Bu mesaji birden fazla alanlardan ozur dileriz. Metin ingilizce maalesef.
Okuyabilenin okumasini oneririm.

Saygilar
Mustafa Akgul
-----------
Bruce Perens tarafindan yazilan ve Acik Sistem'in son on yilini ve
gunumuzdeki Acik Sistem, Yazilim Patent'leri ve Microsoft savaslarini
degerlendiren yazisi asagida. Savasin boyutlarininin daha iyi
anlasilabilmesi icin tum bilisimcilerin okumasinda sonsuz yarar var.
M. Ufuk Caglayan
Bilgisayar Muhndisligi, Bogazici Universitesi
==================================
/State of Open Source Message: A New Decade For Open Source
/ http://perens.com/works/articles/State8Feb2008/
Press contact: Bruce Perens, email bruce at perens dot com, phone
510-984-1055 California business hours. You may publish this entire work
or excerpts thereof, but you must attribute it to the author, Bruce
Perens. Online media should include a link back to this document. You
may alter this document as necessary to reformat it for presentation or
translate it, but you may not edit it to make it appear as if my opinion
is different than presented here.
 
On February 9, 1998, I published the */Open Source Definition/* and the
public announcement of the */Open Source Initiative/* that Eric Raymond
and I were starting. This was the first time that the general public
heard what Open Source was about. Friday, February 8 is the last day of
*/Decade Zero/* of Open Source. Saturday, February 9 is the anniversary
of Open Source and the start of */Decade One/*. It's a computer
scientist thing. We always start counting from zero :-)
 
Of course, in building our Open Source campaign, we were standing on the
shoulders of a giant. Starting in the early 1980's, Richard Stallman
blazed the trail with his philosophy of */Free Software/* and the
creation of the */GNU System/*, which, most notably when it was combined
with the Linux kernel, changed the way software works forever.
 
And that brings me to our first mistake: for a time, there was a
conflict between Open Source and Free Software evangelism. My intent has
always been for Open Source to simply be another way of talking about
Free Software, tailored to the ears of business people, and that it
would eventually lead them to a greater appreciation of Richard
Stallman's arguments. This has come to pass, and I hope you'll continue
to make it so. One only had to witness the attendance of the GPL 3
committees to see that the importance of FSF's work was appreciated by
the largest of corporations.
 
Had you asked me in on that day in 1998 how far I thought this
phenomenon would go, I would not have come close to predicting the
success that exists today. As we enter decade one, */Free Software /
Open Source is mainstream/*. Indeed, we are the leader in many business
computing categories.
 
Our most pervasive penetration has been in business servers and embedded
systems. These days there are, for the most part, two sorts of
businesses regarding Open Source use: ones whose management is aware of
how much they depend on Open Source, and the ones where the boss doesn't
know yet.
 
In contrast, we have not yet achieved the penetration that we might have
desired on user desktop systems, at least if you don't count the fact
that Free Software provides a large part of Apple's MacOS today, and
critical elements of Microsoft Windows as well. Both companies have been
forced to develop strategies to live with us, some of them less
comfortable than others. Today we are seeing much of the value of
software move from the desktop to the network, an area in which we are
already entrenched. This can only lead to the expansion of Open Source
on the systems in individual user's hands.
 
There been a phenomenon of wealth creation by Open Source companies,
starting with Red Hat's IPO and leading most recently to the purchase of
MySQL for 1.1 Billion dollars seven years after the company's creation.
But I would warn those of you who consider Open Source by its companies:
you're missing the biggest part of the phenomenon. Most Open Source
today is software being produced by its users, for its users. The
largest part of the payment for Open Source development today comes from
cost-center budgets of IT users, be they companies, institutions, or
individuals, rather than profit-centers based on Open Source like that
of MySQL. By participating in Open Source development, users distribute
the cost and risk of the development of enabling technology and
infrastructure for their businesses. Their profit centers are not tied
to software sales, but to some other business. To find them, look to the
communities rather than the companies.
 
