brainstorms

Wednesday June 15, 2005

next morning: groklaw and the art of FUD...

groklaw was quiet yesterday. they must have spent the entire day deciding how to craft just the right article to belittle our efforts while mentioning IBM as well.

Sun Microsystems is the second corporation that needs Open Source. It would like you to help them make some money by writing code for them[*]. You can use the code you write for yourself too, so long as you swear on a stack of Bibles you won't mix it with GPL'd code (the CDDL is incompatible) or help Linux out in any way, shape or form.

i am not the least bit surprised about the tone of the article; groklaw made its analytic modes plain in the past with insults and innuendo. here we have selective Nth reprinting of our sun contributor agreement, and just for added dose of fear, binary-only license and various tone-deaf but "silly me" plain-english translations. funniest part for me is FUD with our joint copyright agreement:

In the case of the Sun Contributor Agreement, my understanding is that you give away your right to control what Sun does with your contribution; however, you are also free to use it any way you like yourself. However, since Sun is the copyright holder of your code, just as you are, it can change the licensing terms at any time it wishes. And, of course, the elephant in the room is Microsoft. Sun and Microsoft are in a patent peace, but you aren't. If Microsoft has patents it could use against you, even if Sun knows about those patents, there is nothing in the agreement or the CDDL that requires Sun to share with you what it knows. It can't be sued, but you can be.

can you follow that neat transition from Sun somehow changing the licensing terms to "and of course" microsoft [why not IBM or any other patent holder? that would be the wrong association] suing the programmer? how we would accept patent-troubled code [there is a clause in the contributor agreement about patents] to our life's work and cannot deal with it, or let the programmer know?

this is all very tiring; best thing to do is to stop taking these barely-clued doses of interpretation and translation from groklaw, and start thinking and asking questions instead.

It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else's point of view without the proper training.-- Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[*] "help them make some money" is a link to a straight-forward news item in australianit news. it does not talk about sun making money by having you write code. this is a new twist in blog-journalism: links parading as supporting arguments. if you do not follow the link, you may be tempted to think there is some possibly negative analysis of sun's open source efforts.

note i have disabled further comments on this entry; apologies to those who may have had constructive comments to make. there is now a thread in groklaw about this blognote including my personal likeability (more on that anon); you can contribute your thoughts there if you like, or wait for the next installment. you can also reach me at ozan dot yigit at gmail.