LWN.net Weekly Edition for February 28, 2008

A Beijing trip report

China would seem like an ideal environment for free software. The Chinese have a need for vast amounts of software as their country rapidly industrializes, they have reasons to prefer software which is not controlled by American corporations, and they have been coming under some pressure from those same corporations to do something about their little habit of copying proprietary software without much regard for details like license agreements. Free software offers them the ability to take control of their own software, make sure it lacks unwelcome surprises, and copy it as much as they like. And China has been making a lot of use of Linux and free software, but, as is the case with many Asian countries, China's presence in the development community is relatively small.

Encouraging participation from Asian countries has been a goal of the Linux Foundation for some time; one result of that is the series of symposiums held in Japan over the last few years. Now, for the first time, the Foundation has extended this series to China. On February 19 and 20, the first Linux Developer Symposium China was held in Beijing. This event was organized in cooperation with the China Open Source Promotion Union (COPU). Your editor had the privilege of speaking at this meeting.

This was not the kind of developer-oriented gathering that one might expect to find in many other parts of the world. Far too many suits and ties, for example. Often the focus of the event appeared to be the creation of photo opportunities while people (who were not developers) gave speeches. In general, it was organized in a mode of talking to the participants, rather than talking with them. The agenda makes this clear: 17 speakers on the first day, with only one break (for lunch). The talks were well received by a sellout crowd, but there was not a lot of opportunity for people to talk.

The second day featured a round table discussion and a set of BOF sessions. The round table was interesting, though it focused on issues which are not necessarily development oriented: Linux adoption in mobile devices, competing with pirated copies of Windows, etc. The BOF was, in many ways, the most interesting part of the whole event; this was where participants could find people with similar interests and simply ask questions. Your editor fielded questions on security modules, the kevent interface, community participation in Asia, language issues, and more. Chinese developers, like their Japanese counterparts, seem to be reluctant to ask questions in front of a large group. But, in a closer situation, the floodgates open and all kinds of questions come out.

Unfortunately, the second day was open only to a small subset of the conference attendees, and that subset was heavy on the managerial side. So a lot of people who could have benefited most from the BOF session were not there.

One topic which never came up - until your editor raised it briefly at the round table session - was license compliance. For the most part, it does not seem to be on the radar there. Your editor was told that GPL violations are common with products which are sold in the Chinese market but not exported elsewhere; the people involved can assume, with seemingly good reason, that nobody will take them to court. There is also a fair amount of driver work being done for companies in other countries; once the code is shipped the original developers forget about it and move on to the next project. Quite a bit of that code never makes it into the mainline.

This sort of activity fails to give back to the community which provided Linux in the first place. But it also hurts the developers involved. They do not become part of the community, do not get recognition for their work, and miss the opportunity to learn from others. During the press conference on the first day, it was noted that Chinese companies are having a hard time hiring Linux developers, and that more training opportunities would be a good thing. Your editor felt the need to point out that, of all the people working in free software projects, very few of them are specifically trained to do so. It's more a matter of individual initiative. Training is good, but the training received in Chinese universities should be more than adequate for those looking to get involved with free software.

Andrew Morton took that theme further by pointing out that, rather than complaining about difficulties in hiring, these companies would be better off encouraging community participation and skills development within their existing staff. That would be more productive than chasing the same small set of developers that everybody else is trying to hire. On the second day, Dave Neary made the crucial point that community participation is something that individuals - not companies - do. There are a lot of companies worldwide which have a hard time understanding how free software development works, and China is no exception.

One last note on hiring free software hackers. Your editor ran across this article, which states:

In such a situation (assuming the claim is true - something your editor cannot vouch for), finding developers who are able and willing to learn how to hack on free software should not be that hard.

Meanwhile, your editor was struck by the energy and initiative shown by the Beijing Linux Users Group, which helped with many aspects of the event. BLUG is busily organizing gatherings and creating a local community out of Beijing's hackers. A real spark is glowing there; it will be interesting to see how that group develops in the near future.

All told, the event was a clear success. It was a proper media event which raised the profile of Linux in China and showed that Linux developers care enough about the country to pay a visit. A mixture of local and imported developers were able to present their work to an attentive and interested audience. The discussions brought developers closer and, hopefully, sent them away with interesting things on their "to do" lists. And, importantly, the visiting developers learned something about China that goes beyond the proper technique for eating Peking Duck or the effort required to climb the Great Wall (or to circumvent the rather obnoxious great firewall). With luck, we have a better understanding of what developers are up to in that part of the world and how we can help them to participate fully in our projects. And that can only be a good thing.

(Some pictures from the event have been posted. Unbelievable numbers of photos were taken, so more can be expected to surface at some point. But, under no circumstances should anyone look at the scurrilous photo posted by Andrew Morton.)

