From code war to Cold War (BBC) [LWN.net]

BBC News is running a strange article about the "war" between free and proprietary code. "So now would be a good time to start thinking about how we persuade governments that market in software may eventually need to be regulated, just as the market in electricity, water and food is, and that that regulation may well include a statutory duty to disclose source code and allow it to be used elsewhere." (Thanks to Paul Sladen).

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From code war to Cold War (BBC)

Posted Mar 8, 2004 16:11 UTC (Mon) by imres (guest, #12) [Link] (1 responses)

It might be strange at first reading but it sure is a different
suggestion which merits to be discussed.

I believe that such a regulation should not apply to all software,
neither at every stage of development of certain software. However,
some widely used software, like Unix, could end up becoming a common
good, after passing through a long and very diverse evolutionary
process. Why not? Such software tends to acquire even a social
responsibility and it might make sense to regulate it in some
way. Wouldn't this amount to be a disappropriation of some key
"intellectual property"?

I think that the real big question is "How could such a regulation be
made in order to be effective without hindering the abundant
development of innovative software" To do this one would need some kind
of social consensus but I am afraid that at the moment our society is
quite far from that.

From code war to Cold War (BBC)

Posted Mar 8, 2004 22:28 UTC (Mon) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

I believe that such a regulation should not apply to all software, neither at every stage of development of certain software.

Why not? I personally believe that all software should be Free Software, no exceptions. As a temporary transition measure away from the proprietary model, I would support a 3-5 year copyright term with mandatory source code escrow and disclosure under Free Software terms at the end of the term.

From code war to Cold War (BBC)

Posted Mar 8, 2004 16:51 UTC (Mon) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link] (1 responses)

Let's put it this way:

I have some software at home that I use for composing music. It's proprietary. The company has gone out of business. *Some* of the pieces wound up in another company's product, but effectively, the product no longer exists in the form which I have been using.

There are things about this piece of software that are broken. There are things that become less and less effective as the underlying OS changes. Yet, there is absloutely *no way* for me to improve, restore, repair, or otherwise modernize this piece of work.

If the software had been "copy-protected," I also would be unable to restore its operation in the event of a magnetic media failure (a common occurrence.)

I view this state of affairs as pathetic. If the best solution available is to mandate escrow of all commercial source code, that's fine with me.

I had a range-hood in my kitchen. The chimney for that range-hood was toward the right of the stove. When I bought a new hood (because the old one was useless, dirty, badly damaged, and so on,) the installer refused to put it in because the chimney was in the wrong place. I hired a metal-worker to modify the chimney, and now I have a working range hood. I didn't have to beg the hood maker, nor my house builder, nor the duct-manufacturer, nor anyone else for permission to make this improvement.

In fact, I could have maybe even restored the original range hood (except it didn't fit our decor.)

When the same sort of freedom arrives in the computer industry, I'll know we've arrived where I'd like to be.

My solution

Posted Mar 9, 2004 2:01 UTC (Tue) by dmaxwell (guest, #14010) [Link]

I do not store any data I intend to keep long term in closed formats. That means mp3 or ogg in preference to wma. It means Openoffice or even plain text in preference to Word and so on. Yes, I know mp3 is patent encumbered; how it works is not a secret. The worst thing that can happen is that I'll have to give up a favored application and use something else to open my data. To the extent it is possible, I use FOSS apps to create and manipulate data since the shelf life of an app in source code form is higher. If I have to sacrifice features for longevity then so be it. This is a trust issue and I don't trust closed software.

In the case of your music software, if you hypothetically saved your music as .mid rather than some closed UltraComposer format at least you can still work with it using something else.

Bad wording

Posted Mar 8, 2004 17:22 UTC (Mon) by stuart (subscriber, #623) [Link] (1 responses)

"One is personified by Microsoft and its closed and copyright-protected code, and the other represented by the free software and open source movements, whose most prominent offering is the GNU/Linux operating system."

The article is implying that Free software isn't 'copyright-protected.' Gah!

Stu.

Bad wording

Posted Mar 8, 2004 18:39 UTC (Mon) by fLameDogg (guest, #11305) [Link]

Not only that, there is this:

"For the moment, the battleground is the legal action which the SCO Group, which currently own the Unix operating system which inspired Linux..."

That assertion is in some dispute, to say the least:

http://news.com.com/2010-1071_3-1015624.html?tag=fd_nc_1

http://www.opengroup.org/

Sorry, no time for HTML.

At least the article did get the "GNU/Linux" thing right, for those who consider that right, and important. Er... in the part you quoted, not in the part I did. Funny thing, that. But no, Linux in and of itself was inspired by Unix, but then, so was GNU...

