Three hours later I realized that Apple is back in the same box Steve Jobs put it in over 25 years ago.To continue the morning’s baseball theme, It was deja vu all over again. My friend’s WiFi was on the fritz. The battery was losing power faster than a politician under indictment. No problem, he said. I have an appointment. The store was tightly packed with people, even though it was Monday afternoon. We were called at 3:18 for an appointment scheduled for 3. After examining the unit our hyper-friendly Apple geek suggested a reboot. No good. Sadly he suggested reloading the operating system.
Some 15 minutes later, still no good.OK, he said, we can fix it, but it will take time because it’s a hardware problem. Wait, my friend said, that’s my home phone. Can’t I just buy another?Sure, the geek replied. Just get in this line here. How long is this line here, my friend asked. About an hour-and-a-half to two hours, came the reply from the line monitor.Some 45 minutes later, while my friend frantically used his AT&T data minutes to try and order a new phone online while standing in the Apple phone ordering line, his girlfriend arrived like cavalry to the rescue. She wasn’t under Apple’s spell. She pulled us out and said my friend could buy something later.Suddenly, in the mall parking lot, a miracle occurred.
There, right across the street, was an AT&T store. A company-owned store, its happy little death star sparkling in the sunlight.Eureka, my friend said. They sell iPhones. So we went over.It was night-and-day. By which I mean the AT&T store was nearly empty. The help was not overwhelmed. They were waiting for us. We were taken to a man named Scott, who engaged my friend in earnest conversation while I perused the inventory. Look, I said, this Samsung Captiva costs just what the iPhone would. It’s an Android phone designed to look just like the iPhone, and it seems to have all the same features as the iPhone. Hint, hint.Well, Scott replied, we don’t have any iPhones in stock, but I can get you into a Captiva right now.
A half-hour or so later my friend was a happy Android user, asking me if I wanted an iBrick.There are some important lessons here:Apple claims to be unworried because it is selling iPhones as fast as it can make them. Even faster. Apple is not scaled to meet demand for its product, and certainly not for its retail services. Alternatives with the same look-and-feel are available now.Back in the 1980s, PC users had to live through 6 years of FUD, waiting for Microsoft or IBM to get their act together and deliver a graphical user interface similar to the Apple Mac, introduced in 1984. Apple had 5 years to own the market, yet its insistence on complete control meant it couldn’t meet demand. Microsoft won.
It’s happening again, Steve. Only
it didn’t take Microsoft 6 years to match you. Open source did it in
two. And that’s why Android phones now out-sell the iPhone. They’re not
better, they’re just available, and you don’t have to go into the 7th
circle of Apple Hell to get one.
I previously suggested Dell for this role, saying it would be in their business interest to commit to this course. The problem with IBM is somewhat different. IBM has learned over the last two decades that it can succeed while avoiding the trips and dramas, the strum and drang, which pass the news cycles in the computer press. Sometimes no news is indeed good news, especially in computing, because it’s not about you but the customer. But David has a point. All of open source benefited from having important projects in safe hands. With those projects no longer in safe hands a pall has settled, threatening to become a malaise.
IBM is in a unique position to fight that. It has invested heavily in Java and Linux. It passed its Symphony suite over to OpenOffice.org years ago, and now sells support while offering it for download there. IBM has also benefited from open source through Eclipse and other projects. No other company has earned as much money from open source as IBM. No one else does a better job of giving the lie to the idea that open source is a money loser than IBM.IBM has become the Stan Musial of open source. (That’s The Man himself, on Wikipedia, during 2008’s Stan Musial Day in St. Louis.)
It’s an open source Hall of Famer, with an excellent reputation, but few people outside its home base know the story, just as Musial is little known outside his hometown and certain retirement homes. (His SI cover this summer was, believe it or not, his first as a solo, although he was the magazine’s Sportsman of the Year for 1957.) Now, if I can extricate myself from my own childhood we’ll go on.Despite the nonsense of our Supreme Court (they also think tomatoes are vegetables) companies are not people. They can be immortal, renewing themselves with every generation, adapting constantly, changing with the times. IBM has proven this. The Watsons are dead. Lou Gerstner is long gone. Elvis has left the building.
Yet IBM goes on, its market cap still bigger than Google’s or Oracle’s. If open source needs a hero to step up, IBM is best positioned for the job. One might even argue that IBM owes this to open source. Having benefited from open source for over a decade, unifying its product lines under Linux, sharing development costs with rivals, and making a ton of money, IBM really should give back. This is something open source teaches all of us. You benefit more from open source when you give than when you just take. In fact the more you give the more you benefit.
