Everyone hates patent trolls (except, perhaps, the patent trolls' mothers). But it's easier to despise patent trolls when you either have a lot of patents, or none. What if your company were awarded a significant patent that could be used to shake down Google and the rest of the industry for corporate benefit.
Or buy food for your family?
Is it your fiduciary duty to exercise that patent? Is it a personal duty? And do you have the legal right to do so?
The first two questions are tricky, but the last one is currently being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court. Consider yourself lucky that you don't have to decide it.
Bilski and business method patents
Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the controversial Bilski case where IBM, typically friendly to open source and innovation, backed the wrong horse. According to The Wall Street Journal's coverage of the arguments, the justices were skeptical--if not contemptuous--of the case put forward by Bilski and the proponents of business method patents.
Chief Justice John Roberts quipped that business method patents are akin to patenting the idea that "I buy low and sell high. That's my patent for maximizing wealth."
Silly when presented in this way. But perhaps silly when presented in just about any way.
Business method patents came into being 20 years ago with the Federal Circuit's State Street decision, the case that spawned Bilski. Two of the best-known technology examples of such patents are Amazon's one-click checkout and Priceline's reverse auction.
In a September blog I took IBM to the woodshed for its stance on Bilski. Big Blue filed an amicus brief (PDF) that I argued was disingenuous at best. IBM argued:
Patent protection has promoted the free sharing of source code...which has fueled the explosive growth of open source software development.
Really?!?
IBM was not alone. Novartis, the big pharmaceutical company, also filed a supporting brief.
The industry's moment of (in)decision
I think that the Bilski case is a divider of wheat from chaff, a moment that forces technology companies to take sides on a critical issue that goes to the heart of innovation in our economy.
On one side, companies such as IBM and Novartis maintain that patents should not be tied to "primitive physical technology" but should also embrace a broader range of modern business activities.
But other companies, including Google and Symantec, took the other side and filed briefs (PDF) with the Supreme Court arguing that expanded business method patents would open them up to infringement lawsuits over the "very mental processes and ideas that are the building blocks of innovation."
What would you do? LogLogic and Sponster examples...
I was reminded of this issue by an announcement today from LogLogic, a log management and security company I wrote about last year as an example of the pervasive use of embedded Linux.
LogLogic was granted a patent in October that appears to be rather sweeping in its scope, covering the collection of logs and the management of the data in those logs.
Imagine if LogLogic went "troll" with this patent....
At a minimum it could be a nuisance to its competitors and at a maximum it could possibly shake down any company that sold a product that relied on log collection (describing hundreds, if not thousands, of products on the market today).
Or how about this one? Sponster has a patent on a system for delivering contextual ads against electronic messages like e-mail, SMS, tweets, etc. Google filed for a similar patent, but over a year after Sponster, and while Sponster's patent was recently granted in October, Google's was denied. (Disclosure: I know and am friends with one of the Sponster executives.)
On the one hand, Sponster could go troll and sue just about everyone on the Web. On the other hand, I know from talking with the executives that they have no desire to do so. The fact that the company has not sued anyone in its six-plus years of existence is a clear indication of this. Sponster wants to build its business around the patent, but Google or Microsoft with their heft can squash that desire.
Should Sponster fight or capitulate? It's easy when you think of patent trolls as trolls that create no real value. But what about when they are real people and real companies like Sponster and LogLogic?
LogLogic makes its choice
LogLogic appears to have made its decision. In a company blog on Wednesday, a LogLogic executive points out the potential harm they see in a Bilski decision by the Supreme Court that would allow broader business patent methods.
LogLogic also (correctly, in my view) argues that the anti-business method lobby of Google et al "represent[s] the true innovative spirit of Silicon Valley where entrepreneurs are rewarded for risk taking and embrace the thinking of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter and creative destruction."
LogLogic decided to take a defensive posture with this sweeping patent rather than go troll. Who knows what Sponster will do, or should do. Presumably it worked just as hard on its technology as Google: shouldn't it get paid?
