Wednesday, January 5, 2011

How I See It

Open source needs firm foundations

By Andrew Updegrove, partner at Gesmer Updegrove LLP

No matter who you are, you and your business depend on open source software. That dependency grows by the day, as we adopt new browsers like Google Inc.’s Chrome, and acquire more and more open source-based products, from mobile devices to toys, and even automobiles, controlled by embedded open-source software and firmware. The wisdom of these purchasing decisions necessarily relies on the assumption that the teams that developed the software will continue to maintain it.

So as we reach the start of 2011, you might want to ask: will those developers really be there in a year?

That’s a question of more than theoretical concern, as the events of the past year have shown. Oracle Corp.’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc. and the impending sale of Novell Inc. have thrown many of the most important open-source projects into a state of uncertainty, or worse. Widely adopted tools, including the MySQL database, Java software platform and OpenOffice productivity suite have all been in play, as has SUSE Linux, the second most popular enterprise distribution of Linux.

To varying degrees, each of these projects has suffered. Initially, the fear and uncertainty caused by the protracted sales of Sun and Novell allowed competitors to cherry-pick their open-source project development teams. After the Sun sale went through, Oracle’s actions led to further departures. Worse, Oracle abandoned support entirely for some projects, and declined to clearly signal its intentions regarding others. The consequences have been significant, including new forks of MySQL and OpenOffice. In the Java community, turmoil is ongoing, as evidenced most recently by the resignations of several representatives from the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process.

Given the importance of projects like these, it is remarkable that we have allowed ourselves to become so vulnerable to the strategic whims of corporate acquirers. After all, would you want a key standard like HTML, wi-fi, Ethernet or any of the thousands of other specifications that enable interoperability to be controlled by a single company? Of course not.

The false sense of security that an open-source software license offers by permitting project software to be forked provides part of the explanation. But few developers would relish starting over again after years of effort if the future of their beloved project was hijacked. Just because open-source software users have the source code and license rights to provide their own support doesn’t mean they want to.

This dependency is all the more surprising given how many open-source projects are not subject to corporate control, including fundamental building blocks of modern information technology like the Apache HTTP server, the Eclipse development environment and the Mozilla Web browser. Each of these important projects is hosted by an independent, nonprofit foundation that not only supports the development effort, but also owns the trademark (and in some cases, the copyright in the code itself). 

As part of the maturation of the open-source software ecosystem, developers and customers need to demand the same independence for key open-source projects that they do for the developers of even garden variety standards. Any corporation that wishes to reap the substantial commercial benefits that can result from launching a successful open-source project should transfer its trademark, code, funding and in-kind support either to an already existing independent foundation, or one that is created expressly for that purpose. Until the vendor does, independent developers and other vendors should withhold their support, and end users should refuse to become dependent on the open-source software involved.

 

Andrew Updegrove, a regular contributor to Mass High Tech. He represents the Linux Foundation and other open source projects.