Tuesday, July 01, 2003

Bad Blows The technology world has taken a couple of bad blows recently in court. The first happened a couple of weeks ago, when SCO decided to attack Linux. The second happened last week, when a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Microsoft does not have to bundle Java in the operating system. These two unrelated events may seem opposite in nature, the first being a small company winning a victory over a large corporation (IBM), and the second being the largest of companies winning a victory over a smaller competitor. However, these two issues actually go the same way - against the best interests of technology. I believe that technology has reached a point where it is very difficult to innovate. Innovation comes from one of three sources: the big companies, small startups, or the standards/open source community. When big companies innovate, it tends to be clouded by their own technology vision, which biases it, and therefore makes it less likely to represent true innovation. When small startups innovate, they are held to very high revenue standards in this market, while potential customers are less willing to buy from their risk profile. This means that very few survive, and those that start to survive are usually bought up by the big companies (see above). The last category is the true hope for technology innovation, in my opinion. Sure, there are politics and biases in the open communities, as well, but they are balanced by the nature of the individuals involved. So if we are going to innovate in a economic environment like this, the most likely source of innovation will be the standards and open source groups. Both of these court events I mentioned are tied to this, and both of them hurt open source. In the first, you have a situation where an open source platform has actually become mainstream. One of the big companies (IBM) has adopted it and helped to move it forward. Then along comes charges of copyright infringement. This is the worst thing that can happen to open source. Big companies are already worried about hidden issues when they look at open source. The potential for copyright issues just adds fuel to the fire. In the second case, the most pervasive desktop software in the world is allowed to eliminate Java from its platform. I have less of an issue with this one philosophically, but it is going to hurt Java. Corporations, already concerned about Java's weakened presence on the desktop, won't even consider client Java products now. So this trend is not good for technology innovation... 10:24:26 AM