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This week started the wrong way. Some people started to create what is litterally a storm in the teacup, while some other people made announcements that in my view are extremely disappointing and quite concerning for some practitioners of FOSS licensing management and consultancy. Let me explain this point first.

Black Duck was awarded a patent on Open Source licensing conflict resolution. The patent itself seems to cover the “core technology” of the software developed by Black Duck, and not the actual practice of FOSS licensing management and optimization, which is something that Ars Aperta incidently offers both through its traditional services and certification programs. I have to say that I am not really sure what the patent covers or does not cover, but it sure brings a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt for the existing competitors or potential competitors of Black Duck Software, existing consultancies in similar field and last but not least, customers. No wonder Bradley Kuhn got upset about this. I do find these news quite unsettling myself, and I cannot wait to see Black Duck’s patent promise. At least that should remind some not to trust so called Open Source experts who use laptops with Windows, MS Office and Internet Explorer. It’s a small but telling sign they treat FOSS as some sort of disease and not as something to rationally analyze and assist their customers on. And do I need to repeat this again here? Software patents are bad, they stifle competition, customer choice, block innovation and lessen value. You may call them a reality, you don’t have to necessarily add to it.

What really strikes me as a real storm in the tea-cup is the pseudo announcement that Ubuntu will drop Openoffice.org from its upcoming Lucid Lynx release, in its netbook edition. The news came from this website and got quickly picked out by the largest french newspaper, stirring quite an uproar among the French community.

Let me offer some thoughts on why these news are nothing short of non-news, aside the mere fact that there is no official announcement by Canonical or any Ubuntu release team on this matter.

• First, OpenOffice.org is a large application that usually runs well even on netbooks, but may not be the best tailored tool for specific uses envisioned for netbook users. There is nothing surprising in this, and several Linux distributions have actually never included OpenOffice.org by default because of size constraints and simplicity.

• Second, even if Ubuntu were to drop OpenOffice.org from its specific netbook edition it does not mean that the software would be unavailable from the very same Ubuntu repositories. In fact it would be readily available, but it just would not be included in the default installation. How many computers shipped with Windows only include a trial version of Microsoft Word and not a coherent MS Office stack? Almost all of them don’t ship with the full copy of MS Office.

• Third, we recently got hold of the first reliable statistics, aside our own count of downloads, of the actual market share of OpenOffice.org on a worldwide scale. And guess what? With these numbers, we won’t be exactly hampered by whatever decision not to ship OpenOffice.org in the default install set of Ubuntu netbook edition.

What is now needed is some sort of acknowledgment by the broader community of analysts that these stats are reliable. This would cause some real problems to Microsoft, as these statistics usually only count the shipments or the default installation images of MS Windows that come preloaded with one trial version of MS Word. Unless Microsoft patents some new market share analysis method, that is.

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This will be the last post of the year 2009.  2010 will be an interesting year to come, for many reasons, and that’s why I have outlined a few predictions below for the year to come. Feel free to comment or add to this list, and happy new year 2010!

• OpenOffice.org’s market share will ceased to be constantly looked down upon by analysts. I had recently explained why measuring its market share is complex, and why it is constantly underrated. But now it seems that Microsoft (and the press) are taking good notice of the fast-growing adoption of OpenOffice.org by, well, pretty much everyone out there.
• Standardization of the most recent release of OpenDocument, the 1.2, will be painful, and might perhaps never see a happy ending. For one thing, Microsoft controls the ISO through seemingly fortuitous and massive participation in every national standards bodies forming the ISO, and the ISO’s JTC 1 seems to have decided that the world should be content with some sort of ODF 1.1 “plus plus”. Note that this ODF 1.1 is not a bad thing in itself, but it is very much the result of connivings against ODF and everything non-Microsoft. You never should bite the hand that feeds you, after all…
• The lpOD project, already well underway, will be a success and might become one of the main references for the ODF ecosystem.
• Second Life, the largest online virtual world or metaverse will have to innovate again, or will lose its customers progressively to the new show in town, “Blue Mars“.
• It’s almost becoming a cliché, but cloud computing will again be part of the hype in 2010 and gain a strong momentum on the market. Among many challenges, there is the fundamental need for portability and openness of the users’ data, its control by these very users, and more generally the increasingly clear divide between centralized and decentralized data architecture. In the end, this will become political, and as important, if not more, than the freedome to code and its sharing.
• In the aftermath of the Bilski case, there seems to be a consensus that the criteria for “software patentability” will be much more demanding in the U.S. Of course, a few illuminated curmudgeons inside the European sphere of power, influenced by pro-patent lobbieswill fight hard to implement software patents in its whole horror. But in the end, what we need to do is not being satisfied with raising the bar on patentability criteria, we need to get the message straight and clear that software patents are not acceptable anywhere. ACTA anyone?
• Arch Linux will continue its growth among technical and power users (I’m one of them) while Ubuntu will stagnate (unless Canonical opens its online media store), OpenSuse somewhat loses users, Fedora will grow its userbase, Mandriva will make a strong comeback if they manage to secure their business. How do I know all this? I’ve been in the Linux distributions business, punditry and expertise for quite some time (since 2002, actually) and if there’s something you can count on over the long term, it’s… the Distrowatch billboard. This thing has never proved to be really wrong. I’ll cover more of these topics in 2010. Meanwhile, have a great New Year’s Eve and a happy new year to you!

