Oracle has joined the Open Invention Network. It has licensed OIN's patents royalty free, and promised in exchange not to pursue patent suits against "the Linux environment."

But does this represent fundamental change?

Oracle has not been threatening to sue other Linux vendors. Its own Unbreakable Linux has been a slow-starter in the marketplace. Operating systems aren't its business. Databases are.

Fundamental change would require that Oracle stop playing the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) games that are traditional hallmarks of the proprietary model.

It's unclear to me whether Oracle can do this. In its latest earnings statement the company tried to spin a contract from Yahoo as a total switch off RedHat Linux. It wasn't, as a later statement from Yahoo made clear. The company's re-seller claims are also subject to question.

Transparency is a key open source value, but it's tough to pull off in a public company, which must always seek steady earnings growth and a "story" The Street will repeat to its customers.

Can Oracle, which needs street cred the way a lawyer needs billable hours, really change itsself in that way? Do open source customers need it to?

You might think of this as the other shoe dropping regarding Microsoft's deal with Novell. (Picture from the KMUTT School of Architecture and Design in Thailand, which does usability testing.)

While attention has been focused on the cross-licensing, which implies Microsoft holds patents on Linux, it's clear now that Novell will become the route through which Microsoft technologies reach the open source market.

Take today's announcement of Infocard Selector. On the surface, a graphical way for users to pull virtual credit cards from their virtual wallets. Virtually good.

But look under the hood. You have Microsoft CardSpace, the company's identity management product, tied into Bandit, a standard interface for identity products, all linked to Higgins, Eclipse's open source identity framework. Oh, and Novell says this will be a "licensed product," whatever that means. (It means the keys are held by Novell.)

This is not a secret. The technology link-up was originally announced last year.  It was demoed at Brainshare. It's not the dish I want to point out here, but the recipe, the method.

Novell is becoming a one-way mirror. (Thus the picture above.) Microsoft technology flows through it into the open source world. But the technology itself remains closed to the open source world. Open source developers only see Novell.

To me, it feels like open source is being treated like a perp in a Law & Order episode. So is Steve Ballmer Cassady or Green? (Yeah, I miss Lenny Briscoe too.)

One of the great things about the Internet is that it lets you track companies as they change, so you're not dependent on what some PR person tells you.

Take the case of Simula Labs.

Simula sent out a press release today positioning themselves as consultants to large enterprises seeking innovation from the open source model.

But Winston Damarillo (below, you may recognize him from Gluecode) founded Simula in early 2005 as an open source venture capital firm. Last fall Dr. Dobb's reported Simula was launching an open source marketplace. Recently Nat Tolkington called Simula's CoRE network "a clone of Spikesource."

The current version of the Web site says Simula is "Delivering Open Source Product and Process Innovation to Today's Enterprise IT," whatever that means.

Please don't take any of this as criticism. It's not. Many companies go through several models before hitting success. Reporters need to allow for this. All of which leads to a story, illustrated by the picture above and to the left.

The first software manual I wrote, back in 1984, was for a home shopping outfit called The Promise, which bombed so completely it was dead before its press launch was over. The founders went back, looked at what they had made, found they had a nifty EDI engine, and relaunched as Harbinger EDI.

When the company was finally sold in 2000, the merger was valued at $2.1 billion. The founder went directly into a new start-up. That's him at the top. The lesson is that Simula still has a fair chance of success, and should keep at it.

Yet I wonder how well Harbinger would have done had its every failure been trumpeted online, and immediately available to rascals such as you and I?

This is something of an open thread because I am genuinely confused on this important point. (Picture from Torahmitzion.)

Does Steve Ballmer speak for Microsoft on open source? He's the CEO, and he seems to think that open source does not exist, has no right to exist, and can be ground down with lawyers.

Or how about Brad Abrams, who was at AJAX Net last week claiming that Microsoft is a better open source citizen in the AJAX space than open source? Just look at this permissive license!

Is it Jason Matusow? His blog was considered the "go to" source for Microsoft's open source views a year ago.

Should we look to the Microsoft legal team, its executive ranks, or what about the geek standing in front of you on the trade show stand?

