GNOME: a "cowboy project"?

Article here.

There are a couple of claims in the article which seem worth examining:

GNOME had not included support for the Open Document Format, which was accepted by the ISO as a standard in 2006, in either the word processor Abiword or the spreadsheet Gnumeric, which are part of GNOME.

Not only does Abiword support ODF, and has done for a while, but its deployment within the OLPC platform is ODF by default.

Gnumeric support is also there - it's difficult to say when it was "added" because it emerged from the StarOffice support, it seems. The OASIS "ODF Advantages" PDF puts support for Abiword and Gnumeric at September 2005.

Asked whether, in view of the principled stand taken by the K Desktop Environment on the OOXML issue, the GNU Project would officially acknowledge this (Stallman has acknowledged it in a posting to a GNOME mailing list) and consider nominating the K Desktop Environment as one that now met all the requirements for a free software project, Stallman replied: "That would be a very drastic thing to do."

I wonder if either the question was badly put, or the answer badly reported - RMS has accepted KDE as a free software project for a long time now, and it's listed in the FSF directory.

GPL and sublicensing

Story here, repeated almost verbatim here

A common criticism of the MS OOXML specification is that the patent promise is insufficient to allow an open source implementation without problems, and this story makes a specific claim about the patent license that we can examine:

"What Microsoft intends to do with its OSP is to forbid sublicensability, which is one of the cornerstone for distributing GPL code."

Legally, there are really two aspects to this: first, is sublicensing a corner stone for distributing GPL code (covered by copyrights), and second, does that apply to patent rights (rather than copyrights)? It's important to address both those aspects, since either could be true and would affect distribution in different ways.

First, the copyrights themselves. The GPLv2 doesn't address copyright sublicenses explicitly, but does say that "the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor" (section 6) which isn't a sublicense. GPLv3 is explicit, though: "Sublicensing is not allowed; section 10 makes it unnecessary." (section 2, last para).

Now addressing patents, the position GPLv2 takes on patent licenses is "a patent license [must] permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you" (my edit, the GPL states that in the inverse, section 7). It doesn't require the ability to sublicense, or request it.

GPLv3's section 11 (Patents) is considerably more complex than the v2 counterpart, but in essence requires contributors to grant a "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license". It doesn't ask for the ability to sublicense, and it's difficult to see why you'd need one given the initial license granted by contributors.

Accidental mob justice

Sometimes, the free software community decides to "mobilise" on an issue, and it pays dividends: a good example of this could be software patents in Europe, where everyone spoke up at the same time to ensure that they were heard.

Other times, it doesn't work so well. More often that not, problems occur because someone got the wrong end of the stick about something, blogged it, and the wider community decide to get active. Two good examples recently:

1. A number of sites, including Slashdot, have run a story about a school student being given detention for running Firefox. It turns out that this is a hoax based around a doctored detention letter, and the school had to respond after meny people started contacting them.
   


2. The WHAT-WG mailing list was deluged earlier this month after everyone and their dog blogged about Ogg being removed from the HTML 5 spec. Many people didn't realise that decision was merely one step on the path rather than the final position, and consequently many angry contributions were received by WHAT-WG, rather than more considered arguments in favour of standardizing on Ogg.

It's very easy to publicize "scandalous" issues, and get people to respond. It's a lot harder to undo. Sometimes, all it takes is a simple e-mail to check a fact out before releasing the hounds.

False attribution

Story here, referencing this.

When you write a story claiming that somebody said something, you'd better make sure they actually said it. In this case the headline is "Novell Vice President Again Defends Microsoft’s OOXML", and the story says "As far as attendant of the XML 2007 conference are concerned, Novell, represented by de Icaza in this case, opines that OOXML is needed."

Let's see what statements are attributable to de Icaza in the source material:

• without a direct quote, he "said at the outset of his remarks on OOXML and ODF interop that he was not going to get into the corporate politics surrounding the two formats. De Icaza noted that Novell supports both OOXML and ODF via its use of Open Office."
• “In 2006, there was lots of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about the problems behind OOXML and it went downhill from there,” de Icaza said.
• De Icaza said Novell’s major issue around the dueling file formats was “there is no one-to-one mapping” between them. There are features in ODF, like Page Styles, which have no equivalent in OOXML.
• “Neither group (Microsoft nor the ODF camp) is willing to make the big changes required for real compatibility,” de Icaza said.
• “We need Microsoft’s (ODF interoperability) commitment to go beyond 1.0,” he said.
• Objection over the size of Microsoft’s and the ODF’s file-format specs is a red herring, de Icaza said. What’s really needed is more developers who are building applications using OOXML and ODF to offer critiques of what does/doesn’t work, in terms of interoperability.
• There’s no end in sight to the ongoing disputes between the two file-format camps, de Icaza said. “Sadly, there is a lot of money at stake here,” de Icaza concluded.

Which of these statements is defence of OOXML? And why is no attention paid to the statements he makes against OOXML, that it is missing features found in ODF, and that MS have no long-standing commitment to ODF interoperability.

