The Open Road

Mårten Mickos

As the European Commission continues to evaluate the potentially deleterious effects of Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems and its open-source MySQL database, concern is rising that delay will harm MySQL without helping competition.

One who shares this concern is former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos. On Thursday, Mickos sent a letter to Neelie Kroes, the European Union's competition commissioner, urging that the deal be approved for the good of the market and MySQL. He also spoke with CNET News' Stephen Shankland on Thursday.

Below is the edited full text of the letter.

Helsinki 8 Oct 2009

Mrs. Neelie Kroes
Commissioner for Competition
European Commission, J70
B-1049 Brussels/Brussel
BELGIQUE/BELGIE

Dear Commissioner Kroes,

I am writing to you regarding your review of Oracle's pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems. As I understand it, the EU Commission is concerned about a risk of undue concentration of power in the database market. Having been the CEO of MySQL from 2001 to 2009, and built a business that was serving a new market unmet by Oracle and others, I can agree with the questions posed, but I do not share the concerns that have been expressed. In the following, I will explain why.

In brief, my reasoning is as follows:

1. Oracle has as many compelling business reasons to continue the ramp-up of the MySQL business as Sun Microsystems and MySQL previously did, or even more.
2. Even if Oracle, for whatever reason, would have malicious or ignorant intent regarding MySQL (not that I think so), the positive and massive influence MySQL has on the DBMS market cannot be controlled by a single entity--not even by the owner of the MySQL assets. The users of MySQL exert a more powerful influence in the market than the owner does.

Many expected Oracle to harm MySQL as far back as 2005, when they acquired the InnoDB storage engine that plays a crucial role for many MySQL customers. And yet Oracle increased their investment in InnoDB since that time, making MySQL a stronger player in the market.

For further detail on my views on Oracle's intent, please see this interview with me in Forbes Magazine in April 2009.

It may at first blush seem counterintuitive that control of the MySQL assets does not automatically bestow control of the MySQL installed base. But the free installed base of MySQL--enormous on a planetary scale--is voluntarily but not mandatorily coupled to the commercial market of MySQL. It produces huge benefits to the MySQL business, but it is not controlled by it.

Background

The impetus to write this letter comes from my concern with the talented teams of the MySQL business unit and of Sun Microsystems in general. I am also troubled by certain factual distortions about a subject matter that I am intimately familiar with: MySQL and its business model. Open-source business models are complicated and quite different, and it took many years to fully understand and shape the one of MySQL.

A Finnish citizen, I served as chief executive officer of MySQL from early 2001 to February 2008, when Sun acquired MySQL. After that, I served as senior vice president of the database group at Sun until the end of March 2009. Being the only person to have served as the CEO of MySQL and to have attended every board meeting ever held, I believe I have unique insights into these matters.

To be clear, I resigned from my position in March 2009, and I presently have no commercial or financial interests in the MySQL ecosystem, Sun, or Oracle (or any other vendor in the DBMS market, for that matter), other than my loyalty to Sun employees in general and the MySQL team in particular.

MySQL's Markets and Installed Base

MySQL is the world's most popular open-source relational database, and potentially the most popular relational database of all. It has an enormous influence and impact on the usage and the buying patterns of relational databases (also known as RDBMSs), in particular for Web applications. One might even state that the Internet would not be what it is today, were it not for MySQL. Staffed by a highly talented team of passionate employees, the Swedish company MySQL grew the MySQL business from a small one in 2001 to a massive one in 2008.

In this discussion, the term "MySQL" refers to two things. On the one hand, there is the huge phenomenon MySQL--an estimated 12 million active installations under a free and open-source software license, millions, if not tens of millions, of skilled users and developers, and tens of thousands of corporations who use MySQL one way or the other.

On the other hand, there is the business of MySQL, which is growing rapidly, thus rewarding the owners of the assets (currently Sun Microsystems).

Those two meanings of the term "MySQL" stand in a close mutually beneficial interaction with each other. But most importantly, this interaction is voluntary and cannot be directly controlled by the vendor.

What I mean is that the vast and free installed base of MySQL is using it of their own free choice, unencumbered by the vendor and under no obligation or restraint. That is the nature of open source. And conversely, the MySQL business is supporting the free installed base of MySQL (by improving the product) voluntarily and in the hope of deriving benefit from the installed base.

