Google at 500

I don't get very excited over share prices. I've never owned shares, and as a journalist I don't think I should. But the news that Google's share price has hit the $500 dollar mark, although utterly arbitrary, is as good a moment as any to pause for a little reflection.

There's a nice roundup of fun things to know on Silicon Valley Watcher, which pulls out some interesting graphical and numerical nuggets from other postings, and saves you and me the trouble.

But there's one thing to bear in mind against the background of all this euphoria. Google has become such a bellwether for the Web 2.0 generation, that once its share price falls steeply and significantly, it will take the entire market with it. Don't believe me? Just take a look at what happened when the share price of Microsoft, the Web 1.0 equivalent of Google, crashed half a decade ago: pop!

The Beginning of the End for Novell?

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.)

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.

Sweet as Sugar FastStack

This kind of thing is the future of open source in business:

Sugar FastStack, a software support and delivery service that provides a fast and simple way to install a complete open source software solution, including Sugar software, the Apache Web Server, PHP and the MySQL database.

Out-of-the-box solutions, full of stack goodness. (Via TheOpenForce.com.)

St IGNUcius Kisses Bacula

According to an FSFE press release, Bacula - "a set of computer programs that permit you (or the system administrator) to manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds" - has been officially embraced by St IGNUcius:

The Bacula Project has became the first signatory of the Fiduciary licence Agreement (FLA), a copyright assignment that allows FSFE to become the legal guardian of projects.

This is interesting, because it means - presumably - that the number of projects that will switch to the GNU GPLv3 once it's finalised has just increased by one. Those on the open source side of the fence will doubtless see this as a land-grab by the FSF, which it is, in the nicest possible way.

Brum to Blame

I wrote about the apparent failure of an open source desktop project in Birmingham a little while back: now it looks like it wasn't the software that's to blame. Here's what the inimitable and highly-knowledgeable Eddie Bleasdale has to say on the subject:

"It's an unbelievable cock-up... They decided to do it all themselves, without expertise in the area," he added, saying that a lack of skills in open source and secure desktops would undoubtedly have raised costs.

His view is backed up by another expert in this field:

Mark Taylor, whose Open Source Consortium also exited the project in the early stages, said: "I have no idea how anyone could spend half a million pounds on 200 desktops, running free software".

Quite.

(Rezzed) Signs of the Times

This comes into the "dog walking on hind legs" category: it's not so much that it's done well, as that it's done at all.

Someone is offering signs in Second Life linked to Web pages: changing the latter updates the former. Certainly, a sign of things to come. (Via eHub.)

Update: Here's an post about why there are other reasons this is interesting.

Croeso i Agored.com

This one will make Alan Cox happy:

Agored, a new free office software suite is being launched today by Culture Minister Alun Pugh. The suite, a Welsh and English dual-language version of the OpenOffice suite used worldwide, has been developed over the past two years at the Mercator Centre, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Me, I'm still waiting for the Anglo-Saxon version: "Oft him anhaga, are gebideth...." (Via Erwin's StarOffice Tango.)

On the Meta-Wonderfulness of Blog Plonkings

Whether or not you agree with arguments, this extended post by Clay Shirky on "Social Facts, Expertise, Citizendium, and Carr" is worth taking a look at. It's well written and interesting, as you'd expect; it's crafted on a generous scale - and it's totally free.

I mean, it's just plonked there on this blog, for any passer-by to read: isn't that just amazing - that access to this kind of stuff is now just taken for granted in the meta-wonderful, wacky world of Web 2.0?

MA ODF: Drawing a Balance

Following his rather downbeat piece about the musical chairs in Massachusetts over bringing in ODF, Andy Updegrove has now complemented this with a nicely upbeat one detailing the net effect of all these political games. The final verdict:

ODF has had, and continues to have, a vital impact on the marketplace that is highly beneficial to all stakeholders. It's important to remember that the greatest single event that has resulted in this state of affairs was the courage of a few public servants in Massachusetts that had a vision of what the future should be, and had the courage to commit to it and follow through.

We owe them a debt of gratitude, and I think that they will be remembered long after their more pedestrian peers in state government have been forgotten.

Amen to that.

Is that an 8-Node Beowulf Cluster in Your Pocket...?

...or are you just glad to see me?

Little-Fe is a complete 4 to 8 node Beowulf style portable computational cluster. Little-Fe weighs less than 50 pounds, easily and safely travels via checked baggage on the airlines, and sets-up in 10 minutes wherever there is a 110V outlet and a wall to project an image on. By leveraging the Bootable Cluster CD project, and its associated curriculum modules, Little-Fe makes it possible to have a powerful ready-to-run computational science and HPC educational platform for under $2,500.

