Past entries on this blog have occasionally charged that the promoters of open source software (OSS) are engaged in an enterprise that misleads and harms naïve developers in the less developed world. In particular, this point was asserted in connection with a visit to Brazil made in Brazil by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz a year ago.

It turns out that I missed a chance to cite an authority for my point – namely, Jonathan Schwartz himself. An interview in the June 2007 Linux Journal with Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps contains the following passage:

Interviewer: In a speech a couple of years back, Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz argued that the [General Public License] is “IP colonialism,” because he claimed it imposed on poorer countries “a rather predatory obligation to [give back][sic] all their IP to the wealthiest nation in the world.” Why did he change his mind?

Phipps: Well, you know, this is an interesting thing to contemplate, because I’m not sure he was wrong. The GPL does require you to set aside commercial protections for your software. And, it is possible that the use of the GPL for the indigenous software industry, for example, in Brazil, might harm the Brazilian economy. If you actually read the argument that Jonathan was making at the time, it’s a good academic argument. What made it controversial is that it was the Chief Operating Officer of Sun saying it.

I have not found the speech itself, but apparently it was given to the Open Source Business Conference in April 2005, and the phrase "IP colonialism" was applied to the GPL, not to open source generally. One report:

The GPL imposes a 'predatory obligation to disgorge IP back to the wealthiest nation in the world' on its users, according to Sun's president.

Sun president Jonathan Schwartz on Tuesday proclaimed ardent support for the open source software realm but criticised the GPL.

The GPL governs Linux and countless other projects in the free and open source software arena. But a key tenet of the license creates a situation that amounts to economic imperialism, Schwartz argued at the Open Source Business Conference here.

Naturally, Schwartz presented an alternative, Sun's CDDL, an open source licence that's a variant of the earlier MPL. Sun has begun releasing its Solaris source code under the CDDL in a project called OpenSolaris.

Schwartz singled out the GPL provision that says source code may be mixed with other code only if the resultant code also is governed by the GPL. That provision is intended to create a body of software that must remain liberated from proprietary constraints. But Schwartz said that some people he's spoken to dislike it because it precludes them from using open source software as a foundation for proprietary projects.

"Economies and nations need intellectual property (IP) to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. I've talked to developing nations, representatives from academia and manufacturing companies that had begun to incorporate GPL software into their products, then... found they had an obligation to deliver their IP back into the world," Schwartz said.

The GPL purports to have freedom at its core, but it imposes on its users "a rather predatory obligation to disgorge all their IP back to the wealthiest nation in the world", the United States, where the GPL originated, Schwartz said. "If you look at the difference between the licence we elected to use and GPL, there are no obligations to economies or universities or manufacturers that take the source code and embed it in [their own] code."

posted by James DeLong @ 6:18 AM | International, Software

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