I’m not asking IBM to do something against its interests here.
Quite the contrary. It is very much in IBM’s own interest that it step
up and lead the open source movement. That’s something IBM
representatives have been telling their customers and business partners
for some time, that you give in order to get.
Analysts say the bidding has reached Crazytown, that it’s now all about corporate ego. (Can a headless company have an ego? Apparently so.) My advice would be to let HP overpay. There is more than one way to skin a server farm. The issue with 3Par is that both Dell and HP long ago hit upon similar strategies, high-end hardware tied to services. They have been on a collision course ever since Dell overpaid for Perot Systems to match HP’s EDS buy. But Dell has a second strategy, maybe a better one.
Dell is chasing HP out the back end of the “s” curve, looking to offer bargain prices with narrow margins, which pricing theory says is the way to go in a mature market.Thus Dell is looking for the lowest-cost manufacturing environment it can find, whether in western China or even in India. The idea is if it’s about raw cost Dell is determined to win. (Cheap money is another element in the strategy.) It’s a long way from its old strategy of build-to-order, but it’s a different world.The Dell Streak fits well into this world.
It’s an Android tablet, run under the GPL, which apparently Dell has run afoul of. Rather than argue the point, Dell promises to comply with the license. Critics are dumping on the Android strategy, but a better play might be to double-down. Small and medium sized businesses would love to save with open source, but many remain suspicious about support. What they need is not a big bill, but an arm around the shoulder, what we New Yorkers call a rabbi.
A rabbi in this case doesn’t have to be a Jewish teacher. He doesn’t have to be Jewish. He doesn’t even have to be a he. A rabbi in this case means a friend, a trusted adviser, someone who will guide you and sponsor you. That’s what a lot of medium-sized businesses need if they are to make a true commitment to open source, a rabbi, a friend, an adviser. Someone who knows and will tell them the truth. By expanding its commitment to open source communities and software, by becoming knowledgeable and offering that knowledge, by sponsoring its customers to the open source world, answering questions, Dell could win a lot of customers at very low cost.Rabbi Michael?
But in publicly portraying itself as the Luke Skywalker of open source (and Larry Ellison as Darth Vader) Google is taking a risk. That’s right, someone might find out Oracle is its father. That would be a real disturbance in the force. The problem, as Bruce Perens makes clear at his blog, is that this lawsuit isn’t really about open source. Google deliberately violated the patent freedom grant given by Sun, using a user interface toolkit not found in Java ME or Java SE.Java on the web doesn’t seem to have the problems that Google built into Android, its users can stay within the patent grant without trouble. Oops.
Instead, Android implements the Dalvik Virtual Machine, recompiling  the Harmony class libraries on Apache’s version of Java SE. It then targets the new version at the same markets Oracle has identified.Or, as Charles Nutter notes in his excellent summation of the issues, “Dalvik is not a JVM…it just plays one on TV.” Google made Java better, which is technically a good thing. But it did so in a legally questionable way. One point even the fiercest open source advocates will insist on is that your rights to change code are not unlimited.
They are defined by a license. If Google tweaked a proprietary version of Java it may lack the commercial rights to what it has done.In other words, as painful as it may be admit this, Oracle may indeed have a case even Richard Stallman is bound to respect.Google, who’s your daddy?
Why, yes.Microsoft loves open source for the same reason IBM loves it, for what it can do for Microsoft. Microsoft has used its patents, just as IBM did, to bully its way into the space, it has created open source licenses the suit its needs, and it can use open source as a glue to hold customers to its products with their cash flow. It can now afford to be magnanimous. What’s not to love?
Once more we have to explain to our fellow typists the difference between open source and FOSS. Open source is a practical means for doing business. FOSS is an ideal.Open source does not mean you wear a hair shirt and abjure filthy lucre — just the opposite. (As if FOSS ever did. There are far more long-haired rednecks out there with Bush-Cheney 2004 stickers on their trucks than hippies. This is 2010.) Of course just because Microsoft loves open source that doesn’t mean it does what the open source movement wants it to do as opposed to what Microsoft wants to do.
