Here is my favorite bit from RMS:

RMS: You shouldn’t write software to use .NET. No exceptions.

The basic point is that Microsoft has patents over features in .NET, and its patent promise regarding free software implementations of those is inadequate. It may someday attack the free implementations of these features.

This is no reason not to write and distribute free implementations such as Mono and DotGNU. But we have to keep in mind that using and distributing these programs might become dangerous in certain countries. Therefore, we should minimize our dependence on them – we should not write programs that use those features.

Mono implements them, so if you develop software on Mono, you are liable to use those features without thinking about the issue. It is probably the same with DotGNU, except that I don’t know whether DotGNU has these features yet.

The way to avoid this danger is not to write programs in C#. If you already have a program in C#, by all means use a free platform to run it. But don’t increase your exposure to the danger – don’t write additional code in C#, and don’t encourage people to make more use of C# programs. We need to guide our community away from dependence on an interface we know Microsoft is in a position to attack.

This perfectly illustrates the difference in approach from Team Apologista.

Consider:

Promises Promises

Team Apologista refuses to honestly acknowledge that the patent promise covering .NET is insufficient. In fact, a favorite tactic of Mono Apologists is to mention some other technology (usually AJAX or FTP) and then pretend the Mono situation is similar to AJAX, and so if one is opposed to the former, they must also oppose the latter, or are ignorant/hypocritical/whatever.

The truth of the matter is that .NET is NOT under the same “promise” that these other technologies are, so this ruse is dishonest inaccurate. Shockingly, Mono apologists continue to use this faulty “defense”.

Additionally, much of .NET (and corresponding portions of Mono) are NOT covered by any promise whatsoever – and despite Team Apologista’s occasional concession on this point (often with vague promises to “split” Mono into “covered”/non-”covered” portions), I feel it is not unfair to say Team Apologista downplays this distinction.

Furthermore, the covenant covering Moonlight is even more troublesome than that covering the ECMA-approved bits of .NET, yet I do not see a clear difference in promotion or eduction on these issues from Team Apologista. Again, to be polite, “downplaying the problems” is a fair characterization.

RMS points out that “if you develop software on Mono, you are liable to use those features without thinking about the issue.” But I think it’s more than that – I think Team Mono has intentionally obscured the facts to make it more difficult to think about the issue. It goes beyond counting on people being too lazy/uninterested to examine things right into deliberate misinformation.

Dependency Hell

Team Apologista actively promotes Mono/Moonlight for Mono/Moonlight sake, increasing dependence on Mono (and by extension, Microsoft’s goodwill).

The entire path into GNOME for Mono is entirely based around a simple note-taking application! Pure insanity! Even if one accepts the argument that a note-taking application is so important that a desktop suite simply can not do without one, the answer is not to roll up one that requires an otherwise useless and seperate framework to support it, and further not to do away with it immediately once an acceptable replacement exists.

The foolishness, technical idiocy, and blatant transparency of the Tomboy debacle in GNOME combined with the latter retarded arguments that “oh well, now that Mono is in there, might as well bring in even more Mono apps” is clear evidence that something’s rotten in the State of the Art over at Team Apologista HQ, and immediately and conclusively puts to the lie any technical-based argument in support of Mono.

There are many more (thankfully, less sucessful) attempts to increase Mono dependency in GNOME and in major distros. Usually taking the form of simply rolling out yet another implementation of existing application functionality – but this time written in awesome Mono – most of these projects have failed to gain footholds. It doesn’t stop Team Apologista from trying, though. Desktop Search? Need it in Mono! Torrent client? Need it in Mono! Photo editor? Need it in Mono! Media Player? Need it in Mono!

Why the need to re-create everything in Mono?

To go back to RMS’ point: “Don’t increase your exposure to the danger.”

One issue

Mr. Bott calls out some of the points made on the PlayOgg FAQ as being “FUD”, “outright lies”, “technically absurd”, “factually dead wrong”, and maybe even downright anti-kittens-with-funny-captions-underneath.

Let’s look at one of his examples (we’ll only take the first one, but the entire article is chock-full of fallacious fun).

From the PlayOgg FAQ:

Unlike MP3, Ogg Vorbis is not restricted by patents. Microsoft had to pay $1.5 billion after being sued for using MP3 without a license. With Ogg Vorbis, they would have been safe!

