My article proposing using openness sentinels – the existence of an open source co-developer community working on an implementation as validation of the openness of a standard – is now available in the Essays section.
Filed under: Standards, Webmink | 1 Comment »
If we try to define what an “open standard” is, we’ll probably find the definition being gamed by well-funded corporate interests within a short time. But what if there was another way to get an indication that a standard was problematic? I suggest using a sentinel. Read about it on ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Standards | Comments Off on ☝ The Sentinel Principle
How did Document Freedom Day go for you? If you need a reminder about it, I wrote about why document freedom matters a month or so ago. But I note that in Switzerland there’s been a setback against openness. Read my views over on ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Procurement | Tagged: Document Freedom Day, Switzerland | Comments Off on ☝ Switzerland Celebrates Document Freedom Day
When we consider software patents, it’s easy to believe they are something outside the open source communities. Mentally, many of us model them as a weapon belonging to “patent trolls” – companies who don’t make products in the area of the patents they own (they may have other business interests they are funding) but instead create their income by shaking down businesses who unwittingly stray into their patent minefields.
But I suggest that many of the patents these “non-practicising entities” (as they are known to lawyers) use actually come directly from the development of software and potentially open source software. They start life in “friendly” hands, but there’s every chance they will eventually be used in harmful ways. Just look at the proposed sale of Novell’s patent portfolio to CPTN to get the idea how. Right now the US Department of Justice seems to agree it’s a problem and may even intervene in the sale.
In the corporations where I have worked, programmers have been incented along with other engineers to constantly watch their work for ideas that could be encapsulated in a patent. This “parallel filing” – developers doing work and filing patents on their innovations at the same time – results in the creation of a ring-fence around each activity in which the engineers participate.
The fact is that all US corporations and many EU corporations are “parallel filing” as they engage in software development. That includes corporations who are investing heavily in open source communities. What open source needs is not just the donation of individual patents. While that is a fine gesture of solidarity, it is sadly little more as the patents themselves break the social contract by not actually offering a pattern developers can use to re-apply the patented idea.
There’s one other place that software patents come from, and it’s an important one. Startup companies get advised by venture capital firms and the lawyers that profit from them to gather a few software patents, “so you have some valuable assets” and “so you can protect yourself”. This strong guidance is still given even if the startup is working with open source (ours was, for example). Exactly how these patents can be used to protect the startup against patent trolls or large competitors is never explained.
Since most startups exist to be acquired, and since most actually go bust before that happens, their software patents can then get bought – at fire-sale prices – by patent trolls, perhaps assisted by the same people who recommend the patents be created. The few that survive to be acquired are sold along with their patents to companies whose leadership are most unlikely to share their founders’ ethical stance. Thus patents filed in parallel with development by startups are pretty likely to be used against the startups’ communities eventually.
While the concept is older, the modern idea of patents came from an age of mass production. Innovation was running free during the industrial revolution. Patents expressed an agreement in society to trade a temporary monopoly on an invention to its inventor for the description of the invention so that others could build on it and increase the common good. They were a ‘social contract’, with rights and obligations both on the inventor and on society at large. Without patents, inventors would obfuscate their inventions so as to evade counterfeiters, and consequently the know-how they created would be lost to future generations.
The timescales envisioned by the patent system were predicated on physical inventions requiring manufacturing investment. Pure ideas – business methods, philosophies, strategies for solving problems – were never subject to the same approach. The lack of manufacturing investment required for exploitation combined with the adequacy of copyright protection meant there was no useful social contract to be established for pure ideas.
The same applies to software. Parallel-filed software patents breach the social contract implied by the patent system. Unlike other patents, software patents do not form a useful body of searchable knowledge as they do not contain within the patent the sort of ‘sketch’ that another technician would need. Programmers need sample code, and software patents never contain a reference implementation. Instead, software patents are about protection and control.
A software patent does not free me to innovate; it just provides a constraint to my thinking. What a developer needs is the certainty that any innovation they create is safe from hostile action. Under present law that’s not achievable as an absolute, but I do believe we can devise ways to be protected from patents arising from our own communities.
We’re at a transition point for society. We have moved from the age of mass production to the age of mass connection. More and more invention is happening in the grey area beyond the manufactured. As Lessig pointed out in “Free Culture”, this shift has stretched the laws governing creativity to their limits. As we reconsider patents, we must consider what they are and more importantly we must revisit the social contract on which they are based. Just trying to force fit the old approach of patents to the new world of participation isn’t working.
What open source needs is instead a declaration by participants in open source communities that all the patents they parallel-filed during the development process are granted with the contribution of the code. The grant needs to be (at least initially) a blanket, unenumerated grant to the community receiving the contribution so that developers know they are safe from any action by that participant. The best place to get this grant is either in the community governance or in the open source license itself.
Getting those declarations is the most pressing need of the open source meta-community today, and modern open source licenses like the Apache license generally achieve it. But the really big challenge is making the protection stick with the patents through things like the Novell-CPTN transition.
I remain to be convinced that is possible at present, and it needs urgent research and experimentation. Who by? I suggest the corporations benefitting from open source need to be the ones funding that research. We can’t expect corporations to stop parallel filing until the patent system is fixed. They have a duty to their shareholders to, at a minimum, protect themselves in the dog-eat-dog world of corporate competition. But we can expect them to share the burden of protection with the communities in which they participate. So which of the big-legal-budget corporations that claim to love open source will step up to the challenge?
