Slightly more depressing than all of these, though, are the plans put forward for 2010. Development for 3.1 seems to be about making updates from 2.x less painful, and making some of the features better – all things which 3.0 should have been, in all honesty (upgrading from 2.x to 3.0 has put a number of people I know right off Tbird, to the point they’ve switched to something else). The plans to put Thunderbird on an economically sustainable footing also look staggeringly underdeveloped: Mozilla Messaging has been around since September 2008, and from the look of it there is still absolutely no vision about how this is going to happen. What is going to happen is a series of “experiments”, but it’s not really clear to me how you can judge the potential of a business model on that basis.

My specific worry about this is that by trying a series of experiments, they’re basically going to do a prototype-y half-assed version of each, none will work, and the whole thing will come crumbling down. This is specifically why businesses do market research: they test the market before they develop the product, rather than put effort in a direction which isn’t going to be successful. More than this, ideas for development of Thunderbird have been terribly unexciting so far: more experiments in the “web 2.0″ direction may be interesting for some people, but I struggle to see how people are going to pony up for any of this.

There has also been seemingly no effort to bring into the core the crucial Thunderbird feature which pretty much everyone clamours for: the Calendar. Yes, the plugin exists, and yes it’s pretty good. But in all honesty, there is absolutely no way on earth I would deploy that setup in a business right now with Tbird auto-updating itself, because at some point something will go wrong on update and people’s calendar plugin will stop working. So either I turn off updates, or I don’t use the plugin, and the balance doesn’t weigh in favour of the plugin.

Joe Brockmeier has written some thoughts of his own on the economic future, which involves basically setting up as a mail service for people to use Thunderbird against. I would worry it’s a little bit late in the game for that; businesses willing to pay for that kind of thing already have plenty of options available to them and it’s difficult to see how Mozilla Messaging can add significant value in that area without carrying horrendous costs.

My take: personally, I would want to see them focus on deployment and management of Thunderbird. Specifically, that means some kind of management system for Windows-based networks, whereby I can control updates, configure accounts, control user’s settings centrally, etc. That’s something critical to broad deployment of Tbird in large organisations, and doesn’t really exist right now. It would also be something worth paying for.

Whether or not enough “things worth paying for” can be created, though, is an open question. Fundamentally, there is a problem with giving away the client for free: it is a development cost, and in order to recoup that cost you have to create value in ways which wouldn’t be possible without the client. Every business model that doesn’t rely on that client being available for free as leverage doesn’t recoup the cost, it shoulders it. And that is the fundamental problem facing “open source business models”.

To reprise some of the facts in the reports;

1. BBC News mentioned “a sophisticated and targeted” attack, but then later says that Google pointed the finger at phishing and malware scams rather than security problems.
2. The reports are that Gmail accounts were mainly targeted, and these Gmail accounts were of known dissidents.

Now, 2) is quite believable, but 1) is not at all. Phishing and malware is nothing new, there’s not a lot you can do to stop it, and it’s certainly not sophisticated and targeted unless the Chinese Government was intercepting legitimate Google traffic. Even then, with SSL, that’s a difficult proposition.

Wikileak’s twitter account added a couple of other suspicions:

1. “China has been quietly asking for the same access to google logfiles as US intelligence for 2-3 years now.”
2. “Gossip from within google.cn is Shanghai office used as CN gov attack stage in US source code network.”

With this kind of affair, it’s usually instructive to consider the adage of Cui bono. Sure, Chinese intelligence probably could use more information about dissidents and would probably like log file access and things like that. Almost certainly they try to access gmail accounts too. I have little doubt that Google would have immense trouble detecting this from the more general problem of phishing, and to that extent it’s really not their problem – it’s a social engineering problem.

There is a far larger prize at stake, of course. If Google source code is under attack, which seems reasonable, this presents two major issues. The first, that Google code could be used by China: there is the issue of straight-up rip-off, which devalues Google at the very least. However, Google is already #2 and is well behind Baidu, the native search system. There is motivation to do this of course, but it’s not exactly the biggest prize on offer.

