Jan Wildeboer

Original dutch source is here. I hunted it through google translate and cleaned up some of the translation mistakes. As I am a native dutch, I do know what I am correcting. However – this is NOT an official translation of any kind. My comments are marked in [ ].

Report of Management Innovation week 49 from November 30 to December 4, 2009

ACTA (Official 1 – name known to editors)
At the EU level currently two sections of ACTA are being discussed, namely civil enforcement of IP rights and enforcement of IP [Intellectual Property] on the Internet.

The last chapter [on Internet] is compiled by the U.S. and has only recently been provided.

Because the documents and ACTA negotiations are confidential, this chapter has caused various groups on the internet to speculate about the possible content (esp. wrt ‘three strikes out).

We have received two letters by dutch citizens on this subject: one of the Brein Foundation, in which Stas [State Secretary] has been asked to include all forms of piracy in the chapter and a letter from a citizen who, based on the Brein letter, asked to not include piracy in ACTA.

EU-questionnaires wrt study of information-sharing by public sector bodies in combating piracy and counterfeiting (1 Officer – name known to editors) asked public institutions IM DG (ministries and implementing agencies) of MS to provide insight wrt information exchange wrt to combat piracy and counterfeiting.

EUCie strives for an electronic information network, which authorities can use to exchange information on the above combatting.

Given the amount of players and EZ [Ministry of Economics] is the responsible ministry for enforcement of IP rights [Intellectual Property], the answering of this questionnaire is coordinated by EZ.

INTER DEPARTMENTAL COUNCIL FOR TRADE POLICY IRHP 2010-02 (c)

REPORT OF THE DUTCH DELEGATION TO
THE MEETING OF THE COMMERCIAL POLICY COMMITTEE HELD IN BRUSSELS DD 15 JANUARY 2010

3. 3. ACTA: preparations of the 7th round of negotiations ACTA:

Presidency requested to mark the participation of LS ASAP. Cie reported on latest developments regarding the issue of transparency.

Cie willing to go towards full disclosure of the documents, but it was dependent on the thoughts of the new Commissioner and of course
had to take into account the wishes of some third countries (U.S. seemed unconvinced).

Cie feared setting a precedent for the free trade agreements now being negotiated, it was not intended that the EU position would become completely public. This could have major consequences for EU interests.

POL [Poland], VK [United Kingdom], OOS [Austria], NL [Netherlands], FIN [Finland], IER [Ireland], HON [Hungary], EST [Estonia], ZWE [Sweden] were in favcour of more transparency.

FRA [France] did not object against full disclosure if that would be the consensus, but did have concerns about the U.S. position.

ITA [Italy] sided along with France, was also concerned about impacts on free trade agreements, noted that even if plurilateral setting the precedent of ACTA would in principle be adequate closure. DK agreed with ITA and put reserve study status on the documents.

HON [Hungary] however opposed this with the position that the treatment of ACTA documents would be much more logical to compare with the documents of multilateral negotiations.

Cie announced the next stakeholder should take place after the Mexico round.

Also it is to be avoided to set a precedent towards bilateral negotiations.

INTER DEPARTMENTAL COUNCIL FOR TRADE POLICY IRHP 2010-06 (c)
REPORT OF THE DUTCH DELEGATION TO THE MEETING OF THE COMMERCIAL POLICY COMMITTEE HELD IN BRUSSELS DD 5 FEBRUARY 2010

ACTA: 7th round done with good progress.

LS [Member States] wants Cie to pro-actively advocate transparency * (wrt publishing documents), but Cie does not agree. LS [Member States] put more pressure on this.

6. ACTA (7th round, Mexico)
Cie reports. Long meeting done, the parties still seemed unwilling to offer major concessions. Good progress on customs procedures (exception for personal lugage agreed, is important, due to sensitivities in public opinion). Civil enforcement remains difficult chapter, because all parties have different legal systems. Transit and exports are still not decided. In this meeting the internet chapter could not be fully addressed due to lack of time, pushed to next round (including digital rights management). In general, the coverage was still an issue (EU offensive interests).

Transparency was also discussed, but this was rather to address criticisms in public opinion that were inappropriate (such as personal baggage checks and 3-strike rule for illegal downloading, both not part of ACTA). Release of documents remains undecided (Korea and Singapore oppose, Japan now suddenly wants to, USA remains silent). A written report will follow. Cie also was willing to share its line [of arguments] to take with the LS [Member states] when talking to the press. There will also be a stakeholder meeting next month (preferably a football stadium so that all supporters of the criticism of ACTA could be invited, as Cie joked). Next round in New Zealand 12-16 April and the ninth round probably in Geneva just before the TRIPS Council (Around the 7th of June).