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Just back from the OOoCon I was taking some times reading my email and I am afraid what I saw does not push me into believing that Microsoft has amended much of its ways. I guess we cannot do much about it, and it’s Halloween season anyway.

• Just when we thought the European Commission was leading the way in getting rid of proprietary and foreign technology, helping Europe master its digital independence, the second draft of the EIF v2 (European Interoperability Framework) got leaked last week.  The draft contents are nothing short of appalling. Open Standards are simply erased from the document and Open Source seems to be considered as some shameful condition that needs to be discarded as a possible option for the European digital infrastructure, and reading in between the lines one may get the perception that it might just all be easier in a pure Microsoft environment. I understand that some people are whispering in the corner that Jonathan Zuck stands again behind the leak, but I really have no opinion on that. Go figure who leaks the leaks. Anyway, this might keep some of its credibility if we are to believe this representative of the Polish government, who basically explains that the leaked draft is, well, not a draft but something that does not seem to emanate from the Commission. Here and there outraged reactions have been heard. The good folks at OpenForum Europe who are usually known for their moderation, have spelled it out quite clearly in this press release. Another reaction from another insider in Brussels is also quite telling of a situation where entire pieces of legislation are being hijacked by the will of lobbies while the citizens of the European Union would like more control over the Union’s growingly opaque policy making structures. Basic mental and political sanity would recommend that this leak was actually a leak of a real draft of the EIF or another manipulation by some lobbies pushing an anti-competitive agenda by sabotaging open standards and open source.
• If that weren’t enough, Jomar Silva from the ODF Alliance Brazil has posted its latest revelations about the infamous Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) on OOXML in Geneva and how Alex Brown, its dubious convener, did everything to stop some delegations asking some interesting questions. It is amazing to see how international processes can be bent towards one and the same goal.

Halloween season, I tell you…

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I don’t know if you, dear readers, have gotten this feeling recently; some people around the blogosphere seem to want to bring back the old troll of open source vs. free software. I would not really mind if these people were not prominent bloggers, journalists and professionals. After all , the old rant on “open source is business, free software is freedom” has been around for a long time.

This time however, I am afraid I don’t understand why people like Matt Asay keep on bringing this discussion back on the table. Perhaps Matt Asay wants to look reasonable, business-minded, or simply pettable by the grand corporations of this low world. I am merely conjecturing here. But Matt’s blog is becoming thoroughly disappointing.

First this old discussion is, well, as old as Free Software and Open Source themselves. It disappoints me that Matt would want to recycle old stuff for an obscure reason. Really: Open Source vs. Free Software, let’s write something old, like, “oh those free software zealots”, and these open source darlings. How much easier could this get for anyone now to join the CNet staff?  Next rant: what size do you think Richard Stallman’s beard should be? Who in the FLOSS (note the Free/Libre & Open Source Software acronym) community does still buy into the fiction that open source people do business (and are, therefore, serious) while free software hacktivists (let’s refuse them the simple notion that they could be regular people with jobs or even a company to run) are dangerous extremists whose grand master lives somewhere in Kandahar Boston.

