http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/05/13/1857235.shtml?tid=19
by Tina Gasperson
Tuesday May 14, 2002
Carnegie Mellon University is expected to formally announce its
"Sustainable Computing Consortium" on May 16th. In order to make some
measurable gains in software quality and security, CMU is hooking up
with big players in IT and software development, and NASA, to look at
new techniques for measuring sustainability. And ironically, all these
different companies are going to put their heads together to
brainstorm and collaborate and share ideas on some, get ready for
this, good old proprietary software and intellectual property that
they'll have to pay a licensing fee to use outside their own
companies.
Carnegie is the school that brings us CERT/CC, the reporting center
for Internet security problems. So any Carnegie-created consortium
dedicated to driving "order of magnitude improvements in software
quality, dependability, and security" has got to be all good. And it
probably is. But people who are used to developing in the open
environment fostered by major universities like Carnegie, MIT, and
Berkeley, cringe when they visit the front page of the SCC Web site
and see a quote from Bill Gates prominently displayed there: "It's
time for developers to think and act differently" along with a plug
for an InformationWeek article talking about Gates' now famous, but as
of yet not acted upon memo about focusing on security. And it forces
the question: what is this consortium really all about?
According to the group's authors, "Consortium members support the
creation of standards and specifications that allow for the
measurement and enhancement of software quality, dependability, and
security. Sustainable software encompasses technology, measurement,
policy, economic and market dimensions of software. The work of the
Consortium includes technical efforts to measure and reduce
software-associated risks as well as economic, legal and policy
efforts to manage risk within organizations, the broader markets, and
the national economy."
With recent efforts like the Carrier Grade Linux Working Group having
demonstrated that an Open Source project like Linux can be hardened
sufficiently for mission critical use by the telecommunications
industry, coupled with the overall good record for security that the
operating system already enjoys, it is natural that OSS and Free
Software models should be a driving force behind the Consortium. Yet,
leading Open Source companies who want to get involved have discovered
that the Sustainable Computing Consortium will operate in a
proprietary environment.
The "benefits of membership" listed by the Consortium in its FAQ lays
it out: "Members are entitled to a non-exclusive, internal-use license
for the intellectual property created by the SCC." So what benefit
would it be for a Free Software company to get involved in an
environment that prevents them from using the innovations created in
that environment, since the very nature of Open Source software is
that the source code must be offered to those who purchase software?
And it appears that so far, only closed-source companies like
Microsoft, Oracle, and others have been recruited by the SCC.
NASA is a big part of the Sustainable Computing Consortium, having
granted Carnegie's computing science department at least $23 million
to look into the whole topic of high-dependability software, hoping to
reap the benefits of the creative effort. NASA has called it a "unique
opportunity to develop an empirically-based science for software
dependability," and one that "could have a major impact on NASA's
ability to rely on complex software for advanced mission capability."
But what of projects like FlightLinux, where rocket scientist Pat
Stakem is developing a special distribution of Linux just for use on
spacecrafts? The FlightLinux project was originally funded through
July 2002 and probably will not continue if NASA decides to focus more
on closed-source models.
"The licensing questions at stake for the university are, I hope,
still open," says Eben Moglen, general counsel for the Free Software
Foundation, "and I look forward to CMU's reconsideration of a policy
that makes no sense and will render stillborn an otherwise very
important and productive venture of great importance."
Brad Kuhn, v.p. of the Free Software Foundation agrees. "It's a
travesty to have proprietary development happening in an academic
environment," since the whole point of a University is to make
knowledge available.
Bill Guttman, the former co-CEO of PrintCafe, is the director of the
SCC. PrintCafe, successful by most measures, makes software
specifically for the printing industry. Guttman grew the company to
500 employees and 4000 customers. He's also the director of Carnegie's
Software Center which, among other things, focuses on identifying new
software development methodologies and business models. But when he
took on that role, the Pittsburgh, PA Post-Gazette labeled him a "geek
by accident."
Guttman has a PhD in international business, the article says, but
ended up running software companies because he saw the money in it.
He's typical CEO material: a visionary who is always seeking a way to
do things better. And since the Software Center has been working on
finding new development methodologies, it appears the Open Source/Free
Software method of development didn't come in at first place in
Guttman's book. If it had, he'd certainly select it as the foundation
for the Sustainable Computing Consortium.
In fact, a position paper entitled "High Quality and Open Source
Software Practices" and written by T.J. Halloran of CMU and Bill
Scherlis, who is the co-director of the SCC, expresses reservations
about the suitability of the Open Source software development model in
"quality-related technology." In the conclusion of the paper, they
state, "...any technique or tool is not feasibly adoptable if it
requires a major (client-visible) overhaul of a project web portal,
collaboration tools, development tools, or source code base."
Guttman has told potential Consortium members that the SCC would very
much like to see the Free Software/Open Source community participate
in the project, and he says the group is considering a dual-licensing
strategy. Moglen sees the inclusion of Free Software as vital. "The
Consortium cannot succeed without the participation of the free
software community," he says, "because ours is the development model
that will produce high-quality code in the twenty-first century."
Moglen says that in fact, it is the closed method of software
development which has contributed heavily to the "radical
deterioration in average software quality over the past twenty years,
causing hundreds of billions of dollars of lost time every year from
work that disappears when personal computers crash, fail to exchange
data successfully because of incompatible closed formats, or are
disrupted by well-known unfixed security exposures."
Not only that, but "to attempt construction of an infrastructure that
does what we do without us, in an attempt to bolster the system of
proprietary ownership of software, would be literally foolish," he
says, "and I don't expect it to happen among people as smart and
capable as those presently forming the Consortium."
-
ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org
To unsubscribe email majordomo@attrition.org with 'unsubscribe isn'
in the BODY of the mail.
Received on Thu May 16 05:46 CDT 2002