MESSAGE
| DATE | 2010-12-22 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] 2010: The Year in Free and Open Source
|
Evan - I'm going to add this to the resources and articles section of
the website, if it is OK with you.
Reuvain
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 12:50:54PM -0500, einker wrote:
> 2010: The Year in Free and Open Source Software
> By Bruce Byfield
> December 21, 2010
> http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3918011
>
> To all appearances, 2010 was a year of business as usual in free and open
> source software (FOSS). It was neither the long-awaited and derided Year of
> the Linux Desktop, nor a year marked by any great reversals. However, some
> of the trends that emerged in 2010 may become more important over the next
> few years -- particularly the emerging tendency of corporations to comply
> technically with FOSS licenses while ignoring their intent.
>
> But in the short term, 2010 was marked by such a lack of drama that deciding
> whether FOSS advanced or retreated in 2010 is next to impossible. For better
> or worse, here are some of the leading FOSS events and trends in 2010 for
> business, technology, legal matters, and the community:
> Business Moves and Directions
>
> For those watching FOSS business, 2010 proved a mixed year. On the one hand,
> Red Hat continued to thrive, to the extent that Forbes blogger Dan Wood
> predictsthat
> the company will reach $1 billion in revenues next year.
>
> On the other hand, other companies with FOSS interests showed signs of
> struggling in 2010. Smaller companies such as Xandros, which have made
> headlines in previous years, were quieter in 2010, and, if they enjoyed any
> successes, they were quiet ones that went mostly unnoticed.
>
> As for the major players, Canonical, the commercial arm of the dominant
> Ubuntu distribution, continued to search for profitability in a distribution
> by adding cloud and music services, and laying the groundwork for expansion
> into touch-screens. However, any success in these efforts is going to take
> longer than a year to emerge.
>
> Even worse, Novell, one of the major contributors to the Linux kernel and
> other FOSS projects, was
> soldto
> Attachmate, with some of its patents going to a
> consortiumwhose
> members include Apple, EMC, Microsoft, and Oracle. Although
> FOSS-related patents do not appear to have been involved, nobody knows yet
> whether Novell's FOSS contributions will continue under Attachmate or not.
>
> Similarly, 2010 also saw the finalization of Oracle's acquisition of Sun
> Microsystem, which includes major FOSS projects such as Java, MySQL, and
> OpenOffice.org.
>
> Peter Brown, the executive director of the Free Software Foundation,
> suggested to me that Oracle has still to develop a coherent free software
> policy, but the decisions made by individual corporate units have caused
> shockwaves throughout FOSS in the last year -- everything from a
> campaignto
> prevent Oracle's acquisition of MySQL by Monty Widenius to the forking
> of
> LibreOffice from OpenOffice.org (see below). Such reactions leave little
> doubt that the community lacks confidence in Oracle as a steward for its
> FOSS acquisitions.
> Technology Trends
>
> One piece of FOSS technology -- Google's Android mobile operating system --
> thrived in 2010. Throughout the year, the sale of Android devices continued
> to soar, with headlines telling us that sales were outstripping
> manufacturing capability and that they were outselling the iPhone. This
> success was mitigated by complaints about lack of openness in development,
> and the use of Digital Rights Management technologies and proprietary Java.
> All these things make Android a platform built on FOSS that has strayed
> badly from its ideals.
>
> Another Google project, the Chrome browser, enjoyed something of the same
> success in 2010, rising to an 8% market share by November, and developing a
> supporting set of extensions at the same time. This growth makes Chrome the
> major competitor for Mozilla's Firefox, so that it is now currently setting
> the agenda for browser development. Chrome is an essential element of the
> soon to be released Chrome OS, whose design choices raise
> issuesof
> privacy and control, but is also available separately.
>
> A lesser known, but equally important development in FOSS technology during
> 2010 is the development of the
> Linux-librekernel.
> Unlike the standard Libre kernel released by the kernel project and
> most distributions, the Linux-libre kernel does not include proprietary
> firmware blobs for device drivers, making it the most philosophically free
> version of the kernel available. The Linux-libre kernel has been adapted by
> a small but growing number of
> distributions,
> despite being several releases behind the latest standard kernel.
