Often times, people ask me why I cover Open Source topics like Linux & Apache as well as related topics like the IBM/Novell/Redhat verses SCO case and also the issues related to software patents. Most specifically they ask me what these topics have to do with web development. Today I’ve decided to answer that and the truth of the matter is that Open Source software is more important to web developers then any other industry out there. Permit me me now to demonstrate.

Apache is an Open Source product. It is also the web server software hosting roughly 70 percent of the Internet. Linux and *BSD (both of which are Open Source Operating Systems.) are hosting most of those Apache installations. Windows is considerably more expensive to use as a Web server, because you must buy licenses on a per server basis and many of the hosts have thousands of servers. Were Open Source software to disappear, web hosting would probably double in price almost immediately as the hosts will definitely pass the extra MS license expenses onto their clients. So the first point is that Web hosting is exceptionally affordable almost entirely because of Open Source software. In fact Microsoft has lowered prices because of the fact that they are now competing against what is essentially a free or much cheaper product. Competition is always better for the consumer, of this there can be no doubt at all.

To demonstrate the second reason Open Source and it’s related issues are important to web development, let us consider the small up and coming developers. More often these people are fairly young, they don’t have allot of cash and they don’t often have a big company paying all their bills. So how does one such young person afford the several thousand dollars required to buy such software as Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Flash/Dreamweaver and the other proprietary software that the “professionals” prefer? Open Source software like The Gimp, NVU and MySQL not to mention Open Source programming languages like Perl, PHP and Python make web development accessible to anybody with imagination and a willingness to learn, money is no longer an object. Consider Google for example, Sergey Brin and Larry Page were a couple of young guys working to create Google from a garage, they could not afford to attempt such a thing using proprietary software so they used Linux instead. Now they are worth an estimated 7 billion dollars each. In fact to this day Google still uses Linux on it’s thousands of servers. The story is not that different at Yahoo either, most of their servers run FreeBSD. Likewise Amazon uses Apache on Linux. In short, Open Source software gives little guys the opportunity to become big guys.

Lets look at another aspect of the upcoming web developer. If said developer wants to set-up Blogs for a client, or perhaps e-commerce solutions, or maybe an online forum, he/she has two options, look for a proprietary product the cost of which must then be passed onto the client, or he can download and use free software like WordPress, OScommerce and Yabb and be more competitive as the only charge they need to pass on is the cost of their time. The site you are looking at now is running a fairly extensively modified copy of WordPress, and it’s running on a Linux server using Apache and PHP and Perl, just like most of the other such sites on the Internet.

So there you have it. That is why we cover Open Source issues like the current software patent problems that have the potential to damage the OSS community and the SCO verses IBM/Novell/Redhat litigation that threatened (unsuccessfully so far) to damage the reputation of OSS developers. You might be reading this on a Windows computer using Internet Explorer, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have a stake in Open Source, particularly if you use PHP or Perl or host on a Linux/*BSD server running Apache.

Zdnet has an interesting article about Microsoft and the patent system. Microsoft recently indicated that they thought the patent system needed serious reform, they then went and patented a heap more obvious or non original ideas apparently to prove their case that the patent system needs reform. I suspect Microsoft’s idea of reform is a system where they get free run, but where people challenging their patents or people suing them for infringement don’t. Microsoft has patented 3000 “ideas” so far this year alone, so I can see why they patent system needs reform, but it’s not until you consider that it costs Microsoft $100,000,000 a year to defend itself in patent cases that you get an idea of why they might think it needs reform.

To reform the patent process isn’t that hard, the problem stems from the overworked and underpaid folks working at the patent office who don’t have knowledge or experience in all the fields they are being asked to rule on. What should happen is an industry consortium of experts in each field should be created. And all patents for their field should have to pass though those experts before being granted. This would ensure that people actually knowledgeable about a field would be making the decision that something is innovative and non obvious. There should also be some sort of period just before approval when applications are made available in a public forum and the public get a chance to show prior art or other reasons why a patent should not be granted. The experts should then have to review any relevant evidence that came up before making the final decision. Zdnet’s idea that frequent offenders be banned from the table is a good one also.

It isn’t perfect, but it would be much better then what we have now. I have no idea if anything I’ve written offends any patents out there and it’s likely that I won’t know until the holder takes me to court and that worries me a lot as I’m just a little guy plodding along in the trenches. This doesn’t discuss the need or implications of software patents directly, I personally think copyright is all that is needed for software, just like print media, movies and music. But the problems detailed above are 100 times worse when applied to as intricate and ill defined a process as “software”.

