Licensing

Novell's Mono team continues to improve its "Microsoft Silverlight on Linux" story, now with the release of Moonlight 1.0, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight rich media technology for the Web, as CNET reports. It's a major upgrade to Moonlight and brings it closer to parity with Microsoft's Silverlight. Novell's Miguel de Icaza, the developer behind Mono and Moonlight, relied heavily on working in partnership with Microsoft to deliver the upgrade.

Therein lies both the promise and the peril of Moonlight. Well, one of them. For one thing, due to Microsoft-imposed restrictions, … Read more

I've written before that Cisco has aggressively been adopting open source for its hardware products, in addition to its push to promote Linux at Microsoft's expense.

What's particularly interesting (and frustrating) in Cisco's adoption of open source, however, is its apparent efforts to benefit from open source without taking any responsibility for the included open source.

For example, Cisco's Wireless Control System includes this lengthy list of open-source components in its EULA...

Dojo Apache Struts Java FTP Server Apache HTTP Server Apache Commons Apache Log4J Apache Taglib Apache Tomcat Poor Man's Imaging Wrapper (PMIW) … Read more

Ina Fried of CNET News reports Tuesday on Microsoft's 10,000th patent, with Microsoft's chief patent counsel calling the milestone "a testament to all of the innovation that has been taking place."

Maybe. But innovation is what hasn't actually done Microsoft much good, at least as measured in terms of new product lines that generate material amounts of revenue for the company. It still gathers the vast majority of its revenue from Windows and Office, two product lines that have only incrementally improved (or, in the case of Vista, degenerated) over the past decade or … Read more

Even as Microsoft has slipped into the mainstream of open source by embedding it in its products and adopting open-source strategies for services such as customer relationship management, it continues its subversive fight against Linux.

Linux is different, you see. Open source, as Microsoft is starting to recognize, is just another part of its ecosystem, one that it must support, if it wants Windows to continue to be a first-class computing citizen.

The open-source operating system, however, is competition--Microsoft's top competition, if CEO Steve Ballmer's words are to be taken at face value.

In this context, Microsoft's … Read more

The Open Knowledge Foundation blog provides some excellent reasons to take open-source licenses seriously, especially for data on the Web, but these struck me hardest:

Together, a definition of openness, plus a set of conformant licenses, deliver clarity and simplicity. Not only is interoperability ensured, but people can know at a glance, and without having to go through a whole lot of legalese, what they are free to do...Thus, licensing and definitions are important, even though they are only a small part of the overall picture.

If we get them wrong, they will keep on getting in the way … Read more

Back in 2002, as Roy Schestowitz calls out, Microsoft was desperately trying to figure out a response to Linux. The problem wasn't Linux as a product-level competitor. The problem, as its Windows chief, Jim Allchin, told a small gathering of Microsoft partners (PDF), is that Linux changes the nature of software competition with odd things like "community" and "GPL licensing," the latter of which Microsoft didn't like one bit :

We feel a huge threat from Linux. Maybe we shouldn't, which is a question you could answer from your perspective...There's Linux the community. We're going to learn from Linux the community. Incredible what they did...We're going to practice and practice and practice (to learn how to respond to Linux)...

GPL is the licensing model. We thlnk it's very bad...We don't think it's the same as public domain. Somebody wants to put in a free DSB(?), we don't have a problem with that, at least on licensing. But GPL, we think it's very bad basically for the world, but especially for the United States.

This is not surprising, given that Allchin had earlier deprecated Linux as "an intellectual-property destroyer" in 2001.

But name-calling was proving not to be enough, and for a reason that Allchin and Microsoft struggled to grasp, but one that its partners, which distribute the bulk of Microsoft's software, felt first-hand on the front lines. When Allchin later asked the participants what the biggest driver of Linux is, they didn't mention its modularity, high performance, or other characteristics. Back in 2002 (and, indeed, today, in many instances), one thing mattered:

Linux was free.

Sure, there was the cost of deployment, training, etc., and Allchin called out the work Microsoft was going to do to "educate" the market through IDC and other analysts about the "true" costs of Linux, but price was why these Microsoft partners were starting to defect, in some instances, to Linux.

Allchin's response?

We'll never meet free."

And that is why Microsoft has struggled against open source, and why it will continue to do so. Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth called it out well over a year ago, arguing that the difference between $0.00 and $0.01 is huge and game changing. Microsoft can halve its price, and Allchin talks in the transcript about doing just that. But free? That's not its business model.

Given Microsoft's difficulty in competing with open source's price, it's perhaps not surprising that Allchin hinted at another way of competing with Linux and open source: patents. Imposing a patent tax on open source is a viable way of raising its price tag beyond $0.00.

There's going to be a patent lawsuit on Linux. It's bound to happen...and the patent lawsuit won't really be about the license. It will be simply, "Hey, these guys took intellectual property." And whether the lawsuit comes from Wind River or in X, Y, Z, there's going to be one. Guaranteed. As I sit here today, I will guarantee you at some point there's going to be a challenge about the patents...… Read more

Microsoft may get a lot of grief for its patent strategy, but IBM carries the biggest patent portfolio by far. In fact, Big Blue has acquired more patents than any other company on the planet for the last 16 years running.

This is particularly interesting when you discover, as The Wall Street Journal recently did, that Hewlett-Packard, one of IBM's fiercest competitors, is actually slowing its patent applications. In HP's words, its emphasis now is on patent quality, not quantity:

HP was once trying to compete with IBM as the most prolific patent producer...But after Chief Executive … Read more

Novell officially released openSUSE 11.1 on Thursday, unleashing a torrent of new features like a Linux 2.6.27.7 kernel, improvements to YaST, and others.

While the new features are nice, it's the improved community development process in openSUSE 11.1 that I think signals the biggest change in SUSE, starting with an upgraded license to open up SUSE to more unfettered redistribution.

I caught up with openSUSE Linux community manager, Joe Brockmeier, who confirmed the importance of the revised license and focus on community development:

This release marks a major milestone for the contributor community. It'… Read more

ITWire picks apart a report from CCID, a Chinese research firm, suggesting that "Investments in informatization are becoming more cautious, the postponing and cancellations of system construction have led to a drop in Linux shipment[s]."

While no information is provided on Windows or Mac sales to provide a baseline (Is Linux growth slowing more than its competitors?), it's interesting to me that it's slowing at all. I would think that Linux adoption would grow in a downturn, at least in relatively new markets where Windows hasn't completely conditioned businesses and consumers to expect a … Read more