I want several of these, please. (Via KnowProSE.com.)

No Net Neutrality, No Virtual Worlds

Here's a thoughtful analysis of another harmful knock-on effect of the loss of network neutrality:

What will be murdered with no fallback or replacement is the nascent market of interactive entertainment – particularly online gaming. Companies like Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Sony Online Entertainment, and countless others, have built a business on the fundamental assumption of relatively low latency bandwidth being available to large numbers of consumers. Furthermore, a large — even overwhelming — portion of the value of these offerings comes from their “network effects” — the tendency for the game to become more enjoyable and valuable as larger number of players joins the gaming network.

And that means things like Second Life and all the other virtual worlds that are currently under developmentwill also be hit. So, net neutrality is concretely about the future of the Internet, not just abstractly about the importance of preserving an online commons. (Via Terra Nova.)

Free Our Postcodes

Postcodes are something that should obviously be a commons - owned by and available to all. Instead, in the UK, you have to pay serious dosh to use them, with all sorts of inefficiencies. The obvious solution is to create an open postcode database, and that's what they're doing here. Pity I don't have a GPS device.

Prizes, Not Patents

I've written enough about why the patent system is broken; criticism is easy, but it's harder coming up with alternatives. Here's one: using prizes instead of patents. (Via Technocrat.)

ID Cards: Cracked in All Senses

And talking of ID cards, here's more bad news.

Update: And how could I leave out the inimitable Mr. Lettice's wise words on the subject?

Murder Will Out

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.

The Seed Gestapo

For millennia there has been a seeds commons - a shared store of seeds produced by farmers from this year's crop for the following year.

In my wife’s dialect of kari-ya, which is spoken on the island of Panay, in the Philippines, there is a word binhi, which refers to the grains of rice that are set aside and used as seeds in the next planting season. There is a knack to choosing these. You want plump grains with no blemishes. Every farmer knows how to do it, and usually their families too.

And then:

It seems clear the government is working with the seed companies to strong-arm farmers into buying seeds instead of producing them themselves. So doing, it is paving the way for GMO seeds and the jackboot legal regime that comes with them. (In the U.S., Monsanto has sicced its lawyers on hundreds of farmers for “patent infringement”, often when the patented seeds in question simply blew into their fields.)

I, For One, Salute Our New Antiguan Overlords

Many martial arts are based on turning your assailant's power against himself. Sounds like the plucky Antiguans have taken a course or two:

If the United States remains recalcitrant [over its refusal to open up online gambling], under the WTO rules, Antigua would potentially have the right to suspend its own compliance with the treaty that obligates it to respect the United States' intellectual-property laws.

Go, Antigua, go.

No ID, No Comment

This is what will happen if you're not carrying the ID card that nice Mr Blair wants us all to have....

Open Earth

I came across this story about Whirlpool offering 3D models of its white goods for use in Google's Sketchup program. That's interesting enough, but it led me to explore Google's 3D Warehouse for that program a little, and I was frankly amazed how far things have come since I last looked at this area. For example, the Cities in Development area is full of detailed models of real buildings.

What's striking about this is that it is an example of Net-based collaboration on an open project - in this case, modelling the entire planet by placing these 3D models on Google Earth. Where this gets really interesting is when you start creating Second Life-like avatars that can move freely around that Virtual Earth, interacting away.... (Via Ogle Earth.)

Another View of the Opens

Here's a presentation by Jamais Cascio, a "foresight specialist", who despite his daft job title has put together quite a nice gentle trot through the opens. He gets most of it right, aside from the egregious clanger of calling Linux an operating system....

Digital Fish Wrap

There is a wonderful evolutionary winnowing process underway within the mainstream media: those that get the Internet are thriving, while those that don't, come up with ideas like this:

Here's my proposal: Newspapers and wire services need to figure out a way, without running afoul of antitrust laws, to agree to embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period -- say, 24 hours -- after it is made available to paying customers. The point is not to remove content from the Internet, but to delay its free release in that venue.

A temporary embargo, by depriving the Internet of free, trustworthy news in real-time, would, I believe, quickly establish the true value of that information. Imagine the major Web portals -- Yahoo, Google, AOL and MSN -- with nothing to offer in the category of news except out of date articles from "mainstream" media and blogosphere musings on yesterday's news. Digital fish wrap.