According to Reuters, Apple and Microsoft (among others) are pushing for extended patent protection. They argue that they need broader protection to stop Open Source companies that make their money from services instead of software sales from stealing their “innovations”. The ironic thing is that Apple didn’t mind taking from the Open Source community when it based OSX on FreeBSD, and they also didn’t mind when they based their Safari web browser on KDE’s (One of Linux’s most popular graphical user interfaces) KHTML rendering engine. Now they want protection from Open Source companies? I’m not overly fond of Microsoft, but at least they never claimed they like and support Open Source in business.

Let us look at some facts here, neither Apple or Microsoft invented the Graphical User Interface, neither invented TCP/IP (the protocol used by the Internet and most networks), in fact Microsoft’s early TCP/IP implementation was said to be pulled out of BSD as well. Neither invented E-mail, Instant Messaging, web browsing, digital music and movies, spreadsheets, databases and all manner of other things we take for granted on our PC’s (In fact neither invented PC’s either). That’s right folks all of those REAL innovations were created by other people and companies and copied by Apple, Microsoft and pretty much everyone else. Fortunately the creators of these innovations were not as money grabbing as these two or there is a good chance that the modern PC would look very different from what you are reading this on. I’m saddened and disgusted at how our early pioneers have been replaced with money grabbing opportunists who appropriate the best ideas from others, but patent ever decent idea of their own (and from what I’ve seen they patent a good many bad ideas as well). The older I get, the more I think Richard Stallman might really be onto something.

If you find yourself wondering how software patents favour the big companies, consider that both Apple and Microsoft were very small companies once. Had they been told they had to pay millions in license fee’s to use a Graphical User Interface, or any of the other innovations mentioned above, would either of those companies be as big as they are now? In fact I’d go so far as to say that if GUI’s (for example) had huge patents attached to them, IBM would own most of the software industry as they were one of the very few that were already big enough to have paid big patent licence fees when the GUI was invented by a Xerox research lab.

If you have a niche blog or site, and you use Google’s Adsense advertising to pay the bills, you may find the new rules can hurt your advertising revenue. The new feature is called “Negative site feature” and in short it allows advertisers to block their ads from displaying in specific sites. What this could result in, is huge blocks of the Internet being blocked because the advertiser is hoping to have his/her ad shown on huge portal sites rather then special interest blogs. It would be stupid to do this, because people that frequent special interest blogs and small focused websites are more likely to click a related ad then the generic audience that visits big portal sites. But stupidity is often conducive to people jumping to incorrect conclusions, so let’s hope this doesn’t hurt the small guys.

In other Google news, they are apparently trying to patent the technology behind news.google.com where articles are chosen based on “quality”. I’m against software patents myself, but I guess if the evil companies (you know who you are) are jumping all over them, the good guys should get a few as well for defence purposes if nothing else.

Lastly the Google web accelerator is generating allot of bad press due to privacy concerns and functionality issues. The privacy issues are related to the fact that when you use the accelerator, everything goes though Google’s system. The functionality issues seem to be mostly related to session management and remembered users/passwords. Personally I don’t really see the benefit of the web accelerator, and I worry about how it will affect online statistics generation.

My suggestion to Google is that if they want to produce a really useful, potentially profitable product, they should set-up a sort of “live cache” together with a DNS or linking system whereby webmasters that choose to, can arrange to have the Google live cache return their sites content in situations where a site has been “Slashdotted” (meaning hit by so many users that it can’t respond to them all and the site goes down.) They could do something like this in exchange for the display of some Adsense ads and the benefit to the webmaster is that no matter how much traffic they get, and how small their bandwidth pipe is, their content would always be available. To me that is a worthwhile service. I suspect many others would agree with me particularly since the Linux revolution is resulting in many users setting up their own websites on their own machines. After having been slashdotted recently by news.google.com and Yahoo together, I can really see the benefit of a system like that. It would be difficult to set up such a system, but the benefits of doing so would be worth it.

By Kaj Haulrich.

