Underexposed

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Google didn't invent open-source programming or pioneer the mobile-phone software market, but when it comes to its Android project, don't accuse Google of playing follow the leader.

Although the company has long used open-source software within its internal operations, Android is Google's highest-profile attempt so far to use the collaborative programming method to change how computing is done outside the company's walls.

Andy Rubin, head of Google's Android project.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Google is hardly the first company to try using open-source software to shake up the industry. What's notable is Google's willingness to ruffle feathers in the open-source world, including those of potential allies such as Red Hat, with its approach.

Google is bucking some open-source conventions by avoiding the fashionable General Public License (GPL) to govern the software and creating the software internally before involving outsiders. At the same time, though, it's been easing gradually into the mainstream open-source fold.

"Initially their approach was almost like a proprietary product approach," said John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer of Linux seller and Android partner Wind River. "I think they have adjusted all elements of that strategy as they go. It's much more open-source friendly, more developer friendly."

And though Google's path might be somewhat different, the company has a decidedly ordinary open-source destination in mind: building a broad, cooperative community to thwart a Microsoft hegemony.

Andy Rubin, the Google engineering director leading Android, likens today's chaotic hodge-podge of mobile phone software to the early days of personal computers. In mobile phones, though, Microsoft has begun offering integrated software ranging from office applications and a Web browser at the high level down through the operating system kernel at the low level, and that full suite has a powerful appeal to phone manufacturers.

"It's a repeat of what happened in the PC industry. We want to make sure there's an alternative," Rubin said. But Google doesn't want to be the sole gateway to its software. "We wanted to make sure there's not a single source, (so) if a carrier or user or third party encountered a problem, they could fix it themselves."

Android is massive open-source project--or at least it will become one when the first phones start shipping later this year. The recent version 2.6.24 of the Linux kernel has about 8 million lines of code, but about 8.6 million lines of Android's 11 million are open-source, Rubin said.

Android components that will emerge as open-source software include Nuance's speech-recognition software and PacketVideo's music and audio decoder. Google also has been working to obtain hardware specifications to support mobile-phone chips from Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Sirf, he said. "You'll see our stuff being the first Linux on Qualcomm," Rubin said.

Closed first, then open
But that open-source release will be complex. Depending on how it manages the task, Google could face praise or scorn later this year when it unleashes that code upon the world. The hardest part is not just sharing the code, but in integrating outside developers into a project that's been growing within a company's confines.

There's nothing technically wrong with an open-source project that's solely run by a single company, but it's rarely any company's open-source goal. It's not likely to attract outside coders who want to make a name for themselves by adding important new features or corporate allies that might fund their own contributions.

Google's closed start doesn't sit well with Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens, whose company is among the most aggressive advocates of open-source software.

"I think that decreases their chance of success more than it increases it," Stevens said. "It's preventing the participation of many smart developers who want to get involved in the development of the Android platform...The community comes at the early inception of a product, not when you decide you're ready to ship a product."

Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, added that in general, corporate attempts to make open-source projects out of proprietary software are often hampered by an unwillingness to share control.

"People think publishing the source code is the hard part, but the harder thing by far is having open participation in the decision-making--distributing authority outside your four walls," Schroepfer said. "Where some of these really go wrong is when people aren't empowered and their voices don't matter, they're not going to do participate."

Google won't face the challenges of full-on proprietary software going open-source, though, said Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady: the open-source move is part of the Android plan, not a development that arrived years later.

The open-source hand-off
Google has its reasons for the closed start.

"We want to get to the point where it's stable enough," Rubin said. Then, after the open-source change, "We want it to be thriving."

The software components that constitute Android.

(Credit: Google)

The company is working on the hand-off to the outside world. Android already is a project whose development is distributed among the Open Handset Alliance members collectively backing Android, for starts, as well as among multiple international Google offices. "We're learning how to do a large-scale distributed effort," Rubin said.

The company also has a team more 10 strong working on external developer relations for Android, Rubin said. That team that will grow larger once the code is released and absorbs the Google "maintainers" in charge of Android components, such as its Dalvik virtual-machine software for running applications written in Java.

Google's team under open-source project manager Chris DiBona, combined with some from the Android project, will work with outside programmers, Rubin said. "The developers I have on core development of this, when it gets open-sourced, will move over and will be coding for the open-source tree," or code base, he said.

Google also is taking a community-centric approach to defining what Android is. Project maintainers get to accept or reject contributions, as is common in the open-source realm. What's new is that Google will offer a certification test suite that's based on those maintainers' work in order to maintain compatibility among different versions of Android.

