http://martin.iturbide.com/?page_id=114

eLiberatica is an “Open Source and Free Software” conference in Romania, sponsored by Microsoft. A Gentle Reader of this blog, Dan Serban, questioned this relationship and contacted Richard Stallman for his comments on such situations.

Lucy, you’ve got some ‘splaining to do!

eLiberatica Conference Chair Lucian Savluc has offered up “Some clarity about eLiberatica and Microsoft“. Mr. Savluc’s response is a bit odd but seems well-intentioned.

I call the response odd because although Mr. Savluc defends Microsoft’s sponsorship role, he simultaneously confesses that:

• Microsoft is “not right”
• Microsoft’s speakers “lack passion”
• Microsoft “is wrong”
• Microsoft speakers “pretend they love FLOSS”
• Microsoft “will try hard to slow down FLOSS adoption”
• Microsoft “will not change if we talk to them”

Personally, I agree with those points, and so have difficulty resolving why a conference with the goal of developing a “healthy Free Software, Open Source, and Digital Civil Society movement, and to promote Free/Libre/Open-Source Software business models” would allow Microsoft to have a sponsorship role.

Especially because we know based on court documents that Microsoft had a policy of “stacking” panels and conferences!

So, believing that Microsoft is both wrong and trying to retard FLOSS adoption, and knowing Microsoft will intentionally deceive conference organizers and attendees, I wonder exactly how one reconciles that with the expressed goal of promoting Free Software?

I guess part of it is people feel like they need the money that a Microsoft sponsorship brings, and another part is people simply do not want to acknowledge Microsoft’s bad behavior. If you try to do both, to take their money and condemn them, you end up having some awkward blog post that winds up on this site.

RMS Comments

Here is the email from RMS that Gentle Reader Dan Serban was kind enough to provide. Outer quoted material is RMS, inner quoted material is Mr. Serban’s.

Please distribute this in the community.

My question to you: is it appropriate for Microsoft Corporation to be sponsoring free software community events? What is your stance on this topic?

Accepting the money from Microsoft would, in itself, do not harm.  But Microsoft typically demands a price for its sponsorship, a price that implies a change in the nature of the event.

The price might be, let someone from Microsoft give a speech.  The price might be, don’t say that proprietary software is evil.  The price might be, present Microsoft sponsorship in a way that inhibits you from denouncing Microsoft’s software as unethical.

One way or other, Microsoft wants us to stop saying the most important thing to say: “Proprietary software is an injustice and we want to help you escape from it.”

This issue does not arise for OSCON because that is an open source event.  “Open source” is the term used by those who do not wish to take an ethical stand against proprietary software.  OSCON did not need to sell out its principles in order to accept Microsoft’s money because it never had such principles.  I heard that O’Reilly Associates distributes manuals with Digital Restrictions Management. which can only be read using nonfree software.  I don’t know for certain if that is accurate, but it would not conflict with any principles ORA ever stated.

OSCON is the sort of event Microsoft would like our community to have, one that avoids raising the issue of the injustice of proprietary software.  If eLiberatica is to live up to its name, it must not take OSCON as a model.

myself) and mr. Savluc he insists that in order to be able to finance FLOSS community booths and speaking engagements by yourself and other guests from outside Romania, he needs to bring in Microsoft Corporation as a sponsor.

I would be glad to visit eLiberatica some day, if its message is true to its name.  But don’t weaken the event to get money from Microsoft to bring me.  My speech might do some good, but it could not entirely counteract the weakening effect of the changes that Microsoft would require.

It is better to do without Microsoft’s sponsorship and have a smaller event.

In Summation

I suppose an “Open Source” conference can safely allow a Microsoft sponsorship, if one is speaking of the divorced-from-Free Software modern “Open Source”. As RMS states, there are no principles there to be violated.

However, a conference that attempts to strongly promote “Free and Open Source software” with special emphasis on the “libre”, can not safely allow a Microsoft sponsorship. The compromise in principle is too great.

The harm outweighs any benefit. One must always keep in mind sponsorship is beneficial for Microsoft – they would not sponsor an event if it were not so. Since we know Microsoft opposes Free Software in practice and principle, one must ask what benefit Microsoft sees in sponsoring an event promoting Free Software?

It is, as RMS says, to weaken the event; to decrease or suppress any criticism of proprietary software in general and Microsoft in specific.

Lie. Lie Big. And Stick to It.

