The final draft of the GNU GPLv3 is out, together with copious explanations. If it's just a little too copious, you might try Matthew Aslett's excellent analysis of what it is all likely to mean for the Novell-Microsoft deal.
So, details of the Microsoft-Novell agreement have been released. IANAL, but this is unbelievable:7.2 ***. If a *** (or ***e.g., an *** or ***) *** that this Agreement or the *** (including *** or with respect thereto) of *** under this Agreement are not *** to which a *** and there is an *** by a *** with respect to such *** that the *** and there is no *** (e.g. through amendment of this Agreement), then such *** may*** of the *** this Agreement by *** to the ***.
No, really.
This is getting seriously hard to parse:In a surprise announcement earlier today at the Open Source Business Conference, Novell and the Electronic Frontier Foundation said that Novell would be contributing to the EFF's Patent Busting project. In addition, the two entities will work for legislation and policies that will "promote innovation," specifically targeting the World Intellectual Property Organization.
As I've written elsewhere, Microsoft's FUD is more interesting for what it says about the company's deepest fears than for its overt message. This is certainly the case for the latest example:Coverage of the debate on the new version of the GNU Public License (GPLv3) has focused on the differing opinions among three groups: Project leaders like Linus Torvalds and other top Linux kernel developers; Foundations like the Free Software Foundation (FSF) led by Richard Stallman; and Large Technology Companies such as Sun, HP, IBM, and Novell. While these three groups are certainly all affected by revisions to the GPL, open source developers are also affected, but have been significantly under-represented in the discussion. In this paper, our objective was to give developers a voice and bring their opinions into the debate. What does this fourth constituency think about open source licenses, the upcoming release of the GPLv3, and the philosophies surrounding open source software?
Actually, I lied: the results in this particular case, although predictable, are so hilarious that they deserve wider airing:Thus our results suggest the actions of the FSF may only be favored by approximately 10% of the broader community and leads us to ask, should a committee be created with a charter to create and revise open source licenses using a governance model similar to that of the open source development model? Is it contrary to the spirit of the open source community, which relies on the wisdom and view of the masses, to have the governance of licenses controlled by a few individuals whose views run contrary to the objectives of potentially 90% of the people affected by their actions, especially when the community members are the very creators and developers of the software under discussion?
Hello, people: those "few individuals" you are talking about are essentially Richard Stallman, as in Richard Stallman who single-handedly started this whole thing, fought most of the key battles, and even wrote some of the most important code, alone. And you're questioning his right to revise the licence that he - as in Richard Stallman - devised and then gave to the world?
But of course the main takeaway from this is that Microsoft is really, really worried by precisely those new provisions in GPLv3 that are designed to limit its ability to subvert free software, to the extent that it would even contemplate publishing a sponsored report of this kind based on - wait for it - a massive 34 replies out of 332 requests; talk about "few individuals".
Thanks for the info, chaps.
It would have been more appropriate had this come out on April 1st:If you agree that Open XML should be approved as an ISO standard please sign this petition, which we will send to the Chairman of the British Standards Institute to demonstrate broad support for this initiative in the UK.
Yours faithfully,
Nick McGrath
Director of Platform Strategy
Microsoft Ltd
This is basically trying to strong-arm the BSI into supporting Microsoft's pseudo-standard by soliciting the public's help through the following statements:
• Ecma Open XML was developed through the collaborative efforts of leading companies such as Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba and the US Library of Congress.
• Ecma Open XML is backward compatible with billions of archived documents held by the private and public sectors.
• Any company can freely implement and develop innovative products using Ecma Open XML
• Ecma Open XML enables interoperability, accommodates multiple languages and cultures, and supports technologies that enable people with disabilities to use computing devices.
So, let's just take a look at some of these, shall we?
First, note that Microsoft Open XML has suddenly morphed into that terribly neutral and official-looking Ecma Open XML: who could possibly have anything against that?• Ecma Open XML was developed through the collaborative efforts of leading companies such as Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba and the US Library of Congress.
