Why The Supreme Court's 'Grokster' Decision Led To More, Not Less, P2P Filesharing

In the 2005 "Grokster" decision, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that file sharing networks could be held liable for copyright infringement if they take "affirmative steps" to encourage infringement. Grokster closed down as a result, and the recording industry pretty much assumed it had won that battle


But as a fascinating analysis by Rebecca Giblin of what happened afterwards points out, against the industry's expectations, P2P filesharing flourished: 

Techdirt.

Open Sourcing Politics

“Linux is subversive”: so begins “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” Eric Raymond's analysis of the open source way. The subversion there was mainly applied to the world of software, but how much more subversive are the ideas that lie behind open source when applied to politics.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why There is no Kernel Hacker Sell-Out

As you may have noticed, posting to this blog was light last week, as in non-existent (OK, so you didn't notice.) This was because I was engaged in some serious geeking-out at the LCA2010 conference. One of the talks that I saw came from Jon Corbet, who gave a run-down on recent changes to the Linux kernel. A statistic that he mentioned along the way has garnered much comment: the fact that "75% of the code comes from people paid to do it.” In particular, some have leapt on this figure as proof that kernel coders have “sold out”, and that the famed altruistic impulse behind free software is dead. I think this is nonsense.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Do Top Hackers Have Too Much Money?

The announcement that one of MySQL's founders, Monty Widenius, was leaving Sun, was generally regarded as a pity, though no huge surprise, given the rumours that had been swirling since last year. But its impact was redoubled following the even more astonishing news that MySQL's boss, Marten Mickos, was also moving on; together, they inevitably sent shock-waves through the open source world. Most analysis has centred on the state of Sun, and whether these two high-profile departures mean that the MySQL acquisition was a mistake, or has already failed. But here, I'd like to look at a bigger question that these moves pose: do top hackers (and their managers) have too much money?

On Linux Journal.

Qt Goes LGLP: the Trolltech Saga Attains Closure

There are few commercial programs whose history is more intertwined with the rise of free software than Nokia's Qt toolkit, originally created by the Norwegian company Trolltech. As one of the company's founders, Haarvard Nord, told me nearly ten years ago, when I was writing Rebel Code, Qt began life as a purely proprietary product, but with a free version specifically aimed at free software programmers...

On Open Enterprise blog.

ESR: He Speak the Truth (Technically Speaking)

Sadly, it's become something of an event when Eric Raymond offers one of his stimulating essays on technology. I know he's supposed to be working on some top-secret, er, something, but couldn't we have a few more words like these?

There's an argument commonly heard these days that open-source software is all very well for infrastructure or commodity software where the requirements are well-established, but that it can't really innovate. I laugh when I hear this, because I remember when the common wisdom was exactly the opposite -- that we hackers were great for exploratory, cutting-edge stuff but couldn't deliver reliable product.

How quickly people forget. We built the World Wide Web, fer cripessakes! The original browser and the original webservers were built by a hacker at CERN, not in some closed-door corporate shop. Before that, years before we got Linux and our own T-shirts, people who would later identify their own behavior correctly as open-source hacking built the Internet.

Exactly, as I've noted on these pages several times before. Do read the rest: if ESR gets enough hits maybe he'll return to his flock....

Haggling in the Bazaar

As open source becomes more widely used, people have started exploring how and why its approach to developing software works so well. The pioneering analysis here is Eric Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar, but that was largely describing a prelapsarian world of free software with little commercialisation. An intriguing question is how the bazaar functions in the corrupting presence of serious dosh....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Linux is Subversive....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Of Bazaars and Dangerous Co-location

I often bang on about modularity in this blog, and its critical importance to creating and running open projects. Here are some more thoughts on the subject, along with many interesting ruminations on creating a Raymondian bazaar, and the state of open source companies today. It concludes by answering a key question it posed itself:

Why do so many open-source projects not have the active community of external contributors they are hoping for? Because they have been largely developed by co-located teams of hired software engineers, 100% dedicated to the project, managed and organized like any traditional software development effort. This seems to be especially true for the new crop of ‘custom build’ open-source companies, which would like to take advantage of the open-source business model. They might hope to also enjoy the advantages of the open-source development model one day, but achieving that requires a conscious effort.

Good stuff.

