*** the Long Run ***
Freedom tends to win in the long run. Look at the arc of history since the dawn of civilization, and that's what you'll see. But a lot of short runs happen in the meantime, and it's easy to lose perspective. That's the risk this week, which marks several major victories for Linux and one huge defeat for one of its best friends.
Let's start with the victories.
The first happened in Japan, although it was announced at a keynote by Sony COO Kunitake Ando at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Here's how EETimes reports the matter:
Adopting a genial and occasionally evangelical tone, Sony Corp.'s chief operating officer Kunitake Ando keynoted the opening of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) here Thursday (Jan. 9) by calling for a "global open standard" for broadband technology based on an advanced Linux platform under development by Sony that will "smash barriers" between industries, technologies and applications.
Ando warned the assembled consumer electronics industry representatives that broadband interconnectivity is a tsunami that could sweep them away unless they work together on industry-wide open standards.
Also:
Sony now has a team of engineers design an advanced version of the Linux operating system. "A number of major consumer electronics manufacturers such as Samsung, Philips and LG Electronics — except for Toshiba — are joining this open platform initiative," Ando said.
Ando's call for inter-industry collaboration was a slight departure for Sony, a long-time format warrior. But Ando emphasized that consumer electronics in the broadband age must free consumers to use video and audio content as liberally as possible, and that new technologies must allow them to mix and manipulate all the digital content at their disposal.
<http://www.eetimes.com/sys/news/OEG20030109S0049>
Back in mid-December, Sony and Matshushita (makers of Panasonic) said they were co-developing this new Linux distro, and that it would be GPL'd as well:
Sony and Matsushita Electric on Wednesday announced a partnership to develop an enhanced Linux operating system for digital home electronic devices.
The two companies have invited other consumer electronic firms to join in the effort to make the open source Linux software widely available for digital home products.
Both said any Linux operating system version they developed would be freely available under a general public license.
Any Linux OS for home electronic products would compete with Microsoft Corp., which is promoting its own operating system.
<http://www.cmpnetasia.com/ViewArt.cfm?Artid=18148&Catid=2&subcat=14>
The ironies run thick.
One is that Sony and a bevy of partners quietly abandoned Aperios, a new real-time operating system and development environment intended as an alternative to Windows and .Net. (Aside: Aperios achieved some notoriety as the OS in Aibo, Sony's robot dog. See <http://www.linuxsecurity.com/articles/security_sources_article-1089.html>) Ando said "Aperios was an operating system of a pre-Internet age and we decided that it isn't adequate for the future."
Another irony is that Ando's keynote came one day after Bill Gates' opener at CES. While Billg's talk was sprinkled with references to tempting lock-in strategies (such as SPOT, for Smart Personal Object Technologies), Ando's was highlighted by references to immediately useful real-world solutions, such as a Linux-based home networking platform called "Cocoon", which Ando called "the centerpiece of our strategy to build a new open platform that will dramatically change the whole concept of television and people's lifestyle".
Two pieces of good news here. One is that Reality is creeping into the consumer electronics business, which has been notoriously detached from it for many decades. The other is that Microsoft is finally in retreat. (More about that in a moment.)
Throughout their history, consumer electronics giants like Sony and Matshushita were even more detached from their final customers than Microsoft. They were isolated by a manufacturing and distribution system that allowed them to throw countless new products out at The Consumer Marketplace through a distribution and retailing system that operated by chumming the waters with an endless variety of goods. If consumers took some bait, producers would make more of those and abandon the failures. But even the successes were obsoleted, deliberately, on a kind of schedule.
Producers were entirely in charge of the whole process. There was no little feedback from consumers. (The producers' actual customers were the distributors and retailers anyway; not the people who actually used the stuff.)
On the demand side, personal computing changed all that. Consumers became customers, and tough ones as well. They also developed their own solutions where the supply side was unwilling or unable to oblige. They did it with DECSS, with Napster, with webcasting, with the mass adoption of MP3 and subsequent standards (get ready for Ogg Vorbis). The smart customer genie is long since out of the bottle, and Sony finally realizes that. In fact, they're looking to that genie for more guidance, every day. (They're going to get it anyway, whether they like it or not.)
