RMS comes under attack again

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 24 September 2009 08:47

Opinion and Analysis

There have been fears in the FOSS community that Microsoft could one day raise patent suits over the use of its own IP in Mono. The company has shown its willingness to use patents for its own ends by suing a GPS seller TomTom over the use of FAT patents in TomTom's implementaion of the Linux kernel.

More recently, Microsoft was caught out selling a bunch of anti-Linux patents to a patent troll. The Open Invention Network stepped in and bought the lot.

But Perlow doesn't want to go down this road. It would nullify his rant. He conveniently doesn't mention these facts.

Then he tries to equate Samba to Mono. This is deception of a very high order. Samba began life as a typical hacker's tool - to fulfil a need that Australian developer Andrew Tridgell had, to connect to a Sun machine in his workplace.

He was later surprised to find that the code he had knocked up also worked with PCs running Windows. Running on Linux, it could be used as a file and print server.

Samba is a free implementation of some protocols used by Windows. There are no patent issues with Samba - in 2007, after a titanic struggle lasting three years, the Samba people officially received the full documentation from Microsoft for these protocols. Read all about it here.

Microsoft has no choice but to work closely with the Samba project - it had to sign an agreement with the European Union after a complaint was filed by Sun Microsystems. Microsoft is collaborating because it has to.

Mono depends on Microsoft's work and encourages people to write code based on this environment. Any patents that reside in .NET are likely to also cover code developed with Mono.

The Microsoft Community Promise in no way guarantees anything about the use of Mono. Neither does its loosening of restrictions on the use of some parts of .NET.

Perlow, in his hurry to smear Stallman, walks around a detailed discussion of these facts. While he provides links to articles that buttress his claims, he avoids anything that will derail him.

Collaborating with Microsoft is no crime - provided the software that is the outcome of such collaboration has safeguards built in to prevent lawsuits down the track. Anyone who trusts any company or entity without detailed written agreements is a fool, a cardinal fool.

Perlow demonises Stallman for his insistence on using the term GNU/Linux instead of Linux. All that Stallman wants is that people acknowledge the contribution the GNU Foundation has made to all distributions, by using the name GNU/Linux instead of Linux; in truth, the latter only refers to the kernel and Stallman has never sought to rename the kernel.

But will Perlow tell you this? No.

He paints Stallman as being against interoperability. Stallman himself has no qualms about telling people to use proprietary software if there is no free software application that will do the job.

But remember: his stubborn insistence and principles have resulted in a booming market from which millions make their living.

It is an inescapable fact that the massive ecospace which FOSS occupies now is due in no small way to the idealism of one man who walked out of a very highly-paid job one day because he wanted to produce a free (as in speech, not beer) operating system.

One thing that can be said with certainty - many of today's open source people find Stallman inconvenient. They find his adherence to free software, to the principles that drove him to start the movement, and his occasional pointed statements annoying. They find that it gets in the way of making a quick buck.

Perlow is just the latest one of that bunch.