Month: June 2003

Open source is fun, but real software costs money and Larry Ellison wants to keep it that way:

The database software giant’s $6.3-billion offer for PeopleSoft has intensified a debate about Ellison’s larger vision, which is that the software industry is embarking on a massive consolidation that would leave it in the hands of a few huge companies. He wants to make sure Oracle is one of them.

But…Ellison is counting on Linux to bring Microsoft down, and if that could happen, couldn’t MySQL bring Oracle down?

Just speculating.

The controversy over the Movable Type software license continues, and recent comments from MT Business Development honcho Anil Dash fail to clarify it.

My comments to Anil:

I’m reminded of the old joke about the Polish Mafia – they make you an offer you can’t understand.

The MT licensing terms are inconsistent, incoherent, and probably illegal. Consider how the license applies differently to people who call themselves “web developers” and those who supply “support services”:

Web Developer Installed Website. If you are a web developer and want to install one copy of the Software on one web server as a publishing system for a single website that you are designing for a client.

That’s not even a grammatical sentence, it’s a dependent clause without a predicate.

The client website must be either one of the two types of websites described above for which a Limited Use License is available, or a website license under Licensor?s Personal, Non-Commercial Use License. A single License Fee shall be payable by either you or by the client, with the license issued to both you and the client.

Does this say that a license fee has to be paid by a web developer who builds a custom website for someone who’s entitled to use MT for free? If so, which license fee?

And then it says this:

Without limitation, uses which are prohibited under this Limited Commercial Use License include receiving compensation from others for copies or modified copies of the Software; hosting, or offering to host, the Software, on any basis; receiving compensation for any service that uses the Software, including support services.

How can a reasonable person distinguish what a web developer does from providing “support services”? And how is it legal for me to run a personal blog using MT on a for-fee commercial hosting service without my use putting the hosting provider in violation of MT’s license? My ISP’s hosting the software, whether he knows it or not, and that’s forbidden even if the hosting provider pays a license fee for each blog. That’s clearly ridiculous, and as I said, probably illegal. You can’t write a contract prohibiting anything in the world that you feel like prohibiting, and you can’t write a contract that permits uses to people calling themselves one thing and not to others doing essentially the same thing and calling themselves something else.

You also can’t write a contract that forbids an ISP from supporting its customers after they’ve installed legal copies of MT on their own or with the help of someone else. That’s an unreasonable encroachment on the ISP’s own business.

I’d suggest that you need to review the terms of your licenses with the help of a qualified IP lawyer, because what you have (which reads like it was written by someone who didn’t understand law, let alone English grammar) is not enforceable.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this is not to be construed as an offer of legal advice. It is personal, uninformed opinion offered solely for the purpose of stimulating discussion.

…

The irony of all this is that Movable Type is no longer supported by its developers. They used to support it — when I installed it on an ISP that uses NFS, I ran into problems with database corruption that came about because MT used the perl “flock()” function, which only works on a local file system, instead of an NFS-safe mechanism using “fstat()” to create temp files to serve as locks. Granted, this is a fairly obscure bug that comes about as a result of the (brain-dead, in my opinion) decision of Bill Joy to support a stateless NFS, it’s nonetheless the kind of thing that software has to handle in the 21st century. I brought the issue to the MT developers, and they (Ben) did their best to resolve it (see the “NFSSafeLocking” directive in mt.cfg).

But when I ran into a problem with MT and MySQL (where the conversion script times out and hangs and can’t be restarted), I got no response from them at all, just as others have got no response to their reports of other problems with MySQL and MT. So if the developers aren’t going to support their product, and they’re going to forbid anyone else from supporting it per the license agreement, and you don’t care to spend hours buried in perl yourself to support it, and it needs support, why use it?

The only reason I can see is if you already have it, it works OK for you, and you never want to change. Since change is a constant for me and millions of other geek boys and girls, this isn’t a viable option, so I’m working on a conversion script for Nucleus. I hate to do this (php is a pain and Nucleus has no design docs or inline comments and I know beans about SQL) it seems like the most reasonable option, given that MT has copped-out.

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Nucleus is a nice little piece of blogging software that installs real easily.

It can’t import MT yet, but that’s just a small matter of programming.

How crazy is this piece of news from Kathy Kinsley?

I just got a letter from MT about bloghouse. It says I’m in violation of their agreement for offering to install MT for people. I thought it was only if I charged for it that it was a problem. Sigh. Anyone know how to make this legal?

Yo, Ben, Mena, Anil, and Joi: are you people on drugs? Kathy is running an ISP, and she’s encouraging people to use your software by setting it up for them. You shouldn’t be upset about this, you should be happy, happy, dancing in the streets happy, crying for joy happy, tears streaming down your faces happy. But you’re threatening her for encouraging people to use Movable Type? Hello?

But I so sense a pattern here, which has come up over the last few days as I’ve seen my requests for support from the MT bulletin board going unanswered (I paid for MT, see.) MT has a new policy that it’s illegal for anyone to support their product, including them. This must be one of their VC Joi Ito’s Emergence Fantasies, somehow related to the frustration of the hive mind’s ability to support itself.

That must be it, for sure. Let’s drop those folks a note and see if we can’t get them into a 12-step program.

Kathy Kinsley’s Blog House is an alternative for Blogspot users who’re ready for the big time (where you have an archive that actually works!). She’s offering several types of accounts and it’s all good.

John McCain’s FCC Reauthorzation makes some modest refinements to the agency’s mission. See Broadband Networking Regulatory News for a summary:

Senator John McCain (R, AZ), chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, introduced a “FCC Reauthorization Act of 2003” aimed at reinvigorating the mission of the FCC. McCain said the FCC should be responsible for a wide range of duties, including establishing regulatory policies that promote competition, innovation, and investment in broadband services; ensuring that a comprehensive and sound national competitive framework for communications services exists; encouraging the best use of spectrum domestically and internationally; and providing leadership for the rapid restoration of the nation’s communications infrastructure in the event of disruption.

The full text of the bill is here.

At first blush, it doesn’t seem like a dramatic change, but I’ll analyze it in more detail later.