The freedom to fork is the essential right of open-source software. Until Oracle's attempted acquisition of Sun/MySQL, however, few realized just how important it would be to retain the right to fork one's own code.
After all, just because you have the letter-of-the-law right to fork doesn't mean you have a meaningful ability to do so. So long as you're not the primary copyright holder, you're always going to be second place, with second-place commercial opportunities in the software.
MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius hints at this in his letter to the European Commission, citing conflicts of interest between Oracle and MySQL development interests. Such conflicts wouldn't be of such importance were it not for the lack of external commercial appeal that stems from MySQL's use of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Even Richard Stallman, co-author of the GPL and founder of the free-software movement, and not someone that spends much time worrying about monetization of open-source software, gets this.
As noted in a letter co-drafted with Open Rights Group and Knowledge Ecology International, Stallman notes that Oracle's proposed acquisition of MySQL could hurt its development because the GPL reduces incentives to commercialize the code:
The acquisition of MySQL by Oracle will be a major setback to the development of a FLOSS database platform, potentially alienating and dispersing MySQL's core community of developers. It could take several years before another database platform could rival the progress and opportunities now available to MySQL, because it will take time before any of them attract and cultivate a large enough team of developers and achieve a similar customer base.
Given that forking of the MySQL code base will be particularly dependent on FLOSS community contributions - more so than on in-company development - the lack of a more flexible license for MySQL will present considerable barriers to a new forked development path for MySQL. [Emphasis added.]
For those who have been reading/hearing Stallman for the past 10-plus years as I have, this admission is shocking in the extreme. The GPL, which is supposed to be the ultimate guarantor of software freedom, may deliver the opposite. Because of its control-freak urges, it can stymie competition, which is presumably why Stallman is now calling on the European Commission to grant what his license couldn't: freedom.
Now consider if MySQL were licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. MySQL 2 could arise, take the code, hire all of the developers, and development of the open-source database would not miss a beat.
Could MySQL 2 achieve the same with the GPL? No, it could not, because the copyright holder, Oracle, would always have a superior commercial opportunity, because it has more rights than downstream users, as the GPL leaves the copyright holder with a greater range of business model options, and not simply support/services.
Apache leaves everyone--developers, users, vendors, etc.--on equal footing. The GPL does not. With the GPL, the copyright holder retains effective control.
That's one reason it has been so popular with commercial open-source companies, but the Oracle/MySQL situation may prompt more companies to consider using an Apache license so as to preserve maximum freedom in case of takeover, hostile or otherwise.
Disclosure: My company uses the GPL but has been actively considering areas to use Apache licensing.
Open-source advocates for years have waved the banners of "freedom" and "no vendor lock-in" to sell the value of open source. It hasn't worked. Chief information officers don't buy vague concepts. They buy high-quality software at a compelling price. To better market open-source software to the world, open-source advocates need to match their message to what CIOs actually want to buy.
(Credit:
Software Freedom Day Philippines)
The problem I have with free-software advocates like Richard Stallman is that they think freedom is the primary reason to use open-source software. It's not. Utility is.
After all, we're not talking about essential human rights here. We're talking about getting work done with software.
Over the past 10 years I and the companies with which I've worked have sold hundreds of millions of dollars in open-source software/services. Not once have I been asked about "freedom." For that matter, I've also never heard a customer gush about reduced vendor lock-in.
To the contrary, I've met with CIOs and CTOs who have explicitly told me that this isn't a top consideration for them. Just last week, in fact, I moderated a panel at LinuxCon in which I asked senior IT executives from leading media companies if vendor lock-in is a primary motivation for using open source. Nope.
They have work to do. They want software that helps them get their work done and gets out of the way. That's what open source does.
For those of us who make a living selling services around open-source software, it's not enough to trumpet freedom. No one buys that. A CIO might intuitively know that open source and open standards tend to ensure lower exit costs (i.e., the cost of moving to an alternative vendor/software product), but her primary concern today is the need to squeeze more productivity out of a significantly lower IT budget.
