The Daily Mink

☞ Webmink’s Law

Simon Phipps — Fri, 3 Sep 2010 01:04:56 BST

Does the Fate of OpenSolaris Tell Us Where Unix Is Headed?

I coined a new law yesterday – “For every epic fail there is an equal and opposite epic win” – and this could well be an instance of it. A clever and keen bunch of people are being liberated from the expectation someone else is going to do the job and motivated to establish a fully open, fully Free Unix kernel in the Illumos project. I’m now on the look-out for the counterbalancing “win” for some other “fail”…

So, I don’t think so. But it does liberate Illumos.

Also:

Welcome Apple, seriously

It appears that Apple are happy to play open but Facebook aren’t quite so keen to join in. That’s the deal with “open” – it cuts both ways.

Henry Story and WebID

Another member of the Sun diaspora, with a very worthwhile idea.

⚐ Gosling Webcast

Simon Phipps — Fri, 3 Sep 2010 12:35:43 BST

Image via Wikipedia

Next week JavaZone, the conference that brought you Lady Java and Java Forever will be held in Norway. To celebrate the opening of the new ForgeRock Norway office, we’ve arranged for a party just before the conference starts, on Tuesday evening. If you are in Oslo and would like to attend, please send an RSVP to the address on the web site.

As part of that, James Gosling and I will be “beaming in” via webcast to give short talks and maybe even answer a few questions. If you’d like to join the webcast (using DimDim), please register on our website.

Gosling: Oracle Could Still Live up to 2007 Java Pledge (pcworld.com)
Java daddy says Sun engineers ran ‘goofiest’ patent contest (go.theregister.com)
Java founder Gosling launches T-shirt campaign for free Java (infoworld.com)
Lady Java Video Marks Exact Point Where Geek Culture Jumped The Shark (techcrunch.com)

★ H.264 Is Not The Sort Of Free That Matters

Simon Phipps — Fri, 3 Sep 2010 08:00:40 BST

At the end of last week, the MPEG-LA consortium announced they were extending the arrangement whereby they allow ‘web uses’ of the patents reading on the H.264 standard that they administer for their members to be licensed without charge. The arrangement, which runs in five-year periods, has now been extended to the expiration of the patents in the pool.

At first sight, this sounds great. Headlines have popped up all over the place which might lead one to believe that everything is now fine in the area of video streaming on the internet and we can all proceed without fear of having video taxed. But I’d suggest leaving the champagne corked for now.

Unpacking The News

The statement actually takes a lot of unpacking, probably intentionally so. H.264 is the widely-used “MP4” video format created many years ago by the Motion Picture Experts Group, MPEG. Those “experts” were mostly associated with various corporations and research labs, and the international standard they created was heavily encumbered with patents.

Realising that no-one much would use the standard if each user had to go negotiate patent licensing terms with a large number of separate parties, the patent-holders wisely decided to get together outside the scope of MPEG and create the “MPEG Licensing Authority”, MPEG-LA.

Despite the name, MPEG-LA is nothing to do with the standards group itself. It’s a for-profit company devoted to making the patent problem worse in the name of making it “easier to handle” by creating patent pools for all sorts of other technology areas, beyond the media formats they already police. Go looking for the exact terms under which they are offering “free use” in this case and you’ll find they are not keen for you to know. The best available are summaries that are sketchy about the exact definitions of terms.

They had indeed in February decided to waive licensing charges for what they describe as “where remuneration is from other sources” than direct payment by the viewer to the broadcaster. Their original commitment was to leave such uses untaxed until 2015 and thenceforth to tax at a rate no greater than on-demand internet TV viewing. Their announcement last week commits to never charge under these circumstances.

Chain Of Taxes

Their use of language helps us understand what’s really happening, though. For H.264 video to reach your browser, there is a chain of events that has to happen, and MPEG-LA is taxing every one of them apart from, now, the last.

First, the H.264-format video needs to be created – but that isn’t free under this move. Then it needs to be served up for streaming – but that isn’t free under this move. There then needs to be support for decoding it in your browser – but adding that isn’t free under this move. Finally it needs to be displayed on your screen.

The only part of this sequence being left untaxed is the final one. Importantly, they are not offering to leave the addition of support for H.264 decoding in your browser untaxed. In particular, this means the Mozilla Foundation would have to pay to include the technology in Firefox.

