Ubuntu takes on Microsoft in a full-frontal assault

Microsoft's hegemony depends upon two cash cows: Windows and Office. Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has his sights firmly set on Windows, and has both the means, the chutzpah, and the community to credibly commandeer an assault on Fortress Redmond, as suggested by Ashlee Vance in The New York Times over the weekend.

Others have tried to beat Microsoft at its own game and have failed miserably. The difference with Shuttleworth, however, is that he's not necessarily trying to beat Microsoft at its game. He's hoping to "fundamentally change the operating system market," something that might wrong-foot Microsoft and give Ubuntu a fighting chance.

There are signs that Ubuntu is already stealing a march on Microsoft, as noted in the article:

• Roughly half of Google's 20,000 employees run a version of Ubuntu. With this crowd of early adopters standing behind Ubuntu, a crowd with a massive profit machine behind them, anything can happen;
• IDC estimates that 11 percent of American businesses have systems based on Ubuntu, with even broader penetration likely in Europe and elsewhere;
• Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is approaching $30 million in annual revenue, which may seem like a gnat on Microsoft's bison-esque backside, but this revenue represents multi-million dollar commitments from Dell, IBM, and other large parties with an interest in unshackling themselves from Microsoft. In other words, the nature of the revenue is more telling than the amount;
• Ubuntu commands the fealty of tens of thousands of unpaid volunteers globally, despite Canonical only employing 200 or so employees. Ubuntu has leverage well beyond its means.

So, game on. However, the big test for Ubuntu will be whether it's prepared to make some concessions to business reality in order to succeed. I've talked at length with Shuttleworth on this topic and, while I remain convinced that he has his community's best interests at heart, I believe that Ubuntu's community is going to need to mature beyond the "free as in beer and freedom" mentality to also include "free as in market and profit."

Those that think that there is some fundamentally new way to make money with the Web and open source haven't been paying attention. There are certainly new ways to distribute software and associated services, but whether in the cloud or on the desktop, there's always some element of control, and that control may jar the faithful.

The big question is how Ubuntu will make its money as it goes from $30 million to $300 million. If it can find a credible cloud strategy that separates desktop development from revenue development (cloud), Shuttleworth will have managed to accomplish the nearly impossible: making gobs of money without upsetting his community. If anyone can, he can. But don't be foolish enough to believe it's going to be painless.

[sirrobinyellow]

Ubuntu's future lies in systems which are sold as a package with other things rather than on its own. Microsoft's proposition is more often than not Windows + Office. What is the Ubuntu proposition?

A good laptop operating system needs excellent wifi, sleep, and hibernate. Better still the wifi should come back after you come out of hibernate. Windows does these things very well. The fact that Linux doesn't crash just isn't good enough any more. Windows has been so reliable for so long now that even the Vista debacle didn't significantly improve Ubuntu's numbers on the desktop, everyone just furiously bought up copies of Windows XP.

Ubuntu can't run iTunes, and that may just be it's biggest failing. Hang on though, isn't there something called Songbird now? I wonder if it works when you come out of hibernate?

[MSSlayer]

iTunes can't hold a candle as a burner to K3B and as a player/organizer to Amarok. The iTunes stores is crap anyway.

[ITRebel]

I appreciate Mr. Vance's recent articles about the benefits of open source that have appeared in the NY Times, including his recent article about the R open source language. I am sure that certain regular posters to this blog like MSSLAYER and others will appreciate this present piece about overtaking Microsoft. MSSLayer and others have recently posted about how secure and encrypted proprietary applications are not safe from open source development because they can break the encryption (please see comments on this following Matt's article on Vietnam last week).

Matt discusses this army of volunteers in open source development like MSSLayer as a strength of Ubuntu and other open source developments. However, an article from a Cornell University law professor was passed to me that seriously challenges whether this army of volunteers is really a strength. He reviews recent US court rulings and suggests that much of open source development based upon breaking through proprietary encrypted applications will be viewed as illegal. How many in this army of volunteers have done what MSSLayer and others have advocated and reverse engineered based upon what is apparently now regarded as illegal means? How many open source applications have been developed based upon illegal breaking of proprietary trade secrets? This Cornell University law professor subtitles this recent article "A Looming Ice Age for Open Source Development". How many IT managers at large corporations will want to implement an open source project and have this come back to haunt them because they were unaware of the law and the illegal means by which the open source development took place? My guess is that this will have a bone chilling effect on a large number of open source projects. Here is the link to this article:

http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/research/cornell-law-review/upload/CRN504Hwang.pdf

[odubtaig]

Is this professor by any chance aware that the DMCA only applies in the USA? Is he also aware that it is overridden in a number of US states by laws that protect, for example, the right to back up DVD and Blu-Ray movies?

