citizens, even to Bill Gates.

(So when the Norwegian standards body or wherever listened politely to and then ended a meeting with 20 noooxml.org members who were petitioning them, it was not a Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) conspiracy. The noooxml.org members had no procedural say in the matter at that point apparently, and the Norwegian or wherever committee that did had been meeting about the subject for two years. Ditto in Germany, Croatia and any other country mentioned in the prevalent conspiracy theories written about by anti-Microsoft blogoblatherers, all repeating the same blather interminably.)

4. In particular, IT document format standards are a solution looking for a problem. There are over 200 international Open Standards (upper case) for the most popular document format you’ll ever use, paper. Do you care and/or do they in any way affect your life?

That’s the reason that most impartial observers like myself have noted from the start that the whole OOXML farce was simply an attempt by Sun (NASDAQ:JAVA) and IBM to take market share away from Microsoft. For example, see Mary Jo Foley, the International Herald Tribune, and so forth. Nothing wrong with that except for the waste of shareholder money (see Note below). It’s just how the game is played.

All the rest is bullcrap from IBM/Sun lawyers, lobbyists and employees. This was not about government records retention, long-ago-approved ISO processes, the length of ECMA (not Microsoft’s) standard document, the superiority of another truly Open Standard (even though it was developed by a proprietary company acquired by Sun in 2000), and especially not about the completely absurd idea (coming from Europeans—where they cannot agree about which side of the street to drive on) that only one standard is needed. Like I said, there are over 200 for paper.

A few recommendations:
• Where governments need standards, let them vote on them in legislatures like anything else that affects our lives rather than hide behind so called Open Standards consortia.
• Where they don’t (which is most places, especially as related to document standards), let the market decide.

(Note: If you are interested, I have posted on the waste of shareholder value caused by so-called international Open Standardization on my IT investment research blog site--see link in right hand column.

(In particular, because I live in Massachusetts I have fully debunked the conventional wisdom—perpetrated by blogobatherers from around the world who couldn’t find Massachusetts on a map—that the Commonwealth of Mass. is some kind of mini-version of Neelieland.)

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One of my recent posts was about a battle for the soul of open source. Perhaps related, there is also a battle in progress at the Open Source Initiative (OSI) web site but this battle is simply about the words, "Open Source."

According to a multiple-month license-discuss spat at the OSI web site, Microsoft is using the words "open source" occassionally to mean making source code available. Sam Ramji, a leading open source software (OSS) supporter at Microsoft and others are defending Microsoft (or at least trying to understand the other side's complaint). Michael Tiemann, the president of the OSI, has weighed in angrily against Microsoft, part of a recent pattern in which he has linked Microsoft to the Jim-Crow-law era in the U.S and WWII-era fascists.

I think in all cases where this open source definition issue has come up vis a vis Microsoft, it has related to some kind of Microsoft-based academic or medical code. The OSI members are not actually in agreement that Microsoft is doing anything wrong but the allegation is that the Microsoft code does not meet the OSI's definition of OSS because the code cannot be used in a commercial project. And Microsoft allegedly obfuscates that point on its web site. This concept of commercial vs. non-commercial is at the heart of the Microsoft vs. free-software movement patent dispute as well.

As I see it, in OSI's definition, there can be no restrictions on redistribution other than the restrictions on any downstream OSS being used. And I guess one of those restrictions cannot be "no commercial use." But this is a word battle only a lawyer can understand. We will be talking to Mark Radcliffe in an upcoming podcast so we will ask him about it. Mark is general counsel at OSI, an intellectual property attorney at DLA Piper in the Bay area, and the writer of a real good blog on all these sorts of thing.

I'll also follow up on the conclusion of this spat on the OSI site after the name calling dies down. But you can follow the discussion yourself as described here.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

[NOTE: As a rule, most of my open source blog postings are intentionally pretty light. I strive to give you something between the People column of the daily newspaper and Entertainment Nightly when it comes to open source. If you want something with more depth, look to my Feature articles over on the lefthand side of the ebizQ web site. But the following post is an exception to my rule:]

A few months ago the open source software (OSS) blogosphere got tied up in knots over a Discover article that claims OSS inhibits innovation. The comments on the article were the predictable rantings of the very small OSS fringe when anything negative about open source is released. I have seen the nerdy non-sequitur venom and total falsehoods some techie open source bloggers write in response to my own postings on IT investment research. I have called out anyone (that I was aware of) that lied about me on a blog and I have yet to find one of them that doesn’t backpedal into his or her hole.

The fact that these typically anonymous hatemongers troll the Internet and attack an investment-research posting like mine, words that have nothing to do with technology per se but only comment on the effect one technology position or another might have on shareholder value, illustrates a real problem for the OSS community. Typically, in between the profanity and the hate, their comments go into obtuse arcane technical points that only a nerd could love.

In the end, the OSS fringe wants to take our choices away from us. If we lose open choice, we will all suffer because of the fixations of this small group of OSS proponents against Microsoft (see sites such as BadVista.org, Documentfreedomday.org, and so forth). The good news is that most of the sincere open source community that I meet daily to work on this blog and my feature articles has a live and let live attitude about Microsoft. The vast majority of OSS runs on Windows.

Now there may be a revolt brewing against this non-sequitur venom against normal people in general and against Microsoft users in general. A hint of it can be seen in a back-and-forth battle in progress down-under entitled Ignore the open source hot heads, CIOs told. The jist of the Aussie article is that the vitriolic ad-hominem attacks against anyone that says any thing remotely critical of open source--or in favor of Microsoft--is actually harming the OSS culture. It must be because the Aussies have always had to take a different perspective on everything in the world, but the Aussies are right on this subject.

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The blogosphere is buzzing about the high salaries OSS developers can demand. The buzz is based on stories that were kicked off by a recent press release from BlueWolf. BlueWolf is a New York City consulting company that "specializes in the deployment of enterprise software applications and in business process consulting."