>
> Recently, the idea of a free kernel received a major endorsement when
> Debian, the largest independent community-based distribution,
> announcedthat
> its upcoming release would ship with a default free kernel. This
> decision increases the likelihood of other major distributions providing a
> free kernel as an option.
>
> 2010 also marked the start of a possible move away from Flash as the main
> video format on the web. Although free Flash alternatives such as Gnash have
> been in development for several years, they are still not ready for the
> ordinary user's desktop, and Flash itself remains a non-free format.
>
> However, now, the development of WebM
> and HTML
> 5's video element mean that free
> alternatives to Flash may soon become widespread. This possibility gained
> momentum in 2010, although some browsers and applications do not yet support
> the new alternatives.
> Legal Landmarks and Licensing
>
> Arguments in the SCO legal cases continue to wind through the American
> courts, and some details still need to be worked out. However, for most
> observers, the beginning of the end came on March 30, 2010, when the United
> States Supreme Court handed down the ruling that Novell, not SCO, was the
> owner of the contested UNIX and UnixWare copyrights.
>
> The awarding of
> coststo
> Novell on December 10 provides further indications that the saga that
> has
> fascinated the community for so long might actually have an ending some day.
>
>
> Another court case watched by FOSS advocates that concluded in 2010 was Re:
> Bilski , which was ruled upon on
> June 28. FOSS advocates had hoped to use the case as a means of eliminating
> software patents altogether, viewing them as stiflers of innovation and a
> method for attacking free software. The decision stopped short of
> eliminating software patents altogether in the United States, but placed
> some restrictions on them that could make them saner in the future.
>
> While these cases were winding down, the seeds of future concerns were also
> sown. In 2010, the Free Software Foundation, which has long opposed Digital
> Rights Management through its Defective By
> DesignCampaign, turned its
> attention to Apple's
> iPhoneand
> App
> Store , and Amazon's Android App
> Store.
>
>
> Besides the issues themselves, these issues make 2010 the year in which
> Microsoft lost its position as the major opponent of software freedom to
> other companies. However, since Microsoft has recently entered the mobile
> device market, this is most likely only a temporary change.
> Community Concerns
>
> By far the most widely discussed community story in 2010 was the forking of
> LibreOffice from OpenOffice.org. The fork has been waiting to happen for a
> long time, due to widespread disillusion with Sun Microsystem's centralized
> control of OpenOffice.org. However, the timing of the fork makes it a vote
> of no confidence in Oracle's ability to run the project for the benefit of
> the community. In place of Oracle, LibreOffice has created The Document
> Foundation .
>
> Since the fork is only a few months old, its effect is still unknown. So
> far, LibreOffice's mailing lists and code contributions seem far more active
> than OpenOffice.org's have been for several years. Nearly everything is
> being re-thought, down to the names of the applications in the office suite.
>
>
> However, whether The Document Foundation has the resources to implement all
> these changes has yet to be tested. Working against it is the fact that
> OpenOffice.org has considerable recognition value. To what extent
> OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice will borrow code from each other is also
> uncertain. Possibly, the two code bases will diverge rapidly -- which would
> be wasteful, although possibly unavoidable.
>
> Less publicized, but potentially as far-reaching in its consequences is the
> project begun in 2010 to draft an anti-harassment
> policysuitable
> for technology conferences. Such policies have already been
> adopted by
> a number of FOSS conferences, including LibrePlanet, Linux.conf.au and all
> of Linux Foundation???s events. Given the ongoing concerns about
> sexismin
> FOSS, this development could help to mitigate at least some of the
> symptoms of this often unacknowledged problem.
> When the Letter Replaces the Spirit
>
> However, for me, the biggest story in 2010 is one that has gone largely
> unrecognized: The increasing number of ways that companies have found to
> keep to the letter of FOSS licensing while ignoring the spirit.
>
> Nothing is new, of course, in companies exploiting FOSS for their own
> benefit. In the past, however, most companies, however, have eventually
> realized that at least limited cooperation with a community that includes
> their rivals can benefit them. What is different now is the number of ways
> in which companies are technically conforming to the requirements of FOSS
> while finding ways to continue business as usual.
>
> This trend takes numerous forms. At Oracle, it takes the form of maintaining
> projects, but limiting releases and development, and of bringing a
> claimof
> infringement on Java patents against Google.
>
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Evan M. Inker
>
>
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Evan M. Inker
|
|
