Jim Driscoll's Blog: July 2005 Archive

Posted by driscoll on July 22, 2005 at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a recent news article, my boss said we're going to figure out how to make all of our software free (as in beer). As I've said previously, I'd like to ask everyone reading this to indulge me for a minute, and actually imagine that he's serious. Because I really beleive he is.

And for those of you who are wondering why we just don't go and do it already, I'd like to mention a few of the things that make this harder than just shoving something out the door. First, if you're a shareholder, or just someone who likes us, you'll be happy to hear that we're not looking at doing anything rash - we're seriously looking at all the various ways that we would generate revenue, and making sure that this actually works - Project GlassFish and OpenSolaris are just two things we've already done, but some of our other products require different approaches. Also, we've got alot of third party code in our products. Software's a complex business, and almost noone writes everything from scratch anymore, whether that's a closed source or open source project. And with closed source products, that means lots of tricky licenses. Getting the third party stuff from Solaris approved has been a maze of lawyers - GlassFish was easier, since we wrote almost all the code ourselves, with the exception of some code from IBM, a bunch of Open Source projects, and now Oracle's codebase. Lastly, moving large engineering organizations is hard - while many of the engineers inside Sun are really excited that we're moving in this direction, others have never worked in Open Source, and have lots of questions (part of my job is getting them answers).

It's going to be a really exciting year - I can't wait to see what it brings.

We're not going to sue you

Posted by driscoll on July 20, 2005 at 08:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (31)

In my last blog's comments, Chris Mahan posited that Sun would send lawyers after a hapless coder, nashing their tiny little sharp teeth. Since this isn't generally how things work - I thought I'd blog a bit on this here:

How many times have you seen a discussion on mailling lists, forums or blogs which says "If I do that with my source code, company X is going to sue me". Well, relax. The odds of you being successfully sued as an individual for something you do in code is probably below the odds of death by beesting.
Let me explain:

I've been at Sun for 9 years now, and working in the Java Software group (by whatever name it's called) for that entire time. During that time, we've tried to keep compatibility going through a variety of legal means, including use licenses and contracts. You might think that this means that we've been engaged in alot of lawsuits. With one major exception, we haven't. Now: why is this?

Lawsuits are expensive, and usually not profitable
Lawsuits are a distraction from your real business, which in our case is building computer solutions for customers
Lawsuits usually generate megatons of negative PR for the company bringing them, especially when they're asymetrical (i.e., directed at the little guy)

Now, there's always the degenerative exception, like SCO. Let's talk about that last.

First, let's discuss what usually happens when we see someone doing something that violates our licenses. I have two examples in mind, from my personal experience.

In the first (and this happened more than once), we found our entire source code base published on the internet by someone who wasn't us (this was pre-Open Source days). Now, this was clearly violating our license, no question. It's also rude. Guess what we did? If you're thinking anything to do with lawyers, you're wrong. One of our engineers sent an email, the content of which was something like: "Um, did you know you were doing this?". The answer: "Ohmygodohmygod! I didn't know! I'm very sorry it's fixed now". (The person had intended it for an internal website, and had misconfigured the webserver. Again, this has happend more than once.) And that was the end of it.

The second time involved an engineer coming to me and saying "I just found my code in an Open Source project. It's word for word the same, someone just stripped the @author tags and copyright headers. What should I do?". Ready to guess what I told him? Again, no lawyers. He contacted the Open Source project, and informed them that he was 100% sure that was his code. The Open Source project went through their logs, found the person responsible, and booted him from the project. Then, they removed the code. Problem solved.

Now, why would we handle things this way? Well, despite what the RIAA and SCO seemt to think, noone gets rich sueing their customers, or the communities they depend upon. Also, most people want to do the right thing, and they've just made a mistake, whether that be misconfiguring some software, or trusting the wrong person.

So now, as I promised, let's look at SCO (which, btw is a renamed Caldera (remember them?), the company formerly known as SCO was just bought by my company). They don't have any of the three things holding them back that I list above: They don't care about negative press, lawsuits are their business plan, and they intend them to be very profitable. While you should certainly care about how these suits affect the community and businesses you are a part of, the odds are, they'll never be directed at you. Why? You have no money. (Remember, they need to be profitable, which means that you'd need assets measured in the millions to make it worth their while.) Will Sun ever become like SCO? I doubt it. It took SCO years to become SCO, and they started as a very small company in the first place. In order for any doomsday scenario to play out, the community surrounding Sun's intellectual property would certainly have to become worth less than the value of destroying it for the sake of some sketchy lawsuits. Which is of vanishingly small possibility, even 10 or more years down the road.

Now, with all this in mind, keep in mind that anyone can sue you for anything at all (I love that link, and just wanted to put it in there). So I'll offer you the Jim Driscoll Guarentee (tm) - I'm putting $500 of my own money up on a bet - I'll give it to the first person who's sued over any code in GlassFish, to start your legal defense fund. It's a bet I'm confident of winning.

GlassFish, and Tainted Love

Posted by driscoll on July 19, 2005 at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)

I recently had a very sincere person, who I have every reason to respect, tell me: "I thought about downloading your code, but I don't want to be tainted." He further went on to say "If you had a statement about that on your website, I'd feel better about it."