It would be interesting to see what proportion of the code these contributed. I'd bet it was something like 99.99% Microsoft's work. This was why it was foolish for institutions like the British Library to lend their name: it was bound to be hijacked in this way.• Ecma Open XML is backward compatible with billions of archived documents held by the private and public sectors.
Sorry, Nick, that's a bug, not a feature: backward compatibility has led to elephantiasis in the documentation - all 6000 pages of it - which makes it effectively unusable for anyone except Microsoft. What a coincidence.• Any company can freely implement and develop innovative products using Ecma Open XML
See the previous comment. And oh yes, we know that Microsoft really loves to share its proprietary standards: just ask the European Commission, or Novell, for example.
• Ecma Open XML enables interoperability, accommodates multiple languages and cultures, and supports technologies that enable people with disabilities to use computing devices.
Er, interoperability with what - itself? There will never be a full independent implementation of Microsoft's file format (see above, again). Or perhaps Nick was thinking of interoperability with other XML-based office standards: unfortunately, the way those 6000 pages define Microsoft's format, true interoperability seems a merely theoretical prospect. And note the cunning last line - "supports technologies that enable people with disabilities to use computing devices" - which implies that this is something special. That was true in the past, but things move on, Nick, and ODF offers it too, now.
Given the fact that the company emphasises how keen it is to respond to users' wishes, what I want to know is why there isn't somewhere where we can petition Microsoft to drop its format entirely, and simply switch to the real open office standard, OpenDocument Format, which more and more governments and companies are supporting.
Now that's something I'd sit up and beg for. (Via The Reg.)
One of the worst abuses of Microsoft's desktop power is that it is often very hard to buy a PC without being forced to pay for Windows, whether you want it or not. At long last, there are some cracks appearing in this monolithic approach, thanks, it seems, to Dell's Ideastorm:It’s exciting to see the IdeaStorm community’s interest in open source solutions like Linux and OpenOffice. Your feedback has been all about flexibility and we have seen a consistent request to provide platforms that allow people to install their operating system of choice. We are listening, and as a result, we are working with Novell to certify our corporate client products for Linux, including our OptiPlex desktops, Latitude notebooks and Dell Precision workstations. This is another step towards ensuring that our customers have a good experience with Linux on our systems.
As this community knows, there is no single customer preference for a distribution of Linux. In the last week, the IdeaStorm community suggested more than half a dozen distributions. We don't want to pick one distribution and alienate users with a preference for another. We want users to have the opportunity to help define the market for Linux on desktop and notebook systems. In addition to working with Novell, we are also working with other distributors and evaluating the possibility of additional certifications across our product line. We are continuing to investigate your other Linux-related ideas, so please continue to check here for updates.
It's a pity this weclome move is vitiated by a pathetic attempt at justifying the latter-day Windows tax:We don't want to pick one distribution and alienate users with a preference for another.
So instead of "alienating" some GNU/Linux users, Dell decided it was better to alienate all of them. Right, that makes business sense. Now, tell me again why Dell is losing market-share?
This blog has constantly warned readers to be on their guard against weasel words whose unexceptionable and generalised nature betray an intent to redefine. A classic example - double-barrelled to boot - is the Progress & Freedom Foundation, which has absolutely nothing to do with freedom as Richard Stallman would understand it, and as a concomitant, precious little to do with progress either.
As its About page makes clear, freedom means the right to impose intellectual monopolies - or, as it quaintly puts it:the "imperative" to protect rich digital content and encourage innovation through the traditional legal notions of copyright and patent.
Hm, that's a new one: the imperative to impose intellectual monopolies. Not much freedom there, methinks. The other key phrases to note are "market-oriented policy" and "Applying benefit-cost analysis to proposals for regulation of the market for personal information" - so you can forget about any right to privacy: if it's profitable, it's good.
No surprise, then, that one of the foundation's luminaries has written an oh-so-reasonable defence of the Microsoft-Novell stitch-up. Except that it is fundamentally flawed, despite its reasonable tone.