It's always worth following the links behind stories to see what bloggers base their opinions on, you may find you come to a different conclusion sometimes.

OpenDocument Foundation saga

More than enough words have been expended on the sorry saga of the Foundation, the story of which I will not repeat here.

However, this bit of investigation by David Berlind at ZDNet is worth a read. The public words and some of the private ones are sewn up in rough chronological order, and though the author draws an implicit conclusion (at least, to this reader) he rightly points out the different scenarios which explain the facts. Written relatively neutrally, it seems to be a decent sum-up.

Why fact check exists

In a very timely co-incidence, one of the blogs I analyzed earlier today was cited on the gnome-foundation list, as Richard Stallman had been led to believe that GNOME was now dependent on Mono. You can follow that thread to see what the developers' responses were, suffice to say the basic fact of the matter is that Mono is not required to run GNOME.

A later post in that mail thread I think spells out why a blog like this is required:

On Nov 29, 2007 1:33 PM, Luis Villa  wrote:
> On Nov 29, 2007 5:59 AM, Jeff Waugh  wrote:
> > 
> >
> > > I think you're way too harsh on people who actually concluded things like:
> >
> > Sorry, but the negativity of that site greatly outweighs the positive. It
> > takes more than a little sucking up to earn back my respect after the crap
> > they've been spewing.
>
> I'll second this. The fact:fiction ratio of boycottnovell is just
> incredibly, incredibly bad.

RMS message read "If part of it is not accurate, I hope someone will
explain." Do you care to sort out what is fact and what is fiction?

It is, of course, impossible to present a view of what goes on in the world in an un-biased fashion. We can't do that here. We can attempt to address some of the stories we notice seem to be out-of-sync with reality, though, and present a few facts which the reader might be unaware of. It's more essential than ever to read any material online with a critical eye.

ASUS' GPL resolution on EeePC

Story here, but also in other places.

The story I'm referring to isn't the worst, but I think there is a basic error here: the GPL doesn't say ASUS have to put the source code to their system online.

ASUS are distributing their EeePC with GPL'd software pre-loaded. I'm pretty sure - but haven't had it confirmed - that they are not shipping it with the source code on CDs. If you don't ship the source with the software, the GPL is very clear: you need to make an offer to give the source, or relay the offer you have.

If someone requested the source from ASUS, and they didn't make it available, that would be inconsistent with the GPL, and therefore would likely be a violation of copyright. However, that doesn't seem to be what happened: someone requested it from ASUS, and ASUS made it available.

Was ASUS ever in "violation of the GPL"? Not making the source available to begin with is not inconsistent with the license, and I don't see any evidence that ASUS refused to supply source.

The "Groklaw" blog made this comment about the state of affairs:

PJ: Actually, no. My understanding is that they need to get permission from the authors of the code to be able to redistribute that code again under the GPLv2. It's not automatic. Perhaps they have done so. If not, they would, I believe, remain out of compliance.

This comment comes from the "News Picks", which sadly don't seem to have permalinks so I cannot cite it directly.

PJ is right in that if ASUS were out of compliance, they could not automatically rectify the situation with GPLv2: GPLv3 allows that, but not v2. The implicit assumption is that there were not in compliance, and that doesn't seem to be supported by the facts at the moment.

Novell's "latest discrimination"

Story here.

This posting at "Boycott Novell" makes a two main claims we'll deal with here:

1. Novell is "forking" OOo,
2. that the fork is advantageous on Windows.

The "fork" is the repository at http://go-oo.org/. This has been covered a number of times before by many people. Here are some facts about go-oo which aren't usually mentioned:

• this "fork" is actually used by many in the community, such as Debian, Mandriva, Gentoo. In fact, there's an extremely useful page which can show you exactly who takes which patches. For example, Debian take the calc-solver work Kohei did, if you examine the DebianBase rule.
• if we look at which patches are Win32Only, there is only one: accept-underscores-in-hostnames.diff
• if you look at that patch, all it does is make the "_" acceptable in a URI.

Rather than serving Novell alone, it seems go-oo serves the needs of a wide variety of Linux distributions by providing the build tools, patches and extra features which many people need. It does help building on Windows, but it is unclear where any advantage might lie: sadly, the original posting only makes claims, and doesn't back those up with references which we can analyze deeper.

About the open source fact-check

This blog has a single purpose: to analyze blog postings about open source, and to do some basic fact-checking where necessary. This has become more important because there is an increasing number of blogs which have a bias and political view-point they are trying to promote, and that are not being counter-balanced.

What can you expect to read here? Well, we'll be dissecting some of the more salacious "news" you will see in various places, and actually look at the facts behind it - do a bit of research, see what the situation really is.

What you won't find here are promotions of any particular software or project: it's up to you to choose what open source you want to use. We won't promote or denigrate any particular company. We won't make personal attacks on people, although we may indirectly be commenting on their journalistic skills: if it seems they've done a bad job writing about something, that's unavoidable.

There is no one particular blog we are concentrating on, although by their nature some of them will come up more often because they have a track record of poor writing and research.