"If it passes, then they get to use the Open Handset Alliance Android trademark name," Rubin said. "We're not saying you can't branch. We're saying you don't want to branch."

Licensing choices
Google has been criticized for not working with existing open-source projects. In addition, Sun Microsystems has expressed concern that Google's development of Dalvik could fragment the Java world so that Java software for running Android applications wouldn't work on other Java phones and vice versa.

A sample Android application, AndroidGlobalTime

(Credit: Google)

But Google chose to go it alone with Dalvik and some other projects for one big reason, Rubin said: it wanted to avoid the GNU General Public License (GPL). The pioneering license that serves in effect as the manifesto of the Free Software movement requires that software projects derived from a GPL product also be released under GPL. That concept in effect requires reciprocity: if you use GPL code and distribute the resulting software, you must contribute your changes back to the GPL code base.

Google didn't want to raise that issue, uncharitably referred to as the GPL's "viral" nature, for phone makers that might want to add proprietary features as a way to differentiate, so it chose the less confining Apache License, Rubin said.

"The thing that worries me about GPL is this: suppose Samsung wants to build a phone that's different in features and functionality than (one from) LG. If everything on the phone was GPL, any applications or user interface enhancements that Samsung did, they would have to contribute back," Rubin said. "At the application layer, GPL doesn't work."

Of course, giving back is precisely one of the intents of the license, which Richard Stallman initially wrote to govern a clone of Unix that couldn't be made proprietary; many companies have embraced the GPL, including initial skeptics such as Wind River. And other embedded-computing efforts are using GPL software more widely.

"It's a pretty conservative interpretation," Bruggeman said of Google's GPL stance.

Open-source advocates long have wrestled over whether it's better to permit companies to make code proprietary, as the Apache License permits, or to compel them to keep it open, as the GPL requires. Even though Android uses the Linux kernel, which is governed by the GPL, don't expect Google's position to put an end to this debate.

For that matter, don't expect Rubin's present thoughts to be the final word. The company has shown itself willing to change.

"Here's what I think. No. 1, they're learning as they go," Bruggeman said. "No. 2, they learn really fast."

Over the years, Microsoft statements toward open-source software have ranged from derision and threats to mollification and even cautious praise.

Microsoft's Thursday announcement of a significantly more accommodating approach to open-source programmers is just the latest refinement of the company's ambivalence. At the same time that Microsoft's new arrangement opens up previously secret specifications and protocols for use in open-source software, it also insists that companies planning on distributing or using that software need a patent license.

So to put the news into historical context, here's a chronology of some of Microsoft's statements and practices regarding open-source software over the years:

• On October 31, 1998, the first so-called "Halloween memo" from Microsoft suggested that some in the company saw open-source software as a major threat. "The intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in open-source software has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a long-term developer mindshare threat," the memo said, suggesting that one way to thwart open-source software would be to extend communication protocols with Microsoft-only changes.

• In May 2001, Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie derided the business model of open-source software companies that aim to sell support rather than software licenses, likening the practice to that of failed dot-com companies. "A common trait of many of the companies that failed is that they gave away for free or at a loss the very thing they produced that was of greatest value--in the hope that somehow they'd make money selling something else," Mundie said.

• In June 2001, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates described the widely used General Public License as "Pac-Man-like," referring to the GPL's requirement that software tightly integrated with GPL components must by the license also be governed by the GPL.

• In a June 2001 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said, "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches...The way the license is written (the Linux kernel uses the GPL), if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source."

• A newer "Halloween" internal memo, based on research in 2001, warned that Microsoft's attacks on open-source software and licensing "are not effective" and are backfiring.

• In an October 2002 interview, Ballmer touted Microsoft's shared-source program, which initially emulated some open-source attributes without giving programmers full freedoms. "We're learning...from the Linux world...If you take a look at the Linux world...There are many more communities in the Windows world than in the Linux world. I don't think we have mobilized that community as effectively as the Linux community has."

• In June 2003, Pete Houston, Microsoft's senior director server strategy, said Microsoft had moved beyond its philosophical attacks and had begun trying to show customers the "business value" of Microsoft products. "I don't see the Linux community development model building the integrated offerings we have today," he said.

• A Microsoft executive, Richard Emerson, helped to arrange an October 2003 investment of $50 million in The SCO Group shortly after it began a high-profile but largely unsuccessful attack that argued Linux violated the company's Unix intellectual property, according to the head of BayStar Capital, which made the investment.

• In January 2004, Microsoft launched a "Get the Facts" ad campaign to try to show the cost advantages of Windows and other Microsoft products compared with open-source rivals.