Its central argument in favour of the oh-so-reasonable Microsoft-Novell stitch-up is as follows:Customers also want freedom from concern about potential intellectual property problems. They do not want to worry whether someone might come out of left field claiming the right to enjoin some mission-critical application.
- and yes, there's that tell-tale little word "freedom" again.
So, as a customer, I'm supposed to worry about whether my supplier is infringing on somebody else's intellectual monopoly? Sorry, but I don't care a fig about the intellectual monopolies involved in products that I buy or use: I care about whether they do the job at a reasonable price. I expect the supplier to worry about the legal details - that's partly what I pay for.
Reframing it in these terms attempts to enmesh the user in the battles that try to employ intellectual monopolies as competitive weapons that are the very antithesis of progressive. It is a trick that aims to legitimise and bolster the strength of this approach, by falsely claiming that it matters to the general public. It is true that manufacturers and suppliers do indeed need to worry, unfortunately, but that is a problem, and a reflection of how the original legal frameworks have been distorted by corporate lawyers and greedy industries.
To remedy this situation, we all need to ignore those issues, and fight for minimalist intellectual monopolies - 14 years for copyright, as it was originally, and patents whose scope is narrowed considerably, or, ideally, abolished entirely.
Needless to say, since the premise of the article is mistaken, its conclusion is too: the Microsoft-Novell deal is bad for customers, since it brings in patenting issues where there aren't any. After all, if Microsoft really believed open source infringed on its patents it would go to court, as it routinely has in the past. Are we supposed to believe that Steve Ballmer has come over all magnanimous, and wants to give open source a chance to reform? I think not.
It's also a disaster for Novell, which is now tainted by Redmond's kiss of Judas. Indeed, I strongly suspect that in retrospect it will be seen as the inflection point that began the company's terminal decline.
I'm not sure about this:Probably most of you have heard or read about Novell's effort to provide VBA support in OpenOffice.org for better interoperability with a well known competitive office suite. On the other hand Sun has a similar VBA migration story in place for StarOffice. Sun's solution is designed as an extension which is 100% optional whereas Novell's solution prefers the integration directly in the code base. So we have two similar solutions which overlap in many areas. This is a sub-optimal situation and probably nobody would disagree here. The good news is that both companies have come to an agreement that it makes sense to share their resources and work together on one common OpenOffice.org VBA story.
First, anything to do with Novell while it is engaged in its pact with the devil seems dodgy to me; and secondly, it is well-known that VBA is essentially a toolkit for security problems. Yes, it will be possible to turn it off, but frankly, it seems a bit perverse to aim for full compatibility with even the really dangerous bits of Microsoft Office. (Via heise online.)
Well, strictly speaking, it's "up to" 20K:PSA Peugeot Citroën, the second-largest automobile manufacturer in Europe, and Novell just signed a multiyear contract allowing the deployment of up to 20,000 Linux desktops plus 2,500 Linux servers from Novell.
Still, a good win for SuSE - and for open source.
Of course, that pre-supposes there's no massive oily patch on the road ahead for the Microsoft-Novell "mixed-source" juggernaut.... (Via Open Sources.)
News that the US's official eavesdropper, the National Security Agency, has had a hand in Vista is going to go down really well with the governments of China, Russia, India, etc. etc.: For the first time, the giant software maker is acknowledging the help of the secretive agency, better known for eavesdropping on foreign officials and, more recently, U.S. citizens as part of the Bush administration's effort to combat terrorism. The agency said it has helped in the development of the security of Microsoft's new operating system -- the brains of a computer -- to protect it from worms, Trojan horses and other insidious computer attackers.
Interestingly:Novell, which sells a Linux-based operating system, also works with government agencies on software security issues, spokesman Bruce Lowry said in an e-mail, "but we're not in a position to go into specifics of the who, what, when types of questions."
But at least you can look at the code to find out what they did - unlike with Vista.... (Via The Inquirer.)