Microsoft loves open source because it has found a way to twist it in the direction of its own self-interest.It is also in Microsoft’s self-interest to appear benign toward open source right now. Oracle has gleefully taken up the mantle of open source villain, and Microsoft’s new public stance may help it take some business away from its rival.In the age of cloud computing, a completely proprietary stance makes no logical sense anyway. Where the software comes from does not matter to the cloud user. All they care is that it rains applications. Profitable ones.Now there may come a time when it will be in Microsoft’s best interest to hate open source.
And the fact that it loves open source doesn’t mean it won’t compete fiercely against open source, and try to take business away from open source companies.It’s not love as in “I will always be true to you.” It’s not a marriage. It’s a relationship, a guy thing. More like, “I love you, man,” and punching open source in the shoulder after a few extra beers on a Friday night.We are talking about the love Pete Townsend sang about in “Behind Blue Eyes.” “If I shiver please give me a blanket, keep me warm, let me wear your coat.” That’s a groovy kind of love, too. But I won’t get fooled again by it.Don’t you be, either.
According to meeting notes posted today, the team aims to release beta 5 this Friday and is aiming to post the feature-frozen beta 6 on September 10.The project — which held its weekly meeting here today — will consider adding new features until August 27 but the intent is to wrap up work on the three core elements for Firefox 4: delivering high performance, a compelling user experience to drive upgrades and JetPack SDK, which is the SDK that allows developers to use advanced web technologies to create Firefox add-ons.
Those three priorities have been addressed but some of the other code developed since 3.6 may be moved to 4.1 or 4.5 to enable a speedy delivery of version 4.“Beyond those three things, nothing can make us delay Firefox 4 any longer than we have to,” said one lead Mozilla developer on the call, who added that there are tons of new features in Firefox 4 that will make it a strong rival to forthcoming competitors IE9 and Chrome 5. “It’ll be a huge step for us.”Hardware acceleration is expected to be on by default by beta 5.
Once demand is satisfied, and most buyers are getting their second version of your product, you want to practice value-pricing, with lower margins, to maximize profit.It’s in between these low-sale and high-sale states that we have the most fun. Demand grows exponentially, but you have to scale, getting big as fast as the market, if you’re to make the most from your invention. Flat World Knowledge is about to hit that key inflection point on the s-curve. They face the problem of getting big, fast.
This is where the big money comes in, and the key decisions are made, that decide the fate of the whole industry. Flat World president Eric Frank called last week to say he’s up for the challenge. He was preparing to address a faculty convocation at Houston Community College, which has 25 campuses. It’s one of those big accounts that is going to fall somewhere, soon, as the industry is transformed. So far, the main way traditional publishers are dealing with the threat of open source textbooks, which can be edited constantly and given away as HTML files, is through rentals.
Rather than have kids buy textbooks at the start of the semester and then find a way to sell them back when they’re done, firms like Barnes & Noble are working with college bookstores to make this transaction automatic. My kids save half on their textbook costs and there is less hassle. It’s a good thing. But Flat World is growing fast. Some 150,000 students will have access to its free books this year, with 1,300 faculty members on the program. Flat World profits by selling study guides, PDFs, audiobooks, and printed copies. Authors make about as much as they did before.
This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting on a school of business that is committing its whole program to Flat World. This is just the tip of an iceberg of demand now forming, as three trends hit the industry, Frank said:The bookstore model is under growing pressure. Schools are looking to replace it. Teachers say the print book cost problem is hurting their ability to teach. Teachers will soon be able to customize their textbooks with Flat World. Another important fact, Frank said, is that textbooks are a long tail business. Just 125 titles represent 55% of the market.
Flat World is now moving toward filling all those niches — Frank called it a tipping point.Cloud computing and tablets like the iPad are just accelerating these trends, Frank said. He is now looking to consolidate his distribution system, knowing that demand is coming, and knowing that larger companies are soon going to be sniffing around his market space.“We’re great at author acquisition, book development, sales and marketing. We’re looking for a distribution partner.”Open source textbook publishing, in other words, is no longer a gangly freshman. This year it has to take the MCAT. The pressure is on.
Without that slack, it may be the dumbest thing said all year.Suw Charman-Anderson responded with something almost as stupid. The Web’s not that smart.Yes it is.Google me today and you’ll get about 36,100 results. Bing has me 113,000 times. They’re all accurate because, thanks to a quirk of my German-Irish-Polish heritage, I’m the only one of me there is. (Dana’s etymology is Polish.) My late friend Russell Shaw, by contrast, had his name on a brand-builder, a music composer, and a former football star, among others.Point is, we’re all Google-able.
