So what do the proponents of Oracle's acquisition of Sun think now?

Posted Aug 13, 2010 21:02 UTC (Fri) by hingo (guest, #14792)
In reply to: So what do the proponents of Oracle's acquisition of Sun think now? by vblum
Parent article: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android (ars technica)

I had already decided to stay away from this thread, but since it goes directly back to the Oracle-Sun merger case, I will make a few statements to complement Florian.

Disclaimer: I'm currently on a long paternity leave from Monty's company, where we develop MariaDB, a MySQL fork. Before my leave I worked as COO and worked together with Florian during the process. We used Florian as our EU competition policy advisor, for one because he is a leading expert in Europe in this area, but also because he worked with MySQL AB and thus knew the history very well. (Better than most other "advisors" I saw in Brussels, have to say.) The position paper discussed on Groklaw and now here was mainly authored by Florian and submitted in our name, as part of this engagement. We only retained Florian for some specific occasions, on and off, the other submissions were mainly authored by myself, using Florian's initial crash course into competition regulation best I could. (We are a small company, so this was the best compromise solution for us.)

At the moment there is no affiliation between Florian and myself or our company.

Then for the comment: Hm. PJ's criticism appeared to be that you were trying to get the license of MySQL changed away from GPL. At least that's how I understood her.

Like Florian already said, this is what PJ wants you to understand, and it is completely wrong. The position paper is public, and you can see we do not endorse license change as something that would solve competition concerns. Since this became such a hot topic, I once reviewed everything we submitted to the EU, including the documents not written with Florian's help, plus the email exchanges with PJ, plus email exchanges with Eben (Oracle didn't allow Carlo to talk to us, so no email exchange there). I can honestly say in these documents we never proposed to anyone that changing the license would be a good solution to the problem. Like Florian says, it was not something we even could have done, but since we at times acted without his advice, it is of course possible we could have written silly things too. We didn't. We consistently advocated that Oracle shouldn't be allowed to own MySQL, period. Also very close to the part that PJ selectively quotes, we immediately said that changing the license still wouldn't solve most of the problems. (Arguably, it would have changed one of many problems, see below.)

The back story to how this debacle erupted is as follows:

1. Oracle had said to the EU that it doesn't really matter who owns MySQL, because it is open source, so they should get to keep it.

2. As part of standard procedure, EU asked competitors and customers what they think of this. In fact, Oracle had specifically mentioned our company and our fork of MySQL as proof that they are right. This was the main reason how we ended up in this in the first place.

3. While emphasizing that competition is mainly about other things that some code existing under some license (such as active marketing and sales organization) we explained to the EU that Oracle's statement is wrong, we explained about MySQL's dual licensing model, etc. Essentially what we tried to say was that the GPL is not the same as public domain. We used as example other Sun software which are under the Apache License to illustrate how Oracle's claim actually would be more true if MySQL was available to everyone under such a license too.

...but we never wrote anything that said a different license is something we wanted. In fact in the first round of submissions the EU specifically asked for things that are problematic from a fork's point of view. We gave a very long list (such as MySQL's manual is not open source), but the GPL is not on this list.

PJ had access early on to these documents, and she had access to me by email. I have no idea why she chose to attack us - on the other hand it took me completely by surprise that many other people also came out and said that Oracle is this lovely open source company that will never do anything bad to MySQL or other Sun software.

Carlo's blog post suggests these people were approached by Oracle and selectively shown things from the documents EU collected (these where confidential and only available to Oracle). Carlo seems to have made his decision under the impression that the EU was working against Oracle only because Microsoft and Monty Program in some kind of partnership opposed the deal and everyone else loved it. In reality it is more likely the EU started the investigation because all four of Europe's biggest ICT companies were against it. (One was neutral in opinion, but factual answers indicated major competition concerns for them too.) It seems in Carlo's blog post he has not seen these submissions, and access to this information was completely controlled by Oracle.

...or there could be any other explanation. As for Groklaw, her expertise seems to be in how the US judicial system works, which was very useful in the SCO case since that was mostly about abusing that system. This case was a) in Europe, b) not a court case anyway and c) about MySQL, none of which she should know much at all about. As far as I know she made her decision mostly based on trusting other people she talked to and not trusting me. (And this seems to be a pattern at Groklaw, so it makes sense.) Oh, and there is the fact that Monty was on the advisory board for the Codeplex Foundation, which at Groklaw is proof that you are a bad person.

(Trivia: Windows is still today the most popular development platform for MySQL, and AFAIK also PHP and most popular PHP apps. One explanation probably is that web developers need to test with Internet Explorer.)

Since I ended up writing anyway and I know nobody will read my blog post Florian referred to, I might as well add that: 1) It was written some time ago completely unrelated to todays discussion. 2) I'm not aware of any public statement or writing from either Eben or SFLC that would tie them into the same kind of "Oracle is a good home for Sun's patents" motivation that Carlo mentions in his blog, but 3) without naming names, it is true from private conversations that Carlo was not the only prominent FOSS lawyer to hold that view, he was just the only one blogging it. The point of my blog post was not to name names, rather that I observed a dividing line in that our lawyer friends (and a paralegal) tended to side with Oracle while hackers also outside the MySQL sphere sided with keeping MySQL free.

