Patents in an Open Source World

July 26, 2004 Leave a comment

An interesting article by Lawrence Rosen about patents and Open Source. While he brings up some very good points, he seems to miss one key issue. From the article:
“Don't be too paranoid about the patent problem. It's a real problem, but not a catastrophe. Any patent owner that tries to assert its patents against open source software has many hurdles to leap before the royalty checks start to arrive.”
The part missing here is that some of the patent suits against Open Source may not have getting a royalty check as a goal at all. If you look at the motivation a company like Microsoft would have in bringing a patent suit, it wouldn't be in the additional revenue that the royalty checks would bring in. The motivation would be in scaring companies and slowing down the adoption of OSS, which it eating into their revenues. Luckily, MSFT's first attempt at this with SCO has become a laughable issue, but what if their next pawn is not so incompetent?
–jeremy

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What to do when Open Source Licenses are not Compatible

July 25, 2004 1 Comment

In releasing the LinuxQuestions.org Wiki I had to choose between multiple free licenses. When it came down to making a decision it was the GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) vs. the Create Commons by-sa. I ended up choosing the Creative Commons license for two main reasons: I wanted single articles from the wiki to be easily redistributable and the CC license is much more straight forward. This now unfortunately means that many of the great GFDL documents out there cannot be included. The LQ Wiki is aimed at becoming a large free/open resource for the Linux community and the potential duplication of effort caused by this seems like a waste. I am now considering adding the ability to choose a license for documents entered into the LQ Wiki, but this will not only greatly complicate things, but it will also mean that the entire wiki will no longer be distributable under a single license. While it seems the desired end result of both licenses is similar, the fact that they are not at all compatible really does seem like a shame. IANAL though, so is there anything that can be done?
–jeremy

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How to Misunderstand the Enterprise Linux Desktop

July 24, 2004 Leave a comment

A nice article has been posted at LinuxJournal. From the article:
“If you are considering deploying open-source software in your organization, this article aims to help you draw appropriate distinctions for your business case. We address economic issues, issues of security and administration and the availability of applications. We also discuss myths and perceptions of the dominant operating systems in the market today.”
With distributions from Red Hat and Novell now Common Criteria certified, and Microsoft breaking a fair amount of backward compatibility – this is a great time for Large enterprises and Governments to start evaluating what Linux can do for them.
–jeremy

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Interview with RMS

July 23, 2004 Leave a comment

Builder.AU has posted an interview with Richard Stallman. In the interview RMS covers what he is doing now, the difference between Open Source and the Free Software Movement, his fascination with Australian Parrots and more. From the interview:
If a person persuaded of open source ideas comes across a powerful, reliable, non-free program, she may think it admirable. “I'm surprised they were able to do this without open source,” she might say, “But I can't deny that it works well.” When a free software advocate looks at the same thing, she will see a nasty, unethical license. “I don't care how 'powerful' it is, if it takes away my freedom,” she will say. “Let's start writing the free replacement now!”
–jeremy

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Open Source & DIY-IT in Fortune 2000 Companies

July 22, 2004 Leave a comment

Doc Searls has an interesting post over at the IT Garage concerning Open Source and DIY-IT in larger (ie. fortune 2000) companies. From the article:
“An example: a year or so ago I worked as a contractor at a large bank in San Francisco. They have a thousand or more Sun servers doing their web serving: they are running essentially nothing except Apache. I mentioned to one of their IT directors that they could save tons of money by using whitebox servers running Linux and the same Apache code. His response? “Yeah, but then there wouldn't be anyone we could sue.” He was deadly serious: the ablity to pass along some of the risk is far more important than cost or implementation ease.”
As Open Source and DIY-IT continue to gain momentum, these issue will come up more and more and will certainly need to be addressed. So, what is your experience with Open Source and DIY-IT in larger enterprises?
–jeremy

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GNOME has Forked

July 22, 2004 1 Comment

It appears that, with little fanfare, the GNOME project now has a fork. From the Project GoneME page:
“Project GoneME is the first attempt to try moving the GNOME Desktop into a new direction. As a long years contributor and ex-GNOME Foundation member I got quite unhappy with the new direction that some core decision takers have chosen without further feedback with the community or their participants. Even if I do see that plenty of things that got changed in GNOME does indeed make sense but some other decisions have upset quite a lot of people including me and there was no possibility to bring these problems up on the GNOME Mailinglists or the IRC channel without getting yourself trapped into ugly discussions and slandering. The unfair behaviour caused the result that a lot of people changed the Desktop to KDE or simply switched to something entirely different.”
–jeremy

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You get a BETA preview of a new LQ Site

July 22, 2004 1 Comment

As a thank you for reading my blog, I am going to post a link to a new project that just went beta. ProgrammingQuestions.org is a site similar to LQ, but with a (decidedly Linux) programming slant. In addition to the Linux-related forums there are also forums for all other programming languages. Keep in mind that this site is still beta (and will be for a little while), but feel free to join, post and take a good look around. If you have any suggestions I'd like to hear about them, and they can be posted in the WQ&S forum on PQO. What are we missing, what would you like to see changed, what forums did we overlook – let us know!
–jeremy

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More SCO

July 21, 2004 1 Comment

Looks like the judge granted most of DaimlerChrysler's motion to dismiss the SCO case (they failed to file their required certification within the alloted time). From Groklaw:
“The SCO Group, a struggling company with a loud campaign to profit from Unix intellectual property, has largely lost a case it brought against DaimlerChrysler.
“In a hearing Wednesday, Judge Rae Lee Chabot of Oakland County Circuit Court in Michigan granted most of DaimlerChrysler's motion to dismiss the case, SCO and DaimlerChrysler representatives said. . . .
“'The case “for the most part probably is' over, SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said.
“'We're satisfied that DaimlerChrysler did finally certify their compliance with the software agreement, but we are still interested in gaining some information on why they didn't certify within the allotted time,' Stowell said. The case 'is not completely over yet, because the judge still held out the possibility that we could pursue trying to find out information from DaimlerChrysler on why they took so long to certify.'”
–jeremy

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LinuxQuestions.org is headed to LinuxWorld

July 21, 2004 Leave a comment

Finally booked my hotel today and figured I'd post a reminder that LinuxQuestions.org is going to be in the .org Pavilion at the upcoming LinuxWorld in San Francisco. Make sure to stop by the LQ booth if you will be attending.
–jeremy

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SCO Claims Linux Lifted ELF

July 21, 2004 Leave a comment

In case you haven't seen the latest SCO news, they are now claiming that the Unix Executable and Linking Format (ELF) codes are in Linux illegally. From the article:
“In 1995, the year Novell sold Unix to the Santa Cruz Operation, an industry group calling itself the Tool Interface Standard Committee (TISC) came up with a ELF 1.2 standard and to popularize it and streamline PC software development granted users a “non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license” to the stuff, effectively putting it in the public domain, SCO says.
SCOsource chief Chris Sontag, the SCO VP in charge of the company's hate-inducing IP push, claims TISC, which folded immediately after the spec was published, exceeded its rights even though both Novell and the old SCO – as well as Microsoft, IBM and Intel – were on the committee.”
–jeremy

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