LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 17, 2007

On Microsoft's patent claims

By now, most LWN readers will have seen this Fortune article in which a Microsoft representative makes the claim that Linux distributions violate 235 of its patents. This article has caused a fair amount of concern in the community, with some people seeing it as the beginning of some sort of Final Battle between Microsoft and free software. That might even be the case, but the true nature of the situation is far from clear. Here's a few thoughts on Microsoft's claims.

To begin, these claims are not exactly new. Consider what the BBC was reporting in November, 2004:

So this is not the first time we have heard this sort of charge from Microsoft; perhaps the only real difference is that we have somehow managed to find another seven patents to infringe upon in the last 2-1/2 years. The possibility exists that we may not hear any more about this "violation" for another two years or so - but one shouldn't necessarily count on that.

As companies go, Microsoft is relatively uninclined to pursue patent infringement suits. There was an interesting quote from the Open Source Think Tank report (covered here last week):

Microsoft has, indeed, spent more time being the victim of patent trolls than a patent aggressor itself - and it has lost vast amounts of money to patent judgments in the process. This company has little to gain by heating up the patent litigation scene even more. That said, one should see the remainder of the quote above:

Even if we believe that Microsoft will take a relatively enlightened approach as a result of its time at the defendant's table, we should not lose track of an important fact: companies whose core business goes away have a disturbing tendency to turn to their "intellectual property" portfolios as a way to keep the revenue flowing. Should Microsoft someday decide that Linux world domination really is inevitable, it could react in any of a number of unpleasant ways.

The SCO Group's attack on Linux holds a number of lessons which can be applied to any future Microsoft attack - but those lessons only go so far. There is no doubt that interesting things will happen if you anger our community, especially if you attempt to lay claim to our work. There would be a massive outcry, publicity campaigns, boycotts, and an extended effort to invalidate as many of the patents as possible. Microsoft clearly fears the capabilities of the wider community; the Fortune article notes that Microsoft is not disclosing its specific patents "lest FOSS advocates start filing challenges to them". But invalidating even a single patent is hard; invalidating 235 would certainly tax even the capabilities of our extended community.

On the other hand, Microsoft would have to name specific patents in any legal action, and, presumably, it would not base a suit on all 235 patents. There is also the unknown effect of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in KSR International v. Teleflex; this ruling has raised the bar on the amount of innovation a patent must contain. Some have speculated that this ruling could lead to the end of software patents altogether. That seems like wishful thinking, but it should help those who seek to invalidate many of the software patents currently on the books.

In the SCO case, a weak and incompetent company took on the strongest target it could find, and that target chose to stand its ground. There are no guarantees that things would go the same way this time around. Microsoft is strong financially and has a large, seasoned legal operation. It may well choose to attack smaller companies which cannot afford to put up an extended fight. In theory, a patent attack against Linux should evoke a strong response from the companies working with Linux, many of which hold considerable patent portfolios of their own. In practice, we will never know who would jump into that fight until they make their move. In particular, a defense which challenges the validity of software patents in general could be seen by a number of potential allies as being against their interests.

We should, at least, be able to count on the intervention of the Open Invention Network, which was formed for just this purpose. If OIN's patents are as strong as some believe, the resulting fireworks should be worth watching - from a safe distance.

There are a few other interesting things to keep in mind. Software patents are a U.S. problem, primarily; a successful patent attack against Linux could have the effect of driving its developers and users out of the country. Linux is now sufficiently firmly entrenched that attacking its users or developers could cause extended chaos - it might even upset more people than threatening to shut down the Blackberry network. That, in turn, could inspire more thought on the true costs and benefits of the current patent regime in the U.S. Some people believe that, by selling Novell's coupons, Microsoft has become a Linux distributor and is now subject to the terms of the GPL. Any serious attempt by Microsoft to bring down Linux would bring renewed attention from the world's anti-trust authorities.

Clearly, there are quite a few unknowns here. What it all comes down to is that, sooner or later, this may well be a battle we cannot avoid fighting. Once it hits, there is no telling where things will go. About the only guarantee is that it is certain to be interesting.

Comments (25 posted)

The sincerest form of flattery

Sun Microsystems has made a big show of its open source Solaris release and its attempts to build a working development community around that system. So a number of members of the OpenSolaris community were rather surprised when the press started running articles stating that Sun had decided to embark upon a project to make Solaris look more like Linux. This community was of the opinion that, if it was expected to endorse and participate in "Project Indiana," it might have been nice to know before Sun employees started talking to the media about it.

The person behind this effort, of course, is Ian Murdock, formerly of the Linux community. His position now can be understood from this interview:

Project Indiana, it seems, is Sun's attempt to win over all of those people who only think they want Linux, but who really want a version of Solaris that looks likes Linux.

Many of the goals of this project, as far as they can be determined at this early stage, would seem to make sense. Better package management, for example. More device drivers. Easier installation. A more Linux-like user space with our (relatively) bleeding-edge 1990's shell. And, says Ian, a switch to timed release cycles:

Ubuntu comes up frequently in the discussion; it's clear that some people at Sun see Ubuntu as a model worth emulating.

For those of us who have been working with free software for a while, there is a certain irony in this whole plan. A Linux-like Solaris is not a particularly new concept; for many years, that's how much of the community experienced free software. Before there was a Linux system in a reasonably usable state, the best system to have on one's desk usually came from Sun. As soon as it came in the door, however, it would be loaded up with crucial packages like the X Window System, gcc, netrek, emacs, and so on. Many years ago, we all had systems which, in some ways, looked like what Project Indiana is trying to build now. Those systems did not keep an awful lot of us from jumping to Linux, though, and their cost was only part of the reason for switching.