If they could do that. But they would not be able to do so, since the software they create is open source and thus needs to be able to be freely used by others, as a whole or as a kit of parts, without any restrictions. A license bought from MPEG-LA would not be “sublicensable”, meaning they could not gain the right for any arbitrary open source community member to do the same as Mozilla was allowed with H.264. Consequently they are unable to benefit in any way from this apparently generous action by MPEG-LA.

Why Now?

Why are MPEG-LA taking this action now? They wouldn’t say clearly when they were asked, so we’re left to guess. It seems likely that it’s an action induced by Google’s WebM CODEC. At a minimum, MPEG-LA owes to its members a duty to maintain the commercial competitiveness of H.264 over WebM.

But there may be more to it than that. When WebM was announced, MPEG-LA made predatory noises and tried their best to instill fear, uncertainty and doubt in the market through veiled threats of patent litigation against Google and WebM. It may be they are getting ready to launch that attack, seeing this as the ideal moment for the opening of a third front of patent litigation against Google after Oracle and Paul Allen have started the war.

Whether or not that “Axis” forms, the news is nowhere near as good as other commentators would have us believe. The future of the web and of web video depends on open source software, and H.264 remains unusable in open source because of patent threats. MPEG-LA’s apparently magnanimous gesture offers as little to open source as their original tactical move.

Given the tendency for commentators to stick to directly-causal explanations, they seem to be getting away with it despite the fact it really changes nothing with respect to modern adoption of H.264. We should not be affording them so much credit for it.

[First published on ComputerWorldUK]

MPEG LA: H.264 Streaming Will Be Free Forever (nytimes.com)
H.264 answers Google’s open codec with forever free license* (go.theregister.com)
MPEG LA counters Google WebM with permanent royalty moratorium (arstechnica.com)
Mozilla shrugs off ‘forever free’ H.264 codec (go.theregister.com)

☞ Social Dystopia

Simon Phipps — Thu, 2 Sep 2010 07:03:24 BST

Serbia: “Better on Facebook Than in the Streets”

Interesting article points out what I think is a global phenomenon, where the popular press treats web social media as a threat instead of as an opportunity. Just the same thing happened with blogging, where the popular anti-meme was “you’ll lose your job if you blog”.

Facebook could cost you your job!

Sample FUD that just happened to show up in my mail today

Google’s Earth – William Gibson

Insightful yet typically dystopian view of Google from the great William Gibson.

☞ Insiders

Simon Phipps — Wed, 1 Sep 2010 01:06:54 BST

The End of OpenSolaris

Patrick Finch with an informed view of what happened in the past and informed conjecture about the present and future.

Elections to BCS Council

It’s time for elections to the BCS Council again – do we need to get some open source minded people on there?

Survey identifies open source as an enabler of access to knowledge

“The biggest barriers that consumers face in accessing copyright works are those created by copyright law. Even so, consumers around the world will choose original copyright works over pirated copies, provided that they are available at an affordable price.” Interesting research report that identifies open source software as part of the solution to this problem.

★ On Copyright Aggregation

Simon Phipps — Wed, 1 Sep 2010 08:00:02 BST

A collaborative activity dubbed Project Harmony is now under way between corporate and corporate-sponsored participants in the free and open source software communities (not to be confused with the Apache Java project of the same name). The project seeks to harmonise the various participant and contributor agreements – collectively termed “contributor agreements” by some – used by many open source projects.

The goal of the project’s initiators is to reduce the legal costs of analysing paperwork faced by companies contributing to open source projects. Initiated and sponsored by Canonical, meetings have already been held several times under the Chatham House Rule, including one recently during LinuxCon in Boston. The participants also number several people who are skeptical of the value of copyright aggregation, myself included. At the meeting I was asked to write about my skepticism; this article is the result. I’m by no means the first to tread this ground; you’ll also want to read the earlier article by Dave Neary, and the comprehensive article by Michael Meeks ends with a useful list of other articles.

What are “contributor agreements”, why do they exist, and are they a good thing? The need often arises from the interaction with open source of certain approaches to business. They serve a need of those approaches, but they can come at a significant cost to the health of the project. If you’re starting a new project, it’s worth understanding the bigger picture before diving in with a practical guide on the assumption “everyone uses contributor agreements” because not everyone does. For good reasons.

Dual Licencing

One of the dimensions of the business of open source has been the dual-licensing business model. The name is a little confusing since there is (usually) only one open source licence used – the second arrangement is usually a proprietary license or contract exempting the customer from some of the terms of the open source licence. It can be better to describe this as “selling exceptions to the open source licence”, and it is commonly done in conjunction with the GNU General Public License (GPL) which has clauses some businesses regard as hard to accept.