I suspect they all speak for Microsoft, and at the same time none do. Microsoft is a huge company, much like the IBM Bill Gates faced in the 1980s, and it seeks to use opacity to its advantage.

We once had IBM-ologists. Now we have Microsoft-ologists. In both cases these are people paid to know, or guess, what Microsoft "is really thinking" when if Microsoft itself knew one would think they would tell us.

I don't know why Ballmer feels that aping the IBM strategy of 20 years ago is going to win Microsoft the future. He might consider it didn't work out that well for IBM. Or for the guys  inside the building above 20 years ago, which is called the Kremlin.

Microsoft's Response Point, announced as an OEM competitor to Digium's Asterisk a few weeks ago, may be the biggest favor Microsoft has done open source in some time. (Picture from Obufete.Com.)

The reason is that open source has bigger enemies than Microsoft when it comes to VOIP technology. The Bells.

While Verizon has lately been trying to kill VOIP with price cuts, a quick read of the fine print on its VoiceWing service shows just how much deviltry it and AT&T can engage in regarding VOIP. The whole network neutrality debate has been, in large part, about Verizon and AT&T seeking to control what software, and whose software, you use on connections you buy from them.

When AT&T or Verizon attack Skype or Vonage or even Digium in this way, it's going to be an uphill fight for customers to get redress. Do it to Microsoft, or a Microsoft customer, and you're in a different situation.

Even though this is an OEM product, and Microsoft's name won't be on the boxes businesses buy, Microsoft is the ultimate vendor, and will doubtless stand behind its product's legal standing.

With Response Point Microsoft has put its lawyers at the disposal of supporting the technology Vonage and Digium pioneered. They are competitors in the market, but in a law court they will sit on the same side of the table.

I like having good lawyers on my side of the table, especially when someone else is paying the bill. Don't you? 

Let's talk some more about the open source incline. (The picture is from a political site, but I find it funny.)

The other day I noted how SugarCRM is now talking about licensing code under the GPL, rather than the modified Mozilla attribution license it has been using.

It is doing this, I wrote, for business reasons. It wants a bigger community, more contributions of code, and a better reputation in the open source world.

With Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman now split on GPL Version 3, specifically over the issue of software patents, the question now occurs, what's the bottom of the incline? Is it GPL Version 2, or is it GPL Version 3?

This is not a question either Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman can answer. It's not a question that truly responds well to a poll (although we'll have one). This is a market question, one that will be decided over time, by millions of decisions made all around the world.

It's the vibrancy of the communities built around Version 2 and Version 3 projects, and the level of code contributions such communities generate, that will tell the tale here. People are more likely to contribute code when they sense it's a two-way street, that the playing field between them and the project they support is level.

Do we need language against software patents in order to feel that the playing field is level? Is a license which prohibits such patents explicitly more fair than one which does not?

This is a political question, but not all political questions are subject to a vote. Some are subject to history. And the history on this question has only just begun, unless the software industry chooses to admit that software patents are more trouble than they are worth.

I'm not holding my breath on that. (You may exhale now.)

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At Novell's Brainshare conference this week, Bruce Perens said something we have long suspected. (The picture, by Aaron Toponce, is from Perens' appearance. I cropped it a little.)

Version 3 of the GPL is being delayed by the need to create language against the Microsoft-Novell deal, which implied that Microsoft holds patents on Linux.

This is not a big deal to, say, Linus Torvalds. He's fine with Version 2 of the GPL. Version 3 is under the command of the Free Software Foundation, whose work Perens supports. The FSF in turn is a creation of Richard Stallman, whose decades-long crusade for Free Open Source Software predates Linux by nearly a decade.

At the heart of Stallman's crusade is a firm stand against software patents. Such patents were created by courts, not Congress. The key decision on general patentability of software, State Street Bank & Trust v. Signature Financial Group, was issued in 1998.

We are not talking here about Constitutional principle, but a court interpretation that can be overidden by Congress. Or a higher court.  

