Diddling Around with CDDL

Here's a lovely piece of Jesuitical reasoning:

Could, paradoxically, Sun's rejection of the CDDL for Java project be the best thing that ever happened for the license? It seems counterintuitive, but consider that the biggest obstacle to CDDL adoption - negative impressions of Sun - are in serious decline following the release of Java.

Nice.

Why Sun Mobilised the GPL Now....

Here's a fascinating analysis of why Sun went for the GPL and why now:

In summary, Sun opensourcing Java is all driven by mobile. The timing came from mobile. The license is due to mobile. Motorola, in my opinion, was the target, not IBM. I am a Java fan and I always will be. They were clearly late but maybe not too late. Let's see what happens next. This market is moving so fast, it will be interesting to watch... Once again, though, one thing is clear to me: mobile open source is king and it is gaining momentum every day.

Do read Fabrizio Capobianco's full post - it makes a lot of sense.

Is Sun Trying Too Hard to Be Good?

Not content with GPL'ing Java (for which they have my unalloyed admiration), Sun has now also given some dosh to Creative Commons.

What are they after - the Nobel Peace Prize?

Sun Supports OpenOffice.org - No, Really

It might seem strange to talk about Sun supporting OpenOffice.org - after all, it was the original donor of the code to the open source community. But what's changed is that it is now offering service plans for the software: this is news, because in the past it has only supported its own variant, StarSuite.

This is also important, because it provides a safety net to companies and government departments who want to use OpenOffice.org. In the past, they have been forced to opt for StarSuite if they wanted support; no longer.

Well done, my Sun.

Heroes of the Healing

Java is something of a festering wound in the open source community. Simon Phipps has a nice piece about the "heroes of healing" who have tried to do something about this, as well as some background to Sun's current moves to make Java open source, in an as-yet undefined way.

Update: Matthew Aslett has some information about Phipps's latest thoughts on opening Java.

Hewlett and Packard, Meet Deb and Ian

Things are getting interesting on the enterprise distro front. The two front-runners, Red Hat and SuSE are being joined by a couple of newcomers. Well, Debian is hardly a newcomer, since it was one of the earliest distributions, but it's not well known as an enterprise system. That may change with HP's announcement that it will offer Debian support.

The other one, in case you were wondering, is Ubuntu, which is also coming through strongly, not least thanks to Sun's increasing interest. Via Linux and Open Source Blog.)

Sun Gets Stack Love

After Larry "I'd like to have the complete stack" Ellison, it seems that Sun is joining the Club of Stack Love. Not such a daft idea, actually.

Burnished Sun Kisses Pullulating Earth

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.

Will Java Ever Explode?

Some fifteen years ago I found myself in a café near the top of Merapi, just outside Yogyakarta in central Java. As now, this was at a time of considerable seismic activity there, with lava flows in some places. It was a very strange experience, because I had the feeling that, at any moment, the whole thing might lift into the air.

You could say the same about Java - not the island, but the language. For years it has seemed on the brink of erupting in spectacular pyrotechnics, but it always falls back, to smoulder some more.

The obvious way of adding some deep, magmatic oomph to the Java market is to release the code as open source. Once again, people are whispering about this, making Java something of a litmus test for Sun's new CEO, Jonathan Schwartz: will he, won't he? Is he, isn't he?

At least, to his credit, Schwartz has kept the blogging faith....

Update: C|Net says "Sun promises to open-source Java": me, I'd like to see the details before I throw my hat in the air....

W(h)ither Sun?

McNealy leaving Sun is certainly the end of an era. But the big question is: what follows?

As far as Jonathan Schwartz is concerned, too much is being made (a) of his ponytail, and (b) of his blog. Perhaps the clearest indication of his thinking is this panegyric:

There is no single individual who has created more jobs around the world than you. And ... I'm not talking hundreds or thousands of jobs, I'm talking millions. They ended up in America and India, Indonesia and Antarctica, Madagascar, Mexico, Brazil and Finland. They ended up everywhere. Everywhere the network travels.

