SunMink

Simon Phipps's other Weblog
(a WebMink in the Sun)

Shoddy Assumptions

I don't know why Joe Brockmeier of ZDNet decided to lambast me on the basis of one line attributed to me without explanation in a muckraking article published in Australia, but whatever his reasons his act of drawing his own conclusions about what I might have meant and then lambasting me on the strength of nothing more than his poor insight reflects badly on him. Unlike his wiser colleague David Berlind, who has a good grasp of the principles involved in a very large open source project (even if he needs a little correction), Joe is well short of the truth when he asserts:

I think it'd be great if IBM did contribute to OpenOffice.org, but I'm not sure that the project is critical to IBM's plans for making money with Linux. ... In short, this seems like petty politics on Sun's part. I doubt Sun or members of the OpenOffice.org project expect IBM to suddenly make OpenOffice.org a priority just because they complain about IBM's lack of involvement. From this perspective, it would seem that Sun is just trying to sling a little mud IBM's way. Perhaps Sun needs someone new to pick fights with, since they made nice with Microsoft last year.

If Joe had bothered to ask, he would have discovered that my comment (which was actually a personal comment to Rodney Gedda over a beer and not intended for publication, but which I nonetheless stand behind once placed in context) did not relate to personal use of OpenOffice by IBM employees. If that was the only use they were making then fair enough, we all use code from the rich open source meta-community and it would obviously be crazy to expect everyone to engage in every project and make contribution back. I don't, for example, expect IBM to make any contribution to the Roller weblog software I am using right now even though I know they have extensive internal deployments.

The comment instead related to the common assumption in the OpenOffice.org community that IBM's Workplace Client product is based directly on source forked from OpenOffice.org about two years ago. Many community members believe that, for whatever reason, IBM has not attempted to contribute anything at all back to the OpenOffice.org community despite a heavy dependence on code from the OpenOffice.org commons - no code, no marketing, no goodwill, nothing. As I was at the time among a large group of community members (at the Australian OpenOffice.org conference) for whom this was common knowledge I alluded to it - Gedda sadly did not provide that context and I would have preferred him not to have reported the comment without, but he has and so now the issue is on the table. It would be correct to say IBM would have the right to use the code how they want because it is licensed under SISSL, and I agree with those who suggest that it's time that license was no longer available for the OpenOffice.org codebase - a subject that has been discussed widely in the OpenOffice.org community.

The rest of the article reflects the bad-will the blog in which Joe writes has shown towards Sun for some time. Berlind and Cooper have explained his shallowness in connection with the necessary copyright assignments that most open source projects require of contributions. To correct his assertion about Sun's contributions, Sun contributes widely to open source technologies and I believe has indeed contributed to Samba in the past, as well as many, many other technologies. The only reason Sun would not make a contribution would be if Sun had no contribution to make - we don't want to fork anything and we don't want to freeload.

I am sick of seeing so many shallow, mean-spirited articles like this based on an assumption of malice. Sun has been a consistent contributor to the Unix heritage since 1981 and most Unix and Linux users depend daily on code and ideas in which Sun has played a key role (NFS, anyone? X11? Gnome? Mozilla? Even the 'currently active' list is huge). Joe, you say "In short, this seems like petty politics on Sun’s part", You're wrong. This is a tiny part of a community discussion based on real issues. I'd advise you to ask the affected community before you jump to unwarranted conclusions. And next time you try to read my mind, remember you can't trust what's reported in the press and consider actually contacting me first - simon DOT phipps AT sun DOT com.

Update:Turns out IBM is on the record that Workplace is a fork of OO.o - see this eWeek article [Thanks, Stephen!]. And David Berlind just wrote another wise analysis.

Posted by webmink ( Apr 27 2005, 12:19:36 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Deja Vu

Interesting reading clippings this week and noting how many people seem to have been reading from my keynotes - stuff I have been saying for a year or more is finally showing up in what others are saying. Here's a news review.

