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LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 10, 2003Linux best practices for suits Pronouncements from the Gartner Group have long been a good source of amusement (and anger) in the free software community. Gartner has often looked down on free software, claiming that it is not suitable for business use. Over the years, however, Gartner's position has softened. Their latest proclamation takes a different tack altogether. Now, rather than avoiding Linux, companies are advised to set up proper policies and "best practices." Some of their suggestions actually make some sense.So what approach does Gartner suggest for the suits in the corner office? The highlights are:
Perhaps the most significant point in all the above is that Gartner is advising companies to learn how to work with the free software development community. Free software is not just another shrink-wrapped product you buy from a store shelf or cologne-soaked salesman. It is the product of an active community which must be dealt with in its own way. Companies that work well with the development community will have a far better experience with that community's software. That is good advice.
The RIAA strikes back The next stage of the copyright wars has begun: the RIAA has filed suit against four university students alleging massive copyright infringement and asking for tens of millions of dollars in damages. That's the sort of action that can make a serious dent in an undergraduate student's beer budget. But these cases have a wider significance which merits a look.The four complaints (which can be found over here) share the same basic form and, indeed, much of the same language. The first claim is that the defendants are directly making copyrighted materials available on the net for copying. This act looks like a fairly strightforward copyright violation, so the RIAA - if it can prove its case - probably has a legitimate complaint there. Copyright is the law of the land, and it's important (the GPL relies on copyright law). If you directly violate copyrights, you should not be too surprised if the owners of those copyrights decide they want to have a talk with you. But the RIAA does not (yet) go after every student who makes a few MP3 files available. These defendants were chosen because, in each case, they published an index of files available on a campus network. Through this act, according to the RIAA:
Defendant has hijacked an academic computer network and installed
on it a marketplace for copyright piracy that is used by others to
copy and distribute music illegally.... Defendant has taken a
network created for higher learning and academic pursuits and
converted it into an emporium of music piracy where copyright
infringement is simplified down to the click of a computer mouse.
In all four cases, the actual distribution of files in this "emporium of music piracy" was performed by others. The defendants just created an index to enable others to find those files. In at least one case, the index included all publicly-available files, not just music files. The defendants, in other words, are being sued for creating a search engine. This is the point where the RIAA has crossed the line. Rather than go after people who are actually violating copyrights, they are launching million-dollar lawsuits to shut down indexing services. Once again, linking becomes a crime. This is a direct attack on basic freedoms: it is no longer possible to make an index of files available on a network, since some of them might just be copyrighted. No cost is too high, it seems, to save the recording industry from the modern world. The cost is too high, however. The free software community (and much of the rest of the world) depends on freedom of information flow to function. Every time we are told that we cannot make links, or create an index, or release a bit of scary code our freedoms are reduced and our community functions a little less well. You don't have to be a music trader to feel threatened by that. (See also: Joseph Barillari's analysis of the complaint against Dan Peng).
Five years of Mozilla [This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier] It's hard to believe that it's been five years since Netscape released the source code for what was supposed to be Netscape Communicator 5.0 under the Netscape Public License (NPL), and less than a year since Mozilla 1.0 went "gold." In that time, Microsoft has managed to dominate the browser market, Netscape got swallowed up by AOL and the Mozilla project has tackled milestone after milestone to deliver an Open Source browser — though perhaps not as quickly as many would have liked. More than 200,000 bug reports later, the Mozilla project has put out an excellent browser and a codebase that's being used in a wide array of Open Source and commercial applications. Perhaps even more important than the code itself, Netscape's decision to plunge into Open Source helped to bring the Open Source debate further out into the, well, open. The decision to pursue Open Source was made when relatively few people had heard about this thing called Linux. You could say that Mozilla is more than the sum of its parts, especially when you consider all that's been done with those parts. Mozilla's Gecko, which replaced the original Netscape layout engine, is being used in the proprietary Netscape offering, AOL's Mac OS X client, a native Mac OS X browser called Camino, the popular Galeon browser and several other projects. It's also being used in products like ActiveState's Komodo, an IDE for Perl, PHP, Python and other popular Open Source languages. The project has also designed a cross-platform installer (XPInstall), a Document Object Model (DOM) Inspector, and several development tools that are now being used on projects wholly unrelated to Web browsers. The Bugzilla bug tracking system is used by quite a few Open Source projects (and possibly by a few commercial companies behind closed doors). Bonsai and Tinderbox are also by-products of the Mozilla effort that are being widely used elsewhere. Mozilla's wealth of features has also attracted some criticism. Some feel that Mozilla, with its huge array of options, is too slow and bloated. Apple's decision to use KHTML rather than Gecko in the Safari browser didn't go unnoticed, either. In the article "Browser Innovation, Gecko and the Mozilla Project," Mozilla's Chief Lizard Wrangler, Mitchell Baker, writes:
Some see this as traumatic or as a mark of doom... We would have
preferred to have Apple use Gecko or collaborate with us on the
development of the Camino browser, but providing an alternative to an
OS-sponsored browser is nothing new to us. The key goal of the Mozilla
project is to help keep content on the web open and help keep access to
that content from being controlled by a single source. Apple's decision
to ship a browser based on an open source rendering engine, with a focus
on standards compliance, is a good thing for the big picture goal.
Judging by the project's recently-updated development roadmap, the Mozilla folks have taken the criticism seriously. The new mission for Mozilla might be summed up as "do less, but better" and a move away from the "swiss army knife" approach. The new development roadmap calls for a switch from the current browser component to the standalone (soon to be renamed) Phoenix browser and an increased focus on the Minotaur mail component. It also calls for a move away from the 1.0 branch to the 1.4 branch when 1.4 becomes stable. More importantly, though less visible to the majority of Mozilla's users, is the change in the development model. The current model is being replaced by a meritocracy where a few project "drivers" will be responsible for particular components of the project. From the roadmap:
It is time for Mozilla to "return to normalcy": great software is
originated by one or a few hackers building up and leading a larger team
of people who test, clean up, extend, and grow to join or replace the
first few. Code review, like testing, is an auditing procedure that
cannot make excellent code from mediocre input.
The end goal, according to the new roadmap, is to produce a simpler browser with the potential to have advanced functionality through optional toolkit applications. Kind of an a la carte browser, if you will where additional components can be added easily — but are not required. This should be a big win for proponents of a scaled-down browser. Mozilla 1.4 alpha was released on April 1st (no, really), and the final 1.4 release is likely around the end of May or beginning of June. The ideal release date for 1.4 is given as May 21, but we all know about ideal release dates. The alpha for 1.4 actually seems very stable, and faster than previous versions of Mozilla, at least based on my experience over the past week or so. If the project sticks to the proposed roadmap, the next five years look very good for Mozilla.
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
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