Comments (18 posted)

Ten-year timeline part 6: almost to the present

Part 5 of this increasingly long series stopped in March, 2004, when BitMover loudly proclaimed that the use of BitKeeper had doubled the pace of kernel development. This installment picks up from there, looking at a year when BitKeeper remained in the news, the SCO case was in progress, software patents became more threatening, and more.

• April 8, 2004: The first X.org release. SELinux shows up in a Fedora Core 2 test release. Red Hat v. SCO is put on indefinite hold (where it remains to this day). Anti-software-patent demonstrations are held in Europe.

This week featured some important news. The launch of X.org signaled the resurrection of Linux desktop work and the beginning of a much more interesting and promising era. Meanwhile, Fedora took the lead in pushing SELinux-based mandatory access control technology into a general-purpose system. That work is still very much in progress nearly four years later, but, like it or not, SELinux has become an important part of our defensive arsenal.

• April 15, 2004: The 2.6.6 kernel gains POSIX message queues, filesystem speedups, internal API changes, laptop mode, 4K stacks, auditing, the CFQ I/O scheduler, and more. Sun and Microsoft make a $2 billion deal. Lindows becomes Linspire.

• April 22, 2004: Linspire files to go public. BayStar tells SCO it wants its money back.

• April 29, 2004: Gentoo founder Daniel Robbins leaves the project.

Something else which was going on during this time was a rising level of discontent over the management of the Fedora project, which was not turning out to be the open community that many had hoped for. Pause for a moment and revisit this classic dialog posted by Konstantin Ryabitsev, which so clearly documented how the situation was seen by the community at that time. Fedora has come a long way since then.

• May 20, 2004: The European Council approves the software patent directive, sending it back to the Parliament for final passage.

Remember: the directive approved by the Council was the original version which legitimized software patents, not the version amended by the Parliament which did not. Thus started the final (so far) round in the fight against European software patents - a round which we eventually won.

• May 27, 2004: The kernel adopts the Signed-off-by: convention. The 2.6.7 kernel gains scheduling domains, the object-based reverse mapping VM, filtered wakeups, and more.

The thing to remember here is that 2.6 was alleged to be a stable kernel series, and everybody was still waiting for 2.7 to start. Linus defended the massive VM changes with the claim that they were, in fact, an "implementation detail." The realization that the kernel development process had, in fact, already changed did not come through until...

• July 22, 2004: The "new" kernel development process is adopted.

This kernel summit decision - which, among other things, said that there would be no 2.7 kernel - surprised almost everybody. Certainly there have been some issues since then, but nobody really wants to go back to the old, pre-2.6 days.

• August 5, 2004: Open Source Risk Management funds a study showing that the kernel infringes on 283 patents, offers patent suit insurance. SCO Forum is held, featuring a keynote by Rob Enderle; the rest of the world looks on incredulously. The Munich Linux deployment is put on hold as a result of software patent fears.

• August 19, 2004: Lindows gives up on its IPO. The 2.6.8.1 kernel is released.

There were interesting cross-currents happening at this time. On the one hand, companies like Open Source Risk Management were trying to use SCO as a way to scare companies (and individual developers) into buying its insurance offerings. On the other, there was a hallucinogenic aspect to the SCO Forum discussions that escaped nobody; SCO's time of being taken seriously by the wider world was already done.

It's worth noting that OSRM still exists, but its insurance offering now is for companies worried about GPL-infringement suits.

Meanwhile, 2.6.8.1 was the first three-dot kernel release ever; it was rushed out in response to an unpleasant, last-minute bug in 2.6.8.

• August 26, 2004: IBM brings GPL-infringement charges against SCO. LWN fails to reproduce the posted reiser4 filesystem benchmarks, gets in trouble with Namesys.

• September 16, 2004: Sun announces plans to open-source Solaris. OSDL and the Free Standards Group announce a plan for cooperation on the Linux Standard Base.

OSDL and the FSG were, at this point, separate groups which, at times, almost seemed to be in competition with each other. Those days, of course, are no more: the two have since merged and become the Linux Foundation.

• September 23, 2004: the Ubuntu distribution announces its existence.

Who would have thought that one could create a major new distribution in 2004? One might well wonder whether the situation is any less open now.

• October 7, 2004: the bnetd developers lose their DMCA case. Concerns about kernel quality are expressed. Microsoft's FAT patent is overturned.

• October 14, 2004: Novell says it will use its patents "as appropriate" to defend free software projects against patent attacks. Jeff Merkey offers $50,000 for the right to take the kernel proprietary. The realtime preemption patch set gets started.