On the supply side, Linux and open source development methods are blowing up a pile of producerist conventions, including the belief that the most important goods come from the giants' central research laboratories, which employ thousands and mill endless varieties of patents and highly proprietary inventions. NIH (Not Invented Here) is finally being seen for the toxic vanity it has always been. The virtues of NEA -- Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it, Anybody can improve it -- are ever-more-manifestly self-evident.
Connecting both sides is the Net. And caught between the two is Microsoft.
This brings us to our next piece of encouraging news, which comes from Australia, where The Age comes through with this headline today: "Microsoft opens Windows to counter the Linux threat". Here's how the story starts:
To try to slow the acceptance of the Linux operating system by governments abroad, Microsoft plans to announce that it will allow most governments to study the programming code of its Windows operating systems.
Under the program, governments will also be allowed to plug their security features, instead of Microsoft's technology, into Windows.
More than two dozen countries, including China and Germany, have been encouraging their agencies to use "open source" software - developed by programmers who distribute the code without charge and donate their labour to cooperatively debug and modify the software.
Specifically, Microsoft will open 97% of its code to inspection and testing by curious governments. The other 3% will also be open, though only at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington. So they're not exactly GPLing the code; but they are going through some Reality Adjustment Therapy.
One last piece of good news, along those same lines, comes from India, where Microsoft recently spent the better part of a $billion (including AIDS-fighting money from the William and Melinda Gates Foundation) to encourage Windows usage in a country with crushing poverty. The Economic Times on January 9 gave a convincing rundown on Linux' increasingly strong position in that country. <http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=33792772> And that's just one report among many.
Now for the bad news, which came early yesterday morning: the U.S. Supreme Court has sided with the government in Eldred vs. Ashcroft by a vote of 7-2. <http://news.com.com/2100-1023-980792.html>
Eldred <http://eldred.cc/> argued against the Sony Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, the latest in a series of laws that have extended and re-extended the period during which a copyright holds force (and the scope of that force as well). The constitution suggested a term of 14 years, plus another 14 for living authors. Since then Congress has ratcheted the number in a mostly upward direction, most recently with the Bono Act. Here's how John Bloom described the situation last November in the National Review:
We now have an exact replica of the medieval Stationers' Company, which controlled the English copyrights, only its names today are Disney, Bertelsmann, and AOL Time Warner. The big media companies, holding the copyrights of dead authors, have said, in effect, that Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton were wrong and that we should go back to the aristocratic system of hereditary ownership, granting copyrights in perpetuity. To effect this result, they've liberally greased the palms of Congressmen in the form of campaign contributions -- and it's worked.
In the name of Mickey Mouse and other American icons, we have gradually lengthened that 14-year limit on copyrights. At one time it was as much as 99 years, then scaled back to 75 years, then -- in one of the most anti-American acts of the last century -- suspended entirely in 1998. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of that year says simply that there will be no copyright expirations for 20 years, meaning that everything published between 1923 and 1943 will not be released into the public domain. Presumably they'll take up the matter again in 2018 and decide whether any of these books, movies, or songs are ever set free. There are 400,000 of them.
<http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-bloom112202.asp>
What does this have to do with Linux, other than an extreme overlap between the core value systems of the Linux development community and those of others fighting the Good Fight against this nonsense?
Linux was born, and has thrived, in the public domain. The Internet was designed, has grown, and continues to thrive, as one vast public place: a world of ends with nobody in the middle to assert ownership of it, or of anything that depends on it.
The captains of the publishing and entertainment industry have convinced lawmakers that the issue is about property rights. But it isn't. It's about speech. It's about what it takes to make a civilization.
There are plenty of ways that private goods, and private interests, can contribute. Characterizing speech as property kept private in perpetuity isn't one of them. And that applies to code as well as literature, music and movies.
We lost this battle. But the war goes on. And we'll win because Reality is on our side. The other side remains, in the perfect words of Whitman, "demented with the mania of owning things."
In the long run, bet on the sane.
Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal.