To Free or Not to Free the Code in Question
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Part X - Open Season 2000-2005 "FOSS has become the corporate poster child for capitalist technology giants like IBM, the technological and philosophical weapon of anti-corporate activists, and a practical template for a nascent movement to create an intellectual 'Commons' to balance the power of capital. In these cases and others, FOSS's broadly defined philosophy - given legal form in licenses - has acted as a pivotal point of inspiration for a diverse (and contradictory) set of alternative intellectual property instruments now available for other forms of creative work." [How Free Became Open and Everything Else Under the Sun Biella Coleman & Mako Hill in M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture #7 Jul04]. The 21st century has seen the steady rise of corporate involvement with FOSS - most particularly Open Source. Many capitalised friends have been made: "The nature of the open source community is changing.. many have been hired by Novell, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, or some corporation, including a range of startups interested in cashing in on the open source gold rush." [Does 'community' still exist in open source? NewsForge 9Jun05]. "When VA[Software]'s IPO (initial public offering) opened up in December 1999, its stock price rose on the first day to close at $300 a share. There was a brief time when its investors were talking about being Linux millionaires. That talk didn't last as long as most dot-com fortunes. In the first half of 2000, Linux stocks crashed. Many Linux businesses lost over 90 percent of their value. Today, Red Hat trades in the mid-teens, a far cry from the day when it traded around $150 a share. VA hovers below $2 a share. They were the lucky ones. Some companies simply ceased to exist. The Linux business had been caught in the great tech crash at the end of the 20th century. Now, however, VCs (venture capitalists) are beginning to seriously invest in Linux and open-source companies and startups. When I say seriously, I mean seven and eight figures worth of serious. ..the VC community believes, although use of Linux and BSD is growing, that these technologies are increasingly seen as commodities." [Open-Source Investment Begins to Pay eweek 21Jul05]. The commercial pressure to break OSS free from the GPL - along with its developers - is ongoing and real, as in de-emphasis misconstrued from Linus on Licensing: "new applications developers, the people who will drive the next generation of change in the industry, need to look long and hard at the terms under which they release their work.. [Linus] choose [sic] the GPL, not because it was morally better for everyone, but because it offers a better fit to his personal needs". Rather, 'everyone' gets the benefit of GNU/Linux precisely due to its GPL status, though subtle is the language of denial: "Today the typical hardware design is built around a generic silicon core (x86, ARM, PPC) that's shrouded in a fine Linux/BSD operating gown (although many designers still feel safer wrapping their silicon in a darker embedded Windows cloth.. It can be reasonably argued, however, that open hardware has already had a more significant impact on our industry than GPL, or Linux, or any other modern software." [ZDNet Open source blog 10Jun05; The Future - Open Source Hardware: Open Source isn't just Linux LinuxWorld 14Jun2005]. The cash-in direction is clear: "OSDL leader Stuart Cohen recently remarked at a technology conference that he 'would not be surprised to see Microsoft participate in software that runs on top of Linux in the future.' He even mentioned the dread word proprietary in a positive light. 'There is an opportunity for a tremendous amount of software, mostly proprietary but some open source, to be developed on Linux. Proprietary continues to grow and grow rapidly'." [Microsoft Linux Debate Grows LinuxWorld 14Jun2005]. The commercialisation of OSS satisfies many individual career investments, once a direct challenge to the Microsoft empire, but with the weight of interests now against Free Software. The FSF are still accumulating important numbers of friends too, however - especially in the underdeveloped world, where 'pirating' software is the economic norm otherwise. And it is timely to review the Unix intent and start bolstering the FSF side, when an Open Source licensing minefield looms. Explaining, the "risk of mixing open source and proprietary code is a result of the rise of open source within the enterprise, according to Doug Levin, chief executive at software compliance management firm Black Duck Software.. [BDS] develops ProtexIP, a product that specialises in software compliance management. The suite checks applications for possible licence violations". Clarity is needed. At LinuxWorld 2005, the OSI [were] urged to reform open source licensing into a simple threesome of: "General Public Licence (GPL); the Lesser General Public Licence; and a version that has more restrictions for applications in commercial environments.. God created GPL for a reason". [vnunet 17&16Feb2005]. As an example, Silicon Graphics Inc are long in the *nix game: "IRIX® operating system is the leading technical high-performance 64-bit operating system based on industry-standard UNIX® . For the past 20 years, SGI has been designing scalable platforms based on the IRIX operating system to connect technical and creative professionals to a world of innovation and discovery.. [SGI are] committed to taking a leadership role in the ongoing development and improvement of the performance and reliability of the Linux operating system", but have a hybridised Freeware distribution that avoids generic GPL and promotes the Open Source brand. [SGI IRIX; May 2004]. |
"OSI is responding by instituting stricter criteria for license approvals.. The class of asymmetrical corporate licenses that began with Mozilla was a worthy experiment that has failed. The new policy will discourage them." [License Proliferation Executive Summary OSI 2005]. Market mechanisms are seen by a good many as adequate protection for free *nix. In 2000 the Linux Mark Institute coordinated trademark registration for Linux® . When, in 2005, the issue of sublicensing came up in Australia, Linus explained it this way: "The people who pay to license (or get a unique trademark of their own) a certain name do so because they care about that particular name. People who don't care, don't pay". A revenue stream is thus available, if needed, to defend Planet Linux. However the stated aim does not yet seem far advanced by the Linux International means: "We want to bring marketing to the Open Source community". Sublicensing revenue is now actively being sought, in a building crackdown on the trademark's use: "The registered trademark Linux® is used pursuant to a license from Linus Torvalds, owner of the mark in the U.S. and other countries", LMI January 2005. [Re: [OT]Linus trademarks Linux?!! Linus Torvalds 20Aug2005 Linux-Kernel Archive; Re: Using "linux" in a domain name ibid 18Jan2000; Linux International Marketing; Moglen: Linux Trademark Needs to be Policed internetnews.com 25Aug2005]. SCO claimed they had bought the copyright for Unix source code, and that it had been illegally used by IBM and in Linux, but failed miserably to achieve anything but miscegenation of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD): "SCO filed a $5bn lawsuit against IBM in 2003 alleging that the computing giant had misappropriated SCO trade secrets and code copyrights in its work on Linux and AIX. Other lawsuits followed, and SCO later began threatening to take its own customers to court unless they agreed to pay licence fees for the Linux intellectual property that SCO claimed to own." [SCO was the 'best thing that ever happened' to Linux ZDNet UK 10Mar2005]. "We have to bring back strong representation that advocates the industry interest of users groups and talks to government for them. If you look at the organizations that have users as members today, they're dominated today by the vendors, and that's a change that has to be dealt with." [Bruce Perens On SYS-CON.TV LinuxWorld 15Aug05]. Is Microsoft preparing a patent offensive against open source?. Do we ultimately face an all-or-nothing choice about the future of Not/Unix, on the question of licensing, patents, legal costs, and, primarily, proprietised or Free? The internal contradiction remains: "Linux is exporting our values around the world.. What values? Competition. Cooperation. And opportunity." How is it that the first two can be reconcilable, when it is Novell and Red Hat, for example, in the very same national market? Will Linux's OSS survival be at the price of its GNU soul? See Epilogue. [SiliconValleySleuth 17Feb2005; Our Linux Values computerworld 18Jul05] The most recent and viable alternative to the GPL for securing public access rights to intellectual product is the Creative Commons, begun in 2001 backed by Stanford law professor and author Lawrence Lessig: "flexible copyright for creative work". Lessig is on the FSF's Board of Directors, and argues in The Future of Ideas that the "explosion of innovation we have seen in the environment of the Internet.. flourished there because the Internet protected an innovation commons.. [yet] Powerful conglomerates are swiftly using both law and technology to 'tame' the Internet, transforming it from an open forum for ideas into nothing more than cable television on speed.. " Resistance to a privatised Net is diverse, including ESR's Defending Network Freedom. But when the Bush administration annexes [the] internet, everyone scurries for constitutional backup. [The Register 1Jul2005; The internet is doing nicely without its own UN nzherald 22Jul05]. The 1970s-on consumer individualist me! me! generation thinks computing is about their needs, their interest, and their choice. The preceding ten-part history shows what collective effort went into supplying that choice - as a free unix - for the public good. Ensuring the maximum range of software choice for the future entails a steadfast focus, not on profit and oneself, but on advancing that same public good. There is but one logical end-point to the open-source proprietarist dilemma. That is, to invoke the fifth meaning of Free - zero cost software - that both Stallman and Torvalds looked to in the early part of their careers, only to pragmatically recoil from later as too big a challenge. Computer software can, should, and will be de-commoditised. Only this eventuality will resolve programming's loss of open development to industry and commerce - from science, education, philosophy, and common human progress. Restraining this evolution is the military-industrial Unix sector hold over Linux® brand and 'Open Source' commercialisation. Global US hegemony is the weight behind these waves. Ideologically, a barrier to theoretical analysis has been actively maintained through Godwin's Law since 1990. [Draft 03Oct05 - to be cont'd..] |