Frankly, I was a bit taken aback. Weren't we Open Source? Was this the leading edge of another Sun Evil Plot (tm)?

I was right next to Gier Magnussen at the time, so I turned to him and asked "Gier, what's Apache's tainting policy? We'll just copy that." Geir looked at me, somewhat bemused, and said: "We don't have one."

Now, this makes sense. Apache's an Open Source project, and Open Source projects don't generally worry about tainting. And up 'till now, neither have we. And neither should you. As a real, honest to goodness F/OSS codebase, you're no more tainted if you read our code than if you read JBoss' code, or Geronimo's code. Go ahead. Read it. You won't be tainted. You can't copy our stuff any more than you can copy JBoss' stuff, or Apache's stuff, without listening to the license, but honestly, this shouldn't effect you at all, any more than it effects you for any other project.

I thought about writing more, but I'm not even sure that this is necessary. Still concerned? I want to hear about it - tell me below.

Open Sourcing the Rest of App Server

Posted by driscoll on July 15, 2005 at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

As you know, we've open sourced Sun's AS PE (as Project GlassFish). Recently, some people have taken us to task on not doing the rest of it too. Leaving aside the "geez, are we ever going to not get flack" factor, I thought I'd post this...

In a recent article in Developer Pipeline, my boss got asked about opening the rest of it:

CRN: Will all editions of the application server be available under the CDDL? The version currently available is the platform edition.

SCHWARTZ: If Johnny has his druthers, yes. There's no reason for us to hold anything back. Open source doesn't mean free, as in no revenue.

Now, if you read closely, he didn't say yes. So don't go getting worked up over this. But here's the thing about my boss: Read his blog. Now, imagine this: he means everything he says. Sun is committed to Open Source.

Newest Concern on Sun's Open Source Strategy

Posted by driscoll on July 14, 2005 at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (48)

In my last blog's comments, I had a couple of people raise the issue of joint copyright assignment. The subject was raised with the greatest respect and concern, and I'd like to thank the posters for giving me a chance to talk about it. There continues to be a lingering uneasiness about Sun's new foray into Open Source, so I'll probably be blogging on this and related subjects for the next few weeks.

Joint Copyright Assignment is a fairly standard practice that is being embraced by most major open source concerns. First let's explain how copyright works. As the creator of any peice of work, you by default own the copyright on it, and noone else does. Even if you give it under an existing license (like CDDL, or GPL, or ASL) to an organization, you continue to keep that license.

So far, so good. There's just one problem. Noone else has the copyright on the code you just made. Why can this be a problem? Well, there's a few ways. For one, you can never change the license again, without permission from every copyright holder, which in large projects, can be hundreds of people. Imagine your code worked that way - would anything useful ever get done? Do you beleive licenses are any more free of bugs than code? So, for example, to go to a GPL 3.0, CDDL 1.1, or APL 2.1, it would require to contact every single person and get their permission. One doesn't want to? You can't do it. Can't find one? You can't do it. Then there's the problem of what happens if you end up in court. Only the holder of copyright can usually perform legal operations on behalf of the covered code. If you don't hold copyright on the code, you've got a problem. There's a third issue that Sun faces, and that is that parts of AS PE (and thus GlassFish) find their way into the RI. And Sun's contractually obligated to give the RI to a whole host of companies, including such companies as BEA, and IBM. We aren't going to change that, and even if we could, we wouldn't want to, since that's good for the entire developement community.

And that doesn't even touch on patents, which most licenses don't discuss at all - though CDDL does. So, what's the solution here? Well, one solution is to put a copyright grant right into the license - ASL does this, for instance. But lawyers would make any QE manager proud, they're nervous beasts. They prefer to have a signed peice of paper that actually establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that the original author actually meant to assign copyright. Thus, the SCA is born for our organization, and other similar documents exist for others. It's not a scary document - go read it yourself.

There's been some suggestion that this is a uniquely Sun thing to do. It's not. Other highly regarded organizations do this, for much the same reasons mentioned above. The Apache Software Foundation has been requiring this for some time. The Free Software Foundation has required for as long as I can remember. I've also heard of a number of other groups doing it, but a cursory web search didn't find this information on their websites - they're often less transparent than us, so that's not a suprise.

Still concerned? Let's talk about it below.

One more time: CDDL is Open Source

Posted by driscoll on July 12, 2005 at 03:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

In a recent article, both Marc Fleury of JBoss and Bill Roth of BEA are said to be telling the press that CDDL isn't Open Source. Drat, apparently neither of them read my blog.

So, one more time: CDDL is Open Source. Why can I say that with absolute confidence? Because Open Source is an servicemark that is owned by the OSI. They're essentially the Good Housekeeping Seal for licenses. BEA, JBoss and Sun all don't get to say what is and isn't an Open Source license: the OSI does.

Now, I'm a little disappointed that Bill didn't know this, but it's a bit understandable - BEA isn't exactly known as the Open Source company, though they've been doing stuff there that's interesting lately.

I am a little suprised about Marc, though. One hopes that he was misquoted, since the alternative is that he was trying to mislead people deliberately, or prehaps he just didn't know. I'm not sure which alternative is more disconcerting.

So which is it? What do you think?

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