April 23 – 2005

It may be located at the perimeter of the European Union, but nevertheless the fairy-tale Kingdom of Denmark has become Bill Gates’ beachhead and stronghold in his ongoing trouble with the EU Commission. Last year The Italian commissioner responsible for competition, Signore Mario Monti, slapped Microsoft for it’s monopolistic conduct and fined the software behemoth a stunning 497m euros ($613m; £331m) for abusing its dominant market position and also insisted Microsoft must reveal secrets of its Windows software [to competing developers]. Furthermore, Microsoft was ordered to release a version of Windows without it’s Media Player. Harsh conditions, don’t you think ? – Well, read on :

Microsoft appealed, but the European Court of First Instance, presided by the Danish judge, Mr. Bo Vesterdorf, rejected the appeal. However, a final sentence isn’t expected until 2010, at best.

Meanwhile Microsoft has deposited the money in it’s own bank account and released a “reduced” Windows that nobody, of course, wants to license [due primarily to the fact that it costs the same as the normal version]. But it hasn’t revealed any useful code to make Windows more cooperative with other types of competing software [and what it has released is under license terms that are unacceptable to it’s biggest competitor]. And it probably never will.

So now, Microsoft has plenty of time to further strengthen its monopoly in Europe, and it doesn’t waste it. A few examples :

The EU Commission wants to enforce the patentability of software, US-style. This severely reduces European companies, which typically are small or medium-sized, in their ability to compete with large, multinational corporations, like Microsoft. Naturally, a lot of those companies as well as nation-states like Poland, Germany, Portugal, the Netherlands and – lastly – Denmark objected and demanded a complete re-write of the Software Directive to be sent back to the European Parliament for re-consideration.

Denmark objected ? – Well, not really. Although the Danish Parliament obliged it’s Secretary of Trade, Mr. Bendt Bendtsen, to reject the Directive in the
Council of Ministers, he only did so reluctantly, to put it mildly. (A transcript of his pathetic performance is here, and you can hear Mr. Bendtsen humiliate himself and his country here).

Normally, a minister who ignores his parliament would be fired immediately. Not so this time. The Directive on Software Patents stands and so does Mr. Bendtsen. The noble art of corruption is by no means strange to the EU, but so far Denmark has been – well, relatively – free of it. Let’s delve a little deeper to see if there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark :

In order to clean up the public IT-structure – a gargantuan mess of incompatible systems – the Danish government instigated a reform on standards.
The committee in charge recommended a widespread use of open standards to replace closed, proprietary ones. Some agencies, like the Department of Environment actually began to do so. But in January this year that Department suddenly declared that it had chosen to carry on with Microsoft’s Office Suite. In other words : if the citizens want to communicate flawlessly with the government they’ll have to license a copy of that suite from Microsoft. Pay or shut up. Other public administrations like the cities of Munich and Bergen can use open standards, but Denmark can’t….

Maybe that’s no coincidence. Just prior to the decision on software patents, Mr. Bill Gates paid a “friendly” visit to the Danish Prime Minister, Mr. Anders Fogh Rasmussen. According to the Danish financial newspaper “Borsen” Mr. Gates made it very clear to Mr. Rasmussen, that if Denmark rejected the Directive Microsoft would have to move its Navision branch to the US. That revelation started a public debate where the word “blackmail” wasn’t the least mentioned. Mr. Rasmussen – of course – denied. But you already know how it turned out, don’t you ?

Since then, the Government had other ideas. Although Denmark is haunted by innumerable commissions, committees, councils and “expert” boards, the Prime
Minister nevertheless came up with yet another one : a “super-commission” on the entire scientific, developmental and educational structure of Denmark.
Guess who will represent the IT-sector ? – You guessed it, right ? – Yes, Microsoft. The company that never – ever – invented anything but FUD.

As expected protests were ignored and the Government carries on : last week it donated 40.000 “free” but time-limited copies of Microsoft’s accounting suite C5 to start-ups within the private sector. Well, Denmark has many companies with competing products, but they charge for them. So now, the Government prefers the tax-payers to sustain Microsoft. Just like any other pusher’s product, Microsoft’s first “fix” is free…

If we elaborate a little further on this, it isn’t hard to imagine new, bright ideas : Under cover of fighting terrorism and paedophiles, the Danish Secretary of Justice, Mrs. Lene Espersen, recently authorized the police to “crack” the citizen’s privately owned computers without informing them. As all and everyone knows it isn’t especially hard to insert spyware, key loggers, viruses and Trojans into a Windows PC. If every 14-year old script-kiddie can do it, so can the police. In fact, it is very hard indeed to protect a Windows PC from such intrusion. On the other hand it’s next to impossible to do such nasties to a Linux PC or a Mac, even in its most basic configuration. So, if Danes begin to adopt other operating systems than Windows the government – and Microsoft – would be embarrassed. Not being able to spy on the citizens and control every aspect of their lives is about the worst scenario imaginable to any Danish politician.

