Consultation on European Patent System

The European Commission (Directorate General for Internal Market and Services) is consulting stakeholders on their needs in relation to the legal framework and possible actions in the field of industrial property. More specifically, the Commission is consulting European players about the patent system in Europe, with the goal to make proposals to improve this system.

Many analysts consider this consultation as an opportunity for software patents lobbyists to bring back on the table their proposal to extend patentability to software.

A few months ago, the question of software patent had been fiercefully debated in the community and in the European Parliament, with intense lobbying from pro- and againt- software patents. The bottomline has been a massive rejection of the directive proposal for broader patentability of "computer implemented inventions", a mild wording for "software technologies". Along with other open source stakeholders, members of ObjectWeb have expressed their concerns about software patents. It is worth noticing that we got support in this respect from folks from outside Europe, e.g. the Apache Software Foundation.

So, today, the threat of software patents is surfacing again. I strongly encourage companies with interests in Europe to answer the consultation. A very good source of inspiration is Florian Mueller's position paper from his blog, and for French readers, the position paper from Gérald Sédrati-Dinet (FFII France), which I found very well put.

Recommended reading:

• http://consultation.ffii.org/Downloads?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=wgepl0601-11a.pdf
• http://www.no-lobbyists-as-such.com/PATSTRATpositionpaper.pdf

The Bright Side of Open Source

Pierre Cros (Entr'ouvert) pointed me to a blog entry from Susan Wu, Chief Marketing Officer of the Apache Software Foundation. Susan addresses the question of how the open source model has been "watered down". Between the lines, you may read that there are two sides: the bright side of open source, with the "true" open source players, and the dark side of it, with bad guys taking advantage of the wave for marketing purposes.

Quoting Gianugo Rabellino from this blog entry: "[...] we’re seeing how the status of Open Source is just too much up for grabs by anyone, and easily circumventable using a few tricks that have become “classic” as in the sentence above. I don’t really have a solution handy: I’ve been thinking about starting a new “movement” under a different umbrella which would encompass Open Source yet augment it with the most prominent value coming from community-based development, but I know this would require quite some effort and a lot of inertia to get the ball rolling."

Right, the term "open source" in its strict meaning only describes a category of licenses (which roughly matches what the FSF calls "free"). But is there more to open source than a legal framework?

As proposed by Business Week, 2005 was probably a turning point for open source. Part of the reasons was that open source players eventually became profitable and the Valley VCs not longer overlooked open source startups. The bottom line is, in the Valley and elsewhere, that any old ISV now is open source in a way or another. This is becoming ridiculous: software vendors all have "their own" open source solutions, different from other -open source- solutions from their competitors. So what's the value of open source here? Is reinvention of the wheel the open source way to go? We all doubt it.

Yet, legally speaking, all players are open source because they distribute software under an open source license.

Form an Apache viewpoint, I can understand that some old timers of free/open source software feel bitter. The Foundation was created with a couple of strict principles in mind, including meritocracy, avoidance of brand fascination, etc. What is remaining of this old meritocratic spirit when software giants buy open source credibility (cf BEA / Beehive), use open source as a dumping strategy (cf IMB-Gluecode / Geronimo - ironically enough, IBM pushes talks calling projects "true open source")? I can understand that some feel bitter.

Yet, one may wonder if open source in general, and Apache in particular would have been so successful without discreet support from the same software giants: code donations from some (Sun / Tomcat), code promotion by others (IBM / httpd), not to mention massive communication about open source from all sides. Biting the hand that's feeding open source...

Gianugo is calling for a new movement. But this movement is already around - and I call it "third generation of open source", just because I failed to find a more appropriate wording.

Third generation of open source is a collective strategy aiming a developing open source software through a collaborative process that encompasses more than just code. Because the world is a-changing, and because the business world now is taking over the open source wave.

Collaboration in an 3G open source organization may not happen at level of single projects - and one may even argue that some projects leaders come from the dark side of open source. But the ultimate goal is to have cross-projects collaboration. To bring back the value of open source at a higher level. And because the parties involved no longer are individuals, but also legal entities, a governance model that goes beyond meritocracy is needed. Such governance should be open and transparent, so that the organization be not used as a smoke screen. The open source world is to face the cold reality that open source now serves commercial interests, and it is the price to pay to become more mature and be ready for the next step: unleashing the value of collaboration at a cross-organization level. Or put in other words: yes, there are ethical reasons for going the free/open source way, but there are also sound economical motivations and, beyond, externalities in term of social welfare that policymakers take into account. The open source picture is becoming global. The genie is out of the bottle.

And it's legitimate that all try to make a living for themselves in this open source world. What's damaging to the open source movement is the propagation of urban legends from the good old days. Not values - legends.

For Japanese Speakers

I don't have the chance to speak Japanese, but for those who do, here are a few links to Yoko Sueoka's blog:

• http://pcweb.mycom.co.jp/articles/2006/02/14/ob1/index.html
• http://pcweb.mycom.co.jp/articles/2006/02/10/ob1/index.html
• http://pcweb.mycom.co.jp/articles/2006/02/07/ob2/index.html
• http://pcweb.mycom.co.jp/articles/2006/02/07/ob3/index.html
• http://pcweb.mycom.co.jp/articles/2006/02/03/ob1/index.html
• http://pcweb.mycom.co.jp/articles/2006/02/03/ob2/index.html

Enjoy!

So What's an "Initiative" Anyway?

ObjectWeb lately came up with several "initiatives", namely the ESB initiative, RFID initiative and ONESSI.

The existing open-source communities address technological issues in a very efficient fashion. But they leave companies alone when it comes to complementing software with all that takes to make a product: positioning, packaging, customization, training, professional services, communication, quality assurance, certification of compliance with standards, etc.

ObjectWeb came up with the concept of open source “initiative” to address these shortcomings and bridge the gap between open source projects and enterprise users.

An initiative is not an open source project. An open source initiative is a collaborative program undertaken by industry stakeholders to promote a set of technologies and bring them to the mainstream. The goal of an initiative is to federate complementary projects through the involvement of several partners from industry and research communities, so as to initiate and perpetuate innovation and business opportunities.

So. Initiatives are proactive attempts to strenghten an ecosystem through a collective strategy. They are akin to collective strategies (or better said, ObjectWeb in its entierity may be seen as a collective strategy instanciated through initiatives as a matchmaking tool). I would put initiatives in the class of "organic collectives" (see Astley, W. Graham, Fombrun, Charles J. (1983), 'Collective Strategy: Social Ecology of Organizational Environments', The Academy of Management Review)

New ObjectWeb Board of Directors

ObjectWeb's Board of Directors has been renewed. Here's the new board:

Elected Legal Entity Members Representatives

• Engineering - Stefano de Panfilis
• Experlog - Pierre-Yves Gibello
• GMRC - Hongbo Xu
• IONA - Eric Newcomer
• Red Hat - Paul Cormier
• Thales - Serge Druais

Elected Individual Members Representative

• David Li

Seats of Right

• Bull - Jean-Pierre Laisne
• INRIA - Jean-Bernard Stefani
• France Telecom R&D - Valere Robin
• Chief Architect - Pierre-Yves Gibello (interim position)
• Executive Director - Christophe Ney