Mr. Bott offers two criticisms:

That is an outright lie. Microsoft did not have to pay a penny to anyone as the result of a lawsuit on the MP3 format.
[...]
That overlooks the inconvenient fact that the first stable version of the Ogg Vorbis reference software (version 1.0) was not released until July 2002. It’s hard to imagine how Microsoft could have chosen the “safe” open-source option when it didn’t exist yet.

The problem

The truth is that as things turned out, Microsoft did not have to pay $1.5 billion. It was on the hook, and then off again six months later when a judge overturned the jury verdict.

Does that make the FAQ an “outright lie”? You be the judge.

If the last sentence off that PlayOgg FAQ had been a little more explicit and read “With a patent-free format like Ogg Vorbis, they would have been safe!”, would that be better? Would it change the validity of the point?

Of course not -  the point the PlayOgg FAQ is attempting to make is perfectly valid: there are no (first-party) patent restrictions on Ogg Vorbis[1], and MP3 has more than a few licensing and patent issues.

How about if the other patents that Microsoft did have to pay for in the same dispute with Alcatel-Lucent – to the tune of $512 million dollars – were mentioned?  True, they weren’t audio codec patents, but they were still the results of “infringing” on software patents.

Isn’t that the over-riding concern behind the PlayOgg campaign?

The polemics

People like Mr. Bott who carry water for organizations like Microsoft are going to resort to hypocrisy, hair-splitting and strawman-bashing tactics.

For example, Mr. Bott seems quite content to quote the CEO of the MPEG-LA asserting that “no one in the market should be under the misimpression that other codecs such as Theora are patent free” in the very article where he is taking the FSF to task for FUD.

For another example, Mr. Bott seems quite content to characterize the FSF as “open-source advocates” – a very sloppy generalization – in the very article where he is taking the PlayOgg FAQ author to task for making sloppy generalizations.

It is my contention this sort of rhetoric always occurs when people are more interested in “scoring points” than reaching the truth of the matter or engaging in honest debate. There is a mindset that if you can score enough points you somehow change reality and win the argument even if you are wrong. I don’t get that way of thinking, but it seems to be quite common.

The prevention

So, be aware of that mindset when you write. There will always be someone out there ready to take a cheap shot or play integrity-free games with the point you are trying to make. You can’t stop them – because they aren’t after the truth - but you don’t have to give up free points on the goal either.

[1] It would be difficult to claim there are no patent restrictions at all on any non-trivial software, because of the currently terribly broken software patent system in the United States. Since patent trolls or any random 3rd party can claim a patent violation, the best one can claim is that the producer itself has declined to restrict the software.

Usually I’m not this pedantic, but since being a bit more pedantic is sort of the whole point of this article …

The Film

Patent Absurdity provides an easy-to-understand walk through the legal and historical development of software patents, and also takes care to point out the severe flaws in the results.

The eHarmony patent is devastatingly illustrative if you can follow a slight bit of math, and the Beethoven / patent music argument quite striking – I applaud the film maker for finding such a great example!

A film well worth watching and I recommend it highly. Not only did I learn a lot, but even those areas I was familiar with were clarified.

The Players

I was very happy to see prominent members of the FSF and the SFLC in the film. Just another example of the crucial issues these organizations are addressing.

The Wiki

It seems that the End Software Patents wiki is affiliated with the Patent Absurdity film in some way. I last mentioned the wiki back in August 2009, and am pleased to see it has grown a lot since then (and my very small points remain!).

Spend a little time on the wiki if you like – software patents are one of those things I can’t spend too much time on or I’ll get upset. The system is so obviously broken, it’s shameful.

Furthermore, the announcement asserts that Mozilla Firefox will support VP8 for HTML5 video (along with Google Chrome, naturally).

I mentioned in passing before the FSF request to Google to take this action, and if this news turns out to be true I think it will be a very positive development indeed.

There are patent concerns, but Google has a very good record on patents, so I am optimistic there.

Apple?

A big question is will Apple support VP8? They seem to have a lot invested in H.264, and a fierce independent streak these days, so I’m not sure if they would come on board. Sure would be nice, although I suspect they may simply not see an immediate benefit (having the proper licensing already in place for H.264) and defer.

Microsoft?

Seriously, who cares? Whatever Microsoft does will be 5 years too late anyway after trying (and failing) to introduce their own in-house similar (but incompatible) “standard”.

Although it may disappoint Miguel de Icaza,  Microsoft no longer calling the shots on the web is one of the best things that could happen to humanity outside of actual cold fusion on the desktop. And I ain’t talking about another crappy Adobe product.

