The Open Source Initiative has considered the World Wide Web
Consortium’s Patent Policy Framework working draft at

here

and the W3C’s Response to Public Comments

here.

The recent public disclosure of these plans to endorse patented Web
standards has ignited a major public controversy. The Open Source
Initiative’s charter requires us to speak out for the interests of
open- source developers, and this statement is intended to be our
contribution to the debate.

Recommendation for Change in the RAND Proposal

We believe that there is merit to many portions of this proposal. In
particular, we unhesitatingly endorse the patent disclosure
requirements in section 7. One does not need to settle the general
question of software patents to affirm that all developers (and not
merely open-source developers) are entitled to protection from
unethical “submarine patents”.

We further endorse in a general sense the existence of well-defined tests
for determining whether a proposed W3C standard meets the W3C’s transparency
requirements (sections 4 and 5). Clarity on these questions will better serve
web developers and the public, and the W3C is to be applauded for attempting
to document and regularize its procedures.

However, we must reject the specifics of the proposal for a RAND (“Reasonable
and Non-Discriminatory) Licensing mode. Clauses 1, 2, 3, and 6 are
unexceptionable; clause 4 is fair; but clause 5 “may be conditioned on
payment of reasonable, non-discriminatory royalties or fees” is unacceptable
as written.

While opinions may differ on whether the so-called “RAND” policy with
clause 5 is “reasonable”, there can be no question but that it is
discriminatory. Clause 5 would discriminate against open-source
developers, who operate in small volunteer project groups and have
neither the wherewithal to pay license fees nor the shelter of a
fictive legal entity with which a license might be negotiated.

OSI suggests that the proposed clause 5 can be rescued by adding a
suitable interpretation of “non-discriminatory”. The language in the
State of Maryland UCITA exempting open-source projects from
warranty requirements provides a suitable model:

The payment of royalties under a RAND license shall be waived
for any licensor of a computer program that is provided under
a license that does not impose a license fee for the right to
the source code, to make copies, to modify, and to distribute
the computer program.

This interpretation of “non-discriminatory” would leave patent-holders
the option of continuing to collect license fees from implementers
with plans to charge for the secrecy of their software.

Principles and the Larger Context

The above is a narrow technical prescription, but there are larger
issues here. The OSI would be derelict in its duty if we failed to
address those. We stand with those who see the RAND proposal as an
invasive and corrupting attempt to hijack the standards process, to
tilt the Web’s relatively level playing field in favor of players with
legions of lawyers and lots of money. That other standards
organizations who should have known better (such as the IETF) have let
this particular camel’s nose under the tent is no excuse for the W3C
to repeat that error.

RAND discriminates not merely against open-source developers, but for
entrenched monopolies and against the consumer and small businesses —
who under this proposal would be systematically deprived of
open-source alternatives and have fewer choices (all of them expensive
and proprietary).

RAND would also tend to stifle innovation. The history of the Web and
the Internet amply demonstrates that in today’s world innovation does
not come to us from the entrenched giants of technology and media —
indeed, they experience genuine innovation as an unwelcome disruption,
upsetting their strategic plans and obsolescing their cash cows.
RAND would permit — nay, it would invite — abuse of supposedly
“non-discriminatory” license terms to suppress innovation and lock in
customers.

Web innovation springs from precisely those independents and
open-source developers whom RAND would systematically freeze out of
the process. If the W3C enacts Clause 5 as written, it will be an act
of betrayal against both the Web’s history and its future. The W3C
will deserve the schism and developer revolt that would follow — and
it will deserve the fate to which this bad decision would inexorably
doom it.

In the past, “standards” that are actually manacles could be foisted
on a relatively powerless developer and user community — because both
computing technology and the software development that went with it
were expensive and centralized, requiring financial mass and corporate
management structures. In that world, there was no alternative but
fetter, and customers could only try to choose the least weighty.

The OSI exists today because those days are passing. The combination
of the Internet, personal-computer technology, and distributed
open-source development has empowered millions of users and
developers, and indeed proven that it can produce dramatically better
results than the old system. Software developers and users are
increasingly refusing to accept the kind of suppressive shenanigans
that corporate-dominated standards bodies have used in the past as
market-control tactics.

The time is ripe for confrontation. Thousands of web developers have
already made their voices heard against RAND. The largest IT
consultancy in the world has just recommended that IT customers drop
proprietary webservers in favor of the open-source Apache. The
increase in adoption of open-source operating systems on web servers
continues exploding, propelled both by pressure on capital spending
and the increasingly onerous license terms attached to their closed-source
and technically inferior competitors.

If the W3C persists in its present course, it risks having its tea
dumped in Boston harbor as the first move in a revolution that will
vest effective control of Web standards in open-source groups like the
Apache Software Foundation and entirely out of the ambit of the W3C
and its sponsors. OSI would do what we can help lead that revolt.

