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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There have already been open source projects found guilty of misappropriating code, although most cases have been settled amicably. In 2001, a programmer for the largest Linux distributor, Red Hat, took the source code for FreeBSD's RAID disk system support, removed the copyright notice and annotations, modified it, and submitted it to Linux head Linus Torvalds for inclusion in his operating system. After the original developer found out, Red Hat replaced the copyright notice and re-submitted it to Torvalds.
Buck says the risks are minimised for companies using software available from the Free Software Foundation because the group asks for legal assignments and disclaimers from contributors before incorporating their code. But if an open source project does contain code that it later has to withdraw, end users may find they cannot upgrade because various features they have come to rely on have been removed from the newer version.
Once a project has become open source, it is almost impossible for it to become closed source again. Developers only grant licences to use their patches – not their copyright – so once their code becomes part of the main package, the project owner will have to ask for their permission to make that part of the package available.
Open and shut case?
But other licences are not so stringent and there are projects with few developers. Before Red Hat bought its assets in February 2002, ArsDigita changed the licence for its content management system so it was no longer open source. It was able to do this because it had not used code from any contributors and so held the copyright on the source code. But since ArsDigita released its earlier code under the GPL, it is still legal for people to distribute and modify earlier versions.
Similarly, upgrade paths also disappear when the community developing a project loses interest or the original vendor goes under. “Vendors vanish. That much is a fact of life,” says consultant Gary Murphy, who advises on open source strategies. “When a proprietary vendor vanishes, the code vanishes and the applications are screwed. When open source teams disband, no one really notices.”
His own web site uses the now-defunct open-source portal system SIPS. “SIPS quickly fell apart as a project. The code was not extensible and... within weeks, it was obvious we were on our own. That was three or four years ago and our site still runs SIPS. Because it was open source, the failure of the 'vendor' did not impact us – we knew the dangers, accepted the risk, and while we'd love to replace it, it works and for a price we can afford.”
Open source users share many of the same problems as closed source software users. It may be easier to spot when someone has violated a licence agreement if the software's source is freely available, but major companies are still caught 'borrowing' others' proprietary code.
In 1998, for example, Microsoft was found using code from Apple's QuickTime in its Windows Media Player software, and Trio Systems spotted in 2001 that Adobe had used its C-Index technology in its InDesign program. But if end users have access to the source code, it is far easier for them to overcome these problems.
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