Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008 - (Page 18)

Cover Story SAVING OPEN SOURCE It would be easy to think that the case was simply a matter of a more savvy court correcting a misguided one under the monster table that supported a room-sized world of HOgauge tracks and scale models of roads and buildings and trees. They were managing the spaghetti wiring that supported the multiple controllers and trains that ran on those tracks. When the first class in computer science was offered at MIT, taught by some crazy guy named John McCarthy, the TMRCers already had a complex system that they were trying to manage. Many famous hackers came out of the TMRC, as did, you could argue, the philosophy behind free software. Interestingly, the control system under the table in the model railroad room would seem to have dealt right from the start with the problem in Jacobsen v Katzer, in that it managed signals from multiple controllers distributed to different sections of track. Complex model train systems have been revisiting that problem for forty years. What this means in terms of prior art in Jacobsen v Katzer is a matter for others to decide. Credit where credit is due: It would be easy to think that the case was simply a matter of a more savvy court correcting a misguided one, but in fact a lot of work went on behind the scenes to ensure that the decision ultimately came out the way it should—and did. Credit goes of course to Bob Jacobsen for bringing the case and standing up for FOSS. But credit also goes to the lawyers and consultants who offered time and expertise, often for free: Jacobsen’s lawyer, Victoria Hall; the authors of the amici brief from Creative Commons, Chris Ridder and Anthony Falzone; Mark Radcliffe, Lawrence Lessig, Karen Copenhaver, Allison Randal, Roberta Cairney, Larry Rosen, Scott Peterson, David Gross, and Steve Chiari; plus the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, the Linux Foundation, Perl Foundation, HP, OSI, and others. An individual identified as GrayHairPgmr on Lessig’s blog put the ruling in this perspective: In my not so humble opinion, software IS a service, the code is only one delivery vehicle. SaaS is redundant and proprietary software is an oxymoron. This ruling begins a process of building a meaningful legal framework for software commerce. It’s a big deal. DDJ Download a proven, cross-platform database alternative • Unmatched performance in enterprise systems, desktop deployments, and embedded devices for over 25 years. • Simplified framework for rapid development of data-driven applications including graphical tools to speed your development and monitor critical metrics of the database engine. • Free development and free deployment in non-commercial environments. • Flexibility to use ISAM and SQL API’s within the same application. • Sophisticated feature set including 64-bit support, memory files, ADO.NET, LINQ, C#, VCL, and dbExpress. • Cross Platform support including Windows, UNIX, Linux, Mac OS X, and more. • OEM Database Engine simplifies your deployment with a single executable and flexible licensing options. Prove it to yourself in six minutes. 18 Download today! www.faircom.com Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l November 2008 http://www.faircom.com http://www.faircom.com http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer's Notebook Saving Open Source Conversations iPhone Building Your Own Web Server Green Telnet What's New In Boost Threads? Testing Service Oriented Architectures Test Case Generation, UML, and Eclipse Unit Testing Web Services C3 Programming The Agile Edge Swaine's Flames Effective Concurrency

Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008

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