DivaBlog

Spent most of this week in Europe, first at the opening day of the UNCTAD F/OSS Expert Meeting and then yesterday and today at the second OpenOffice.org Conference, in Berlin.

A common theme of both meetings has been concern about the effect of software patents on the F/OSS community. For those of you unfamiliar, the European Union has for months and months and months been considering whether they should start granting software patents. It seems the EU patent office was chartered not to grant software idea patents, but as applications have continued to pour some have been granted anyway, and there is mounting pressure coming from the US to formalize what is happening. There are even associations that provide detailed analysis of every twist and turn of the issue.

The hacker community (and I use that term to indicate white-hat F/OSS programmers, not black-hat people who break into systems illegally) are agreed that software patents are a big problem. They don't really have access to the infrastructure to file a lot of patents and even if they did they don't have the resources to defend any patents they might be granted against the corporate might of the principal software patent holders. They maintain that many software patents granted today are spurious because they grant monopolies on obvious solutions to software problems. It is increasingly difficult for a small player to write software that doesn't touch prior art, and that means software can only come from big companies who can afford to fight or buy rights to patents.

On the pro-patent side are people who point out that there are so many software patents already (particularly in the US) that it is impractical to try to toss out the whole patent system. They believe that the original purpose of patents (which are supposed to incent and reward original R&D by granting limited monopoly) is still a need of the technology community. These people believe that the system is broken not inherently but in its current implementation. Patent examiners are not doing a good enough job of winnowing out the obvious solutions from non-obvious innovations, and the barrier to entry for individuals is too high. Also many have noticed technology is moving too fast now for legal remedies to be much remedy (because by the time a judgement comes down protecting a given technology, the decision is often irrelevant in the marketplace).

At the UNCTAD meeting I heard several proposals, including creation of a patent collective from a South African (which I've heard proposed before and which actually might work). At OpenOffice.orgCon I heard that projects such as Apache have gotten much more saavy about patents and have begun to accumulate rights that cover their communities. How this debate works out is going to influence more than just the European Union, though, as many developing nations simply adopt much of EU policy as their own.

What do YOU think should happen?

You may have read some of the articles, blogs, and newsgroup postings about excerpts from Sun's settlement with Microsoft that appear in our SEC filing. The discussion centered around the protection we secured for the StarOffice brand, and implications for the OpenOffice.org community.

Well from my perspective Sun loves OpenOffice.org and has been a good steward. When we open sourced it nearly 4 years ago (can it really have been that long?) I was personally concerned that Sun would lose interest in the project before it had a chance to really take off, but I was happily mistaken. OpenOffice.org is in some respects our best open source community, because it shows that code isn't the only valid contribution and that people want to increase their freedom by breaking away from vendor lock-in to open standards, even at the desktop productivity level. After 4 years we still develop one of the most popular F/OSS software projects in the clear, even though it takes more time to do it that way. We want people to use it. We're trying to build a community here.

In many ways I think a strong community is the best hedge against legal troubles, too. All of F/OSS is still virtually untested legally, so participation is about revolution, not business as usual. What really keeps big companies from suing F/OSS projects is the negative PR impact. And notice that OpenOffice.org is widely adopted in Europe, where Microsoft has also been having other troubles of late. A strong community behind OpenOffice.org makes it harder for to pick on, period.

The funny thing about open source community is that one party cannot unilaterally push their agenda forward - even if they originally donated the code. Five years ago we hired an engineer to work on the Tomcat team and since we'd hired him to write code, of course we gave him commit privileges the day he started work. The community was outraged. They pointed out in no uncertain terms that it wasn't fair for a new engineer to automatically get commit privileges just because he worked for Sun! Ever since then every Sun F/OSS project requires new engineers from Sun to go through the same process of building reputation as any other community member, because like Tomcat they are now shared resources.

Doing things in F/OSS ways is a sea change for proprietary software companies. For years Mozilla.org was legally still part of Netscape. They actually wanted to separate it but they couldn't figure out who would pay (and provide health insurance) for the employees if they did. And most of the engineering was coming from inside Netscape, despite their many efforts to attract outside committers. But the Mozilla community continued to press on through negative press predicting their demise and supposedly scandalous stories that most of the committers worked for Netscape. They ultimately even survived losing their corporate steward, and lost some developers in the process. But true F/OSS people are stubborn and work continued on Mozilla until finally they are getting results! And I'm not the only one who thinks so.

I believe we would have loved to protect OpenOffice.org from future lawsuits by Microsoft in our settlement with them but F/OSS software is by definition a shared resource and we have no explicit control over all the elements of that community. The language of the settlement takes OpenOffice.org as an example and makes it clear that Microsoft reserves the right to bring suit against any F/OSS project against which it has a claim (whether or not the project is stewarded by Sun). This isn't really news, is it? Nothing has really changed, except that in our settlement with Microsoft we managed to get some protection for our brands.

There are many individuals, companies, and government agencies who benefit from the use and the growth of OpenOffice.org. Many of them also give back to the project by validating builds, serving on one or more of the groups that have formed to advise the project, or through free-form evangelism (telling their neighbor or their church or school or even their employer about the benefits of using OpenOffice.org). We are always looking for more people (and companies) to join the community. That's why we sponsor a yearly conference, and why, when Microsoft applied to have a booth there this year, we were happy to oblige. I'm still holding out a hope that they will see the light and join the standardization process for OpenOffice.org's XML file formats.

Think about what M.K. Gandhi said about the stages of change...first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. I'll be at the OpenOffice.org conference next week, working for community. Hope to see you there!

Okay, so I didn't write much more about EuroFoo last month...it was a great time and like many I learnt lock picking...but it didn't have the same sparkle as the "original" Foo (I guess we have to now call it CaliFoo? Since its in California?). Last night people here at CaliFoo were up late...4am...talking and talking and talking. And yet this morning everybody is up and sharing again!

Definitely my favorite conference these days ;-)

More later.

Zak Greant (Community Advocate) has left MySQL. His resignation letter (well, blog really) says he's left not because of concerns about the rightness of MySQL's licensing and community policies, but rather because it was the right thing for him to do...(my paraphrasing here) "leave before burnout sets in". All-in-all, Zaks' blog is pretty classy, and anyone who has done a stint working on community within a corporation can tell you about burnout.

But notice he asks the MySQL community to let the company know if his leaving is a concern...if it signals a "MyPocalpyse".

This blog makes me think of the not-so-classy, but famous resignation and postmortem posted by Jamie Zawinski upon his decision to leave Mozilla back in 1999. Most of the present Mozilla crowd will tell you they didn't thank Jamie for his letter (since it declared the project "dead")...but I might argue that his final act of publicly calling the direction of the project into question may have helped Mozilla to regroup and eventually prevail. Its a powerful thing when someone well thought of falls on their sword and says why.

Certainly Jamie's letter caught the attention of folks at Sun, who still reference it from time to time when we are discussing the importance of voice and community in our projects. If a given community it mostly happy and strong, then the occasional spat or disgruntled letter goes largely unheeded (as with the resignation of Jon Stevens from Jakarta), but if a community is teetering...a well-placed public letter can really galvanize change.