Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> Open Source community subversion as marketing ploy
>
> ,----[ Snippet ]
> | The launch of Microsoft's Codeplex "shared source" site is merely the
> | latest attempt to undermine and usurp the open source community via clever
> | marketing.
I recently had someone try to tell me about a Microsoft "open source"
package called GRETA. He told me that it was supposed to be a really
fast regular expression handler, similar to that used in PERL, GREP,
and SED.
He have me the link, which I followed, and was immediately greeted with
a "license agreement".
Unlike so many people in this industry, when I see a license agreement,
I actually READ IT CAREFULLY BEFORE ACCEPTING IT. The first part
looked pretty good, I could view the code, use it for free, and refer
others to the same link. Pretty nice. But then I got a bit further
down in the language and got to the "gotchasucker" clause. It seems
that you have the right to view the code, and you can even use anything
you can remember, after you've closed the file, and this includes
patent, copyright, and other intellectual property rights. HOWEVER
***** NONE of these waivers apply to any dirivative work produced by
you or anyone else creating derivative works based on this license.
Simply put, just by accepting the license, I could not use ANY regular
expression handler in my code or projects again. Because Microsoft
would have the preponderance of the evidence - record of my acceptance
of the EULA - to prove that such code was based on Microsoft's product
- regardless of how different it was. Furthermore, the wording of the
license effectively covered such tactics as "clean-room" reverse
engineering, "closed book" reverse engineering, and "functionally
similar" reverse engineering.
Because Open Source licenses do not provide proof as to when you viewed
the source code, and do not provide record of what you actually looked
at and when, you could only prove that you had obtained and accepted a
license for say, Red Hat Linux, not that you had studied the source
code of GNU grep in intimate detail. As a result, Microsoft would have
the preponderance of the evidence in their favor and could claim
partial ownership and control over your GPL based version of grep.
Fontunately, the license agreement had both an "Accept" and "Do Not
Accept" button, and I pushed the "Do Not Accept" button - and never saw
this "infected" code.
If Richard Stallman put a clause like that into the GPL or LGPL, and
required proof of acceptance for any source code viewed, the entire
community would be fuming, because it would automatically put ANY
version of any application that was even SIMILAR to a GNU
implementation would now be covered by the GPL. This would include all
BSD code, all proprietary derivatives of BSD code, and many other
"lenient" licensed code.
The problem is that most young people will not read those licenses, and
will not be aware of the consequences of pressing the "I accept"
button. Even worse, they will not mention the fact that they pushed
the "I accept" button when they are talking to an employer who wants to
use OSS software, which may require compiling software that is similar
to the code viewed by Microsoft.
Suppose some young college student clicked "I accept", to this code,
and several other similar library offerings. Then supposed that this
student, a few years later, was hired by Novell and had worked there
for 3-4 years. Microsoft would be able to use disclosure to force
Novell to provide a list of all of the employees who had compiled
source code, and maybe even the applications they worked on. Microsoft
could then combine this information with a list of all of the "I
Accept" buttons pressed for all of the "Open Source" pieces that had
been accepted by all of these employees, then claim the right to
royalties based on every module ever seen by any employee.
In all probabability, Microsoft would not immediately enforce these
claims. They might wait 2-3 years, making sure that all of these "I
accepts" had a chance to infest as many Open Source companies as
possible, making it impossible to provide a solid trail of
"counter-evidence" and auditing as to who had seen what GPL source
code, and when.
The irony is that I had seen the regex source code software from AT&T
25 years ago, when I first joined CCI. Because of this, I could not
contribute any code related to any of the AT&T source code I had seen
for Linux or other Open Source projects, because I had been "infected"
in just the manner described abover. The difference is that AT&T had
CCI give a list of who was viewing what source code - and this provided
them with an archive.
The irony is that if I had limited my studies to the AT&T V6 kernel
(which predated the notion of copyright licenses, and was distributed
to universities with no specific restrictions because AT&T "wasn't in
the software business", and the BSD source code, which was,
effectively, the oldest "open source" copyrighted software in the
industry, I could have contributed freely to source code.
The SCO lawsuit is trying to press exactly these types of claims in
their lawsuit against IBM. They are trying to assert that because IBM
hired people who were on record as seeing AT&T source code, possibly
decades before joining IBM, and those people may have made suggestions
to those who had been working on the Linux port to 390 architecture
(pre-Z Serries), that they have the preponderance of the evidence that
should cause the judge to rule that intellectual property belonging to
SCO was passed into Linux.
The irony is that this association ignores all "prior art", all
releases and licenses, all subsequent releases of software under OSS
licenses by the original authors, and all software generated by college
students based on public specifications made available by posix,
X/Open, and other standards bodies.