As forecast, it seems Microsoft are getting ready to embrace & extend Linux - meanwhile, perhaps to avoid that old Redmond bear-hug Scott Handy of IBM seems to have finally realised that open source is about more than just Linux - time to open up DB2 and WebSphere, guys, charging for licenses is so last-millennium. He's also discovered (perhaps from reading the Australian government's open source procurement guide) that Linux is not free and that the experts who package it and make it work actually cost something to employ. Next he'll be advising people to use non-Intel chips for high-end tasks - oh, wait...

At the new-order end of the world Marten Mickos of MySQL ("the JetBlue of Databases", that has a nice ring to it - I hope they don't charge per-CPU) has been talking about how it's possible to make money with open source software, although he's not articulating a clear general model yet (such as: "communities of artisans maintain a commons that they use to create wealth, in the process enriching the commons"). He probably has his reasons.

On another tack, Adam Bosworth is realising that 'web services' in the WS-I sense is a ploy by the old order to inject complexity into SOAs to distract people from the simplicity of REST and the necessity for standards on payloads as well as envelopes. What next - ebXML from Google? Good to have Adam in the Loyal Opposition though.

Posted by webmink ( Apr 24 2005, 09:01:04 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Glorifying ephemera

I see that IBM will treat dual core CPUs as one chip but I agree with Tim about his one. As I have been saying in my keynotes for about a year, pricing that's based on the ephemera of implementation is senseless in a massively-connected age when the network is the computer. Who cares how you achieve your results? What matters is that you can deliver those results.

Pricing in a massively-connected era can't be based on licenses to use particular bits of software, on how much memory you've installed, on the kind of CPUs you've selected or indeed on any arbitrary ephemera, because increasingly there will be multiple equivalent ways to achieve the same results - from self-built Unix installations all the way to rented time on utility computing services. It makes no more sense to charge per-CPU than it does to charge per-memory chip. it's like the electricity company charging for electricity based not on what you use but rather on how many filaments you have in your light bulbs (and woe betide if you install fluorescent!)

We're in a transitional phase, and IBM's move is a step forward (come on, Oracle, everyone is waiting), but it's time end users started pressuring suppliers to move their business models into the massively-connected 21st century, before open source and innovative silicon wipe them out.

Posted by webmink ( Apr 23 2005, 08:43:38 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Open Source OK for Oz

Australia's Capital
Originally uploaded by webmink.

I was in Canberra at the start of the week, delivering the opening keynote at the OpenOffice.org mini-conference and awarding prizes as part of Sun's sponsorship of the regional delegate program at linux.conf.au. I really like that particular sponsorship as it allows the real stars of open source, the individual contributors, to attend the conference and gain recognition for their efforts. It works by paying the expenses and conference fees for ten key contributors (one from New Zealand and nine from around Australia) to attend the event, and then giving one of them (in this case Colin Charles from Victoria, a contributor to both Fedora and OpenOffice.org) an all-expenses paid trip to a conference in Europe or the US.

Also of note this week was the launch of an open source procurement policy by the Australian government. It's an addendum to last year's commonwealth procurement policy and it's packed with good advice on how to also procure open source software and services for government use, giving the official green light at last. It's a step to be warmly welcomed.

Posted by webmink ( Apr 20 2005, 08:20:32 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Zero Tolerance for Patent Hoarders

A commentator on Slashdot asked me several important questions about Sun's approach to patents; I'm copying the answer I left there so I can find it more easily in the future. Ogerman says:

Regardless of license choice, there is one big fly in the ointment: software patents. Lets just put it on the table.. the primary reason many members of the Open Source community have a distrust of Sun is because of this issue.

So let me be perfectly clear. Sun has never been a patent terrorist and does not intend to start now. Sun accumulates patents in parallel with software development in just the same way that all US corporations do (I call this "parallel filing") - it would be irresponsible to do otherwise. However, our policy is to grant these patents to the communities around the software they relate to. We have them for our defence, and for the defence of those we partner with including open source communities.