More broadly, do you agree with IBM that business methods should be upheld, or with Google that they should be crushed? What would your company decide to do? Where do you stand?
Open source is now mainstream and routinely used in mission-critical applications. For 99.999 percent of the people reading that statement, it's so obvious as to induce global yawning. But for Peter Gyorgy, chief information officer of GE's Consumer and Industrial division in Europe, it's apparently heresy.
Gyorgy is quoted by eWeek as follows:
I think open source is great for own internal playground type of things, but if it's running vital mission critical applications--networks running on open source for example--then that is a huge, huge risk to the organisation....
We are not here to be an IT shop, we are here to be the partner of a business and we shouldn't put businesses operations into risk by running very low cost solutions.
So much factual error, so little time.
First, it's ridiculous to suggest that because something is "low cost" it is inherently risky. Gyorgy seems to believe that the more he spends, the safer he is. Last time I checked, Google et al. were running their networks at more significant scale than GE, and all on open source.
Maybe Gyorgy simply doesn't like equal or better performance for less money. In this, he's apparently alone. The 451 Group's survey data has roughly 90 percent of the 1,700 IT executives surveyed declaring that they have realized cost savings with open source. These are IT executives that a few years ago might have shared Gyorgy's views on open source.
No more.
But Gyorgy needn't trust strangers. He could just talk with his colleague, Laurent Rotival, senior vice president and general manager of Enterprise Solutions, GE Healthcare who, in conjunction with one of the leading health care providers in the United States (Intermountain Health Care) and Red Hat, put together a Linux-based health care system that he describes as "state-of-the-art" and that "presents less risk for our customers, protects their total costs of ownership, and ultimately takes them from a legacy architecture to a state-of-the-art architecture."
Left hand, meet right hand.
Second, Gyorgy's assertions are ironic given GE's widespread use of JBoss, Linux (in GE Healthcare and elsewhere), Alfresco, MySQL, and other open-source projects, in Europe and globally. Contrary to Gyorgy's assertion, these aren't "internal playground type" applications. Some of them are mission critical by anyone's standards.
I am personally familiar with several of these.
So is Gyorgy's boss, GE's global CIO Gary Reiner. Reiner not so long ago purchased an enterprise subscription for MySQL when he discovered that GE was running MySQL all over the place, and not solely for internal "playground" sort of applications.
Apparently, no one sent Gyorgy the memo that spells out areas in which GE is actually sponsoring open-source projects (like VTK), in addition to its broad adoption of open source. I suspect Gyorgy isn't the only one to have missed the memo. After all, the CIO is the last one to know.
In the past week, the open-source business community appears to have reached consensus: making money from open-source software is a bad model, but making money with open source is golden.
This can't be good for Microsoft.
Microsoft has long maintained that as the open-source industry has matured, it has become more and more like the commercial world it sought to leave behind. Fundamental freedoms of open source, like the right to modify source code, are signed away to secure a support contract with Red Hat or another vendor.
In many ways, Microsoft was right. Unfortunately for the Redmond giant, however, the new consensus should lead to less commercialization of open source, and more commercialization around open source. There's a big difference, and it's one that threatens to seriously undermine Microsoft and every other traditional software vendor.
That is, unless Microsoft responds in kind.
The new consensus
This consensus has been articulated by TechDirt, Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady, GigaOm, and here on The Open Road.
In fact, it's a drum I've been beating for over a year as Tim O'Reilly's wisdom on the topic finally caught up with my 33MHz brain.
There are fundamental, strategic benefits to open source: ease of distribution, friction-less adoption, costs, etc. There are also serious downsides when it comes to selling it: people chafe at paying for something if they can get it, or something similar to it, for free.
Such problems don't plague companies like Google, which distributes open-source software to drive more adoption of its proprietary advertising or SaaS services. Even Red Hat isn't really in the software business: not with its Linux distribution, anyway. It's in the business of providing certification and update services; of managing the complexity of an operating system.