If open-source vendors want to get her attention, they had better be pitching high value for low dollars, not freedom. Freedom is something that gets considered once the CIO has already recognized upfront cost savings in a fully operational IT project.
Even then, CIOs don't think of it as "freedom." They think of open source, as The 451 Group's Matt Aslett suggests, as "flexibility, performance, and reliability." These are the long-term benefits that drive CIOs to invest in open source long term, but they start with short-term cost savings and a successful IT project.
Forrester is now projecting a 9.3 percent drop in U.S. IT spending in 2009, according to ZDNet. Want to help a CIO? Find her a way to avoid the reported $6.2 trillion in IT project failure using open source, so that her more limited budget can still pay for the work she needs to get done.
This is what Novell did by helping The Burton Corporation shave 80 percent of its server costs by moving from Unix to Suse Linux Enterprise Server. That's real money. That's tangible. That's open source.
Don't sell her on "freedom" and open source as "magic pixie dust." Right now, she can't afford it. Freedom is something that she'll appreciate over time, and it will reveal itself in terms of additional development flexibility and lower budget requirements to get things done.
Sell the CIO on open source's value, in terms of cost and quality, as Forrester reports. That's the marketing message she needs to hear right now.
One of the most inspiring things I've witnessed in my 10-plus years in open source is its gradual embrace of pragmatism. By "pragmatism" I don't mean "capitulation," whereby open source comes to look more like the proprietary world it has sought to displace. Rather, I would suggest that the more open source has gone mainstream the more it has learned to make compromises, compromises that make it stronger, not weaker.
Let me explain.
While free-software advocates provided the early backbone of the larger open-source movement, the market has been made by open-source backers. Free software makes for great headlines ("Miguel de Icaza is basically a traitor to the Free Software community"), but it is far too demanding, and of largely the wrong things, to capture mainstream interest.
To go mainstream, free software needed to become open source.
Open source also makes for great headlines ("Open Source Code Worth US$ 387 Billion"), but its real value is not in generating controversy but rather in alleviating it, turning the focus from open-source personalities to open-source code, and the value that companies and individuals can derive from it.
Free software demands one way. Open source encourages many ways.
To get there, open source has softened its elbows and opened its arms. Jason Perlow recently wrote on ZDNet that he, like most of the world, has to work with both open-source and proprietary software, and can't afford to dogmatically cling to one or the other. (It's a message that even Steve Ballmer begrudgingly repeats, suggesting that Microsoft must support those that "for whatever crazy reasons don't want to be on Windows, might want to be on Linux.")
For that reason, Perlow further writes:
But some people, particularly our free software leaders, are so mired in their hatred of Microsoft and proprietary systems that they will use only free and open source software for the sake of ideological reasons alone....Stallman and the FSF [Free Software Foundation], like his Cretaceous ancestors 65 million years ago, isn't evolved enough to see that his reign is about to come to an end. The open world needs interoperability, not shut itself off from other standards just because they originate from proprietary sources.
Hard-hitting, but true. Open source embraces interoperability, whereas free software takes a hard line that even Microsoft, despite its preference that customers use its complete software portfolio exclusively, won't take.
It's certainly not a line that open-source advocates should take, as it cuts against the very idea of open source: choice. Sometimes, after all, an open-source project is absolutely the wrong choice for a customer (just as sometimes a proprietary product may not be a good fit). There is no one-size-fits-all for either software approach.
Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and a staunch proponent of open source, with a penchant for free software, suggested as much in his LinuxCon keynote in which he argued that Linux 'desktop' developers need to be far better at meeting real customer requirements, not simply scratching their own, developer-focused "itches" (to use the Eric Raymond-inspired vernacular).
The path forward is open source, not free software. Sometimes that openness will mean embracing Microsoft in order to meet a customer's needs. After all, fierce partisanship and an unwillingness to compromise in software accomplishes is just as pointless, distasteful, and useless as it is in government.