Don't rush out and buy a new Mercedes just yet (or assuming open source developers also like to build cars from scratch, don't rush out and buy all the parts for a new Mercedes just yet). First notice that the press release does not mention open source at all. Michael Kirven, BlueWolf's Co-founder, mentioned an important trend he was seeing in open source development hiring in one of the subsequent interviews and all the facts got skewed as one story lead to another across the Internet.

I went back and asked BlueWolf to clarify so that I didn't join the line of bloggers playing the whisper game. There is some good news.

"There's been a huge wave of people embracing open source technologies," said Kirven in a prepared statment. "The availability of those techs has far outstripped the people trained for them."

But no hard numbers can be pinned to the trend yet.

And be careful of the overall numbers in the press release. None of the press people or bloggers writing the follow-up stories and blog posts went back to check the fine print. These are New York City prices folks, where a glass of OJ in the morning costs you $12 in midtown.

And possibly on the down side, follow the logic behind this article in Canada's IT World (you might have to sign up for their free subscription). SAP Labs Inc. researcher Dirk Riehle is right about the statistic in the first sentence in the article (see our recent research here) so I conclude that the rest of the thinking deserves some consideration.

But that does not mean that Kirven is wrong about open source developers being more in demand. In fact, I think BlueWolf's and SAP's findings might synch up.

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I live on Cape Cod and spent so much time with an airline seat strapped to my back for 30 years that I feel no strong reason to leave.

But when I do, one of my favorite places to visit is the San Francisco Bay area. If I don’t have the days it takes to head up to Crescent City, CA, I can get a taste of the redwoods right there in Muir Woods or down in Big Basin. Head out of San Jose to the East Bay the back way for a couple of hours via Mount Hamilton to Livermore and it’s like riding in the Colorado high country. If I’m homesick for Cape Cod I can head out to Point Reyes. (If you’re familiar with Cape Cod but not Northern California, Point Reyes is a National Seashore Park the size of the entire Cape, not just its outer forearm.)

So what does this travelogue have to do with open source?

Well all you bay area open source community members have a way to keep the region "green" for when I visit. Untangle (see previous post) and the Alameda County Computer Resource Center (ACCRC) have partnered to donate hundreds of open-source-software-based computers to Bay Area schools through an “Installfest” to be held Saturday March 1, 2008. They need volunteers to install Ubuntu, Firefox, OpenOffice and more on recycled computers provided by the ACCRC. The volunteers are needed in four locations: San Francisco, San Mateo, Berkeley or Novato.

To signup and volunteer for the Installfest please visit: http://www.untangle.com/installfest

By the way, if you come to Cape Cod, some folks are doing their bit to keep it "green" as well. A proposal is in review with the Federal government, supported by the Sierra Club and others, to build a wind farm in the Sound. It will provide 75% our electricity. NIMBY Kennedy, our summer-visitor U.S. senator, and his otherwise ecology-centric nephew Robert are fighting it but it looks like it will happen. But I digress from a travelogue to politics.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a breath of sensibility in the midst of the open source software (OSS) movement's explosion of Microbashing on the blogosphere beginning February 21.

Nicholas Negroponte is quoted February 24 in the Boston Globe as follows:

"One of the argument here at OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) is, if 100 million kids could have an Asus running Windows, is that better with (sic) two million kids running the XO? And the answer is yes. We want kids connected and the largest possible number is the goal."

XO is the OLPC laptop that bundles a Red-Hat/Fedora-based Linux but could also run Microsoft Windows . It has a price tag goal of $100 but OLPC has moved its price tag down to about $200 at this point as production ramps up. That is still lower than Asustek's series of Eee PCs, some bundled with Xandros Linux and some with Windows XP, beginning at about $245 (subject to exchange rate variations since the Asustek's announcement in 2007) .

The real ideal is billions of kids running whichever they like. Or even both. Unfortunately manipulative politicians around the world, supported by corporations that are anti-competition (in the name of "wanting a level playing field") will get involved and muck up the ideal.

But at least Mr. Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop per Child Foundation, has his head on straight.

Congratulations.

(By the way, I do not mean to imply that the stories about OLPC and the Microsoft open source interoperability principles are related. The Negroponte interview by Hiawath Bray in the February 24 Boston Sunday Globe was most likely conducted prior to Microsoft's announcement.)

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Over at Research 2.0 (see link at right), I’ve analyzed the big-picture on Microsoft’s open-source interoperability “principles” announcement of February 21. Despite the words open source in the press release, the announcement was really about Microsoft’s long-term strategy to move to services. In executing this emerging strategy, Microsoft management could care less about mundane closed or open technology terms and conditions. And it could care even less about standards because all the technology—standard or not, open source or proprietary—will eventually all be behind the curtain. In fact, the press conference was delayed because Microsoft couldn't believe so many reporters and analysts even cared about this subject, and didn't have enough operators to handle the call-in volume.

But Microsoft still has pesky courts and government regulators out there wandering around Oz and it doesn’t need them arriving at the castle like Dorothy and Toto some day. So in the announcement, Microsoft said it was opening the APIs for all of its volume software products (Windows Vista, the .NET Framework, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007), writing some new ones for those that still want to fight about the Open Office XML (OOXML) standard, opening all interfaces used by Microsoft itself in tying its volume products to “other Microsoft products,” and listening even more than ever to its customers.

All good stuff if you like to get down into the engine and get your hands greasy. Most users and enterprises have better things to do.

The open source “news” is that Microsoft basically put its open source software (OSS) agreements with the European Union Competitive Commission into Microspeak. Nothing changes since October from an OSS perspective that I can see.

