Dana Blankenhorn

Perens Covenant A Quick Fix for the Oracle Copyright Loophole

Back when I was covering open source every day for ZDNet, the issue of control was just in the process of switching from patent to copyright.

Oracle was the villain here. After buying Sun Microsystems, holder of important open source projects like Solaris, OpenOffice and Java, Oracle used its control of copyright for those projects to try and monetize them.

Programmers who had, in good faith, contributed their work to a shared code base, suddenly found a new owner trying to make money off their work. They were pissed.

But Oracle had found a loophole in the open source ethos. Copyright could control code. So the license a project had, and the position of that license on what I termed the Open Source Incline, didn't really matter. Copyright mattered. And without some control over copyright by an outside party, a project's new owner was free to do whatever they wanted.

Apache had “fixed” this long before by making it a policy that code contributors retained their copyrights. But even this solution isn't foolproof. It can kill a project if the lead developer decides to take the project in a direction a minority don't like – they just pull their copyrights and that's it. Dead end for the customer.

Besides, Apache supports a BSD-like license, the Apache license. Beloved of corporate America because it's “permissive,” it basically permits any member of the project from withholding their own code contributions and productizing them. You need X to make Y work, pay – even if you were a code contributor to X.

Can IBM Succeed Where Obama Failed?

There was a lot of chuckling over WellPoint's  announcement that it will be partnering with IBM to use that company's Watson supercomputer for medical diagnoses.

The idea is that Watson will combine patient medical histories, tests, medical literature and (perhaps most important) clinical best practices to decide quickly what doctors should be doing.

It's not the only such deal in the market. Other tech companies have similar initiatives. AT&T calls its program ForHealth. 

The idea in all these cases is the same, to take some measure of decision making out of the hands of doctors, and give insurers a rationale for denying expensive treatments when less costly ones are available. 

Another term for this is comparative effectiveness. You look at what a lot of people have done in similar situations, what happened, then do what works best.

Bright Spots Amid U.S. Solar Gloom

The collapse of Evergreen and Solyndra has accelerated a backlash among Republicans drunk on fossil fuels, with states with GOP governors seeking to reverse field on renewables and the party licking its chops for an industry scandal that might topple the Administration.

Fact is, solar is a boom-and-bust market. Last year was a boom.  This year looks like a bust, due to overproduction of last year's model panels, mainly by Chinese companies eager to bury foreign competitors. The U.S. is soaking up much of this capacity with 24 GW in non-residential solar projects now in the pipeline

Few remember this but the Japanese were killing the U.S. in PCs almost a quarter-century ago. Two things stopped them. The Japanese stock market crashed in 1987 but, more important, technology changed as Dell Computer used just-in-time manufacturing and parts sourcing to eliminate the time lag between production and sales.

Solar technology is also changing, rapidly. It is this innovation that will see off the Chinese challenge. Not all these relate directly to the efficiency or cost of solar, but they add up.

Leave Klinsy Al-o-o-o-o-ne!

Like other American footy fans I was very disappointed in the national team's losses to Costa Rica and Belgium over the international break.

The youngsters came out flying at the start of the first game and faded. The oldsters did the best they could but made one mistake and paid for it.

The announcers were all upset with the coach. In a way that's good. It shows we care. But in this case it's unfair.

The reason lay in Klinsmann's smile, which almost never left his face throughout the two matches.

What Has Really Happened Since 9-11

 

In the 10 years since 9-11 Americans have become a sour, angry, and paranoid people.

The costs of the wars begun in the wake of the attack, combined with the corruption of the Bush Administration and the financial crisis, have caused our incomes to remain fairly static over the period.

In an era of growing scarcity, the rich always take it out on the poor, and even the middle class. They're eating the seed corn of their own market, and the fact that poor and middle class people haven't revolted against this treatment is a testament to the true patriotism and patience of the American people.

While our troops have been dying overseas our focus has turned inward. On this anniversary I want to say that's the wrong focus.

Energizing The Silent Majority

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 38 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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One hallmark of a crisis is that the falling Thesis makes the most noise.

Whether we're talking about Confederates, Monopolists, Liberty Leaguers or Hippies, it's always the folks whose world has just crashed, whose economic models have proven their failure, that wind up dominating the culture in the early days of the next era.