Under this model, open source software is genuinely present, guaranteeing the freedoms of its users, but the business owning the copyright makes money by selling benefits such as the right to make derivatives under a different licence, commercial terms that offer additional guarantees and (most famously) anything-but-the-GPL as the licence under which the software is used. This last option means dual-licensing has often been associated with shady sales tactics along the lines of “it would be a shame if your business got infected with that evil GPL viral licence…”

Copyright Aggregation

In order to use this model, the business owning the copyright has to own the entire copyright to the software they are distributing. As a consequence, when any community member wants to add a modification or enhancement to the source code for the software, the owner demands that to do so they must also hand over their rights to the addition. To achieve this, the copyright owner makes signing of a legal document mandatory for any involvement in the community that involves co-development.

Usually called a “contributor agreement” (to the detriment of older arrangements that use that term for community participation agreements that don’t actually aggregate copyright), the document gives rights amounting to ownership of the copyright in the new work to the copyright aggregator. It may also include other clauses, such as a statement or originality (“this is my work and I didn’t plagiarise it”), a grant of patent rights and even an indemnity (“if you get sued you can blame me”). In most cases the author retains rights to their individual work in some form or receives a license back, but it’s only the aggregator who has ownership of the copyright to the whole system.

So What’s The Problem?

Open source can be defined as the co-development of software by a community of people who choose to align a fragment of their self-interest in order to do so. The commons in which they work contains software under an OSI-approved licence free from usage restrictions with guaranteed freedoms to use, study, modify and distribute it – “free software”. The community members each work at their own expense in order to achieve a shared outcome that benefits all, including themselves. When they create an enhancement, fix a defect, participate in a design, they are not “working for free” or “donating their work” so much as they are “participating in co-development”.

That favoured word “contributor” gives a clue to the problem copyright aggregation agreements cause. An open source community is an open, meritocratic oligarchy – ruled by an elite who gained leadership based on the merit of their participation and skills, open equally to anyone who does the same in the future. The presence of a “contributor agreement” that involves copyright aggregation may be a warning sign that the community using it has one member who is more equal than all the others.

Communities whose members are termed “contributors” rather than “members” or “participants” may well be unequal places where your interests are subsidiary to those of the copyright owner. They are often dominated by users and fans of the software rather than by co-developers, since the inequality makes it hard-to-impossible for a genuine co-developer to align any fragment of their interests on equal terms. Indeed, this inequality is seen by some dual-license proponents as one of the attractions of the model as they seek a community of enthusiasts and (hopefully) customers that they can exploit without competition.

Exceptions

There can be justifications for having copyright aggregation by and for a community. When the beneficiary of the aggregated copyright is the community itself (in the case of a community hosted by a non-profit Foundation), there are benefits available that may outweigh the disadvantages. These include giving the Foundation the legal right to enforce the copyright in certain jurisdictions, and the freedom to update the open source licence later. They may also include the granting of additional rights such as patent licences in the case where the open source licence does not adequately deal with patents, or to help in countries where copyright law is sufficiently different from US law that the US-centric concepts behind open source fail. Richard Fontana covered these well in his LinuxCon presentation.

Even with these benefits available, there are many communities that choose not to aggregate their copyrights – notably the Linux kernel, GNOME, Apache and Mozilla communities. The recent policy and guidelines on copyright assignment by the GNOME Foundations are especially worth reading. Having diverse copyright ownership leads to a deeper mutual trust and an assurance that the playing-field remains level. Insisting on copyright aggregation is one of the more certain ways a company can ensure the open source community it is seeding remains small and lacking co-developers. With the rise of “value add” business models such as Apache-based open core or service subscriptions, it is less necessary for the businesses involved to aggregate copyright.

Some Foundations that avoid aggregation (such as Mozilla) do have a document termed a contributor agreement but the purpose it serves might be better termed a “participant agreement” since it mainly addresses community norms and specifically avoids copyright aggregation. Indeed, there are some who suspect a motivation for using the term “contributor agreement” vaguely to describe agreements also aggregating copyright is a tactic screen the toxicity of copyright assignments from general view.

How To Flourish

It may well be advisable to have a participant agreement for your community, to ensure that everyone has the same understanding of and commitment to the project if they are sharing its evolution. But if you want your community to flourish, eschew aggregated copyrights, or vest them in a non-profit entity representative of and open to the community. In fact, avoid any institutional inequality and focused control. Communities should be open-by-rule.