• Midway through the decade, Microsoft softened its attacks and even began launching its own open-source projects.

• In June 2005, Ballmer said Microsoft isn't trying to compete with the philosophy behind Linux, only with it as a software product. "We come to work every day and we compete with products, we don't compete with movements," he said.

• In June 2006, Microsoft launched a site called CodePlex to host shared-source projects.

• In May 2007, Ballmer and Brad Smith, Microsoft's top lawyer, said Linux and other opens-source projects collectively violate 235 Microsoft patents. "We live in a world where we honor, and support the honoring of, intellectual property," Ballmer said in an interview with Fortune. Microsoft's open-source competitors must "play by the same rules as the rest of the business."

• In September 2007, Clint Patterson, public relations director for Microsoft's Unified Communications Group, said: "The open-source development model has yet to demonstrate the ability to support profitable software businesses that can drive the coordinated research and testing necessary to sustain innovation."

• In October 2007, after Red Hat Linux had declined to enter into a patent licensing-deal the way rival Novell had, Microsoft's Ballmer told an audience that customers using Red Hat Linux need to pay Microsoft for its intellectual property. "People (who) use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to eventually to compensate us."

• In October 2007, the Open Source Initiative grants official open-source status to two Microsoft licenses, meaning that projects governed by those licenses may be called open-source software.

• Finally, here's how Ballmer described Thursday's move: "Our goal is to promote greater interoperability, opportunity, and choice for customers and developers throughout the industry by making our products more open and by sharing even more information about our technologies."

Open-Xchange is using Yahoo's acquisition of rival Zimbra last year as an invitation to tackle the U.S. market with its open-source server software for e-mail, calendars, and other collaboration tools.

"Now is the time. The vacuum has been created, and we feel the suction," said Rafael Laguna de la Vera, who took over as chief executive in January. "Yahoo is not a software company...Now, with Microsoft (trying to acquire Yahoo), I think it's over for Zimbra."

Those are bold words for a CEO of an unprofitable company with 2007 revenue of $2.5 million that has struggled for years to penetrate the crowded "collaboration" software market. But Laguna also shared other plans to elevate Open-Xchange's profile:

• On Thursday, Open-Xchange plans to announce a broader release of its software as open-source under the General Public License (GPL). Coming will be installation and administration tools that previously were proprietary.

• Two other non-open-source components, a connector that lets Microsoft Outlook connect to an Open-Xchange server and the Ajax-based user interface for the Web-based access to the server product, will eventually become open-source, too, within a year or two, Laguna said.

• The company plans to join the Eclipse Foundation during the first half of 2008 to take advantage of the OSGI (which formerly stood for Open Services Gateway Initiative) tools to integrate software components. "We will be dual-license the server code under the Eclipse Public License," Laguna said.

• Laguna plans to hire U.S. programmers and other staff to augment the company's current staff of 40. "Marketing, management, global sales, user interface usability--all will be here," he said.

• Open-Xchange might raise a new round of funding to hasten these expansion efforts.

• The company's current main sales approach is to sign partnerships with Internet hosting companies that can offer the software as an add-on subscription service to those registering Internet domains. Its biggest partner to date, 1&1 Internet, plans to extend its partnership to the United States within the first half of 2008, Laguna said.

The company, originally called Netline Internet Service and based in Olpe, Germany, made its way to market chiefly through a partnership with Suse Linux. It's been trying for years to stand on its own, in particular after Suse was acquired by Novell, whose GroupWise product competes.

Because of the strength of open-source rival Zimbra and its willingness to sell at low prices, though, Open-Xchange chose to concentrate its efforts in Europe, Laguna said. "You pick your battles," he said.

The overseas ambition resembles those made by Suse, where Laguna worked until its acquisition by Novell. Suse wasn't terribly successful, but Laguna thinks things will be different: Suse was thwarted by Red Hat in the Linux market, but Laguna believes Open-Xchange now can take on Zimbra.

He's not the only Suse veteran at Open-Xchange with experience trying to perform this sort of conquest. Suse's former chief, Richard Seibt, is on Open-Xchange's board, and its chief technology officer is Juergen Geck, who held that post at Suse.

The Qt components make it easier to build software that runs on many operating systems.

(Credit: Trolltech)

Finnish mobile-phone giant Nokia has acquired Norway's Trolltech for about $150 million, the companies said Monday.

The Nordic merger significantly expands the possibilities of Nokia's Linux-based phone efforts. Trolltech makes open-source software and programming tools that can be used to build software on mobile phones, and Nokia has been working for years on mobile Linux devices.