I don't see these guys getting arrested yet http://www.dvd-cloner.com/

Elcomsoft were acquitted, as was Jon Lech Johansen.

Quite apart from this, reverse engineering is still protected just about anywhere outside the USA, at least for the purposes of continuing access to data and for other legal purposes such as backing up.

It's roughly as scary as Microsoft's 'patents'.

[MSSlayer]

In memory encryption is worthless because sooner or later then key gets stored in memory.

You don't need to reverse engineer to write OSS programs. What sort of drugs are you on now? Take Office, lets say I wanted to copy all the functionality of Word, including how it looks. That requires no reverse engineering, you don't know much about software do you? If I was retarded and wanted to copy the Excel macro crap, I could without RE, unless I wanted to make it compatible with Excel.

It doesn't take much to make a copy of a program, just use it enough to understand what each feature does.

You are still a moron.

I reverse engineer all the time, to find buffer overflows and other exploits. Be grateful people with a conscience do that or Windows would be a million times worse then the its security is today.

[ITRebel]

Odubtaig,

Those are good questions and I am not a lawyer, but a basic ruling principle in corporate America is "when in doubt, stay out". The recent court rulings referenced by the professor will, at the very least, cause serious doubt about the wisdom of implementing an open source project in much of corporate America until the law becomes clearer.

[odubtaig]

Well, good thing for Microsoft (and many others) not everyone has that attitude because IBM would still be the only maker of what we call the PC.

That asides, if I need to reverse engineer your encrypted code for access to my own data, this is still 100% legitimate. It's quite clear in the text that this was not at issue and that 'interoperability' could not be claimed because Bnetd did not enforce Blizzard's CD-Key based copy protection scheme.

So, they were convicted on the claim that Bnetd was solely for the purpose of aiding copyright violation.

Both Elcomsoft and Johansen were acquitted because their reverse engineering had legitimate purpose . In the case of Elcomsoft their software was more legal in Russia than Adobe's because it met a legal requirement for accessability, specifically for blind people, and in Norway it's legal to make backups of your films.

'holding that Bnetd had limited commercial application and was distributed solely to ?circumvent[ ] Blizzard?s technological measures controlling access to Battle.net and the Blizzard games."

Second, the court held that the Bnetd authors did not fall within the interoperability exception to the DMCA?s anticircumvention provision. Because Bnetd servers could not authenticate CD keys sent by Blizzard games connecting to the defendants? servers,81 gamers could play unauthorized copies of Blizzard games over Bnetd. This fact essentially prevented Bnetd from claiming the exemption provided in § 1201(f)(1).'

[ITRebel]

One simply needs to set up the encryption in a way similar to Blizzard and one is generally protected. Additionally, a legitimate purpose for reverse engineering is open to question when one has agreed in the EULA that one will not perform reverse engineering unless one has permission to do so and one has not asked for permission. That is what got the defendants in the Blizzard case in trouble. At the very least, this will give others reason to sue for violation of intellectual property protection in other cases involving breaking of encryption.

Also, it is different from the Microsoft patents in that there is clearly a "David vs. Goliath" mentality in any lawsuits if open source companies go up against Microsoft over patent violations. In this case, many of those that hold intellectual property in encrypted software are small companies - much smaller than large open source competitors to Microsoft. US courts involving juries are likely to favor the underdog in these cases. At the very least, it creates another entire legal challenge to much of open source development and this will scare off many large companies from implementing it. "When in doubt, stay out!"

[odubtaig]

It may have been the reason Blizzard sued but they didn't win on it. There's a reason every EULA has the 'if any part of this agreement is invalidated in court' clause. That's not a part of the EULA that could be legally enforceable because it attempts to forbid something which is explicitly protected by law and in such cases law always wins.

With regards to Microsofts patents, I was referring to them in the context of them being an empty threat.

This is a very specific case which was won because of the (deliberate or otherwise) purpose to which the reverse engineering was put, which was copyright violation. If someone reverse engineers a new media format to allow the backup of the content and it can be proven that there is a legitimate and legal purpose for this reverse engineering, that is still protected.

Likewise, any reverse engineering of any encrypted software for any legitimate and legal purpose, even if it can also facilitate illegal activities such as copyright infringement, is still protected.

There is no doubt.

