This is interesting reading for all interested in the practicalities of discovering GPL violations:
The GPL Compliance Engineering Guide
By Armijn Hemel
Here are some caveats that however rightfully apply.
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gpl-compliance, armijnhemel
(Pictures by Aslak Ransby)
I had the great pleasure of talkning this year at Open Source Days in Copenhagen on an open source topic that I am constantly trying to understand: Copyleft or reciprocity. I will try to condense the talk into a blogpost later, but until then here are my slides:
http://www.slideshare.net/vonhaller/applied-copyleft-03-10-2008-presentation/
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copyleft, opensource, opensourcedays08
Open source law is a big business area for me. I get at lot of work at Bender von Haller Dragsted that involves advising on legal aspects of the development and use of software released on an open source license. Some of that work reaches me through the cooperation that I do with Black Duck Software - the leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source and third-party code.
Some of the local Scandinavian work associated with the Black Duck products is done in cooperation with Malmoe, Sweden based Purple Scout.
Last week I met with Hans Bak (in the picture above) of CodeExperts, based in Amsterdam. CodeExperts is a highly skilled reseller and business partner of Black Duck Software that offer a set of solutions and professional assessment services that provide the highest level of assurance during due diligences.
I hope to cooperate with Hans in the future to assist his European clients with legal aspects of the results of the Black Duck Software code reviews that Code Experts is offering.
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blackducksoftware, hansbak, codeexperts
It should come as no surprise for the readers of this weblog and for people who knows me from the Danish IT-industry that I am a fierce proponent of open source as a customer-friendly business model with among other things the potential to break Microsoft’s monopoly or near monopoly in certain software markets.
I have clear and vested interests in open source software becoming successful, partly as a citizen in Denmark and of the world, where an efficient software market is becoming increasingly important, partly as a lawyer and consultant who hopes to make a lot of money from clients by advising on open source legal matters.
I am one of the co-founders of the Danish Open Source Vendors Association and participate in a lot of different venues and organisations that deal with the promotion of open source software.
Thus having made full disclosure of my preferences and economic interests from the outset, I also need to emphasise that I have never felt that Microsoft as a company or the people working there are particularly “evil” or “bad persons”.
Microsoft are a great and hugely successful company that all business people should admire and take lessons from. Microsoft employees are among the most intelligent people within the IT-industry that I have ever met.
I think that Microsoft is doing what everybody else wants to do, if your aim is to be successful: to maximise your profits in your capacity as a self-interested individual or firm. If this was not your purpose, you should not be in business. If I was in a position to monopolise legal services in Denmark, I would surely take advantage hereof (luckilly for other lawyers and society at large I am not in such a position).
Notwithstanding my acknowledgement that Microsoft as a company pursue the goals that every profit maximising company should do and that this self-interested behavior is the basis on which a capitalist market-oriented society should operate, I think that it should be equally clear that a monopoly or a near-monopoly is always bad for competitors and customers and for society as a whole. And my position is - like that of the Economist and courts both in Europe and the US - that Microsoft has a monopoly in certain software markets.
Maybe the most important regulation of markets in capitalistic societies is competition or anti-trust law. As all markets are not perfect, and as many markets are closer to imperfection than to perfection, strong and efficient competition regulation is paramount.
In my opinion it is not a question of whether you are for or against Microsoft, but whether you are against monopolistic behaviour.
In my experience it is also impossible to generalise and to say that a company is either this or that. A company consists - and especially a large company consists - of a great number of people and a lot of departments that despite strenuous efforts to promote a single goal, vision or culture in fact has diverging or often conflicting interests.
This is mostly apparent when you read corporate press releases and relate those to conversations you have had with people within the same organisations. Sometimes you cannot fathom that the one person undersigning a press release is in fact part of the same company that another person that you spoke to about the same subject the day before is.
I must stress that I am not saying that Microsoft are more inconsistent in this respect than any other companies are. I am just saying that Microsoft as a large multinational corporation are faced with exactly the same organisational dilemmas as every other large organisation. But when I interact with the local people that I know at Microsoft Denmark, it seems clear to me that Microsoft are just like any other huge cooperate behemoth.
I meet people from Microsoft Denmark in a lot of different situations. I participate in several committees and counsels appointed by large Danish IT-industry organisations and by the Danish government with Jørgen Bardenfleth who is the CEO of Microsoft Denmark. I have attended open source seminars and workshops with Ole Kjeldsen who is the manager of Platform & Development at Microsoft Denmark and who is also working a lot with interfacing Microsoft products with open source products. I know Claus Holte Andersen who is the corporate vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions Sales & Operations from his dealings with several start-up firms that I advise. And I have a very positive impression of these people.
Before the summer vacation I had the privilege to meet with Claus, Jørgen, Ole and Jacob Schaumburg-Müller (right to left in picture above) for breakfast at Microsoft’s Vedbæk offices in Copenhagen. The purpose of the meeting was to have a frank discussion about how Microsoft and the Danish open source industry could work better together in the future.
The meeting was very constructive and in particular I enjoyed the honest and the straight-forward discussions with the four people, each of whom I admire highly on a professional level.
However, I came away from the meeting with two conclusions. First of all I think that it is important that the open source communities and industry - in this case here in Denmark – should open up to Microsoft and try to work together with Microsoft to create products, services, solutions and other offerings that combines Microsoft’s code and code released under open source licenses.
To me it is evident that this will work in favour of the promotion of the open source software in general. Of course you can argue that working together with Microsoft will allow Microsoft at least to attempt to exert the strategy that is often attributed to Microsoft: extend, embrace and extinguish.