The larger prize is access to code to work out security issues. Google does not develop code in the open, and while most of it is probably secure there are doubtless issues that a determined attacker could find more easily with access to code. And, once you start getting access, you start being able to gain the stuff of real value: the information stored on Google’s systems, in Gmail, in Google Docs, in Postini, as well as the various logs and other behavioural data associated with advertising.

Put like that, Google simply cannot afford to work in China. In one sense, China is lawless: there is a certain class of “criminal” who is state-sponsored and therefore can do as they please. There is no good technological defence to this, there is only the question of whether to participate or not. And what are the potential costs of participating? Essentially, limitless. Major US and EU firms on Google Apps will not want their business information readable by the Chinese authorities. More than that, firms doing business with other firms using Google Apps will not want their information readable too.

On Facebook, I gave the example of Jaguar Land Rover as one company who use Google Apps for everything. Will they like the idea of the Chinese authorities being able to see what they’re up to? No. Even if it’s not happening, it will put the wind up them: potentially, it could destroy their business. And lets remember, there are now millions of businesses on this platform.

This highlights one danger of cloud computing: not only do you have to trust the provider, but you also have to trust that the aggregation of data in one place doesn’t become a sufficiently juicy target for someone else. And Google is a very, very juicy target.

Let me speculate further on a few potential issues in the future (none of which are problematic at this point today):

• Google controls large amount of “dark fibre” and “private internet”. That’s a juicy target.
• Google are putting Android into many handsets. Yum, yum, another juicy target!
• Google maps / street map / other raw data. If, somehow, the collection of data could be controlled by another agent – well, that’s quite a useful tool to have.

This doesn’t even go into the potential issues of having hardware controlled by another agent in your data centre or in your phone, which isn’t outside the realms of practical possibility for the Chinese Government either.

Let’s be clear about this: all Governments have secret services, and the Chinese are by no means the most adept or technologically advanced. However, they may be the most dangerous and the most likely to work clandestinely. Google must know already that they have spies working for them, not just in China but in all their major offices. Most good industrial espionage is internally undetectable, because it’s acquired information out only. The Chinese spies clearly have been up to many detectable activities, which puts them in a very different class.

Update: Wired has a very good article up with more details about the attack. In short, there was a specific piece of malware targeted at Google to pull their source code out of the organisation. It doesn’t say what, but it does say that the large amounts could be sent and doesn’t say how quickly they detected in. Which is exceptionally scary. I would have thought the Windows-based attack would limit the scope of what could have been lifted, but this doesn’t explain many of the other rumours about Google’s Chinese offices, and doesn’t (on its own) explain Google’s seeming decision to withdraw. Possibly, Google were attacked in other ways too.

So, what are the problems? Jason from “MonoNoNo” gave his thoughts here. While I disagree with much of his analysis – e.g., the Media Pack issue is essentially irrelevant for free software users, and the GPLv3-hate is also basically not a problem – many of the points raised are valid. I don’t think they make Moonlight non-free itself, but they prevent people re-using the code, which is not ideal.

I also raised the issue on fedora-devel-list, and received a somewhat limited reply from Tom Callaway. The commentary on what lawyers are willing (or not) to do is relatively interesting, although I don’t think is entirely apropos. It would be simple for someone to say “these permissions are the minimum that we need” regardless of any specific license, which I haven’t seen anyone do with respect to patents. It’s not a huge step to go beyond that and check off whether each permission has been properly granted.

That all said, I think there are a few key issues here:

1. Versioning. I haven’t seen anyone else discuss this, but the Covenant is issued for versions of Moonlight which do not yet exist as far as I can tell. So in one sense, all of this discussion is basically moot.
2. End users vs. distributors. I don’t understand why the Covenant attempts to differentiate these cases, but it does seem to put people such as Red Hat in a situation where they are specifically not covered. Why? This just seems mad.
3. End dates are not far in the future. This isn’t going to instil confidence in people relying on these agreements.