We switched to Linux because it was free, alive, fun, and clearly going places. There was always something new and interesting happening, especially in those days when running development kernels on production systems was a necessary part of making things work. All these years later, there is still always something new and interesting, and, often, it even comes nicely packaged on a regular schedule. Not many of us are looking back to the systems we used to run.

So it is no surprise that the folks at Sun are putting such a big emphasis on trying to duplicate the things that Linux does right. A similar user space, timely releases, easy upgrades, and, especially, the creation of a vibrant community around Solaris. The thinking seems to be that, if they make a system which looks like Linux but which contains their kernel (which they feel to be superior - a view which is not universally shared in the Linux community), the world will flock to their door.

There have been no real (public) decisions on how this project will proceed; the process for creating an official OpenSolaris project has not yet begun. There has been some initial discussion where it has been suggested that the project start by adopting the work of either BeleniX or Nexenta. This idea drew an immediate complaint from our old friend Jörg Schilling, creator of SchilliX, but it appears that the OpenSolaris community listens to Jörg about as much as the Linux community does. Regardless, it will take some time before the real shape of Project Indiana emerges.

It will take even more time before we see if this project has any real impact. Certainly it should make life easier for Solaris users. But "a better Linux than Linux" is not a particularly compelling sales message. It might just turn out that people who say they want Linux actually want Linux, not another system dressed up in similar clothes. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it is usually a poor way to regain one's past prominence.

Comments (48 posted)

ATI starts to come around?

A fair number of LWN readers have wondered: why hasn't LWN posted anything about the statements by ATI at the Red Hat Summit to the effect that it would be changing its relationship with the open source community? Certainly this is a relationship which could use some reworking; ATI has been one of the most stubborn vendors in its refusal to release free drivers or the programming information needed to let us create those drivers ourselves. As a result, free support for ATI's older hardware has required reverse engineering efforts - and the current chipsets have no free support at all. So, one would think, a statement from ATI that it plans to change its approach would be a welcome change.

As it happens, the developers in charge of making graphics work on Linux systems are pretty much unanimous in their lack of enthusiasm. This is not the first time that ATI has made promising sounds, but, so far, the corresponding actions have not been forthcoming. Graphics hacker Dave Airlie is particularly unimpressed, noting that ATI has not yet bothered to communicate its intentions to the developers:

Dave is particularly annoyed because he has been sitting on the code which implements 2D support for the R500 chipset for many months while waiting for ATI to give him permission to distribute it. There is no ATI code in this driver; Dave is asking permission because he signed a non-disclosure agreement with the company. So far, that permission has not been granted. Until that changes, it's hard to believe that ATI is interested in free support for its hardware.

There is one thing which has changed: ATI is now part of AMD. Historically, AMD has been much more friendly toward the free software community. It could well be that this approach is now filtering down through ATI and could result in some real changes. But we should not celebrate too much until ATI follows its words with some concrete actions.

Comments (7 posted)

Waiting for Emacs 22 (and looking forward to Emacs 23)

The much-delayed Emacs 22 release has been covered here a couple of times recently. Since the last article, it would appear that the Emacs process has hit its lowest point, and things should be getting better from here. In the long term, though, the Emacs developers may have to take a hard look at their release management process if they want to keep the project healthy.

The low point was probably sometime around when Richard Stallman got tired of people asking when a release might happen:

A number of developers responded that they had no intent to insult or abuse, but that they do have real concerns about how the process works. A couple of examples:

(Kim Storm).

(JD Smith).

Clearly, the extended Emacs development cycle is proving frustrating for developers. The situation with the Linux kernel was once similar; changes merged at the beginning of a development cycle could take years to make it to a stable release. In that case, distributors responded by backporting changes into older releases, but that doesn't happen with Emacs.

The good news is that the biggest blocker - some questions about whether the Python mode code could be distributed by the FSF - appears to have resolved itself in the best possible way: the code has been cleared. Inevitably, there's another bug or two in need of squashing before the release can happen, but the remaining wait should be relatively short. Hopefully.

Some of the Emacs developers are already looking forward to the Emacs 23 development cycle. One of the first things that may go in is multi-tty support, which allows a single emacs instance to drive multiple terminals or X connections. This code apparently still does not work on all architectures, though, meaning it needs some work before it is truly ready. The other big change is a complete rework of character set handling; only Emacs would come with a news item reading "The Emacs character set is now a superset of Unicode. (It has about four times the code space, which should be plenty)." There's a lot of other work waiting to be merged, but getting the unicode-2 branch and multi-tty working together looks like it should be enough to keep the developers busy for a little while. Happily, they are starting to think about this sort of challenge rather than wondering if their previous work will ever be released.

Comments (16 posted)

The Open Source Business Conference

The Open Source Business Conference is happening on May 22 and 23. For the first time, LWN will be present at this event. Look next week for coverage on what's happening on the business side of Linux.

Beyond that, your editor somehow got talked into sitting on a panel dedicated to the question "is the Novell-Microsoft deal good for open source?". Given recent events, one might expect interest in this topic to be high. It should be a memorable experience; your editor can only hope that there is a pub within quick walking distance of the venue for the post-event recovery process.

Comments (none posted)