In Mr. Asay’s recent piece “IBM patent claims show open source has arrived“, that’s not a problem – because I disagree with everything, filled as it is with inaccuracies and sloppy thinking.

Here we go

Mr. Asay starts rather badly, calling IBM’s letter to TurboHercules a “cease-and-desist” letter to the “OpenHercules” open-source project.

Problem 1: The open-source project name is “Hercules“, not “OpenHercules”.

Problem 2: The letter is not a “cease-and-desist” letter. A “C&D” is an order or request to halt an activity, or else face legal action. IBM’s letter does no such thing.

So we see from the start that Mr. Asay’s understanding of the situation is perhaps less nuanced than one might hope.

Building on a foundation of sand

Because I doubt Mr. Asay actually understands the situation, I am not surprised that his analysis is poor.

For example, consider Mr. Asay’s attempt to frame IBM’s actions a being “willing to defend its mainframe business against any and all threats, open source or otherwise.”

The problem here is that IBM explicitly pledged not to assert 500 named patents against Open Source and that 2 of those patents where among those listed in the IBM letter.

You don’t get to explictly promise not to assert patents against Open Source and then turn around and assert patents against Open Source. It doesn’t matter if Open Source is a “threat” or not. You made a promise.

Of course, promises are made to be broken, especially if the cost-benefit analysis says it is more profitable to break the promise than keep it. This is just one of so many reasons that people take Microsoft’s various promises, pacts, covenants and double pinky-swears with a grain of salt.

Watch out

Be careful now – if you want to excuse IBM by pointing out that they can chose to enforce patents outside of the 500 named  (let’s assume they listed the 2 by mistake and will retract them), then you must in turn acknowledge that projects like Mono and Moonlight which range far far beyond the standardized core are in explict danger as well.

I do not think IBM is legally out-of-bounds here, no more than I think Microsoft would legally be out-of-bounds to shut down vast portions of Mono and Moonlight now or in the future. (Perhaps after Novell is bought out and agreements are no longer renewed?)

I’m just surprised Mr. Asay finds this an encouraging development for Open Source.

Revealing a flawed understanding of Open Source

Mr. Asay reveals – not for the first time – his corporatized view of “Open Source”:

This doesn’t make IBM an enemy to open source, because that sort of statement doesn’t make any sense anymore, now that open source is just how software gets written by just about everyone, at least, at some point in the software supply chain.

This is view of Open-Source-as-a-design-methodology absolutely misses the entire point of Open Source.

By reducing Open Source into “that’s just how software gets written” and ignoring everything else, Mr. Asay shows his understanding of Open Source is either superficial or fatally biased.

And I’m not talking about “Free Software” here – look to the OSI’s own definition, paying special attention to “No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor”.

Really off the Reservation

Now, even though we’ve seen that Mr. Asay neither grasps the specific situation of IBM and Hercules, nor the general situation of Open Source, the next bit is still a bit shocking:

IBM has always been an opportunist when it comes to open source, just as every open-source company, project, and developer is. Try ripping off Red Hat’s trademarks and see how long it takes before a cease-and-desist letter lands on your door. Or try stealing GPL code from the project of your choice, without contributing code modifications back as per the license, and see how that makes the developer feel.

This is an express train of ignorance that shot pass Stupid Junction in Wrong City and ends up derailing just shy of Did He Really Say That Central?

Problem 1: Every open-source developer does not try to stop competing developers with patents. Every open-source developer doesn’t even file for patents. Every open-source project does not try to stop competing developers with patents.

This goes to one of my main complaints with Mr. Asay and others of his pro-corporate bent: stop trying to pretend like every person on earth is a souless entity focused on profit above all else.

Some are, and some aren’t. Even assuming one stays within the bounds of the law, there’s a whole lot of grazing land between What Is Legal To Do and What Is Ethical To Do.

Stop pretending like everyone who participates in Open Source would sell out every other participant if they thought it would benefit them. Put plainly, it’s damn disrespectful.

Problem 2: Trademarks and “stealing GPL code” are not the same as enforcing patents. I suspect Mr. Asay knows this and knows he is (at best) using bad examples of equivalency here, so I must wonder why he is doing it?

One of the main differences is that it is highly unlikely that you will innocently “rip off Red Hat’s trademarks” or “steal GPL code”. However it is highly likely that you will innocently infringe a patent if your software product is non-trivial.

Another is that “ripping off” and “steal” implies malice in appropriating other people’s property. Even if Hercules is infringing an IBM patent, it does not follow that it was done maliciously. Why use language then, to characterize it so?

