Patently Absurd, Aug 23, 2005

Patent Reform Legislation in Congress Amounts to Little More Than a "Get Out of Jail Free" Card for Microsoft

I said that there would be a crisis in the Linux community thanks to the SCO threat, and that some new governing structure would emerge as a result. At the time I wrote that, I thought Open Source Development Labs was stepping-up to take some semblance of control of Linux through its hiring of Linus Torvalds. This one is hard to call, but I think I got it more right than wrong.

But what I'm writing about here is a different part of the case -- how Burst claims Microsoft avoids damning documents being discovered when a record retention rule is in place. The short version of this Burst argument is that Microsoft deliberately identifies the wrong people so that retained records are useless, and records that probably should have been retained are destroyed.

It is Burst's further contention that this policy of deliberate evasion on Microsoft's part has affected other cases beyond Burst v. Microsoft, up to and including the big Department of Justice antitrust case against Microsoft that was settled a couple years ago. In fact, the major example of the technique provided in the Burst brief is from the DoJ case.

Like many of us, Andrew Greig put a WiFi access point in his house so he could share his broadband Internet connection. But like hardly any of us, Andrew uses his WiFi network for Internet, television, and telephone. He cancelled his telephone line and cable TV service. Then his neighbors dropped-by, saw what Andrew had done, and they cancelled their telephone and cable TV services, too, many of them without having a wired broadband connection of their own. They get their service from Andrew, who added an inline amplifier and put a better antenna in his attic. Now most of Andrew's neighborhood is watching digital TV with full PVR capability, making unmetered VoIP telephone calls, and downloading data at prodigious rates thanks to shared bandwidth. Is this the future of home communications and entertainment? It could be, five years from now, if Andrew Greig has anything to say about it.

Following last week's column about Baxter, my idea for a distributed kinda sorta peer-to-peer Internet data back-up scheme, I expected this week to write about all the problems readers found with the idea, and all the existing Baxter-like services none of us had heard about. Well, things change, and I'll be doing that column next week, leaving this space to describe how Microsoft is planning a preemptive strike against Linux using its control of the PC hardware standard.

One of the cheapest Linux computers you can buy brand new (not at a garage sale) is the Linksys WRT54G, an 802.11g wireless access point and router that includes a four-port 10/100 Ethernet switch and can be bought for as little as $69.99 according to Froogle. That's a heck of a deal for a little box that performs all those functions, but a look inside is even more amazing. There you'll find a 200 MHz MIPS processor and either 16 or 32 megs of DRAM and four or eight megs of flash RAM -- more computing power than I needed 10 years ago to run a local Internet Service Provider with several hundred customers. But since the operating system is Linux and since Linksys has respected the Linux GPL by publishing all the source code for anyone to download for free, the WRT54G is a lot more than just a wireless router. It is a disruptive technology.

At the core of Ballmer's remarks is a fundamental misunderstanding not only of Open Source, but of software development as an art rather than as a business. Cutting to the bone of his remarks, he is saying that Microsoft developers, since they are employees, are more skilled and dedicated than Open Source developers. They are better, Ballmer suggests, because Microsoft developers have their rears (presumably their jobs) on the line. All those lines and all those rears are part of a road map, he says, and because of that road map the $30 billion plus Microsoft gets each year isn't too much for us to pay, so the model works pretty well.

This is nonsense. It is nonsense because Steve Ballmer, like Bill Gates before him, confuses market success with technical merit. Microsoft's product roadmap is a manifestation of a business plan, and what matters in Redmond is the plan, not the map, which is in constant flux. How many technical initiatives has Microsoft announced with fanfare and industry partners, yet never delivered? Dozens. That is no roadmap.

Here is where institutional memory ought to come into play but doesn't seem to be. Remember that the motto of the combined Caldera and SCO was "Unifying Unix with Linux for Business." It is very possible that SCO's Linux team added UnixWare and OpenServer code to Linux. They then sent their Linux developers to SuSE when United Linux was formed. Soon after that, CEO Ransom Love departed. Now the SCO management is scouring the UnixWare, OpenServer and Linux code bases and says that they are finding cut-and-pasted code. Chances are that their former employees put it there.