Attorney Carlo Piana, with whom I spoke in September 2007 when Microsoft lost its appeal at the European Court of First Instance (EU CFI), seems to agree. He said the announcement was “another vague declaration of principles, with no apparent real commitment.” He seems to feel if Microsoft won’t explicitly abandon OOXML then it is not serious about interoperability. I disagree with Carlo only in that OOXML is not an OSS issue. Open standards are not the same as open source and standards are simply whatever most users buy (see Blue-Ray vs. HD DVD, betamax tapes, and so forth).

Red Hat won’t give up its criticism of Microsoft easily even as it works with Microsoft to make JBoss middleware work better on Windows. Red Hat released a statement that said it “regards this most recent (Microsoft OSS) announcement with a healthy dose of skepticism.” It wants Microsoft to drop OOXML (as mentioned above, not an OSS issue and only tangentially an interoperability issue), extend the Microsoft “Open Specification Promise” (i.e., give up all patent protections) and “Commit to competition on a level playing field” (get out of the Office software market I guess). As noted here before, Red Hat increasingly wants protectionism rather than a level playing field. It didn't need government regulations to grow 30%/40% a year in the past. Why is Red Hat whining now?

I am still a little mystified about the free-software-oriented organization called the Protocol Information Freedom Foundation (PFIF) formed in December 2007 to facilitate the EU CFI agreement between Microsoft and Samba. Carlo Piana is a director of PFIF and says the Microsoft announcement does not change any of its obligations under the agreement Samba signed with PFIF and PFIF signed with Microsoft at that time. He says “the PFIF arrangement is there because of a Decision, confirmed by the CFI, which became definitive, and there is an agreement with obligations and a supervising authority.”

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Bruce Perens, one of the thought leaders of the open source software (OSS) movement via his actions in founding the Open Source Initiative (OSI), has issued a State of Open Source message celebrating the 10th anniversary of the founding of the organization, which began on February 9, 1998.

Congratulations to the group, which I have written about often on this web site.

Also see our podcast with Michael Tiemann, the current president of the OSI.

Please read Perens' document.

Now here's where I disagree with it

1. I date the idea of community development of software with liberal redistribution rights (which is what OSS is really all about) to a much earlier time period. I look back to COMMON, Share and DECUS--along with Bell Labs' awkward hand off of Unix to Berkeley--as the real beginnings. Even in the modern era, the creation of Apache would make a better beginning point. The original Apache license is copyrighted 1995, three years before the founding of the OSI, and many would argue that Apache-licensed OSS is the most prevalent open source software.

I am not going down that rathole. But my first point is that if you think the open source movement emerged up out of the moors as primal matter just 10 years ago, you will have a poor understanding of the software industry. And that will cloud your software choices as a user, vendor or investor.

2. I can't quickly think of any (never mind "many") "business computing category" in which open source software is a leader as Perens claims. But that all depends on how you measure leader (e.g., installed base, annual revenue, downloads, and so forth) and how discrete your categorization is.

OSS does not lead in the operating system, database, middleware, ERP, BI or standalone applications categories, which is a holistic categorization of the entire market. I could probably slice or dice one of these six in a way that makes his claim true but again the result, although mathematically accurate, would mislead you.

3. I have never understood the vehement Microbashing by the OSS movement.

But it's old news. Even as I write this, Microsoft is the "Platinum Sponsor" of the Open Source Think Tank, a gathering of the open source software elite. It's self defeating for the open source movement to wallow in whatever bothered it about Microsoft in the past.

And here's where I agree with Perens' retrospective:

4. The combination of the Free Software Foundation's GNU utilities with Torvald's Linux kernel did change "the way software works." (Although I would never add "forever" to any observation.) I assume Perens means the software market and not software itself (which works the way it has always worked, one step at a time). Large systems and software suppliers quickly realized that they could both reduce their R&D expenditures and make their customers happy by adopting the open source development model.

This was a two-fer no chief financial officer could ignore. Later many of these same companies (IBM, Oracle, and so forth) also adopted OSS terms and conditions, realizing that most software was becoming a commodity and that their real value proposition was in the accompanying maintenance and other services.

5. Open source has not achieved much penetration on the desktop. I am not sure why that was ever a goal.

The Red Hat strategy vis a vis desktops outlines why it doesn't matter. (Caveat: the linked blog post is based on an interview of Tim Yeaton who subsequently left Red Hat. I have requested an update or reconfirmation from Red Hat multiple times but have not yet received an answer.)

6. Software ought to be copyrighted rather than patented.

As long as copyrighting is as acceptable as copylefting.

Which apparently is why the OSI separated itself from the FSF 10 years ago.

Happy birthday, OSI!

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I started writing a blogpost with that title ten months ago. Subsequently I found so much anti-marketing thinking among the open source software (OSS) community that I let it drop as a research issue. If everyone was anti-marketing then marketing would not be a dynamic in user decision making and therefore not worth me researching.

It began when I "attended" the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 event and some subsequent research led me to LinuxWatch's discussion of the event. But I started asking myself the question again in January 2008 when I read Matthew Aslett’s article, “Can LoopFuse crack the open source conversion conundrum?,” on the 451 web site because maybe now almost a year later the community is beginning to realize it needs to better understand how markets work.

Red Hat, at its March 14, 2007 event, began a discussion about RHEL by bashing Microsoft. In his article, Steven Vaughn-Nichols waited until the second sentence to do the same. I wondered, “What does upgrading a UNIX server (RHEL 4 to RHEL 5) have to do with why someone would or would not upgrade from XP to Vista on a client?” There appears to be no thought given to the marketing message OSS companies are putting out and the press of course parrots back what the companies say. When talking to financial analysts and IT investment research folks like me, Red Hat is always careful to position itself as trying to migrate users from other UNIX systems, not from Windows systems.

In Aslett’s article, he anonymously talks about an OSS startup that apparently maintains a web site, provides samples of its (presumably dual-licensed) OSS product, uses a press person or PR agency, and analyzes leads. But he quotes the anonymous company’s executive as saying it “would have cost in the region of $2m in marketing to get… leads if the company was not open source.” Does the company not realize that all the activities it apparently conducts in order to save marketing dollars are marketing?