It's a great business, but if you had to choose between Google's sales or Red Hat's, it's a no-brainer.
Microsoft's response
As this lightbulb goes on across the industry, companies like Microsoft, which insist on direct monetization of software, with little in the way of open-source complements to fuel adoption (or simply undermine competitors), are going to struggle. More and more companies will give away Microsoft's core business as open-source complements to their own.
So, here's a suggestion for Microsoft as just one good way to respond: open-source Internet Explorer.
Fight Firefox with fire
Cut Google's Chrome and Chrome OS off at the knees. Undermine Mozilla Firefox's raison d'etre. Give the European Commission a reason to love you.
More importantly, give developers something to embrace and extend. Microsoft has been steadily losing browser market share as Firefox eats into it. In some countries, like Germany, Firefox has even surpassed IE's market share.
Fight fire with fire. IE is still the world's most popular browser. Make it the world's most open browser, too.
Every Microsoft business could benefit from this move. Even if one assumes that Microsoft isn't ready to take the plunge and fully open up the development process around IE, here's some comfort: neither has Google around Chrome. Microsoft can still steer the IE ship, even if it were open source.
Microsoft needs a proactive open-source strategy, rather than the reactive policy it has had to date. Open source is a threat, yes, but it's a threat to everyone, especially as the industry collectively comes to grips with open source as a business enabler, rather than as a product to sell.
If Microsoft wants to win big in the new world of Web-based software, it needs a bold strategy. Open-sourcing IE is the starting point.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Mike Milinkovich
(Credit: Eclipse Foundation)Open-source communities are founded on trust. It's therefore disappointing but not surprising, to see the Eclipse Foundation's executive director, Mike Milinkovich, rip into former Eclipse Foundation director of community Bjorn Freeman-Benson and tell him to take his "steady acid drip of negativity" and "go away."
Milinkovich, a steelie, hockey-playing executive, didn't mince words in a blog post:
Your former colleagues at the Eclipse Foundation have tolerated your public abuse quietly because we are professionals, and we honestly thought that you would tire of it. Apparently we were wrong. But the time has come to say it: You are a jerk. Please go away. You quit the Foundation, you have zero commits since April, and we tire of your sniping from afar.
Not the most diplomatic but better than a body check against the glass any day.
Given Freeman-Benson's constant carping on the foundation and his former colleagues, it's understandable that Milinkovich went on the offensive. In a variety of posts, including the one that prompted Milinkovich's post, Freeman-Benson has sought to undermine the Eclipse Foundation, which has successfully managed one of the industry's top open-source projects.
His criticism may have been fragmenting the trust that held together the Eclipse community.
Indeed, as Eclipse Foundation director of marketing Ian Skerrett told me, "There is a long history of troll-like blog post[ing] that built up to this point; yes, it is harsh, but it was hurting the community."
Call it tough love for the open-source set. Given the existence of poisonous individuals in many open-source communities, it may be "love" we see more often.
With open-source software businesses, you have two options. Actually, three, but the third belongs to Red Hat, and it applies to roughly no one else.
The first option is to sell support for open-source software. This option is generally advocated by those who have never grown a business beyond $10 million. It's a terrible model unless your only aspiration in life is to run a services company.
Hence, the support model might be good for Accenture or systems integrator, if they want to take on the burden of support, but it's a poor model for Red Hat, MindTouch, Microsoft, or other software company.
The second option is to contribute heavily to open source but not build your revenue model around monetizing that software directly. This is what the New York Times points to in its Sunday expose of allegedly fizzling open-source business models.
Open source can drive adoption like little else. It's not, however, necessarily a great driver of revenue. For that, you need to be selling something beyond the source code, and that "something" is often going to be proprietary, be it hardware, software, or a service.
Proprietary search revenue funds a lot of open-source development at Google.
That's the way successful companies are run: they take ownership of what they ship. They are influenced by but not controlled by the mystical whims of The Community.
Even Red Hat, which piggybacks on a lot of Linux kernel development, increasingly includes more home-grown software in its distribution and takes great pains to certify its Red Hat Enterprise Linux will work in the most demanding environments before putting its brand on the label.