This is the paradox of an open-source business, and it took me a long time to truly understand how powerful a force it is. It is unlike any traditional business. The key point is that both the users and the vendors of open source are engaged in a powerful free-market dynamic that cannot be contained by any single entity.

It is in everybody's interest that the two sides of MySQL produce benefit for and derive benefit from each other. But neither group can mandate or control the other one. This is a core philosophy of open-source software and more generally of the "architecture of participation" (as defined by Tim O'Reilly). There is a mutually beneficial voluntary relationship, but there is no control by one group over the other. In more colloquial terms: the owners of MySQL cannot force MySQL users to pay up, and the nonpaying users cannot force the business to subsidize them.

Anyone acquiring the MySQL assets will therefore acquire an ability to control the business aspect, i.e., meaning how MySQL is licensed commercially, but only an opportunity (and no free reign) to derive benefit from the free user base.

This explains how the MySQL business can be valued highly in the market ($1 billion, when acquired by Sun in February 2008) while at the same time providing no way of controlling its installed base. This unusual relationship between market share and installed base is at the core of the topic. The market share is small but controllable, to some degree. The installed base is enormous but not controllable. The installed base is, and can be, hugely beneficial to the owner of MySQL, but only to the extent and for as long as this owner of MySQL enjoys the trust of the installed base.

To put it in numbers, it may be useful to see the usage of MySQL, as divided into three categories:

The European Union undoubtedly believes it is taking a principled stance against the specter of antitrust as Oracle attempts to buy Sun Microsystems. As I've written, however, the EU's delay threatens to gift Sun's customers to IBM and other competitors while doing little to no good for its MySQL business. Worse still, the EU may be paving the way for Oracle to drop its bid, only to return to scoop up Sun's software assets at a rock-bottom price.

Think this is far-fetched? Consider the following (increasingly likely) scenario:

Let's say the EU holds up Oracle's acquisition of Sun by four months. In the technology world, this is an eternity. The lack of clarity around the business has already contributed to two woeful quarters from Sun, with Q4 revenue down 31 percent year-over-year.

Sun's revenue drop is bad, but it will almost certainly get worse the longer the EU drags out its "in-depth investigation." How much worse? Perhaps 50 percent. Heck, perhaps as bad as 80 percent. IBM and HP, in particular, have been crowing about hundreds of Sun customers jumping ship in the wake of Oracle's beleaguered acquisition. Thirty-one percent may come to seem like the good ol' days.

The sad thing is that the EU will almost certainly bow to the inevitable and withdraw its objections. It will look silly for holding up a deal on the specious grounds of MySQL's health (it's doing just fine, thank you, and isn't in danger of being lobotomized by Oracle, which likely will prove to be a better manager of this asset than Sun was).

The EU, unfortunately, is likely not to notice just how silly its stance was, and we'll see other companies go through the same rigamarole.

Regardless, Oracle isn't a silly company, and isn't going to pay top dollar for a diminished asset. It would not be surprising to see Oracle drop its offer by as much as 50 percent, claiming it's actually a premium as revenues are down by more than that. (There is precedent for this in Oracle's various offers for PeopleSoft.) Sun, ruined by this point, would have little choice but to capitulate.

All of which would make Oracle's acquisition of Sun's software business even better than before. As Larry Augustin noted, Oracle's $7.4 billion offer for Sun effectively valued the software at $0.00. Getting a better price on the hardware business and still buying the software business for $0.00? That sounds like a sweet deal.

After all, Oracle is primarily interested in Sun's software assets. Getting Sun for $3.7 billion would make it even easier to quickly flip Sun's hardware business to Fujitsu or HP at a profit, which some speculate is waiting in the wings to buy Sun's hardware business and which I noted back in March was considering a joint-bid on Sun with Oracle.

"Angelic" may not be the word most often associated with Oracle. "Shrewd" is more apt, and low-balling Sun after the EU scuppers its value is shrewd business indeed.

EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes probably means well by holding up Oracle's acquisition of Sun, but the only group she's helping with the investigation is Oracle, which may end up getting Sun for half what it planned to pay. I'm sure Ellison will give her a ride on his yacht for her troubles.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Neelie Kroes

(Credit: European Commission)

IBM and Hewlett-Packard could not have planned it any better.