Second, and that’s what I do find really disturbing about this discussion: Since when do people like Matt Asay feel empowered to tell an entire community of people that 1) they don’t know how to work or make money 2) what they should do and think about values such as freedom? I think Matt’s points concerning open source marketing are quite misplaced. He is really telling us that CIOs don’t care about freedom and care about good old fashioned value. He’s probably right, but it also depends on how you define freedom. You can have a fully open source enterprise software, but be the only one to provide support and outsource its development to China. Where’s the freedom in that? Where’s the choice for customers? Where’s the genuine attention to provide something valuable in return for a fair price? It’s nowhere to be seen, and that’s very much what people care about when they buy open source solutions. No one cares about a source code that is undocumented, not understandable, not maintained but that comes with heavy support fees.  That’s Casino Open Source. I’m disappointed Matt seems to have taken that path and frankly enough, I know proprietary software solutions offering better value than that.

What’s more, barriers to freedom exist in ways that we constantly need to discover and take into account. How does Matt handle issues stemming from joint copyright submissions for instance? I hear no word of that. How does Matt advertise the existence of FLOSS to people? Matt rather seems to be ignoring them. It might be said that once you wrote “people”, the word freedom isn’t usually far off the corner. So let’s take Mozilla marketing for instance: I don’t think that telling people about freedom has hurt them a lot. Instead of this, Matt Asay has decided to tell the world that freedom was definitely a dangerous idea to use. We should therefore think about money, value for the money and customers. The rest, according to this interesting doctrine, is non-existant.

I will try not to add anything else to what has struck me as being largely a one-way debate. What I would like to do, however, is to try to offer a -hopefully- more innovative way to look at both Free Software and Open Source in my next post. Full disclosure: I don’t believe Open Source and Free Software can be separated, both organically and historically. These are two sides of the same coins, and you can’t have one without having the other. Until then… always be aware of the people splitting hair in half.

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I remember that a while ago, as I was attending a heated debate on the (in)famous standardization of OOXML. As we were arguing with Microsoft on some specification details, I happened to state all aloud that when it came to this level of security (the topic at hand was security), I had my concerns about the encryption algorithms used by the specification but that in a general sense, security relied much more on the application using the format and the underlying operating system’s level of security. I went on to say that for the specific portion of the draft we were studying, it was perhaps not necessary to waste time in fruitless discussion topics including the behavior of OOXML documents in a computer undergoing a nuclear attack and being stored on a computer facing a zero-day exploit at the same time.

The response from one of the Microsoft spokesperson (I’m coining the term spokesperson, because that’s what most of them were) was a mix of surprise and sarcasm: “Everything happens, today you agreed with us!”. And indeed, I agreed that we should continue to parse the 6000 pages-long draft.

Looking back at this small anecdote today I cannot help thinking about the announcement of the 14^th of September: Microsoft launched a foundation to host open source software. Regardless of what we may think of this move, I think we just have to step back and consider what an odd situation we have come to experience. What would this foundation entail? Poison? Divide and conquer? Or just a grumpy admission by Redmond that this industry has evolved after all, and that there is no way trying to go against the tide?

I will not provide an in-depth analysis of the few elements that are known to the public about the Codeplex foundation. Andy Updegrove has already written a wonderfully detailed post on his blog.

It is important at first to explain that we stand at a very specific point in time, where most of what we know about the Codeplex foundation, its governance, its structure and perhaps even its goals, is but of a temporary nature. This new entity has an interim board, we know who is the main and only sponsor, we know from what and where the foundation stems (Microsoft and its codeplex code repository) but besides that the rest is subject to change. Therefore it will be a bit difficult for me to draw a conclusion on the secret and not so secret goals of this foundation, and even more difficult to guess whether Microsoft has truly amended its ways. On the latter question, I don’t think it has. But that’s almost off topic for now. Going back to our former issue, it would be very easy for me to point out that almost everyone on the board of the foundation is either a Microsoft employee or someone with strong economic (and probably sometimes ideological) ties to Microsoft. This is not something that will make the Codeplex foundation look trustworthy to many. Miguel de Icaza might develop free software, his actions and the general sense of his projects have definitely tagged him, at the very least, as someone with a very exclusive sense of what free and open source software mean.

All this is so far very easy to write. But I don’t think we should understand the Codeplex foundation to be a simple reunion of Microsoft “and its minions in the open source community”. Frankly speaking, it does ring a bit cheesy and once again, too little detail is known about this project. I understand, on the other hand, that the website called codeplex has been around for quite some time and is still acting as a code repository for open source and not open source software tied to the Microsoft ecosystem and technologies. The very existence of this repository has never ruffled many feathers inside the free and open source software community, regardless of the success Microsoft claims its website to have.

