SYS-CON.TV spoke exclusively at LinuxWorld San Francisco 2005 with Bruce Perens, a recognized leader in the open source software community and the original author of the "Open Source Definition," now widely recognized as the authoritative description of open source software. Few can match the duration, depth and variety of Bruce's experience in the open source world: he co-founded several well-known open source organizations, including the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the Linux Standard Base (LSB), and Software in the Public Interest (SPI). His engineering and project management contributions have included high-profile efforts such as Pixar's films, the first known flight of a Linux system on NASA's Space Shuttle, and the Debian GNU/Linux Distribution.

SYS-CON.TV: Hi it’s Dave Burleigh from Creation Capital. We have with us here today Bruce Perens, who’s one of the longtime spokespeople for the open source effort, and without further ado, Bruce has made some announcements today, and I’d like him to share them with the community.

BRUCE PERENS: I’ve kind of cast a little a doom and gloom on this whole great show. I think there’s an elephant in the closet that a lot of people aren’t talking about, and that’s the specter of software patents, and what they’re going to do to open source. We’ve recently seen OSDL create a sort of patent pool that’s used by companies that wish to donate patents for the use of open source. I want to make two points about that. OSDL means well, but the patent pool is from the wrong people. They’re from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, companies that already have a business interest in open source, rather than from Microsoft and whatever companies Microsoft would be using as proxies against us, as they used SCO. So, that’s one of the problems with the patent pool.

The other thing is that the patents can’t be used defensively because the people who contributed those patents to the pool can’t use them against Microsoft. They already have cross-licenses with Microsoft so, for example, if Microsoft brings a lawsuit against an open source developer, they have nothing to fear from Hewlett-Packard; they have nothing to fear from Sun; indeed, they have nothing to fear from OSDL. Now, if we look at open source software and, indeed, if you look any software, any significant computer program, it’s infringing on patents. Any significant open source program is infringing on tens or hundreds of software patents. These are things that should have never been granted. No one ever voted for them. They were the result of a court decision. And, we have to fix the law because if you look at where innovation is coming from these days, look at the changes that Microsoft is putting into Microsoft Internet Explorer. They’re all things that came from Firefox. Look at the changes in the Java community where all the revolutionary programs in Java this year are the open source ones – Struts, Swing, Hibernate, etc.

What we’re finding out is that open source is the font of creativity, the source of innovation in the industry, and the purpose of the patent system was to protect and promote innovation. It’s actually working across purposes now, and it’s becoming important because we have folks like Nathan Myrvold who are out to aggregate the interests of patent holders, and to start charging the rest of the world for patents that they aren’t making income from right now. That can really blow up in the face of open source developers.

The other issue here is that there’s no justice for the poor. The American Intellectual Property Law Association has said that it would cost between $3–5 million to defend your interests in a software patent lawsuit. What this means is that for me – I have a couple of open source programs out in the world. If someone sues me, what do I do? I settle. I take whatever terms they offer; I sign over my copyrights; I agree not to make that program again. Because, regardless of the justice or the lack thereof of the claim, there’s no justice for me. I can’t afford to fight that suit. So, the open source developers can really be put out of business, and we’d be back to proprietary software as the only way of satisfying our needs.

I think if you look around and if you ask the people at the show if they want that, of course they don’t. But, if you ask what the vendors are doing, well, when we’re fighting these issues, we’re often fighting against IBM; we’re often fighting against Hewlett-Packard; fighting against Phillips, which is also embedding Linux devices in its products, and was a very strong proponent for software patenting.

We have to get the customer and say, “Linux and open source customer – are you talking to your vendor about what they’re doing about the situation? Are you really clear that your vendor is giving you a sustainable source of open source software in the future, and that we won’t be attacked by software patent holders tomorrow?” I think that’s something that every customer should be concerned about.

SYS-CON.TV: I think you’ve really laid out the problem that we see. Can you give us any sort of short-term or long-term solutions that you see becoming more concrete. Give us some idea, because what you’ve just laid out, scares the heck out of a lot of us.

BRUCE PERENS: It sure scares the heck out of me; it has for years, and I think that it’s time for us to do something about the problem. Now, there are several problems that we can address.

First of all, who represents customers? Who represents the enterprise software customer? It used to be users groups; in the ’80s there was a change at the IRS that made user groups no longer tenable as non-profits anymore, and users lost most of their representation. We have to bring back strong representation that advocates the industry interest of users groups and talks to government for them. If you look at the organizations that have users as members today, they’re dominated today by the vendors, and that’s a change that has to be dealt with. We’re also not aggregating the interests of the open source developers, and even the companies that are interested, although many of them have a conflict of interest, as IBM does. IBM makes billions of dollars from their software patents too. We need better lobbying in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Currently the only lobbying we have for open source is the OSAIA, which is a division of the Computer and Communications Industry Alliance. Unfortunately their lobbying for us is sort of half-hearted. We need a lobbying organization that’s out there deliberately speaking for open source and no one else.