Changing your name won’t help. Not being found is becoming almost as much a cause for suspicion as finding you said something stupid once upon a time. And I have. Many times. I have a troll who loves reminding me of one such bit of intemperance. His aim is, simply, to discredit my work, which is what people fear when they say they have lost their privacy to the Web. They fear that one mistake will haunt them forever.The best advice I ever got in journalism school came in an early lecture, in 1977. Live your life like you’re on TV, I was told. As a journalist you are a public figure. I have not always lived up to that charge well, but I have remembered it, and it has given me some important advice for anyone who must look anyone else in the eye in the age of the Web. Forgive.
We are all fallible. We all screw up. We all say stupid things, and do stupid things. What matters is what we are today, what I can do for you today.In other words, look at the code, not the coder. And understand that just as they’re an open book to you, so you and your company are an open book to them. Seek to build your credibility, every day, in every way you can. Contribute to good deeds, by coding if you can, by bug collecting or using beta code or by just writing if you can’t. And take that attitude into the world with you.When we’re young, we’re young. When we’re angry, we act out. When we’re tempted, we may fall.
In some jobs we may fail. And the Web never forgets.But we’re not the Web. That’s our advantage. We can forgive, we can balance our judgments of one another, we can change our minds, we can change. Each day is a new opportunity — sounds corny but I really believe it.The problem is not the Web’s lack of anonymity. The problem is our attitude toward living as though we’re on TV, because sometimes you’re going to be the windshield, and sometimes the bug.Living in an open book can be liberating. At least you’re being read.
In the open source software community, there's considerable nervousness about paying people to work on volunteer-driven projects. For example, Joomla recently hired some developers to work on its core software, a decision that has caused much debate in the Joomla community. There's also an understandable concern that the spirit of volunteerism will be lost or a volunteer project will be tainted when a paid staff is introduced. There are worries that a project's agenda will change to suit the needs of "privateers." However, many projects that rely completely on volunteers fall short of what can be done by a paid staff. Some projects can't afford not to make use of the benefits that a full-time, focused staff can provide. The concept of major projects growing out of a volunteer, community-based model is not new to the world. Throughout history there are examples of pure volunteer organizations that were instrumental in the founding and formation of many projects. The building of roads is one example. While the first routes were often developed by citizen volunteers, over time the maintenance and expansion of transportation systems ultimately has been taken on by our governments and public institutions. In other words, whether we are talking about roads or technology projects, there will always be a place for volunteers, just as there is a place for professionals. It's quite common in the software industry that great movements are started by volunteers. While this can work quite well initially, there comes a time when a volunteer-based project becomes a threat to larger, controlled organizations (for example, MySQL to Oracle, Linux to Microsoft). At that point, if the open source organization is to survive and compete, it may have to fortify its position by fostering commercial involvement that helps the project advance and compete. Red Hat is a good example. Without Red Hat, Linux might not have the strong market share it has today. It is also one of the reasons I co-founded Acquia. Within the Drupal project, we don't have a paid staff to advance the software. However, many of the developers who contribute to critical parts of the Drupal code base make their living by building complex Drupal websites. Some Drupal developers are paid by customers to contribute their expertise to the Drupal project or are employed by companies "sponsoring" Drupal development.
Now, with MUMPS experts looking increasingly like an opera audience (aging out), the VA is looking to replace VistA. They like the idea of open source, but they have serious questions about things like governance and management of the intellectual property.So, in the way of Washington, they have issued a Request For Information, hoping the industry can answer its questions. The whole process illustrates why big, proprietary contractors have the upper hand in government procurement.
They can put experts onto this RFI, writing sparkling essays (complete with charts) showing exactly why sharing the intellectual property open source creates would be a really bad idea.Open source vendors can’t afford this, because the costs of the effort can’t easily be capitalized into a later contract. Open source doesn’t create million dollar washers. Yet the advantages for the VA in the open source process are proven. The VA has been benefiting from that process for a quarter century. VistA itself, which has spawned a small open source industry with no help from the VA, is the proof of that.It’s like you have to educate someone on their own invention.
