Smalltalk with James Robertson

Joachim Tuchel makes an interesting point about open source licenses and issues, in his retrospective post about ESUG 2010:

The open source licenses panel was interesting and shocking at the same time. In short: no matter what you do, if someone wants to sue you, they can sue you and nobody will be able to tell you upfront in what direction this might go in court. But that might just be my impression. Lots of things to look at, lots of pitfalls for all contributors, users and vendors. Were you aware that if you write some code in your spare time, chances are your employer owns the rights to it? I wonder how any joint effort like Squeak or Pharo or whatever can be sure they even have the right to declare code as being theirs and grant any licenses if the authors themselves cannot be sure about it. This whole stuff simply is a bloody mess in my (now at least almost a little informed) opinion.

It's complicated for sure, and even within companies, it's unclear. On the one hand, most vendors (mine included) take great advantage from open source code, like Seaside. On the other hand, there's the constant tension of "aren't we giving away too much?" - and I think the demise of Sun illustrates the far end of that continuum.

I'm not sure how much cleaner any of this will get, either. Like patents and copyrights, a lot of this stuff is an exercise in MAD between vendors....

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, esug2010

Color me not shocked: Oracle is letting Open Solaris whither on the vine:

In an act of desperation, the OpenSolaris governing board (OGB) has issued an ultimatum to Oracle. The company must nominate a contact person able to take decisions regarding OpenSolaris by the 16th of August or the board will dissolve and relinquish control of OpenSolaris to Oracle.

The people who were sure that OpenSolaris had a future should probably rethink that right about now...

Technorati Tags: oracle, solaris, open solaris

That's the only conclusion I can draw from this:

OpenLogic's survey found that more than 65 percent of respondents who believed they were not distributing OSS actually were to customers, partners or others. And though 84 percent of all respondents were using OSS in the workplace, only 22 percent were using some sort of tool to determine whether the software they were distributing contained any of that code.

I suspect that the numbers are about the same for all licensing - including code under proprietary licenses. It's just very easy to make copies of anything digital, and the requisite license restrictions are easily lost. That sounds like an argument in favor of DRM, unless you've pondered how useful that's been over time :)

Technorati Tags: license, software

Here's an interesting app store issue:

An iPhone port of GNU Go is currently being distributed through Apple's App Store. However, this distribution is not in compliance with the GNU GPL. The primary problem is that Apple imposes numerous legal restrictions on use and distribution of GNU Go through the iTunes Store Terms of Service, which is forbidden by section 6 of GPLv2. So today we have written to Apple and asked them to come into compliance.

That's from the FSF. They go on to say that they expect Apple to drop the app from the store rather than comply; that's how I'd bet. I also wouldn't be surprised to see the SDK development rules updated to forbid GPL code....

Technorati Tags: apple, gpl

Looks like Oracle understands that Sun's "make it up in volume" theory just wasn't working out:

Rebranded Oracle Solaris operating system, the UNIX OS will now be available for a 90 days trial version and then users have to pay to buy a licence. Earlier, under Sun, the OS was available for free but users had an option to buy support from Sun. This may seem OK for enterprise customers as cost of OS is miniscule compared to cost of services. Companies like Oracle generate extremely thick revenues through services and support.

I'm not sure what kind of future Solaris has in any event, free or otherwise. Linux mostly qualifies as "good enough", I think.

I find this announcement fascinating - a mashup of MS Outlook and Google Docs, using the APIs from both products:

Effective today, Mainsoft is offering full-featured access to Google Docs documents directly from within Microsoft Outlook. Their belief is that e-mail and document collaboration sites need to work together seamlessly — so end users can be more productive. They're also planning to give away software that offers full-featured access to SharePoint document libraries, within Microsoft Outlook. So to reiterate — full use of Google docs within Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint — tools enterprise users are used to, with the significant benefits that the cloud brings.

The Mainsoft product is called Harmony and will be a free product and has been built using SharePoint Web Services interfaces and Google Docs open APIs, giving full-featured access to Google Docs or SharePoint documents from an Outlook sidebar.

I'd love to know what Microsoft thinks of that. On the one hand, it doesn't displace Outlook. On the other hand, if an outfit that wants to go with Google Docs finds that they pretty much only use Outlook from the Office Suite, that could cause some heartburn.

Not having used Google Docs, I can't really say anything about whether they would actually serve as a replacement for Word and Excel. I've been happy enough with Apple's iWork, so I haven't seen any reason to wander over that way.

Technorati Tags: MS Office, Google Docs

I love this "call to action" from Michael Widenius amusing - here he decries Oracle acquiring MySQL:

It's not in the Internet users interest that one key piece of the net would be owned by an entity that has more to gain by severely limiting and in the long run even killing it as an open source product than by keeping it alive. If Oracle were allowed to acquire MySQL, we would be looking at less competition among databases, which will mean higher license and support prices. In the end it's always the consumers and the small businesses that have to pay the bills, in this case to Oracle.

Simple question for Mr. Widenius: just who sold MySQL to Sun in the first place? Once you did that (and took the huge payday, I might add) - what did you expect was going to happen? A future filled with happy Unicorns?

Technorati Tags: mysql, stupidity