Software's open war

We’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.

Advertisement

This was published 20 years ago

Software's open war

Who really owns your software? This is the benign question behind an epic ideological struggle raging internationally through courts of law and public opinion. At stake is who will control the software industry and, by implication, information distribution in the 21st century, and the wealth of nations.

The controversy centres on an abundance of efficient programming tools and programmers, plus freely available programming code, allowing new software ideas to be mimicked by almost anyone. Consequently, commercial software developers have resorted to patents and copyright protections, attempting to create 20-year legal monopolies around their products, stymieing both their competitors and in some cases, the free software movement.

This widening of a proprietary/open-source division is perhaps best-characterised by the SCO affair.

SCO, a software company selling Unix operating systems, is suing automotive manufacturer DaimlerChrysler as a user of the Linux operating system, and IBM as a contributing Linux developer, for allegedly infringing upon its intellectual property rights.

Advertisement

Accordingly, IBM is counter-suing SCO, as is Linux distributor Red Hat. Novell is also suing, claiming it is the real Unix copyright holder in any case.

Meanwhile, hardline open-source evangelist Eric Raymond suspects SCO's ability to mount a challenge against Linux has been bolstered by licence revenues from Microsoft, plus helpful referrals to other funding sources, totalling more than $US84 million. Rival Unix vendor Sun Microsystems also chose to pay SCO for a licence.

Meanwhile, developers of free software complain SCO won't openly reveal which lines of code might infringe on their copyright, thus thwarting attempts to avoid the trouble by simply replacing them.

So, fearful of being squeezed out by hard-nosed IT businessmen armed with patents and copyright claims, the open-source community has taken to the streets. Denouncing software patents as the scourge of digital freedom, a huge lobby is pressing for their abolition in Europe - and making significant headway.

This is not a knee-jerk reaction, but the considered position of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a group founded in 1985 to promote the development and use of free software.

Paradoxically, the FSF relies heavily on copyright protection to prohibit the commercial exploitation of code published under its General Public Licence (GPL). So, while a particular expression of an idea in software may be subject to its creator's GPL wishes, according to the FSF, the idea itself deserves no protection - to be mimicked by others without restriction - especially by free-software programmers.

This ideology is at odds with commercial developers like Graeme Port, vice-president of engineering at Australian software update specialist ManageSoft. He believes the wider community will suffer if organisations such as the FSF get their way.

"Ultimately it's someone's super fund," he says. "Stuff it up and that's someone's retirement. Patents give small companies the ability to provide a return."

One thing is clear: it's crunch time for the IT industry. Choices must be made, by large and small companies alike, about their use or development of proprietary, open source or even hybrid software systems.

And some Australian businesses are making some big calls.

One is Daemon Software, specialising in web content management on Macromedia's Cold Fusion application server. Last year, Daemon CEO Geoff Bowers bravely decided to put the source code of his company's main product, FarCry, into the public domain for free download.

"We had a cutting-edge solution which was successful in its implementation," Bowers says, citing FarCry users such as Blue Scope Steel (formerly BHP Steel), Roche Pharmaceuticals and the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption.

"So we were not 'end-of-lifeing' it by throwing it to the wind through open source," he says. "The issue we were facing was several hundred competitive solutions, all vying for the mind-share."

Bowers says content management systems are becoming impossible to patent, so the decision to go to open source was justified by his company's server licence revenues being less than its services revenues. And so far, the source code has only been used by one other commercial developer, in South Australia, so freely publishing it has not cost Daemon any business.

"Product promotion for mind-share would put us out on a limb for attracting investment," he says, "while decreasing product development. There are some tremendously bad systems out there, but if you have a lot of marketing dollars, you can get into the enterprise space.

"The reality is they have a head start on us with marketing and distribution. But some people are very keen to embrace the (open-source) philosophy."

Thus, the FarCry code was put out to open-source developers with even fewer restrictions than the Free Software Foundation's General Public Licence; knowing that as the code's creator, Daemon would be a preferred tenderer for any custom modifications, it didn't want anything to inhibit wide corporate adoption.

Indeed, Bowers reports hundreds of independent contacts from which he might derive some business, with training revenue currently replacing lost licence revenue.

"We've had some really significant functionality contributed by people independent of us," he says. "And there has been a tremendous turnaround in morale in our development team.

"Now that we have gone open source, our developers are celebrities in their own field. And they work harder and longer."

Such independent releases of free software on Macromedia's proprietary Cold Fusion platform is potentially both good and bad for the software vendor, which protects itself by using software patents. Bowers says companies have expressed interest in Cold Fusion, attracted to it by his open-source code. However, the presence of an open-source content management system could make it more difficult for Macromedia to market this type of product. In fact, on any reasonably open system, non-patented proprietary software could be duplicated by open-source developers, limiting a vendor's commercial potential.

So is Macromedia worried?

"I think all power to them," says Macromedia executive vice-president of marketing Alan Ramadan. "If they think they can provide a better product and service than Macromedia - or any other company - it's a free world."

Macromedia itself, along with IBM, supports an open-source project called Apache AXIS web service engine, which is freely distributed with its proprietary  products.

Ramadan characterises Macromedia's Flash file format as "open", as a published proprietary standard, used by more than 50 applications from other vendors. Macromedia's Flash player, though available free of charge, has not been open-sourced in the free software sense, either.

Ramadan believes that if given the choice, customers would prefer to deal with a strong vendor because open-source projects may come and go, but with more than 1000 employees and a healthy bank account, Macromedia will be there tomorrow when you need them, he says.