In the open-source programming realm, Trolltech is known well for its Qt library of user interface components such as buttons and drop-down menus. While Qt is governed by the General Public License (GPL), the elements also may be used in proprietary programming projects. Using the components also makes it easier to build software that runs on multiple operating systems.

Indeed, Nokia--which must reckon with many operating systems already--evidently sees that advantage. "The acquisition of Trolltech will enable Nokia to accelerate its cross-platform software strategy for mobile devices and desktop applications and develop its Internet services business," the company said in a statement. "With Trolltech, Nokia and third-party developers will be able to develop applications that work in the Internet, across Nokia's device portfolio and on PCs."

Nokia also went out of its way to reassure open-source fans that it won't be dropping Trolltech's open-source ways. "Nokia embraces open-source technology and will take further the open-source development culture found in Trolltech," the company said.

• Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac to ship in second quarter 2008 - Adobe previously said "early 2008," (http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9783661-39.html) but now it's second quarter. Not a big deal since Mac folks get iPhoto. Why bother offering pre-order months early? Answer: to make it not look like a delay.
• More Canon 5D Mark II Rumors | Photography Bay - Some guy's Canon rep said to expect an announcement of the new low-end full-frame camera at PMA (which starts January 31, but Canon's announcement looks like January 24).
• Tighter intellectual property restirctions at iStockphoto.com - iStockphoto is tightening restrictions on permissible photos; Previously, no face, no model release required. Now, if subject could recognize him- or herself, needs a release. Also out: recognizable cars, cruise ships.
• SimCity Source Code under GPL - The original SimCity is now under GPL, called Micropolis for legal reasons and refurbished somewhat.
• Mainframe: Will Microsoft Windows be next on System z? - Back in the 1994, IBM figured out how to boot Windows on a mainframe, but legal machinations between IBM, Microsoft, and Bristol Technologies killed it. "We'll never see a day when Windows will run natively on the mainframe."
• The Online Photographer: The Arc of a Forum Exchange - An amusing parody of a typical forum. Look for the hidden original definition (now probably obsolete mostly) of a prime lens.
• Peachpit: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Resource Center - A big collection of book chapter excerpts, videos, and other useful Lightroom training material.
• Holy moly--Nikon D3 SLRs spotted on the NFL sidelines - Canon has such a lock on pro sports photography that it's news even if just a handful of Nikons are in use.
• Shortcuts You Must Memorize - Inside Lightroom - I agree--this is a great list of very useful Lightroom keyboard shortcuts.
• PDF: Now an ISO Standard - Let's hope this will make "export to PDF" more common. It really is a useful format, despite its hassles and annoyances.

(Credit: Samba)

A complicated third-party arrangement means that the open-source Samba project will be able to make use of proprietary documents describing Microsoft file-sharing software.

Samba, governed by the General Public License (GPL), lets Unix or Linux servers behave like Windows machines used to share files over a network and control networked printers. But the effort has been difficult: Microsoft doesn't go out of its way to share the details of the protocols; patent infringement concerns also have appeared more than once.

On Thursday, though, the Samba team announced a deal that gets around the previous barriers. The increasingly influential Software Freedom Law Center, led by open-source legal guru Eben Moglen, established a nonprofit group called the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation. The PFIF is paying Microsoft 10,000 euros (about $14,400) for documentation that will be shared under a nondisclosure agreement (click here for a PDF of the NDA or read this Samba explanation for further details) with Samba programmers.

Those programmers are free to write code based on the documentation, though not to share the documentation itself, Samba said. And Microsoft must keep the documentation up to date.

The move is interesting for a number of reasons. For one thing, it's a concrete outcome after years of antitrust efforts that had left many Microsoft foes bitter. For another, the technological repercussions very likely will strengthen a direct Microsoft competitor. And perhaps most interesting, it illustrates the growing legal sophistication and clout of the free and open-source programming movement.

Samba leader Jeremy Allison is champing at the bit with the technical possibilities the agreement opens up for the software project.

"If you'll pardon me breaking into song: it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas," Allison said.

Among the features he expects will be added as a result of the agreement are full support for Microsoft's Active Directory, encrypted files, a better search interface, and support for "SMB2," a new version of Microsoft's Server Message Block protocol after which the Samba project took its name. SMB2 is built into Longhorn Server, which when released in 2008 will be called Windows Server 2008.

I asked Allison whether open-source code in fact reveals information in the proprietary documentation. "It does to those who can understand it. It's not revealing the actual documents, though, and that's the main thing," he said.