The RFI reminds me of how I discovered my own daughter was dyslexic, many years ago. She got a learning game, went through the first level, and instead of going to the next level created a new screen name for herself, going through the same level again. Wash, rinse, repeat.Her dyslexia was eventually repaired, through an education process that emphasized hands-on learning, at which she excelled. She would write her spelling words into shaving cream my wife spread on a glass tabletop. She’s in college now and doing well. But the VA has already gone through this hands-on learning process. Why should they need the benefits explained yet-again?
Because that’s how government procurement works. The VA spent most of the Bush years pushing VistA to the sidelines, and even signed a contract for a proprietary lab system from Cerner. While the VA’s new managers have some open source religion they are still in the position of judges, and need evidence before proceeding. There are experts who can deliver the lesson, like Fred Trotter. Unfortunately Fred is currently fighting a patent troll (thanks again, Justice Roberts).
Medsphere could deliver the lesson, but they’re pretty busy these days filling orders. They do have an interesting white paper out on how they’re upgrading MUMPS with Java, but I suspect the VA wants more of a 10,000 foot view.So consider this a call-out to my friends at the Linux Foundation. These boys need a re-education. If you do it right, you can educate enterprises of all sizes.
It is with the aim of creating this kind of FUD that Oracle has made its moves against Java and OpenSolaris. Most analysts now expect similar moves against mySQL and OpenOffice. (To the right, a proprietary Dana, not the open source one. All will be explained.) Why would Oracle destroy assets it just paid good money for? Two reasons. Oracle paid $7.4 billion for Sun. Even with recent drop-offs in revenue(which can be made up) the company should easily clear $2.5 billion in hardware sales this year. If you can buy a viable computer hardware business for three times sales you’re doing pretty well. Oracle got the software assets for free. Oracle’s moves against high profile open source projects like Java (and presumably OpenOffice and mySQL) also serve as a warning against enterprise dependence on other open source projects. Open source companies practically live to be taken over. It’s the pot of gold at the end of their rainbow. Oracle is telling their customers that could leave them high and dry. We assume that the license status of open source is fixed, like baby names. But the status of baby names isn’t fixed at all. When I was born in 1955, most kids named Dana were boys. By 1970, when the singer Dana Owens (Queen Latifah) was born, most Danas were girls. They will be when my grand-kids are born too. (Picture from Wikipedia.) What Oracle is demonstrating with Solaris is that such status is not fixed. (Good news for boys named Dana.) Open source can be taken back. Which means that if you come to depend on open source, you may find yourself staring down the barrel of a large bill one of these days, if someone else chooses to be like Larry. This has always been an Achilles Heel for open source businesses. They can’t make people buy their stuff. They make up for the revenue shortfall with lower sales and distribution costs. But they still have that revenue shortfall. Thus proprietary companies have a big advantage whenever an open source company wants to cash in. They’re still the most likely buyers. With Solaris Oracle seeks to prove the rights enterprises think they have to open source code can be taken back. If this can be seen to make financial sense — if Oracle’s strategy is copied even by Oracle — then the corporate way forward for open source may be closed off. Enterprises may decide they have to buy licenses for their own protection, and the open source era ends. That seems to be the plan, and it’s a cunning one, because as I noted the assets Oracle is playing with were essentially free. All it had to do to get the crown jewels of open source was play a little poker, a game where you win by convincing others your hand is something it’s not. Open source is not dead, of course. Solaris and the other projects Oracle has bought could be forked. Or can they? Didn’t Google fork Java for Android, and isn’t Oracle now saying in legal papers its control of Java is protected by patents? And if there’s one thing an enterprise buyer wants to see less than a bill, it’s a lawyer. Lawyers can scare Danas of both sexes.
It’s not a merger. Yahoo’s open source projects remain Yahoo’s. This is in contrast with the Oracle-Sun deal, where Sun’s open source projects were said to be behind Oracle’s interest. But look more closely. Yahoo’s open source projects are now held by acompany that is cash poor. The company will be under enormous pressure to monetize its software assets, and the for-sale sign is already out. Just this year most crown jewels in the corporate open source crown have changed hands. Java. Hadoop. Open Office. The Yahoo User Interface Library. All just pawns in bigger corporate games. This may be hard for backers of the corporate open source model, like our own Matt Asay, to explain away. But when you support a corporate open source program, your community efforts are subject to the corporation’s strategic whims. I return again to a favorite open source analogy, Tom Sawyer “painting” his Aunt Polly’s fence in Mark Twain’s 19th century classic. Who winds up painting the fence? Who gets the credit? Twain meant the tale as a satire of Gilded Age capitalism, the eternal struggle where you knead and bake the bread but I eat it. Contrast this with corporate community projects such as Eclipse or Apache. What happens with one contributor there has only a limited impact on the community as a whole. Not only does the code abide, but so does the governing structure. That’s protection which goes beyond what you’ll find in a mere software license. This lesson may prove hard to swallow. Communities can be starved, but corporate projects can ignore community members’ wills if they want. Those who don’t like the terms can fork it, out in the cold cruel world, or they can suck it up. What Microsoft is saying to open source here, what Oracle said to open source in the Sun deal, was said perhaps most famously by Tom Friedman in regards to the Iraq war. The polite paraphrase of Friedman’s statement is this. You don’t count.
Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond's LinuxCon keynote kicked off with the announcement that open source had crossed the IT adoption chasm. Hammond's data, drawn from five Forrester, Eclipse Foundation, and "Dr. Dobbs" surveys over the past two years, showed that nearly 80 percent of organizations are using open source software in IT development projects. The survey results also found that IT executives were much more pragmatic about increasing open source usage and that software developers -- who tend to favor open source usage -- are increasingly important to product selection decisions. Thus, there's a potential for a collision between the business' mentality of "use what's most appropriate," and developers' mentality of "we want open source everywhere possible." Expanding open source usage isn't a top priority
Keep in mind that the survey question states, "when making software decisions." As such, an IT organization might not have open source usage as an explicit factor during software selection, and yet select an open source product for a given project because the open source tool happens to be the best for the job. And an organization that is intentionally trying to increase open source adoption will still pick traditional applications where they are the best choice for specific projects. The survey results indicate that the vast majority of IT decisionmakers select software based on its ability to meet their business requirements, not whether the product is open source or not. That's pragmatic, and is very much in line with customers I've interacted with, or whose stories I've been told by sales colleagues at IBM. What's changed is that the "religious factor" around open source has diminished. Even as little as a year ago, customers were much more likely to state, "we're moving everything to open source" or "we'll never touch an open source product." Today, it's common to use a mixture of open source and closed source products. If your company is in the minority that has rejected either open source or closed source software in its selection processes, you must ask why your competitors are making a different decision. Are developers the new king-makers? Developers are much more willing to recommend products that they are already productive with. This has been a boon for open source products that are free for developers to use and gain experience with. It's no surprise that traditional software vendors now offer developer editions of their respective software at no charge, to match their open source competition. But Hammond notes that IT executives are beginning to reassert control over the software selection process. As such, Hammond provides the following advice for software vendors: "To win, you must drive adoption and affirmation through developers, and purchases through management."
This will be an interesting power struggle to watch play out across IT departments. It's important to again recall the lack of importance that IT executives put into "increasing open source usage" as a business goal. Software vendors, open source or not, have an opportunity to secure the IT executive's selection vote if their products meet the needs of developers and other key stakeholders, such as the operations teams and administrators, while integrating well with existing infrastructure. Similarly, software developers who propose product selections that address stakeholder needs across the entire IT lifecycle, not just development, stand to gain credibility with IT executives. Who holds the balance of power in the software selection process at your company?
Yet when IT executives were asked, "How important are each of the following business goals to your internal IT organization when making software decisions?" their responses were lukewarm. In the 2009 survey, 47 percent of IT decisionmakers ranked it 1 or 2 (out of 5), implying that expanding the usage of open source is not a business goal for their organization when making software decisions. In 2008, 37 percent of decisionmakers ranked open source as a software selection criterion as 1 or 2, indicating the use of open source had become a less-important goal. Similarly, the percentage of decisionmakers who thought the use of open source was an important software selection criteria fell from 9 to 8 percent in that period.
Another key finding from Hammond is that the software decisionmaking process is tipping toward developers, away from IT executives. Hammond states, "More than ever, developers can block -- or significantly aid the adoption of software!"
This was bound to happen, of course. Things were going too well. At a time when Google isactivating 200,000 Android phones a day, and Android has overtaken the iPhone in terms of US market share, Oracle decided to drop the bomb:
Oracle today filed a complaint for patent and copyright infringement against Google, Inc.
"In developing Android, Google knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property. This lawsuit seeks appropriate remedies for their infringement," said Oracle spokesperson Karen Tillman.
Oracle is the world's most complete, open, and integrated business software and hardware systems company. For more information about Oracle, visit oracle.com.
