Antimoney or antifreedom?

• Article 2 of 16
• LinuxUser & Developer, February 2004
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 1.8MB

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If the community fails to support a project and there are insufficient numbers of people working on it, the project tends to die off. As well as weeding out the cool from the dull, this acts as a self-checking mechanism on those who represent only minority views within the community. It also stops vendors from trying to seize control of projects.

Eric Raymond, president of the open source initiative, says that while some people have tried to “fork” code in the past, splits in major projects have been rare, and always accompanied by re-labelling and a large volume of public self-justification. “The splitters felt they were going against a fairly powerful community norm,” he says.

A further check is provided by the developers who are based within corporations, and who are unlikely to support a project run by other companies unless there is material benefit to doing so for their own company.

“In the early 90s, you had Linus Torvalds and friends providing a system,” argues SuSE’s Geck. “In the mid 90s, you had companies like Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake and others hiring as much developer capital as possible to get an impact on the project. At the end of the 90s, when the IT industry kicked in and Oracle, IBM, Informix and everybody else were making very audible announcements, it was the IT industry that was hiring all these people. It still is. You have more developers on Linux in Intel than at SuSE. The same goes for HP, IBM, Oracle and SAP. The majority of the active Linux community has never been a bunch of altruistic nerds: it’s a misconception.”

This opinion is supported by author and security analyst Hal Flynn. “When it comes to security patches, I’ve always heard the same argument from the open-source and free software crowd,” he claims. “The argument is that when a security hole is announced, the volunteer community is supposed to come to the rescue like the fire brigade. But in most cases, it seems the open-source community is the last group to come to the rescue. Instead, the fire brigade consists primarily of the maintainers of the software, the vendors and others.” Potentially, the reason for the lack of a real backlash by the community against companies trying to make money from Linux is that the community is already made up of companies making money from Linux.

So just like any society, the Linux community has social codes and taboos that keep its citizens in check. Stick to those rules – or don’t do anything too bad – and the community will support you. Red Hat’s slow transformation from “just another Linux distributor” to a company that can force even the likes of Hewlett Packard to license its distribution - some of which HP wrote - in order to receive certification shows how even some “proprietary” activity and moulding of the community mind is possible; but it still requires a sufficiently long period of time and the loss of a considerable amount of good faith in the process.

While any one company can try to exert an influence on the direction Linux takes, the size of the open source community as a whole means that even the largest companies have a small say overall. They can influence the marketing of Linux-based technologies, but the underlying technology is still under the control of Torvalds and the community as a whole. Which means that it is only by causing a drastic change to the community that any big effect is produced in the direction of Linux. Unfortunately for Linux, that means that the most change can be created by its enemies.

There is one big threat to Linux. It is not Microsoft. It is intellectual property law. Patents on software processes now exist in the US and other countries. Companies such as IBM, SCO and Microsoft own a considerable number of patents, IBM in particular owning many thousands. According to Bruce Perens (see box, Perens says…), IBM has so many patents that it is possible, if it wanted to, for the company to severely cripple Linux. As Microsoft continues to increase and take advantage of the body of patents that it has, it seems likely to be only a small matter of time before it starts “defensively patenting” items to block Linux development, assuming it does not find something in its portfolio that it believes Linux infringes upon.

And if it proves impossible to earn money by working with the community, intellectual property could prove to be another way in. SCO, current owner of Unix, claims that IBM illegally copied code from its AIX Unix operating system into Linux and so IBM or Linus Torvalds should pay recompense. SCO’s decision to attack first IBM, then Linus Torvalds and then finally the GPL has brought down upon it the kind of wrath normally reserved for Microsoft. Open source proponents have lambasted it, described CEO Darl McBride as “a rapist”, and caused sales of its software in enterprises to drop, at least according to SCO’s SEC filing; the over-zealous have even mounted denial of service attacks against its web site, making SCO one of the few companies to have suffered a real backlash from the community rather than open scorn and a failure by the community to get involved with or buy its products. Most of the ire has stemmed from McBride’s poorly considered open letters to the community that do little more than accuse Linux developers of communism; considerable time is being spent by SCO trying to douse the flames the letters have caused, since even it is not willing to suffer the all-out wrath of the Linux community.

“It was started purely as a reaction to one of our licensees [IBM] violating their agreement and incorporating some of our intellectual property into Linux without our permission,” says Gregory Blepp, vice president of SCOSource for the SCO Group. “When I have a chance to sit down for an hour with open source people and explain that to them, they understand where we’re coming from.”

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