Gagging Linus

I seem to recall that Darl McBride, the man behind SCO's suicidal strategy of suing IBM, once received a box of worms as a token of displeasure from someone. I think he would have got rather more than that had this idea gone ahead:

SCO suggested that all parties involved in the litigation be subject to a stipulated gag order. The company then stretched the definition of "involved parties" to include SCO, Columbia Law professor Eben Moglen, OSS advocate Eric Raymond, and Linus Torvalds. "Because of Mr. Torvalds' position in the technology world, his comments about SCO's evidence in this case are given particular weight in industry and popular press," argues the letter from SCO attorney Kevin P. McBride.

Behind and Beyond Halloween

The publication of the first Halloween memo in 1998 was a pivotal moment in the history of free software. For the first time, it was clear that internally Microsoft was worried by this new threat, despite its outward-facing bravado and rhetoric.

Of course, there was no confirmation from the company that the memo was genuine, so there was always a theoretical possibility that they were faked in some way, although the internal evidence seemed overwhelming. But now, Groklaw reports, we have official proof of their genuine nature. The posting also offers an interesting meditation on how all this feeds into Microsoft's current attempts to "go legit" with the ECMA standardisation of its Office XML formats.

Eric's Saga

Eric Raymond - ESR - is a curious chap.

Interviewing him was definitely one of the highlights of researching my book Rebel Code: there was a thoughtful intelligence behind his replies that seemed perfectly of a piece with his most famous contribution to the open source world, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

And then we have Eric's blog, entitled "Armed and Dangerous." The kindest thing I can say about this is that here ESR comes across as a thinking person's Michelle Malkin.

It therefore comes as something of a relief to see that Eric has posted very little to his blog recently. Indeed, he's generally pretty low profile these days, which makes his appearance at LinuxWorld and the dispensation of traditional non-blog Eric wisdom there all-the-more welcome.

According to The Reg:

Raymond said the community is not moving fast enough to engage with non-technical users whose first-choice platform is either an iPod, MP3 player or Microsoft desktop running Windows Media Player.

With iPod holding a massive market share and Windows Vista coming down the pipe, Raymond warned that Linux risks getting locked out of new hardware platforms for the next 30 years unless it proves it can work with iPods, MP3s and WMP.

I think this is a good point: for many, computers are really just big bits that you attach to an iPod or MP3 player, and so it's vital that GNU/Linux be able to play nicely here.

Fortunately, the WMP side is being sorted, and the MP3 handling was always quite good. The main problem is really Apple, with its wretched DRM. It's hard to see Steve Jobs finally seeing the light (he's probably too blinded by his own aureole), so it's clearly down to the community to come up with solutions.

Indian Summer of Code

I wrote earlier today about the fallacy of assuming that once you start offering money the spirit that informs the world of collaborative efforts like open content evaporates, leaving crass cupidity. It occurred to me afterwards, that we have already been here before.

Back in 1998, the first wave of open source IPOs hit. One of the main beneficiaries of the VA Linux IPO was Eric Raymond. As he wrote at the time:

A few hours ago, I learned that I am now (at least in theory) absurdly rich. ... VA had indeed gone out on NASDAQ -- and I had become worth approximately forty-one million dollars while I wasn't looking.

He then turns away from this typically self-centred story to examine (with characteristic insight) the wider implications of the IPOs that were happening:

Reporters often ask me these days if I think the open-source community will be corrupted by the influx of big money. I tell them what I believe, which is this: commercial demand for programmers has been so intense for so long that anyone who can be seriously distracted by money is already gone. Our community has been self-selected for caring about other things -- accomplishment, pride, artistic passion, and each other.

This is still true. As proof, witness the Season of KDE 2006:

As in 2005, KDE again was a participating organization in this years Google Summer of Code 2006. Many interesting and much needed project ideas were submitted and students from all over the world began to apply for them. The KDE project received more than 200 student applications. Sadly Google's capacities are not limitless and thus, only 24 students were selected to participate in Google's Summer of Code under the mentorship of the KDE project.

Driven by the urge not to let many good applications go to waste the KDE project decided to give many of the rejected students a chance to realize their ideas after all in the first Season of KDE. Since KDE does not have Google's financial capacities the students will not get paid for their efforts. Still it is a very good opportunity for students to get involved in KDE development while being mentored by an experienced KDE developer and as a result be an active part of the Free Software Community.

In other words, no Google moolah is flowing, but the aspirants coders are still coding - out of sheer hacker love. Kudos to the students for doing so, and to their mentors for giving their time. That's what this open stuff is all about.

