Efforts to increase the adoption of open-source software are being derailed by the efforts of a "loud minority" within the community who have made personal attacks on individuals who have expressed doubts about the software, according to one of the open-source movement's main advocates.

Jeff Waugh of open-source advocacy group Waugh Partners was disheartened after a series of personal attacks directed at the heads of Australian government agencies. These included comments directed at Australian Taxation Office chief information officer Bill Gibson...

Some of the public responses to the article labelled Gibson a "bureaucratic parasite" and his concerns "short-sighted".

While Waugh believes the open-source model holds better security outcomes than its proprietary equivalent, he describes the vitriolic reaction to Gibson's comments as being "disgraceful" and says they achieve nothing for the industry.
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"This kind of language makes it extremely hard for the open-source industry to get the appropriate level of consideration in government departments," Waugh continued.
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Waugh was also disheartened when personal attacks were levelled at Standards Australia's Alistair Tegart over Microsoft's push to have its OOXML format accepted as an ISO standard. "I suspect that as a result, [Teggart] is becoming deeply cynical about open source," Waugh said.

Essentially, the paper tries to survey Lessig’s writings to try to understand how even the demagoguery-prone author of Free Culture could have ended up arguing that we should replace copyrights—exclusive rights granted to the authors of expressive works—with tax-funded art and pervasive federal surveillance of what law-abiding citizens do, read, hear, and watch in their own homes, cars and offices.

I don’t usually try to anticipate responses, but two seem sufficiently predictable to be worth noting in advance, in hopes of better focusing debate.

First, some may argue that if Free Culture promotes an “Orwellian” future for copyright, then the use of so-called filtering technologies at the ISP or application level is equally Orwellian.

No, it isn’t. As I use the term here, filtering technologies work like this: They automatically use an algorithm to analyze given files and generate a unique digital identifier that is then automatically checked against a reference database that contains the fingerprints of files not authorized for uploading/transmission. If there is a match, the upload or transmission is blocked, if not, it completes, and the algorithm moves on to the next file. Nothing in this process requires the system retain any information, or communicate it to any rightsholder, or service-provider/ISP.

No one who presently uses a file-sharing program can credibly claim to find this process objectionable. File-sharing programs like LimeWire already generate similar digital file identifiers for each shared file and then store databases of them on multiple, potentially insecure computers scattered across the Internet. Moreover, (see here at p. 59, n.93), most such programs will, by default, create such databases (and fileservers) on computers owned by program users’ ISPs. For users of such programs, any alleged concerns about filtering look much like thinly veiled excuses for piracy.

For others, it is important to note what such filtering technologies do not do: They do not identify the content of any file that does not match one in their reference database. In other words, the filtering system does not “know” anything about the activities of noninfringing users.

The scheme advocated by Lessig is frighteningly different: It involves the government collecting, retaining, and analyzing surveillance data recording events in your home, car and office. That data must be sufficiently detailed to yeild detailed information about what you read, watch, and hear. And thus, what you do.

Second, some will argue that Lessig and his ilk cannot be said to despise or reject property rights in general or copyrights in particular because they support Creative Commons and open-source licensing schemes that are predicated upon copyrights in particular.

This a non sequitur—it’s like saying someone must respect free speech because he supports the speech of those who agree with him. In the case of both property and speech rights, the key question is whether you support the right of others to exercise their right in ways that you disagree with.

The exclusive rights that we grant to property owners and the free-speech rights that we grant in the First Amendment both tend to be very broad. As a result, holders of such rights can exercise them in many ways—including ways that most of us would think unwise. A farmer growing apples could choose to let them rot on her trees. A law professor could chose to play a video that gratuitously mocks other people’s religion.

But in neither case do we grant such broad rights because we want to encourage inefficient or rude behavior. To the contrary: We grant very broad freedom to act because we doubt that we can divine, in advance, through some collective mechanism, what the optimal outcome would be as to every situation that might implicate those rights. We thus conclude that over the long run, we will be more likely to discover truth or efficiency through an ex post process of competition between people who can make different—even clashing—decisions about how to exercise their rights.

This freedom to act also ensures that—at any one moment—some people are exercising their rights inefficiently, in part, because people disagree about what the true or efficient solution is. From a static perspective, these are inefficiencies caused by freedom (as we in the West like to imagine it). From a dynamic perspective, these disagreements are the truth-seeking mechanism that gives systems of speech rights and property rights superior dynamic efficiency. Schumpeter makes this point: “A system—any system, economic or other—that at every given point in time fully utilizes its possibilities to the best advantage may yet in the long run be inferior to a system that does so at no given point in time, because the latter’s failure to do so may be a condition for the level or speed of long-run performance.”

