Sun exec: Open-source is irrelevant

Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president, Sun Microsystems   Today’s Top Stories    or  Other Software Stories  

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September 12, 2003 (Computerworld) -- Last weekend, I went to go look up a patent filing at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). It was a really engaging experience—it's a fascinating site, with filings dating back to 1790. Just for yuks, I decided to explore what it takes to file a patent. I was in for a rude surprise: The site, and the PTO, demand that all online patent applications be submitted using Microsoft Word.

Now, why is that a problem?

Well, it's a problem because my company doesn't use Microsoft products. Nor can most people afford them. And if you don't have a copy of Word, does that mean you have to pay Microsoft for the privilege of submitting a patent application? To protect your own intellectual property? And the government has mandated that? Something must be wrong here.

One school of thought says, "Open-source will stop this nonsense."

I don't buy it.

To me, open-source is irrelevant to the discussion. And as the industry's single largest contributor to the open-source movement, I don't say that lightly.

The issue for patent submitters isn't the licensing convention used to build the word-processing application. At least for my customers, purchasing decisions are never made on the basis of the licensing convention used to build the product—customers care far more about product quality, price/performance when compared to the competition, and (especially of late) their security attributes. None of those issues have anything to do with open-source any more than whether Sun employs left-handed engineers to build the products, or marketing folks who work weekends (we do, both).

What's at stake isn't whether the source code to Microsoft Word is available. Even if it were, you'd still need a copy of Microsoft Word to submit a patent. And you'd have to pay for the brand, or be smart enough to build the source tree.

	Jonathan Schwartz is executive vice president of Sun Microsystems Inc.'s software group, which includes the Solaris operating systems, the Java technology platform, Project Mad Hatter and Project Orion. This column expands on points he made in a LinuxWorld keynote address.

If the file format used to submit a patent were publicly available, it'd be up to me to determine how I elected to submit my application—so long as I followed the standard. And if I stopped liking the word processor I was using, I could move to another that supported the standard. My choice. And if the standard were royalty-free, such as those formats available through OASIS, then any organization that wanted to interact with the PTO, or with the patent submitters, could do so without fear of dependency upon proprietary technology.

Now a variety of technology companies are delivering proprietary technology into the world, and they're creating dependencies while hiding under a shroud called "open-source." Don't be fooled, they're shirking the very open standards that guarantee interoperability. Why? Because they don't like interoperability—they like dependency.

As the supplier of the only cross-platform office productivity suite on the market, StarOffice, I don't say the following lightly: Ignore the fact that StarOffice is open-source. It's an irrelevance.

Focus on the open standards we follow.

They matter far, far more.

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