The European Union has launched an in-depth investigation into Oracle's acquisition of Sun, potentially delaying the merger by several more months. In doing so, the EU is actually guaranteeing the demise of Sun's hardware business and gifting it to Sun's competitors by misunderstanding the deal's impact on open source, generally, and on MySQL, specifically.

If you haven't been paying attention, the delay on the merger due to U.S. and EU scrutiny has already resulted in two shockingly bad quarters from Sun. Many enterprise customers are already moving to competitors like IBM because of the uncertainty surrounding the future of Sun products, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Further delay will only compound the problem.

Unlike the U.S., which approved the deal, the EU's Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes is concerned that Oracle's takeover of Sun will end up diminishing competition:

Systems (like MySQL) based on open-source software are increasingly emerging as viable alternatives to proprietary solutions. The Commission has to ensure that such alternatives would continue to be available.

The Commission doesn't have to. MySQL's open-source license already does. It's open source: even Oracle can't put the open-source genie back in the bottle once it has been released, as MySQL has, under the GNU General Public License.

Consider: some of the folks cheering loudest for the EU to clamp down on the proposed merger, like representatives from Monty Program, have already demonstrated Oracle's (and Sun's) lack of control over MySQL. Monty Program has created a significant fork, or derivative, of the MySQL database, and stands to gain much by the EU's obstructionism.

In delaying the merger, the EU isn't helping MySQL. It's helping its competitors, including Drizzle, OurDelta, MariaDB (Monty Program's fork), Percona, etc.

Competition within and around MySQL is alive and well, regardless of Oracle. After all, as former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos has been saying for years, MySQL has never really competed with Oracle, anyway. MySQL serves (and has helped to create) a very different market: the Web database market.

When asked in April if Oracle's bid for Sun would end up hurting MySQL, Mickos responded: "MySQL works for Web-based applications. Oracle is for older, legacy applications." The vast majority of Oracle's revenue comes from enterprise IT. The vast majority of MySQL's revenue comes from Web companies like Facebook, Google, etc.

MySQL and Oracle don't really compete. They live in two very different markets.

So, if anything, Oracle's acquisition of Sun helps it leverage MySQL into a market--the growing Web database market--that its own technology is ill-equipped to manage. It also gets a lower-cost product with which to bludgeon its real enemy, Microsoft, coupled with a greater footprint in the rising open-source developer community.

Open source is not the enemy in this deal. Microsoft is.

The EU, however, has made itself an enemy to Oracle, Sun, and MySQL by holding up the merger, a situation that will only get worse due to its glacial pace, as CIO.co.uk's editor Martin Veitch suggests. Customers are not the beneficiaries of its intervention: Sun's server competitors like IBM are.

Though the EU purports to be in tune with open source, its meddlesome muddling reveals a surprising ignorance of open source, and shows a complete disregard for MySQL's true market opportunity.

UPDATE @ 6:59 Pacific on 9/4/09: I solicited comment from Gartner vice president and Distinguished Analyst, Donald Feinberg, who had this to say:

The EU does not understand open source. This is clear by using DBMS (MySQL) to extend the deadline. It also is clear that this is an attempt to use MySQL as a cover-up to a political agenda. It is protectionism at its worst.

The EU is entering deep water here, water that it clearly does not adequately understand.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

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."

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (red fedora) and Michael Tiemann

(Credit: Ricardo Stuckert)

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 thought of just Tweeting a few of these news bits, but some deserve to be blogged. Alas! I lack the time today but....

