State of Open Source Message

• Everyone, please enjoy lunch.
• The press conference is sponsored by Prentice Hall and The Bruce Perens' Open Source Series of books. There are now 13 books, with all text under Open Source licenses.
• I've written a new report, The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source. Here's the abstract:

  Open Source developers have, perhaps without conscious intent, created a new and surprisingly successful economic paradigm for the production of software. Examining that paradigm can answer a number of important questions.

  It's not immediately obvious how Open Source works economically. Probably the worst consequence of this lack of understanding is that many people don't understand how Open Source could be economically sustainable, and some may even feel that its potential negative effect upon the proprietary software industry is an overall economic detriment. Fortunately, if you look more deeply into the economic function of software in general, it's easy to establish that Open Source is both sustainable and of tremendous benefit to the overall economy.

  Open Source can be explained entirely within the context of conventional open-market economics. Indeed, it turns out that it has much stronger ties to the phenomenon of capitalism than you may have appreciated.

• There's a great deal of business at the show. The good news is that the business of Open Source continues to be a strong one. But there remain clouds upon the horizon, mostly of a legal nature.
• Compare the change in the interest in "intellectual property" as it effects Open Source between the show we held in New York a year ago and this year. Although I published my first article on patents and Open Source in 1996, last year was the first in which the topic began to see wide discussion. Half a year ago we hosted the Dan Ravicher report on patents potentially infringed in Linux and got the first patent statement from IBM, a narrow committment not to attack the Linux kernel, this year the topic of intellectual property has become a very important one. We have some leaders on the topic such such as Ravicher, myself, Eben Moglen, Larry Rosen. We have some companies active in the space such as Open Source Risk Management, and Black Duck. We have effective solutions to manage copyright issues. We have no solution to the software patent problem.
• Summary of the European software patent battle to date. We may still lose and have broad software patenting in Europe, it could be passed as early as February 24. We do not have a definitive re-start of the European software patenting bill.
• The software patenting battle is essentially large companies agitating for protectionism against smaller companies. The only small companies that can win with software patenting are non-producing entities. Everyone else loses.
• We need to bring the software patenting debate home to the U.S. To do so requires involving small and medium sized proprietary software businesses, who have as much or more to lose. Legislators follow economic needs.
• Discussion of the IBM patent grant. Inclusion of garbage patents like the one on set screws that Johnathan Schwartz could point out was a strategic mistake. There are also some good patents in there. The grant is symbolic, IBM files 1500 software patents per year. The terms of the grant are acceptable to the entire Open Source community, as the grant covers all OSI-accepted licenses.
• We can't say the same for Sun's grant, which was promoted as one to The Open Source developers but in reality is only to OpenSolaris developers.
• I continue to see Sun's OpenSolaris participation as a cynical attempt to compete with Linux rather than cooperate with Open Source.
• Unfortunately, we can't expect anything else of Sun. I can see no good exit from their present situation, and their conduct with OpenSolaris may well be the best they can do for their company for now. From my meetings with them, I am convinced that the OpenSolaris staff have their hearts in the right place. But Sun's top management is in between a rock and a hard place, and it's not possible for them to participate as honestly in Open Source as their engineering staff and their middle management would like. They must preserve all remaining value through any means possible to them.
• But that' won't help Sun. OpenSolaris has almost lost its differentiating value as Linux improves. We're sure OpenSolaris is not faster than Linux, despite some extreme claims from Sun. In some ways OpenSolaris provides more functionality, but that won't last even two years.
• My advice to Sun would be to concentrate all of their software budget on their remaining differentiating software, rather than software that is losing its ability to differente their company. This ties into the discussion of differentiating software vs. Open Source in my economic paper.
• We continue to see the erosion of the SCO cases. Ralph Yarro, generally acknowledged as architect of their lawsuits, was dismissed from Canopy Group, not before he drew more than one hudred Million dollars in stock and bonuses from the company, according to his own account. Unfortunately, SCO's contractual committment to David Boise' law firm would prevent them from dropping the suits currently in progress before Boise' wants to give them up - in other words before any hope of a settlement with IBM is exhausted. IBM can't afford to give SCO anything but a pyrric victory, or other companies will line up to try similar extortions upon IBM. I see no future for SCO as a profitable entity.
• SCO isn't the last case we'll have. There have been signs that Microsoft is gearing up for a patent attack, this could be carried out direclty or through proxies like Nathan Myrvold's "Intellectual Ventures".
• The bad news is that Open Source does not have an effective defense against that yet. IBM and other large companies that might come to our aid also have interest in a strong software patenting regime, and agreements with the companies that will potentially be our agressors.
• Because of its board, OSDL represents the large patent holders rather than the Open Source community.
• We must adress the software patenting problem with new legislation right here in the United States, or there will continue to be serious questions about the future viability of Open Source. And unfortunately those questions are not FUD.
• De-emphasis on community and freedom aspects of Open Source does not help us solve the patent problem. If we lose our moral high ground, we won't be able to get the legislation we need. If Linux becomes just another Unix promoted by companies alone, rather than a public good, there is no reason for legislators to change the rules for us.
• No amount of insurance or indemnity will solve the problem.
• Discussion of indemnity directed to users vs. developers - Linux is the only industry that even tries to protect its developers, although such protections are inadequate.
• Discussion of GNU Radio and the Universal Software Radio Peripheral designed by Matt Ettus.
• The Linux Desktop is making significant progress.
• Linux on laptops is finally real. ACPI finally works.
• Problems of no-source device drivers - both legal and maintainability.
• License proliferation and OSI.