[dot] aKademy Interview: John Terpstra on Challenges to Free Software

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1094179086/

From: Tom Chance <akademy-team at kde.org>
Dept: let's-get-our-act-together
Date: Friday 03/Sep/2004, @04:38

aKademy Interview: John Terpstra on Challenges to Free Software
===============================================================

   John Terpstra, one of the long-term members of the Samba Team, never
shies away from speaking his mind. He is known not only for his work on
documenting Samba, and his long experience as a Senior Consultant, but
also for his outspoken views on intellectual property. Intrigued by an
article [http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040805065337222] he
published on Groklaw [http://www.groklaw.net/] recently, I took his
attendance at the KDE World Summit - aKademy
[http://conference2004.kde.org/] - as an opportunity to talk to him
about his thoughts on intellectual property, what problems the free
software community faces, and how we (including KDE specifically) should
respond. Read on for my reflections on our discussion.

     Open Technology Development Under Threat
     John firmly believes that open technology development is under
threat, both from direct legal and financial attacks, and from being
limited technologically in its ability to compete by way of deliberately
restrictive laws in respect of intellectual property. Various
organisations and individuals, he asserts, are willing to sacrifice the
world's freedom to use technology for the sake of their own short-term
gain.
     He compared the current use of Intellectual Property (IP) law to
the attacks on science and religious heresy in the European Reformation,
where those leading the attacks do so under the guise of protecting some
valuable existing cultural network. This message in and of itself is not
new, but John opened the interview with a tone of real concern. While
the Reformation may show precedent for these kinds of attacks, he
proposes that the world is complacent, including open source and free
software communities, and that if we are to save ourselves from a
structural shift that will make the free software project impossible, we
must organise a clearly focused response.

     On Software Patents, Copyrights, Trademarks and Licensing Deals
     John asserts that software market leaders have spent the past
thirty years in particular amassing vast portfolios of software patents,
copyrights, trademarks and licensing deals. That a company should focus
on IP is not a problem for him - in fact he challenges the software
community who reject the term IP to provide a better way of describing
in cogent terms the very substance of creative thinking that is embodied
in free software - and that we as a community particularly treasure. His
concerns come in part from analysing the Information Technology (IT)
market over the past few years: "it has suffered a major downturn in
parallel with the rest of the economy, which should be seen as a
judgement against the IT industry. It should be in demand when companies
need to cut costs and run a business in an increasingly competitive
environment".

     John was quick to point out the large number of experienced
management has been laid off over the past four years and replaced by
younger, less experienced employees. He said that "we will soon see
these large companies' profits decrease as they realise the need for
experienced managers. Many displaced executives are now being hired as
short-term consultants." The opportunity for informed Open Source
advocates is expanding - not contracting.

     On Linux Adoption
     When I mentioned how the major software vendors are increasingly
supporting Linux and Open Source software in general, he replied, "The
major IT vendors are focussing on large businesses. Only one company is
focussed on the entire market spectrum - Microsoft, and many of their
clients want an alternative solution. The trouble is that no Open Source
company has a clear focus on offering such a solution. Linux companies
are targetting the displacement of traditional UNIX systems." He went on
to say that, "the small to medium business market is adopting Linux
despite the lack of clear focus in this vital part of the market."

     A quick review of business statistics (see this page
[http://www.bizstats.com/businesses.htm]) shows that there are 5.6
million businesses in the USA alone. If we factor this according to the
USA proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) this equates to there
being approximately 17 million businesses globally. The major vendors
focus their activities at the top 2% of all businesses. By number of
business establishments 98% of all IT opportunity is accounted for by
small business needs that do not need large-scale computing solutions,
but that are also most dependant on support from consultants and
resellers.

     Large Technology and Media Business Interests in Opposition to Free
Software Community
     So what does all of this mean for the free software community? Put
simply, for John it is both a clear warning and an opportunity. We
should be aware that the large technology and media business interests
are in direct opposition to the interests of the free software
community, even if they appear to be supporting us.