That's what Stallman wants Microsoft to support, and GPL V.3 is his leverage in that effort. Microsoft has just been hit by an immense judgement for its use of MP3, a software algorithm. While Microsoft today is very much in favor of software patents, this has not always been the case.

It's not Stallman you should be dumping on for inconsistency, or Stallman whose mind you should be looking to change. It's Steve Ballmer's. He's changed it once. He can change it again.  

I spent some quality time today with Simon Crosby, CTO and co-founder of XenSource Inc., who said virtualization is the Next Big Thing, that it makes all the benefits of Moore's Law real, that it has benefits for all classes of users. (Picture from XenSource.)

But does it help open source? While Xensource is an open source company, and has a range of products for enterprises, server owners and individuals, virtualization moves the control point of computing to the virtualizer, and Xen does not necessarily win.

Microsoft has a virtualizer, the Virtual Hard Drive or VHD. With virtualization, applications bring their environment with them, and Microsoft-based software dominates the application space.

"The value is from orchestrating the virtual machines and then delivering value-added applications on top of them," Crosby said. XenSource will support both the Microsoft VHD and the VMWare virtualization technology.

There are many ways for virtualization to reach the market, Crosby added. It can come in software, it can come in hardware, it can be retrofitted. It also challenges our ideas on how software is priced. But it doesn't change software pricing.

The game will change, in other words, but the game will go on. And there is no way to tell, based solely on this technology trend, who the winners and losers will be.

SugarCRM, which found controversy with its attribution licenses last year, is now talking about moving down the open source incline and supporting GPL Version 3.

The decision emerged as Sugar announced it was entering the project management arena and opening an office in Ireland. (That's why Guinness calls it the St. Patrick's Day Season.)

The incline is a term I started using last year referring to open source licensing strategy. The idea is that newcomers start with BSD licenses which protect their right to profit but are eventually pushed toward GPL licenses in order to secure the benefits of community participation in their projects.

SugarCRM CEO John Roberts was quoted yesterday as calling such a move "hedging bets," but the incident seems to prove that while customers will take software under licenses that protect vendor rights, they are reluctant to give away code unless rights and obligations are equal on both sides.

That is the point at issue. What drives companies down the incline is a desire for community participation, and for code contributions. While the arguments over licenses may sound legal, moral, or even political, in the end these are practical business decisions.

The lesson: code is a two-way street. I give to you but expect the same conditions under which you give to me.

The open source process is transforming politics before our eyes.

The latest example is the Macintosh 1984 mash-up produced against Hillary Clinton by an anonymous supporter of Barack Obama. At last count it had been viewed over 1.3 million times, making it far more popular than any ad produced so far this cycle.

Political pros are noticing. The ad cost Obama nothing, either to produce or to run. It was created anonymously, by a YouTube user who dubbed themselves ParkRidge47 (Clinton was born in the Chicago suburb of ParkRidge, Ill. in 1947).

There are suspicions this is just a cover story. Conspiracy theories are now being chewed over by the media. People with online experience seem convinced by the viral nature of its distribution this was neither an Obama nor a GOP production. On CNN Obama denied knowledge of it. The quality of the production leads me to suspect Hollywood had something to do with it.

How much has this changed the game? Recent polls give Clinton a double-digit lead over Obama. If those results remain the same in the next month, this may be much ado about nothing.

But the ad, and the buzz surrounding it, do point to some truths about open source politics. Creativity trumps financial power. The best ads do play on our fears. What good does it do to have an enormous financial advantage if the best TV ad of the cycle cost nothing? When the work of some anonymous schmoe trumps the work of highly-paid campaign consultants, why depend on them?

My view is these are early days. I have covered online politics since 1996 and my kids, who have the Web in their earliest memories, are nearly grown now. This campaign revolution will not be televised. And it is beyond the power of anyone to control or predict.

The beta release of Glassfish Version 2 is a good place for evaluating Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz' open source strategy.

Glassfish is a Java-based application server. As such it competes with other quality open source products.

Schwartz' bet was that Sun will, in the long run, make more money by leveraging an open source community and selling support than by keeping its code proprietary. Financial types might want to measure support revenue, compare that to the previous year's sales revenue, and then look hard over the tops of their eyeglasses.