Unless those issues are sorted out, it seems pretty clear to me that Moonlight is not going to get into Fedora. Of course, there are plenty of people who do not want it in either way, so the effort that might go into fixing these problems is likely to be less than minimal.

It’s sad for a number of reasons: first, because it would be something that I think is easy to fix. Microsoft, if they are serious about Silverlight, could issue a covenant which covers Moonlight properly, without the silly restrictions and time limits, and prove to people that they want it to succeed so much they are willing to give up control of who can implement it.

Second, because Silverlight is technically extremely appealing. Free software players for Flash are not great, and the development tools are terrible. HTML5/SVG/JS etc. is in a similar position; the “players” (browsers) are much better quality (although the user experience is variable) but the development tools are non-existent. And Moonlight is not the only Silverlight implementation on the way: apparently Intel are also working on a completely different implementation.

I doubt anyone from Microsoft reads this blog, but they are the only ones who could fix this. I’m surprised they don’t see the value in doing it.

“So, of the four “major” distributions over the past month (Ubuntu 9.10, Mandriva 2010, openSuSE 11.2 and Fedora 12), the only one that didn’t crash, hang or otherwise misbehave on at least one of my laptop/netbook/nettop systems was Fedora.” – “Saving the ‘Best’ for Last“, J A Watson at ZDNet.

I think this is a tremendous accomplishment by the people working on this stuff, and the release team, given the short and punchy nature of this development schedule. Fedora 13 has a great base to start from, although it also has to live up to what seems to be a pretty good Fedora 12 release.

It was also interesting to see that news of Google’s Chrome OS hasn’t really overshadowed the release: yes, people are writing a bit about it, but it hasn’t really set the world alight in the same way Wave did a few weeks ago. And you know what – I think it’s because it’s really not a terribly hot idea. In fact, I would say that Fedora 12 and Gnome Shell (the preview of part of Gnome 3) is actually a better Chrome OS than Chrome  OS.

The stuff that Chrome supposedly brings to the table, I already have. My netbook unsuspends in 5 seconds flat, and it lives its life “on”. This fast boot stuff is basically worthless to me. The user experience of Chrome OS is surprisingly close to what Gnome Shell already offers; and of course I’m able to run proper applications not just web-based ones. And, actually, I think Moblin actually gets a lot of this stuff right already: particularly the deep integration between the desktop shell and web applications. If I’m honest, this just looks to me like another Google “re-invent the world and outspend the people already innovating in this area”-type project. If Google were not so fat on advertising revenue, there is no way they could make a play like this.

And, to be honest, I’m not entirely sold on the people already innovating in this area already. I’ve written before about litl’s webbook – which ChromeOS seems to be aimed squarely at. If I were litl, I would be pretty deeply worried, since a web-based OS with Ubuntu underpinnings running on custom hardware is basically a rough description of both projects. And you can bet that Google (or, their hardware partners) aren’t going to be knocking these out at $700 a pop.

I’m deeply unconvinced by this “web apps only” approach, anyway. A browser is not the be all and end all, and files exist on disk for a reason: “it’s too complex for normal people” argument just does not stack up at all. What ChromeOS, and litl and others, are doing is saying “we can make a computing experience as simple as a television”, which is fine. But then you get a computing experience just like a television, with minimal interactivity and flexibility. I mean, custom hardware is great, but one size doesn’t fit all – you have to talk to cameras, printers, mobile phones, and all manners of other gadgetry. That needs OS support. Are Google going to come up with some kind of USB-to-website system so my camera’s photos can be uploaded via flikr? In what world of UI interaction does that even make sense?

