Open desktop mechanic

Accusations of Open Source exploitation?

Wednesday Jun 01, 2005

Mr. Villasante, the head of software technologies at the European Commision's information society had a few harsh accusations of corporate open source involvement. The first thing I thought of when I read this is that neither Sun, nor IBM, nor HP nor anyone else would or could force anyone outside of internal paid open source developers and contractors to write software. If companies could force free developers to do the all of dirty work, why would they spend so much money on i18n, a11y, bug fixes, productisation, support, documentation, marketing and all of the other less interesting ingredients in the open source bakery?

If it's all take and no give, why would corporations ever throw IP over the wall? I don't think the open source world be better off without AT&T's VNC, Sun's OpenOffice, IBM's documentation, Netscape's Mozilla, RedHat's kernel patches, Ximian's Evolution, RealMedia's Helix, SuSE/Novell's YaST... I also disagree with this quote from Mr. Villasante:

"What I think is that Europe doesn't have a software industry today -- the only one we have today is in America. In the future we may have China or India. We should decide if we will have a European software industry in the future,"

I worked in IT in the U.S. I find the European open source economy to be much more progressive. Europe is a powerful force in the software world precisely because it is less afraid of mixing open source software with business. But sometimes I wonder if the E.C. has any idea how open source software works. Again from Mr. Villasante:

"Open source is a complete mess -- many people do lots of different things. There's total confusion today..."

Companies can't force unpaid open source developers to do anything they don't want to. Nor can governments. And that is exactly as it should be.

Update:I'm tempted to remove this whole posting, but I'll leave it here to prove that I can be wrong too. It sounds like Mr Villasante's talk was much more positive about open source than the zdnet article implied. I'm glad to hear that someone who 'gets it' is in such a position. Now why doesn't the U.S. have an open source czar? And why do tech publications get it wrong almost as often as my supermarket overcharges me?

Update:Here's another take on Mr. Villasante's talk. From this and what Simon indicated, I'd have to agree with most of what Mr. Villasante says, though it still surprises me that the E.U. is falling behind the U.S. in open source. Isn't it puzzling that some in the U.S. consider open source "unamerican" and in Europe some consider it too American? We need to grow it on both sides of the Atlantic to prove the critics wrong.

[6] Comments
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Posted at 02:52PM Jun 01, 2005 by bnitz in Open-Source
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Words of wisdom - "Within every lie hides some truth!" 'Open' code can be better because the very smartest individuals don't ALL work for any one company. (Don't tell a CIO this.) Engineers can be very upset when a teenager produces better code, many eyes and lack of rote methods can be a recipe for true innovation. I would venture to say Open Solaris will surpass Solaris in code quality simply due to 'eyeball' volume and associated innovation. SUN 'coders' can't do everything alone! 'Open' projects need FOCUS typical within most commercial businesses. Commercial business often needs 'Open' projects to add a 'breath of fresh air' into existing and/or future wares.

Posted by William R. Walling on June 01, 2005 at 09:56 PM GMT+00:00 #

I had dinner with Mr Villesant this evening and he tells me that the reported speech in the ZDNet article was an inaccurate and selective rendition of his rhetorical style at the conference. Certainly my conversation with him over the evening revealed no signs of the cluelessness the article implies and I have to conclude he's a victim of the british press.

Posted by Simon Phipps on June 01, 2005 at 10:29 PM GMT+00:00 #

Thank you Simon for clearing that up. I should have guessed that was the case. Technology publications seem to have a worse record for accuracy than even the daily tabloids. I apologise my immediate reaction. I hope Mr. Villesant understands that open source collaboration is similar to the long history of knowledge sharing between corporations and learning institutions. It's just a way to avoid reinventing the wheel. Open source abuse can occur, but community peer pressure quickly discourages it.

Posted by bnitz on June 01, 2005 at 10:44 PM GMT+00:00 #

Yes, he does, and he expressed understanding of reactions like yours - he was most surprised by the story himself as he was unaware that there were any press at the event. The irony is that his comments were actually praise of the (in his view) more advanced attitude of companies like Sun to open source and a chiding of his European audience to get to it.

His native tongue is Spanish and in conjunction with his rhetorical style he was probably an easy target for the conflict-hungry tech press.

Posted by Simon Phipps on June 01, 2005 at 10:52 PM GMT+00:00 #

I was at the conference the article speaks of and saw Mr. Villasante speak. He has an interesting rhetorical style providing enough sensation for a hungry reporter, but I do not think there is anything wrong with his English.

The main point of Villasante's argument was the implementation of the Lisbon agenda where the EC has set the (near impossible) goal of catching up with the US in terms of innovation and technology driven industry.

Software development in general, and in this context specifically OSS could be one way of creating business dynamics in Europe and Villasante is charged with getting this done (I believe).

He had problems with the leading position taken in both the proprietary as the open source software industry by big American corporations (like the ones you named) and he said he wanted that kind of industry to be formed in Europe as well.

Someone in the audience commented that Europe probably has a lot more Small to Medium Enterprises which are not as visible as the big guns but usually are far more important, innovative and bigger in size when combined.

I think that comment is head on but I would not mind if the profile and visibility of software development in the EU would be raised to a higher level.

Posted by Alper on June 02, 2005 at 04:04 PM GMT+00:00 #

I agree that there is a visibility problem. Of the corporate open source contributions I mentioned; YaST2 and OpenOffice originated in Germany, VNC originated in the U.K. the linux kernel originated in Finland. I don't think the EC's goal is nearly impossible, innovation happens everywhere. I can't comment more on the talk since I wasn't there. But I hope it was a call for increased open source involvement by European companies rather than decreased involvement by U.S. companies. Open source is shared competition. Imagine if all of the R&D that went into the U.S. Russian space race had gone into a shared intellectual resource pool.

Posted by bnitz on June 03, 2005 at 09:39 AM GMT+00:00 #

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