David Herron's Blog

Opensville?

Welcome to Opensville, Population Zero is a blog that's been referenced by Slashdot right now. It's an interesting blog posting. I've never heard of this William Hurley, but he has an interesting thing to say.

When I started with open source, in the 1980's before the phrase "open source" had even been coined and Eric Raymond was still living in Texas (if I remember right) ... there was little of big companies making anything off the software we passed back and forth over the network. It was all freely shared, the kind of nirvana whurley refers to as opensville. The parks are beautiful, the shopping is amazing, and the nights are pure Vegas. Sounds like a great place, huh? But, he says, nobody wants to live there. hmm, seems that in the 80's anyway all of us who were on the Internet did live there. The later commercialization of the model does seem to have changed a few things.

But as a Sun employee it cannot escape my mind hearing our past and current CEO's both saying Sun was founded upon open source software. They claim the original Sun OS was based on the "Open Source BSD distribution". Hmm, that's always struck me as a strange claim because to get the BSD distribution one had to possess a valid AT&T Unix license, which absolutely was not open source. Further the BSD distribution still had some AT&T code in it. It wasn't until later that some people whose names I've forgotten worked to de-AT&T-ize the code to make the first 386bsd distribution. And that led AT&T to sue UC Berkeley. So tell me how the BSD distribution of 1982 was open source? Maybe Bill Joy et al took only the bits which were BSD licensed and worked to fill in the gaps with code written by Sun employees? If so then why did Sun later buy a perpetual Unix license from USL?

Anyway, getting to the current time. There is clearly a mix of styles of interaction between various companies and the various open source projects. Clearly there are some companies who, as whurley says, act as leech's only taking code and not giving anything back to the project who maintains the code. Just as clearly there are some companies who participate in the projects from whom they get the code they turn into their products.

He asks What separates legitimate use from outright exploitation?

And I'm astonished... Clearly the open source licenses allow for this situation to exist. Clearly the open source licenses generally do not require that changes be fed back to the project. Clearly the open source licenses generally allow for the recipient of code from a project to do pretty much as they wish. After all, one of the core tenants of open source software is the freedoms which are granted to the recipient of the code.

He goes on to suggest some kind of rating system that I suppose he wants to use to punish the moochers. I think there is an informal system like that ... e.g. I think one of the network router gadget makers is known to be using open source code but not abiding by the licenses and making it hard for the community to fiddle with the open source software that was used to build those boxes. And that some are saying they boycott that company, because of that product.

And, of course, it is his right to agitate in any way about perceived misuses of open source software. But, I ask again, if the license allows for this then is there any real room for complaint?

Even more interesting is the impact this idea has on one of the age-old arguments in the open source community. That is the relative worth of the various types of licenses. The BSD-versus-GPL debate has been present with us since at least the 90's maybe the 80's I kind of forget when I first saw that debate raging. And the debate is with us today.

But getting back to whurley's blog posting ... the BSD license explicitly allows for corporations to mooch off open source projects without returning anything to the project. The GPL license on the other hand tries it's darnedest to make mooching hard. Which just reminds me of a posting I read once with someone talking about the open source license they prefer ... they prefer everybody elses code to be under the BSD license, but they prefer their own code to be under GPL.

It's easy to imagine a corporate manager who's just invested $n million in engineer time and other resources to beef up a piece of open source software. How happy is that corporate manager to be about sharing the results of that investment with "the community"? Is the corporate manager going to grasp what that means? Or is the corporate manager going to see overhead, wasted resources giving something to these other people, and perhaps even seeing an advantage fly out the window?

Clearly there is another viewpoint the corporate manager could take. For example the longterm maintenance of the code is enhanced if they feed their changes to the main project. If they instead hoard the changes they have effectively forked the project, and then they have the overhead of maintaining the fork. Depending on how widely the fork varies from the main code that can become a huge headache.

Comments

• you are focusing on the rich version of the problem, a place where people have enough money to decide to open or not to open their sofware licenses. Property concept is something reasonable only if you remove constraints well known on the weird side of the earth, a.k.a. third world.Open Source initiative is not only a business model, it is a chance to give people the chance to use software... You are right, a bad guy can steal software and use it badly with impunity, but there are million people out there hopeless to get a chance of paying for software .. they never paid, they have never used and they will never have a chance to try a computer software under commercial licenses. These guys justify the risks, and they are much more important than license discussion anyway.. think about them.... it is beyond property, beyond technology... it is about humanity.

  Posted by: felipegaucho on May 01, 2007 at 03:13 AM

• a good example: few years ago, Brazil insisted in the generic drugs policy that allowed poor countries to produce medications used to treat AIDS by themselves. At first moment the big american industry protested against years of research beign used by millions of people on third world without paying royalties. At the end, after a big trial in the global trade organization, governments recognized that make no sense to avoid access to medicin just for money reasons. The same is happening with software, and it is just the beggining. The world is starting to recognize the future of the planet is not only turn off a bulb light to safe 3 cents of energy, it is necessary to help also the people on a global perspective. To give the poor countries the chance to learn how to use software is a reat step forward a better future.
  

  Posted by: felipegaucho on May 01, 2007 at 03:24 AM

• "but there are million people out there hopeless to get a chance of paying for software .. they never paid,"
  and a billion more who could pay for it but choose to steal it instead, irrespective of the license and whether a free alternative is available.
  Most end users, like it or not, don't care about licenses. They want the product to work for them, and they want it for free (meaning at no cost to them). They don't know under what license the product is distributed because the person who supplied it to them never showed them the license. Stores selling boxes with pirated copies of Windows preinstalled are just one of the more blatant examples. People selling freeware on eBay are another.
  "At the end, after a big trial in the global trade organization, governments recognized that make no sense to avoid access to medicin just for money reasons"
  In other words, they decided that companies have no right to recover their investment and reimburse their people, that everyone can steal whatever they want whenever they want it as long as the thief can claim that he's being harmed by "big corporate greed". It will (and is) slow product development as it's becoming ever more impossible to recover investment in new products as ever more people are in areas where it's fully legal to pilfer your investment and start selling it for their own profit.

  Posted by: jwenting on May 02, 2007 at 02:02 AM

• Controversial subject, too polemic to be discussed through an asynchronous blog.. .. I will be at JavaOne and I am always ready for this topic because I had the privilege to live in different societies and to observe different points of view over the same problem.

  perhaps a good topic for a BOF, an un-bof or just a beer with socialist feelings around :)

  and, of course, even in the most apparently out-of-law countries, to copy software is illegal... the problem is to find a reasonable and efficient way to control million of illegals :) If you know how to do that, please share your thoughts :) And zou are right, some peoplo steel just for their own profit .. You can check the letters from Pirates Bay to see people from one of the most rich countries in the world acting in criminal way.. with total impunity, just for fun :)
  

  Posted by: felipegaucho on May 03, 2007 at 01:23 AM

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