Source material
- Article 33 of 77
- Information Age, March 2002
The issue of ownership is the biggest point of contention for many intent on using open source software.
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Open source development has undeniably changed computing – and the evidence is abundant. Linux now runs over 50% of the world's web servers. IBM claims to have already recouped the $1 billion it invested in Linux projects during 2001. Apple has based the latest version of the Macintosh operating system on the open source FreeBSD and Mach dialects of Unix. And version six of Netscape's Internet browser is a product of the Mozilla open source project.
But to executives at software giant Microsoft, open source is “a cancer”, “an intellectual property destroyer” and “un-American”. They, in common with other detractors, accuse open source of “gobbling up intellectual property like Pacman”. They point to the abundance of cases where open source projects have ground to a halt, half-finished, after developers fell out and abandoned their projects or quit to work on their own version, as proof of this argument.
FreeBSD, for instance, started after a dispute between its founders and the originator of 386BSD, which the former were trying to repair.
Businesses have been reluctant to adopt open source software for a number of reasons, including a lack of commercial support services – an issue Red Hat, IBM, and other Linux vendors have attempted to address. But the issue of ownership is the biggest point of contention for many developers and users.
At issue are a series of critical questions the answers to which will ultimately determine the influence of open source within the corporation: What happens if the obtained software contains code the developers had no right to use? Can developers use and amend open source software in their own programs without being forced to offer the end result on an open source basis? And can an open source product's developers change the terms of their licence to demand royalties from customers if the product needs patches or upgrades? Might they even be able to withdraw it?
The answers frequently depend on what open source licence is used. Microsoft, for example, uses open source code released under the BSD licence (see box, Open source licences) in its own software, but its gripe is with the terms of the GPL (GNU general public license), which the Linux community and the majority of open source developers use. This mandates that if a product makes use of GPL code, the completed product must be released under the GPL, the developer must provide the source code for the software for free, and other developers can use part or all of the code in their own products. So the necessity for companies that want to retain a closed source model is to ensure they know exactly what licence the original developers used for their code and ensure that it is compatible with their own business aims.
Alternatively, they can 'ring-fence' their own code - open source licences cannot, by definition, determine the licences of other bundled software. As a result, even the GPL cannot force developers to open source their software if it is merely on the same CD, for example, or forms part of a wider package. In contrast, Mozilla uses different licences for its four main modules, since the Mozilla public license (MPL) allows software that links to (rather than modifies) MPL software to be released under different licences. Some developers even avoid the need to publish changes to source code by not directly distributing their software. Instead, they offer executable modules on an application service provider basis.
The drawback to this ability to mix and match licences is that developers who do not check all the licences of the software they are using may make the false assumption that they have rights to code that is actually proprietary. In May 2001, members of the open source community were surprised when the author of the IPFilter firewall bundled with several distributions of Unix amended the licence for his software to state that “modified and derivative work are not permitted without the author's prior consent”. The author, Darren Reed, pointed out that he had never released his software under the BSD licence and was just clarifying his existing rights. Those who had assumed the software was available under the same licence as the operating system it accompanied, and had released modified versions of the software, had to withdraw them.
“Source code is a work much like a book written by one or more people,” explains Ben Adida, part of the licensing group of the OpenACS community. “An author can decide to distribute source code if they want to, but that does not give the user of the source code any rights other than to make use of it. Users can freely download it and use it, but they cannot create derivative works or redistribute them.”
The risks may be small, but they cannot be ignored, believes Joe Buck, a member of the steering committee in charge of the open source compiler gcc. “Some contributor to a project may send something that he has no right to, especially if he works as a programmer in the US,” he suggests. “In the worst case, his employer could sue the person running the project for financial damages; at minimum, the tainted code might need to be ripped out and work restarted.”
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