Wednesday July 13, 2005 CDDL Reflections
Jim Driscoll (who is the mastermind behind Glassfish) has obviously got his competitors spooked because they are saying crazy things in public - in particular Bill Roth (ex-Sun, now BEA) is quoted as telling a straight lie (that CDDL is not real open source), I hope it's a misquote. As Claire commented on Jim's posting, we heard it all before when we used CDDL for OpenSolaris so I thought I'd collect my postings about CDDL here for easy reference:
- On the patent clauses of CDDL: 'Father of Method Patents' Slams CDDL
- On the blanket patent grant: Zero Tolerance for Patent Hoarders
- On CDDL as a cure for license proliferation: Proliferation of Proliferations
- Why CDDL and nt GPL for OpenSolaris: On Cane Toads, Fire Ants and Patents
- Quick answers to common jabs: Satire or Shallowness?
- On license proliferation and categories of licenses: 'Failed' as in 'succeeded wildly'
If you only have time for one, read the last!
Posted by webmink
( Jul 13 2005, 06:17:34 AM PDT )
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Wednesday July 06, 2005 Pigs Fly And You Can't Patent It (in Europe Anyway)
The European Parliament finally got to vote on the European Software Patent Directive today and somewhat to my surprise threw out the whole thing. Over the last few months I have made many trips to Brussels to speak with politicians and European Commission staff on this subject. In particular, Mark Webbink from Red Hat and I have teamed up to explain to as many people as possible why it would be a disaster for the Open Source software movement if there was a regime where any kind of compulsory licensing applied to software interoperability. Kudos to the whole team (which included two other companies too) including a number of folk who prefer not to be named, for the behind-the-scenes work.
"Royalty Free Licensing" (RF) may sound much better than the infamous "Reasonable and Non Discriminatory Terms" (RAND) but the new world of community-maintained software is one where there is often no legal entity that can engage in a once-for-all licensing act of any kind. In this world, any terms that require an action to gain a license have to be fulfilled by the end-user, placing a chill on the market and threatening privacy - imagine if every Firefox user had to register to gain their "royalty free" license to some technology included in Firefox! Open source communities can't engage in licensing, can't indemnify, can't pay royalties - so those and all actions like them are hostile to open source.
While we would both have rather seen new law that actually created certainty and protected open source software and its developers, you'll note from the press release (next: pigs fly) that we both feel the rejection of the Directive as it stood was probably the least bad outcome. It's not over, though. Having cast out the demon we need to make sure that seven more don't fill the void and leave us worse-off than we were.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 06 2005, 01:12:00 PM PDT )
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Monday July 04, 2005 Piracy is in the mind of the monopolist's agent
Note to those who regard the BitTorrent protocol as a vehicle for piracy: Sun regards it as a vehicle for freedom. That's why the OpenSolaris crypto files are now available as BitTorrent downloads. And a happy Fourth to all of you.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 04 2005, 12:00:37 AM PDT )
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Sunday July 03, 2005 JavaOne: Apologies for Dennis Miller
I've put off this thought for a few days but it's still at the front of my mind so I have to comment. I went to the JavaOne After Dark party this week and watched our invited entertainer, Dennis Miller, give a show that had a number of very funny observations in it - I was creased with laughter as my companion would confirm.
However, in the middle he veered off into a five minute tirade of bitter, unfunny and very racist comments about French people and then for the rest of the show peppered the content with comments about many other nationalities such as Germans, with a big emphasis on right-wing American politics. I enjoy political humour and tolerate a great deal of breadth but I found him very offensive - and this coming from an Englishman, defending the French...
I'm not keen to be a party-pooper but even James Gosling felt the need to comment in his Thursday keynote. I think Miller was a profoundly bad choice of entertainment for an international techno-geek conference and I was ashamed to work for Sun as I watched delegates troop out of the room following these comments (one Englishman shouting out "racist!" as he left). My deepest apologies to friends, customers, colleagues and even enemies - I have commented internally that even the Java condoms are in good taste compared to Miller, I have no idea which out-of-touch marketeer thought Miller appropriate. Sorry.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 03 2005, 12:00:52 AM PDT )
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Saturday July 02, 2005 British Journalism Redux
I'm just on my way home from JavaOne and I notice that Ingrid Marson has done her bit to sustain the low standard of "reporting" by UK hacks in her story Sun 'distorts' definition of free software on ZDNet UK News. Ingrid has chosen to pick up a rhetorical device delivered in the context of a long, positive keynote about freedom and sharing rather than describe the actual spirit of either the keynote or indeed the news at hand (where Sun has open sourced another huge and crucial part of its software portfolio under a real OSI-approved open source license in a real, public community).
She didn't show up for her interview with me*, even after rescheduling it, where she would have been able to find out about Sun's actual position on open source rather than having to refer to Slashdot for comments from parties at least as biased as me and considerably less informed on the actual facts. Neither did she comment, even in her article about whether Java developers want open source, on Sun open sourcing it's Java EE application server. In that article she also preferred to recycle out-of-date comments from IBM rather than report on the rapprochement between Sun and IBM. Does she have an axe to grind? I hope so because the other diagnoses are much less charitable. [You can read all her JavaOne coverage - 4 stories - and be the judge: Real Time Java; Schwartz on "Free"; Java and open source; JavaOne News roundup (notice anything missing?)]
Is there a decent journalist working anywhere in the UK tech press any more? Getting comment from alternate voices is a valid device. Reporting via vox populi can sometimes be interesting. But when so-called "reporters" combine the two in a spirit of cynicism and fail to report the actual new news despite copious opportunity you know that 'journalism' has left the building.
* Update 6 July: Word reaches my ears by a circuitous route that Ingrid is upset that her integrity has been maligned - she apparently cancelled the second meeting because it clashed with the flight home booked for her by Sun UK - had I known I would have pointed that out. I also gather she did not use Slashdot to gather comments. My apologies to her.
Oh, and Matt & Ingrid, feel free to leave comments here too, no need to go through official channels - these are my personal views after all.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 02 2005, 03:32:57 AM PDT )
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