• October 21, 2004: the first Ubuntu release (4.10) comes out. Busybox 1.0 is released at last. Mozilla begins fund raising to advertise Firefox in the New York Times.

• November 11, 2004: Firefox 1.0 is released. Novell gets $500 million in anti-trust cash from Microsoft.

The Firefox 1.0 release was, in a very real sense, the much-delayed culmination of the process which began back in 1998, when Netscape announced that it would be releasing its code. Firefox was almost seven years in the making, but, sometimes, late really is better than never. Even those of us who use a different browser should be thankful for the effect Firefox has had toward the creation of a standard-compliant web and a competitive environment for web browsers.

• November 18, 2004: the Linux Core Consortium is formed by Conectiva, MandrakeSoft, Progeny, and Turbolinux.

• December 2, 2004: MandrakeSoft turns a profit.

Whether it's called United Linux, the Linux Core Consortium, or Manbo-Labs, this is an idea which returns on occasion: pool effort on the creation of a base distribution so that each player can concentrate their differentiation efforts on the higher levels. It often seems not to work, though. It is hard to compete with more community-based distributions through the establishment of a base platform by corporate fiat. It seems that the true "base" distributions have names like Debian or Fedora.

• January 13, 2005: Debian runs afoul of the Mozilla trademark policy. The European Parliament attempts to restart the software patent discussion from the beginning.

• January 27, 2005: Sun starts releasing Solaris code under the CDDL.

• February 3, 2005: The Software Freedom Law Center is founded. Eben Moglen starts talking about GPLv3. Russ Nelson becomes the president of the Open Source Initiative - briefly.

• February 10, 2005: IBM's requests for summary judgment in the SCO case are dismissed - temporarily - by Judge Kimball. BitKeeper flame wars return, this time about the locking-up of history metadata and license-based prohibitions on its extraction.

The locking-up of metadata within BitKeeper was a sore point even for developers who had accepted BitKeeper in general. Larry McVoy was unsympathetic, though, stating that he was operating within his rights. This episode was the beginning of the end for BitKeeper and the kernel.

• March 3, 2005: MandrakeSoft acquires Conectiva. The European Commission ignores the European Parliament's request to restart the software patent directive process.

• March 10, 2005: Kernel quality concerns lead to the creation of the -stable tree.

Those quality concerns are not gone now, though they have diminished somewhat. The -stable tree seemed like an experiment at the time, but it has proved successful and is still being produced almost three years later.

• April 7, 2005: The BitKeeper era comes to an abrupt end when the free-beer license for the software is terminated by BitMover. (Unfounded) rumors about a merger between UserLinux and Ubuntu circulate.

• April 14, 2005: Linus posts the first version of git. MandrakeSoft becomes Mandriva.

The termination of free-beer BitKeeper was probably inevitable from the very beginning of its existence; trying to maintain a closed system with proprietary data formats in the middle of a highly open process was always a losing proposition. For some time, many of us had feared that it could end in a much uglier way than it actually played out. We, the community, had danced on some thin ice for a while, but, when it broke, the water was only ankle-deep. We got lucky.

As your editor has said before, BitKeeper did us a lot of good by bringing order to the kernel development process when things had been working very poorly, and by showing the world what distributed revision control could do. It set the stage for what came after. Git was not the first free distributed revision control system, but it was the first to be employed on such a massive scale. In a real sense, git launched a new era of free software development.

On that note, this article will end - and, probably, the retrospective series ends as well. As events become more recent, the difficulty of putting them into historical perspective gets greater. A retrospective covering the remaining 2+ years risks becoming a repeat of the annual timelines and adding little of value. That period is best left for the 20-year retrospective.

So, the entire LWN staff would like to say "thanks!" one last time to our readers, who have treated us so well for the last ten years. It has been an incredible ride.

Comments (32 posted)

Interoperating with Microsoft

Last week, with much fanfare, Microsoft announced a change in its practices in order to "expand interoperability". It is a rather sizable shift away from some of its previous inflammatory statements about free software—though it scrupulously avoids that term—but whether it is the harbinger of a more open Microsoft, or yet another empty pronouncement, is still unclear. It does contain things of interest to the community, in particular the patent enumeration, but there are pitfalls as well.

The largest chunk of what Microsoft promises is documentation for APIs and protocols used by some of their most popular products. They immediately released some 30,000 pages of Windows protocol specifications, much of which the Samba project had to pay to access last December. In addition, they will be releasing documentation suitable for developers wishing to interoperate with "Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, and future versions of all these products."

Microsoft has also promised to list which of the documented protocols are covered by one of its patents or patent applications. We may finally start to get a handle on the infamous "235 patents" that Linux and free software supposedly infringe. These patents will be available for license on the standard "reasonable and non-discriminatory" (RAND) terms, with an interesting addition: "low royalty rates". The patent list is not yet available, but may be of use in ways that Microsoft does not intend; invalidating some of the patents with prior art for example.