UK once again declared its supportfor full disclosure of the documents, noted the current position [of secrecy] in EU is hard to keep national parliaments (European Parliament), citizens and civil society should be informed, there was nothing to hide.

UK insisted Cie should take a pro-active stance and should try to convince other parties of the need to be transparent. Backed by FIN, FRA, NL, SWE, OOS, HON, DK, ITA, IER, POL, BEL, POR. NL Cie and Legal Service of the Council are asked for possible legal basis of ACTA under the Lisbon Treaty and the possible involvement of national parliaments to ratify. ITA and POR noted that GI ’s as of yet came off worst in the negotiations.

JDvdR reported that legal basis depends on the final text, but with criminal sanctions in it the text would create a mixed agreement.

DUI [Germany] declared at the end of the meeting to have no position on the issue of transparency. UK found that there was a consensus and thus the EU position could be changed.

Presidency said that the party line was not to become isolated on this issue, and that still remains. There were still some differing opinions of MS [Member States]. BE, POR, DK en DUI [Germany] are not sure that full transparency should be given.

Seems that DUI, BE and POR can be convinced, but DK is not willing to change. The internal opinion finding process was not completed, but has to be for the next round in NZ, according to presidency.

Lots of comments on my last blog entry. Let me make some points clear before you all turn the flamewar to full force.

FIRST I am NOT proposing you turn the beer event into a political demonstration. I do strongly encourage you to go there to have FUN. That’s what I will do. I will be there. Wearing my Fedora. So if you want to flame me for what I say, let’s do it face to face.

SECOND The fact that the developers working on the Android kernel parts seemingly (as pointed out by Greg Kroah-Hartman) have problems with upstreaming their patches is an alarming signal for the Linux community. I hope that Google shows us that I am wrong and they are willing to upstream their changes.

THIRD My call for saying “No, Thanks” to the beer is a pun directing to RMS famous quotes on comparing free beer and free speech.

So in closing: Geez, peeps! FOSDEM is about having fun *and* exchanging opinions. We should have both.

The unique opportunity that a lot of Open Source and Free Software minded people meet at FOSDEM could be a strong signal towards Google that we are there to *help* making things better.

So grab your beer, have fun and flame me if needed. If you want to throw your frustration and anger on me – fine. But I would prefer if you use that energy to get more Android patches upstream.

Deal?

UPDATE

This mail shows you that Google wants to get stuff upstream but ATM (that was in october last year) is limited in doing so..

We (Google) definitely want to get back in sync with mainline (as I’ve mentioned earlier in this or a related thread), and we’re planning on snapping up our kernel trees to 2.6.32+ once we get past various deadlines in the near future.

DISCLAIMER: This post reflects my personal opinion and is in no way related to the company I work for.

LWN tells us what is happening with the android kernel patches in upstream.

The short version: They are gone

As Greg Kroah-Hartman explains:

So, what happened with the Android kernel code that caused it to be deleted? In short, no one cared about the code, so it was removed.

This is a normal process, Microsoft was there before.

So far nothing special. However, as Greg correctly points out:

The Android kernel code is more than just the few weird drivers that were in the drivers/staging/android subdirectory in the kernel. In order to get a working Android system, you need the new lock type they have created, as well as hooks in the core system for their security model.

Now adding new features to the kernel is quite OK. If the changes are sound, stable and help Linux in general, the kernel community will gladly accept such changes upstream. I was sure Google was well aware of this process and according to their promises, I was also sure that they clearly understood that Upstream Is King.

This seems to be wrong. It is up to Google to fix this problem. Google hackers should make sure this situation is solved for the best of upstream ASAP.

If this doesn’t get solved, the kernel running Android is a fork. An incompatible fork, as Greg concludes:

Because of this, Google has now prevented a large chunk of hardware drivers and platform code from ever getting merged into the main kernel tree. Effectively creating a kernel branch that a number of different vendors are now relying on.

Forking the linux kernel is the worst possible outcome. Tell Google what you think of this. Use your contacts inside Google to make sure they understand the magnitude of this problem (however, I am quite sure that the smart Google peeps know this already, which makes this even more strange).

[UPDATE] In october last year we already heard a bit about Google trying to work better with upstream, as described here (thanks to @haypo in the comments):

Linus asked: why aren’t these patches upstream? Is it because Google is embarrassed by them, or is it secret stuff that they don’t want to disclose, or is it a matter of internal process problems? The answer was simply “yes.” Some of this code is ugly stuff which has been carried forward from the 2.4.18 kernel. There are also doubts internally about how much of this stuff will be actually useful to the rest of the world. But, perhaps, maybe about half of this code could be upstreamed eventually.