• Joomla has surpassed 10,000,000 downloads. It's hard to describe just how impressive this is, and particularly given the fact that these have come in the past four years, and after a fractious fork from Mambo.
• The University of Southern Mississippi and the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate have launched the Homeland Open Security Technology (HOST) program, along with Open Source Software Institute (OSSI) and the U.S. Navy, to invest $1.5 million in the development of open-source technology.
• A new report from Gartner suggests 42 percent of CIOs surveyed chopped their IT budgets in the first quarter of the year. Less budget almost certainly will mean more open source.
• MindTouch (Disclosure: I am an advisor to MindTouch) CEO Aaron Fulkerson asks what's the big deal with Google's new Wave collaborative platform, given that wiki technology (like MindTouch's Dekiwiki) has been "waving" for years. Rafael Laguna, Open-XChange CEO, agrees. I still think Wave is cool.
• Speaking of Google, the company recently launched Page Speed, an open-source Firefox add-on that "web developers can use...to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them. Google continues to demonstrate ever-stronger commitment to feeding the open-source community.
• Given that no one has yet settled on the optimal open-source code contribution model, MySQL developer Brian Aker discusses the Drizzle fork of MySQL and how he and the project team is handling third-party contributions to it. Very interesting insight into code contribution policies, copyright assignment, etc.
• Acer, meanwhile, is crippling its Android Netbooks by having them dual-boot Windows. I don't have anything against Windows (well, that's not really true...), but this seems like an exercise in futility. If customers want Windows, give it to them. If they want the lower price (and different experience) of Linux, give that to them. But don't give them both, or they'll likely revert to Windows out of sheer habit.
• Cloudera CEO Mike Olson indicates that Web applications are just the beginning for Hadoop. Indeed, Cloudera's easier-to-use commercial version of Hadoop is doing so well that Cloudera had to raise another $6 million just to keep up. Fortune, for one, thinks that Hadoop might be perfect to help power the electrical power grid.
• Back in Redmond, Microsoft is coming under increased pressure from the European Commission, reports The Register, which may force Microsoft to offer rival browsers with Windows. Microsoft probably feels pretty beleaguered, but Roy Schestowitz offers up some data that indicates it's spending its free time pressuring European groups to side with it. It doesn't seem to be working.
• Finally, Oracle executives didn't mince words in a town hall meeting with Sun employees, stipulating that some tough choices will be made about Sun technology and personnel. Indeed.

The European Commission has a bold plan for improving software quality: make software developers liable for their code. The purported reason? Consumer peace of mind, according to the European Union commissioner of consumer affairs, Meglena Kuneva:

If we want consumers to shop around and exploit the potential of digital communications, then we need to give them confidence that their rights are guaranteed. That means putting in place and enforcing clear consumer rights that meet the high standards already existing in the main street. [The] internet has everything to offer consumers, but we need to build trust so that people can shop around with peace of mind.

Because, you know, the Internet has really struggled with consumers due to the poor quality of code. Google has a wide range of products in beta that really struggle to find users because who could possibly trust the beta version of Gmail, News, etc.?

What tripe.

I'm personally not against software liability, but have yet to discover a software vendor, open source or proprietary, that tries to evade responsibility for the quality of its products. In other words, I think this is a case of regulators seeking to justify their existence, not a plan for actually improving anyone's software experience.

On that note, the EC should be careful to avoid hurting the software industry, and minimizing its benefits, even as it seeks to help consumers of that industry by ensuring those benefits. For example, one of the reasons that software remains comparatively inexpensive is that the cost of legal liability is not baked into the purchase price. The EC's action could well result in pricing software beyond the reach of many current consumers and businesses.

Don't worry, some may claim, there's always open-source software! It's free and high quality!

Well, yes, but oddly enough, it also comes with absolutely no warranties, indemnification, etc., at least when used without commercial backing. It's a good thing, too: imagine releasing your software free-of-charge onto SourceForge.net, only to get hit with a lawsuit because some company's business was hurt because your software allegedly failed to work as expected. Talk about a raw deal.

On this point, Glyn Moody quotes security guru Bruce Schneier, who suggests that open source could get a free pass because open-source software is distributed without contracts. Open source, in other words, might be the ultimate get-out-of-EC-regulation-free card.

If this free pass works as advertised, presumably we'd see more software companies distributing software under open-source licenses, and only taking the blame for the proprietary add-ons/extensions that complement this open-source software. It's unclear how this would be helpful to the consumers the EC is straining to protect, but it's the stance I'd take if I were a vendor.

In this way, the EC's proposed changes to software liability could end up leaving businesses and consumers with less protection, not more, with open source providing a convenient escape hatch. Perhaps this is good as it means more software released under open-source licenses. But the idea of open source used as a means to evade legal liability doesn't sit well with me, and likely would ruin the positive connotations that currently attach to open source.

As noted, the Web seems to have thrived despite (or perhaps because of?) the lack of software-liability regulation. Open source, too, has fared exceptionally well, and has yielded significant benefits to companies and consumers...despite offering exactly zero software liability.

But this is the problem when bureaucrats, not common sense, rule. Subscription-based business models protect commercial customers, and open-data policies protect consumers, far better than any software-liability regime can. The freedom to change software vendors is a far better antidote to poor software quality than some EC bureaucrat.