One of the things Mr. Weir points out is that through a simple Google search, it’s easy to see how a troop of zombie “tech journalists”, bloggers, and astroturfers simply parrot Microsoft talking points – right down to the exact phrasing.

(The audacity of Microsoft complaining that someone else is “restricting choice” is nearly as amusing as when Microsoft complains of “Google’s monopoly status”. )

Freedom and Choice

I’ve made this point before on this blog – and am certainly not the first to do so, but “Freedom” and “Choice” are not the same thing.

There are a host of reasons why it is the “Free Software Foundation” and not the “Foundation for Software Choice” (the latter of which would be a fantastic name for yet another Microsoft front group, don’t you think?), and Mr. Weir presents a nice thought experiment:

So going back to the  boxes again.  Now imagine one has $10 in it, and the other has a note in it that requires that you pay me $10.  You can see the contents of each box.  Which one do you choose?  It should be obvious, you pick the one with $10 in it.

But what if I say you are not limited to picking only one box.  You can pick either box, or both boxes if you wish.  You have absolute freedom to choose A, B or A+B.  What do you do?  Of course, you still pick the box with $10 in it.

But doesn’t that eliminate choice?  Yes, of course it did.  But the value of choice was only derived from the value of the underlying outcomes.  By choosing, I’ve derived the full value of having a choice.  Since if one choice is clearly more favorable than others (it “dominates” the others) then the alternatives should be discarded.

Fighting Sound Bites and Fallacies

Not only is the full thought experiment quite nice, but Mr. Weir makes a very perceptive insight when discussing the integrity and composition of Microsoft’s “ODF restricts choice” argument:

This argument is quite effective, since it is plausible at first glance, and takes more than 15 seconds to refute.  But the argument in the end fails by taking a very superficial view of “choice”, relying merely on the positive allure of its name, essentially using it as a talisman.

There is an implied component here that is absolutely crucial to understanding Microsoft’s argument on ODF – Microsoft is intentionally trying to deceive.

(Shocking implication: the ODF/OOXML arena may not be the only place this is happening.)

When Microsoft attempts to construct a narrative like “ODF restricts choice” or “Shared Source is Open Source” or “Microsoft has embraced Open Source”, it’s not because there is necessarily any truth in the story.

“Truth” isn’t of value to Microsoft because Microsoft isn’t in the truth-telling business. And while I think most people are smart enough to recognize that companies in general are going to try to “spin” things in a favorable way, it’s always amusing to see journalists, fanboys, and astroturfers present spin as honest opinion.

What’s even sadder is when people actually believe the spin.

Right, so, Novell is up for sale and there’s a couple dozen potential buyers.

First, let me tell you what is not going to happen:

Microsoft is not going to buy Novell.

Novell has served their purpose to Microsoft, which is basically acting as a lap-dog and providing Microsoft with good PR while simultaneously dividing and hurting the FLOSS community.

Microsoft could not have hoped for a better partner in the Open Source space, but Novell is of ever-diminishing use to their Redmond masters: anyone naïve enough to accept Microsoft’s “golly-gee-we’ve-changed” overtures has done so and Microsoft is now backing off “interoperability” talk and going back to the “customers just want one solution from one provider” strategy in public (which they never changed in private, mind you.)

Furthermore, Microsoft wants nothing to do directly with selling Linux. Novell served as a DMZ between the GPL and Microsoft, and staring across a DMZ is about as close to Linux as Microsoft wants to get. Microsoft is not about to get into the business of directly distributing/selling/supporting Linux.

What I suspect will happen

Novell will be bought up by some investment fund with the sole purpose of dismantling it. This “first buyer” won’t be a name anyone in the tech community is familiar with, and won’t really matter. The only thing this first buyer wants to do is get the cash reserve Novell has and then sell off the rest.

The first buyer in turn will consult with potential secondary buyers – buyers who, if they don’t already have an agreement with are very close to one – on exactly how to divide up Novell. Whoever is going to buy Novell isn’t doing so hoping they will make money – they are going in knowing they are going to make money, because they have the secondary buyers already lined up.

This is the more interesting  part, since Novell holds patents (and possibly copyrights and trademarks) that impact the wider community.

I fully expect a front company or two funded by Microsoft to poke around and pick up bits that they feel will be useful in the future against Linux. Less likely is Microsoft directly buying the same bits out in the open under their own name – expect a Baystar-like beard instead. There will be no big announcements of these sells, by the way.