Schwartz will argue that would be wrong. Look at the revenue number's direction. If support revenues are on an upward trajectory, not just for Glassfish but for all the tools in Sun's Web Developer Pack, that's a turnaround. If losses are even narrowing, month to month, that's a turnaround.  

Add in the value of community contributions, the goodwill from enterprise developers, the translation into hardware sales down the road, and please look out with a longer time horizon than 11 months before giving out any dirty looks.

Then recognize that without these moves Sun's software business would still be nosediving, he might say. Oh, and it's a one-way trip. You don't come back from the GPL. The best (financially) thing you can do is cut off support to the community, to walk away from the software entirely.

So, is Jonathan Schwartz' open source turnaround working?

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I've written many times here about the open source incline. The more community support you want, the closer your license moves toward the GPL.

But ever since Sun decided last year to release Java under the GPL, companies have been recognizing the offensive advantages of a license that makes all improvements into community property.

RedHat is a veteran of the license game, but it had an "ah ha" moment after it acquired JBOSS, which uses a GPL license. So when it acquired marketing rights to Exadel's suite, it pointedly placed Exadel Studio Pro, now to be called Red Hat Developer Studio, under the GPL.

Its target was Genuitec, whose MyEclipse uses the LGPL. Ed Burnette writes that the move is designed to keep Red Hat Developer Studio code out of MyEclipse, because its GPL license would then make all of MyEclipse GPL.

Unfair, says Genuitec CEO Maher Masri (above), and Burnette agrees.

But is it unfair? Licensing games are played all the time, and they all move eventually to the bottom of the open source incline, where the GPL says all tools belong to all. If license disarmament is the end game, what's the problem?

Personally I think disarmament is good thing.

Most enterprise software vendors are quiet. They're more William H. Macy than Tom Cruise.

Big customers like that, which may be why firms in what I call IBM's posse, like CentricCRM, don't try to make news. Do your job, keep your customers satisfied, and word will get out as far as it needs to.

Since parting company at the end of last year with CTO William Hurley, Qlusters has gone back into those shadows. CEO and founder Ofer Shoshan is not a man for the grand gesture. Neither, any more, is his company.

Shoshan called last week to discuss his management project's expanded virtualization and Xen support. "The whole idea is to build expandable, open architecture making it easy to link with other products.

"Our support for virtualization is both inside OpenQRM and for plug-ins to different technologies. We've officially released the Xen plug-in so you can have one OpenQRM server supporting remote boxes and Xen partitions, or support the Xen Hypervisor itself."

For the large enterprises, usually with hundreds of servers, who are moving from homegrown solutions to OpenQRM, this is a good thing. It's not for the front page of the New York Post, but it's a good thing.

Shoshan has also quieted the hype surrounding the Open Management Consortium Hurley announced with great fanfare last May. Now it's just some vendors trying to inter-operate. It's no longer the greatest thing since sliced bread, and doesn't have to be.

If it serves the customer, people will find it.  

Who broke the U.S. Attorney scandal that is now fascinating political Washington? According to the Columbia Journalism Review, bloggers.

Who offered the best coverage of the Scooter Libby trial? According to The New York Times, bloggers. In fact many top journalists were caught up in that trial, and in my view found wanting.

Memo to Tim Russert. When sources talk to you the default is that your conversation is on the record. Only stenographers turn the default to off.

This is not a partisan point. Conservative bloggers got credit for Rathergate, a scandal involving former CBS anchor Dan Rather that helped propel President Bush's re-election in 2004.

The fact that all these stories were broken and pursued by political partisans is an important point. It's one the "mainstream media" uses to dismiss such reports, but the criticism does not disguise the fact that these partisans can scoop paid reporters and, eventually, win apologies.

Programmers work hard, often without pay, to code or provide support on open source projects, for similar reasons. Belief is a powerful motivator in open source, and many companies now license commercial programs under the GPL to tap into that belief.

If tapping into non-economic motivations is OK in software, why can't it be OK in journalism?