See Darwin run. (Via Techdirt.)

We, the Undersigned...

Here's a slightly hopeful development. On the 10 Downing Street Web page (Tony Blair's official cyberhome), there's a new facility: e-petitions - kudos to Number 10 for adding this. Especially since the most popular petition is currently the following:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to create a new exception to copyright law that gives individuals the right to create a private copy of copyrighted materials for their own personal use, including back-ups, archiving and shifting format.

So, if you're a Brit, do sign; the cynic in me says it's not going to make the blindest bit of difference, but hey, it's worth a try. (Via Michael Geist's Blog.)

Update: The petition against ID Cards is also soaring away: you know what you need to do, O Britons!

Crumbs from Google's Bigtable

For a company that is so big and important, Google is remarkably opaque to the outside world (blogs? - we don't need no stinkin' blogs.) Any info-morsels that drop from the Big Table are always welcome - which makes this downright gobbet of stuff about Bigtable particularly, er, meaty:

Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance.

Get some while it's hot (and hasn't been taken down by the Google Thought Police.)

The Other Planet Solaris

Since Solaris is one of my favourite planets, and since I was less than generous the last time I wrote about OpenSolaris, I feel duty-bound to pass on the information that there is another Planet Solaris - Planet OpenSolaris, to be precise. (Via SunMink.)

The Problems of a Synthetic Biology Commons

Here's a fascinating paper:

Novel artificial genetic systems with twelve bases instead of four. Bacteria that can be programmed to take photographs or form visible patterns. Cells that can count the number of times they divide. A live polio virus "created from scratch using mail-order segments of DNA and a viral genome map that is freely available on the Internet." These are some of the remarkable, and occasionally disturbing, fruits of "synthetic biology," the attempt to construct life starting at the genetic level.

All good stuff, but there's a problem that may be of interest to readers of these posts:

synthetic biology raises with remarkable clarity an issue that has seemed of only theoretical interest until now. It points out a tension between different methods of creating "openness". On the one hand, we have intellectual property law’s insistence that certain types of material remain in the public domain, outside the world of property. On the other, we have the attempt by individuals to use intellectual property rights to create a "commons," just as developers of free and open source software use the leverage of software copyrights to impose requirements of openness on future programmers, requirements greater than those attaching to a public domain work. Intellectual property policy, at least in the United States, specifies things that cannot be covered by intellectual property rights, such as abstract ideas or compilations of unoriginal facts, precisely to leave them "open" to all – the public roads of the intellect. Yet many of the techniques of open source require property rights so that future users and third parties will be bound by the terms of the license. Should we rethink the boundary lines between intellectual property and the public domain as a result?

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.

King Coal Rides Again

The greed and cynicism of some is simply beyond words:

Whatever the cost to the ecosystem, it could be an immensely profitable bet. Company executives say the plants will provide cheap electricity for Texas, make lots of money for shareholders, conserve more valuable natural gas and reduce the pollutants that make smog.

"Whatever the cost to the ecosystem": that's us, people.

Trouble 't Mill - No, Really

This is not good - although it would be interesting to know what exactly went wrong. It may just be that the old GNU/Linux desktop just wasn't ready for what they wanted. (Via LXer.)

Google: Is That the Sound of Crying?

Google search is useful - my day revolves around it. But you'd be hard-pushed to claim it was cool anymore. On the contrary, it's archetypally a tool that you use and forget about.

But this is cool:

OWL multimedia has launched an audio similarity search engine stocked with 10,444 CC-licensed tracks from ccMixter and Magnatune, with many more to come from other CC supporting sound repositories.

You can search OWL via search.creativecommons.org but its real power is finding new music through music. Drag an mp3 into the OWL interface and you will be shown tracks that sound similar to the mp3 you provided. You can select a segment of a track to search on and of course you can limit your search to tracks with licenses that permit uses you require, e.g., commercial or derivative use.

Google, are you listening?

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?

Copycat: I Say "Tomato", and You Say "Tomato"

Ha!

MA Ma-Madness

Talking of lightning, I can't believe that the curse of Massachusetts has struck twice in the same place, but apparently it has:

In (another) sad day in Massachusetts, State CIO Louis Gutierrez submitted his resignation today to the Romney administration. Like his predecessor, Peter Quinn, Louis is a man of principle. And, like Peter, he is taking the high road by using his resignation to inform the citizens of Massachusetts of a regrettable lapse on the part of their elected representatives.

I suppose the only consolation is that if ODF succeeds here, with everything ranged against it, it will succeed anywhere.