Top Samba man Jeremy Allison, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing many moons ago, has done the decent thing, and cut his ties with (ex-)employer Novell:I have decided to leave Novell.
This has been a very difficult decision, but one I feel I have no choice but to make.
As many of you will guess, this is due to the Microsoft/Novell patent agreement, which I believe is a mistake and will be damaging to Novell's success in the future. But my main issue with this deal is I believe that even if it does not violate the letter of the licence it violates the intent of the GPL licence the Samba code is released under, which is to treat all recipients of the code equally.
Sad day for Novell. Luckily, Jeremy will soon be snapped up elsewhere. Bravo for taking a stand.
Update: And the lucky winner is...Google - again.
Good news, you might think:Novell today announced that the Novell edition of the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite will now support the Office Open XML format, increasing interoperability between OpenOffice.org and the next generation of Microsoft Office. Novell is cooperating with Microsoft and others on a project to create bi-directional open source translators for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office, with the word processing translator to be available first, by the end of January 2007. The translators will be made available as plug-ins to Novell's OpenOffice.org product. Novell will release the code to integrate the Open XML format into its product as open source and submit it for inclusion in the OpenOffice.org project. As a result, end users will be able to more easily share files between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org, as documents will better maintain consistent formats, formulas and style templates across the two office productivity suites.
Pretty cool, huh? Well, maybe not.
The code may well be released as open source, but there's the small matter of patents they might draw upon. Given that "Novell is cooperating with Microsoft and others", there must be the fear that to produce these undeniably handy translators Novell has availed itself of some inside knowledge kindly provided by that nice Mr Ballmer.
I've no idea whether that happened or not, but if I were in the OpenOffice.org group I do know I'd be refusing the proffered chalice - just in case. (Via LWN.net.)
This is a characteristically brilliant post from Pam over at Groklaw, particularly in the way it uses the Wayback machine to skewer Novell as it twists in the wind. It concludes:So, here's the question I have for Novell: what happened to that promise to protect FOSS with its patent portfolio? Novell did say it. We relied upon it, and OIN is totally separate from the above promise. I mention that because some Novell guys have been saying that Novell never made any such promise or that the OIN patents fulfill the promise. Read the promise again. Novell clearly promised to use its patent portfolio, not OIN's, and Novell appears to have just bargained that patent portfolio away, giving Microsoft a clear path to now bring patent infringement claims against everyone else. Novell's character and honor is on the line. And we await your statement with interest.
But arising from this, I too have a couple of questions that are starting to loom large in my mind:
Is this the beginning of the end for Mono? If Novell continues along its current path surely everything it touches will be regarded as tainted by the free software community, and Mono is sponsored by Novell. And now that Sun has done the decent thing with Java, there is a nice little programming language just waiting for all those disappointed hackers.
The other question is even bigger: is this the end for Novell? It seems to me that there is a broad-based and massive movement growing within the free software world to ostracise Novell utterly - something that will simply kill the company. As far as I know, this has never been done before - perhaps because the free software world simply wasn't strong enough. Now it is: are we about to see it claim its first victim? (Via AC/OS.)
Well, what a surprise:In comments confirming the open-source community's suspicions, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer today declared his belief that the Linux operating system infringes on Microsoft's intellectual property.
In a question-and-answer session after his keynote speech at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in Seattle, Ballmer said Microsoft was motivated to sign a deal with SUSE Linux distributor Novell Inc. earlier this month because Linux "uses our intellectual property" and Microsoft wanted to "get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation."
And there we all were, thinking that Microsoft really wanted to be free software's best chum.
Understandably everyone is jumping up and down about Microsoft's announcement that it will be working with Novell. But for me, the key phrase is the following from Steve "Monkey Boy" Ballmer:We’re excited to work with Novell, whose strengths include its heritage as a mixed-source company.
Did you catch that? "Mixed-source" - it's clearly the Microsoft meme of the moment, as Microsoft tries yet again to get a grip on this spaghetti monster that is open source. In the past it's tried calling it "non-commercial" (as well as a few less complimentary things), and I predict that we're going to be hearing the phrase "mixed-source" quite alot - until they move on to something else.