As Microsoft is well aware, RAND terms are a non-starter for free software because they restrict redistribution of the code. The company has tried to soften that blow, perhaps, by rehashing its "covenant not to sue" developers that originated as part of the Novell interoperability agreement. The covenant may be a great public relations ploy, but does little to alleviate concerns that free software developers will have in implementing patented protocols. It is the rare developer who finds an itch to develop code to talk to Microsoft servers and who has no thought of using or distributing it commercially.

There are also provisions in the announcement for documentation of Microsoft implementations of industry standards. A cynic might wonder why additional information is needed, they are, after all, supposed to be standards. The unfortunate reality is that Microsoft does extend such standards for its own purposes in incompatible ways; having that kind of information can only help web browsers, directory services, and other multi-platform tools.

For a company as adamantly opposed to Open Document Format (ODF) as it claims to be, it is a bit surprising to see that they plan changes to Microsoft Office to "promote user choice among document formats". APIs for document format plug-ins along with the ability for users to make their own choice about the default save format will be added. How reasonable those APIs are and how faithfully they can encapsulate Office documents will be an interesting test of both Microsoft's sincerity and ODF's capabilities. It is also a pretty clear attempt to at least appear to be playing nicely with ODF while its competing OOXML format is being considered for an ISO standard.

There are also various platitudes about "opening dialogs" and "expanding outreach" with the community included in the announcement. It will be interesting to see how that actually plays out. It is, however, hard to imagine even a year ago seeing a posting on a Microsoft-sponsored site entitled "How open source has influenced Windows Server 2008". In less than seven years, we have moved from a "cancer" to influencing its flagship products.

One obvious conclusion that can be drawn from this and other Microsoft initiatives is that it is feeling a fair amount of pressure from customers, the European Union, standards groups, and free software. These kinds of changes, even if they don't go as far as the rhetoric would lead one to believe, are a pretty substantial shift in Microsoft culture and thinking. Unfortunately, they do also seem to be angling for the long-sought "Linux tax"—a payment, even just a small one, for each and every Linux deployment.

So far, Microsoft doesn't seem to have caught on to the idea that most Linux installations are free in both senses of the term. There is no per-installation, per-processor, per-core licensing stream to tap into. One of the headaches that free software users avoid is keeping track of all those licenses, enforced by the ever-present threat of a Business Software Alliance audit. It has, to a limited extent, already tapped into—and likely tapped out—that revenue from the deals with Novell and other distributors.

Overall, this seems like a positive step. It clearly acknowledges the role that free software (or open source if you prefer) is playing in both the commercial marketplace and the marketplace of ideas. The actual effects of this announcement for our community may be small, but it may also be indicative of Microsoft moving in a more cooperative direction. That would be a rather nice thing to see.

Comments (none posted)

Page editor: Jonathan Corbet

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition

• Security: Cascading security updates; New vulnerabilities in acroread, clamav, qemu, wordpress,...
• Kernel: Early merging of drivers; Tracing memory-mapped I/O operations; The state of Nouveau, part 2.
• Distributions: A brief look at some distribution news; Foresight GNOME Edition 2.0 Alpha 4; Ubuntu Hardy Alpha 5; Interview with NetworkManager developer Dan Williams
• Development: The Linux Desktop Testing Project reaches the 1.0.0 release, PyChess Philidor developments, Ryzom.org State of the Game, Emacs gets new maintainer, new versions of rsplib, CUPS, Sonic Visualiser, Gmsh, LyX, UrJTAG, LedgerSMB, Wine, Claws Mail, Staden Package, Dictionary Maker, GNU Classpath, IT++, GIT.
• Press: SELinux blocks real-world exploits, Janice Honeyman-Buck's talk at HIMSS, KDE PIM Team meeting, Alan Cox interview, Tristan Nitot interview, Kommander Leaps Forward.
• Announcements: GNOME Foundation funds accessibility projects, FSFE on Microsoft interoperability pledge, Open Solutions Alliance turns 1, Microsoft to promote interoperability, SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service, Sun completes MySQL acquisition, Timesys Announces Embedded Linux Support for Atmel AT91SAM9RL Microcontrollers, Radeon R5xx 3D programming guide, LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice awards, EFF Pioneer Awards, SourceForge Community Choice Awards, Linux System and Network Administration BootCamp, Workshop on Open Source Software for Computer and Network Forensics cfp, FUDCon announced, LAC2008 final countdown, LugRadio Live USA 2008, MySQL Conf keynotes, Music made with Linux.

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