Tuesday December 06, 2005 French law to require rewrite of all connected software?
Gilles Gravier has sent me a copy of the proposed amendment to the French equivalent of the DMCA and it's clear that it's been hastily drafted. There's a comment with it suggesting malice aforethought, too, explaining that open-source software makes the proposed controls impossible and to "draw the conclusions that you wish". Gilles has posted a statement about the amendment in French - translated, he says:Sun is very deeply concerned by the proposed VU/SACEM/BSA amendment to the DADVSI law project forbidding software designed for sharing copyrighted matarial, and not equipped with technical measures since the definition is so broad that it could embrace software such as some of Sun's commercial offerings like Java System Web Server, Java System Messenging Server, Open Solaris, as well as other proprietary and open-source software that drive the internet, like Apache Web Server, Linux...
It appears necessary to take more time to examine all the implications for the rest of the industry of such an amendment rather than proceding at the request of a single interested party
It seems that those drafting the amendment didn't really understand the reach of the words they were using. This is what happens when you let interest groups write law, I suppose.
Open Source Hardware?
One of the things that cropped up in the European software patents debate at the start of the year was the issue of defining what a software patent actually is. You'd think it was easy, but it's not. Software patents sneak through by reference to the computers they actually run on (a software patent I have to hand starts "Two computers A and B each have a clipboard function..." - that's a European one, by the way). And even chip designs turn out to be a grey area.
I recently had the opportunity to meet some of the team designing the new UltraSPARC T1 processor ("Niagara") and saw first-hand what my friends up the road at Southampton University have been pointing out for years. While there's a good deal of skill in the instantiation, a silicon chip these days is "just" the compiled version of a software design. A chip like the UltraSPARC T1 is actually a huge Verilog program compiled to atoms instead of assembly language.
The reason I found all this out is that the team has decided it's time for the Participation Age to reach into the world of chip design. Nestling among all the other excellent announcements about low energy, high performance computers in today's launch event is an announcement that to me is quite revolutionary. SPARC is going open source.
Yes, you read that right. The Verilog source code, tools and more behind the UltraSPARC T1 (the "design point") will be released under an OSI-approved open source license next year - OpenSPARC - and a community will hopefully be forming to use that design point for any purpose that's interesting. I think that's revolutionary.
Of course, open source hardware doesn't work the same way open source software does. Because the "compilation" process is so heavy, the community won't be working on a single rapidly-iterated shared tree of source. It's likely to work more like the Jini community, with many co-operating community participants doing their own thing with a common baseline and then contributing back innovations and fixes based on their experience.
I'll be helping as much as I can to get this off the ground, and learning a lot in the process. It's heading into uncharted territory and there's plenty of opportunity to "learn through corrected error" but I think the new OpenSPARC community is the start of something big, the perfect complement to OpenSolaris.