That is not normal commercial behavior, nor is it a good way to get IT users to learn about OSS products:
-- Did you ever go into buy a Camry and have the car salesperson begin the pitch by telling you what's wrong with Harley Davidson?
-- Or go looking online for a new audio system and find the web site filled with criticism of HP photo printers.
Yet this approach is standard operating procedure in the OSS community.

As for the effect on my research agenda, I quickly found that all the well funded OSS pureplays and OSS-heritage hybrids were in fact aggressively marketing their wares (I'm sure the VCs insisted on it and told them which PR agencies to use). They run webinars and seminars and user groups and conduct "direct mail" as well as advertise via Google as well as via popular web sites like ebizQ. Successful OSS guys sure seem to like marketing.

By the way, if you regularly read this blog and web page, LoopFuse is not new news. We talked to Tom and Roy last fall primarily because we like the name LoopFuse and got some good advice to pass on to those thinking of becoming OSS developers while we were at it. They know what marketing can do for OSS.

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Between January 16 and January 23, there was an interesting discussion at the Open Source Initiative (OSI) “license-discuss list.” It turns out to be a good name for the list. As noted a few weeks ago, the OSI recently split its license-discuss list from the license-approval list because the group wanted to encourage just such give and take among newbies who had no need to get bogged down in the minutia and inside-baseball that comes into play in OSI license approval. Typically the latter concerns whether a particular company or license is strictly adhering to all 10 OSI commandments, whereas this OSI license-discuss participant just wanted some help getting his company to adopt more open source software (OSS).

The net of it is that his company’s “legal department… will not allow any use of GPL'ed software anymore in the company (except Linux)” [GPL, for those just tuning in, is the GNU General Public License, the most “free” of the dozens of different terms and conditions under which open source software (OSS) is licensed.] I saw a similar issue recently (not necessarily exactly the same) when I was “talking to” John Roets of createtank, developers of elemenope. Roets originally made his OSS code available to the world under GPL in 2003 but had to add the Apache license as an option in 2006 because of the objection of a large customer’s legal department against GPL.

According to the initial question to the OSI license-discuss list, the guy’s legal department says it “is an open question what constitutes/does not constitute distribution. Some consider on-site access/use by contractors to be distribution; and… the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has previously stated that remote access/use by contractors is distribution. The unfortunate part with the GPL is that it defines modifications broadly and, at least under v.2.1 of the GPL, linking to/with other programs whether dynamically or statically, is considered a modification.”

The lawyers continued, “The GPL, especially v. 3.0, contains provisions which are adverse to Company X's intellectual property right interests. What constitutes distribution is not clear, which is why internal use does not fully negate some of the more onerous provisions of the GPL (e.g., access/use by non-Company X employees is considered by some to be distribution; remote access by non-Company X employees is considered by almost all to be distribution).”

Among many responses, the OSI discuss-list member got some high-powered OSS guys to respond.
• Oft quoted Dutch patent attorney Arnoud Engelfriet gave the questioner the European Union view.
• Chris DiBona, Google’s OSS guru, suggested he ask his lawyers “what they know that Google doesn't.” He said Google uses “GPL'd code on our production, internal corporate and shipping on the search appliance.”
• Brian Behldenorf, one of the founders of both Apache and Collabnet, weighed in on a finer point of FSF legal history.

This kind of response would be like your asking a question about the rules of golf on golfdigest.com and getting answers from Tiger Woods, Ernie Els and Vijay Singh in a matter of a few hours. Or—-coming up on Super Bowl week--asking about some NFL rules and hearing back from Tom Brady and all the Mannings, including Archie.

By the way, although they were all probably involved in writing or approving the GPL and other OSS licenses, the OSS gurus’ advice was focused on how to work with the questioner’s lawyers. They weren’t giving legal advice.

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The open source software (OSS) blogosphere, amid the slow news period that always surrounds major holidays, has had no alternatives the last few weeks except to get tied up in knots over a Discover article that claims OSS inhibits innovation. There are many thoughtful responses on the Net, such as this one on Ars Technica. There is also the usual ranting of the OSS fringe and Free Software Foundation (FSF) members when anything negative about OSS is released.

I don't know the Discover article author's work. He is credited with coining the term virtual reality (VR), and that has never been part of my research focus. He founded a VR company called VPL whose IP was evenutally acquired by Sun. I found a very interesting interview on the Sun site where he uses some pretty obtuse terminology to say, as I have said, that software development is still a cottage industry, whether it be closed- or open-source software. My only connection to him is that he is said to have been involved with the great VR-oriented film, Minority Report, (although I tend to think more of MIT's John Underkoffler in this context).

According to the Discover article Lanier shared the same MIT/Cambridge timewarp as the FSF's Richard Stallman. Relative to OSS, it looks like Lanier is positioning himself as the anti-Stallman. His criticism of movements such as OSS is not a new area of criticism for him. He has penned pieces criticizing Wikipedia and like efforts as "Digital Maoism" and undue technology devotion in general as misguided totalitarianism and collectivsim.

So putting all of the politics and historical background aside, what does his Discover article really say about OSS and innovation? I don't think he says much about OSS at all other than that non-IT-related scientific pursuits should not follow the OSS development model. According to Lanier, other areas of scientfic research such as synthetic biology should stick to such things as focused teams of scientists and rigorous peer review. He gives one example of closed-source-software innovation--the iPhone--that I don't think of as very innovative. He gives another--Google's algorithms--that are really sort of OSS in that they were developed while the Google meisters were Stanford students (the algorithms are not really OSS of course because Stanford patented them but they were developed in the OSS model).

So I guess it depends on what Lanier's other scienfitic pursuits are trying to accomplish. As planned by those that fund the OSS movement, the OSS development model is all about commoditizing software functionality. Innovation is not the objective; shining up Unix was the objective in the 1990s as was improving the application server concept this decade. Now shining up the applications layer of the software stack is next. As long as you realize that OSS is doing exactly what is expected of it by the folks that fund it, criticism about innovation is unfounded.