Why was Microsoft so willing to share the specifications now? In short, the antitrust case the European Union brought against Microsoft required the company to release interoperability information. Most recently, Microsoft agreed to share the information for a one-time fee rather than requiring a share of revenues from products--a pricing scheme that doesn't jibe well with open-source methods.

The roundabout way of getting proprietary information to an open-source project may sound abstruse, but it's actually relatively common. Companies provide information to open-source programmers under nondisclosure terms, knowing full well the coders will release open-source code that reveals at least in part how hardware works.

Indeed, one purpose of the Linux Foundation is to make sure there's an organization in place to handle NDAs. Novell programmer Greg Kroah-Hartman now runs a program that regularly does so in order to write software drivers that let Linux computers communicate with various hardware devices.

One specific case in point: Red Hat programmer David Miller has worked with Sun Microsystems to bring Linux support to its Sparc processors. "I signed an NDA with Sun that got me the documentation and allowed me to write GPL code using it, but I'm not allowed to pass on those documents to others."

What's notable about the Samba case is that it involves Microsoft, which at times has been outspoken about free and open-source software. Although the company tried to tone down earlier rhetoric that called the programming movement "un-American" and a "cancer," the company resumed the offensive this year, declaring in May that Linux and other open-source projects infringe 235 Microsoft patents. Microsoft didn't say which specific patents it believed were infringed.

The Samba agreement also specifically addresses the patent issue. Microsoft is required to make a current list of patents involved in the protocols, Samba said, letting programmers work around them.

"The patent list provides us with a bounded set of work needed to ensure non-infringement of Samba and other free-software projects that implement the protocols documented by Microsoft under this agreement," Samba said Thursday. "Any patents outside this list cannot be asserted by Microsoft against any implementation developed using the supplied documentation."

For a blow-by-blow history of Samba's attempts to get access to the Microsoft documentation, another Samba leader, Andrew Tridgell, has posted a long account at the Samba Web site.

Intel has released source code for a server software project that lets Fibre Channel communications run on a more ordinary Ethernet network.

Fibre Channel is a higher-end network technology used to connect storage systems to servers. Intel and networking giant Cisco Systems are among those working to adapt it for ordinary and ubiquitous Ethernet technology, a technology called Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), appropriately enough.

To further the project, Intel on Tuesday announced the Open-FCoE.org to house the source code. It's governed by version 2 of the General Public License.

The code itself was announced in November on the project mailing list by Robert Love, a kernel programmer and Intel employee.

Programmers behind Busybox, a collection of utilities governed by the General Public License (GPL), have settled a second lawsuit that argued a company violated the widely used free and open-source license.

This time the company that settled is Xterasys, which makes networking products, said the Software Freedom Law Center, which represented the Busybox coders.

"As a result of the settlement, Xterasys has agreed to cease all binary distribution of BusyBox until SFLC confirms it has published complete corresponding source code on its Web site. Once SFLC verifies that the complete source code is available, Xterasys' full rights to distribute BusyBox under the GPL will be reinstated," the center said on Monday. In addition, Xterasys agreed to appoint an open-source compliance officer, notify those who may have received the Busybox software from Xterasys of their GPL-granted rights, and pay the Busybox programers an undisclosed amount, SFLC said.

The Busybox programmers had sued Xterasys and High-Gain Antennas in November, not long after suing Monsoon Multimedia and not long before suing Verizon Communications. The moves collectively show that at least some are willing to be more legally assertive about GPL enforcement than in the past.

Monsoon settled its GPL lawsuit in October.

Flickr on Thursday released a new version of its tool for uploading photos to the Yahoo photo-sharing site, and made it an open-source program in the process.

Flickr Uploadr 3.0, available for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 and for Windows XP and Vista is now available in source code form, too, governed by version 2 of the General Public License (GPL). Open-source software may be freely modified, copied, and shared; opening source code could let programmers modify the Uploadr tool so it works on Linux or uploads to other photo-sharing sites, for example.

Uploadr lets photographers select photos for upload, add tags, organize them into sets, and change privacy settings. Among the changes in Version 3 is the ability to set the photo order in sets and to add new photos to the upload queue while others are in the process of being transferred.

Uploadr 3.0 also inherits Flickr's multilanguage support: English, French, traditional Chinese, Korean, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.

Flickr also released a new statistics tool Thursday for pro users (pro accounts cost $25 per year but are free for those who get DSL through Yahoo-branded deals). Flickr Stats shows whence visitors came to look at your photos, either from within Flickr or outside on the Web.

Stats also shows totals for recent viewings of photos and compiles data such as how many photos have tags, geotags, and comments. Views of your photos can be sorted by viewing totals, comments, favorite status, and the ever-elusive "interestingness" ranking.