If you read the license that you are granted by the Java specifications, you'll find that they give you an unrestricted blanket grant of all the patents Sun has that might be infringed by Java implementations. The same is true of the CDDL and OpenSolaris - if you work in the OpenSolaris commons, you have the full use and protection of Sun's patents. As more companies work in that commons, the CDDL will force them to donate all their patents too. Those grants survive anything that may happen to the companies involved, so even a hostile acquisition would not result in the loss of patent protection. Blanket grant provisions incrementally build a meshed patent commons that promises safety for developers and as it grows offers protection against patent terrorism.

Until we're able to reform the patent system (and Sun is a firm believer in patent reform and is working behind the scenes in Europe too to promote sanity) the smart thing to do is not to neglect patents, any more than it would be smart for a policeman who opposed gun ownership to protest by not wearing body armour. However, I think the F/OSS meta-community should show zero tolerance for patent holders who don't give the communities in which they work blanket protection from their patent holdings.

This does not mean I want to see lots of individual patents in some way made public. Software patents are deeply flawed and breach the social contract implied by patenting because they do not usually provide the know-how in a way that the public commons is enriched. Software patents are not sources of either sample code or of inspiration, and I can't see why it is helpful to "grant" them to the meta-community outside the source commons to which they relate. Enumerated, untargetted grants miss the point and glorify patents. Instead, I want to see corporations forced to donate all patents that are used by the various code commons they care about, with a blanket, unenumerated, blind grant and an enforceable patent peace. That's why I am a fan of the MPL/CDDL!

That's why I'm also not a proponent of multiple licensing for OpenSolaris (something else Ogerman asks about) - yes, I have considered it. If people could use the GPL as their license rather than CDDL, they would not have to contribute to the patent commons surrounding OpenSolaris or be subject to its patent peace provisions. Multiple licenses are great all the time they share values, but I am so committed to creating a patent-safe developer commons around OpenSolaris that I feel it would be a bad idea to multi-license CDDL-licensed code until the GPL has suitably strong patent provisions. Once the GPL becomes combinable and includes patent protection, I would be very happy to revisit this view.

Posted by webmink ( Apr 19 2005, 07:53:36 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Kebabs At Last

I'd like to welcome Sun's newest blogger - that's Emma in Northampton, who is set for world domination. When we started blogs.sun.com she was exactly the sort of Sun employee I had in mind. Our vision for blogs.sun.com was to create a vehicle where the people Sun trusts most to speak on its behalf - that would be our employees - are able to do so. We expected to hear authentic, original and passionate voices from around the world. We wanted everyone to meet the real heart of Sun - not its marketing wing, not its PR professionals, but the real people who are engaged in delighting customers every day.

So Emma, an experienced blogger (who I have never met) branching out onto blogs.sun.com for the first time, is exactly the sort of person I was hoping to find blogging here. I'll be adding her to my Bloglines aggregator - welcome, Emma.

Posted by webmink ( Apr 19 2005, 07:31:30 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

'Failed' as in 'succeeded wildly'

There's a real feeding frenzy going on about the CDDL right now, for reasons I don't understand. Maybe I should take it as a sign that those who hate Sun are really spooked by the fact that Sun actually appears to be doing things right with OpenSolaris. But whichever way I look at it, there's been a sudden rush of online chatter ranging from the sarcastic and spiteful through the shockingly misinformed to the plain wrong (no link - just look for fools -including analysts - claiming that OpenSolaris is in some way 'closed' before they have even seen it or the CAB has published a governance).

In the absence of a decent conspiracy theory, it seems the prompt for much of this is one remarkably intemperate remark in the otherwise pretty rational posting over at OSI on license proliferation in the open source meta-community. The remark in question is summarised by OSI thus

The class of asymmetrical corporate licenses that began with Mozilla was a worthy experiment that has failed. The new policy will discourage them.

and they go on to say

That strategy worked well in 1998, as a way of giving people a place that felt safe within which to rethink their assumptions. But seven years later, we think it is is significant that the original corporate open-source license, the Mozilla Public License, has been dropped by its originating organization in favor of the GPL. It is becoming increasingly clear from this and other examples that the "middle way" represented by Mozilla and other corporate open-source licenses is not a stable, effective solution even from the point of view of selfish corporate agents.

