New York, Aug. 30: Free open-source software began with high-tech tinkerers and researchers. Sharing code and ideas was their priority, not profits. In the tech industry, they were sometimes compared to socialists and communists.
Those days are long gone. Some of the communal idealism remains, but as open-source software is used more by big technology companies including IBM, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Google and Apple – even Microsoft – it has also become a weapon in corporate warfare.
An unusually public salvo came this month, when Oracle sued Google, accusing it of copyright and patent infringement. Oracle claims that Google’s Android operating system for smart phones and other mobile devices is illegally using ideas and code from Java, a set of software tools initially developed by Sun Microsystems in 1995. Oracle bought Sun in January,
Google denies the charges against Android, which is also open-source software, saying that it built the operating system and its own Java tools without using Sun’s intellectual property.
Google instead sees the suit as a move by Oracle to re-establish corporate control of Java, something Sun’s executives were reluctant to do. “This action is not against Android per se but against any Java development not sanctioned by Oracle,” said Kent Walker, general counsel of Google. “The lawsuit is trying to put the genie back in the bottle.” With open-source software, programmers can view the underlying source code and make modifications and fix bugs, as long as they abide by certain rules. Open-source programs are typically distributed free. An estimated three-quarters of all open-source software is chugging away in service of the profit-seeking corporate world. It is used, in the form of the Linux operating system or the Apache Web server, to run data centres that power the Web.