Establishing a foundation on top of this online repository may then raise questions. There is a general, albeit perhaps paranoid, sense that what is being attempted here is nothing short than some sort of grand divide of the free and open source software community between the “pro-Microsoft” and the “pro-whatever-you-name-it”. I have given some thought to this, and regardless of whether some actually do have this goal in mind or not, I think this plan is doomed to fail.

First, one has to realize that what happened with Novell was a serious attack against free and open source software, but although it was serious, it never really had any major impact on the community itself. What I mean by this is not that it did not have any real and damageable impact on IT companies or OEMs that ended up signing phony IPR deals with Microsoft. I mean by this that when you step back, you end up realizing that even the divide it caused inside the community is not that big. There is no one “Novell Community” and one “FSF Community”. That simply never existed except perhaps in the mind of some Mono architects. Even the Ximian bunch is very much on its own; influential because of monthly salaries, and time to devout to their pet projects and an historical ties to Gnome. But aside this, the impact of the Novell agreement with Microsoft did not create the “grand schism” many feared or wished at that time.

Of course I’m not considering technical or commercial realities here, I’m only talking about free and open source software in general. Back to the theories around the Codeplex foundation: I don’t think you can divide an already intangible, present and yet evanescent community with a foundation and a repository. So few people understand that in order to entice other people to contribute to your project you have to walk the line, be truly open and give them a sense of appropriation of the project they’re working on. In other words, if what the Codeplex foundation is about promoting phony software projects, it will fail in the long run to harm the free and open source software movement. If this foundation’s trade is about playing games and not developing software that comes with freedom to the users and developers in a sense that has best been described by the FSF, I don’t think anyone, except corporate minions, will be interested in it.

But if the Codeplex foundation is really about developing software, and free or open source software at that, then… what should this be bad news? I do sound willingly positive here: I should perhaps mention truly free and open source software; no patent bomb, trap, games being played in the dark (although that does exist elsewhere, obviously); what is wanted here is an honest deal, not an apple and a snake dancing around it.

Given the founder of the foundation, I am quite sure it will have so much scrutiny that it will be condemned to be have, or disappear.

Several elements, however, make me think Microsoft is trying to achieve something different, and I feel a bit puzzled by this. Reading into the announcement: “ […] the CodePlex Foundation was created as a forum in which open source communities and the software development community can come together with the shared goal of increasing participation in open source community projects. The CodePlex Foundation will complement existing open source foundations and organizations, providing a forum in which best practices and shared understanding can be established by a broad group of participants, both software companies and open source communities. […]”.

So the Codeplex foundation does not seem to be a mere placeholder for code; it seems to be some kind of meeting place to share best practices andinformation. I note the strange comparison of terms: “a forum in which the open source communities and the software development community can come together”. One more little effort, Microsoft, you will end up writing “proprietary” software development. But I digress. This foundation strikes me then as being something different from what we know. All of a sudden, it’s not Sourceforge vs. Codeplex, not one model vs. another one. It calls for a joining together and a better communication, a sharing, yes, sharing not being an usual word for Microsoft, of best practices. What to do with that?

Let’s read further and check the first answer of the FAQ: “ […] We believe that commercial software companies and the developers that work for them under-participate in open source projects. Some of the reasons are cultural, some have to do with differing software development methodologies, and some have to do with differing views about copyrights and patents. In general, we are going to work to close these gaps. Specifically we aim to work with particular projects that can serve as best practice exemplars of how commercial software companies and open source communities can effectively collaborate. […]”

That is, I believe, the essence of the Codeplex foundation that is described here. Forget the code for a moment, and you might come to the conclusion that either Microsoft wants to impose its views on patents and copyrights, or it genuinely wants to have a fruitful conversation with the free and open source software community. The former is only surprising as it shows a different approach, but if that’s what they’re looking to achieve I am afraid that unless this foundation comes out with the most radically innovative ideas in the field of IPR, it will fail, for the first reason I outlined much above: Nobody will follow them, except people and constituencies who have an economic incentive to do that. What is left, then, if not the latter hypothesis? Interesting times are ahead of us in this case.

I am afraid, however, that the people interested in “ closing the gaps” are not going to be many. Who might be interested? Microsoft should better do its homework alone; I don’t see who might help it. By “closing the gaps”, Microsoft may be displaying a change of attitude that many have asked for, but what the company is essentially offering to the world is to serve as a crutch while it’s trying to fix itself. But who needs a crutch when one can walk perfectly?

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