Why Microsoft should not lose (and free software will still win)

There has always been a section of the free software community which has an anti-Microsoft agenda. It’s almost like their mission statement is “It’s not over until Microsoft is dead”. Certainly there is a lot of feeling that if Microsoft went away, a lot of our problem would be over. But do Microsoft even need to “lose”; is there even a battle to be fought and if so what would constitute winning it?
Easy target

Let’s face it Microsoft are an easy target when it comes to protesting against proprietary licencing. They are—after all—the largest and most obvious proponent of that particular form of consumer control. It’s all too easy to view the fight to bring free software into the mainstream as a David and Goliath type battle, but I don’t think it is. I don’t think that the death of Microsoft would necessarily be a good thing for free software. I do think the death of some of their practices would be a good thing for computer users but—perhaps I am being optimistic here—I think free software can ultimately be good for companies like Microsoft.

What do I mean by “good”? Well I certainly don’t mean it would allow them to continue as they are. I don’t think Microsoft and their like can sustain their grip on a consumer market place which is demanding more and more ethical thinking from their suppliers. I can only speak from my own experience in the UK but I see a definite trend where the consumers are creating and responding to demands for ethics in their purchases. To counter this, I should say there has always been a growing trend with consumers to save money as well but I don’t see free software licencing being a hindrance to that particular need. In fact it could drive it. Software companies saving on development costs can pass some of them onto customers.

As computers become ever more a consumer product, Microsoft are going to have to change a lot of their ways to survive. In fact I would go so far as to say they will probably have to change so much they would no longer be recognisable as the Microsoft we see today. Don’t believe me? Look at IBM. Not long ago they were the corporate big guns, they were the ones that everybody watched first. Now they don’t resemble the blue-suited corporation of the past. True, a lot of that might be marketing, but IBM have won hearts and minds by embracing free software.

Interview with Kurt Denke, the man who shut "Monster Cable" up

I was lucky enough to catch Kurt Denke for a short interview. Kurt is actually on vacation right now; however, he still found some time to answer my questions. For those who have been living under a rock for the last week, Kurt Denke is the owner of Blue Jeans Cable; Monster Cable attacked Blue Jeans Cable on the basis of “Intellectual Property violations”. You should read Kurd Denke’s response. It’s a very enjoyable read, which makes you realise just how knowledgeable Kurt Denke is, on intellectual property law and on cables (!).

Here is the interview:

TM: I think everybody read your letter to Monster Cable. The short story is: you were harassed about paying patent licensing fees, and—as an ex lawyer and business owner, wrote the only possible response. Did you expect to receive such a letter?

KD: No, I had no idea such a letter would be coming; it was out of the blue. However, Monster is so well-known for bringing frivolous intellectual property claims that I have long thought that it was likely something like this might happen someday.

TM: A part of your letter showed your deep understanding of what you sell. The part I enjoyed the most was:

[…]the connector end is constrained by the standard dimensions of the RCA socket, and by the need, as the socket provides for no bayonet or screw attachment, to provide sufficient tension on insertion to maintain good mechanical and electrical contact; the barrel, grasped by the user for the purpose of insertion and removal, requires traction which is typically provided by raised or recessed rings, plastic inserts, knurling, or the like; and transition between the connector and the cable to which it is attached requires, in one form or another, a reduction in barrel size at the connector rear […]

TM: Now… I feel that you were incredibly lucky, because you have more knowledge than most people about IP laws — plus, a tremendous understanding of your products. But, this worries me, because this is not common. Computer programmers often know a lot about programming, but very little about IP laws. The same can probably be said for other industries. How long — and how much money — do you think it would have taken a person to come up with a letter like the one you wrote, if s/he had to do it paying up a lawyer? How long did it take you to write it?

KD: Well, it didn’t take long to write it; a couple of hours, perhaps. But I did spend a long time working on the underlying research and consulting with IP attorneys who are old friends of mine, running drafts by them, making changes, that sort of thing. It’s been a few years since I last did intellectual property litigation, so I had to refresh myself on fundamentals, and I also had to search for other applicable patents and marks.

If one were without legal education and needed to refer this to outside counsel, I would assume it would have cost a few thousand dollars to have the letter written. There are other obstacles as well; I know excellent IP lawyers I can phone for advice; that’s a lot better than having to scan the yellow pages and hope you get a competent practitioner who has time and the inclination to help.

Linux Users Will Rescue the Desktop...Geek Please.

How much "proof" do you need.

Red Hat just informed you that your desktop isn't their priority.

Ron Hovsarian of Novell just said the same thing.

IBM and HP BigWigs looked me in the eye at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit and basically told us this in so many words. "We don't offer systems, we offer solutions."

Bruce Perens took the mic and said that if we wern't going to get funds for advertising, then we needed publicity. On that note, the moderator then ended the session.

And That was the end of that.