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eWeek starts the year off with a little Microbashing built into a requiem for Netscape Navigator. The opinion piece alleges that the brower's death was a homicide instead of self-inflicted. It's just a sampling of how certain segments of the open source software (OSS) community make the entire community look bad. Or look so biased that the wider IT world won't pay attention to the benefits of OSS.

First you have to realize that in the world view of the journalist that wrote the eWeek article, based on other opinions he has posted, Microsoft, Ballmer and Gates are responsible for global warming, AIDS, the war in Iraq and the genocide in Darfur. Specifically, this particular analysis of Microsoft's involvement in the failure of Netscape as a business entity forgets some inconvenient truths (to coin a phrase).

In the mid 1990s, Apache and the NSCA at the University of Illinois--among others-were OSSing web server software and browser software respectively, perhaps even before Microsoft started bundling it. Netscape's business plan to charge money for functionality "users" could get for free, without adding any other value, was fundamentally flawed from the beginning. That Wall St. bought into the idea by giving Clark and Andreessen millions of dollars is not a sign that it was a good business plan.

Oh by the way, in the mid 1990s, the major "users" of web server software (the real business Netscape was in) were IBM and Oracle, not the corner grocer. They had to make a tough decision: pay Netscape or get it OSS. It wasn't a tough decision especially once Netscape decided to "add value" by competing with Lotus Notes, which IBM was acquiring around the same time.

But telling the whole story ruins the Microbashing. I am not saying Microsoft did not participate in some illegal "tying" and get caught just the way IBM and others have over the history of the IT industry. It just didn't have anything to do with Netscape's demise. By the way, Navigator's still effectively available OSS via Mozilla.

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New Year's week is always a good time to step back and reassess work objectives. (And your weight, addictions, prelidictions etc. if you so choose. I am sticking just to re-assessing my work.)

About half of my research relates to open source software (OSS). Most of the rest of my research involves investment-related research concerning the 10 largest software suppliers (see link to Research 2.0 to the right). Increasingly over this decade, those two subjects have converged.

While all the other year-end look backs and lookaheads scattered across the Internet are still taking a backward looking approach by talking about the "war between the OSS world and the commercial world," that is no longer a viable analogy. The closed vs. open war ended in 2007 (if not earlier) because in my opinion,
-- IBM tied or surpassed Red Hat in OSS-related revenue in 2007 (even as Red Hat grew 30%).
-- Microsoft decided all the hoopla over its OSS statements (e.g., "Linux is cancer") was a distraction and is now moving ahead aggressively with Samba, with its OSI-based licenses, and on many other OSS fronts (there is no one more religious than a convert).
-- Whereas in 2006, Oracle saw OSS as just a way to stick a finger in Red Hat's eye, in 2007, Oracle saw OSS for the tactical advantages and reduced R&D expense it provides (Oracle rolled out a virtualization product in weeks based on OSS)
-- Google built its infrastructure on OSS over 10 years; Google held Developers Days in June 2007 to get as much intellectual property going for its first generation applications products as possible with minimal cost to its investors
-- SAP is trailing in OSS related tactics but has made its database software OSS and will probably use OSS more aggressively as it brings NetWeaver out of its installed base.

Those five factoids pretty much make the convergence complete in my mind. They also raise questions about how to redirect my research framework and my biases in reaction. (NOTE: summaries of my OSS research show up on ebizQ.net, my broader IT investment research shows up on Research 2.0, and most of my opinionating begins at one of the two sites and then show up a lot of other places by means I only sort of understand).

First, here are the sources of my biases: I have been an information-technology (IT) market and product research analyst for a long time. Bull SA, Data General, the Datapro division of McGraw-Hill, and IDC before my current spot. I have consistently researched and analyzed the same topic at all of those places—What’s hot in IT now? What’s not and why?

Translate that list of companies above into market and product research topics and I’ve covered a good bit of the history of the IT industry: custom-built inventory control in the warehouse and accounting on the desktop 40 years ago; Multics, PARS, virtual memory management, minicomputing, microcomputing, and the Soul of a New Machine (the market for the machine not the book) during the 70s; material requirements planning (MRP), the first integrated office automation software and the industry’s first laptop in the 80s; the open-software movement, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), the debut of R/3 in the U.S., shared-memory high performance computing (not shared processor), and more in the 90s; application service provision, business process management (BPM), the enterprise service bus (ESB), and OSS so far this decade.

Because I have been talking about the convergence of OSS and all these other items for about five years, I see no reason to change my biases. I will continue to try to balance the opinion among
• culture subjects such as the acceptance of the GPL license or the Microsoft "live" philosophy
• development subjects such as Eclipse, the Linux Foundation, the efforts at TechED and Carnegie-Mellon
• Business subjects such as what IBM, Oracle, Google, SAP, Sun, CA and others—including Microsoft—are doing no matter what terms and conditions or development models they are using. I just need to add Alfresco, Compiere, MySQL, OpenBravo, Pentaho, Sugar, Talend and a few others to that list (I have already added Red Hat)

The research framework will change to include higher-order software beginning with ERP and CRM applications as well as all the emerging services that OSS will enable (people used to call them components). Because ebizQ readers are mostly users, I will look at things from your point of view here. Investors should look more at Research 2.0 but there will be many cross overs between the two I am sure.

But I am no longer an agnostic about the "religious" aspects of the OSS movement (I was never using that term quite right anyways). Software is not air or a tree or a fish. I have to stop pretending I am willing to be convinced otherwise.

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The Open Source Initiative (OSI) last week broadened widely the role it wishes to play in supporting the open source software (OSS) developer and user communities. These changes will also increase the OSI role in speaking for the OSS movement in general.

