In April 2009, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire Sun. Since Sun had acquired MySQL the previous year, this would mean that Oracle, the market leader for closed source databases, would get to own MySQL, the most popular open source database. If Oracle acquired MySQL on that basis, it would have as much control over MySQL as money can possibly buy over an open source project.

Obviously, MySQL users and supporters will have an interest in seeing that Oracle is not able to exert its full influence over MySQL, leaving customers at their mercy, since MySQL has become such a major competitor to Oracle. No surprise that there’s now an online petition campaign to  Save MySQL!

London Stock Exchange dumps Windows for Linux:

When it comes to business computer systems, nothing is more mission-critical than the massive trading software systems that underlie stock markets. A failure of an hour here can mean billions of dollars of lost trades. The LSE (London Stock Exchange) learned that the hard way when their .NET/Windows Server 2003 trading platform died like a dog early last September. The new LSE management is not going make that mistake again. This October, the LSE purchased MillenniumIT and will be switching its stock exchange programs to the company’s Linux-based Millennium Exchange software.

Today Microsoft released some GPL driver code for Linux for some hardware. Why? Well, so that the hardware could be better virtualized in a VM running Linux on a Windows host. Yippee. Well I’m sure this will help some people. It does mean that FLOSS is influencing them, and that is a good thing.

In contrast, the FSF made a press release last Thursday, quoted below in its entirety. So Microsoft is trying to win people over, whether it’s with really useful stuff or not, it is Free this time… and the FSF is just yelling at people. Who’s going to make more friends here?

Last week, Microsoft extended the terms of their Community Promise to implementations of the ECMA 334 and 335 standards. You might think this means it’s safe to write your software in C#. However, this promise is full of loopholes, and it’s nowhere near enough to make C# safe.

### Why Worry About C#? ###

Since we published Richard’s article about Mono[1] last week, some people have been asking us why we’re expressing special concern about free software developers relying on C# and Mono, instead of other languages. Sun probably has patents that cover Java. Maybe IBM has patents that cover C compilers. “Shouldn’t we discourage the use of these too?” they ask.

It’s true that all software patents are a threat to developers–but that doesn’t mean that all software patents are equally threatening. Different companies might have patents that *could* be used to attack other languages, but if we worried about every patent that *could* be used against us, we wouldn’t get anything done. Microsoft’s patents are much more dangerous: it’s the only major software company that has declared itself the enemy of GNU/Linux and stated its intention to attack our community with patents. If Microsoft designed a patent trap into C#, that is no more than what it said it would do.

The company has been quite clear about its intentions since late 2006. At a user conference in November that year, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, responding to a question about their patent agreement with Novell: … the fact that [GNU/Linux] uses our patented intellectual property is a problem for our shareholders. We spend $7 billion a year on R&D, our shareholders expect us to protect or license or get economic benefit from our patented innovations. So how do we somehow get the appropriate economic return for our patented innovation…? (Seattle Post-Intellegencer, The Microsoft Blog, “Ballmer on Novell, Linux and patents,” November 16, 2006. “Intellectual property” is a confusing term that should be avoided; to learn more, visit.)

A few days later, an interview with Microsoft President Bob Muglia was published, and he made it clear that they considered C# one of these so-called “patented innovations:” There is a substantive effort in open source [sic] to bring such an implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being driven by Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we made with Novell is that the intellectual property [sic] associated with that is available to Novell customers. (eWeek.com, “Microsofts Muglia Talks Longhorn, Novell and Java”, November 17, 2006.)

They’ve been turning up the heat ever since. In May 2007, Microsoft followed all this up by announcing in a Fortune magazine interview that they believed GNU/Linux infringed 235 Microsoft patents. And recently they made it very clear that these were not idle threats: the company sued TomTom for using the VFAT filesystem implementation in the kernel Linux without buying a license from it.

All of this can’t simply be brushed aside. These are statements and actions made at the highest executive levels of the company. Using patents to divide and conquer the free software community is a fundamental part of their corporate strategy. Because of that, C# represents a unique threat to us. The language was developed inside Microsoft, so it’s likely they have many patents to cover different aspects of its implementation. That would make free software implementations of C#, like Mono, an easy target for attack.

The Community Promise does nothing to change any of this. Microsoft had an opportunity to take action and demonstrate that it meant usnno harm with C#. Instead, they took meaningless half-measures thatnleave them with plenty of opportunities to hurt us.

### Incomplete Standards ###

The ECMA 334 and 335 specifications describe the core C# language, including information about standard libraries that must be available in any compliant implementation. However, there are several libraries that are included with Mono, and commonly used by applications like Tomboy, that are not required by the standard. And just to be clear, we’re not talking about Windows-specific libraries like ASP.NET and Windows Forms. Instead, we’re talking about libraries under then System namespace that provide common functionality programmers expect in modern programming languages: binary object serialization, regular expressions, XPath and XSLT, and more.

