Opening Sourcecode

This is an interesing topic. One with both an ethical and a practical stance.

I think that the concept of opening code if a product is discontinued is a good one - it would preserve the knowledge for all, and would stop the waste of the effort.

The thing is that open code is only really useful if it can be utilised. It could obviously be read by people, but usage of the code is another matter. Should the code be freely available under the GPL or something for others to use?

The think the practicalities of this issue are unlikely. Even if a law was passed to do this, companies would have a problem where even though one product is discontinued, it may use code or libraries from another project that is maintained or shoul dbe kept secret. I think it would be a legel minefield for people.

Once again the ethical and right solution probobly will not happen, but it is certainly something we can encourage. Just because it is not enforcable by law does not mean a trend of opening code should not be encouraged by business discontinuing development of a product or more importantly...a hardware product or driver.

very interesting and thought-provoking questions, this article.

1) the purpose of buying companies _is_ often to terminate the project in the marketplace.

2) HP Openmail: HP released openmail presumably because it's not part of their core business. no sales, we're a hardware company, hmmm, let's release it for free! apparently, microsoft contacted HP just after they released it to complain that their sales were being affected, and, oh by the way, incidentally, we really like your printers but it's _so_ hard to write good printer drivers these days.

3) the implications for the business practice of purchasing companies and killing the product are that companies may not develop the product in the first place, or will find other anti-competitive techniques to terminate competition.

4) individual developers souls are bought. what xxxxxing difference does it make whether the project source code actually sees the light of day, as far as the company is concerned? they OWN the developers and other than that couldn't give a xxxx about them or their rights. they PAID them, they can shut the xxxx up and go home to their little families (or not) and little homes (or not) and get on with their lives (or not).

right? :)

Use to be a company had to put a copy of its source in a "source bank" before customers would buy their binary, so they would have access to it in the event the seller went out of business. This technique could arise in the marketplace again, with the eventual benefit of a lot of legacy code let free.

The government could get involved by offering a special tax writeoff to companies that open-source software they are abandoning.

Here's the Bodleian Library collections development link, for your edification. Also I had thought at first that the Library of Congress would have a similar standing in the US, but it does not.

I'd love to see some sort of "library of record" for source code. But it seems to me that the fundamental problem is that for something like that to stick in the usual legal framework (IANAL) the companies would have had to publish the source code in the first place. Most libraries of this sort appear to archive only what is actually published; this would be akin to having boxed versions of released binary versions of software on the shelves of our hypothetical software library, rather than the source code used to create it.

I like the idea of a tax credit for releasing source code, though. That would seem to fit in with the sense that you are contributing to a public good by releasing code. I wonder if you could start a charity and solicit donations of source code?

This whole thing reminds me of the idea of restricted term copyright. I wonder if there will ever be a day when copyrights expire on source code?

heck, why not have a tax rebate for releasing source code, full stop?

i mean, govts tend to insist on an escrow clause: if company goes tits up, they get source of programs that they have critical infrastructure based around, and they are happy to pay for this.

the tax rebate idea takes this a step further.

_great_ idea.

What does discontinuing actually mean this case?

Wouldn't companies just say that "no, the product X is not discontinued, it's just incorporated into product Y"? Or do you mean that if e.g. Microsoft stopped shipping Word as a separate product, they would have to open its source (or GPL it or whatever)?

Or maybe this would just lead into pricing or other issues, like how currently the product would just be discontinued, but if discontinuing wasn't "possible" because of a requirement like this, the same effect would be achieved by setting the price of one licence to 999 billion dollars. And lawyers can surely think of even "better" ideas.

Maybe the tax rebate idea has more potential.

Taxes are coerced from all members of the community. With a perfectly functioning opt in government this might be worth considering. Currently children are taxed on candy purchases in most U.S. states and probably indirectly through federal sugar subsidies. Speculation, I did not look up the data. Like taking candy from the kiddies? Once it is subsidized it is regulated. Consider the quality of legislation, judicial proceeding and executive that can be purchased in Washington D.C. today.

