Another Brick in the Wall?

By Brian Proffitt
Managing Editor

It seems, for now, that the plan to negate the threat of
Microsoft’s patent protection plan with certain Linux partners has
succeeded. The statements made by Microsoft disavowing any notion
that they will fall under the new version of the GNU General Public
License (GPLv3) seems to confirm that.

Essentially, Microsoft is saying that it will not distribute or
support any code that’s under the GPLv3 license, even as it
continues its partnerships with Novell, Linspire, and Xandros.
That, I think, will be neat trick, given that the next time any of
these Linux distributors puts out another formal release, there’s
bound to be some GPLv3 code in that release somewhere. In other
words, Microsoft’s support could be full of holes. No one is
exactly sure how this will play out, since this is uncovered
ground.

I still find it hard to believe that Microsoft thought this
could go another way, and they weren’t expecting this. Perhaps, as
I opined last week, their goal is to try to challenge the legal
validity of the GPL itself. Or perhaps they were just dumb enough,
as my colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols theorizes, to get caught on
the hook.

Whatever the reasoning for entering such agreements, it seems
that the issue of patent protection is either completely out of the
picture or heavily damaged. And I must admit that gives me a
certain sense of relief, given that I was not looking forward to a
knock-down drag-out fight that would waste valuable resources and
time for open source developers.

But in all fairness, I have to also admit that part of me is a
bit concerned that we have lost a genuine opportunity to actually
get some interoperability between Linux and Windows going. Let me
be clear: the patent protection racket solicited by Microsoft was
wrong, is wrong, and forever more shall be wrong. It would have
been better if Microsoft had reached out to the Linux community
without making that IP protection clause a part of all of its
deals. As comments from Red Hat’s executive staff suggest, any
genuine effort for interoperability–without patent claims,
statements, or whatever–have been consistently rejected by
Redmond.

I don’t entirely blame Microsoft for this division. I have seen
members of the free software and open source community reject any
notion of interoperability with Microsoft, citing past misdeeds by
that company as reason enough not to trust Redmond.

I am not saying that this mistrust is unwarranted. What concerns
me is this: a technology wall between free and proprietary software
is slowly being reinforced by the recent deeds on both sides. This
is not, mind you, the ideological wall that already existed between
the two camps–that wall is still very high. But the technology
wall, which lies on the path of interoperability between the
technologies, wasn’t very high and there were signs that it was
coming down (I note the recent efforts of the Samba Project and the
Open Source lab at Microsoft as an example).

Now, to protect itself, Microsoft may be less willing to share
and actually work towards interoperability. Maybe they never
intended to, but it seems clear to me that such efforts are surely
going to fall by the wayside.

This will pose some challenges for the open source world, both
legal and technical, because like it our not, this is still an IT
world dominated by proprietary software companies. As the GPLv3
rightly shows us (and them), we don’t have to play by their rules.
But is there ever going to be a chance for compromise on any
level?