SYS-CON.TV:  What about the counterbalance of a Wal-Mart that runs Linux. They have a very vested interest in continuing to do this. Are there other organizations that might all of a sudden find themselves on the side of the user against the corporate structure of the patent system as it stands now? 

BRUCE PERENS: Okay, so, capitalism is in everyone’s interest. What we’re talking about is capitalism. We’re talking about an open competitive market where open source and various proprietary software manufacturers compete, and of course we’d like that to be a level playing field, but it’s not really one yet because most of the legislation that affects software has been built for proprietary software rather than open source. I think that it’s in every customer’s interest for economics, Adam Smith’s hand, to drive prices down and quality up, because there is a competitive market. We’re not seeing the Wal-Marts talking to their congressperson about that. I’ve not heard a thing about that yet. Frankly, if Wal-Mart had to switch back to Microsoft next week, they’d make a good deal. This really has to be done by aggregating hundreds of thousands of customers together, not just one organization.

SYS-CON.TV:  I don’t want to get too far down the track on your new potential career here as a legal scholar, because I really appreciate you as a developer, knowing you for the many years that I have. I think you have many years of innovation to come, so let’s get back to your progress on the ability to create what I think is scary too, and that’s a tripartied world of the Red Hat stack, SuSE Novell, and now the Debian Alliance, because I noticed that a lot of organizations are not included in the Debian Alliance, some of the smaller distributions, so do you think they’ll get swept in, or will they be forced to get in bed with one of the other organizations? Is this going to be a tripartied world? Is this what you’re doing to us?

BRUCE PERENS: You know technically the user of a Linux Project is me, and I get included so I don’t think that the Debian Common Core Alliance is keeping people out. I think that anyone who has an interest is welcome to help out. As far as SuSE Novell, that’s an interesting question because Debian has a user base three times the size of Novell’s and they should be concerned. Red Hat, I guess, has a bigger user base in the enterprise. But, something that I hear a lot when I visit Fortune 100 customers for Source Labs is that folks who are developers all have Debian on their workstations and they deploy on Red Hat, and I’d like to fix that problem. I mean obviously developers have Debian on their workstations because they think that it’s a superior solution, and I’d like to make it possible to deploy. I would rather not have a triparty world; I would rather have a world in which the base for the non-differentiating infrastructure of all these Linux distributions is Debian, which is essentially a non-profit. These distributions would differentiate themselves with the software built on top of that infrastructure because, I think, it’s not in any Linux distributions interest to have a better version of the C library, and in fact no one does.

And, there’s a good deal that Red Hat does on the kernel that I don’t think is in Red Hat’s continuing interests to have a fork of the kernel that’s separate from the main kernel development. They really need to get together on this. I’ve been chasing this interest for a decade now. I started the Linux Standard Base to fix this, and I did not want the Linux Standard Base to be a paper standard; I wanted it to be a binary standard, and I lost the fight and it’s been a paper standard. However, it turns out that it’s not convincing anyone to standardize. In fact, I don’t know of an LSB-certified application, so I think that we need a binary standard to get the application providers to certify it. The DCCA is really the only solution that I think will work structurally, where the middle is a non-profit and the rest of it is different collaborating companies that can make their profits in their own spaces. 

SYS-CON.TV:  Before we let you go, talk a little bit about your new job and what you’re going to be doing.

BRUCE PERENS: I work for Source Labs and I’m vice president. Half of my time is spent being an open source leader, and they don’t say what I do in that time, but they do pay all my airline and hotel bills, which are very substantial.

And the other half of my time is spent working for Source Labs, as vice president of developer relations and policy. Right now, because it’s early in the company’s history, I’m mostly spending my time getting them Fortune 100 customers, and I’ve been pretty successful in fact. I’m surprised that I can actually be a pretty good salesman when it’s time to be a salesman. But, on a long-term basis, I’ll be running a services division for Source Labs, which takes the interest of large open source customers. For example, we’ve announced Merrill Lynch as our customer. Guess what? Those folks want to implement open source programs by taking some money that Merrill or others would pay for the service, and finding core open source developers of the interesting open source projects and contracting them to work. This has been tried before, but the last time it was tried, the market wasn’t big enough. 

SYS-CON.TV:  The difference is also, that you mentioned that a few of the people in the organization with you are ex-Microsoft guys. What was the statement that you made to me about when you interviewed with them?

BRUCE PERENS: Brad Silverberg, the ex-head of Microsoft Windows Development, is one of the venture capitalists behind Source Labs, so here I find myself in the same company with “The Enemy!” and so I interviewed Brad Silverberg, and what came out of that is that Brad is looking forward, not back, and he has not had anything negative to say about my going out and trying to fight software patents, and actually fighting Microsoft in some venues. 

SYS-CON.TV: Good luck with being the warrior for our better here, and we appreciate you taking the time, Bruce, thank you.

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