I think we should stay the course of embracing and extending the paradigm of freedom and not clutch for defeat in the jaws of victory. Let us step up our education efforts for "intellectual property" producers. If they can see the money and the methods inherent in efficient production and delivery of high value to the economy, then perhaps the Trickle Around Theory { cp 2001 :) MRI, All rights released to the universe. } will attract their interest sufficiently that they can generate profits by freeing their developers. Gushers would be better but trickles grow with continuing spring sprinkles.

This reminds me of some of the compulsory license issues. I remember proposing that there should be a compulsory license for any work which is "out of print"; a lot of people gave me a hard time about the definition of "out of print" (can publishers sell a work for a prohibitively high price to avoid this compulsory license?).

But it really bothers me that things go out of print and become rare and hard to find, just because copyright holders continue to enforce copyrights on things they're no longer publishing (sometimes even for non-economic reasons, like withdrawing an embarrassing work). I've maintained that this use of copyright typically does not benefit the public, and should not be allowed.

if it were legally required to release source code for "discontinued" products, even if "discontinued" could be defined in a multi-billion dollar legally acceptable way (it can't because dollars won't allow that), this would be bad.

The huge drawback:

Potential customers would have -less- incentive to use already open source products from the start because they could argue that it will be open when it ever matters to them. Anything that encourages someone to depend on a proprietary product is bad. Depending on non-open unencumbering-licensed products needs to be a hard lesson for anyone who does so.

plus, many non-open products have super scary source code, it would give you nightmares. ;)

Should governments require companies discontinuing products, release the source code?

Are you referring to products developed under government contract with public money or all products in general?

Even if it were a universally good idea, it would not be universally practicable. For instance, I know there have been numerous requests that Lotus Development open Notes for DOS -- but they cannot do so because the source includes IP from other origins under restrictive licences.

The book parallel really is not a valid analogy. For instance, the library does not get a copy of the proofs or revisable sources -- it just gets the book. That would be equivalent to saying the binary product would be archived; the analogy would not apply to the source.

If you are referring only to products developed for the government, that would be a bit sticky, eh? Can you imagine the Inland Revenue or the NSA publishing the sources to their now-obsolete-and-replaced analysis and snoop packages?

And if you are referring to all products, why should a company that discontinues product A, but used the whizzo IP in it and learned from it in follow-on product B, have to reveal the sources?

And that is not even considering the issue of extraterritorial products and the international legal issues...

No, I do not think this is realistic. I offer the alternative currently being used in Rio Grande do Sul, in Brasil: all software developed for the government must be open from the outset. Now, that I think is both possible and cool.

In any case, do not expect to backdate anything to get access to sources for past discontinuances.. I do not think that will happen. :-)

the indian government has a reputation for being paranoid. i heard that they don't use anything for which they cannot get full source.

the french government i heard do the same, and the german government announced likewise but the story _rapidly_ disappeared from the source it appeared on...

While I appreciate the sentiment (not to let good code go to waste), this really wouldn't be feasible to mandate across the board. Many (most?) products contain code licensed from other companies. Netscape had a hard time releasing their source code because something like 30-40% of it was actually licensed from others -- all of that code had to be rewritten in the end. There would also be logistical problems, such as when the provision should kick in.

The better solution would be to go back to the original copyright law, where a copyright was granted for 14 years, and renewable (once!) for another 14 years, for a maximum of 28 years of protection. 28 years is plenty of time to make a profit, and if nobody cares about the product after 14 years, it might not even get renewed. With 28-year maximum copyright duration, early versions of Unix would now be public domain, not to mention OS/360 and everything else before 1973. Of course, we will probably never see copyrights get shorter -- they just keep getting longer and longer.

While I don't think this would work for "discontinued" products, I do feel that taxpayer money shouldn't be used to develop proprietary products that the public would have to pay for again as customers. This is fairly common -- government research and development leading to commercial products. I'd like to see projects funded by taxpayer money be automatically placed in the public domain as a condition of such funding. After all, if the public pays for it, why grant copyright? Others could then make use of the publicly-funded public-domain code, even if a derivative of it gets commercialized later...