OpenSUSE is greatly diminished under this scenario: as a community-only distro and without corporate backing, it’s looking at the bottom end of the Top 10 List. With Novell’s stained name out of the picture, OpenSUSE may become acceptable to people who actually care about FLOSS, so I won’t count it out of the picture.

Team Apologista takes a major hit, but sadly probably not a finishing blow. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Mono-based spinoff. There’s money to be made there and Lord knows Team Apologista has some players with personal, professional and emotional investment in Mono that guarantees they won’t be giving up that fight.

And there’s an interesting issue there too – say you are a Team Apologista Superstar and now Novell is gone. You’ve spent the last 5 to 8 years focusing on nothing but C# and .NET. I’m not sure what Linux-centered companies are looking to hire that particular skill set? Oh well, the world always needs more Windows developers.

What might happen

A big buyer that is FLOSS-friendly (say IBM, though I don’t think they will) comes in and scoops everything up. The good in this scenario is that:

Almost anyone who takes over will be a better Novell than Novell was. A chimp could manage Novell better by throwing darts at a craps table, so it would be hard for a more incompetent hand to get behind the wheel there.

The FLOSS community dodges a bullet. Again, Novell was just about as anti-FLOSS and damaging to the community as possible while still pretending to be a member. To do more damage, you’d have to come right out and say that was your intention.

I’m hoping for this outcome, but I’m expecting the vulture funds.

From a FLOSS-friendly corporate standpoint, Novell has 2 major products of interest: OpenSUSE and Mono. So the hypothetical FLOSS-friendly buyer has to meet two important criteria:

1. They want an existing distro (which has plusses and minuses). 
2. They don’t mind taking on the whole Mono controversy.

I can tell you that if I had money to match my stunning good looks and devastating wit and was in charge of a FLOSS-Friendly company, I wouldn’t be buying Novell.

For one thing, I’d rather start up my own distro so I can manage expectations, shape the community and make sure I’m in control of those fanboys (Hello, Mark!).

For another thing, I wouldn’t want to enter the Mono stink – it’s one think to keep fighting a fight and a whole ‘nother thing to enter a fight you can avoid.

We Will See What We Will See

Novell’s done for no matter what happens, and I think that’s a long-term positive for the community.  

The fallout will be very interesting, but I can’t speculate farther ahead until the buying’s done.

Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division and one of the company’s foremost cloud proponents, also dismissed Google’s claims of Office-Docs interoperability.

“It clearly shows their lack of maturity and lack of understanding for the business market,” Elop told The New York Times Wednesday. “Companies don’t want to mix their technology.”

I am shocked, shocked, to hear Microsoft come out against interoperability.

Let me state up front one of the reasons I hate Twitter is because it is so ill-suited for any real communication. There are a very limited number of things Twitter works well for, but explaining an idea with any nuance is certainly not among them.

I hate to read too much into a tweet because everyone is trying to make a point in so few characters that I’m not sure if the person is aware of problemd and is just ignoring them  out of space considerations, or if they are ignorant of the problems, or they have proposed solutions, or what.

Joe Hewitt Speaks – People Listen

Joe Hewitt – of Firefox and Facebook fame – went on a Twitter rampage, summarized in this TechCrunch story if you want to read more. Here I’ll just focus on a few representative tweets:

Redirect your hatred of Flash to the W3C, whose embarrassingly slow pace forced devs to use a plugin because the standards were so weak.

Also, I am looking at you, developers who bitch whenever a browser offers “non-standard” but innovative APIs.

Browser makers need to go nuts with non-standard APIs and let the W3C standardize later. Waiting for the committee to innovate is suicide.

We’ve already been down this road once. It lead us to websites that wouldn’t work across browsers. I led to those little “Best viewed in:” buttons. It lead to faking user-agent strings. It lead to dozens of plugins to view a single site as designed.

We are still suffering under the fall-out of this approach, albeit to a much lesser degree every year.

I can’t imagine anyone – save proprietary software houses who want to try to take over the web again – advocating a return to this environment.

I want to stress that Mr. Hewitt is not advocating moving forward, he is advocating a return to how we did it in the past.

We begin to see the core of Mr. Hewitt’s thinking:

@ppk Yes, exactly. I’d rather developers had forced users to launch different browsers instead of making watered down x-browser sites.