The solution is straightforward : Just a small amendment to criminal law, and the use of non-Windows PCs will be a felony. – Oops, maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that….the Government might read this…better shut up now before I – typing this on a Linux PC – am considered an Enemy of the State.

References :
http://wiki.ffii.org/SwpatcninoEn
http://www.thankdenmark.info/
http://wiki.ffii.org/Dkparl050304En
http://wiki.ffii.org/Kofod050310En
http://wiki.ffii.org/Cons050307En
http://www.computerworld.dk/default.asp?Mode=2&ArticleID=27908
http://www.computerworld.dk/default.asp?Mode=2&ArticleID=27919
http://www.computerworld.dk/default.asp?Mode=2&ArticleID=27693
http://www.computerworld.dk/default.asp?Mode=2&ArticleID=27060
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050308084230867
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2005030721574383
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050307095336843
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050215071109231
http://www.cedi.dk/visNyhed.asp?artikelID=1115
http://www.computerworld.dk/Default.asp?Mode=2&ArticleID=26860

[Afterword: Kaj Haulrich is a resident of Denmark and kindly agreed to write this article for us after hearing about how many of us had mistaken Denmark’s involvement in the EU software patent directive. HTMLfixIT wishes to thank Kaj for his contribution.]

Microsoft has had a hard time of it in court lately. First there is the EU debacle, following much the same path as the US anti-competitive conviction did, only with much stiffer penalties. Then we have the long list of settlements made by Microsoft to many companies with whom they were litigating, the largest payoff approaching 2 billion dollars (to Sun Microsystems). Not too many people seem to feel sorry for the company that has of late been handing out money hand over fist to try and clear its litigation schedule a bit.

Now something new and probably unexpected has happened. A company by the name of Alacritech has gained a preliminary injunction [PDF] against Microsoft for alleged patent infringement of their networking technology. The story goes that Alacritech approached Microsoft and showed them what they had in 1998. Microsoft chose not to license with them and promptly developed similar technology themselves called TCP Chimney for inclusion in Longhorn and an add on pack for Windows 2003 server. The case could potentially delay Longhorns release if Microsoft doesn’t settle and the case drags on as similar cases have in the past. My prediction is for a Microsoft settlement in the future, they can’t afford to delay Longhorn any further as their many resellers would likely have hissy fits about lost profit opportunities, especially in light of the fact that Windows XP, Microsoft’s last major desktop release is nearly 5 years old now. All Alacritech really has to do, is drag the case out and maintain the Injunction until Microsoft capitulates and settles.

Do not get me wrong here, I am not in favor of litigation of this type, but Microsoft has been a strong proponent of software patents and has tried long and hard to establish them as law in the European Union, so I find it somewhat ironic that they didn’t realize that they are the biggest target with the deepest pockets and will forever be handing out money to anyone with a grievance. It’s worse for them when you consider that they are a twice convicted monopolist and have a long and questionable litigation history that makes it possible for people (and more importantly Juries) to at least consider the prospect that they are guilty as charged. Microsoft has 21 days to appeal the decision.

The German National Railway made a second major move towards open source Linux software when it successfully moved 55,000 of it’s Lotus Notes users onto the Linux operating system. The Railway expects “continuous cost savings, greater flexibility and integration benefits” as they move the rest of their systems over. They already replaced 150 of their servers with Linux systems as of November of 2004.

Most people think the Munich deal is the biggest Open Source deal in place world wide, but the Munich deal is relatively small compared to German Railways (Munich is only 14,000 desktops as it stands now.) Both roll-outs are very significant however and show how Germany is one of the worlds leading countries in adopting Open Source and Linux. It is also unlikely that Germany will back the software patent directive any more (yay!), now that big chunks of their infrastructure is based on Linux they will not allow big companies to use spurious software patents to cause them problems. The simple maths here, is that Microsoft can make all the threats it likes about pulling out funding from these countries, but nothing they can offer would match the amount these governments will save in the long term by not being reliant on Microsoft. So the writing is on the wall. Governments are full of bean counters, and the numbers are not in Microsoft’s favour. IBM is behind both of these big roll-outs, and is to be congratulated for both. You can read more about this at Techworld, but you may need to register to see it.