Open Standards Require Open Source

But W3C does not have to be on the losing side. We urge the W3C to take
this opportunity not only to affirm its royalty-free-only license
policy, but to institute a requirement that no proposal may become a
W3C standard unless it is backed by an open-source reference
implementation on an open-source platform, with patent grants
sufficient to ensure that the reference implementation remains
unencumbered.

That requirement would truly create a level playing field for all
parties — users, developers, content providers, and all of the Web’s
millions of stakeholders. It would also serve as a reliable reality
check on the tendency of paper standards to effloresce into
unimplementable monstrosities.

Your organization is supposed to be committed to a World Wide Web that
is open to all. The OSI urges W3C to remember this, and to center its
standards policy around one simple truth: open standards require open
source.

Issued by and for the Board of Directors of OSI
by Eric S. Raymond, President
9 October 2001

From eWEEK (on Yahoo News): “StarOffice has the interface familiarity and file
format compatibility that will enable it to peacefully coexist with Microsoft Office.
And its cross-platform support and ingenious use of XML (Extensible Markup
Language) will pay dividends in future, more wide-scale deployments.

New features aside, the price of StarOffice-free-should be enough to give
pause to sites weighing their software options in the context of Microsoft’s
potentially costly and entangling new licensing schemes.”

LinuxWorld: “n this series, we show how little you need to spend to outfit your
organization — big or small — with hardware some might consider
worthless, while giving away nothing in utility, speed, reliability, ease
of administration or use. Sound impossible? It’s not!” Part 4 of an ongoing series.

Linux 2.4.11-pre6 is out; changelog below; download from your preferred mirror site.

                   pre6:
                    - various: fix some module exports uncovered by stricter error checking
                    - Urban Widmark: make smbfs use same error define names as samba and win32
                    - Greg KH: USB update
                    - Tom Rini: MPC8xx ppc update
                    - Matthew Wilcox: rd.c page cache flushing fix
                    - Richard Gooch: devfs race fix: rwsem for symlinks
                    - Bj?rn Wesen: Cris arch update
                    - Nikita Danilov: reiserfs cleanup
                    - Tim Waugh: parport update
                    - Peter Rival: update alpha SMP bootup to match wait_init_idle fixes
                    - Trond Myklebust: lockd/grace period fix

                   pre5:
                    - Keith Owens: module exporting error checking
                    - Greg KH: USB update
                    - Paul Mackerras: clean up wait_init_idle(), ppc prefetch macros
                    - Jan Kara: quota fixes
                    - Abraham vd Merwe: agpgart support for Intel 830M
                    - Jakub Jelinek: ELF loader cleanups
                    - Al Viro: more cleanups
                    - David Miller: sparc64 fix, netfilter fixes
                    - me: tweak resurrected oom handling

                   pre4:
                    - Al Viro: separate out superblocks and FS namespaces: fs/super.c fathers
                      fs/namespace.c
                    - David Woodhouse: large MTD and JFFS[2] update
                    - Marcelo Tosatti: resurrect oom handling
                    - Hugh Dickins: add_to_swap_cache racefix cleanup
                    - Jean Tourrilhes: IrDA update
                    - Martin Bligh: support clustered logical APIC for >8 CPU x86 boxes
                    - Richard Henderson: alpha update

                   pre3:
                    - Al Viro: superblock cleanups, partition handling fixes and cleanups
                    - Ben Collins: firewire update
                    - Jeff Garzik: network driver updates
                    - Urban Widmark: smbfs updates
                    - Kai M?kisara: SCSI tape driver update
                    - various: embarrassing lack of error checking in ELF loader
                    - Neil Brown: md formatting cleanup.

                   pre2:
                    - me/Al Viro: fix bdget() oops with block device modules that don't
                      clean up after they exit
                    - Alan Cox: continued merging (drivers, license tags)
                    - David Miller: sparc update, network fixes
                    - Christoph Hellwig: work around broken drivers that add a gendisk more
                      than once
                    - Jakub Jelinek: handle more ELF loading special cases
                    - Trond Myklebust: NFS client and lockd reclaimer cleanups/fixes
                    - Greg KH: USB updates
                    - Mikael Pettersson: sparate out local APIC / IO-APIC config options

                   pre1:
                    - Chris Mason: fix ppp race conditions
                    - me: buffers-in-pagecache coherency, buffer.c cleanups
                    - Al Viro: block device cleanups/fixes
                    - Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS 1.1.20 update
                    - Andrea Arcangeli: VM tweaks

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, Oct. 9, 2001 — Linux NetworX, a provider of powerful and easy-to-manage cluster computing solutions, announced today that BioCryst Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: BCRX) is now using a Linux NetworX Evolocity cluster to aid in creating pharmaceuticals for the treatment of human disease and illness such as influenza and hepatitis C.