Basically boils down to “put the burden on the user”. I couldn’t disagree more strongly with this way of thinking. As a Linux user, I know that the odds are “launch a different browser” will turn into ”just run IE in Windows”, and – poof – we are back in 1998.

Even if you accept that Mr. Hewitt has identified a real problem (“Standardization moves so slow it hinders innovation”), I do not think he has identified a real solution (“Let’s go back to how we used to do it.”)

There may indeed be problems with the W3C et al. and how long it takes to get standards out – no small amount of which is due to corporations gaming the standardization process by the way - but I can not accept that the proper answer is to abolish or ignore standards.

A better solution might be for standards bodies to speed up delivery of standard. Or, for corporations to quit hamstringing the decision making process. Or, for corporations to stop trying to inject proprietary technology all over a standard. Or, for standards to be released incrementally. Or, a combination of the above and probably a dozen other things I haven’t even thought of.

I hope though, that a careful consideration of Mr. Hewitt’s tweets reveals a “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” mentality that would nullify all progress we have made for standards acceptance on the web and return us to the dark days of the Browser Wars.

It is in this context that Mr. Hewitt made one additional tweet:

If CLI was the ECMA standard baked into browsers instead of ECMAScript we’d have a much more flexible web: http://bit.ly/sLILI

Miguel de Icaza Speaks – Microsoft Smiles

You don’t even have to read his blog entry to know how Mr. de Icaza reacted.

Recall Mr. de Icaza’s earlier lament:

I still believe that Microsoft lost a great opportunity of having .NET become the universal runtime of the net, and they could still have the best implementation.

Well, dry your tears for Ballmer, Miguel, because here’s a way you can give Microsoft back a “great opportunity”: stick Microsoft .NET inside Firefox!

I am absolutely fascinated by the idea and I only regret not having come up with it. We have been too focused on the Moonlight-as-a-plugin to take a step back and think in more general terms: how can we use the ECMA CIL engine for *all* applications without a browser plugin.

[...]

The only question is what browser to target first Firefox or Chrome.

(Just in case you didn’t know, “ECMA CIL” is originally “MSIL” as in “Microsoft Intermediate Language”, terminology still in quite popular use.)

Seeing the future

This entire situation is quite illustrative in one sense, because it yet another example of Team Apologista’s modus operandi:

Ignore any existing similar technology in favor of the Microsoft offering. Just like Mono rejects efforts like Vala and Java in favor of implementing patent encumbered Microsoft technology, CIL-in-a-browser rejects Google’s NaCl and Mozilla’s XUL.

People are certainly free to reinvent the wheel, it’s just laughable that Team Apologista insists on always doing it, and always doing it with Microsoft technology.

Expand Microsoft lock-in. This is part of the “lock-in” problem: generally speaking, Microsoft technology is designed to work as smooth as possible with other Microsoft technology, and as difficult as possible with non-Microsoft technology. This means that once you start down the road of using Microsoft technology it becomes ever more difficult to step outside of that ecosystem.

Thus, Team Apologista must constantly replace other parts of the development ecosystem with the Microsoft solution. If you learn a Microsoft language (C#), you can’t be using a non-Microsoft language in your browser – have to get C# in there. And that means implementing .NET in your browser. So it goes.

Move from Opt-in to Opt-out to No-opt. Everyone in the world who deals with telemarker calls or shovelware on new (Windows) computers (or uses Facebook and cares about privacy) knows that “Opt-In” is far more preferrable to the user than “Opt Out”.

So, the defense that “if the user doesn’t want Mono they can just remove it” is bogus from the start – “Opt Out” is always the defense offered by those peddling things no one wants. It becomes more bogus when non-Mono apps are replaced by Mono apps, and it explodes in a mushroom cloud of nuclear bogosity when you start sticking it in their browser.

Miguel de Icaza has proven over the past decade from day one that he intends to make .NET ubiquitious – if he gets his way it will be a crucial component of your desktop, your application choices, and even your web browsing experience.

[Microsoft signing the Joomla Contributor Agreement is] a clear demonstration of how far Microsoft has come in it’s commitment to OSS projects. Now, I’ve got my own issues with the GPL as I think that it strips the consumer of all of their rights but that’s for a different discussion.

I would love to hear exactly how the GPL strips the consumer of “all their rights”. Even entertaining the BSD vs. GPL sort of arguments, I’ve never heard such hyperbole.

I suppose the GPL might not be as consumer freedom-granting as the typical Microsoft EULA, but…