Microfinancing Goes Open

Microfinancing - making small loans to many people, especially those traditionally unable to obtain loans - is about decomposing money: breaking it up into smaller bits for more efficient use. The same could be said about the distributed development technique employed by open source. So it's good to see the two coming together:

A Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization has sparked the creation of an open source project to help build technology infrastructures for non-profit microfinance institutions. In developing countries around the world, these institutions loan small amounts of money to women who want to start businesses and create a better life for themselves and their families. The Mifos Software Initiative debuts this week at the Global Micro-Credit Summit in Halifax.

The Mifos Software Initiative has been created by the Grameen Foundation:

to address the microfinance industry’s information management challenge. The Mifos Initiative delivers an open source information management system for the global microfinance industry via a collaborative development and support community.

The Mifos Initiative is a new approach to technology that puts the control of technology in the hands of the MFI [microfinance institution]. The open source framework allows microfinance institutions to select locally based development and support services to assist with customization of their software, maintenance and implementation support services. Previously, this level of control could be met only by building and maintaining their own system, which is extremely expensive and therefore not accessible for most MFIs.

Feast of the Behemoths

There's no doubt that the three giants of the online world are Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. What they get up to matters, so tracking what they're doing in terms of acquisitions, say - and who they're doing - is a fruitful activity. The problem, is keeping track. Enter this rather nice draggable timeline, which shows who did what, when and to whom. (Via John Battelle's Searchblog.)

Top500 Supercomputers: Guess Who's Top?

The Top500 Supercomputer list is always fun, not least because it shows us where we will all be in a few years' time. There are all sorts of cuts of the main data, but the one you'll really be interested in is here; it shows that GNU/Linux ran a cool 75% of the Top500, and that a certain other operating system's share is so nugatory it's not even mentioned by name.

How Green Was My PC?

Not very, it seems.

This report contrasts the amount of electricity consumed, and carbon dioxide generated, by two approaches to school computing: one based on conventional PCs, the other on thin clients running open source. The difference is startling:

The Green Model therefore represents a 89% saving in the cost of electricity and a 78% reduction carbon dioxide emissions when compared to the Conventional Model.

And it's going to get worse:

The stated aim of many authorities is to have one computer per child. In addition the exponential growth of the interactive whiteboard in all education sectors is set to achieve one in every classroom.

Bearing in mind that an interactive board runs from a conventional PC with a 600w projector and that there are over 50,000 primary schools in the UK we can predict a ten fold increase in power consumption with concomitant carbon increases over the next five years.

Serious stuff that merits thought and action, quickly.

Will Lightning Strike OpenOffice.org?

I've written elsewhere about what I call the FOOGL concept - Firefox, OpenOffice.org and GNU/Linux. Basically, the idea is that once everyone is using Firefox and OpenOffice.org on Windows, it's much easier to slip them across to GNU/Linux, because nobody really cares about platforms if the apps are the same.

The only fly in the ointment in this argument is that you need a good email client. Thunderbird, I here you say: to which I reply, OK, but what about the calendaring? If you're going to replace Outlook, you need to match its basic functionality, and for businesses that means calendaring.

Enter Lightning, an add-in to Thunderbird that brings it up (down?) to Outlook's level. Here's an interesting interview with the Engineering Director at Sun Microsystems, Michael Bemmer, on this very subject. What's particularly significant is that it hints at a day when Lightning will be more closely integrated with OpenOffice.org too.

Now that would be seriously fooglicious.

Legal Commons vs. Social Commons

Interesting distinction, fascinating examples.

Science Commons - the Conference

To late to go to this, of course, but it's interesting to see the science commons meme spreading. And there's always some yummy papers to console.

Google+Open Access = Health

Doctors in doubt about a patient's ailment could use Google to help them reach a diagnosis, researchers said today.

Two Australian doctors have found that entering the symptoms of a tricky case into the internet search engine often results in accurately diagnosing the illness.

This story has an interesting implication. One easy way to improve the quality of the results - and hence the quality of the diagnosis and subsequent therapy - would be to release more medical literature as open access. Then, by definition, it would be picked up by Google, which would feed through the results to the medics.

Open access: you know it makes sense.

The Opens.mp3

If you really have absolutely nothing better to do, you could always listen to me wittering on about the opens at the British Computer Society a couple of weeks back. You can even read the book of the mp3 at the same, for double delight.