One can only wonder. They know there is a problem, they promise to change this as supporting forks is expensive and not really sustainable (quelle surprise!) but still, it seems they are not walking the walk.[/UPDATE]

FLASH-MOB Call

In case you are going to the FOSDEM Beer Event this friday, join the flashmob. Google will sponsor free beer – refuse it. Don’t take the free beer. Insist on the integrity of the kernel community.

Please all, spread the word and sign my pledge!

Let us show Denmark how much we support their brave decision to use ODF as the onyl document format.

Sign here:

http://www.pledgebank.com/DenmarkODF

Spread the word!

Breaking news. If your danish is good enough, read here, here, here, here.

The Konlusionspapiret has all the details.

So from April 2011 all intergovernmental documents will be in ODF. If this will also mean a change to OpenOffice remains to be seen however.

OOXML however is out. It is considered to not be good enough to be treated as an open standard. And trust me, Microsoft really tried to convince the danish politicians. But as it seems their arguments in support of OOXML (and also their numerous attempts to discredit ODF) have failed.

Will other countries learn? Tell them. Ask them. This is a good day for open standards.

Finally. A place to discuss, learn, promote everything open. With 5 channels:

• Business
• Education
• Government
• Law
• Life

We started thois community to allow people from all across the world, regardless of job and skills, to communicate and foster more Open. Let’s look (far) beyond software. Lets talk about the Open Everything that this world so desperately needs.

Talk to you at opensource.com!

From the decision:
wrt MySQL:

Given the open source nature of MySQL, the Commission also assessed Oracle’s ability and incentive to remove the constraint exerted by MySQL after the merger and the extent to which this constraint could, if necessary, be replaced by other actors on the database market.

The Commission’s investigation showed that another open source database, PostgreSQL, is considered by many database users to be a credible alternative to MySQL and could be expected to replace to some extent the competitive force currently exerted by MySQL on the database market. In addition, the Commission found that ‘forks’ (branches of the MySQL code base), which are legally possible given MySQL’s open source nature, might also develop in future to exercise a competitive constraint on Oracle in a sufficient and timely manner. Given the specificities of the open source software industry, the Commission also took into account Oracle’s public announcement of 14 December 2009 of a series of pledges to customers, users and developers of MySQL concerning issues such as the continued release of future versions of MySQL under the GPL (General
Public Licence) open source licence. Oracle has already taken action to implement some of its pledges by making binding offers to third parties who currently have a licensing contract for MySQL with Sun to amend contracts. This is likely to allow third parties to continue to develop storage engines to be integrated with MySQL and to extend the functionality of MySQL.

So Neelie Smit-Kroes and her people are smart. They know what they are talking about and they did what I expected: thorough research. I fully agree with the findings. The Open Source ecosystem can produce competing solutions. It doesn’t need a Dual License special approach.

wrt JAVA:

It found that Oracle’s ability to deny its competitors access to
important IP rights would be limited by the functioning of the Java
Community Process (JCP) which is a participative process for developing and revising Java technology specifications involving numerous other important players in the IT industry, including Oracle’s competitors.

The Commission also found that Oracle would not have the incentives to restrict its competitors’ access to the Java IP rights as this would
jeopardise the gains derived from broad adoption of the Java platform
and therefore the proposed transaction would raise no competition
concerns in respect of the licensing of IP rights connected with Java.

This is going to be more important IMHO. The freedom of Java is really important.

Neelie Smit-Kroes, most famous for her decisions wrt Microsoft in the various competitive cases, is under dubious pressure:

As noted here, some german conservatives express strange doubts:

Angelika Niebler, a German conservative, was one of several to express dissatisfaction, saying that MEPs had not got “many specific answers” from the commissioner-designate. “I don’t really feel I know in which [policy] direction you are going to go,” she said.

Andreas Schwab, a German from the centre-right, described Kroes’s answer to one of his questions as a “sort of yes and no”, while Doris Pack – like Schwab and Niebler, a German member of the European People’s Party – said she was “not very satisfied” with an answer she received.

This comes after her hearing last week. If you take a closer look at what Neelie told us in that hearing, I fail to see why it is wrong. However I fully understand that some other companies and organisations are alarmed. This is what she had to say wrt Open Standards (transcribed from the hearing which is ironically only accessible with non-open Microsoft stuff):

5- Digital society depends upon open standards and interoperability. And with this in mind, public organizations should practice what they promote. If they don’t use open standards, why should citizens? I will pursue this from local authorities up to european institutions. If public data such as maps, weather information and health advise is not interoperable, how can it be exploited in new ways? And for such reasons I want to explore new ways to develop ICT standards in Europe.

So Neelie wants to explore new ways, wants to enforce the use of open standards, wants to free public data. I am not going to tell you who might have a different opinion. But I am sure, my dear Lazyweb, that you know which company I am talking about.