[ITRebel]

Odubtaig,

This law professor explicitly mentions that the defendants saw and agreed to the EULA as an important factor, so I do not know where you get your details You certainly have a different take on this area of law than this Cornell University law professor, who happens to be sympathetic to open source software. I quote from his last statement:

"[because of this ruling] copyright holders wield in their hands a powerful weapon that will, at
least in the short term, successfully blunt the socially beneficial development of open-source software?software that is borne of innovation and effectively competes with and extends the functionality of major
commercial applications. As Blizzard demonstrates, it is clear that copyright holders will not hesitate to use such a weapon."

Go ahead and dream up a novel reason to break an encryption and test the US courts yourself (that is what these foolish defendants tried to get away with). I have a feeling that you could end up serving some time in prison for intellectual property theft and software piracy.

P.S. I also do not see the move toward protectionism for US products ending anytime soon, as Obama's statements have sounded decidedly protectionist and I imagine that his judicial appointments will have similar views.

[MSSlayer]

If you understood encryption, even on an elementary level, I might be able to stop laughing at you.

Clicking on a button is not a legally binding contract, and it is very simple to crack open executables, without even installing it, so nothing was agreed upon.

[ITRebel]

MSSlayer,

I hate to break up your laughter, but the U.S. court disagrees with your amateur legal opinion. I generally look to lawyers for legal opinion on software and not to computer hackers like yourself. Please read the law professor's paper.

[odubtaig]

I've already given examples of just that including Elcomsoft. I've also seen plenty of examples of contracts of all kinds being invalidated on the basis of clauses that are not legal. It does not matter if someone agreed to an EULA, if the clause is illegal it's worthless. Spend some time looking up just how enforceable 'no compete' clauses in employee contracts are in most US states.

In the meantime I've given you two court rulings (one in the USA) and a commercial product (also in the USA) that are contrary to this view that any and all reverse engineering is risky.

Now, having looked up Mr Hwang, I note he is not a professor (which requires current academic involvement and regular research publication, he's clearly not in academia), is an associate at Davis Polk and Wardell and has only been a practising attorney since 2007. It's also interesting that this article was published in a the Cornell Law Review, of which he was an editor.

So, unless it turns out that he's some amazing young genius whose specialty is copyright and licensing this article isn't that important without the backing of people with a great deal more experience and understading of these issues. As always, it's important to be wary of single publications, especially from those with no track record, because they are often wrong. Even longstanding professors have been known to publish articles which are ridiculed by everyone else in their field.

[ITRebel]

Odubtaig,

Thanks for the good information. Let's call the author of this paper a legal scholar, if his current status is no longer in academia. I believe that the Cornell Law Review is a reputable publication, but I grant you that there could be flaws in his arguments as in all academic work.

I do not believe that the author of this article is saying that there is blanket protection for proprietary software against reverse engineering under this ruling. He is complaining that there is now some protection though. Ultimately, the courts need to decide whether a given reverse engineered process was done legitimately. The strongest point though is that this lawyer is very supportive of the open source software movement and still comes to a very different view of legal protections afforded for open source development than you have.

[MSSlayer]

You are the idiot that thinks that to create open source software you need to reverse engineer an executable.

Of course I am laughing at you.

[MSSlayer]

Too bad Ubuntu is one of the worst Linux distros around, at least among the better known ones. It is also a shame that Ubuntu does next to no development, they are merely a clearinghouse for packages with a hideous brown wrapper on it.

Then again, it is light years ahead of Windows.

[emmerc]

I really see in Ubuntu an excellent OS option. I have used it four years so far in old and new machines, in working and broken machines. I have gotten it to work just as I wish with all the eye-catching eye-candy bells and whistles I wished. I have two laptops (Toshiba P305-S8832 Vista Home, Toshiba Satellite 6100 Ubuntu 8.04) and an Asus eee PC 900 (Ubuntu-eee). I am able to run BibleWorks and MS Word 2003 in wine and I enjoy the compiz-fussion effects at full throttle! I recognize that it takes some time in order to work in a comfortable way with ubuntu but once you get to know the basics, Ubuntu will never leave you nor let you down. I have mess up my Ubuntu machines several times and always I have been able to get the right way to get it back on business.

There is something that has brought shame on me today as I read the news. A lady drop out of her school at Madison Wisconsin because she was not able to have the workarounds for her Ubuntu box. I have gotten tons of help and advice on the web about the workarounds needed for my Ubuntu box to work as I wish. I cannot understand how someone can harass this lady! She should have gotten advice and How-to messages and not insults! Ubuntu means people toward people and this is not what we have show in this opportunity! What a shame! What a Shame on us linux and Ubuntu users! Help and assistance is what she needs and not insult! What a Shame! This is not the way we will get to spread Ubuntu usage nor the way to get new users!