[PLUG] Creative writing

Daggett, Steve Steve.Daggett at fiserv.com
Thu Aug 14 17:18:01 UTC 2003


Jeff Schwaber:
> 
> I'm arguing for much much further opening: I think if you sell a
> product, you should have access to its workings and specifications in
> entirety. I should be able to see (NOT MODIFY/REDISTRIBUTE, just see)
> Windows code. In the original form.
> 
  That's not as easy as it sounds.  Unless your company wrote every line of
code, it's not just a matter of pushing a tarball out to the FTP site.

  As a simple example...  Lets look at IE 5.5.  MS didn't write every line
of IE.  They bought major components from other companies.  All that code
has a non-MS copywrite and is most likely covered under NDA.  This is a
pretty common situation.  Why reinvent the wheel.  It's often cheaper and
faster to buy code than write code.  

Here's IE 5.5's "About" statement.    

Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center
for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign.
Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc.
Contains security software licensed from RSA Data Security Inc.
Portions of this software are based in part on the work of the Independent
JPEG Group.
Contains SOCKS client software licensed from Hummingbird Communications Ltd.
Contains ASN.1 software licensed from Open Systems Solutions, Inc.
Multimedia software components, including Indeo(R); video, Indeo(R) audio,
and Web Design Effects are provided by Intel Corp.
Unix version contains software licensed from Mainsoft Corporation. Copyright
(c) 1998-1999 Mainsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Mainsoft is a
trademark of Mainsoft Corporation.
Warning: This computer program is protected by copyright law and
international treaties. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this
program, or any portion of it, may result in severe civil and criminal
penalties, and will be prosecuted to the maximum extent possible under the
law.

  Open Sourcing IE alone would require auditing the code to identify were
each line came from *and* what legal agreements and copywrite was attached
to it.  It would be a massive project that would likely bring in no profit.
Then you would have to rewrite all the legally encumbered code before your
Open Source release.

  The Netscape Open Source release is a good example of the complexity of
going from closed source to Open Source.  They had to rewrite tons of
legally encumbered  Netscape code just to get the basic browser released.
Lots of stuff didn't work at all because of the code loss.  

  While I'm a big fan of Open Source, I don't think we'll ever see massive
releases of old close source copywrited code to the Open Source world.  It's
a nice dream, but that's not the way corporate software development works.
It would simply be illegal or *very* difficult to do, with very little
economic benefits to doing the work.  

Steve D...




More information about the PLUG mailing list