For about a year, early on in my career, I worked as a Java developer and I generally liked the Java language. At the time (around 1999), Java had some serious speed problems that we had to work around and it didn’t run well on Linux (this was before Sun made an official Linux version). My roommate Kevin was a Java fanatic, and we often had the Java vs C++ debates. I haven’t done much Java work since then but I have been keeping tabs on the language and I liked the improvements I have seen over the years.
I generally thought C# was a better language choice than Java on Linux, because the Mono implementation was open and Java was very much a black box. It wasn’t really for any technical reasons that I preferred Mono over Java, but ideological ones because I could tweak the guts of Mono and I generally only support software released under Free Software Foundation approved licenses.
Well, the last week shows how things can do a quick 180 in the tech world. Sun made the expected announcement that it was going to open source Java, which they have been saying they were going to do eventually. Well, Sun surprised us all by announcing that not only were they going to open source Java, but release under the GPL! This is going to make Java a much more popular language option for Linux developers. Now every Linux distribution has no reason not to ship the official Sun Java environment with every copy of their OS.
Ironically, Novell, a primary sponsor of Mono C#, is going down the open source road the wrong way, by announcing last week that they have formed a partnership with Microsoft, the open source anti-christ. This is a horrible move and has personally made me loose any desire to do future C# programming with Mono. I had been a big evangelist of the Mono project but now I will be pointing people towards Java and Python.
Eben Moglen, attorney for the Free Software Foundation and an author of the GPL v2 license, states in a CNET article: “If you make an agreement which requires you to pay a royalty to anybody for the right to distribute GPL software, you may not distribute it under the GPL.” Eben is referring to Section 7 of the GPL, which Novell seems to have conveniently forgotten about.
Many open source projects are begging Novell to pull out of the deal, and the complaints are loud that this will cause SuSe and other Novell projects to violate the GPL. The Samba project expresses the feelings of many members of the open source community quite well with the following message to Novell:
Samba Team Asks Novell to Reconsider
The Samba Team disapproves strongly of the actions taken by Novell on November 2nd.
One of the fundamental differences between the proprietary software world and the free software world is that the proprietary software world divides users by forcing them to agree to coercive licensing agreements which restrict their rights to share with each other, whereas the free software world encourages users to unite and share the benefits of the software.
The patent agreement struck between Novell and Microsoft is a divisive agreement. It deals with users and creators of free software differently depending on their “commercial” versus “non-commercial” status, and deals with them differently depending on whether they obtained their free software directly from Novell or from someone else.
The goals of the Free Software community and the GNU GPL allow for no such distinctions.
Furthermore, the GPL makes it clear that all distributors of GPL’d software must stand together in the fight against software patents. Only by standing together do we stand a chance of defending against the peril represented by software patents. With this agreement Novell is attempting to destroy that unified defense, exchanging the long term interests of the entire Free Software community for a short term advantage for Novell over their competitors.
For Novell to make this deal shows a profound disregard for the relationship that they have with the Free Software community. We are, in essence, their suppliers, and Novell should know that they have no right to make self serving deals on behalf of others which run contrary to the goals and ideals of the Free Software community.
Using patents as competitive tools in the free software world is not acceptable. Novell, as a participant in numerous debates, discussions and conferences on the topic knew this to be the case. We call upon Novell to work with the Software Freedom Law Center to undo the patent agreement and acknowledge its obligations as a beneficiary of the Free Software community.
The original source of this announcement is available here: http://news.samba.org/announcements/team_to_novell/
After Novell bought the Ximian group, who many of the top Gnome developers worked for, I though the company finally had seen the light and was going to rescue it’s failing NetWare business by embracing the open source movement and competing with Microsoft with innovation and freedom. But after this latest development, I can only speculate that they were just latching on to the open source buzzword worthiness long enough to become enough of a pain for Microsoft that the evil empire would pay attention to them and buy them off.