No single individual has spawned so many startups, fueled so much venture investment, or raised so much capital without actually trying - just with a vision of the future that gets more obvious by the day.

No single individual has so effectively created and promoted the technologies at the heart of a new world emerging around us. A world in which the demand for network computing technology will never decline - as we share more family photos, watch more digital movies, do more banking on-line, build more communities on line, run our supply chains, automate our governments or educate our kids.

Unfortunately, Schwartz is not talking about Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who did all these things, and did them entirely out of altruism, but supposedly about McNealy, who did nothing on the same scale, and did it for the dosh. If this is the quality of analysis we can expect from the new head of Sun, it's probably time to find some comfortable chairs, order a dry sherry, and to enjoy the imminent sunset.

To DRM or Not to DRM - That is the Question

Digital Rights Management - or Digital Restrictions Management as Richard Stallman likes to call it - is a hot topic at the moment. It figured largely in an interview I did with the FSF's Eben Moglen, which appeared in the Guardian last week. Here's the long version of what he had to say on DRM:

In the year 2006, the home is some real estate with appliances in it. In the year 2016, the home is a digital entertainment and data processing network with some real estate wrapped around it.

The basic question then is, who has the keys to your home? You or the people who deliver movies and pizza? The world that they are thinking about is a world in which they have the keys to your home because the computers that constitute the entertainment and data processing network which is your home work for them, rather than for you.

If you go to a commercial MIS director and you say, Mr VP, I want to put some computers inside your walls, inside your VPN, on which you don't have root, and you can't be sure what's running there. But people outside your enterprise can be absolutely certain what software is running on that device, and they can make it do whatever they think necessary. How do you feel about that? He says, No, thank you. And if we say to him, OK, how about then if we do that instead in your children's house? He says, No, thank there either.

That's what this is about for us. User's rights have no more deep meaning than who controls the computer your kid uses at night when he comes home. Who does that computer work for? Who controls what information goes in and out on that machine? Who controls who's allowed to snoop, about what? Who controls who's allowed to keep tabs, about what? Who controls who's allowed to install and change software there? Those are the question which actually determine who controls the home in 2016.

This stuff seems far away now because, unless you manage computer security for a business, you aren't fully aware of what it is to have computers you don't control part of your network. But 10 years from now, everybody will know.

Against this background, discussions about whether Sun's open source DRM solution DReaM - derived from "DRM/everywhere available", apparently - seem utterly moot. Designing open source DRM is a bit like making armaments in an energy-efficient fashion: it rather misses the point.

DRM serves one purpose, and one purpose only: to control users. It is predicated on the assumption that most people - not just a few - are criminals ready to rip off a company's crown jewels - its "IP" - at a moment's notice unless the equivalent of titanium steel bars are soldered all over the place.

I simply do not accept this. I believe that most people are honest, and the dishonest ones will find other ways to get round DRM (like stealing somebody's money to pay for it).

I believe that I am justified in making a copy of a CD, or a DVD, or a book provided it is for my own use: what that use is, is no business of the company that sold it to me. What I cannot do is make a copy that I sell to someone else for their use: clearly that takes away something from the producers. But if I make a backup copy of a DVD, or a second copy of a CD to play in the car, nobody loses anything, so I am morally quite justified in this course of action.

Until the music and film industries address the fundamental moral issues - and realise that the vast majority of their customers are decent, honest human beings, not crypto-criminals - the DRM debate will proceed on a false basis, and inevitably be largely vacuous. DRM is simply the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

Contrapuntal DRM

DRM is one of the central themes that has been weaving in and out of many of my posts here; this well-written piece from Sun's Simon Phipps brings in plenty of other related topics too, and provides an interesting take on the issue (via Groklaw).

(It also includes a link that reminds me why I don't have an iPod - and why I hate the word "Podcast".)