By SCO's logic, Rex Ballard worked for CCI from July of 1983 to
November of 1987. CCI had a source code for AT&T Unix in January of
1983 (not sure of exact date), as part of the AT&T Directory Assistance
project, Rex worked at the IBM facility in Kingston NY from July of
1992 to December of 1992 as a contractor, where he ported X11 from the
RS6000 to the S/390 architecture. In 1997, Employees of IBM who had
worked in the Kingston facility in 1992 worked in the same building as
a team that was working on porting Linux to what is now known as
Z-Series architecture. Code published in the AT&T System V release 4
distribution looks Identical to code published in Linux.
The fact that the code in question was originally published by BSD in
1982, and that AT&T obtained a non-exclusive license to this code from
BSD in 1984, in exchange for specific patented software such as regex
(AT&T's regular expression handler) on a nonexclusive basis, and that
writers had contributed enganced versions of this BSD code (which
permits relicensing under additional terms so long as the original
terms are honored), is much harder to prove. SCO was hoping that by
the rule of law that the court must vote based on the "Preponderance of
the evidince", that those claims which are best supported by specific
evidence and testimony, over those claims which are less well
supported.
Yes, you could claim that the reason that the Linux code looks so
similar is because Bill Joy wrote code for BSD in 1983 which was passed
to AT&T in 1984 and that the BSD version was the one ported to Linux in
1992 rather than the AT&T version could be a bit harder to prove with
corroborating evidence under the rules of evidence.
Here is the real sticker. If someone wrote enhancements or bug fixes
for the GNU version, and published those enhancements ONLY for the GNU
version in 1993, but the AT&T version and BSD version looked identical
in 1992, and looked identical again in 1993, and the AT&T version has
no written agreement with the original author, woudn't that mean that
the AT&T version had included pirated code which had only been released
to the GNU version? Wouldn't that make AT&T version subject to the
provisions of the GNU licenses?
Wouldn't it be ironic if, in their mad quest to try and prove that AT&T
owned the GNU code, the preponderance of the evidence showed that the
SCOX code was actually now covered by the GNU license and that ALL SCO
code patched in this manner now had to be re-released under the terms
of the GPL?
And since Microsoft's code may also include some of this "GPL enhanced"
BSD source code, wouldn't this also make Microsoft's code covered by
the GPL?
Who is pirating from whom?
> | There are two main reasons proprietary vendors are threatened by open
> | source alternatives: price compression and loss of market share.
> `----
Ironically, there really aren't that many proprietary vendors who are
really threatened by OSS. The only company who really has a great deal
to lose is Microsoft. Third party vendors, and even big vendors like
Oracle, Sun, IBM, CA, Siebel, SAP, and many others actually have far
more to GAIN from Open Source software, especially Linux.
First, because Linux is API compatible with UNIX, they only have to
write one set of code which can be compiled with GCC on many platforms,
including AIX, Solaris, HP_UX, Linux, even SCO Unix, as well as cygwin
for Windows.
Second, because customers don't have to spend as much as 2/3 of their
IT budget on Microsoft intellectual property righs and support
contracts, there is more for hardware and their software. The vendor
can provide more "bang for the buck" using their Linux/Unix software
than they can using a Windows-only version.
Third, because the vendors don't have to license technology from
Microsoft, there are fewer secondary royalties and with fewer
restrictions on how products and code can be offered including
advertizing, packaging, interconnections, and distribution options.
Fourth, because the margins on Linux are about 1/4 those of Wnidows,and
the overall costs can be as much as 90% lower, and the source code is
available with very few restrictions, most of which do NOT impact the
ability to market proprietary code with or for Linux, it's much easier
for a proprietary vendor to support their code running on OSS
frameworks and libraries than it is to support code on a platform which
expressly forbids "reverse engineering" (stepping through OS libraries
and code), even for the purpose of fixing bugs or taking
countermeasures against sabotage.
Fifth - because Linux strongly encourages and supports third party
development, even when it may involve "competing" with freely
distributed products, there are huge market opportunties which can be
accessed with far less time, money, effort, and risk, than coding to
the Microsoft "Windows-Only" APIs. Remember, coding to the OSS
frameworks still gives you access to the Windows markets, but it also
gives you access to several other platforms and markets as well.
StarOffice is a prime example of a product which is available as a
commercial offering, competes with their own OpenOffice offering, and
takes advantage of the ability of the OSS/*nix APIs to run on Windows,
Linux, Solaris, OS/X, AIX, HP_UX, SGI, and pretty much any other
platform that is supported by a GCC compiler and GLIBC libraries.
> http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2006/06/microsoft_attem.html
>
> Read on and mind the bit on Microsoft and SAP strategies. Fairly
> interesting...
|
|
