Apple has benefited heavily from open-source software over the years, and it has earned a warm spot in the hearts of open-source advocates, despite its heavily proprietary stance.
With BluWiki, however, Apple appears to have gone too far.
In November 2008, as CNET's Tom Krazit wrote on Monday, Apple wrote to the BluWiki administrators to have iPodHash, an open-source program that attempts to enable iPods and iPhones to sync with music software other than Apple's iTunes, removed from the Web site. Apple argues that iPodHash violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by actively seeking to circumvent Apple's iTunes copyrights.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, however, begs to differ. It has launched a lawsuit against Apple, as PC World reports, and seeks a "declaratory judgment action to vindicate the free-speech interests of Internet readers and publishers," according to the EFF's complaint (PDF).
After all, this isn't really about DMCA circumvention, as the EFF's Fred von Lohmann declares. It's about a Web site's right to allow others to post information related to legal, fair use-protected actions. Frankly, it's ultimately about the right to open information, and, tangentially, about open-source software.
Von Lohmann explains:
This is the first time I've seen a company suggest that simply talking about reverse engineering violates the DMCA. All of the previous cases have been cases that involved actual successful reverse-engineered tools.
Apple, in its sometimes-rabid desire to control everything to do with its brand and technology, appears to have overstepped its legal authority in the BluWiki case. Apple argues that it's about much more than the right to have online discussions about reverse engineering, suggesting in a letter to the EFF (PDF) that the iPodHash software could be used to break Apple's FairPlay copy protection system.
I love Apple's technology. I love its brand. I could do without its heavy-handed attempts to protect technology that its own recent actions suggest is heading toward extinction, with DRM-free music now the norm on iTunes.
Apple is a great company because it makes compelling, beautiful products. It's not Apple because it beats up on administrators of discussion forums. At least, I hope not.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Patents have become a minefield that inhibit software innovation, a fact recently highlighted for me in a conversation with Rob Tiller, Red Hat's vice president of Intellectual Property and assistant general counsel.
Many software patents are of poor quality and are difficult to interpret, Tiller explains, made worse by the fact that patent boundaries are often vague: a patent can even cover an invention the patent holder never conceived.
Compounding this morass, it's difficult to impossible to know if code you have written could be covered by a patent, as search methods are unreliable (and damages are structured such that it may not even be advisable to search because you hit treble damages for willful infringement, as one Microsoft employee has counseled in the past ("Ignorance is bliss and strongly recommended").
Even worse, unlike copyright law, which is more suitable to software, patent law isn't concerned with knowledge of infringement: you can create a completely original invention with zero knowledge of someone else's invention and still violate his patent.
What to do?
One option is Microsoft's: engage the industry in cross-licensing agreements. These may simply be nothing more than safety blankets, as there's really no way of knowing the quality of Microsoft's patent portfolio in advance of being sued and having a court decide.
Another is to engage in disarmament, which is unlikely but probably the right thing to do. The software industry doesn't need patents. Patents are actually counterproductive to innovation.
In fact, as Tiller explains, "Most of the important enterprise software in wide use today rests on ideas that predate the explosion of software patents in the 1990s." Lotus 1-2-3? Released in 1982. Microsoft Word (a facsimile of WordPerfect)? 1983. Oracle version 3? 1983. Windows 3.0? 1990.
Several of the world's largest software franchises, in other words, were built without the aid (or inhibition) of patents. Microsoft, for all its recent bluster about patents, is probably the world's biggest beneficiary of a patent-free development environment.
Of course, post-Bilski, we may be entering a period of court-ordered disarmament, which would be fantastic. The Bilski decision puts software patents on the defensive, and it hopefully will help to clear the minefield that currently helps only incumbents--and arguably hurts even them more than it helps them.
In the meantime, it would be fantastic to have more community-reviewed patent applications, since the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office seems incapable (due to both expertise and workload) of adequately reviewing the flood of patent applications. Something like the Peer to Patent project, which ex-Red Hat general counsel Mark Webbink runs at New York Law School, perhaps? Or how about Post-Issue Peer To Patent and Linux Defenders?
We have a serious patent problem on our hands. It's time to do something about it.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Can an open-source project be acquired against its will? Apparently, the answer is "yes," as the recent experience of the TWiki community demonstrates.
In this case, TWiki.net (the company) has taken over Twiki.org (the project), booting all nonemployee contributors from the core project, leaving the TWiki.org community fuming (and forking).
In fact, the TWiki.org community is calling it a "hostile takeover," and the name may well be apt, though no shares have changed hands. TWiki.net has sought to reform the TWiki.org community under the auspices of the Relaunch Twiki.org Project, but it's not clear that this kind of reform was needed, at least from the community's perspective.
TWiki.net, however, begs to differ. The company suggests that its new governance model is based on Ubuntu, and is designed to foster clearer direction and better brand protection. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen's classic line to Dan Quayle, "I know Ubuntu, Mr. TWiki, and you're no Ubuntu."
Indeed, while Ubuntu seems to be in no hurry to turn a profit, it is almost certainly a desire for cash that has spurred TWiki.net's overhaul of the TWiki.org governance model. Founded in 1998 by Peter Thoeny, the company raised a small series A funding round in early 2007 and has been on the prowl for more funding in 2008. The company almost certainly needs more cash.