Much to the relief of said BigWigs. While I was speaking to the panel, I was getting notes passed to me with suggestions for questions, people were turning around in their seats and giving me the thumbs up. One well connected PhD from St. Louis University whispered.

"Got Milk?" Use something like "Got Milk?"

The topic of advertising the Linux Desktop is one of passion and a passion of many.

Just not the passion of those who can make it happen.

I wish I could have said more. The "official discussion" may have ended there, but in the halls, the dining rooms, the smoking areas, the cafeterias and informal discussions, it was talked about plenty. And the consensus?

Linux Users will rescue the Desktop. We don't need corporate help.

Let me take this ice cold bucket of water and welcome those who believe this to the real world. Take a deep breath, because I'm about to splash you abruptly back into the cold, harsh light of reality.

Linux Users could give a crap about anyone adapting to Linux and being freed from Microsoft.

At least the majority of them. There is a core of caring, sincere people out there who do care. I know many of them by first name. I know where their kids go to school, I know their wives favorite colors...I know what they drive, I know how much money they make, I know what their hopes and dreams are. And with rare exception...

I've never laid eyes on any of them. And still, I call those people my friends. They've helped me put together a fledgling little charity that builds computers for kids that wouldn't normally be able to afford them. They've driven or flown hundreds of miles out of their way just to spend a few hours with me. They've assisted me in helping get disks to Windows users and they've given me encouragement when thing looked terrible from my end...times when I thought I could count the rest of my life in days and weeks. One of them actually "infiltrated" our organization in order to "prove" we are frauds and report back to the blog-O-Sphere their findings. He now works for us as one of our most active volunteers. It's those people that are going to make Linux succeed. Not the 40 million or so users world wide...but the fraction of a percentage of those that really care. Say it with me...

They are the Two Percent Solution.

You know who you are, and who you are not. Of course, if you are reading this, there's an extremely good chance that you are in the first group. Hey first group...thank you. I'm going to return your graciousness here in just a minute.

Ask RedMonk: Open Source Indemnification - the Q&A

There are many possible justifications for the uptick we’re seeing in inquiries regarding the indemnification of open source software. It could be a natural consequence of the increasing role that open source is directly playing within traditional proprietary software businesses. It could be the public and private veiled threats regarding potential patent liability for vendors and customers alike.

In any event, indemnification is a topic of increasing interest to judge from our inbound traffic, and so I thought it would be useful to answer a few of the most common questions we hear on the subject.

Q: What does indemnification mean in the context of open source software?
A: As Wikipedia defines it, indemnification means essentially that “a sum paid by A to B by way of compensation for a particular loss suffered by B.” As it pertains to open source, then, indemnification generally implies that a commercial supplier or backer of a particular open source asset will indemnify or protect the users of said product from potential liabilities related to their usage of said asset.

Q: Why is indemnification of interest to customers?
A: Enterprises - the organizations typically engaging in commercial relationships with vendors - are risk averse. In many cases this is for good reason; one of the original use cases for IBM’s MDM suite, after all, was identifying so-called “slip and fall” candidates. That is to say, people for whom one of their primary revenue sources is entering large retail sources, only to fall and sue.

Any opportunity, therefore, to reduce their risk - whether said risk is real or merely perceived - will be sought. This is natural and to be expected. The question is what priority potential customers assign to indemnification.

Q: And what priority do you see being assigned to it, generally?
A: It’s exceedingly low in the majority of cases, in my experience. At some organizations, of course, particularly those with limited or no exposure to open source software, it becomes a more important factor in buying decisions. But this is atypical, in my experience.

As an example, Sun for many years touted its indemnification of the Solaris codebase as a differentiator against competing offerings from the likes of Red Hat Linux (though it’s worth noting that Red Hat does in fact programs or explicitly detailed their support or options.

Q: Is all indemnification created equal?
A: An excellent question. In short, the answer is no. Much like insurance, there are limits and thresholds that must be explored. More to the point, indemnification options are frequently offered by vendors that are dwarfed by potential litigants. Ergo, the value of indemnification does depend on both the nature of the offering as well as the size and resources of the vendor offering it.

Q: Who are the would-be attackers in scenarios in which the shield of indemnification becomes important
A: Focus typically centers on larger commercial institutions whose offerings are potential threatended by competitive open source offerings, notably Microsoft. This is understandable, in light of the rhetoric coming from Steve Ballmer which included, the following:

“Novell pays us some money for the right to tell customers that anybody who uses SUSE Linux is appropriately covered,” Ballmer said. This “is important to us, because [otherwise] we believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability.”

Tokamak Sprint Turns Plasma Upside-Down

Tokamak, the first International meeting of Plasma was held in Milano in northern Italy over the last weekend. 14 people joined the fun and spent some days hacking on the KDE 4 desktop shell. For the most part, it was like meeting friends, only that some had never met each other in person before. The meeting was filled with small sessions, such as discussing target users for Plasma to optimise the Plasma interface for. Topics were target users, underlying technology, scripting, integration with other parts, webservice integration, visual presentation, porting of Plasma to new technology in Qt, Italian profanity and how everybody loves pizza.