I am confident however that this strategy will not work exactly because of the strength of the open source value proposition. If the open source community is afraid of “opening up” to Microsoft, this can validly in my opinion be taken as a sign that an open source strategy is not as strong and viable as we would like it to be.
In fact I am convinced that more cooperation with Microsoft on a practical, customer-oriented level will only serve to “force” Microsoft into becoming more like an open source company itself.
My second conclusion was that this is still not the time for the open source community to let Microsoft into the inner halls of the political decisions processes in organisations that are established only with the aim of promoting open source software. I still find that there are such strong forces within Microsoft that if not want open source to go away and perish, then want to delay the ultimate success of open source for as long as possible.
In my opinion Microsoft will for a long period still attempt in any political context to prevent, postpone or make hindrances for adoption of the use of open source software and the promulgation of real open standards in private as in public businesses. Such strategy is sadly still in Microsoft’s short-term interest.
Therefore it does not make sense to let Microsoft participate in organisations that have as their clear goals to promote open source software, in particular at the expense of closed source software licensing strategies.
I must emphasise again that I think that it is fully legitimate for Microsoft to pursue their current strategies. If Microsoft feel that this is in their best business interests, they should clearly do so as a profit maximising firm. I would do exactly the same, if my monopoly in providing legal services within a certain area was about to be abolished.
By the end of the day I am very much looking forward to working together with Microsoft people, in particular the people that I know from Microsoft Denmark, on combined closed source/open source project and ultimately fully and genuine open source projects. I think that we will all have a lot of fun, made a lot of customers happy and make ourselves good money by doing this.
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microsoft, klausholseandersen, jorgenbardenfleth, olekjeldsen
I have just submitted the abstract for my presentation at Open Source Days 3-4 October 2008 here in Copenhagen:
Applied Copyleft
by Martin von Haller Groenbaek
The arguable most discussed aspect of open source licensing is that of copyleft. In certain situations the use of open source code will have the effect that the licensee is obligated to allow other access to licensee’s own code under the same open source license terms. However important copyleft is to the promotion of open source both as ideology and as business model, the concept is ingenious but also highly complex and often difficult to apply in concrete situations.
This presentation goes beyond the theory of copyleft to address applied copyleft. In particular the following often questions are addressed. When is code modified to an extent that the code is consider a derived work covered by the copyleft provision? When does linking between different classes of code create an entire work that will have to be released under an open source license with a copyleft provision. When is a work distributed, propagated or conveyed with the result that the obligation to release the code under the copyleft license is triggered? Are copyleft provisions enforceable? How will they be enforced and by whom. To what extent can non-compliance with copyleft provisions lead to the payment of damages or other types of compensation and who are the claimants to be compensated? What are the differences between the application of copyleft in GPL v.2 and v.3 and in other hereditary open source licenses?
Anyone with comments or suggestions as to what i should cover in this presentation?
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copyleft, hereditarylicense
Here is a very good interview with Linus Torvalds. Listen to what he has to say on the innovation hype:
‘I think that ‘innovation’ is a four-letter word in the industry. It should never be used in polite company. It’s become a PR thing to sell new versions with.
It was Edison who said ‘1% inspiration, 99% perspiration’. That may have been true a hundred years ago. These days it’s ‘0.01% inspiration, 99.99% perspiration’, and the inspiration is the easy part. As a project manager, I have never had trouble finding people with crazy ideas. I have trouble finding people who can execute. IOW, ‘innovation” is way oversold. And it sure as hell shouldn’t be applied to products like MS Word or Open office.
So no, I don’t think people need ore innovation. I’d rather see more people sell their product on some plain old-fashioned ‘being good’.
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linustorvalds, innovation
In my humble opnion, one of the best presentation at Supernova 2008 was clearly the keynote by Jonathan Schwarz of Sun Microsystem. The best take-away from this was to me - having an open source perspective - Jonathan Schwarz’ four key points to Sun’s open source business strategy:
1. Open source your code (this is ofcourse self-evident for any oss strategy)
2. Collect all the data that you possiby can about interactions with servers, web-site etc, even though you don’t know at the time of collection what to use the data for. You are going need for something in the future!
3. Be transparent, in particular about your data collection and processing. If you are trying to be sneaky about this, someone will discover and publisize it and your company will suffer.
4. Keep copyright to all your code. You want to make your code available to the world under an open source license, but you want to control the code. You are not putting the code in the public domain. If you control the code by having the copyrights you might use dual licensing.
To me these points really charecterize a modern, pragmagtic open source business. A lot of companies can learn af lot from listening to Jonathan Schwarz.
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supernova, supernova2008, jonathanschwarz, sunmicrosystems
In the neverending, but still relevant discussion, about the asp loophole in the GPL, the most recent example from the loophole-will-kill-open-source camp is the pervasive use of open source software in cloud computing.
The company the modifies open source software released under the GPL ii not considered to be distributing (GPL v. 2) or conveying (GPL v. 3) when it run the modified software as part of collaborative cloud computing. Therefore, the company does not have to contribute the modified software back to the community pursuant to the copyleft clause of the GPL.
My personal take on the challenge of securing that open source software covered by the GPL continues to flourish despite the asp loophole is pragmatic as the view expressed by Gordon Haff expresses in Do we need to protect open source from the cloud?.
So far, open source seems to have survived the asp and the web-service challenge without any change to the GPL with respect to the asp loophole. And more fundamentally, the market for oss licenses should take adequately care of any inefficiencies here. If open source needs to close the loophole to continue to succeed then surely devlopers and project owner will abandon the GPL for licenses such as the Affero General Public License.
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agpl, asploophole, cloudcomputing
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