On its web site, the OSI board said that as part of its ongoing effort to improve transparency and encourage participation, it will concentrate on three major mailing lists in 2008: one for license review, one for license discussions and one for general OSS issues. This is somewhat in reaction to the August-October 2007 review process for the Microsoft public licenses, which branched off into much more substantive philosophical discussion than whether the Microsoft licenses simply met the letter of the OSI definition of OSS. Another driver of the OSI decision is what some OSI board members and discussion participants think of as a dangerous proliferation of OSS license types.

The three discussion groups are as follows:

1. License-Review: This new, tightly-focused list is specifically for evaluating licenses with respect to both whether they conform to the OSD and how they impact proliferation (relative to the pre-defined categories), in accordance with the revised License Approval Process. It will be managed by Russ Nelson, Chair of the Licensing Committee.
2. License-Discuss. With the creation of license-review, this list is being repurposed as a general forum to deepen the community's understanding of licensing issues. As such, it will be responsible for the new Open Source License FAQ, which is designed to capture the community's "best understanding" of common issues. The list will be moderated (as needed) by Ernest Prabhakar, OSI Board Observer.
3. Issues. In addition, the OSI is creating a brand new list for the community to provide feedback and input on the OSI's operations as a whole. In particular, this list is a place where anyone can request (and volunteer for!) activities they feel the OSI should pursue. As such, the Issues List acts as the "parent list" for Membership, the Open Standards Requirement, Women in Open Source, and other initiatives that are currently on hold pending new leadership and clarified charters. This list will be managed by Michael Tiemann, OSI Board President.

In keeping with OSI's belief in the power of open communities, the board said all of these lists are open to the public. However, the contents of the License Discus FAQ will be moderated and only a tight group of editors will actually post to the License-Review community.

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I’ve posted here and here about the difference between the terms “free software” as defined by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and “open source software” (OSS) as the term is used generically and defined by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). A recent Computerworld interview of law professor Eben Moglen (founder, president and executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center and former director of the FSF) lays it out from the FSF point of view better than I can. And I find it chilling. Despite signs that court action will actually finally be taken by his center for the first time after a decade of talking the talk about the FSF’s GNU General Public License (GPL), Moglen’s and the FSF’s position is really philosophical and not law-based.

Moglen says that in 1980 he began believing “that the linguistic interaction between human beings and computers afford human beings better ways of knowing and solving problems.” He continues according to Computerworld, “The issues about software were then as they are now, merely one layer in a layer cake. They are a crucial layer because the network that we live in is made out of software.”

Thankfully my “network” consists of my wife, kids and grandkids, siblings and parents, friends and associates. I agree with software’s problem-solving ability and the layer cake analogy (that is, software is pretty much of no value without some kind of hardware). But I get lost with the FSF worldview that seems to look at software as a living thing, which leads to Moglen's logic that because software is somehow almost alive, it then needs to be free (as in air, or trees, or fish—his analogies not mine). Come on, software programs are just tools, like hammers and screwdrivers, pretty much useless without nails and screws.

Then the interview morphs to FSF Microbashing as such interviews always do. To be fair, the reporter wouldn't have ended the interview until he got some red meat from Moglen. According to Computerworld, Moglen says, “Microsoft still maintains strongly the view that its business model, which depends upon concealing source code from users, is a viable and important and necessary model.” He compares Microsoft to the Soviet Union and its intellectual property relationships (and threatened but never taken legal actions) to intercontinental ballistic missiles. I doubt if Microsoft’s past business plans care one iota whether its source code was concealed; more important, I am pretty certain from doing information technology market research for 20 years that over 99% of Microsoft’s near billion customers didn’t care. But for Moglen to make those two analogies demonstrates what you’re dealing with if you simply want "open choice."

And even if concealing source code was a past Microsoft tactic, the company is changing tactics quickly in reaction to the OSS software development model because the model potentially saves Microsoft (and Oracle and IBM and Google) billions in R&D expense.

Moglen goes on to say, “because of GPL… you can't own it (software now and content next); it's a commons… and you need commons management.” Translation: And we—the true believers—will be the managers of that commune. This is another probably unintended analogy with the Soviet Union. I certainly have no problem with the FSF members thinking this way. That’s its members’ right. I do object to them working to take away my right to open choice, through support of anti-open-choice legislation/regulation and outright politicization (that is, the cronyism, kickbacks and so forth that we witnessed here in Massachusetts a few years ago in the name of OSS).

And even if you don’t care about Moglen's opinion about software as logic, Moglen wants to now move on and "free" software as content. He says, “the Disneys and the other major movie studios... have a great deal of image-making authority in the world -- and a great deal to lose from the obliteration of their distribution mechanisms.”

This is where the FSF philosophy really gets problematic for me because Moglen is saying that not only should the tools be free (and you must use “free tools” to build things, not “closed tools”) but that the resultant things you build with the tools (your house) is free as in air also. In the FSF/Moglen view, your house can be a commune whether you want it to be a commune or not. I have nothing against communes but I don't choose to live as if the house I built is a commune (except for weeknds in the summer when the grandkids show up).

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This is just a time out to say Happy Thanksgiving to U.S. readers.

The U.S. version of this worldwide tradition is based on events that occured almost 400 years ago here on Cape Cod. Some interesting sidelights to the story are highlighted over at my personal web site, IT Investment Research.

To many, the most interesting sidelight is that the story does not begin with Plymouth Rock but at many points further "down" the Cape.

To others sadly, the story is not all about the Europeans that wandered all around Cape Cod that fall like a bunch of tourists today. Just as there are two sides to the open source software (OSS) story--which is why I am agnostic about OSS--there is another side to the Pilgrim's story. It is the saga of the Wampanoag that met the Pilgrims.

That story might have become less sad this year with the tribe's "recognition" by the U.S. federal government.