Filed under: Patents | Tagged: Novell, Patent troll | Comments Off on ☆ The Threat Of Parallel Filing
My article discussing why open source subscriptions should not be procured with the same assumptions and procedures as proprietary software is now available in the Essays section.
Filed under: Procurement, Webmink | Tagged: Subscriptions | Comments Off on ☂ Subscriptions Article Available
Filed under: Copyright, Webmink | 2 Comments »
When you procure proprietary software, you buy a right-to-use license and then a support agreement. But when you buy open source, you already have the right-to-use from the OSI-approved free license, so you should compare the subscription cost with just the cost of a proprietary support agreement. Right?
Wrong! The open source subscription includes all the same elements as the combination of both purchases. In most cases, if you are receiving equivalent value, you should expect to pay similar prices.
Read all about it over on ComputerWorldUK…
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Procurement | Tagged: Subscriptions | Comments Off on ☝ Open Source Procurement: Subscriptions
I am speaking at the ODF Plugfest here in the UK this morning, on the subject of the challenges facing the procurement of open source software by traditional enterprises (including the public sector). Based on a selection of experiences from ForgeRock’s first year, my talk considers procurement challenges that legacy procurement rules raise for introducing true open source solutions. My slides are available online. I consider two different needs:
If we’re to see open source solutions bringing budget and change flexibility to government IT as the Prime Minister wants, both kinds of change – addressing legacy processes and lock-in (so that SIs are out of excuses) and seeking new kinds of value – are essential.
Filed under: Events, Open Source, Procurement | Tagged: Government | 1 Comment »
Filed under: Procurement | 1 Comment »
It seems everything has a special day. Among all the various red letter days, you may not have run into Document Freedom Day, which this year is being celebrated on March 30th. Don’t for a second underestimate the importance of document freedom. It sounds dull – not just mundane, but the forgotten esoterica of the mundane – but it’s a crucial driver in the dominance of major software vendors. If the other elements of our Digital liberty are to be allowed to unfurl in their natural order, we need document freedom.
The phrase “document freedom” refers to the long, subtle game that proprietary software vendors use to ensure they have control over their customers and are able to extract money from them long-term. The format which programs use to save work determines which software can be used to perform the work. By keeping it private, the vendor can make sure that there’s no other program you can use to manipulate the document.
Of course, since you already have the software that created the document that’s not a problem for you. But when you need to collaborate with others, it places the onus on the other person to have the same software as you. As the world became more meshed a “network effect” occurred and a new dynamic emerged, where members of a collaborative network would be forced to keep acquiring new software (framed as “upgrades” but actually a new purchase each time) in order to keep up with the software choices of the rest of the network.
Responding to competitive pressures, vendors may appear to ease their customers’ alarm at this upgrade arms-race by offering “compatibility”, “interoperability” or even “open formats”. But the problem remains all the time there’s really only one piece of software that others can effectively collaborate in a network. Being able to “import” a file is not the same as being able to collaborate. The proprietary vendors have made too much money from locking you in to release you voluntarily.
What’s the solution? Ideally, all software of the same genre would use the same format to save work. Then every program could open and work on a file, save its changes and pass the file to another program without any loss of the integrity of the file contents. There would always be differences in how each program handled the work; there might even be some capabilities of a program that no others had, which would be stored in the file for later use without harming the rest of the file. But by using an open, interoperable standard fully implemented by multiple programs, everyone would be free to make their own choices, without being compelled to be a customer of the same vendors as everyone else in the network of collaboration.
In the areas of word-processing, spreadsheets and presentations, such a file format exists – it’s called Open Document Format (ODF). It works with a wide range of different software, and when you save your work in ODF it can be passed to other people for their contribution. The only problem is how few people know. There are two issues; first, the problem is so subtle that they may not realise they are slaves to a corporate master, and second they may not know there’s a solution available.
Document Freedom Day exists to address both of these problems. It has been running for a few years. It provides a day to raise the profile of document formats and demand that our governments, schools, religious bodies, employers and more all use open formats. When they do, we’re all free to engage with them using the computers and software of our choice rather than theirs.
Without document freedom phrases like “if you don’t use Microsoft Word you can’t apply” or “only works on a Mac” negate our choices and incrementally remove our freedoms. So celebrate Document Freedom Day 2011 this year, it’s on March 30th and you can join in easily. Obviously the first step is to start using open source software that supports ODF, like LibreOffice.
If you’re already using a program like LibreOffice, you could simply decide to respond to colleagues or friends who send you a closed format (“I’d love to read your document but I don’t have the program you used to make it – take a look at this web page”), or you could go further and join a local team celebrating in their own way. You might even explore your employer’s policies and challenge the bad practices that spread closed formats (“Why do we always send out Word files when all people need to do is read the document? Why don’t we have a company standard of using PDF for everything that doesn’t need editing?”).
But whichever you choose, it’s worth investing a little of your time to promote freedom instead of sitting quietly tolerating the status quo. As Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach is reputed to have said, the greatest enemy of freedom is a happy slave.
[First published in ComputerWorldUK]
Filed under: ODF, Standards | Tagged: Document Freedom Day, LibreOffice | 2 Comments »
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All views expressed on this blog are those of Simon Phipps and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other entity, including current and former employers and clients. See my full disclosure of interests.
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