Actuallity does not meet theory

Posted Mar 8, 2004 19:41 UTC (Mon) by NZheretic (guest, #409) [Link]

I have already replied

You write: "But once we see an open source alternative to Quark Express running on those Linux boxes, or Postgres databases replacing Oracle, and an open source digital music store that challenges iTunes, we can expect to see Adobe, Apple and the rest of the software industry piling in too."

For at least four years, freely licensed software has been widely deployed displacing software from Oracle, Adobe, Apple and other proprietary software vendors. Yet, instead of threating lawsuits, Oracle, Adobe, Apple and other vendors such as Realnetworks, Novell, Sun, IBM etc have done the complete opposite, they are actively engaging the open source developer community.

Oracle has provided clustering support for the Linux kernel under the GNU GPL ( General Public License ), making it available for use for all open source databases.
Why? Oracle gains more from the open source community than it loses from the competition.
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/oracleopen/chapter/ch01.html
Oracle has also begun to offer a new services, under the title "unbreakable linux", http://partner.oracle.com/linux/

Adobe provides the Postscript and PDF standard under a royalty free implementation license. This dispite losing a lot of the PDF generation market to Ghostscript. Why? Overall, Adobe gains more by the PDF format being adopted as a defacto industry standard. Adobe,like Oracle can also gain more from providing interfaces for open source tools.
http://opensource.adobe.com/
http://www.adobe.com/svg/demos/devtrack/theater.html

Apple has released the kernel of its OS under an open source license.
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/
OpenDarwin provide compatable forks of MacOSX core products.
http://www.opendarwin.org/
"Many OpenDarwin members are either Apple employees or Darwin Committers, who have an active interest in merging technologies from OpenDarwin.org into Darwin and Mac OS X releases."
There is also a massive library of freely licensed applications available for the MacOSX...
http://darwinports.com/

Realnetworks is developing its next gneration of mediaplayer under an open source license...
https://helixcommunity.org/
RealNetworks has awarded the Xiph.Org foundation one of its Helix Grants to support continued development of Ogg and other freely licensed codecs.
http://www.vorbis.com/

It's an established fact that Novell, Sun and IBM have tied their future into Linux and the GNOME Desktop environment, both GPL or LGPL licensed. Sun has release the Openoffice.org source under a dual LGPL license.

Almost all major proprietary software vendors, with the exception of Microsoft, have begun to dive in or at least dip their toes into freely licensed open source. Some may adopt a hybrid approach mixing closed and open source or adopt non-free open source licenses or just proprietary programs to Linux. However all know that thay will face competition from GPLed alternatives.

To quote myself...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=98803&cid=8429381
QUOTE

The role of open source development, under commons preserving GPL or LGPL licenses, in driving Linux adoption should not be underestimated. Though few companies will be anxious pay for software developed from scratch in the current slow economic environment, they don't have to. One of the key advantages of free licensing over proprietary solution development is the simplified legal invocations without the hassle of NDA'a and intellectual property cross licensing. It encourages both organizations and individuals to participate in the full knowledge that none of the participating parties can deny access at a later date though threat of intellectual property lawsuits or licensing.

The end user rights granted by the GPL and LGPL even extend to vendors of proprietary software, who may even be producing software that is direct competition with open source software. There is nothing to prevent proprietary software vendors from *linking* and distributing LGPL licensed code with their software, as long as are willing to distributed the LGPL'ed source code to the end users. There is nothing to prevent proprietary software vendors from *bundling* and distributing GPL licensed code with their software, as long as are willing to distributed the GPL'ed source code to the end users. As mentioned above Microsoft already does this with the GPL licensed GCC developer toolkit.

Even with a full GPL, the proprietary software vendor can strip out the required functionality from GPL sources and create separate standalone application that runs as a mini-server, callable via command line and passing data via pipes or even shared dynamic memory to the proprietary licensed application.

...

But more importantly, by 1871 Horace Greeley also wrote: "This Daniel Boone business is about played out."

In the same way, the last decade's Linux customer base can be seen as the self reliant pioneers. The "Do It Yourself" attitude and habit was learned from a time when "doing for themselves" was the only option. This is no longer the case, there are plenty new settlers and far many more willing to migrate, who are all too willing to pay for hardware, support, customization, collective development and even quality proprietary licensed products.

UNQUOTE

From code war to License War?

Posted Mar 9, 2004 10:44 UTC (Tue) by ATN (guest, #20069) [Link]

I do not know how software could be regulated, to have a system where people who do work get paid - and where distribution is not largely based on illegal networks.
I do feel unwell when I look at my lawer, my juges, my political representatives, and soon my <insert your religion here> representatives using software under licenses which includes "not to sue" clauses.
So the laws in my country is written and maintained by computer systems with a "agree not to sue the provider company in any way" license?
Nobody is forced to agree the license - but then he can not read the law?
The juge can only read the evidence written in <atextprocessor> if he first agree the license?

a strange world it is,
ATN.