This is shockingly partisan and manipulative. Just neglecting for the moment that the MPL has in no sense been dropped by the Mozilla organisation, as a simple visit to Mozilla.org would have told the writer, the frame the writer is trying to create, defining the MPL as some kind of corporate Franken-license, is either an expression of profound inexperience or ruthless manipulativeness. Asserting things like Groklaw does:

a license under which programmers can write Brand X Open Source software, software that ends up not open at all on a whim, which the engineers get to write for them in the open and then the company gets to take closed and proprietary, and not only that, you don't get any code back from them in return for the code you donated, unless they feel like it.

shows a profound lack of understanding of how the MPL works - clearly someone with that mindset was also writing for OSI. MPL-style licenses don't allow that theft from the commons and it is dishonest to assert they do - hiding lies about the MPL behind criticism of the CDDL does nothing to change that. All changes to files in the commons have to be given back. Period. It is permitted for original work that's not in the original commons to be withheld from it - but why not, giving people no choice what they do with their work is a strange definition of "freedom". If it's OK for BSD-style licenses to leave that freedom, why is it wrong for MPL-style licenses to leave it too?

I've been thinking long and hard of a way to summarise the nature of open source to help with this sort of misunderstanding. The best summary I have come up with to date is as follows:

An open source software project is a software source-code commons maintained by a creative community, which uses the content of the commons to create richness and innovation, with and around the commons. In the process of that creativity, the community enriches the commons for the benefit of all and may be compensated by the recipients of the creative act.

Using that framework it's then easier to understand various aspects of open source. The license is chosen to facilitate the commons and to decide the way it is enriched. By definition, all open source licenses allow the commons to be used for any purpose - they differ mainly in how the resulting new works are treated.

• BSD-style licenses (of which I regard Apache v2 as the state-of-the-art) place no restriction on whether derived creations are returned to the commons. Thus the creative works of the community surrounding a commons created by a BSD-style license may be returned to that commons, may be applied to a different source-commons¹ or may be incorporated into a closed-source work.
• GPL-style licenses require that derived creations, both resulting from the original commons and created newly around the commons, be licensed under the same license. The commons is thus enriched as it is used, but innovations created outside the commons can very easily be found to be licenseable only under the GPL and thus need to be compulsorily added to the commons - the artisan will often find that there is no freedom of choice in this regard.
• MPL-style licenses (of which I regard CDDL to be the state-of-the-art at present) require that creations derived from files in the commons be licensed under the same license as the original file, but allow newly-created files to be licensed under whatever license the creator of the file chooses. This is a win-win; the commons is continually enriched, and the artisan retains the freedom to license innovations in any way that's appropriate. That's GPL-style (copyleft) for your work on the commons and BSD-style for your own creations - what's not to love?

As well as offering the software craftsperson the maximum choice while protecting the commons for the benefit of its community, MPL-style licenses also work well for existing works that are being donated to the open source meta-community. They allow a working program to be placed in the commons without the need to change the licenses of all the files that comprise it on day one. This is the main reason Sun selected an MPL license for Open Solaris. If we'd decided to use the GPL, we would have needed to wait until the ownership of every file was precisely determined. As it is, on launch day this quarter there will be a fully buildable, linkable kernel available from opensolaris.org even though some of the files will still only be available in binary form, to be incrementally released as source as the due diligence is completed for them².

I find the assertion that the Mozilla license is a failed experiment utterly ludicrous. On the contrary, it has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of most people, with the consequence that some small defects in the original license³ have caused the MPL to be copied endlessly by responsible, detail-oriented corporate lawyers who couldn't in good conscience allow their employers to proceed without fixing them. Calling those people "selfish corporate agents" is ungenerous to the point of rudeness, even if their necessary fixes are the basis for the majority of the proliferation. Calling the MPL a failure is to fly in the face of the obvious fact that, if the MPL was a failure, there would be no proliferation and thus no need to act.