     Before he answered that question, he returned briefly to the point
of large businesses that appear to support us. When I asked him why we
should not value their contribution, he replied: "How should we measure
that: by their revenue? By their contributions in terms of code? By
their innovations?" John was dismissive: "There will be a fundamental
reshaping of the market, which can only come from the bottom up, i.e.
from the free software community and from small companies".

     On Open Standards
     So John's vision is that we should focus on building a market
infrastructure that favours open standards, free software where
appropriate, and small to medium sized businesses, which account for
more than two thirds of the market already, but are downtrodden and in
need of better solutions.

     I put it to John that such a goal is laudable, but not exactly
something a free software advocate or small company could read and act
on. He concurred, and admitted that he has no silver bullet
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_bullet], but had some advice. "The
two most important strategies we must adopt are to encourage and adhere
to open standards, which undermine big IP oriented business' ability to
monopolise and dominate the marketplace. And we must develop a more
customer-oriented free software market by listening to and engaging with
customers, and then building stronger channels of communication, so that
small and medium sized companies develop a relationship with free
software and open standards. If the entire small and medium sized
business community were to migrate to these effective Open Source
solutions, we'd win overnight".

     John quickly became more specific on what those of us involved in
the free software community can do to achieve this. First, he urges all
free software advocates to look for work in the small companies, and to
support them with our purchasing decisions. Second, he thinks that the
small and medium sized companies need to improve their total business
environment, including better training offers and more hand-holding of
customers. "This is a big opportunity for cell groups, local providers,
to step in and beat the big players at delivering what customers want".

     Reshaping the Market
     Finally, he has a list of major advances in the products themselves
to address customer needs that he considers critical for the success of
the products themselves, and therefore of our efforts to reshape the
market.

     The harder of his changes fall into the category of migration
technologies. "How", he asks, "can we convince a company that has built
its operations around a proprietary solution to suddenly migrate if in
doing so they lose both the solutions themselves and the data contained
therein?" He gave the example of a company that he believes is typical,
one which uses custom programmed Microsoft Access products to manage its
entire operation. "If the programmer who created that solution has left,
taking the source code with him, that company is stuck relying on this
dated solution". Conventionally, free software advocates would see that
as an ideal opportunity, but John pointed out that unless the data could
be migrated seamlessly to a new free software solution, the process
would be extremely expensive and time-consuming. His work for Samba
lends weight to this point. But despite progress with Samba, groupware
integration and some partial office solutions, free software still
cannot offer a streamlined migration across the range of solutions
businesses depend upon. "That", he says, "has to change".

     Desktop to Server Integration
     The second change is a matter of complete integration across all
aspects of the desktop and the server. Given the disagreement over such
moderate integration efforts as those under the umbrella of
freedesktop.org [http://www.freedesktop.org], advocating something so
radical as complete integration will be met with raised eyebrows by
some. But John wants to see a desktop where you can, for example, open a
Control Center that will let you manage everything, the entire
configuration architecture, in one place. This would require a major
standardisation effort that John says KDE can and must lead.

     He believes that KDE is already an extremely advanced bit of
technology - he described it as "seriously slick" - and expressed his
admiration of the advances between KDE 3.0 and KDE 3.3. When told about
some of the latest KDE news, such as the Microsoft Exchange connector
for Kolab and the power of the Kiosk framework, his opinions were
reinforced.

     So why was he telling me all of this? "Because", he said, "we need
to get our act together". It isn't a matter of KDE being cooler than
GNOME, nor of free software being technically superior to proprietary
software in some areas. If we can't reshape the market around open
standards and customer satisfaction, he believes free software community
will come under increasingly frequent and damaging attacks. And whilst
the technically able members of the community may be able to continue
development to some extent (to what extent is unclear since new hardware
may become incompatible as well), by inaction we may fail where the
Reformation and Enlightenment seceded, and fall to the selfish interests
of a narrow group of businesses. KDE is on the forefront of this fight,
and it's important that we win.