In short, despite getting a lot of bad press lately, the market remains the best way to protect customers. If the EC would spend more time ensuring open markets, instead of trying to regulate closed markets, European consumers and businesses would find much better software protection.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

We live in a world that demands entitlements for just about everything. While the framers of the U.S. Constitution talked about the rights of assembly, speech, and religion, our modern world has crowned new rights. Universal health care is a hot one. But now the European Commission's Viviane Reding has suggested Internet access as a fundamental human right.

Who knew?

The statement comes as the European Commission grapples with proposed three-strikes legislation, an effort sponsored by France to deny file-sharers Internet access after three warnings of copyright infringement. Opponents of the legislation have responded by suggesting that Internet access is fundamental to liberty, an argument that suffered a setback on Wednesday as the European Parliament voted against codifying Internet access as a basic human right.

It's gratifying to see that someone recognizes that Internet access doesn't rank alongside free speech, even if it can help to publish that speech. Speech is fundamental, but how you express it need not be.

Ms. Reding apparently disagrees, however, as she explains in a statement to the European Parliament (NB: Microsoft Word document, which is really very ironic):

The fourth element I would like to underline is the recognition of the right to Internet access. The new rules recognise explicitly that Internet access is a fundamental right such as the freedom of expression and the freedom to access information. The rules therefore provide that any measures taken regarding access to, or use of, services and applications must respect the fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons, including the right to privacy, freedom of expression and access to information and education as well as due process.

Wow. We live in such an entitlement culture that we expect to be handed everything, Internet access now included. Does that mean I'm guaranteed fast access, or will dial-up do?

Sun's Simon Phipps explained to me over Twitter that "if the stated direction of government is eGovernment then citizen access to the Internet is a right not a privilege," which makes sense, but provides a very slippery slope. Following this line of reasoning, shouldn't I have a right to cable TV, since that's where I watch C-SPAN and other government-related activity? If that's how the government chooses to communicate with me, the citizen, I darn well better get full access!

Or how about a right to get The Wall Street Journal? It provides useful commentary on my government's actions and how they affect my wallet. But then, I'd also need The New York Times so that I could develop a balanced view on important political matters.

None of which will matter if the government doesn't force upon me the right to education! And not just any education, but an education that makes me fully capable of making intelligent voting decisions and filling out endless forms.

See the problem?

Glyn Moody suggests "framing this in terms of "rights" is pretty silly, but it's significant politically that (Reding) chose to put it this way," and he's absolutely right. It's also very dangerous.

The Western world is big on rights these days, and seems to forget its responsibilities. Indeed, the interesting thing about the fundamental rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution is that they mostly involve keeping government out of the lives of citizens, whereas these new government-granted rights do the opposite: they beg government to get deeply involved with citizens' lives through taxes and regulation.

I'd therefore turn this discussion on its head, and suggest to Reding and the European Commission: we may choose to shoulder the responsibility for delivering Internet access to Europe and the rest of the world, but let's term it as a "fundamental responsibility," and not as a "fundamental right."

After all, let's be honest: if the government assumes Internet access as a fundamental right, it ultimately is granting itself the fundamental right to tax its citizens to pay for it. I don't feel any burning desire to pay for your "right" to download silly YouTube videos, porn, or even to read this blog, which is what people would do 99.999 percent of the time with their Internet access. None of these is fundamental to freedom or to a happy, fulfilling life (except maybe that last one ;-).

Do more, in other words, and expect less.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay. It is your right. :-).

It's fascinating to see governments around the world embrace open source as a way to boost local economies and improve sovereignty. It's even better when the policy process itself is laid bare, allowing outsiders to see the partisan meddling that goes into a publicly articulated policy.

The European Commission is in the midst of preparing a report entitled "Toward a European Software Strategy," (PDF) with a draft released on Tuesday to Wikileaks. The draft is fascinating for all that it says about how open-source software affects the European software industry, but it's equally intriguing for all that some of its editors want it to unsay about open-source software.

One such editor is Jonathan Zuck, president of the Association for Competitive Technology, a lobbying organization with strong ties to Microsoft. There is nothing wrong with Microsoft making its voice heard in the software strategy development process, as it stands to gain or lose much in the process, but it does make for some interesting political gamesmanship in the document.