And the Wampanoag's story has an IT connection as well. One of the leaders of the movement by the Wampanoag to gain U.S federal government recognition was Russ Peters, a marketing manager at Honeywell Information Systems (HIS) in the 1970s. HIS is a predecessor of the French information technology systems supplier, Bull SA. There is more on Russ at my web site as well.

Don't eat too much turkey.

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I had an interesting “meeting” recently with Kim Weins, Marketing VP, and Steven L. Grandchamp, CEO, of OpenLogic. The Denver-area-based company is among those driving the inevitable consolidation of the open source software (OSS) market but with a strategy that preserves the OSS culture. I did not hold their preference for the Colorado Rockies over the Boston Red Sox in the World Series against them. Like good salespeople everywhere, they looked for the positive, saying what a great year the New England Patriots were having.

The CEO explained the background. Open Logic was founded as a consultancy back in the late 1990s, with a mission from large enterprise clients to do something to rationalize all the OSS products then starting to permeate the clients’ IT shops. Right from the start OpenLogic avoided one of the biggest stumbling blocks that more purist OSS companies run into, only dealing with OSS. The company (Steve and Kim had not joined at that point) realized that large IT users needed to not only integrate the different pieces of OSS code finding their way onto large-enterprise servers but to also integrate the OSS with other software, no matter how it is developed, licensed or distributed.

Unlike me, the OpenLogic executives are not “open choice” by philosophy. Instead they are “open choice” because that’s what the market is telling them.

Beginning in 2002, OpenLogic began to productize software it had developed to support its consultancy. That software has grown in various versions into a library of over 300 certified OSS distros, a knowledge base, some IT governance functionality, support software and an interesting product that lets users do a census of OSS on their installations.The latter is freeware available for download but not an OSS distribution itself. The company has almost totally exited the consulting business and partners instead with firms such as Unisys and Covalent. OpenLogic secured venture capital in separate funding rounds in 2005 and 2006.

So how does OpenLogic keep the OSS culture alive when they don’t even OSS their own software?

Interesting tactic: Although OpenLogic provides first-level support as part of its maintenance subscriptions, which are also available via a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering called OpenLogic Exchange (OLEX), Steve and Kim “employ” on a per-incident basis what they call the OpenLogic Expert Community. These are the same guys responsible for the distros in the OpenLogic library. If you take a look at the library you’ll find a line up of OSS' greatest hits. Therefore, the OpenLogic Expert Community gives OpenLogic’s enterprise clients easy access to many of the well known writers of OSS’s greatest hits without having to go foundation web site to company home page to consortium bulletin board to South Pacific island looking for the experts.

Aggregating the support as well as the distros is a great idea and I suspect Kim and Steve will have a few more good ideas up their sleeves. We’ll keep an eye on OpenLogic.

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Update on October 22: Microsoft and EU settled this disagreement, at least for now, as the EU got to scold Microsoft and Microsoft gets to charge others what appears to be reasonable fees for its documentation and some of its interoperability protocols. The linked press release puts Microsoft's spin on the announcement. The EU version is on its web site.

Originally posed on September 28: On Monday September 17, the European Union (EU) Court of First Instance said that the EU Competition Commission (EU CC) was correct when it ruled in April 2004 that Microsoft acted to “abuse” a market it dominated. There is nothing wrong in market domination, just in abusing that domination. There were multiple aspects to the case but as a middleware guy at heart, my interest was in the so-called interoperability/protocols—open source software (OSS) portion of the initial EU CC ruling and the court’s recent concurrence.

Red Hat at first put out a press release congratulating the EU CC. Sometimes as an analyst you come across a factoid like that in your research and you say, “I understand that. It’s interesting but it’s irrelevant, a side issue.” I did a blog post on that Monday and moved on because I had actually completely analyzed the original ruling in a December 2006 research deliverable. Later, strangely in my opinion, Red Hat put out a press release that I would say, “scolded” the EU CC. As an analyst, it’s typical that because of some intervening event like the second Red Hat press release, you say “Now I don’t understand that and it may be really relevant.” So you interview a group of people, do extensive secondary research (an academic term for “surfing the web”), and then decide “Now I think it’s irrelevant again. On the other hand, if all of these other people care so passionately, I should at least tell their story.”

The subject of this week’s featured article, Hacker vs. Hacker, falls in the latter category at least for now. As I said I would in my Tuesday September 18 blog post, I scrambled and I put a week of deep dive into trying to understand the scold in particular and Microsoft’s inexplicable actions in this matter. Unlike my blog posts, which have a clear—I hope—point of view, the feature article is a straightforward research deliverable, attempting to summarize fairly both sides of a complex issue in less than 2000 words, and telling you what it means without burdening you with my biases. I do not believe that this is evident in the research deliverable but I admit a strong bias against the innovation-stifling ways of the Eurocracy. It dates to my days at the infamous Avenue Gambetta facility of Honeywell Bull in the early 1970s (see "Riots against CIA Involvement in the Allende Assassination”) and a lot of time spent later at Parc Monceau and La Defense for Data General. I leave my biases to my blogging, however.

Some subsequent intervening event may move my research to a fourth category feared by all analysts: “This did matter and I missed the significance.” But for now, the most interesting finding from my research into the EU handling of the Microsoft anti-trust matter and the OSS community's involvement and reaction is that software developers like to argue about the strangest things. My takeaway is that this is just a huge lose-lose for all parties involved. It is the Open Source Initiative (OSI) "license-discuss list" but with tens of millions of dollars to spend on lawyers. In the article I compare this Microsoft hacker vs. OSS hacker battle to the events portrayed in the movie Braveheart. In reality, I think the war between England and Scotland was settled quicker.