So if the question is whether someone who creates works or writes code should be permitted to administer their works according to a Creative Commons or open-source license, the opinions of others about their wisdom of doing so should be irrelevant: By granting broad exclusive rights that can be waived in whole or in part, we seek to give creators of socially valuable resources broad freedom to disagree about how best to administer them. In other words, if you do think that open source is a superior development method, then the real question is whether you respect the rights of other software developers to disagree and use closed-source development methods.

Indeed, if the test for being “pro-property” is merely whether there are some implementations of property rights that you would support, then even Karl Marx passes. Notwithstanding the call in the Manifesto of the Communist Party for abolishing all property rights, Marx makes clear that the problem is not all property rights, but property rights being administered in a bourgeois manner; the Communists, Marx says, really “intended abolition of bourgeois property.”

There's nothing particularly surprising in the shift from the volunteer to the corporate model - it tends to be what happens when lots of money enters the picture - but it does reveal that while Net-based "social production" efforts may be unprecedented in their scale and unusual in their technology-mediated structure, they are no more immune, or even resistant, to being incorporated into established market systems than any other type of labor that produces commercially valuable goods.
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The shift in Linux kernel development from unpaid to paid labor, from volunteers to employees, suggests that the Net doesn't necessarily weaken the hand of central management or repeal old truths about business organization.

And the game industry continues to grow and prosper, despite the piracy. This is because the proliferation of platforms allows publishers to more easily abandon platforms that are pirated to the point of being uneconomic. Instead they concentrate on platforms where there are windows of opportunity to run a viable business. Either because the anti piracy technology is on top or because there is a sufficient number of honest customers to get a return, even sometimes with a heavily pirated platform. Games with an online element can often be made very pirate proof which has been a major incentive for developers to go down this route.

So for 25 years or so game players have been stealing games in truly massive numbers with zero chance of being caught and punished for their crime. Very often far more copies of a game title have been pirated than have been bought. This self evidently causes harm to the games industry, ultimately leading to less money being invested in games for the pirated platform. So, the game player suffers for his theft by having less games and lower quality games. All pretty obvious to anyone but the pirates who make all sorts of feeble excuses to justify their stealing.

[My own views on video game piracy can be found here and here.]

Linus Torvalds used to talk about "world domination" as his goal for Linux. These days, though, while we seem to be making progress toward this end, we also appear to be increasingly complacent. We downplay the ideology that underlies open source in favor of "safe" rhetoric about lower sales and marketing costs and such.

I'll await word from Mr. Asay on whether digital copyrights and software patents can help explain the sudden pedestrian state of FOSS.

Red Hat likes Linux on the desktop, but it also likes making money.

The company's desktop software unit on Wednesday released an update on its plans, saying it will focus its efforts on specific markets but not face off against Microsoft in the consumer market.

The Linux Desktop team explained:

An explanation: as a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops, this is much harder to do than with servers. The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today's Linux desktops simply don't provide a practical alternative.

Instead, Red Hat is focusing on desktop software that works with its server products aimed at businesses and developers.

If Red Hat was really a good FOSS community citizen, it would still compete directly with Microsoft on the desktop, ride any loss to its bottom line, and therefore promote the freedom to tinker and the FOSS revolution.

Nine out of ten software-as-a-service providers will rely on open source software by 2010 to save money, but the cost savings likely won't be passed onto customers, Gartner says in a new research note.
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"The name of the game with software-as-a-service providers is dialing down your software acquisition costs," [Gartner Analyst Robert] Desisto says. "It's really economics-driven."
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The savings SaaS providers obtain by using open source software can be passed on to customers, added to profits, or used in R&D. Users shouldn't expect to see any cost savings, though, Desisto writes. The savings are more likely to go toward the vendors' bottom lines or R&D.

First, “Pay Us Not To Sue You” describes—not the operation of criminal protection rackets—but the operation of property rights in all traded goods or services. Doubting Crunchers can verify this for themselves: Go to a local electronics store, grab some pricy gear, and leave without paying for it. This is why you cannot leave an Apple store with a free iPhone: The people who made it must be paid not to sue (or prosecute) you for just taking one. In effect, a property right in a trade good really is a right to sue those who just take it without securing consent, (i.e. “paying for it”).

Second, had TechCrunch actually investigated, it would have learned a shocking truth: While “the music industry” does not, many people and groups really do advocate replacing copyrights with a “music tax.” These include allegedly public-minded, Silicon-Valley-loving Internet savants like Lawrence Lessig, Yochai Benkler, and James Boyle, groups Public Knowledge, “innovation scholars” like Hessler, von Hippel, and Bessen, Berkman-Center law professors like William Fisher, Johnathan Palfrey, and Johnathan Zittrain, and the distributors of the file-sharing programs LimeWire, eDonkey, Grokster, Blubster, Morpheus, and KaZaA. Scores of other “scholars,” technologists, and “public interest” groups are also long-time advocates of replacing copyrights with such a “tax.”