What you end up with is an emasculated system where apps don’t talk to each other or share content easily (can you insert images into Google Docs directly from flikr?). It’s entirely retrograde, and a non-compelling view of computing which limits users to various hard-coded paths of functionality. For simple stuff like sending e-mail or browsing the news online, it’s fine. For “harder” stuff like attaching a document to an e-mail: well, you’d better hope that you use Google Docs and GMail and that those apps can talk to each other. Better hope, though, you don’t have a video camera and want to edit some clips – there’s no website for that yet, so you’re stuffed, bud. And even when it arrives, it’s going to take a while to upload those hundreds of megabytes of Little Eric walking for the first time, because that ADSL connection you have with 8Mb download has only a 512K upload.

It’s clear these “computers” are only going to have a very limited appeal. And this, to me, is where Fedora (and other free OSes) shine. You can have the Moblin interface, or a proper Gnome desktop. The hardware support is great; it will work on your netbook or on your full desktop. You can make the choice to cut down and simplify the interface, and not lose the ability to run the more complicated apps.

If I were to prognosticate, I would say that litl will be around for maybe a couple of years, but not much more. ChromeOS, Moblin and the like will find their place on cheap photo-frame-like touch PCs which people will scatter around the home, but there will still be a real PC in the corner.

In a word: wow. For what is supposed to be a technical preview for Gnome 3.0 which, we should remember, is about a year away, this is a remarkably polished bit of software. The simple black borders looked a bit basic in screenshots but in use the understated nature of the interface actually looks a bit classy. The Applications menu and particularly the side panel are a bit rough looking, but I don’t have the side panel turned on.

The workspace metaphor is taking me a bit of time to get used to; it’s quite similar to the Gnome 2 system but has slight differences. I’ve had a bit of trouble launching apps in the way I want, but I keep discovering new features to it (e.g., dragging and dropping the app into the workspace) which give me better ways of doing things. Not being able to access applets from the Activities page is also a bit odd, but eh.

What is particularly praiseworthy, I feel, is that even though it doesn’t appear to be designed particularly with netbooks in mind – unlike, for example, Moblin – it does seem to work really well. I’ve put the Chromium browser on there as well, to save screen real estate, and the combination is much better than the relatively-stock Ubuntu I had on before.

Although there aren’t really any new features compared to Gnome 2, everything seems to be placed in a smarter way, and in particular I could see non-technical users using these workspaces and actually “getting it”. I suspect a lot of what’s remaining is really “small scale” stuff – the polish which really makes things sing. I noticed odd problems with windows not popping up when they should occasionally, and stuff like that – or clicking a link and having it appear on a browser in another workspace with no notification. These are the small fit-and-finish pieces which make an application great, though.

On a whim, I decided to have a look at the current state of play: turns out Chandler 1.0 is pretty much dead, and the work is now concentrating on re-architecting the software for Chandler 2.0. Having been in a similar position myself with the Bongo project – though I like to think the work we’ve done has been more evolutionary than revolutionary, except where absolutely necessary (e.g., the Hula store not being able to handle concurrency – d’oh!). The pages don’t seem to say why, although I seem to remember Chandler suffering from various pretty severe performance issues (i.e., being unusable).

It also reminds me somewhat of the situation with Mozilla Messaging and Thunderbird 3. MozMess has had a few millions injected into it, and now their developers are on a spree of embedding “search”, databases, bizarre active folder systems, and “conversation view” into Thunderbird – literally every release in version 3 I’ve been using (and I use it as my main client) has been a step backwards for me.

Clearly the injection of substantial money isn’t any particular driver of success; indeed, on the other hand, it seems to have a negative correlation on those (extremely limited) data points. However, without resources to have people develop, it’s difficult to see how to build up enough momentum to make this stuff happen. It is something of a conundrum.

I still don’t get why they went to the effort to design their own hardware. Ok, moving parts are gone – that’s good (although, it has a CF drive? Aren’t those hard drives writ small?). Aside from that, this is just a bit of a bendy netbook. One hopes they didn’t spend too much on the design of that. And the controller: well, ok, it has a wheel and a button, and the Mac-like dispensation with other stuff probably makes it reasonably easy. But infra-red: oh dear. This isn’t like the Wii wand; you need line-of-sight.