From code war to Cold War (BBC)

Posted Mar 9, 2004 13:04 UTC (Tue) by copsewood (subscriber, #199) [Link] (3 responses)

There is a genuine public interest here, and a need to balance this against the private property rights inherent in the copyright. The public interest arises from the benefits of a competitive marketplace and the need for incentives to innovate. There is also the important issue of historical archiving of all significant cultural information, including software. Closed source software is inherently monopolistic, and network effects can make it exceptionally so, particularly when a closed source software product becomes an essential service. The monopoly problem can partly be met by requiring software funded by the taxpayer to be purchased on an open source basis.

I think the need to incentivise innovation would be more than adequately met by balancing the inherent monopoly obtained by allowing the sale of closed-source software, by requiring escrow of source code of any product sold without full source access, and for this code to be released into the public domain after no more than 10 years or on the bankruptcy of the copyright holder if sooner.

For an escrow system to work, the contractor undertaking to keep the escrow copy would need to be supplied with a full build environment such that use of this to replicate every marketed version of the binary product could be demonstrated.

From code war to Cold War (BBC)

Posted Mar 10, 2004 4:35 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (2 responses)

There is a genuine public interest here, and a need to balance this against the private property rights inherent in the copyright.

First of all, what property rights? Despite the misleading term "Intellectual Property", ideas are not like property. They are not a commodity that someone can lose once they have it, and sharing them does not deprive the sharer of the original.
Second, what balance? The idea of "balancing" the interests of the general public and those who desire copyrights, patents, or other controls over ideas is a fundamental misinterpretation of the justification for copyright. To quote Misinterpreting Copyright from the GNU project:

The consequences of this alteration are far-reaching, because the great protection for the public in the copyright bargain -- the idea that copyright privileges can be justified only in the name of the readers, never in the name of the publishers -- is discarded by the "balance" interpretation. Since the interest of the publishers is regarded as an end in itself, it can justify copyright privileges; in other words, the "balance" concept says that privileges can be justified in the name of someone other than the public.

In other words, the only valid reason to have copyrights and other idea control mechanisms is for the benefit of the general public, through the generation of more works for their use. If the general public wants to give up fewer or none of their rights over works and accept the possibility that fewer works will be created, that is their choice alone, and not the choice of prospective copyright holders. (Note that none of this is intended to advocate (what is currently) illegal file-sharing, just to say that if the general public wants it to be legal, it should be, period. That's the way government should work, although not the way it currently does.)

From code war to Cold War (BBC)

Posted Mar 10, 2004 13:52 UTC (Wed) by imres (guest, #12) [Link] (1 responses)

> In other words, the only valid reason to have copyrights and
> other idea control mechanisms is for the benefit of the general
> public, through the generation of more works for their use. If
> the general public wants to give up fewer or none of their rights
> over works and accept the possibility that fewer works will be
> created, that is their choice alone, and not the choice of
> prospective copyright holders.

The safest way of guaranteeing the benefit of the general public,
in my view, is to incentivate through practice and through
legislation, whenever viable, the availability of a *rich public
domain*, no strings attached, period!

Unfortunately this point is being little addressed in the current
debates and controversies. As a matter of fact it seems that both
sides literally abhor the idea of a public domain where the
author looses his control about his creation. This might be a
rendering to the "world of bits" of the classic "Tragedy of the
Commons" critique, elaborated for the "world of atoms".

I would also like to add that I have my doubts about the escrow
schemes being proposed. If someone wants to hide his source code
he can transform it into something only slightly more
intelligible than binary code but which can be happily compiled
by a compiler. As far as I know Don Knuth made this (perhaps for
the first time?) in his Web computer system written to support
Literate Programming, about 20 years ago.

What is needed is a genuine wish to cooperate and to form a
community around the software and I do not see how these can be
easily guaranteed by legislation. Maybe more investment should be
made first in educating the public about the importance of these
aspects, even if they seem irrelevant for the majority of
individual users. At the same time it could be stressed how the
source code can help the formation of such communities. But the
source code alone is not sufficient for their formation.

From code war to Cold War (BBC)

Posted Mar 11, 2004 0:44 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

I would also like to add that I have my doubts about the escrow schemes being proposed. If someone wants to hide his source code he can transform it into something only slightly more intelligible than binary code but which can be happily compiled by a compiler.

Just include a "preferred form for modifications" requirement like the GPL's:

The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.

This prohibits obfusticated source, unless that is the form used by the original authors.