The money went toward 20 deals, of which 17 had a publicly disclosed value, resulting in an average deal size of $12 million. "The first quarter of 2008 was the most successful quarter in history in terms of open source vendors raising venture capital funding," writes 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett. By comparison, 11 deals with disclosed value brought in $100 million in the first quarter of 2007.

All change at End Software Patents again. The organisation has now downgraded its claims of the total costs involved in software patent litigation in the US from $30.4 billion per annum to $11.2 billion per annum. This follows an email that both myself and Ben Klemens, the executive director of End Software Patents, received from Jim Bessen and Mike Meurer concerning the stats used by the organisation which, it stated, were based on the two men’s research.
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Interestingly, while Bessen and Meurer (conservatively) estimate that the current total cost of software patent litigation in the US is $8 billion, No Software Patents has the figure at $11.2 billion. I make no comment, but merely point out the disparity.

However, the bigger picture is that on Friday End Software Patents was claiming that $11.4 billion is "wasted" each year “in litigation over software patents”. Now, after a brief flirtation with a sum in excess of $30 billion, the organisation is stating that $11.26 billion of costs are “incurred by software patent lawsuits”. This is something completely different and is probably a lot closer to the reality, although there is still no real explanation of what that extrapolated figure actually means.

Whats amusing is that Groklaw was the source by which I uncovered the FOSS Movement's involvement in the 2007 EC case against Microsoft. Following the decision, while celebrating a victory for its FOSS friends and a loss for its enemies (Microsoft) through a series of blog posts, the Groklaw community showed itself steeply concerned with vested commercial interests (various FOSS entities and Microsoft competitors).

Its further amusing that Groklaw has done nothing to bring attention to the fact that IBM (a major opponent of Open XML receiving ISO approval) is historically a suave player in the standards process. Unfortunately for IBM, it may be better at the standards game than properly securing government contracts. Big Blue has recently been suspended from contracts with the US federal government as well as the state of Massachusetts.

Having followed technology policy for a number of years, from within the West Coast software sector, and then in the think tank community of Washington DC, I've grown accustomed to the fact that industry entities compete on policy positions as they do in product-service markets. It still baffles me, however, the positions of FOSS entities such as the SFLC, that aim to weaken practices that do not support their own. The issue is rarely whether or not others conflict with the FOSS Movement, rather, the FOSS community shows agitation whenever others do not support its ideals. The result is the perspective that others' gain is the FOSS Movement's loss.

For example, the SFLC took issue with Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP).

The OSP cannot be relied upon by GPL developers for their implementations not because its provisions conflict with GPL, but because it does not provide the freedom that the GPL requires... GPL developers, with their special sensitivity to issues of preserving downstream freedom, will be unable to rely on the OSP with confidence...

...Microsoft wrongly blames the free software legal community for Microsoft's failure to present a promise that satisfies the requirements of the GPL. It is true that a broad audience of developers could implement the specifications, but they would be unable to be certain that implementations based on the latest versions of the specifications would be safe from attack.

One thing is clear though- the SFLC and the FOSS Movement will criticize all instances that do not advance their ideals. They are simply destructive and find weakening the efforts of others as its own reward.

Right, innovation benefits from different kinds of development-business models. Yet often, this point is distorted by FOSS proponents who argue that FOSS should over-ride its proprietary counterparts, and therefore intellectual property rights lose importance. But the mere viability of FOSS development-business models does not render traditional proprietary models obsolete.

Too frequently, FOSS is positioned as a phenomenon that will displace proprietary models. This view conflicts with developments in the industry. Organizations that adopt FOSS business channels have shown no inclination to abandon their patent backed P&Ls. If FOSS could replace proprietary innovation, IBM would have jettisoned its more traditional revenue streams years ago. Instead, IBM has continued, and even increased, its investments into patented technologies.

While some technologists may jump and throw their fist in the air for the right to tinker with FOSS, consumers must be cautious of policy recommendations that favor FOSS at the expense of proprietary innovation. Consumers have already indicated their limited benefit from FOSS, and their policy views should follow their technology adoption.

Somebody, please remind these developers that the FOSS movement relies on their continued tech support-troubleshooting for contributed code despite current professional affiliations, and that in a down-turn economy, if they get laid off, heck, they can still work for free and be part of the revolution.

...it's important to note that [Chris] Anderson's Free! is something quite different from Lawrence Lessig's Free-Culture. One is about new technologies and business models that in the end seek to make money. The other is about the demonization of property and profits. One is about voluntary exchange and creative new ways of doing business. The other is about imposing a radical new utopian and quasi-socialist agenda on our imperfect but highly productive and creative capitalist economy. There may be overlap at the margins of Free! and Free-Culture, but at the core they are very different concepts.