So let’s hope for the best. Neelie was grilled again today by the parliament and she will hear tomorrow if she is accepted.

For the sake of Open Standards in Europe, I can only hope she’ll make it.

DISCLAIMER: This post is my PERSONAL opinion.

I am quite sure that I will get a lot of angry flames for this post, but I am not going to sign the petition to “save MySQL”.

I strongly believe in community. In transparency. In openness. I hoped that the fight of Monty Widenius would be about exactly that – making sure MySQL becomes the Open Source database engine for the Free world. Making sure a vivid, creative, open community of users, developers gather around MySQL and make it better.

It seems however that this is not what the petition is about. Here some quotes that leave me with mixed feelings:

http://www.helpmysql.org/en/theissue/gplisnottheanswer

MySQL’s database server has traditionally been a product developed and maintained by a single company, not a community project depending on volunteers or on multiple vendors (like Linux).

Well – at least they don’t hide it. But the wording is misleading. It implies that an open source project is either run by a company or by volunteers. This is so wrong that I have a hard time not loosing my temper. Take a look at AMQP. It is a quite good ecosystem around a defined standard. With several implementations. Some of them Open Source, some not. Or take a look at the Linux kernel. Most of the contributions come from people who are actually paid to do this work. Some of the devleopers are employed by Red Hat, some by IBM, Novell, Intel etc.

A real Open Source project is about making something better for the good of all users. Not only for customers. And distributing the development across several companies reduces the risk for every participating entity. So the more the merrier.

However, for MySQL it seems the world is different:

Those who wanted to incorporate it into or enhance it with closed-source products without having to publish their entire derived work on GPL terms (which would practically preclude them from many commercial opportunities)

Let me tell you, this is not correct. Red Hat can pay its employees by generating revenue based on the GPL. I would say that Red Hat does quite well with that business model. Look at the stock price.

And if MySQL would be so succesfull with their dual licensing strategy, why did they sell themselves to SUN anyway?

There is a lesson hidden here: If you sell something, you don’t own it any longer. MySQL is now SUNs business. And if SUN decides to sell themselves to Oracle – it is their business. If the MySQL founders and fanboys don’t like this, they simply shouldn’t have sold MySQL to SUN in the first instance.

So we have two possible solutions here. My preferred solution: Oracle takes over SUN and puts MySQL under a single license, the GPL. It also declares all relevant “Intellectual Property” to be licensed Royalty Free up- and downstream.

Second best solution: The (former) MySQL people do what Open Source always offers: Fork. Let the best implementation win.

The current plan offfered in the petition however is based on exclusiveness, something that I refuse to accept. And that is why I personally will not sign the petition the way it is.

To all that quote me, let me repeat again: THIS IS MY PERSONAL OPINION.

So Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management, teaches us all on his understanding of “open” in various fields in this article over at the official Google Blog. I gather that he reflects a sort of canonical defintion that somehow is used or should be used inside Google.

It leaves me with mixed feelings.

It contains a lot of good stuff on open standards (yet fails to point to a proper definition), it tells us about Open Source and Google (and contains the typical claim that they are the “biggest contributor to open source” – a claim used inlfationary across all tech companies).

But it also contain stuff that really surprises me in negative ways. Let’s go through some stuff and you, dear reader, decide yourself:

If the GNU C compiler that I’m using has a bug, I can fix it since the compiler is open source. I don’t have to file a bug report and hope for a timely response.

Well – you should file a bug report and put your fix into that bug report so the whole community of GCC users and devs can have a better solution … private fixes == private fork == non-open …

If existing standards aren’t as good as they should be, work to improve them and make those improvements as simple and well documented as you can. Our top priorities should always be users and the industry at large and not just the good of Google, and you should work with standards committees to make our changes part of the accepted specification.

The problem here is a seemingly ignorant attitude towards “upstreaming” modifications. Just as with the GCC example, Mr. Rosenberg seems to favour private forks of standards to gain a competitive advantage and treat the upstreaming as a nice-to-do afterwards. In my world, you would *first* try to upstream your modifications (to make sure you get sustainable support) and *secondly* base your product on the modifications.

Today’s open source goes far beyond the “patent pooling” of the early auto manufacturers,

Patent-pooling creates a *closed* community – nothing open or competitive. See how GSM patents are used to deliberately hinder competitors to enter the market. Same with MPEG patents.

Also Open Source in general has *never* created a patent pool. Open Source has *always* opposed software patents.

“Others can take our open source code, modify it, close it up and ship
it as their own.”

So how is *that* open?

Don’t get me wrong, there are some good things in that article, but in general it leaves me with mixed feelings.