One recent phenomenon has been the appearance of government officials
openly on the stage at conferences concerning Free Software. Of late,
it's my turn to speak when the minister has finished his greeting, and
they are always announcing some national government initiative
concerning Open Source. OK, I speak outside of the U.S. a lot, but even
in the U.S. we are seeing Linux (and presumably the GNU system) in a
USD$200 Billion defense project with Boeing as the prime contractor.
Nobody's apologizing to the proprietary software industry for doing this
any longer. Indeed, we have become such an accepted part of the software
industry that most proprietary software vendors make use of Open Source
in development or to inter-operate with their products, and many include
Open Source components in their products. Only a few remaining bad
apples feel a need to fight us.
 
We have actually changed the way that innovation happens. */Innovation
has gone public/*. Many companies, institutions, and individuals share
innovation on a daily basis, entirely in the open, through Free Software
development communities. The products they produce are the leaders in
their field. Public innovation eliminates the high transaction costs of
lawyers, lawsuits and licensing. It focuses on building a fertile
community across the market for idea creation and utilization rather
than dividing the market for the direct monetization of ideas as
property. This is the economically most efficient approach for most
companies.
 
My previous reports have discussed SCO. SCO is toast. Good riddance.
However, many in our community have been damaged by SCO's allegations
and will never be compensated. Mr. Ralph Yarro made some tens of
millions from the rise of SCO's stock on anticipation that they'd win
something. He has been allowed to keep those funds. I see no suit, legal
charge, or SEC investigation against him so far. We must also note
Microsoft's participation as financial backer of SCO, as revealed in
sworn testimony during the case. And finally, there were two suicides in
connection with the SCO case: Val Noorda Kreidel, the only daughter of
SCO founder Ray Noorda, and Robert Penrose, IT director for SCO holding
company Canopy Group. One can only wonder at the pressure these poor
souls were under.
 
Microsoft remains a problem, as the bastion of the old way of thinking
about software, and as the epitome of the old school of dirty corporate
fighting. Their current strategy seems to be to poison us with money,
most recently by making patent agreements with a number of Linux
distributions. These agreements go against the spirit of the software
licenses used by our developers, and were perhaps intended to dissuade
developers from contributing their work. To this end, Microsoft poured
more money into Novell last year than Novell's annual profit - indeed
Novell would have had no annual profit without Microsoft.
 
But Microsoft's continuing attempts at patent-based FUD, for all they
cost, don't seem to be effective. They've not caught the big fish with
their agreements, but only the third-ranking Novell and a handful of
also-ran distributions that few knew were still in business. These
companies have offended their own enterprise customers, who hate the
idea of patent FUD directed at their own operations. They are viewed
with suspicion by many Open Source developers, although some have been
too quick to forgive.
 
Aside from that, the most visible effect of Microsoft's influence seems
to have been to send some Open Source projects in arguably hurtful or
merely absurd directions, as with Novell's propagandizing projects to
participate in Office Open XML. Reassuringly, Microsoft remains visibly
heavy-handed. Their ballot-box stuffing around the OOXML standards
process has won them few friends among national standards organizations
and has made governments take a hard look at a situation that they
otherwise would have left to the techies.
 
Some see the potential purchase of Yahoo by Microsoft as a threat.
Certainly it might curtail or corrupt some of Yahoo's involvements in
Open Source communities, and in half-Open-Source products like Zimbra.
But a buy-the-loser strategy could potentially suck up a large part of
Microsoft's unpleasantly (to us) ample cash while leaving them with the
loser. An increase of Microsoft's influence in the content business
could mean the entrance of DRM into conventional web pages. Goodbye
"view source", printing without a fee, and Firefox, if Microsoft is ever
successful with that. It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft were to make
more plays in the content market, perhaps investing in music and film
companies.
 