Implementing an innovative drug discovery approach, scientists at BioCryst create synthetic small-molecule inhibitors, atom by atom, to bind with specific disease-causing proteins or targets. By identifying the target protein in advance and by discovering the chemical and molecular structure of the protein, scientists believe it is possible to design a more optimal drug to interact with the protein.

?The Evolocity system from Linux NetworX speeds the rate at which BioCryst scientists are able to design and develop comprehensive compound libraries and databases of potential targets for their drug discovery efforts,? said Shane Hiett, director of information technology for BioCryst. “Not only does the Linux NetworX cluster technology fit our needs, but the ClusterWorX® management software helps us gain control of cluster administration and ensure cluster health.?

The massive amount of data computation inherent in drug design typically requires the power of a supercomputer-class system. Cluster technology is a method of linking multiple computers, or compute nodes, together to form a powerful, unified system. Linux NetworX clusters can match the performance of traditional supercomputers for a fraction of the cost.

BioCryst?s new Evolocity cluster includes 32 Pentium III 933 MHz processors, with 16 GB of memory and a 10/100 Ethernet network. Linux NetworX configured the cluster to handle complex computer modeling applications, such as X-ray crystallography and combinatorial chemistry. BioCryst utilizes the Linux NetworX ClusterWorX management software and signed an on-going service agreement as well.

?Linux NetworX is an excellent choice for biotechnology organizations demanding powerful and reliable high performance computing Linux clusters,? said Clark Roundy, vice president of marketing for Linux NetworX. ?We are pleased to see companies like BioCryst rely on our technologies to enhance their capabilities.?

About BioCryst Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Founded in 1986, BioCryst Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: BCRX) is a biopharmaceutical company focused on the development of pharmaceuticals for the treatment of viral, inflammatory/ autoimmune and cardiovascular diseases and disorders. BioCryst develops novel small-molecule pharmaceuticals using structure-based drug design, an approach to drug discovery that integrates biology, biophysics and medicinal chemistry. The Company’s most advanced drug candidate, RWJ-27021, is a neuraminidase inhibitor designed to treat and prevent viral influenza.

About Linux NetworX

Linux NetworX (www.linuxnetworx.com) brings its powerful and easy-to-manage cluster technology to those demanding high performance and high availability systems. Linux NetworX provides solutions for organizations involved in oil and gas exploration, aeronautical and chemical modeling, biotechnology research, graphics rendering and visual effects, Web serving, ISPs, ASPs, and other technological research fields. Through its innovative Evolocity hardware, ICE? cluster management tools and professional service and support, Linux NetworX provides end-to-end clustering solutions. To date, the company has built some of the largest cluster systems in the world, and boasts numerous Fortune 500 customers.

Linux is a registered trademark owned by Linus Torvalds. All other products, services and companies are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

CONTACT
Brad Rutledge
Linux NetworX
801-562-1010 ext. 218
brutledge@linuxnetworx.com

Posted at LinuxDevices: “The MyLinux Pocket Linux Workstation Project, a 100% Open Source Project sponsored by Arizona
Cooperative Power, LLC, is accepting Advanced Purchase Orders for its Wide Beta Version MyLinux
Pocket Linux Workstation (PLW). The PLW is a 100% Open Source, custom embedded Linux platform
that is small enough to fit in your pocket and yet powerful enough to serve as your workstation.”

Here’s what PC World NZ author Geoff Palmer wrote, after ditching Windows and using nothing but Linux (“cold turkey”) for a month: “In its heart of hearts I believe Microsoft realises the inevitable. It’s fighting hard – who wouldn’t? – but at the end of the day it’s
ultimately doomed. That’s why it’s pushing .NET and Passport and using XP as a sales platform. Its days as an operating system and
software tax-gatherer are numbered. It’s moving instead to position itself as an internet tax gatherer. Whether it makes that
transition depends to a large extent on how effectively it can demonise a cute, cuddly penguin called Tux.”

Brian Vincent has posted the 105th edition of Kernel Cousin Wine. Check out a notable quote from CodeWeaver CTO Jim Graham, a discussion on debugging MFC programs, the proper way to submit a patch to Wine, and Borland style imports. Posted at kt.zork.net.

“his summer, J.S. Wurzler Underwriting Managers
raised premiums by up to 15 percent on clients that use Microsoft’s Windows NT or Internet Information
Server. Wurzler found that system administrators who use open source systems tend to be better trained
than those who use Microsoft. Wurzler’s stance was bolstered last week when John Pescatore, Gartner’s
research director for Internet security, advised companies that were hit by both the Code Red and Nimda
worms to quit using IIS immediately and switch to more secure platforms like Apache.” Full story at Interactive Week.

“The business of open source has finally come of age. Open-source software is in the IT
marketplace alongside all the traditional, commercial, closed-source products. It is on the
menu of IT options for business, and it is being evaluated for its merits and deficiencies like
any other solution.

The revolution continues. Only now, business is definitely paying attention.” More from InfoWorld.