Wednesday, March 27, 2002
Wallowing in Paradox
Yesterday evening my wife and I went to hear a lecture by the writer <http://www.pacificnews.org/contributors/rodriguez/> and public TV essayist <<http://www.pbs.org/newshour/essays/richard_rodriguez.html>> Richard Rodriguez, who was on the circuit flogging his new book, "Brown: The Last Discovery of America".
Rodriguez is a deep thinker, a provocative writer and a powerful speaker who takes great pleasure in exposing the ironies and paradoxes of a race-obsessed society that desperately needs to categorize the uncategorizable. Rodriguez, by one label a Mexican-American intellectual, is also a gay Catholic among whose opinions are many we would call conservative and Republican, even though his day jobs are all in what the Wall Street Journal would call Liberal Media -- the Pacific News Service and the News Hour on PBS. The circle of his Mexican family, he tells us, includes a vivid blonde married to a Hindu Indian, whose grown son people mistake for Italian.
His lecture was terrific, but the most memorable thing I had ever heard him say was in one of his News Hour essays, back in 1992, on the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America. Speaking for the Indian ancestors he so strongly resembles, he wondered if Spanish culture in fact did not conquer the Indians. "Perhaps," he said, "we stole it."
Which brings me to the matter of World Domination.
On the way back to the parking garage after the lecture, my wife and I talked about how Linux is turning into a universal building material, and how this risks making Linux a dull subject. "News about Linux is like news about concrete," my wife said. "New! Improved! Now contains rebar!"
Lately Linux has proven very useful to some of the largest builders in the computer business. IBM's love for Linux is well-advertised, to say the least. And yesterday Hewlett-Packard announced the world's largest Linux-based supercomputer. <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6005> No doubt a lot of rebar is involved.
But what else is happening as Linux increasingly becomes the building material of choice for giant companies? The short answer is: paradoxical stuff.
For example, news came this last week that IBM seems to have wrestled control of the Java conversation away from Sun (its Java partner), not only by employing open source as a strategy, but by partnering with Microsoft on SOAP and UDDI. Where XML-RPC opened a popular path for RPCs through HTTP, SOAP stretched functionality to a bunch of other Net protocols. That was nice by itself, but the coup de grace came when IBM open-sourced all of its Eclipse code, making it easy for lots of developers to come up with stuff that routes RPCs between different operating systems, all with one IDE. Suddenly SOAP looked like a kind of platform. Will this attract Windows developers to Linux? Well, which OS is cheaper to work with and features the most rebar?
So far so good. But warnings quickly came from the Sun camp. One friend wrote this to me a few days ago:
1) SOAP was (effectively) invented by Microsoft. They then submitted it to W3C for consideration as a standard. It had lots of proprietary hooks in it, which IBM took them to the mat for. Between the two of them, they fixed most of the problems in the spec (other than the fundamental problem that SOAP is a way to execute untrusted content through a firewall :-) and the W3C accepted it and has been moving it forward as a standard. Sun as well as many other companies now support it.
2) Sun was upset that IBM launched its Eclipse initiative (open-source development platform) not because it was a "threat to the JCP and/or Java", but because we have had an open-source development platform in place for over three years (netbeans.org) which would have welcomed IBM's participation and involvement with open arms. NetBeans is a free, open-source IDE with a pluggable architecture that literally hundreds of companies have written modules for. Instead, IBM seemed to want to split the community and decided to roll their own. Just like .NET was a reaction to Microsoft loosing the enterprise to J2EE, Eclipse seems to be a reaction to the success of NetBeans. On the plus side, there is talk of a NetBean/Eclipse rapprochement, which would be ideal. There is much to be gained by cooperating in this space. If we fragment the developer community unnecessarily, Microsoft is the only winner.
Later he added this:
Sun has been in a battle to preserve the Java trademark (so it doesn't turn into "Kleenex" and get immediately co-opted by - how shall I say it - companies less interested in preserving platform-independence) for years. In order to do that, we have to prove (in a court of law if we have to, which is what trademark battles come down to) that we have quality assurance over anything that is called "Java". Open-source presents challenges for that, as an open-source project tends to evolve according to what people want to throw in, rather than by figuring out what's needed, agreeing to amend the spec, amending the spec, implementing the spec, then finally adding the new functionality to the test suite to ensure compatibility between all compliant implementations. It is true you can "innovate" a whole lot faster by just throwing the doors completely open, but then you rapidly lose "write once, run anywhere" and the platform becomes balkanized. Sun is absolutely committed to not allowing that to happen, and the challenge has been how to balance the obvious goodness of open-source with preserving the fundamental values of the Java platform.
Linux addresses this by (at one point - is it still this way?) having Linus decide what gets adopted into the main tree and what doesn't. Sun is doing it by putting requirements on developers to maintain compatibility with the spec and the test suite, and by making sure the test suite is complete enough. We have recently (announced at JavaOne) addressed all of the concerns expressed by Apache over how open-source is handled in the Java Community Process. When the next version of the JSPA (the legal agreement that companies sign to develop under the JCP) is ratified by the JCP Executive Committee (again, it is not up to Sun here, the JCP is run by the industry, and we have one vote) then it will be possible to develop and release Java standards under open source. This will be so because there will be guarantees in place that maintain compatibility. Without those guarantees, Sun was not willing to allow open source because of the fear of balkanization outlined above. Apache is now completely satisfied - check out <http://www1.internetwire.com/iwire/release_html_b1?release_id=39838> Believe it or not, Sun really wants to be a good community member here, but we have demonstatable proof that there are companies out there who have it in for the Java platform. We have needed to move carefully to preserve the unique value that the Java platform brings to developers.
My friend, who wishes to remain anonymous, disclaims any role speaking for Sun here. He's a rank & file worker from deep in the organization -- an old UNIX veteran who knows and uses Linux as well. He thinks Sun and the communities it supports deserve to be heard here -- and not in the usual ways through the usual channels. I agree.
Okay, now let's move on to the next piece of news, specifically to a piece David Berlind of ZDNet wrote a piece a couple days ago <http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2861528,00.html> titled "IBM drops Internet patent bombshell," in which he says an IBM patent claim, disclosed in a filing with the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), "could threaten royalty-free access to a key Internet standard protocol... called ebXML..." After reading the piece, my friend from Sun wrote this:
...beware of large companies carrying massive patent portfolios, for they aim to make you pay.
Obviously, all kinds of stuff is arguable here. We could go down that hole. But instead, let's look at the paradoxes and ironies of it all.
A brilliant priest once told me it is impossible to take the teachings of great religious leaders literally, not only because they tended to speak in arcane languages using untranslatable metaphors, but because they expressed their truths in profound paradoxes that tended to survive translation quite intact. "You can often spot a truth because it arrives in a paradox," he said.
Linux World Domination, for example. Try to find a more paradoxical idea in all of computing. Or Internet World Domination, for that matter. What we have here is a hypersimple worldwide network that can't help surviving every attempt to control it. That Linux and the Net facilitate the promulgation of each other is no coincidence, no?
And now, looking at how businesses are putting both to use, I find myself wondering what Linux and the Net are both busy stealing.