Licensing

A sign that Microsoft is becoming the world's biggest law firm

There was some distressing news buried in Sean Michael Kerner's look into Novell's and Microsoft's virtualization partnership. The news, however, had nothing to do with virtualization, and everything to do with Microsoft job titles.

This was a product announcement, yet Microsoft resorted to its legal department for quotations??? (Novell, of course, offered up a "senior product marketing manager." It has yet to become a licensing company, and is still focused on thriving as a software company.)

The two Microsoft employees quoted have bizarro job titles:

Monty O'Kelley, technical director of legal and corporate affairs … Read more

One problem with the cloud: Obsolescence of applications

ReadWriteWeb lists 10 of its favorite Web applications that have disappeared from the Web. In so doing, it calls out a problem with cloud-based applications that lack an open-source license: once they're gone, they're really gone.

I've mentioned before enterprises that have desperately tried to get their proprietary vendors to open-source their code, only to see the vendors go bankrupt and take their code with them. No, having source code access wouldn't necessarily guarantee an easy future for such customers, but not having the source code ensures that there is no future for the product and … Read more

Harry Potter ruling points out the limits of fandom

J.K. Rowling recently won the right to be even richer when a US federal judge ruled against a Harry Potter fan's right to publish The Harry Potter Lexicon. In so doing, Ms. Rowling demonstrated two things:

No matter how "right" it may seem to use someone else's copyrighted works, you can't simply assume that right, and Just because you're copying out of love and devotion doesn't make it right.

I'm sure that the defendant in the Harry Potter decision, Steven Vander Ark, must have felt hard done by to see his paean to Rowling's genius stomped on by her. A wide range of Potter fans seem to share this view. As I'll describe below, this isn't wildly different from open-source "fans" who piggyback on the works of others.

But their misplaced feelings and his intentions are somewhat irrelevant here. He copied liberally from Rowling's work to create "his" lexicon, which is the primary problem, as Groklaw points out:… Read more

The open-source add-on economy

Dana Blankenhorn suggests that add-ons make good business sense for Acquia and other open-source vendors, and he's dead-on. Zimbra climbed to $20 million in just two years on the back of a successful add-on strategy to its open-source Microsoft Exchange killer. SugarCRM is doing well with such a strategy, too.

It's not, however, simply a way to make money. It's also a way to better define and feed community.

Seem counterintuitive? Perhaps it is for those companies like Red Hat, Acquia, and others that are built to harvest preexisting open-source communities (Linux and Drupal, respectively). But for companies like Zimbra, MySQL, etc., an add-on strategy enables a vendor to focus wholly on delivering a quality open-source project while simultaneously creating a robust, scalable business.

SugarCRM's John Roberts has been saying this for years, and Marten Mickos of MySQL (now Sun) has been suggesting this strategy for the past year as MySQL looked for ways to strengthen its revenue while keeping its community strong. The two need not be conflicting strategies.

In fact, they're complementary. It's actually quite difficult to distribute a 100 percent open-source product and monetize it at the same time. Support doesn't scale. Determining how to make a "community" release compelling while also selling an "enterprise" release without selling "just support" is tricky.… Read more

Copyright extension of 45 years to net just $40 for most performers

Just when I think the freedom brigade is on a roll, I read nonsense like this from the European Union, as reported in Ars Technica, suggesting that the EU is considering extending copyright terms by 45 years in order to guarantee income for aging artists. US entitlements like Medicare having nothing on this....

Every few years the US extends copyright terms because Disney lobbies the heck out of Congress' weak-kneed legislators to prevent Mickey Mouse from becoming public domain. After pilfering the commons for the basis of much of its revenue (Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, and even, perhaps, Mickey Mouse), Disney keeps going back to the congressional well to ensure its God-given right to make money on old intellectual property forever and ever.

But that's the US. I would have hoped that the EU would show a bit more common sense. Alas! Its proposal completely fails to solve even the problem it sets out to fix, as Open Rights Group notes:

"The Commission makes much of the challenging financial situation facing aging performers," it says. "While we do not accept that IP law is an appropriate mechanism to deal with this situation, as we will demonstrate in the second section of this submission, it also turns out to be a very inefficient one."… Read more

Open-sourcing legal documents

In the wake of Google's attempted intellectual property landgrab (and subsequent about face), ReadWriteWeb suggests that a new "terms of service regime" is needed for online applications like Google.

I agree, but also think we can go one step further and "open source" legal documents.

The idea is not actually mine. John Robb, vice president of marketing and product management at Zimbra, suggested the idea to me after reading about Y Combinator's idea to offer standardized venture funding documents.

It's a great idea, one that we'll be exploring further at OSBC 2009. … Read more

Free but not easy: A guide to open-source compliance

A friend pointed out to me that the Free Software Foundation's "Practical Guide to GPL Compliance" has some intriguing details. One, in particular, caught his eye.

Most people familiar with open source understand that distribution of modified open-source software compels the modifying party to make source code available for the derivative work. However, as the Free Software Foundation points out, there is no obligation to make it easy to compile source code:

The GPL contains no provision that requires distribution of the compiler used to build the software. While companies are encouraged to make it as easy as possible for their users to build the sources, inclusion of the compiler itself is not normally considered mandatory. The Corresponding Source definition--both in GPLv2 and GPLv3--has not been typically read to include the compiler itself, but rather things like makefiles, build scripts, and packaging scripts.

In other words, source code must be available, but the onus isn't necessarily on the code author to pave the way to a perfect binary. I personally believe that it's in the developer's interest to make it as easy as possible to compile as the benefits of open source start the moment the receiving party can contribute and participate in the code, but it's not a requirement.

One other thing that caught my eye was the Free Software Foundation's clarification as to whom a code author must distribute her source code:… Read more

Google's weird ways with open-source licenses

CNET's Stephen Shankland has already picked up on Google's decision to allow two popular open-source licenses back onto its Google Code open-source repository. Up until now, the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and Eclipse Public License (EPL) were both banned from the site.

The reasoning Shankland reports for Google belatedly approving the licenses, however, is a bit bizarre. In the case of the EPL, Google's Chris DiBona argues:

Eclipse is an important, lively, and healthy project with an enormous plug-in and developer community that uses an otherwise duplicative license. They aren't interested in using the BSD or … Read more

Microsoft patents Page Up/Down functionality

Lest IBM be accused of being the only big software vendor to apply for and receive silly patents, Microsoft is proving its silliness mettle with the award of a patent on Page Up/Page Down functionality. And to think that I've been using that functionality for years without knowing that Microsoft had yet to invent it!

I used to believe that patents had to be non-obvious to make the cut, but Microsoft here demonstrates that the only obvious thing about patents is that the more they encumber the industry with both silly and even useful "inventions," innovation … Read more