Simon Phipps Responds
I commented on Simon Phipps CNet article recently, and he responded on his blog, accusing me of having “knee-jerk opposition”.
I can understand how he could have become confused into thinking that my rant on my personal blog was about him, but if you read the post again you will see that I was very careful in my phrasing. Phipps was only used in the first two sentences of the article as a springboard to launch into my thesis, which is about the newspeak of Stallman and Lessig when they say “Free Software is about Liberty”.
Sun’s position on intellectual property is far closer to Microsoft’s than to Stallman’s. Sun, like Microsoft, realizes thatopening code and protocolscan form apowerful nexus of community, and can be liberating in many circumstances. Both Microsoft and Sun have released code and protocols under various licenses, ranging from public domain to purely proprietary.
In fact, for a company who has said that “software is a feature of hardware”, Sun keeps tight rein on her software intellectual property.For example, Microsoft donated C# to theECMA international standards body very early on, but Sun still refuses to open up Java to real community participation. There is something known as “Java Community Process”, but the word “community” is considered by most to be newspeak, since Sun created and continues to exercisetight control over the “process”. The number one non-Sun Google hit for “Java Community Process” yields a page titled “Java Gated Communty Process“, which is a hint of how many Java user’s feel about the “liberty” provided by JCP.
Anyway, I’m not trying to criticize Sun’s record, since that’s not the point. Sun deserves a lot of praise from the community; for contributions like NFS, Java, and even Crimson. The point is that Sun (wisely)treats licensing as a tool rather than a religion, and could therefore never live up to the intent of Stallman’s phrase “Free Software is about Liberty”.
Simon’sappropriation ofthat famous Stallman quote in his CNet article was clearlyused in a context that Stallman had not intended. Simon’s blog seems to imply “there are lots of definitions of liberty; can’t we all just get along?”. But I would only point out that Stallman was thinking more like “I am a freedom fighter, so the ends justify the means”. There is no room for compromise or cooperation in the newspeak “Free Software is about Liberty”.
Since Sun remains pragmatic about licensing, it’s clear that Simon’s use of the Stallman quote was not indicative of any FSF-ization of Sun’s position. Andhis lamenting“the attack Microsoft continues to make on the community of open source communities” is rather melodramatic. This is tired politics: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and Microsoft is our enemy, so we must be friends”. That technique was once effective, but silly in today’s post-bubble reality.
Microsoft and Sun share many of the same customers, and when it comes to helping our customers grow their businesses, we share a common purpose. Microsoft continues to make significant contributions to various independent and open developer communities, recognizing that the industry’s collective future depends on these communities. In the act of serving this important constituency, too, Microsoft and Sun are partners. Simon is entitled to be bitter about Microsoft’s current role in the industry, considering Sun’s long history of credibility in Internet standards. But I think people realize that Microsoft is involved for the same reasons as Sun — to serve our mutual customers. People are tired of the paranoia.