The whole idea of a non-partisan, professional, detached media is a mid-20th century invention, created by funds from press lords like Joseph Pulitzer and the heirs of Joseph Medill who themselves had firm ideological biases, and who often used their papers on behalf of them. Their names now adorn America's two best journalism schools. I went to Medill's.

Today's open source journalism takes us back over a century, to an era when journalism was indeed politics by another name, and where readers voted for truth with their pennies. Once again it's the market, measured in dollars and profit, that will judge.

Both want to monetize other folks' content. (Picture from Bill Christofferson.)

The RedHat Exchange announced yesterday will sell support contracts for applications tested to work under RedHat Linux 5. RedHat becomes the re-seller and takes a re-seller's cut.

YouTube wants to do the same thing with video. It has proven it can expand the distribution of video files, not only from its own site but from thousands of sites around the Web. It has been negotiating with content owners on a financial split.

One difference, of course, is that until now YouTube has not been getting most of its content from the owners. The quality is often poor, second-hand. That is not the case with RedHat, which will only sell projects whose quality it can certify, and who enter into eyes-open contracts with it.

The other difference is that the companies RedHat is working with want wider distribution, and aren't arrogant enough to believe that users can't live without what they produce. That's the stance Viacom has taken, but its lawsuit is, in fact, negotiation via other means.

YouTube has proven demand exists, and that it can satisfy that demand cost-effectively. Now it wants a re-sale agreement that it and its customers can live with. Viacom, for now, has broken off negotiations and gone to court. How far down the road it goes is anyone's guess, but in the end YouTube's offer is financially compelling.

Journalists and analysts have a bad habit of treating business lawsuits and business negotiations as two separate realms. Often they are not. Often suits are leverage in an ongoing negotiation, one that is very likely to end in agreement, and leave journalists looking like Gilda Radner's old Emily Litella character (above), who after making up controversy out of whole cloth has to say "oh, never mind."

A decade ago, when I was working for another publisher, they put all readers into three boxes, the makers, the sellers, and the buyers of technology. (Early English fishwives kept their money close in pockets like this. From the Tyne and Wear Museum in northeast England.)

In covering open source for ZDNet I find the market breaks down similarly, into three parts:

1. The Corporate Market, defined as firms big enough to have their own computer departments. This is the sweet spot for most open source projects. The customers understand paying for value, and see open source as a way to gain control over operations.
2. The Re-seller Market, small businesses who buy their solutions from re-sellers. These firms, which may be large or small themselves, see open source as a way to gain control over customers. Doctors may think they know Windows, but most don't pretend to know Linux.
3. The Consumer Market, ordinary users who are mainly seeking free solutions or alternatives to Microsoft. Few consumers will ever try to understand, let alone manipulate, their own code. This is where desktop Linux tries to play, and where it constantly fails.

As you move up-market, from consumers to corporates, the prospect list decreases, but it gets easier to extract money from individual prospects, because they understand the value proposition.

As you move down-market, toward consumers, the prospect list increases geometrically, but much of the money comes from vendors, whose motivation may be to financially "dis-arm" rivals. 

Open source was originally a business model, and business models remain its main challenge. How do we extract a fair price from the consumer market? How do we get into pockets like the one above? Finding an answer to that question will determine how far open source goes in the future.

Your suggestions, as always, are welcome.

Why hadn’t I heard much about CentricCRM before CMO Michael Harvey introduced himself to me?

To hear him tell it, Centric was already a wild success story. Some 7,000 community members, the largest of them a $20 billion food service outfit. A 25 person staff. A solid Java-based core being extended into other areas like content management, even project management. A complete open source stack solution. Subversion version control.

Then Harvey said the three magic letters, IBM, and I understood.

Every major vendor today has a “posse,” a set of open source vendors who surround it and live in its ecosystem. Microsoft has one. Novell has one. RedHat has one. IBM’s is like the company itself, quiet, corporate, and shy unless they have something to say.

Which Centric does now. 

“Our internal load testing, running on modest hardware, right off the shelf, assembles databases with tens of thousands of records, 1,000 or more concurrent users, and the system doesn’t break into a sweat.

