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Bill Gates, which we disagree with

As but one more piece of testamentary evidence that the old guard at Microsoft needs to be shown the door, Bill Gates has demonstrated conclusively that he has exactly zero understanding of open source, or at least zero desire to have an intelligent discussion about it. Speaking to a pharmaceutical industry group, Bill Gates took time out to utter irrelevancies and inaccuracies about the GNU General Public License:

There's free software and then there's open source," he suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries [largely in response to open source, I might add]. With open source software, on the other hand, "there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with." Open source, he said, creates a license "so that nobody can ever improve the software," he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business.

Ahem. It's the exact opposite, Mr. Gates. 100% the exact opposite.… Read more

Back to the future for MySQL

As I'm occasionally reminded, MySQL didn't start out as open source. In fact, MySQL's original license was very similar to what it is trying to achieve today: Free for noncommercial use, but not-so-free for commercial use. It didn't decide to go open source (GPL) until 1999.

So for those of us that get caught up in MySQL's decision to keep some extensions closed to paid subscribers, perhaps a refresher course in MySQL history will make it seem a bit less shocking. (Also be sure to check out the early 2001 brouhaha over trademark violations surrounding MySQL.org. Fascinating stuff.)

With that said, there's an ongoing tension between commercialization and adoption that MySQL (and all commercial open-source projects) have to manage. As a friend noted in an email to me yesterday:

Remember that Monty [co-founder of MySQL] chose to go open source only after the world totally ignored his work. There is a real value that goes along with being open source that lends itself well to adoption. If you have to pay, then that will deter adoption of immature products in ways that it won't with free products.

His take on Monty's reasoning is a bit strong, and I don't agree that MySQL had been ignored, but still he has a point: Open sourcing one's code can lead to far greater adoption in a short period of time than proprietary source.

The question, however, remains for all open-source projects: Is it fair or productive to close off the code after open source has made it popular?… Read more

The GPL's poor translation into French

The cheekiness/gall of Free/Iliad is almost shocking.

Free/Iliad is a billion-dollar French ISP that is taking sophistry to new depths. In response to a cease and desist letter that it either stop distributing with its arguments about why it's entitled to heavily modify software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) without contributing back its modifications, as Pierre writes.

What's of particular interest here is the way Mr. Niel [Free's founder] argues the GPL is irrelevant to this case. His claims is [sic] roughly this: my 3,000,000 GPLoaded-home routers are part of my network therefore the GPL doesn't apply since I don't distribute any software outside of my network.

Oh, really?… Read more

The GPL is a capitalist's best friend

Ah! Finally some intelligence on the GNU General Public License (GPL). John Mark Walker says something that few seem to understand, yet it's so simple (and true):

No, the GPL does not cede your intellectual property to the public domain - as a matter of fact, it does a pretty good job of protecting it. In fact, the GPL is a pretty good compromise between granting rights to all parties and protecting IP.

The GPL is probably the best license ever devised for protecting one's intellectual property. The GPL simply protects through transparency and openness, not opacity and … Read more

A cure for the "cancer within open source": the OSI approves the Affero GPL

One of open source's biggest failings has been to extend its relevance into the Software as a Service world. The OSI has finally corrected this with the approval of the Affero GPL.

Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of mobile open-source company Funambol, has been the most ardent crusader for development and approval of a license like the AGPL. In a blog posting, he talks through the importance of the AGPL, and identifies perhaps its biggest opponent: Google.

In GPL v2, those who ran open source software in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment, and modified the open source code, were not required to return the changes back to the community....For me, this has always been one of the worst risks for open source oblivion. If you can take and you do not give back, defeating the copyleft concept, you kill open source. The ASP loophole is the cancer of open source....

Is Cittio ripping off the OpenNMS community?

There are a lot of allegations flying around relative to Cittio's (allegedly improper) use of the OpenNMS code without contributing code back, in apparent violation of the GPL. The best post on the subject is this one, in my opinion.

It reminds us of a few things:

We don't actually know how Cittio is using OpenNMS, in part because Cittio is keeping the whole thing under wraps and has been very sneaky about it. Regardless of #1, Cittio would have to be clever indeed to have found a way to bury GPL code in their proprietary product without giving a single line of code back to the OpenNMS project. No matter #2, Cittio's stripmining of the OpenNMS community is in poor form. Irrespective of #3, Cittio apparently doesn't let its customers know that it is shipping them GPL code. I bet those customers would like to know this and, as a lawyer, I'd strongly suggest that Cittio has a duty to inform its customers of this fact.

Ultimately, as Tarus Balog (founder of OpenNMS) notes, open source is a matter of trust. Cittio has demonstrated that it knows little about open source and deserves precious little trust.

Cittio is a parasite. Tarus wrote to me:… Read more

Microsoft's long history of open-source acrimony

Over the years, Microsoft statements toward open-source software have ranged from derision and threats to mollification and even cautious praise.

Microsoft's Thursday announcement of a significantly more accommodating approach to open-source programmers is just the latest refinement of the company's ambivalence. At the same time that Microsoft's new arrangement opens up previously secret specifications and protocols for use in open-source software, it also insists that companies planning on distributing or using that software need a patent license.

So to put the news into historical context, here's a chronology of some of Microsoft's statements and practices … Read more

Open-Xchange aims for U.S. expansion

Open-Xchange is using Yahoo's acquisition of rival Zimbra last year as an invitation to tackle the U.S. market with its open-source server software for e-mail, calendars, and other collaboration tools.

"Now is the time. The vacuum has been created, and we feel the suction," said Rafael Laguna de la Vera, who took over as chief executive in January. "Yahoo is not a software company...Now, with Microsoft (trying to acquire Yahoo), I think it's over for Zimbra."

Those are bold words for a CEO of an unprofitable company with 2007 revenue of $2.… Read more

Nokia acquires open-source firm Trolltech

Finnish mobile-phone giant Nokia has acquired Norway's Trolltech for about $150 million, the companies said Monday.

The Nordic merger significantly expands the possibilities of Nokia's Linux-based phone efforts. Trolltech makes open-source software and programming tools that can be used to build software on mobile phones, and Nokia has been working for years on mobile Linux devices.

In the open-source programming realm, Trolltech is known well for its Qt library of user interface components such as buttons and drop-down menus. While Qt is governed by the General Public License (GPL), the elements also may be used in proprietary programming … Read more

Linux to GPLv3: A practical matter not a legal one

A couple weeks ago, the Linux Foundation released a podcast interview with Linus Torvalds that, among other topics, touched on if or when Linux would "upgrade" from the GPLv2 license to the new GPLv3 version that was approved last year after much acrimony. Allison Randal's summary over at O'Reilly Radar seems about right: "In the end, what we have is a stable system by reason of inertia. It may eventually shift, but not anytime soon."

One major reason is that Linus just doesn't see any compelling reason to make the shift--which is to … Read more

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