WWW8 Notes: Open Source Software and Software Patents Continued

Richard Stallman Wins Microsoft's Money

As soon as his face appeared on the display screens, even before the announcer mentioned his name, the applause for Richard Stallman started.

From an office in Mountain View, California, Stallman appeared, via videocamera, to accept the Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award. The $10,000 cash award is meant to recognize leaders in the development of the Internet's infrastructure. Rather than talk about technology, or thank a long list of people for helping him to get to this point, Stallman took the opportunity to talk to the audience about patents, and the danger software patents hold for the Internet.

"It would be very good if we could simply continue working on software," he said, "writing programs to carry out the ideas we have and nobody would try to stop us. But unfortunately that's not true. In the US, you're very likely to step on a software patent when you make a decision about writing a program."

While the United States does allow and enforce software patents, the status of software patents in European Union countries is unclear. He warned that multinational corporations are encouraging EU countries to allow US-style patents, specifically the ability to patent basic software processes. He predicted that should the European Union decide to enforce software patents (it will make a decision by the end of the year 2000), a number of lawsuits would crop up as a result of "stealth patents" that have been filed in Europe, but never enforced. He encouraged all citizens of European Union countries to take a look at the web site http://www.freepatents.org/ to become familiar with the situation.

It was fairly surreal when the announcer, without a trace of humor in his voice, thanked the companies which helped put together the $10,000 prize: Sun Microsystems, the Graphic Communications Association, OASIS, and Microsoft. The audience broke out in laughter at the mention of Microsoft giving Stallman its money. In parting, Stallman warned the audience against pursuing short-term gain at the cost of future freedoms: "Keep a sense of proportion. It's more important to be safe from the software patents than to get money to give an award to somebody, much as I appreciate it."

PHP

Aside from the major speeches, conference attendees had a chance to get more up-close and personal with various open-source software developers through both a BOF (Birds of a Feather) meeting with PHP and Apache developers, and a half-day session on Developer's Day.

Rasmus Lerdorf and Stig Baaken (pictured, left and right respectively), two of the core group of PHP developers, spoke at the BOF meeting and the Developers' Day session. Two fairly interesting things they discussed were the upcoming PHP book to be published by O'Reilly, and the development of Zend, the new engine for PHP which was announced earlier this year.

The O'Reilly PHP book is being coauthored by the entire core group of PHP developers. While the content of the PHP book is essentially done, the integration of all the parts, to make it a cohesive whole, has not occurred yet. Unfortunately, the developers didn't have a good estimate of when the book would be out. (Nor did they know what animal would grace the cover.)

At the BOF meeting, the developers also revealed the story behind the development of Zend, a scripting engine developed by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, the core PHP developers currently residing in Israel. The development of Zend was the result of a decision to really modularize PHP - to seperate the core engine from the language functions and the rest of the language. Lerdorf mentioned that the developers hoped that Zend might be plugged into other products - MySQL was one example given - at some point. This would allow the Zend creators to work on creating the best scripting engine possible, rather than worrying about the external environment that it would sit in.

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