The software interface is obviously a bit different to what’s on the market at the moment, but not that far a departure from the likes of Joggler. It’s built around channels, which is a familiar concept from TV. I’m not totally sold on this: the channel concept is beginning to die a death precisely because it doesn’t work in the modern era, and it reminds me a bit of early computer UIs which were designed around physical desks and files (which is partly why we still call them “desktops”). However, I’m willing to give it a go and see if it grabs me – the proof of these puddings is always in the eating.

What slightly scares me is the use-cases set out on the website. “View photos”. “View photos on your TV!”. “Get the weather”. “Get movie listings”. “Access the web”. Etc. Oh, and “plug it into your TV”. Ok, I can see some point (although, I’m not really feeling this). But not a word on the point I made previously: battery life. Being portable and light is great if you can move it around freely. Will the battery life keep up with that? How will it work? If the litl ends up being tethered to the mains for the most part, suddenly most of the appeal I can think of has flown out of the window.

And then, the big, big disappointment: litl want $700 for this. Assuming a decent exchange rate, that’s still £450 with the best will in the world. Plus they want an extra £10 or so for the remote control, which bafflingly is an optional extra. Looking at what that would buy me in on the High Street if I went out this afternoon:

• £250 gets a 10″ Atom-based netbook with storage built in (yes, it’s a PC)
• £450 gets me the same netbook but with added mobile broadband, so not only can I take it everywhere around the house, I can take it around the country and still access my stuff
• £150 buys me a Joggler, which for my money does a lot of what litl does but has a touch screen and is even more portable. It’s not as flexible or powerful I guess, but I could buy three of these for one litl and I can text mobiles directly from it.
• £140 buys me a Chumby – less portable, less flexible, more interactive.
• £340 wins me a Fizzbook Spin. It’s ruggedized, the screen’s more adjustable as is the webcam, it has a handle and the orientation adjustment. It also has the important touchscreen.
• £300 also buys me various TV media centres which play photos, video, browse the web etc. Sure, it’s stuck under the TV.

In reality, how many of these are actually in competition with litl? Probably not many directly, although Joggler comes very close. It depends what you mean by “in competition”, though. I know a couple of people who leave a laptop around in their living room for accessing the web, so I vaguely understand what litl are aiming at. I’m just not sure this is on target, though, and for all the nice design it’s missing (unless I’m mistaken, which I could be) a touch screen and wireless wand – both of which I think are crucial features if you want people to either pick this up or use it from the sofa. A keyboard is entirely useless in both those scenarios.

So, I’m inevitably feeling a bit disappointed. I believe they’re missing a trick: not because they don’t have a good idea; I think it is a good idea (in most respects, anyway) and it appears to have been executed well. However, I think also that times have changed since this thing was on the drawing board. One excerpt from the “software essay” on the litl site stood out for me:

“Let’s say you have a litl at home, a litl in your weekend home, and a litl plugged into your TV.”

Wow, what an assumption to start from. Are they really aiming this device at people with a second home who can afford to drop $2000+ on three netbooks? That’s not the economic climate I see around me today.

And, I think that sums up my problem with this device. What functions it has seem to be well designed. But, it’s a complete luxury device. It’s not enabling me to do things I couldn’t do before. It’s simple, yes, but when I think about it, simple isn’t the first word that springs to mind: the first word I thought of when I saw this was “decadent”. Decadence of design, of implementation, and of product. That’s not a good thing.

Update 12:45 – there’s a pretty enlightening interview with John Chuang up now too; and the absolute last sentence is probably the most revealing: “We can have a long-term view because we’re self-funded. We know we have a great device, and right now we want to make sure we sell it to customers who are buying it for the right reasons.”