Does it also need more community? If so, it chose the wrong way to go about it.
Back when Thoeny spun up a company around the TWiki.org open-source project, some within the TWiki.org community worried that the move would damage its community, concern that now seems fully justified:
... Read moreDisclosure: I am on the advisory board for MindTouch.
Double disclosure: I really, really like the latest release of MindTouch Deki (formerly "Deki Wiki").
MindTouch has always thought that a wiki should be about more than simply creating basic web pages. With its new "Kilen Woods" release, the company has significantly bent the rules as to what constitutes a wiki, and just which data sources can feed into a wiki.
LinkedIn? Yep. Salesforce.com? Sure. SugarCRM. Uh-huh.
MindTouch Deki enables businesses to connect and mashup the growing number of application and data silos that exist across an enterprise - including legacy systems, CRM and ERP applications, databases, and Web 2.0 applications....For example, MindTouch Deki can visualize content from a Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Access databases and mash it up with other services, such as Microsoft Live Earth or Google maps, LinkedIn and a CRM system - offering a common wiki and web-service interface for content and behavior from multiple sources.
eWeek and others have some good reviews. Me? I just like that I don't have to learn any wiki language to use it. Take a look for yourself:
... Read moreI had a very frustrating experience this morning. I decided to start editing an internal team wiki and ran into a significant roadblock: To edit the wiki, I first needed to learn "wikiml." What is wikiml? I'm glad you asked. It's a wiki markup language so that wikis look more like Web pages/documents, and not like a stream of undifferentiated text.
There's just one problem: Wikiml. Who wants to learn a markup language just so you can collaborate with colleagues? It's not that the markup language is particularly difficult (here's a cheat sheet for reference), but requiring the learning of a new language is a step backward, not forward, in terms of ease of use.
Wikis may be more powerful than a Microsoft Word document, but if they're not at least as easy, then they're simply not going to get used. Period. Google gets this: Google Docs is actually easier to use than Microsoft Word.
The Bible has this great counsel in Mark 2:27:
The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
The idea is that Biblical commandments were not designed to inhibit people, but to enable and improve them. Sometimes we let the letter of a law impede the spirit and end up cramping our capabilities. Is there a correlation to software?
... Read more
While it's true that open-source companies, in general, are starting from a small base of revenue and adoption, it's equally true that the real measure of any company is growth. If it's good, it will grow.
Hence, it's great to see MindTouch, a commercial open-source collaboration company, booming:
... Read more
- Over 200,000 active installs - 100 percent increase
- Installs on all major Linux distributions - 600 percent increase
- More than 3,000 registered members at the developer community - 30 percent increase
- Translated into 16 languages - 500 percent increase
(Credit:
Google)
Google Sites was just launched and its target is clear: Microsoft SharePoint. While it has an uphill battle--security and a lack of the complex features that SharePoint has, for example--its biggest problem is that it doesn't connect with the content production tools that most people spend their (enterprise) content-producing lives in:
Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office.
Of course, Google Sites is free, which will cover a multitude of other problems, especially since Microsoft SharePoint turns out to be amazingly overpriced for a Microsoft product. Microsoft has, according to CMS Wire's analysis, completely priced the SME market out of SharePoint.
... Read moreJust what is a wiki, anyway? A few years ago, I could have told you. Today, I'm not so sure.
Part of the problem is that wiki authors have made innovations, broadening the appeal and scope of wikis. Witness MindTouch's recent upgrade of its DekiWiki platform to 1.8.3.
DekiWiki, the leading enterprise wiki (measured in terms of downloads and, in my opinion, by raw innovation), still allows easy creation of Web pages by nontechnical users.
But the new release goes much further. DekiWiki eliminates the need to use a separate programming environment to add widgets, external services, or JavaScript libraries. In other words, it makes it easy for developers to connect a wiki to everything else. Yes, everything else:
... Read moreOpen-source wiki company SocialText just pulled down a Series C round of funding ($9.5 million from Draper Fisher Jurveston, Omidyar Network, SAP Ventures, Intel Capital, plus a few angel investors). It also got a new CEO, Eugene Lee.
Congratulations to Ross Mayfield and the SocialText team. My one question in this is why no new investors joined in the round. If I remember right, the investors above are the same who invested in the last round. This either means that the Series C round was so hot that the existing investors didn't want to share it, or that SocialText was having difficulty finding new investors.
I hope it's the former, as the wiki/collaboration world keeps heating up and SocialText has been one of the leaders.
Downloads of Mindtouch
One of the great things about open source is that it provides a very tangible way to measure interest in a product: downloads.
Looking at the most recent download statistics for open-source wikis, I was surprised to see that Mindtouch has been on a tear. I bumped into Aaron Fulkerson, one of Mindtouch's co-founders, at OSBC last year and didn't think much about it.
No offense to Aaron. You've got to remember, I was the guy who yawned at SugarCRM when it first debuted. My track record isn't so great. :-)
Mindtouch has hit 100,000 installations and grows by ~50% each month. Why? Reading through the blogosphere, it's because of its ease of use and rich functionality. I may give it a spin over the next few days....
Where does it go from here?
... Read more