Train keep a rollin’

You think I’m reading too much into this? Consider the very next paragraphy from Mr. Asay:

If, in fact, TurboHercules is violating IBM’s patents, shame on it. Just because OpenHercules is open source isn’t a license to steal, any more than IBM should have the right to pilfer code from it or any other project without complying with the license grants afforded by such projects.

This is ignorant in the extreme, and not just because Mr. Asay can’t even be bothered to Google the project under discussion to get its name right.

As we’ve already seen, “violating” patents can be near unavoidable and most certainly does not carry the same mens rea that “stealing” or “pilfering code” does.

In this short paragraph, Mr. Asay reveals a fundamentally flawed understanding of both software development and patents and copyright.

What we are talking about

Stacking bewildering point atop bewildering point, Mr. Asay at last comes to his truly bizarre conclusion:

This isn’t cause for concern. It’s cause for celebration. It means open source truly has arrived.

Really? Not a cause for concern? If I were working on an Open Source project that might compete with an IBM offering, I would be just a touch concerned.

I certainly would not be celebrating - what sort of idiot party do you suggest? The “Glad I’ll Have More Free Time When MegaCorp Shuts Me Down” Shindig?

Overall situation

Leaving behind (mercifully) Mr. Asay’s questionable analysis, I am witholding my own interpretation of the overall event.

I strongly oppose software patents, especially when wielded offensively, and double-y especially when wielded offensively against Open Source projects.

However – in this particular case – it is not clear to me who all the actors (and motivations) in this story are, and to be frank it’s not clear to me that IBM is actually going after the Open Source project in question. I need to see more of the document trail and I think associations need to be vetted a bit more.

Much government work is done by civil servants emailing Word documents back and forth. Yet Berners-Lee refuses, on principle, to use Word, which is a proprietary rather than an open source format. On one occasion, one official recalled, Berners-Lee received an urgent document in Word from one of the most senior civil servants and refused to look at it until a junior official had rushed to translate it into an acceptable format.

Golly-wolly these zealots sure do make me mad.

Why couldn’t Sir Tim just be pragmatic and use the perfectly functional Microsoft Closed and Proprietary offering?

Stop wasting time trying to change things! If it’s “good enough” for most people, then that means it’s good enough!

(Via @timjph by way of Opendotdotdot)

The Treasure

I ran across some interesting quotes allegedly from Miguel de Icaza:

Microsoft has shot the .NET ecosystem in the foot because of the constant threat of patent infringement that they have cast on the ecosystem [...] Unlike the Java world that is blossoming with dozens of vibrant Java Virtual Machine implementations, the .NET world has suffered by this meme spread by [Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer] that they would come after people that do not license patents from them.

You don’t say?

And there’s this too, on the subject of how limited Microsoft’s actual standardization efforts are:

It never went into other areas like server APIs, GUI APIs, or even updating some of the core to include LINQ, the DLR and many others.

Good stuff, right? It’s Microsoft MVP but MDNAA¹ Miguel de Icaza acknowledging and perhaps – if you squint just a bit – agreeing with a couple of the concerns that us wacky zealots are always rudely mentioning.

There’s some more interesting quotes, too – but I don’t want to get into those just yet.

The Hunt

I know this will startle the Gentle Reader, but I actually try to check and verify stuff. It’s how I pretend I have integrity.

So I plugged the quote into Google and found a few references, all of which linked the SD Times article “Does Windows cost Microsoft opportunites?” allegedly by David Worthington.

Oh – don’t bother with that last link. It’s a 404. The article isn’t in the list of articles by the author David Worthington as listed on the SD Times site either.

Google cache has it though. It certainly appears like the story was out there, and was on SD Times, and contained the alleged quotes from Mr. de Icaza.

The Question(s)

Why is this article no longer up on SD Times?

Are all the quotes attributed to Mr. de Icaza in the article genuine? (If they are I have more to say about some of them!)

3-26 Updates:

Miguel de Icaza on his blog.

David Worthington on his twitter.

Slashdot story.

ItWire story. (Which mentions me! Huzzah!)

3-27 Updates:

Bruce Byfield on the whole sordid affair, in which I am awarded the title “free software advocate”. I shall have business cards annotated forthwith!

Slashdot on the Bruce Byfield piece

It’s getting all terribly self-referential, so here’s my own follow-up to this in which I finally get to do what I originally wanted (address Mr. de Icaza’s statements).

¹ Most Definitely Not An Apologist