Not just decadent design of a decadent product, but now decadent marketing. Buying a product for the right reasons?! Whoa. This just smells of multi-millionaire play-thing, a la Chandler, OLPC, to name but a few.

Update 13:40 - last update I’m making on this. Engadget, who leaked the hardware first, are not impressed by the price either.

The other point I wanted to make in this post but forget: the UI is very similar to the Palm Pre, for me, or the Nokia N900. Both of which devices will be a. cheaper than this and b. much more useful to me. But then, I guess I’m just not the right sort of customer

Last point – it appears possible this thing runs Ubuntu under the hood. The Crunchbase listing for litl has Canonical down as an OS service provider, and there’s a PPA on launchpad for “bfallik-litl” – bfallik on twitter has not tweeted, but is friends with Peter Teichman (of Hula fame) and other known litlers.

Given Havoc Pennington, ex of Red Hat, is the Director of Operating Systems or something at litl, that’s a bit of a surprising choice for me, but I guess the OS layer is likely to be pretty thin anyway – the stuff on top is Javascript-based somehow, possibly the whole thing is running in a Mozilla window much like the Pyro Desktop.

It’s rare to find, then, a brochure produced with the intent of talking down free software as a whole. However, Wikileaks has turned up just such a document: the SirsiDynix brochure against “open source” library software, distributed on a restricted basis to certain customers. In particular, they’re raging against the likes of Evergreen and Koha. I should own up that I’ve known one particular Koha developer, MJ Ray, for a long while, but this isn’t an area I particularly have a lot of direct experience. If I were a Koha developer, though, reading this would be a bit smarting: they accuse it of many things, in particular of having priorities belonging in the 80s.

As well as the relatively malicious falsehoods being perpetrated against those specific library projects, there are also vague allegations about open source in general – from accusations of Red Hat being “proprietary” to the highly entertaining argument that the US Department of Defense “restrict the use of open source software for fear that it could pose a terrorist opportunity” (clearly, SirsiDynix are not exactly up-to-speed themselves with the state of the art in this area).

What does this document tell us about SirsiDynix? Well, first, it tells us that they probably have a product which is much better than the state of the art in the free software community: they are an incumbent, large business with offices across the world, and even though I’ve no experience of their product I’m sure it’s about one of the most featureful things on the market. But, this is the really interesting thing: someone in their position would not go to the effort of even writing a single side of A4 on the ills of free software were it not for the fact that this is a threat to them. So, for as much as their systems do, and for all the talking down of free software they do, they are obviously worried. Clearly Koha and Evergreen are getting something right.

And here’s what I think they’re getting right, and what customers of SirsiDynix should be looking at. The author of this paper – Stephen Abram – blogs extensively from his “Lighthouse” at SirsiDynix (which is actually, cough, open source Movable Type). And interestingly, this “leak” having hit Wikileaks yesterday (the 29th), he’s posted the same paper on his blog today (30th, actually just in the last few minutes!) in a posting entitled “It’s About a Respectful Discussion“. Note well that word, “Respectful”. While his paper warns customers to stay away from free software lest they end up in the dirty, proprietary hands of Red Hat, he freely admits they use it. It would be quite easy to take apart the paper on a factual basis and highlight the inaccuracies and blatant spin. But, I think there’s an easier way.

Simply read the posts at the Lighthouse. Read about the crucial role of communities and the technologies of the web that bring them together, or the difference in information production and consumption in information technology-literate users. It’s clear Stephen realises that the role of “creator of content” is played by a broad spectrum of people, and the role of a modern library is not simply to warehouse dusty knowledge trapped in paper for the locals to learn from. Libraries of the future will be as much about production of information as dissemination, and I think Stephen realises this – and that’s why his arguments against production of software in a community fall flat on their face.