Tagging Second Life

Tags have proved one of the most powerful Web 2.0 ideas. They let everyone add their pebble to the cairn of taxonomy, creating a rich tapestry of knowledge that would be impossible to match using automated means (well, with the current state of AI, at least).

Tags are a kind of signpost in semantic space, so an obvious extension would be to tag other kinds of space - for example, the virtual one of Second Life. Enter the LandRing, which lets you do exactly that. It's another product of the fertile mind of Timeless Prototype, and it's being made available through the Multi Gadget - here are the details.

Towards a Trillion Trees

I'm a big fan of trees, especially for helping to address the world's environmental problems. So this sounds like a jolly good wheeze:

The Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai launched a campaign today to plant a billion trees next year - 32 every second - to highlight the need to tackle global warming.

Mind you, in the light of the fact that

Over the past decade 130m hectares of trees have been destroyed, according to the UN. Reforesting such an area would require 140bn trees to be planted.

I think we should be more ambitious: how about a trillion trees? Has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

Zeroing in on Abundance

A characteristically deep post from Techdirt about the intertwinings of copyright, economics and abundance.

Thinking about Thinkature

I like Thinkature for four reasons.

First, it's about real-time, online, visual collaboration.

Second, it doesn't use Flash (unlike one of its rivals).

Third, it's free.

Fourth, it's got a great name.

(Via TechCrunch.)

Wikipolitics, Or, The Power of the Many

Nothing new here, but it bears underlining, since it's why collaborative openness will prevail:

when news of Donald Rumsfeld's resignation from his position as Secretary of Defense came across the wires I was not necessarily surprised to see that a Google search for his nominated replacement Robert Gates returned Gates' Wikipedia page as the first search result. Wikipedia content places very high in many Google search results, not only its articles but its user profiles as well. But the key factor was that his bio had been updated to include dozens of useful new edits from several sources within hours of his announced nomination - including information and links about the nomination itself.

Tapping into the Digital Tipping Point

For some reason, the idea of open source film is one that exerts a strong fascination on people. I've written about it before, and here's another one:

The Digital Tipping Point film project is an open source film project about the big changes that open source software will bring to our world. Like the printing press before it, open source software will empower average people to create an immense wave of new literature, art, and science.

...


The first DTP film will follow my individual personal growth from being an attorney who feared computer technology to being a community activist who picks up technology tips while shooting this movie, and brings that technology back to a local public school.

So far, so dull, you might think. But more interestingly:

We will make as many films as the open source film community would like to make. The DTP project will actually be many, many films made about free open source software. We are giving away our footage under a Creative Commons license on the Internet Archive's Digital Tipping Point Video Collection.

There's another aspect to this. The 300 or so hours of interviews that have been conducted for this film will form an invaluable record of some of the key people in the open source world, a resource that future historians will be able to tap.

Which reminds me: I really must put online the hundreds of hours of interviews that I did for Rebel Code six years ago: it would make an interesting foil to the present material.

From Ransom Love, With Love

One thing I could never understand about the whole SCO affair is how the people at Caldera, which took over SCO, could be in any way part of the mess. And now comes this from the ever-diligent Groklaw:

Here's Ransom Love's Declaration [PDF] as text, which he has provided to IBM, another of the 597 exhibits IBM has offered in support of its summary judgment motions. I want to thank Laomedon for doing the work.

Love was the CEO of Caldera prior to Darl McBride. And he tells the court about Caldera when it was a Linux company, about the Santa Cruz assets acquisition, a bit about Novell, where he worked before starting Caldera and worked on the Corsair project, and about his view of SCO's claims regarding header files. He didn't have to do this declaration. It's voluntary, unlike a deposition, and that speaks volumes right there.

He thrusts a dagger right into the heart of SCO's claims. I see no way to recover from his declaration, because there is no one who can convincingly contradict. He was the CEO, the co-founder of the company to boot. Who can possibly know more than he does about the history of the company, what it did with Linux, its striving for POSIX compliance, and particularly whether the company knew about the header files being in its own distribution of Linux that SCO claims are infringed? Even if SCO were able to trot out Bryan Sparks, the other co-founder, Sparks was not CEO at the time of the Santa Cruz acquisition. There is no one but Love to testify at this level. Love has done the honorable thing and told the truth. I take my hat off to him.

Me too. When I interviewed him for Rebel Code, he seemed a very decent chap. This latest twist in the sorry SCO saga confirms that view.

Fork Your Data

Eric says:

The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end user, let them move it if they don't like us, the better.

Nothing like the threat of a fork to keep 'em honest. (Via Slashdot.)