Some, including me, have wrongly concluded that Red Hat's business model would apply to other product markets beyond the operating system. It doesn't. It only applies where the moving parts in the product are complex, multitudinous, and frequently changing.
For everything else, there's Option 1 (if you want a business that doesn't scale well or possibly at all) or Option 2 (which is really no different from the old proprietary model except that it effectively uses open-source complements to lower engineering costs and possibly sales/marketing costs).
Even Option 2 won't work if you under-invest in marketing and development, as Symbian is learning to its hurt. It turns out that there is no free lunch, even in the land of free software. It always takes work. And money. Lots of both, actually.
Twitter and Facebook are duking it out to own the future of the social Web, though users won't have noticed. Indeed, for those who use both, this may come as a surprise, since the two, while both social media platforms, seem to serve very different purposes.
Tell that to Twitter and Facebook, which increasingly have painted big bull's-eyes on each other.
Facebook groks this more than Twitter, which is why your mom/dad, teenage neighbors, and friends all use Facebook, and probably don't use Twitter.
Both companies have open APIs that encourage third-party developers to build out their respective platforms. Facebook has the Open Stream API; Twitter, the ">Open API Service.
These are critical components of a platform strategy, but they're secondary to the lesson that Microsoft and Apple have taught us: if users don't care about the front end of software/services, developers won't care about the back end of the same.
Facebook largely works because people know how and why to use it. Twitter...not so much.
It's telling that Twitter's "big" feature of the last six months is...lists. I use and love Twitter, but after a month I still can't get myself excited about creating or following Twitter lists. I'm not even sure why I'd want to do so.
Is this the best Twitter can do?
This is perhaps why Twitter seems to work for a narrow class of user: Caucasian, middle-aged urbanites with no kids.
In other words, not teens, not your mom/dad, and probably not you.
Facebook's demographics look very different, probably because its current range of uses is very different.
To me, this is a user-interface problem, and not a defect in the DNA of the Twitter platform. It's simply not immediately obvious what one should do with Twitter. That's not the case with Facebook.
We learned this long ago in open source. What separates a good but doomed project from a truly great project is documentation (to help developers know how to use the system) and user interface (to help end users know how to deploy the software). That's why Linux was interesting but not ubiquitous until Red Hat, IBM, and others added the finish that made its power usable by the general business world.
Twitter has a lot of promise, but not yet much polish.
It's nice that New York gangs have found new ways to dis each other using Twitter. It will be better when Twitter makes it easy and obvious for me to talk with my parents using Twitter.
Desperate for a deal after sleeping right through Wal-Mart's early-morning Black Friday frenzy? You're in luck. The best deal this holiday season may be just a download away.
(Credit:
Handbrake)
And boy, is it beautiful.
Handbrake has long been my go-to choice for ripping DVDs to my hard drive (saves battery life when watching videos while traveling and ensures my kids won't ruin the DVDs), but this particular version exceeds my expectations. Why? Because it delivers over 1,000 new enhancements while delivering better picture quality at a smaller file size and faster.
Or as the Handbrake developers say:
There's an old proverb in the video encoding world: "Speed, size, quality: pick two." It means that you always have to make a trade-off between the time it takes to encode a video, the amount of compression used, and the picture quality. Well, this release of HandBrake refuses to compromise. It picks all three.
This isn't hype. In my own use of the software during the past week, performance is noticeably faster, and picture quality is awesome.
Importantly, while the Handbrake developers have been hard at work over the past year to update the venerable video transcoder, the team owes a lot to developers from the x264 project:
A large portion of these speed, size, and quality improvements come to us for free, from the x264 project. The past year, like every year, has seen some massive improvements for that video encoding engine. As always, it has been further hand-optimized for better performance. But it has also gained new features like macroblock tree rate control and weighted P-Frame prediction.
This is how open-source development works: Handbrake focuses on what it does best (User interface, features like live preview, etc.) while leveraging the best of other project's strengths.