Widgets-on-Canvas

Part of the meeting was dedicated to large changes under the hood in Plasma. In Qt 4.3, which KDE 4.0 is based on, it was not possible to use QWidgets on the QGraphicsView canvas. Trolltech has addressed this problem in Qt 4.4, so we're now able to use QWidgets in Plasmoids. This deprecated quite a lot of code in libplasma, so the Plasma developers were able to remove that, reducing maintainance burden, size of the codebase, memory footprint, but at the same time Plasma becomes more powerful and easier to use for those that already know Qt. Moving over to QWigets involved tearing large parts of Plasma into pieces and putting them back together. Alexis spearheaded this effort and had other people jump in from both, Tokamak hacking place, but also via IRC directly. The worst breakage happened during Sunday, by Monday night, quite a lot of Plasmoids were functional again, some with reduced featureset, others with issues fixed. In any case, the Widgets-on-Canvas port will be well worth the effort and pain of porting and will allow for much more powerful Plasmoids.

Sinclair's Syndrome

A curious FAQ put up by an unnamed ISO staffer on MS-OOXML. Question #1 expresses concerns about Fast Tracking a 6,000 page specification, a concern which a large number of NB's also expressed during the DIS process. Rather than deal honestly with this question, the ISO FAQ says:

The number of pages of a document is not a criterion cited in the JTC 1 Directives for refusal. It should be noted that it is not unusual for IT standards to run to several hundred, or even several thousand pages.

Now certainly there are standards that are several pages long. For example, Microsoft likes to bring up the example of ISO 14496, MPEG 4, at over 4,000 pages in length. But that wasn't a Fast Track. And as Arnaud Lehors reminded us earlier, MPEG 4 was standardized in 17 parts over 6 years.

So any answer in the FAQ which attempts to consider what is usual and what is unusual must take account of past practice JTC1 Fast Track submissions. That, after all, was the question the FAQ purports to address.

Ecma claims (PowerPoint presentation here) that there have been around 300 Fast Tracked standards since 1987 and Ecma has done around 80% of them. So looking at Ecma Fast Tracks is a reasonable sample. Luckily Ecma has posted all of their standards, from 1991 at least, in a nice table that allows us to examine this question more closely. Since we're only concerned with JTC1 Fast Tracks, not ISO Fast Tracks or standards that received no approval beyond Ecma, we should look at only those which have ISO/IEC designations. "ISO/IEC" indicates that the standard was approved by JTC1.

So where did things stand on the eve of Microsoft's submission of OOXML to Ecma?

At that point there had been 187 JTC1 Fast Tracks from Ecma since 1991, with basic descriptive statistics as follows:

• mean = 103 pages
• median = 82 pages
• min = 12 pages
  
• max = 767 pages
• standard deviation = 102 pages
  

A histogram of the page lengths looks like this:

Did Canonical Just Get Punked by Red Hat and Novell?

I watched with my usual fascination as the news cycle built to a shrill crescendo last week when both Novell and Red Hat each made a point of announcing that they were not planning to put a lot of effort into developing a desktop for the consumer model.

One media outlet after another propagated the story theme: "Red Hat drops plans for consumer desktop development" Of course by the second or third wave this story, like the game of Telephone, has morphed into: "Red Hat Abandons Desktop! Aieee!" Which industry pundits immediately jumped on and used as "proof" for their long-waning arguments: "See? Even Red Hat sez that Linux on the desktop is no work-y. Told ya so!"

Curiously, very little attention was paid to Ron Hovespian's comments on Novell's similar plans, made before Red Hat's. If I were Novell, I would take this as a bad sign. Not only did the mainstream media not pick up on Novell's news, but even most of the hard-line Linux blogosphere wrote them off with nary so much as a "meh" And if you can't get those folks mad, you must be doing something wrong! :)

My first opinion during all of this hooplah was that why should I care about Red Hat and SUSE Linux not having a consumer desktop line? It doesn't detract from the Linux desktop as a whole (since their business desktop products are doing just fine, thank you), plus let's face it: Ubuntu is kicking butt and taking names on the consumer desktop market already. Let that community and Canonical be the flagship for the Linux consumer desktop. In open source, it's all good anyway.

I was not alone in this opinion, either. Dana Blankenhorn made a similar point in his blog last week, essentially calling Canonical the victor in the consumer desktop arena.

Except I think Blankenhorn and I may have both been wrong. (Well, now it's just him who's wrong; I've moved on.) After talking to Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth last week, I was reminded that the consumer desktop is not Canonical's scene either.

I mentioned my conversation with Shuttleworth last week, when I reported his company's stance on the recent troubles Microsoft is having with Windows XP's end of life. The rest of my conversation with him was about the announcement Canonical is making today about the release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (aka Hardy Heron) desktop and server editions on April 24.