Free software has lost. Open source has won. We're all the better for it.
Richard Stallman, godfather of the free-software movement and co-author of the GNU General Public License (GPL), has apparently found a home:
(Credit:
Steve McLoughlin (Alfresco))
It's not clear whether it's a retirement home, a private club for members, or what, but I'm sure they'll welcome him anytime he's in London, where it's located. Let's hope it's nearby Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's Zune House, as the man doesn't seem to have much love for the iPhone, according to this story in Ars Technica.
(I think GPL, in this case, actually stands for Garden Picture Library, but...don't tell Stallman. :-)
Free Software Foundation President Richard Stallman recently went on a tirade against software as a service (SaaS), suggesting that consumers of SaaS are "putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."
Apparently, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, missed Stallman's memo, because it's advertising for a Salesforce.com developer to help it manage its proprietary (gasp!), SaaS (gasp!) CRM system.
Not that Canonical is alone. Red Hat, Hyperic, MySQL, and other open-source companies also use Salesforce. Are they bad? Are they putty in the hands of Salesforce? Maybe. But they're also companies that need to make the trains run on time, and apparently, they felt that Salesforce was the best tool for the job.
My own company uses SugarCRM (as well as Zimbra and other open-source software), and we've been very happy with it, but we also use proprietary software where it's more mature and hence makes more sense. Open source will eventually be on par or better than its proprietary counterparts in most or all product segments, but until then, we need to use what works.
This is the point that Hyperic's Stacey Schneider makes while analyzing the comments of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Stallman, relating how Ellison's critiques of SaaS sound eerily similar to early complaints about open source, all of which have been disproved over time:
We didn't do (open source and SaaS) because they were cool, or for any desire to be some sort of fashionable IT software company. We did it because it makes sense for our users, and both are an approach to building more affordable, useful, and scalable IT.
In other words, if it works, do it, whether you're a vendor or a buyer. It's really not any more complicated than that.
I read Richard Stallman's commentary on cloud computing in the UK's Guardian. Stallman is full of warnings about cloud computing:
One reason you should not use Web applications to do your computing is that you lose control. It's just as bad as using a proprietary program.
But he completely neglects to mention that he had a chance to seed the cloud, which is largely built using open-source software, with an upgraded GNU General Public License (Version 3), and he demurred. Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation failed to protect the cloud when they had the chance, finally capitulating to industry pressure with the Affero GPL, an inelegant but workable sop.
Ars Technica is right to suggest that Stallman's doom-and-gloom about cloud computing is "myopic" and utters a final judgment well before even a provisional judgment is warranted.
But Stallman's biggest fault here is that he criticizes a problem that his own inaction created.
I cringed when I read Richard Stallman's comments against the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It's fine for him to write for the BBC that:
Gates may be gone, but the walls and bars of proprietary software he helped create remain, for now. Dismantling them is up to us.
Three cheers for freedom!
However, it's not so fine to then start picking apart the intentions behind Gates' philanthropy:
Gates' philanthropy for health care for poor countries has won some people's good opinion. The LA Times reported that his foundation spends five to 10% of its money annually and invests the rest, sometimes in companies it suggests cause environmental degradation and illness in the same poor countries.
He may be right. He's probably wrong. Regardless, it just demonstrates poor judgment and bad taste to try to kick Gates on his way out, especially for the charitable work that Gates and his wife do.
Ah! Finally some intelligence on the GNU General Public License (GPL). John Mark Walker says something that few seem to understand, yet it's so simple (and true):
No, the GPL does not cede your intellectual property to the public domain - as a matter of fact, it does a pretty good job of protecting it. In fact, the GPL is a pretty good compromise between granting rights to all parties and protecting IP.
The GPL is probably the best license ever devised for protecting one's intellectual property. The GPL simply protects through transparency and openness, not opacity and closed doors. Many of the industry's most successful open-source vendors use the GPL for this very reason.
Richard Stallman. A capitalist for the 21st Century.
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