It's a recipe for a supereasy and very powerful transcoding experience. And at a 100 percent discount now through forever (Handbrake is open source and costs nothing to download), now is a good time to download it and let 'er rip, whether you run Mac (Intel 32-bit and 64-bit, plus PowerPC), Linux, or Windows.
When an open-source project is working optimally, can proprietary-software companies hope to compete?
Eat my dust, proprietary sloths
Greg Kroah-Hartman, a prominent Linux kernel developer and Novell fellow, suggests that the answer is no. Speaking to the How Software Is Built blog, Kroah-Hartman makes the case that the pace of Linux development leaves competition in the dust:
[The Linux kernel development team adds] 11,000 lines, remove[s] 5,500 lines, and modif[ies] 2,200 lines [of code] every single day.
People ask whether we can keep that up, and I have to tell you that every single year, I say there's no way we can go any faster than this. And then we do. We keep growing, and I don't see that slowing down at all anywhere.
I mean, the giant server guys love us, the embedded guys love us, and there are entire processor families that only run Linux, so they rely on us. The fact that we're out there everywhere in the world these days is actually pretty scary, from an engineering standpoint. And even at that rate of change, we maintain a stable kernel.
It's something that no one company can keep up with. It would actually be impossible at this point to create an operating system to compete against us. You can't sustain that rate of change on your own.
Microsoft might beg to differ, as would Apple, but the reality is that neither is updated as often or as extensively as Linux is, which supports a far broader hardware portfolio than any other operating system in existence.
Linux is pretty incredible. But it's not alone. Mozilla Firefox, Eclipse, and other projects produce best-in-class software at an almost frightening pace.
Can anyone compete with an open-source project at the top of its game?
The answer might well be no, as the top open-source projects are collaborative efforts between multiple companies that pool resources and expertise to drive development. And while it might seem reasonable that a single corporation could best open source's seeming "development by committee" approach, the reality is that well-managed open-source projects have none of the inertia that one might expect from a communal approach.
Quite the opposite.
Having said that, very few open-source projects actually meet the criteria that enable Linux's success. Most appeal to a too-narrow and too-small population of developers (i.e., single-company projects) to glean the benefits and scale of Linux-like development.
As such, the proprietary-software companies probably won't have to worry about competing with indomitable open-source competitors. Not most of the time, anyway.
For those that do, however, better stock up on the pumpkin pie. It may be the only thing to be grateful for this Thanksgiving season.
Greg Kroah-Hartman interview discovered via @glynmoody's ComputerWorld blog.
Life has never been better for enterprises and consumers. From free music to free software, the digital economy is an all-you-can-eat free-for-all.
That is, unless you're a vendor.
Traditional vendors are getting shellacked by the digital economy, spurring some, like Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp., to threaten to stick a finger in the dike and demand that users pay for content. (At Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, users already do pay to access some stories online.)
The problem with this approach is that not everyone is willing to follow suit. Why? Well, not everyone needs to. The BBC responded to Murdoch's plans by declaring it won't charge for content. It doesn't need to. U.K. taxpayers already fund it.
Different strokes for different folks. And different business models, too.
Google makes money by making it easy to discover others' content. So does Apple's iTunes. Google can afford to give away lots of free software (and even free hardware) to nudge people into its advertising model.
That's hugely disruptive.
In software, Microsoft doesn't like competing with free Linux. Microsoft spends a lot of money developing Windows. It must seem unfair to have to compete with the rest of the industry, which increasingly coalesces around Linux (or Android, or MySQL, or...).
But that's life in the open-source economy. Your core competence is always going to be someone else's throwaway complement, and ripe for open-source commoditization.
How would you like your software today?
(Credit: Domino's (Screenshot by Matt Asay))Could Domino's have bought an off-the-shelf system from Oracle, SAP, or another vendor and customized it? Probably. But then, this isn't how most IT gets built, anyway.