In my experience, attempting to retain control of a project you’re starting or hosting leads to mistrust, contention and a rules-based focus that diminishes your reputation. Relaxing control will lead to the community innovating and growing in ways you’ve not anticipated, as well as enhancing your reputation. As I’ve frequently said (although less frequently been heeded): trade control for influence, because in a meshed society control gets marginalised while influence delivers success.

[First published in ComputerWorldUK]

☞ Two Endings and a Beginning

Simon Phipps — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 01:05:07 BST

Murdoch’s New iPaper: One Last Tragic Roll Of The Digital Dice

When all you own is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Grim numbers point to the end of the venture capital era

I’d be interested to see a bit more data showing what the 7 and 5 year trends are as well, but this sounds like bad news for venture funding. Still, true open source opportunities that build on existing code and innovate are probably easier to self-fund, and we may well be on the threshold of a new wave of self-funded startups leveraging open source insight.

Burning Man’s open source cell phone system could help save the world

Another person in the Sun Microsystems diaspora: Glenn Edens, former head of Sun Labs and now trying to change the world with open source GSM. AGPL, uses VoIP, using Burning Man for a load test, the story is fascinating.

Hold The Celebrations; H.264 Is Not The Sort Of Free That Matters

Simon Phipps — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:00:00 BST

At the end of last week, the MPEG-LA consortium announced they were extending the arrangement whereby they allow 'web uses' of the patents reading on the H.264 standard that they administer for their members to be licensed without charge. The...

☂ Causality Essay Published

Simon Phipps — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 03:38:00 BST

In response to several comments, I’ve just extracted my discussion of direct and indirect causality from my recent article on why “which licence” is now the wrong question in understanding open source communities. The discussion can found as the essay Direct and Indirect Causality. I’m keen to get it fixed up so your comments are invited (here).

♥ Thinking of OOoCon

Simon Phipps — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 02:36:02 BST

Hungarian Parliament, originally uploaded by webmink.

My best wishes to all my friends attending the OpenOffice.org conference in Budapest this week. With all of the ups and downs and pluses and minuses of the OpenOffice.org project, it is still entirely remarkable what it has achieved over the decade since Sun made it open source, most notably:

Forced Microsoft to open up their file formats – ODF is a true phenomenon and one of the wonders of the FOSS world
Provided true competition for productivity software in public administrations globally
Kept going all these years!

Whatever happens next for the project (and I sincerely hope it’s excellent), we can all be proud of what we’ve achieved collectively against all odds. Have a great conference, and enjoy visiting the Hungarian Parliament (pictured above, feel free to use my photo!)

OpenOffice.org Celebrates Tenth Anniversary at OOoCon in Budapest (prweb.com)

♫ Holiday Gift

Simon Phipps — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 01:07:45 BST

Vanguard Records Sounds of Summer MP3 Sampler

Not 100% to my taste, but some of the tracks are very good (I like Robert Cray and Stacy Clark) but the whole thing is likely to have different appeal for different people so go grab it! Amazon US, so US accounts only.

(tags: Amazon MP3 music)

Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements?

Simon Phipps — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:30:00 BST

GNU/Linux - finally it's Free software

Simon Phipps — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 11:35:14 BST

This may come as a shock, but all GNU/Linux distributions to date have been built with essential software under a licence that clearly meets neither the Open Source Definition nor the Free Software Foundations' requirements for a Free software licence....

"Which Open Source Licence" Is The Wrong Question

Simon Phipps — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:06:32 BST

Various commentators are beginning to pick at the threads of the rediscovered collaborative model for open source now that the "open source bubble" is being superseded. This is a return to what many of us regard as "real open source"(the...

Open Source Trade Associations Lack Sanctions

Simon Phipps — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 07:30:40 BST

A controversy developed last week when the author of an article concerning the Java lawsuit quoted what I said on Twitter in 140 tongue-in-cheek characters:"The ORCL-GOOG case makes OIN and the Linux Foundation look like the League of Nations at...

No Comment on Oracle vs Google

Simon Phipps — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 05:56:08 BST

I have no comment on the news that Oracle is suing Google over Android's use of Java. But there are a few data points I'd like to draw to your attention.The news: Oracle sues Google over Android and mobile...

Open Source: "The King Is Dead, Long Live The King"

Simon Phipps — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 06:00:28 BST

I wrote last week about the end of the "open source bubble": "The anomaly is not that projects like Hadoop or OpenStack lack a company 'monetising' them - it's that we believe open source projects ought to have such...