Update: Here's a very shrewd analysis of what happened from Simon Phipps.
I noted previously that Red Hat has blessed the idea of the integrated open source stack; now Novell is doing the same, with the support of IBM.
And the meme marched on.
Little things can make all the difference. If there is some audio stream using Microsoft Windows Media Format that you absolutely must listen to, then switching to GNU/Linux is that much harder. So anything that removes such obstacles is to be welcomed.
Such is the case for the news that Real and Novell are working to make Windows Media work out of the box for GNU/Linux.
There are currently two main GNU/Linux distributions for business: Red Hat and SuSE. So it is perhaps no surprise that Sun, which badly needs to start pushing the free operating system if it wants to play in world of open source enterprise stacks, should choose something else entirely - Ubuntu, to be precise.
This makes a lot of sense: in doing so, it guarantees that it will be the senior partner in any enterprise developments, and ensures that it is not drawn into the orbits of IBM (with Red Hat) or Novell (with SuSE).
It also has bags of potential in terms of branding. Ubuntu is famous for its "I am what I am because of who we all are", as well as its tasteful mud-brown colour scheme. Now, imagine an enormous, burnished sun rising majestically over the rich, dark pullulating earth....
Update 1: Interesting interview with Mark Shuttleworth on the enterprise-level Ubuntu.
Update 2: Further confirmation of the alliance: Ubuntu running on Sun's Niagara servers.
Wandering around Technorati, I came across Novell's Open PR blog. Mere PR PR? Maybe not, since there are comments from real people - including some not-so pleasant ones, which have been left up. How's that for authenticity?
There was an amusing story in Groklaw yesterday, detailing the sorry end of utterly pointless legal action taken against the Free Software Foundation (FSF) on the grounds that FSF has conspired with International Business Machines Corporation, Red Hat Inc., Novell Inc. and other individuals to “pool and cross license their copyrighted intellectual property in a predatory price fixing scheme.”
It sounded serious, didn't it? Maybe a real threat to free software and hence Civilisation As We Know It? Luckily, as the Groklaw story explains, the judge threw it out in just about every way possible.
However, welcome as this news is, it is important to note that the decision does not provide the long-awaited legal test of the GPL in the US (a court has already ruled favourably on one in Germany). Some people seem to feel that such a test case is needed to establish the legal foundation of the GPL - and with it, most of the free software world. But one person who disagrees, is Eben Moglen, General Counsel for the FSF, and somebody who should know.
As he explained to me a few weeks ago:The stuff that people do with GPL code – like they modify it, they copy it, they give it to other people – is stuff that under the copyright law you can't do unless you have permission. So if they've got permission, or think they have permission, then the permission they have is the GPL. If they don't have that permission, they have no permission.
So the defendant in a GPL violation situation has always been in an awkward place. I go to him and I say basically, Mr So and So, you're using my client's copyrighted works, without permission, in ways that the copyright law says that you can't do. And if you don't stop, I'm going to go to a judge, and I'm going to say, judge, my copyrighted works, their infringing activity, give me an injunction, give me damages.
At this point, there are two things the defendant can do. He can stand up and say, your honour, he's right, I have no permission at all. But that's not going to lead to a good outcome. Or he can stand up and say, but your honour, I do have permission. My permission is the GPL. At which point, I'm going to say back, well, your honour, that's a nice story, but he's not following the instructions of the GPL, so he doesn't really have the shelter he claims to have.
But note that either way, the one thing he can't say is, your honour, I have this wonderful permission and it's worthless. I have this wonderful permission, and it's invalid, I have this wonderful permission and it's broken.
In other words, there is no situation in which the brokenness or otherwise of the GPL is ever an issue: whichever is true, violators are well and truly stuffed.
(If you're interested in how, against this background, the GPL is enforced in practice, Moglen has written his own lucid explanations.)
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