The open-source community has a long tradition of looking for and hounding away at the very thought of Microsoft influence from government IT policies.
For example, Open Source Initiative President Michael Tiemann rightly decries an alleged tie between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's charitable donations and Microsoft's "cabinet-level access to inform policy."
Apparently, however, Tiemann has no problem proudly displaying a picture of Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, wearing a Red Hat fedora, declaring...
Would that all Presidents and all ministers of all countries were so concerned about the sovereignty of their nation and the fiduciary care of their people!
...that they'd openly stand behind one vendor? That doesn't sound much like a sovereign act to me.
In fact, it sounds exactly like the sort of bias that the open-source community routinely inveighs against. Imagine the outcry if President Lula would have been seen posing with Bill Gates, wearing a Microsoft t-shirt?
Mark Taylor, president of the U.K.'s Open Source Consortium, lashed out against the U.K. government "pay(ing) lip service" to open source while "actually pursuing policies that are exclusive." Presumably it would be better if those "exclusive" policies actually favored a particular open-source vendor or technology?
That seems to be the message coming out of Europe, too, in its proposed policy changes around the purchase of standards-based technologies, which some suggest amounts to a built-in bias for open source. Policies that promote openness, generally, are good, because they help to protect a country's sovereign interests.
But when a country's leaders are seen to be supporting a particular vendor, even a vendor of open source and open standards, that strikes me as just the sort of favoritism that we disparage when the beneficiary is Microsoft. Just because it's bias in our favor doesn't make it right.
Back to Brazil. Sun Microsystems' Simon Phipps also posted pictures of President Lula wearing the Red Hat fedora, but also a Sun Java ring. (The president apparently said it made him feel like "James Bond.") At least Java is a technology, not a vendor, which makes this act of Lula less...loony.
Simon Phipps and Lula show their open-source colors
(Credit: Simon Phipps)That said, the ironic thing is that while Phipps points to the benefits Brazil derives from its commitment to open-source Java, he neglects to note that Brazil had this same commitment to Java long before it was actually open source.
Regardless, in describing Lula's affection for open source Phipps unwittingly makes him sound like an open-source groupie, which is hardly how I'd want my president to act, either for proprietary or open-source interests.
A sovereign nation should be just that: sovereign. Its leaders shouldn't bow to particular vendors or even particular development practices, nor should they be perceived to do such. For Brazil, it's immaterial whether the company is Sun, Red Hat, Microsoft, or SAP: it is a sovereign nation and should act as such.
A government tasked with the protection of its people should never look like a cheap infomercial for any vendor--either open source or proprietary.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
I have spent years advocating the GNU General Public License as the optimal open-source license for commercial open source.
Roughly nine years after I first became a fan of the GPL, I think I've been wrong.
My admiration for the GPL mostly stemmed from its ability to mimic, but then invert, proprietary licensing. The GPL is like opening a cannister of radioactive waste: while your competitors can touch it, you're dead certain that they won't.
Given that openness is increasingly a winning business model--if not the winning business model, as Red Hat executive Michael Tiemann argues--one has to wonder if pretending to be open through the GPL accomplishes as much as fully opening up through Apache-style licensing would.
Open-source luminary Eric Raymond is pretty clear on this point:
I think we live in a...universe...in which the GPL is unnecessary rather than futile. Mind you, I am not claiming the GPL is entirely useless. It's a signaling behavior, like wearing a crucifix or yarmulke or pentagram; it helps build trust groups. But it has costs, too.
It creates a lot of needless fear from potential allies and users who suspect they won't be able to control their exposure, if they let it in...Is the GPL's utility as a form of in-group signaling worth the degree to which fear and uncertainty about it slows down open-source adoption? Increasingly, I think the answer is no.
The GPL may be a community-building signaling device, but it is also a confession of fear and weakness. To believe that it matters, you have to believe that you live in a...universe where closed-source development is such an attractive proposition that you have to punish people for trying to move to it.