Of course, it almost certainly isn’t. The FCC photos take the extremely strange step of photographing it standing on the top screen edge: a position many netbooks wouldn’t be able to reach (some do, but not many). That, combined with a strange rubber insert along that top edge and a conveniently located power button make me think this thing is designed to spend much of it’s life in that position. Much like a photograph standing on the mantlepiece, this thing is probably designed to sit in your living space and “do stuff”. I could be wrong; the IR detector on the front of the keyboard is presumably needed for something, but there could be another built into the bezel somewhere (the FCC photos appear to show one). Interestingly, it’s designed by FIC apparently – the same people from whom OpenMoko spun out of.

What “stuff”, I’m not sure. It doesn’t look like it has a touchscreen (and it has the keyboard attached), but it does seem to have a webcam. Presumably you can Skype or something through this thing, but to interact with it you have to pick it up and flip it over? I suppose one possibility is that it has insane battery life, a wake-on-wlan function somehow and doesn’t need to be permanently strapped into a power socket, but I don’t know – having an Intel Atom and stuff probably means it doesn’t do that.

Doesn’t seem to have DVD/TV even though it has an HDMI output, doesn’t have 3G, doesn’t have touchscreen, etc. If it’s supposed to do something like a Joggler that would make some sense, except that again it doesn’t seem quite so interactive. Can’t believe it’s any good for gaming.

So, I’m kind of at a loss. If you’re going to all the effort of designing your own hardware, there’s usually a reason – a la OLPC. But this doesn’t seem to have many interesting features, except that it’s totally legacy and peripheral free – it only has one USB socket. Presumably the software has tonnes of interesting features, but in these days of Maemo and Moblin I wonder how close to the state of the art this is, or whether it’s in a kind of Daikatana situation. If it turns out to be another Chumby – well, that’s nice, but again disappointing (Chumby already exists, after all).

We only have around a week to wait to find out apparently, but I’m kind of left feeling “what’s the point”? If this is really just a netbook for accessing web content, I don’t understand it at all. You don’t need custom hardware for that, and people already know how to use web browsers. I hope I’m wrong, but it’s vastly underwhelming so far.

What’s interesting here is that this is, definitively, the best exposition of the difference between “software license” and “business model” that you could get. The letter is not saying the license isn’t good enough; it’s a commentary on the business model. Secondarily, it’s a commentary on the difficulty of moving from a GPLv2-only license to a GPLv3 one, but that is treated somewhat as the lesser issue (or, at least, one with greater effects in the future rather than now).

Of important note, and I think the main way this is being misread, is that this letter isn’t about GPL’d projects: this is specifically about MySQL. What they are saying is that MySQL as a business has worked on a “dual source” model – that’s how the development has been funded, that’s how the community is set up, and those are the social norms. If that “dual source” model is shut down, that means MySQL needs to transition to some other way of funding the development and/or reduce the development occurring. This letter rightly points out the risks that development would slow/stop, and the fundamental change to this model risk killing the project.

Joe says, “Asking that a governmental body preclude the sale of a company to another because it will cease or curtail its development of a Free Software project seems unreasonable”. I somewhat agree, but again, that’s not what the letter is actually asking – it says “should block Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL”. The EU have the power to do that, and I think it’s a sensible measure. MySQL is a business which can survive on its own (at least on past performance; although many key people left during Sun’s period of ownership), and Oracle quite clearly pose a competitive risk in this area. I think the letter elucidates why brilliantly.

Update: Simon Phipps (of Sun) has posted his thoughts on this letter too, and I think makes exactly the same mistake Joe did: conflating the issue of freedom with success. The things which make software free are not the same things which make development rock or a product successful, and vice-versa.

Of course, it is true to say that an unsuccessful but free project is of very little help to the community, but saying “lack of dual-licensing dollars will hinder MySQL development” is not the same as saying “GPLv2 protection is not enough to make something free”. The issue is one of commercial success, not freedom – but of course, this does help put to bed the lie that if you are pro-free software (staunchly so, in RMS’ case) you are ignorant of or ambivalent toward commercial realities.

Update 2: Matt Asay also weighs in, and somewhat predictably also confuses the issue of freedom with success.