“We’ve also been working closely with IBM on certifying and porting so the same Centric CRM application runs across the entire IBM hardware and middleware stack.” In fact Centric often exhibits in IBM booths at major events,

“One of their main demos uses Centric CRM working on IBM hardware. We’re working with at least six different groups within IBM. There’s technical, marketing and sales collaboration.”

Centric started as a consultancy in 2000, and Harvey admits the first version of their software, written with PHP, was poorly received. But the Java version has taken off. It’s now on Version 4.1.

And that’s the message. If you’re in IBM’s posse you’ll get the time and support to make mistakes, as well as a hearty endorsement when you do succeed. IBM’s posse isn’t flashy, but when the press does get called you’ll be ready for your close-up.

When Dell says "let's have a conversation" the company really means exactly what Hillary Clinton does.

Show me the money.

Instead, Dell has this questionnaire. Asks where Dell should put its Linux — on what model computers. It asks which Linux you prefer.

It's nonsense.

Linux isn't Windows. Open source is not something you just load onto a piece of hardware and then up-sell.

If Dell is serious about open source, it needs to get in the game. It needs to become active, providing support for specific projects its corporate clients want. It needs to engage at Slashdot and, yes, even here.

Until it does, I will treat it much as I do the New York Senator and any other politician. Carefully, with my hand firmly on my wallet.

RedHat will announce RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 today, at a dicey time for the industry.

Wall Street has begun to sour on Linux as a business. Douglas MacIntyre of 24/7 Wall Street is among the disenchanted.

"Linux has been a bust," he wrote last week. Total revenues for RedHat and Novell combined don't amount to much more than Larry Ellison's sailing bill –  barely $500 million.

Perhaps MacIntyre is looking in the wrong place. With virtualization you don't really need an enterprise operating system — the OS hooks come with the application. And reportedly RedHat 5 is going to support the open source Xen Hypervisor.  

"Software appliances are sounding the death knell for the general purpose OS," says Billy Marshall, who worked at RedHat in Raleigh before founding rPath. "Historically you have to port applications with each new release. With Xen they can just wrap them up as virtual appliances and deploy onto RHEL 5 without being compatible."

That's also true for Windows. Marshall has heard "Microsoft patented something describing a smaller OS with modular components that leaves when it's used." If Big Green is awake to the danger, shouldn't the rest of us be as well?

Of course cynics will note that Marshall would say that, given that rPath is in the virtualization business with its rBuilder and rLinux. But might he be right? IBM has seen the light. Has the market? Has Wall Street?

Why write about Viacom's suit against Google in an open source blog?

Because there but for the grace of open source goes software. (The image is from the ZDNet blog of Donna Bogatin, who holds a different, albeit quite valid, view on these topics.)

Back at the turn of the century stories like this one dominated the pages at ZDNet and the rest of the computer press. Proprietary software companies, through the Business Software Alliance, were raiding many American businesses, and anger toward these tactics was growing.

You don't read much about it any more, and I don't believe that's because of BSA's enforcement efforts. It's because companies which don't feel they can afford BSA member prices have an alternative. They can get it free, through open source, and pay for only the support they need.

Instead, most BSA activities today involve Internet pirates and international activity. The number of DMCA notices for violation of U.S. software licenses has slowed to a trickle. And I for one fully support these BSA actions. "Selling" software you don't own for "bargain" prices is no bargain, it's theft on both sides, and you just don't have to do it.

No such compromise is available on the video front. Viacom claims Google's YouTube is profiting from piracy, but YouTube is not monetizing the traffic in question. Viacom is, but its costs for hosting are not inconsiderable, its distribution capacity is limited, and the failure to create a network of online resellers is, over the long run, untenable.

The agreement Viacom has with Joost must also be questioned. The Joost application uses peer-to-peer technology. Critics in the ISP space may thus call it a bandwidth pirate. At least Google's system is open about those costs.

Only direct negotiations, and a financial accommodation, can end the content copyright wars. Waiting for corporate egos and their lawyers to do the right thing, absent the market pressure open source provided in software, however, is bound to be painful.