While the draft doesn't make it obvious who is saying what, there are numerous instances where editors have tried to soften the appeal of open source or downplay its significance, repeatedly trying to insist that open source not be called out as more significant than proprietary software.

In one area, an editor crossed out this section:

Proprietary vendors charge their users twice, once at the deployment phase (through support contracts), and once at the procurement phase (through licensing fees).

And replaced it with this comment:

PAPER SHOULD FOCUS ON OSS AND NOT DWELL INTO UNSUPPORTED AND UNNECESSARY STATEMENTS AGAINST PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE.

This commentator further suggests that European companies may be more prone to open source because they lack the capital to start "real" software businesses:

European IT companies also have fewer alternative growth strategies than their US counterparts due to smaller/more risk adverse venture capital community and fewer IPO opportunities.

Fascinating. It somehow overlooks the European origins of venture-backed open-source companies like MySQL, JBoss, Alfresco, Trolltech, etc. But who needs facts?

The redlines (literally, comments and additions in red) seem to come from Jonathan Zuck, and demonstrate an attempt to deny any unique nature to open source, and turn it into something that the European Union need not do anything in particular to foster. As edited, the policy paper remains a strong endorsement of open source, but highly diluted from its original intent.

Again, there's nothing wrong with Microsoft protecting its interests in a market where it stands to gain or lose much. Microsoft competitors, however, would do well to analyze how it seeks to influence both IT buyers and policymakers with respect to open source.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

Mozilla Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker

(Credit: Mozilla)

Mozilla Foundation's Mitchell Baker describes Firefox, the open-source Web browser, as "an anomaly."

While most Microsoft competitors lay down and die when Microsoft claims 90 percent or more of a market, Mozilla has fought back to earn more than 20 percent of the browser market.

Despite this success, Baker believes that government, and in the European Commission in particular, has a role to play in further leveling the playing field. As she notes in a recent blog post, government entities would perhaps have less relevance but for the antitrust activity that resulted in Microsoft's dominant market share in the first place:

Microsoft did not obtain its (Internet Explorer) hegemony solely through competition on the merits of IE. A number of illegal activities were also involved in creating IE's market dominance...The idea that Microsoft is an innocent victim (of European Commission intervention) is deeply flawed.

I interviewed Baker at length on this topic on Friday, and though I have something of a knee-jerk negative reaction to government involvement in markets and have argued against Mozilla's need for government bailouts, one thing she said particularly resonated with me. When I asked the most damaging thing Microsoft's activities had done to the browser market, Baker turned to psychology:

The Internet became mixed in people's minds with Microsoft. Many people conflated Windows with "the Web." Our first great challenge was to convince people that they could improve their life by making a choice in their browser. To this day, most people think of "the Internet" as the blue "E" (IE's icon).

It's always there on the desktop. The muscle memory of the blue E has been a giant problem for us and for competition.

In Silicon Valley, this might seem like an odd argument--"surely, everyone knows that IE is just a browser, not the Web, and that Windows isn't a browser or the Web!"--but outside the borders of highways 280 and 101, the argument resonates. Deeply.

Most people, as Baker continued, fear their computers or, at best, consider them somewhat foreign and difficult to understand. They just want them to work and aren't in the habit of using any software other than what comes preinstalled:

Just having things work when they turn on the computer gives people reassurance. Telling them to try something else, and thereby risk breaking this system, was a difficult proposition.

It's actually worse than this. Not only did Mozilla have to convince would-be Firefox adopters once; it has to do it over and over, as Baker suggests:

Every time someone buys a new machine, they have to make a decision to go out and download/install Firefox, even if they've already made that decision. There is persistent resistance to Firefox. We have 220 million users, and a lot of those users have had to choose Firefox more than once. That's an issue.

Again, had Microsoft achieved this coup with fair dealings, Mozilla might grumble but would ultimately learn to compete on Microsoft's terms, as it has for years.

But IE's "brainwashing" of the market didn't come through fair means, so Mozilla is getting involved in the European Commission's suit against Microsoft. Baker and her team have been granted special status that enables them to access Commission documents and offer their perspective on the proceedings.

Mozilla isn't looking for a handout. It's looking for a level playing field. It has managed to scratch out 20 percent of the browser market on Microsoft's terms. Imagine what it could do with a fair and truly competitive market.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.