The complaint [.pdf] offers slightly more detail, including the patents that Oracle claims Google has infringed upon. It also spells out what the company wants:
A. Entry of judgment holding Google liable for infringement of the patents and
copyrights at issue in this litigation;
B. An order permanently enjoining Google, its officers, agents, servants, employees,
attorneys and affiliated companies, its assigns and successors in interest, and those persons in active concert or participation with it, from continued acts of infringement of the patents and copyrights at issue in this litigation;
C. An order that all copies made or used in violation of Oracle America’s copyrights,
and all means by which such copies may be reproduced, be impounded and destroyed or otherwise reasonably disposed of;
That last demand - that all copies of Android, including, presumably, the ones in our phones, must be impounded and destroyed - raises the obvious question: what exactly is Oracle after here? That particular issue has been explored with commendable thoroughness by Stephen O'Grady, who concludes:
As for predictions, I’ll make only one: whoever wins will also lose. This suit is going to negatively impact - probably substantially - Java adoption. The enterprise technology landscape is more fragmented by the day, as it transitions from .NET or Java orthodoxy to multi-language heterogeneity. Oracle’s suit will accelerate this process as it introduces for the first time legal uncertainty around the Java platform. Apple and Microsoft will be thrilled by this development, and scores of competitive languages and platforms are likely to see improved traction as a result of Java defections.
Of course, the other, even bigger, question, is: who has the law on their side as far as the facts of the case are concerned? Even if I were a lawyer, I wouldn't hazard a guess, since this particular case seems to be a puzzle inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma: there are so many interacting and conflicting aspects that it makes second-guessing what a court will find - assuming it gets that far - particularly unrewarding.
Instead, I'd like to note Google's response to the suit:
We are disappointed Oracle has chosen to attack both Google and the open-source Java community with this baseless lawsuit. The open-source Java community goes beyond any one corporation and works every day to make the web a better place. We will strongly defend open-source standards and will continue to work with the industry to develop the Android platform.
It will not have escaped your notice that the phrase “open source” is used no less than three times in one short paragraph. In other words, Google wants this framed as nice, open Google attacked by nasty, closed Oracle.
It's rather unfortunate for Google that this comes hard on the heels of its widely-criticised move away from Net neutrality - effectively part of the Internet's openness - which rather dimmed its halo. Indeed, it's hard not to suspect that Oracle seized that misstep in order to attack Google when it was uncharacteristically unloved by much of the open source world. Still, Oracle's threat is probably serious enough for most hackers to give Google the benefit of the doubt as far as its free software credentials are concerned.
Similarly, there seems little doubt that Google was being quite opportunist in the way that it implemented Android, guessing that Sun wouldn't complain about Google's cheeky approach of writing its own “clean room” “Dalvik” virtual machine (although, as Andy Updegrove points out, a clean room implementation won't in itself protect Google against claims of software patent infringement) rather than paying to use the official one.
Jeffrey Hammond, principal analyst at Forreseter Research, said he bases his broad conclusion on several surveys peformed in 2010 which indicate that almost 70 percent of corporate customers say they are using Linux at the operating system layer, 65 percent are using open source at the database tier and about 60 percent are now using GPL-based programming languages.“We’ve moved from a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy into strategic adoption,” Hammond said during his keynote at LinuxCon Wednesday.
“Take your victory lap and we’ll move on.”Ironically, another key indicator of open source’s acceptance is that it slipped on the list of top strategic priorities of IT architects and CIOs.“We saw it was not quite as important in 2010 as in [our] 2009 survey. It’s not top of list but there’s good reason for that: it’s already happened. We’re there. We asked developers and asked different [users] using open source and its all over the place,” he said, noting, however, that open source still tops the survey in terms of technology deployment for this year.
In one of the surveys aimed at a group composed of quite a few .NET developers, only one in five said they are not using any open source and roughly 20 percent say they are contibuting to at least one open source project, Hammond said. IT pros remain interested in using open source to reduce costs and integrate disparate technologies, as was indicated in last year’s survey, but two other priorities popped up in the same survey in 2010: “improving the speed of business processes and getting in position to support growth when we come out of the recession,”Hammond said.
Linux advocates should highlight
the secondary benefits of open source to address these next gen
requirements, namely enhanced speed and flexibility and increased
developer engagement, which occurs when customers feel less like
curators of proprietary software and more like owners of their
 infrastructure from “stem to stern,” Hammond said.