Will Illumos Bring OpenSolaris Back To Life?

Simon Phipps — Tue, 3 Aug 2010 06:33:47 BST

Today sees the launch of the Illumos Project, heralded last week in a message on the OpenSolaris mailing lists. The announcement caused much excitement, with many assuming it was a fork of OpenSolaris or another OpenSolaris distribution. Illumos is...

Is The "Open Source Bubble" Over?

Simon Phipps — Mon, 2 Aug 2010 12:30:18 BST

I was pleased to be able to attend this year's OSCON, O'Reilly Media's open source convention held once again in Portland, Oregon in mid-July. There have been numerous reports about it, not least from the New York Times, but...

iPhone Jailbreaking Decision Is Temporary Relief

Simon Phipps — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 04:00:00 BST

While the decision by the US Library of Congress to create exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for unlocking cellphones and jailbreaking iPhones (among other things) in the USA are very welcome, the reaction has been just...

San Francisco & The Bay Bridge

webmink — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 10:59:40 BST

webmink posted a photo:

Open Source Does Not Need "Monetising"

Simon Phipps — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 06:17:00 BST

It's common to hear commentators and business leaders justifying practices that wouldn't be recognised as "open source" on the grounds that they have to make money somehow. Phrases like "we can't give everything away" garnish the thought, and it's...

Shasta, from 20,000ft above Lassen

webmink — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 07:03:47 BST

webmink posted a photo:

Really Open Source Cloud Computing Arrives At Last

Simon Phipps — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 07:12:00 BST

This week I'm attending the Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon, along with the ancillary events it attracts. Today's report covers the significant news of a true, community-driven open source cloud project announced today and the impact the so-called...

A Considered Future For OpenSolaris

Simon Phipps — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 09:56:00 BST

You may have seen some of the news reporting of the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) meeting that was held last Monday (I am an elected member of the Board). At a meeting with an unusually large number of community...

Open Source Needs To Have An Unfair Advantage To Succeed

Simon Phipps — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 02:00:00 BST

A guest post from Mårten Mickos in response to Simon Phipps's statement of opposition to so-called "open core" models. Mickos argues that "for an open source company to become commercially successful, it needs to have an unfair advantage against...

Open Core Is Bad For You

Simon Phipps — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:45:00 BST

The open core model is being feted as the new default open source business model. But I assert it does not deliver and sustain the principle that delivers cost savings and flexibility to the customer - software freedom. As...

The Anniversary Rose

webmink — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 03:58:05 BST

webmink posted a photo:

Blooming fragrantly and beautifully again.

Transfer Summit Gala Dinner

webmink — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 09:33:44 BST

webmink posted a photo:

In Keble College, Oxford. Very Harry Potter.

Why Do Open Source Advocates Attack Each Other?

Simon Phipps — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 03:33:00 BST

Maybe it's a trend, or maybe I just noticed because I was looking, but following my article last week about the strange parallels between Life of Brian and the critics of the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement,...

The Daily Mink

☞ Webmink’s Law

⚐ Gosling Webcast

Related Articles

★ H.264 Is Not The Sort Of Free That Matters

Unpacking The News

Chain Of Taxes

Why Now?

Related Articles

☞ Social Dystopia

☞ Insiders

★ On Copyright Aggregation

Dual Licencing

Copyright Aggregation

So What’s The Problem?

Exceptions

How To Flourish

☞ Two Endings and a Beginning

Hold The Celebrations; H.264 Is Not The Sort Of Free That Matters

☂ Causality Essay Published

♥ Thinking of OOoCon

Related Articles

♫ Holiday Gift

Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements?

GNU/Linux - finally it's Free software

"Which Open Source Licence" Is The Wrong Question

Open Source Trade Associations Lack Sanctions

No Comment on Oracle vs Google

Open Source: "The King Is Dead, Long Live The King"

Will Illumos Bring OpenSolaris Back To Life?

Is The "Open Source Bubble" Over?

iPhone Jailbreaking Decision Is Temporary Relief

San Francisco & The Bay Bridge

Open Source Does Not Need "Monetising"

Shasta, from 20,000ft above Lassen

Really Open Source Cloud Computing Arrives At Last

A Considered Future For OpenSolaris

Open Source Needs To Have An Unfair Advantage To Succeed

Open Core Is Bad For You

The Anniversary Rose

Transfer Summit Gala Dinner

Why Do Open Source Advocates Attack Each Other?