I read Perens’
patent nonsense with mild dismay today; mild because, luckily,
Perens seems to have lost much of his influence on the community. As
I’ve said before, patents are the major external threat to free
software, and must be taken very seriously. I’m glad to see what the
OSDL has done. The mistake Perens makes is to speak out against a
strategy on the basis that it is not perfect — it definitely is not,
but the open source approach is usually to try everything and see what
works. Also, we haven’t had much luck legislatively in the US
(remember the old League for Programming Freedom?), and perhaps a
can’t-beat-em-join-em approach a la the GPL is more workable. There
are still failure modes with this approach, so Linus’ can’t be the
only approach. But, there is nothing wrong with this idea.

The internal threat

The major internal threat is balkanization, driven primarily by
incompatible licenses. While this is usually quite difficult to
change, the future does look hopeful. The GPL v3 promises to help out
quite a bit (it is rather lame that many of the newer licenses are GPL
incompatible, and often I think this is driven by an irrational hatred
of the GPL). I saw David Turner at the FSF booth at OSCON, and there
was a little sign saying “Ask us about the GPL v3” — a promising
indicator given the FSF’s ordinary tendency to the cathedral approach.

The CORBA tale

So, near the end of February, Audrius Meskauskas started working
on a CORBA implementation for GNU Classpath. At the time I was very
skeptical of this work; I thought we could convince the JacORB developers to relicense and
donate their code, and I said as much.

That turned out to be impossible, and in any case Audrius pushed
forward with his work. Now, it turns out, he has nearly finished the
thing. The latest Classpath japi scores
are fairly amazing — we went up 3% just in the week I was away at
OSCON. Also, he says that our CORBA passes more of the standard tests
than some commercial implementations, so we aren’t just talking about
a thin veneer of API completeness.

The moral of this applies directly to the patent situation.
Sometimes, even if you think an idea is a bad one, it would be smarter
to just shut up. Nobody has a perfectly functioning bad idea
detector, and if someone else’s work doesn’t affect you, then just get
out of the way and let them try it.