Caldera CEO Ransom Love shook up the Open Source community this week with a couple of pronouncements. What made the most news: Love’s partial agreement with Microsoft executive Craig Mundie, who ripped into the supposed evils of the GNU General Public License a couple of weeks ago.

Love chatted up several technology journalists this week, and he told them that the GPL was Open Source’s “weakest point” and hinted that Caldera was working on a BSD-type of license. Caldera also completed its acquisition of pieces of Unix company Santa Cruz Operation and then announced that it has become the world’s largest Linux company.

Love also talked to NewsForge’s Jack Bryar this week about a wide-ranging list of topics, from Caldera’s “world’s largest” claim to the GPL to Caldera’s place in the Open Source community.

Red Hat doesn’t like Netscape

But this isn’t the Caldera weekly news wrapup. Other news broke out, too. Linux distributor Red Hat announced this week it would dump Netscape for the Mozilla browser once Mozilla reaches the 1.0 version (maybe we should say if Mozilla ever reaches the 1.0 version). For the record, we should mention that the long-awaited browser did announce its 0.9 version this week.

Torvalds doesn’t like software subscriptions

Linux father Linus Torvalds punched back at Microsoft this week after the Mundie speech. Torvalds criticized software subscription schemes, like Microsoft’s software renting plan announced this week. Torvalds said software subscriptions are just plain bad for customers, although we all know, of course, that Microsoft would never do something to prop up its bottom line at the expense of consumers. (Note sarcasm.)

Also worth reading, if you didn’t get enough of the Open Source community’s response to Mundie last week, is Torvalds’ comments in an interview with ZD Net.

New in NewsForge

You saw these stories first in NewsForge this week:

• News editor Dan Berkes broke the news that a company called CodeWeavers is releasing a program that will allow Linux Web browsers to run Windows plug-ins such as Quicktime and Shockwave.

• We reported on IP.com and The Foresight Institute’s launch of a “defensive” intellectual property database for programmers who don’t want to patent their work at PriorArt.org. However, Free Software leader Richard Stallman argued that the Web site won’t solve the problem of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issuing patents for very minor creations.

• Editor-in-chief Robin Miller reported on the Open Source Initiative board’s vote to grant the OSI Certification Mark to two licenses, the Apple Public Source License, version 1.2, and IBM’s Common Public License, version 0.5.

There are major problems with priorart.org. Actually, two
problems — one tactical, and one strategic. In the U.S. patent system, if the PTO looked at certain prior art and
decided to issue the patent anyway, the court is supposed to presume
the PTO was right to regard that prior art as insufficient.
But if the PTO was unaware of the prior art, then the court can look
at it with an unbiased eye.As a result, prior art is more effective against patents if the PTO
does not know about it. For potential patent victims to inform the
PTO about prior art is a self-defeating project.

The effect of this is worse than you might think, because of the way
the PTO uses prior art. The question they are supposed to ask is, “Is this
idea unobvious given the known prior art?” But their threshold of
“unobvious” is so low, that in practice the tiniest difference from
the known prior art is enough excuse for them to issue a patent. The
courts are much more likely to apply a sensible definition of
“unobvious”, if they are not blocked by a prior PTO decision about the
same prior art.

Then there is the strategic problem. I have seen publicity associated
with this activity, and it serves as an excuse to whitewash the system
of software patents. The publicity suggests that we could live with
software patents, if only we “work to make the system function” in
this way. It encourages people to think that the only problem in
software patents is when non-novel ideas are patented, and that
software patents on new ideas (some brilliant, most pedestrian) are
ok. And that will undermine the efforts now under way in Europe to
prevent software patents there.

Organized efforts to collect prior art could be useful if they avoid
these two problems. But if they have these problems, they can easily
do more harm than good.

This is a non-exclusive message sent to us by Richard M. Stallman. It is published here with his permission.