I have written about this before in the context of the 1960s, about how Nixon was a figure of ridicule by the culture, about how his suburban supporters were the butt of jokes, and about how surprised people were, in retrospect, both at how powerful he was and how liberal his Administration was.

This was also true of FDR. He didn't set out to be a liberal, and the deficits run up during the Great Depression were fairly minor. They certainly weren't stimulative, until World War II forced his hand. Theodore Roosevelt was actually an establishment figure, a New York blowhard put on McKinley's 1900 ticket to get rid of him. And Lincoln, at this point in his term, was considered a shoe-in for retirement, not re-election, because there seemed no end in sight to a war that, while launched with Napoleonic enthusiasm, was by this time taking on aspects of both World War I (trenches) and World War II (death camps and war on civilians).

What's interesting about the majorities of that time, in fact, is how relatively passive they were. And how disappointed they were, by this point in the cycle, with their new leaders.

Which brings us, once again, to the crisis of our time, and the crisis leader, Barack Obama.

A Cloud is a Cloud

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff decided to start one of those pissing matches tech is famous for by calling Oracle's cloud offerings a “false cloud” at his latest corporate conference. 

Benioff, who looks a bit like former Borland CEO Philippe Kahn circa 1988, has a lot in common with the man. He's a salesman, a showman. He's about sizzle. When he takes the stage, it's to entertain, inspire, and provoke. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

He has some good points. Virtualization, by itself, is not a cloud. Software, even running on a server, is not a cloud. Running enterprise applications, even if you have a cloud stack installed somewhere, is not a cloud.

9-11 And Urban Transformation

This week, Mayor Michael Bloomberg hopes to turn the 10th anniversary of 9-11 into a celebration of New York's rebirth.

But it's not a rebirth.

It's a reinvention. And it's happening across the country, unobserved and often unremarked upon.

The Downtown Alliance, which advocates for the area, notes that lower Manhattan has added 56,000 residents, calling that a mark of its progress. But that was never the benchmark before.

Since the Second World War, the benchmark for the health of a downtown was the amount of commercial space it had available, and how much of that space was rented. Downtown was the commercial center, the office center, it was where the elite went to work.

But even absent 9-11, that has been changing. Why? Because the engine of a city's growth is no longer its commercial heart. It's no longer about moving money, about financial commerce, about planning. It's about exchanging ideas, about intellectual property.

And, unknown to those who make our policy regarding intellectual property, the nature of that has changed as well. We're used to thinking of it as property, something to be controlled by patent and copyright. It's not. It's the raw material for new discoveries. It's the steel, not the car.

The Core of Corruption in “College” Football

Everyone knows college football is corrupt. It always has been.

But as another season kicks off, with more poor kids getting their knees, backs and heads stoved-in for the entertainment of rich alumni, it's a good time to note the source of that corruption.

The NFL.

Football is the only collegiate sport that serves as the sole minor league for its professional game. Yes, there are NBA basketball players on some campuses, but most are just passing through for a year. Seniors are usually second-rounders. Some baseball players go pro, but you can choose to sign right out of high school, and most clubs prefer that you do. Future pros are scattered among the other sports, although you know what they call collegiate womens' gymnastics don't you – the senior tour.

Only in football (American football you dork, not soccer) does the pro sport depend on the college sport to train its employees. A few kids have gone early, but most turn into negative examples. No, the techniques, the training, the coaching, the schemes – the pro game is college dependent. (Thus the league imposed an NCAA penalty on Terrelle Pryor when he left Ohio State, suspending him for five pro games. In poker that is called a tell.)

A Stimulus Program That Saves Money and Creates Jobs

A French reporter called me last week after I wrote about the failure of Solyndra here.  (Don't believe me. Here's the story.)

She was asking about whether the President was in trouble, due to the failure of loan guarantees to jump-start the industry. I agreed those programs had not worked, adding government has two roles in renewable energy, expanding research and guaranteeing a market.

The President has taken two important steps recently to assure a steady flow of research dollars. The first was the Defense Department's commitment of $7 billion to becoming more energy-independent. The second was the rise in CAFE standards. 

Then I told her that the best possible short-term stimulus that might come from the President next week would focus on the cheapest form of renewable energy there is, something we have more of than any country in the world, something we can access cheaply and without new technology.

Efficiency.