So what's the solution? Well, I am neither a lawyer nor a software license expert so I'd not presume to dictate a solution. However, Sun felt that the best way to address proliferation was to make a template license out of the MPL, and that's exactly what CDDL is. The solution is not to jettison this wildly successful licensing approach, the one that balances the freedoms of commons and artisans the best. The solution is to fix the defects so that the wild success can continue without license proliferation. Personally I am committed to that goal, be it achieved through the CDDL, through a revised MPL or through some other vehicle.

Posted by webmink ( Apr 15 2005, 10:07:02 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Brazil & the JCP, redux

I just reached Australia after an exciting week in Brazil. They are doing so much with the Java platform in open source over there! To find out more, read the stuff I just wrote on java.net.

Posted by webmink ( Apr 14 2005, 06:20:49 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

OpenSolaris Director Blogging

Great to see Stephen Harpster, Sun's director for the initiative to open source the Solaris operating system, with a new blog here on b.s.c. He starts out by refuting the idea that the Cobalt acquisition was responsible for the (temporary) demise of Solaris x86 a few years ago. If you're interested in more Solaris bloggers try Planetsolaris

Posted by webmink ( Apr 08 2005, 12:18:38 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Brazil Joins JCP

I just arrived in Brazil for the two day "Cafe Brasil" extravaganza in Brasília, and already it's been fantastic. Sat and listened to a passionate appeal for open software with standards by the government's IT philosopher Sergio Amadeu, there has been a tenth birthday party for the Java platform complete with cafe and champagne and then to cap it all Brazil's IT agency SERPRO has announced that they have joined the JCP - the first government to do so. Wow, what a first few hours...

Posted by webmink ( Apr 07 2005, 12:56:23 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Schwartz @ OSBC

Jonathan Schwartz @ OSBC
Originally uploaded by webmink.

Posted by webmink ( Apr 05 2005, 10:38:46 AM PDT ) Permalink

OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board Launched

OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board

(Updated)

The new OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board was just announced, and met for the first time, here in San Francisco. I'm delighted and honoured to have been named as one of Sun's two representatives. We also had a long conversation about Sun and open source with Jonathan Schwartz, who spent over 90 minutes in casual but impeccably informed conversation.

We actually had a pretty effective meeting considering it was the first time any of us had met. We discussed our charter (which is to devise and propose a model for defining how OpenSolaris is "governed"), our views on governance (and Roy's experiences at Apache are already proving invaluable), the need for transparency (we'll have a mailing list with public archives set up soon), how to make decisions (we prefer consensus and can't really see why any decision that the five of us can't agree should be made), how to run meetings (we'll take it in turns to chair them, we're a group of peers) and more - we asked Jim Grisanzio to act as secretary for the CAB and he has all the notes.

All in all, this is very exciting. Some may mock OpenSolaris as just a marketing exercise but it was obvious from the CAB meeting that that's not the case. The focus on the technical aspects of governance is already emerging - topics such as version control and the handling of binary-only components are high on the list - and I think OpenSolaris stands every chance of empowering a significant slice of the huge, global Solaris community to engage directly with the code on which they rely. The open source meta-community is getting a huge infusion of new members and today was a very important step in making it happen.

Posted by webmink ( Apr 04 2005, 10:40:19 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Platform Too

While there has been plenty of fuss about development tools for the Java platform, like Charles Ditzel I have been surprised how little comment has been made about the open source community success story which is the NetBeans Platform. The NetBeans IDE is just one example of a piece of software that can be made with the NetBeans platform - there are other examples, like the mobile network management software system that Nokia has built. Because it's 100% pure Java code, NetBeans provides an ideal base for this sort of success story - I remember back when it was launched one of the examples was of a hairdressing salon management system that was built from the NetBeans Platform.

This is especially cool because the diverse usage of the Platform means that a valuable synergy develops. Nokia's application and Sun's Java Studio Creator product have no market overlap for example, yet they contribute to each other's success because when Nokia finds a bug and fixes it, Sun benefits too (and vice versa) - it's the perfect example of the way that an open source commons allows different artisans in the 'guild' which uses it to create wealth (in the sense Paul Graham describes of making a 'good', not necessarily direct financial wealth) using their own skills while also enhancing the value of the commons to all other players.

Posted by webmink ( Apr 02 2005, 10:41:01 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]