Because these libraries are not defined in the ECMA specifications, they are not protected in any way by Microsoft’s Community Promise. If this were the only problem with the promise, it might be safe to use applications that avoid these libraries, and stick to what’s in the standard. But even the code that’s covered by the promise isn’t completely safe.

### Figuring Out What’s Necessary ###

The Community Promise only extends to claims in Microsoft patents that are *necessary* to implement the covered specifications. Judging just by the size of its patent portfolio, it’s likely that Microsoft holds patents which a complete standard implementation probably infringes even if it’s not strictly necessary–maybe the patent covers a straightforward speed optimization, or some common way of performing some task. The Community Promise doesn’t say anything about these patents, and so Microsoft can still use them to threaten standard implementations.

### Moving the Goalposts ###

Let’s say you’ve written an implementation of one of the specifications covered by the Community Promise, and you want to determine whether or not you’ll be sued for infringing a certain Microsoft patent. The necessity question already makes it difficult enough to figure this out. But even if you manage it, you should make sure you check again tomorrow, because the Community Promise might not protect you then.

The Community Promise does not give you any rights to exercise the patented claims. It only says that Microsoft will not sue you over claims in patents that it owns or controls. If Microsoft sells one of those patents, there’s nothing stopping the buyer from suing everyone who uses the software.

### The Solution: A Comprehensive Patent License ###

If Microsoft genuinely wants to reassure free software users that it does not intend to sue them for using Mono, it should grant the public an irrevocable patent license for all of its patents that Mono actually exercises. That would neatly avoid all of the existing problems with the Community Promise: it’s broad enough in scope that we don’t have to figure out what’s covered by the specification or strictly necessary to implement it. And it would still be in force even if Microsoft sold the patents.

This isn’t an unreasonable request, either. GPLv3 requires distributors to provide a similar license when they convey modified versions of covered software, and plenty of companies large and small have had no problem doing that. Certainly one with Microsoft’s resources should be able to manage this, too. If they’re unsure how to go about it, they should get in touch with us; we’d be happy to work with them to make sure it’s satisfactory.

Until that happens, free software developers still should not writesoftware that depends on Mono. C# implementations can still be attacked by Microsoft’s patents: the Community Promise is designed to give the company several outs if it wants them. We don’t want to see developers’ hard work lost to the community if we lose the ability to use Mono, and until we eliminate software patents altogether[2], using another language is the best way to prevent that from happening.

[1] http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono
[2] To learn more about our End Soft Patents campaign, visit http://swpat.org/

_______________________________________________
FSF And GNU Press mailing list http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-press

Esther Schindler sifts through 25 highly anticipated open-source releases coming this year which will be of interest to people in various categories from IT Admins to programmers to mobile users: “These open-source browsers, dev tools, mobile apps and more promise that ‘Oooh, cool!’ sense of discovery.”

Royal Pingdom serves up 10 interesting open source software forks and why they happened. Some reasons better than others, of course. Interesting to note where the fork surpasses the original project in popularity, and where it doesn’t. Two of the listed forks were in pursuit of Mac support.

Steve Wozniak speaks out, predicting the death of the iPod and suggesting things he doesn’t like about the iPhone, comparing it with Google’s Android platform. Woz is quoted as saying that “the iPod has had a long time as the world’s most popular media player, and that it will fall from grace due to oversupply.” Hmmm. Is it a victim of its own success, then?

Mandriva’s latest release: Mandriva Linux 2009. Get it while it’s hot! Mandriva’s always been a bit of an overlooked distro, imo… but it continues to install easily and work very well. Reviews are appearing now for those who like to read before they download. Time to update my Mandriva systems…

This is amusing: apparently the roots of the iPod’s development are traced back to 1979, when “Kane Kramer from Hertfordshire filed a patent for a digital music player that stored just three and a half minutes of music to a solid state chip.” He didn’t renew the patent in 1988, so he hasn’t seen a dime from it. “To be honest,” he said, “I was just so pleased that finally something that I had done which has been a huge success and changed the music industry was being acknowledged.”

The launch today of Canada’s new DNCL has the website flooded — earlier today it displayed an error page, and when I tried again just now (noon Central), the site displays and allows you to enter a number, but is still to flooded to generate the necessary captcha to complete the registration. I imagine that Michael Geist’s iOptOut site will probably be getting extra traffic today as well — it picks up where the DNCL leaves off, since the list presently has too many exemptions. Story at the Globe & Mail and CTV’s “What you need to know about the Do Not Call List.”

iTWire claims their list of Top 10 reasons why Steve Ballmer should be certified insane is offered tongue-in-cheek, but it is vaguely possible that some people might take it more seriously than that. The list counts down, clocking in #5 as: “Ballmer can get a little quirky when Linux is mentioned. ‘Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.’ Doesn’t sound completely sane to me.