In other words, if openness works (in the Jamesian, pragmatic way), why not give it free rein, rather than hedging our open-source bets to the point of obviating their efficacy?
Equally important, we may not be getting the "protection" we seek from the GPL, anyway, as the GPL becomes the new BSD in the cloud, as Linus Torvalds recently commented to me in an e-mail:
AGPL/GPLv3 anti-ASP/TiVo language doesn't "protect" anything. There is no upside to pushing freeloaders away.
Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz rightly identifies adoption, not protection of freedom, as a key open-source benefit: open source provides an efficient way to distribute software to the maximum audience at the minimum price. With this in mind, unfettered Apache-style licensing would be the ideal license to maximize adoption, despite likely being the worst way to directly monetize software.
So long, however, as one's business either monetizes software indirectly (i.e., Google with its advertising model) or adds to the open-source components with commercial extensions (i.e., IBM with proprietary software, services, and hardware add-ons), then a company should be able to reap a bounteous harvest from its open-source seeds.
In sum, the GPL may well be an excellent capitalist tool, but Apache licensing could well be even better.
Disclosure: My company uses the GPL, not an Apache license.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
In the midst of an engaging Times UK article on the rise of open source, Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative and a Red Hat executive, declares that proprietary software has outstayed its welcome:
A few days ago, I was visiting several banks in Canary Wharf and the city. On television the entire day was one apology after another from banks whose fundamental business was trust and reputation.
We are now living in a moment where claims of reputation are not sufficient to ensure delivery. We are using source code instead of reputation as a means to grade who is doing what.
The honeymoon period for proprietary software is over. It remains a struggle for many executives to even begin to justify their investment in IT...Ten years ago, I believed that there were reasonable exceptions for when to use proprietary software. I have since come to believe that proprietary software has no advantage, even for the most specific applications.
It used to be believed (by myself and others) that open source couldn't tackle niche applications, as there wouldn't be a financial incentive or sufficient expertise in a given field to mount an open-source approach. But that thinking was wrong. We just didn't know it yet.
It's very likely that open-source vendors will increasingly intermingle proprietary code with open-source code in order to improve their top and bottom lines, but I agree with Tiemann: the era of top-to-bottom proprietary lock-in is over. Even Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says so.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Sunday morning, and I couldn't help but ponder Michael Tiemann's excellent note on Microsoft's revised (and improved) Open Specification Promise and "what Microsoft can do for open source."
Michael rightly notes that Microsoft's Promise, while certainly improved, still leaves much to be desired. No surprise there, which leads Michael to a thoughtful, probing analysis of what Microsoft could do to fully engage with open-source communities:
Let's think big. The open-source community already has more than a billion lines of source code at its disposal, and it's doubling every 12.5 months, so I think it's fair to say "we don't really need your code." And we also know that money alone is no substitute for the freedom to innovate that we so crave. So what big thing could we do with Microsoft's cooperation?
There are really four things on my list, but if they did only the first, it would be a meaningful start. The list is:
- Pursue the abolition of software patents with the same zeal they showed in their efforts to get OOXML approved as a standard.
- Unilaterally promise to not use the DMCA to maintain control of their Trusted Computing Platform.
- Transition to 100 percent open standards (as defined by the OSI, IETF, W3C, or the Digistan).
- Stop trying to maintain their monopolies by illegal, anticompetitive means.
These sound more like an ultimatum than a request for mutual action, but you get that in Michael's detailed discussion of these four items. In so doing, I think that Michael does an excellent job of demonstrating how to work with Microsoft:
... Read moreMichael Tiemann has an excellent piece on open-source licensing over on his Open Source Initiative (OSI) blog. He captures what I've been trying to say about Microsoft's application for OSI certification, in part (though he doesn't address this in his blog), as well as the importance of open-source licensing, generally.
Want the CliffsNotes? Open-source licensing works because it breeds trust in process and code, not in people.
What does this mean?
... Read more
- prev
- 1
- next