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There is an open-source-software (OSS)-related “corporate/social responsibility” initiative at the November Oracle shareholders’ meeting and the Open Source Initiative (OSI) may weigh in on its merits. A pair of experienced corporate/social responsibility advocates has put a proposal on the Oracle proxy that requires the Oracle board to “issue, at reasonable expense, an Open Source Social Responsibility Report to shareholders by April 2008 that discusses the social and environmental impacts of Oracle’s existing and potential open source policies and practices.” The OSI board of directors may debate whether to take a pro or con or “beyond our remit” vote on the issue at its next board meeting on November 7. The Oracle shareholder meeting is on November 2 so any OSI debate would apparently be only for intellectual purposes, but would likely affect future proxy initiatives.

When I first saw fellow bloggers posting on this a few weeks ago, it went right past me like a Rafael Betancourt fast ball past Kevin Youkilis after 10 foul balls. Then I read it and said, “Why OSS?” And “Why Oracle?” And “Why Now?”

The sponsors kindly answered my questions even knowing my opposition to their idea. They indicated that proxy-question procedure is partially responsible for the wording of the proposal vis a vis OSS saving the world. SEC regulations forbid ballot questions that simply ask shareholders to vote on company operational aspects. For example, they could not ask investors to vote to have Oracle adopt OSS as its driving technology principle, although that is what they would like to see happen at Oracle and in other corporations. So, instead, their proposal asks for a report on how OSS contributes to Oracle’s social responsibility.

As for Oracle and timing, the reason is that the sponsors are experienced activist-investor advocates who are very busy in the winter and spring leading up to most corporation’s annual meetings. Because Oracle proxies in the fall, it was easier for them to approach Oracle on what they acknowledge is a personal pursuit. In the spring, they are too busy with other corporate-responsibility initiatives.

Still the effort makes the OSS community look bad, even though I can find no OSS-related organization involved. The proxy question has factual errors and confuses OSS with the standards movement. It uses IDC numbers that I have discussed in the past to point out how OSS is an infinitesimally small part of the overall software market (and actually an overlapping orthogonal software-market ecosystem anyways). Not surprisingly then, despite the proxy wording, OSS is not an important part of Oracle’s business either (and of course, Red Hat devotees would argue that Oracle is just barely better than Microsoft when it comes to OSS bonafides). In addition to real stretches such as OSS having environmental benefits and being in a position to save the “third world” (is there a third world anymore?), the question says OSS can contribute to transparency in government institutions (of course, as indicated in multiple places, some large IT suppliers tried to use OSS to decrease transparency here in Massachusetts state government).

I hope the OSI does consider the proposal if only for intellectual purposes and I urge the OSI directors to vote “no,” not because proxy questions are not part of its charter but because this particular proxy question does the OSS movement a disservice.

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As anyone that blogs or writes regularly knows, you always want to keep a little scrapbook of ideas nearby in case there’s a slow news day but your editor still wants you to fill up the spot beside your photo with something new.

Today is such a slow news day. So I went through my scrap paper and the best I can come up with Ms. Book is a list of open source software (OSS) blog post ideas that I refuse to blog about:

• I will not blog about the iPhone, whether or not it uses OSS or interacts with OSS. I am just sick of hearing about iPhone.
• I will not blog about Business Week’s article on Sun’s OSS strategy. But our subscribers should look at the article.
• I will not blog about OpenOffice until it has an email function. Until then, it might better be called OpenDesk.
• I will not blog about Google buying Jaiku. It would very quickly deteriorate into an iPhone story.
• I will not blog about the two guys leaving Thunderbird. Any OSS project that is that dependent on two guys is not real community.
• I will not blog about “cloud computing.” Been there, done that; see Data General and N.T.T. circa 1987.
• I will not blog anymore about Microsoft accusations that OSS violates its patents. That subject is hot again this week but the story is two years old and I said all I can say about it here in June.
• I don’t think I’ll blog any more about the Open Source Initiative (OSI) debating the Microsoft Public and Reciprocal licenses. I updated my September 10 posting below. It looks like a done deal. (I guess I’ll have to go back to that well though in the highly unlikely case that the OSI board turns Microsoft down.)

Instead, I think I will do some research into the Oracle proxy statement asking shareholders to vote in favor of OSS. So look for a post on Friday. And I will write about the new Pentaho Business Intelligence (BI) tools in an upcoming ebizQ deliverable on OSS BI like this ebizQ feature article from a few weeks ago.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Update: Russ Nelson (see below) has forwarded the Microsoft licenses to the OSI board for approval with the recommnedation that the board approve them. Approval is almost certain.

More important Update: The Red Sox (see below) cannot lose to the Yankees because the Yankees were eliminated by the Cleveland Indians and a swarming infestation of Lake Erie "Canadian gnats" released onto Jacobs Field by the Free Software Foundation (see below), which is based in Boston.

Originally posted 9/10: Microsoft moved closer to getting two of its “shared-source” licenses declared open source software (OSS) licenses by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) this week. The OSI president seems to have interpreted a Microsoft posting to the “license-discuss” list as asking the OSI board for a vote. And Microsoft also said it would make name changes to satisfy OSI “license-discuss” list concerns.

The OSI is the acknowledged guardian of the OSS license review process. It functions to review and rate licenses from many sources including Apache, Berkeley, other non-profit OSS communities, and individual companies such as Sun and IBM, as well as the much better known Free Software Foundation (FSF). The OSI promotes “10 characteristics of OSS” while FSF claims there are only four characteristics (numbered 0-3). The FSF has a strident, but intellectually honest, all-or-nothing approach to OSS. The FSF is stricter about its OSS interpretation methodology, and supports basically only one OSS license, the GNU General Public License (GPL), with some minor derivations. It uses the GPL for software developed by its companion GNU project community and urges other communities to adopt it.

As an aside, the FSF is also opposed to open choice between OSS and non-OSS products by users, digital rights, various international intellectual property protections, the use of the term “open source,” the use of the term Linux without the word GNU in front of it, and—most likely—global warming. I mention the latter only because, sitting here in New England on what is sure to be the last real day of summer (in the 80s, the leaves about to turn, the Red Sox closing in