Most software is written by enterprises to use, not for sale, as Bruce Perens and others point out. So while we credit Microsoft, Oracle, and others as the backbone of the "software industry," the reality is that these companies are really a drop in the software bucket, with companies like Sony, Wal-Mart, and GE the true backbone of a much larger software ecosystem than the vendors comprise.
As open source matures, we're going to see these "software users" develop more software in-house, often building from open-source projects. Gartner calls out intriguing proof of this trend, but it's equally evident in anecdotes like this one, highlighting Virgin America's adoption of open source to reduce costs and improve innovation.
Virgin America is writing few checks to external vendors. That money is paying internal developers instead.
Digitization, then, may not be destroying the software market so much as reshaping it. In this new model, companies like Domino's will need more internal developers as they rely less on outside software vendors.
There will still be a need for companies like SAP, of course, as there are broad industry needs that a company or open-source foundation can satisfy. But for strategic IT projects, we're likely to see more open source plus internal development, and less packaged software purchases.
If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. That popular aphorism never seemed truer than today when reading The Wall Street Journal's analysis of Wikipedia's declining volunteer base. Despite countless articles extolling the virtues and seeming omnipotence of "community" over the past several years, the technology industry seems to be settling back into old habits:
Command and control.
It's not that the "wisdom of crowds" idea hasn't influenced the way technology is developed, or how news and information are gathered and distributed. It has.
It's just that the promised sea change has proved to be far less disruptive than we expected.
Take Wikipedia. As the Journal calls out, volunteerism has declined as the ease of contribution has waned. The easy topics are taken. Rules for upping the quality have proliferated. Wikipedia is becoming...corporate.
Nick Carr has been pointing this out for years, but it's only now becoming self-evident. Wikipedia has grown up and, in so doing, is looking more and more like the encyclopedic world it sought to displace.
Nor is it alone. Open-source business models increasingly look like proprietary software models, as the Software Freedom Law Center's Bradley Kuhn suggests.
Even uber successful open-source communities like Joomla have discovered that reliance on volunteers falls short of what a few good paid developers can do.
That's a positive discovery by Joomla. A more worrisome discovery is that Mozilla remains far too dependent on Google to fund development of Firefox. Mozilla has lots of community, right? Yes. As Mozilla CEO John Lilly has said, 40 percent of Firefox's code comes from developers not employed by the foundation.
But that still leaves 60 percent, and virtually all of the core development work, that relies on "company," not "community," which is how much of the world's best open-source software is developed: funded by IBM and other "community" members.
For those who think "community" is a euphemism for "everyone else doing my work for me," think again. It just doesn't work that way.
Of course, companies can go to the opposite extreme, too. Apple, for one, gets beat up for a heavy-handed approach to its App Store approval process. Apple, in other words, doesn't seem to care one iota what "the community" thinks.
But then, this is the same App Store with more than 100,000 applications and 2 billion downloads to date. No wonder Apple isn't apologizing: it's clearly benefiting most people most of the time, or the application developers would take their complaints to a different platform.
But they haven't, and this calls out the problem with deifying "community." It's accepted wisdom that one shouldn't "anger the community," as if it's some unknown god that demands the occasional virgin to be thrown into the volcano. But the truth is, "community" is not really much different from the "customers" and "partners" the industry has sought to satisfy for decades.
So, yes, by all means seek to work with your community of users and partners, but don't expect "the community" to do your work for you. Guess what? "The community" already has a day job, and can't afford to work full-time for you unless you pay it.
All of which leaves us largely where we started. The most successful software companies don't rely on some vague "community" to build their products. Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Google (Android, anyone?), and even, increasingly, Red Hat (JBoss, KVM, etc.) build great software based on their own, internal plans and expertise and "the community" buys it (or resells/embeds/etc. it).
The big shift, however, has been in the transparency of the feedback loop, which has been a welcome change in the industry. So, to the extent that "community" simply implies a more open way of developing and distributing software, then, yes, it has been significant.
But it hasn't changed the world. It has only changed the way the dominant technology companies...dominate.