Regarding Carlo I've always emphasized that as a lawyer he is free to work for any client that needs his FOSS expertise and this doesn't make him more or less a friend of FOSS, it is just what he is supposed to do as a lawyer. I can honestly say I wish Oracle had let him help them even more, we will never know if the painful process could have been handled faster in that case.

Henrik Ingo
formerly Monty Program COO, now Dad

So what do the proponents of Oracle's acquisition of Sun think now?

Posted Aug 16, 2010 10:53 UTC (Mon) by guest (guest, #2027) [Link] (1 responses)

"... Henrik Ingo"

PJ's reply (see "you can't just ignore it" comment to http://web.archive.org/web/20200508230103/http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100813112425821 ):

"Authored by: PJ on Saturday, August 14 2010 @ 11:30 PM EDT

It was Ingo who sent me the documents that I quoted from. I didn't make them public at the time, because he asked me not to. But if he continues to misrepresent the truth, I surely will. Normally, if I give my word, I keep it. So this is fair warning that I will publish if he continues to lie about it and about me.

Here is the article where I quoted just the pertinent section, in any case, so you can see what they wrote to the EU Commission for yourself:

"We would like to draw attention to the fact that some major concerns about the effects of the proposed transaction could be somewhat alleviated by requiring that all versions of MySQL source code previously released under the GPLv2 license ...must be released under a more liberal open source license that is usable also by the OEM users and would also create an opportunity for other service vendors to compete with offerings comparable to MySQL Enterprise. A good candidate is the Apache Software License."

And here's the article that began the discussion. Now read what Ingo wrote, and see if it matches:

"Like Florian already said, this is what PJ wants you to understand, and it is completely wrong. The position paper is public, and you can see we do not endorse license change as something that would solve competition concerns. Since this became such a hot topic, I once reviewed everything we submitted to the EU, including the documents not written with Florian's help, plus the email exchanges with PJ, plus email exchanges with Eben (Oracle didn't allow Carlo to talk to us, so no email exchange there). I can honestly say in these documents we never proposed to anyone that changing the license would be a good solution to the problem." "

So what do the proponents of Oracle's acquisition of Sun think now?

Posted Aug 16, 2010 11:56 UTC (Mon) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

Yes. Someone already emailed me that.

I never comment on Groklaw, the level of correctness is too low a starting point to bother (hence, prefer LWN :-). For instance in those comments someone claims that Miguel de Icaza is a Microsoft employee, and this isn't even corrected by anyone else (last time I checked). If someone wants to spend time educating the Groklaw community, this would probably be valuable, but I won't volunteer.

In any case, I don't have anything to add to what I already wrote. Perhaps I could add that when I originally shared those documents with a few selected journalists that I believed to be potentially FOSS friendly, it was just to provide them information of what the EU was asking and what we were responding. At that point it was not our intent to make any public statements or even become heavily involved, my effort was just intended to provide a little bit of background. Since the EU process was totally confidential, the online discussion was mostly also dominated by lack of information more than anything else and this was problematic since the open source community generally benefits from access to information and transparency. (So for instance this whole discussion of GPL and other licenses was not at all core to what the EU was even interested in, regardless of which side you decide to believe in here.)

Ah, now I remember. What triggered me to send that first email was a column by Stephen J Vaughan Nichols EU takes on Sun/Oracle. I had also asked Stephen not to quote me but just use the material as background info. Apparently I was unclear in my messaging as the next day he did exactly that in Why the EU should block Oracle/Sun.

The email I sent to PJ is an exact forward of what I sent to SJVN. Note that SJVN's response is titled "Why the EU should block Oracle/Sun" not for instance "Why the EU should change the license on MySQL" :-) Looking at it now, the email doesn't even discuss the topic of "license change", the whole discussion came to us from somewhere else.

I should also again emphasize that in all of what I've written in this comment and the above one, I am not trying to attack or criticize Groklaw in any way. I know there are accusations that Groklaw is paid by IBM (or even Oracle, belive it or not) and I've never made such accusations. Even if she had gotten some money from a proxy such as OSDL (see link by Florian in this thread), I still don't think that is important. It is perfectly normal that people write such things purely out of conviction and she's not alone. So after the SCO case wasn't interesting anymore, I haven't followed the site and that's that. The site I do follow and actively comment on is LWN, and I wanted to make one comment to defend myself so that false information doesn't spread here.

During the process much sillier things were said about Monty and our company than what PJ said and the best thing to do was to ignore them. Due to lack of information most bloggers had no clue what to write of the Oracle-Sun thing, and PJ was not worse than many many others. On the contrary, thanks to its "crowdsourcing" community digging for truth, Groklaw at least towards the end of the process, after 5+ months and several pro-Oracle blog posts got close to the real issue relevant to this discussion when I read in one blog post "Update: [groklaw member] pointed me to this page, with the MySQL FOSS exception. I don't yet know what it means, but it looks rather generous." (paraphrased, I cannot actually find that on groklaw anymore, but I remember it vividly so that is an approximate quote.)

Which is to say, among bloggers, Groklaw was in this case probably average or better, but they were still wrong, so I wish we could stop repeating that information now.

Apparently I still had more to say... I apologize. This really isn't something I like spending time on anymore.