But Microsoft recognized software patents as the Achilles heel of Free
Software. This is more evident today with several running patent
lawsuits against Open Source developers. The JMRI case is notable since
it is a software patent suit against an individual Free Software
developer, and for its offensiveness: an Open Source developer's work, a
Java Model Railroad Interface, was integrated into a commercial product,
a model railroad throttle, and then the throttle's manufacturer brought
a patent suit against the very Open Source developer whose work he
capitalized upon. Without the fortunate participation of a pro-bono
attorney, the developer would have been defenseless. We should note that
the well of volunteer attorneys and defense funds for Open Source
developers is all too finite.
 
JMRI's developer countersued the throttle manufacturer for violating his
license. The developer's use of the */Artistic license/* with its rather
shaky legal language, and an odd court ruling on that license, weakened
his countersuit. The case remains in court. The JMRI developer has since
switched to LGPL. His plight should be a warning to other developers:
you need a license with the strongest legal language that you can get to
make it effective, and to protect you from software patent holders, lest
unsavory businesses pull the same trick on you. Ask your attorney, but
my surmise is that LGPLv3 and GPLv3 are about as strong as you can get,
having been reviewed by the attorneys of dozens of major corporations,
the eminent Mr. Moglen, and his attorneys at the Software Freedom Law
Center.
 
There are also running suits against a component of JBoss (Red Hat is
the defendant), and against the ClamAV anti-virus software (Panda
[ClamAV producer] and Barracuda [integrator] are defendants) for the
"invention" of integration of virus checking into email transfers.
 
At this point I don't need to re-iterate the evils of software
patenting. That story has been well-told. But it's notable that Open
Source is not the only entity that is threatened by software patents.
Any small or medium-sized business - meaning any company with less than
1000 employees - is at risk, and has common cause with Open Source on
this issue. But small and medium sized enterprises haven't been
sufficiently educated on this issue. That must now change.
 
Until this point, Open Source evangelists like myself haven't been the
right people to talk to non-Open-Source business about this problem,
because we've been viewed as outsiders by the proprietary software
business, by content businesses, indeed by most business in general.
That's no longer the case. We're part of their community now. And thus
we are in position to handle a problem that's been untenable until now:
a effort to overturn software patenting in its bastion, the United
States, through the political process.
 
There are a number of different efforts going on regarding software
patents:
 
The Linux Foundation has been operating some "patent quality
initiatives" with the U.S. Patent Office, which unfortunately may in the
end only serve to strengthen the patents to which they are applied. We
must recognize that the Linux Foundation's steering board is composed of
the very largest of corporations, who in general stand to profit from
the present system while the rest of the business world loses. While the
foundation does excellent work for us in many areas, they would have a
severe conflict with their large-corporate membership if the radical
reform necessary to solve the software patent problem was to to enter
their agenda.
 
The Free Software Foundation is working on telling stories about
businesses hurt by software patenting, and on bringing a court challenge
to software patenting law. My problem with a court challenge is that it
only takes an act of congress to undo what is done by the courts. Thus,
unless we simultaneously build a strong political force against software
patenting, a court challenge is worthless.
 
Only the Europeans have turned back the prospect of pan-Europe
enforcibility of software patents through a political process. They have
recently suffered something of a setback in a British court decision
that disallowed the outright rejection of software patents by the
British patent office. They expect that a version of the European Patent
Litigation Agreement may be back under consideration by the end of this
year, and that in its next form it will not go through parliamentary
channels, and thus will be much more difficult for us to fight.
 
But where the Europeans have won so far, the Americans haven't even
tried. Expect to see that change soon. One necessary tactic will be
decoupling the case of software patenting from the system of patenting
desired by the pharmaceutical companies. Pharmaceutical companies
literally have the best government they can buy. We don't want them in
the argument.
 
So, you can see that the future will present its challenges for Open
Source. We could never have forecast how big we would become during
Decade Zero of Open Source. But we've built tremendous strength, to the
point that we can consider much larger tasks. Join us now, as we enter
Decade One.
/
*- Bruce Perens -*/
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Received on Sun 10 Feb 2008 - 23:36:10 EET