Meanwhile, for some Australian businesses, holding open-source code might provide comparable security and service options to what a vendor can provide. Rob Janson, co-founder of the Enterprise Java Victoria user group, says his employer, the National Australia Bank, is developing an "enterprise open-source white paper" concerned with the identification of open-source issues, risks and opportunities.

"The National Australia Bank sticks to well-known open-source areas, such as Apache," Janson says. "One of our issues is there are a number of people in the bank using different versions of open source, so we want to get the front door organised."

Janson says NAB modifies open source to "innovate over our competitors". So, with senior bank management declaring "reaching out to the community" as an organisational goal, how much the bank should give back.

To answer this question, five people have been meeting every week since January and will report back soon.

"I'm looking to put forward the model where a benevolent dictator owns the source tree to the enterprise," Janson says. "That's the way open source itself works on the internet. I think the model might apply to the enterprise."

Since the bank tracks the use of its code internationally for tax purposes, Janson says coping with an additional open-source management overhead shouldn't be a problem. However, not every company has the resources to hire a team of developers for its website, nor to appoint a "benevolent dictator" to manage its source code. Although companies like Daemon will gladly sell packaged open-source products, ManageSoft's Graeme Port says his company could not successfully innovate and compete with the likes of IBM and Microsoft, were it not for software patents.

"I think patents provide an extremely valuable protection for a period of time," he says. "It assists the smaller companies in innovation. IBM's patents haven't stifled innovation, and holding a patent in itself isn't that valuable - 99 per cent of the effort is making them into a commercial success.

"But without a patent, someone will copy the idea and you will have no legal redress and you'll lose all your development to someone else."

Port says his company's auto-update software is technically superior, with "rocketing sales", despite Microsoft's SMS being in effect free under many enterprise agreements, 70 per cent of which are overseas. Also, ManageSoft uses and contributes to open-source projects.

So would Port sue if ManageSoft's patents were infringed?

"We are certainly willing to do it, because there are millions of dollars at stake," he says. "And the software industry is always involved in acquisitions in which patents become important."

But what if the infringers were open-source developers?

"There have been open-source proposals put out with similar ideas. Our response would not be to shut them down but to hire them. We could demarcate areas where we have a complementary offering."

It remains to be seen if the worlds of software patents and open source can be amicably reconciled. Certainly those holding genuinely innovative patents are in a position to negotiate with the open-source community. Those who don't may either embrace it - as with FarCry - or one day be overwhelmed by those who do.

The author is a commercial software developer.

NEXTSPEAK

Open source: Instructions written by computer programmers that are published for download via the internet. Many programmers collaborate to create open source "projects" in order to make programs together. A project's contributors and users are often referred to as an open source community. Various usage rights may attach to open source.

Free software: Better described as "freedom software", free software is open source that may be modified and redistributed by anyone. Free software licences that limit this freedom, range from the liberal "you can even sell this free code" to the restrictive "you must not sell it and must republish any changes you create so others may benefit from your work for free, as you did from theirs".

Linux: A Unix-like operating system, comprising a number of open-source projects. The two most notable projects are the Linux kernel pioneered by Linus Torvalds and the GNU higher operating system functions pioneered by Richard Stallman. Various projects are added to these, forming Linux "distributions". For example, the Red Hat distribution is aimed at business users, while the Mandrake distribution is aimed more at home/small office users. Other distributions are aimed at programmers and ISPs.

GPL: The General Public Licence is the legal instrument under which much of the world's free software is used and distributed. Broadly speaking, the GPL relies on copyright to ensure the derivatives of an original work are always redistributed with the same freedoms attached, a concept known as "copy-left". The self-perpetuating licence includes a requirement to make code freely available to end-users, regardless of development cost. Only recoupment for distribution expenses (cost of CDs and postage for example) is allowable under the GPL.

Unix: A popular type of server operating system used in many corporations. Originally created by Bell Labs in 1969, the Unix world has been fragmented by vendors competing with more than 300 flavours of varying compatibility. Today, only a handful of Unix players remain, such as Sun, HP, IBM and SCO.

Open standards: Common definitions of how computers do things, designed to ensure that systems work together. Open standards are created by standards bodies, whose members represent different industry interests, ensuring broad adoption and high compatibility between competing products. For example, thanks to a standards body known as the W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium), web browsers are able to request pages from hundreds of different models of web server.

Proprietary standards: Definitions of how computers do things that are owned but not always published by an IT vendor. Because of the internet, many proprietary standards have diminished, such as Novell's networking and Microsoft's email protocols. Because controlling standards give an IT vendor a head start on competitors, software patents are sometimes used to capture processes involved in implementing standards.

SCO DISPUTE

1979
SCO, the Santa Cruz Operation, founded as a Unix consulting company in California.

1995
SCO acquires the AT&T Unix source from Novell.

2001
SCO sells Unix technologies and services business. Remainder of SCO becomes Tarantella.

August, 2002
Caldera International renamed The SCO Group.

March 7, 2003
The SCO Group sues IBM claiming SCO knowledge was used in Linux.

May 14, 2003
SCO warns Linux users of unauthorised source code.

May 18, 2003
Microsoft licences SCO patents and source code.

June 17, 2003
SCO increases damages claim in IBM case to $US3 billion.

October 16, 2003
SCO receives $US50m in financing from Baystar.

March 3, 2004
SCO sues car maker DaimlerChrysler for not certifying it has SCO code in its Linux installations.

March 3, 2004
Microsoft linked to Baystar funding for SCO legal battles.

Have you participated in an open-source project for the first time recently? Tell Next readers about your experience at next@fairfax.com.au

Most Viewed in Technology

Loading