Scrying an Oracle

This story has so many interesting elements in it that it's just got to be true.

According to Business Week, Oracle is poised to snap up no less than three open source companies: JBoss, Zend and Sleepycat Software. JBoss - which calls itself the "professional open source company", making everyone else unprofessional, I suppose - is one of the highest-profile players in this sector. Not least because its founder, the Frenchman Marc Fleury, has a tongue as sharp as his mind (you can sample his blog with this fab riff on genomics, Intelligent Design and much else).

His controversial remarks and claims in the past have not always endeared him to others in the free software world. Take, for example, the "disruptive Professional Open Source model" he proudly professes, "which combines the best of the open source and proprietary software worlds to make open source a safe choice for the enterprise and give CIOs peace of mind." Hmm, I wonder what Richard Stallman has to say about that.

JBoss has been highly successful in the middleware market: if you believe the market research, JBoss is the leader in the Java application server sector. Oracle's acquisition would make a lot of sense, since databases on their own aren't much fun these days: you need middleware to hook them up to the Internet, and JBoss fits the bill nicely. It should certainly bolster Oracle in its battle against IBM and Microsoft in the fiercely-fought database sector.

While many might regard the swallowing up of an ambivalent JBoss by the proprietary behemoth Oracle as just desserts of some kind, few will be happy to see Zend suffer the same fate. Zend is the company behind the PHP scripting language - one of the most successful examples of free software. (If you're wondering, PHP stands for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" - employing your standard hacker recursive acronym naming convention).

Where JBoss is mostly key for companies running e-commerce Web sites, say, PHP is a core technology of the entire open source movement. Its centrality is indicated by the fact that it is one of the options for the ubiquitous LAMP software stack: Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP or Perl or Python. The fact that Oracle will own the engine that powers PHP will be worrying for many in the free software world.

About Sleepycat, I can only say: er, who? - but that's just ignorance on my part. This article explains that Sleepycat's product, Berkeley DB, is actually the "B" in LAMP. Got that? The Sleepycat blog may throw some more light on this strange state of affairs - or maybe not.

Whatever the reason that Oracle wants to get its mitts on Sleepycat as well as Zend and JBoss, one thing is abundantly clear if these rumours prove true: Oracle is getting very serious about open source.

In the past, the company has had just about the most tortuous relationship with open source of any of the big software houses. As I wrote in Rebel Code, in early July 1998, an Oracle representative said "we're not seeing a big demand from our customer that we support it" - "it" being GNU/Linux. And yet just two weeks later, Oracle announced that it was porting Oracle8 to precisely that platform. This was one of the key milestones in the acceptance of free software by business: no less a person than Eric Raymond told me that "the Oracle port announcement...made the open source concept unkillable by mere PR" - PR from a certain company being a big threat in the early days of corporate adoption.

Open source has come on by leaps and bounds since then, and these moves by Oracle are not nearly so momentous - at least for free software. But I wonder whether the otherwise canny Larry Ellison really knows what he's getting into.

Until now, Oracle has mainly interacted with open source through GNU/Linux - that is, at arm's length. If it takes these three companies on board - especially if it acquires Zend - it will find itself thrown into the maelstrom of open source culture. Here's a hint for Mr Ellison: you don't get to assimilate that culture, whatever you might be thinking of doing with the companies. You either work with it, or it simply routes around you.

Yes, I'm talking about forks here: if Oracle misplays this, and tries to impose itself on the PHP or JBoss communities, I think it will be in for a rude surprise. To its credit, IBM really got this, which is why its embrace of open source has been so successful. Whether Oracle can follow in its footsteps, only time will tell.

But the rumoured acquisitions, if they go ahead, will have one other extremely significant effect. They will instantly add credibility, viability and desirability to a host of other second-generation open source companies that have grown up in the last few years. Free software will gain an immediate boost, and hackers will suddenly find themselves in great demand again.

Given the astonishing lift-off of Google's share price, and the palpable excitement surrounding Web 2.0 technologies (and the start-ups that are working on them), the hefty price-tags on open source companies being bandied around in the context of Oracle have a feeling of déjà-vu all over again: didn't we go through all this with Red Hat and VA Linux a few years back?

You don't have to be clairvoyant - or an oracle - to see that if these deals go through, the stage is well and truly set for Dotcom Delirium 2.0.