In case you didn\’t hear about this whole dispute, let me briefly explain
it for you. It turned out that two members of the KDE team (Kurt Granroth
and Andreas Pour) found out that Ximian was paying for some \”sponsored links\”
on the Google search engine that would only show up when a user would do
a search for anything related to the KDE project (say, \”KDE\”, \”kword\” or
\”kspread\”, for example). They sat down and wrote Business Ethics\” in the Open Source Community? to
protest against that move. The article started a debate in LinuxToday (see
the discussions at the bottom of the page). Then, the Ximian CEO and
developer (Nat Friedman) was requested to express his views by one of
LinuxToday\’s contributors, which in turn reignited the discussion. In
the end, Ximian published an
announcement on their web site explaining that they would discontinue
the campaign, even though the company had \”designed its advertising strategy
in good faith and had no intention to offend or deceive anyone\”. Granroth
and Pour updated their original article with a note acknowledging this
change in Ximian\’s policy and basically considering the case closed. They
all agreed to make peace and went to the closest pub to share a few beers…
right? Well, not quite.

First of all, the current fight cannot be understood without resorting to the
historical competition between the KDE and Gnome/Ximian teams. Some deep
disagreements and even personal animosity have to exist there in order for this to happen. I mean, things got really out of hand in just a
matter of hours. It may have started with the old dispute about the QT
license and whether it truly was free software or not, but then both sides
definitely escalated the tension (at least in the business sense) with the
creation of a couple of foundations and the public announcement of several
partnerships with major companies to further their cause. In other words,
the dispute had been moving away from a purely programming issue that could
be discussed on technical grounds to a political and business issue that
was deemed to cause some friction.

So, lesson #1: mounting tensions between two different open source teams
does not necessarily lead to \”healthy competition\”, but in some ocassions
to the equivalent of a Cold War that erupts every now and then leaving behind
a history of resentment, bad memories, and in general bad publicity for
the community as a whole. Hackers tend to be passionate about technical
issues, but when it comes to these other issues there is an additional
element (social and political, as well as business like) that should be
taken into account, and a cold headed attitude is what the doctor prescribed
for those situations.

The second interesting thing to notice (and directly associated to the
previous point) is that Linux, as well as open source in general, is becoming
a business. Come on, folks! We knew it was going to happen sooner or
later. This is the sort of thing that happens when a product becomes popular
and moves to the mainstream. All of a sudden, there is money, interests,
market share, investors… In this sense, Ximian\’s campaign was certainly
naive and even amateurish but far from being the type of hardball tactic
they\’ve been accused of. After all, like someone pointed out in one of
the online discussions, I visit LinuxToday everyday and see a banner at the
very top announcing… FreeBSD! Is that unethical? Is that unacceptable?
Hardly so, I\’d guess. Like it or not, Linux is moving to the center stage,
which means that we\’ll have to learn how to live with things like this.
You say you don\’t like it? Well, I suppose there\’s always FreeBSD…
although of course there is no guarantee that BSDi will never resort to
these tactics either. So, unless you want to build your own kernel and
start all over again perhaps there is not much you can do.

Therefore, lesson #2: becoming mainstream also brings mainstream problems
and attitudes with it. These Linux companies, that to a great extent are
precisely the ones that brought us to the center stage, need to make some
money, pay their employees and even return money to their investors. So,
get ready to see the regular array of attitudes and tactics used in the
business world. Virginity has been lost.

Third, as we move into this business environment, I think it\’s rather
interesting that the very same side that launched a free software crusade
against the KDE guys just a couple of years ago for using the QT license
is now using these methods to compete in the market. In other words,
the idealists who launched that crusade are scrambling now to justify their
actions by using the old tired cliches of the business class (you know,
\”friendly competition\” for market share, \”healthy\” information for
potential users that this way are exposed to a wide arrange of options,
and the rest of the managerial speak). I may be the only one to find
this so ironic, but we may end up with the guys who started playing the
role of the bad guys moving all the way to the other end. Makes for an
exciting plot, doesn\’t it? Perhaps the open source community shouldn\’t
be so dogmatic in the future in judging those who release source code
to the public. Maybe Linus\’ own attitude is the one we all should adopt
in this regard: \”he who writes the code gets to choose his license, and
nobody else gets to complain\”.

And here comes lesson #3: dogmatism and oversimplication need to be
avoided when facing these disputes. The open source world is not a battle
between the good guys and the bad guys, even though we all grew used to
this mindset by constantly portraying Microsoft as the Evil Empire. Well,
the fact is that the Redmond giant is not the devil either, and we\’d better
start maturing and adopting a richer, more complex, approach to the
world that surrounds us.

Finally, perhaps we should all reconsider if the means that have served
us so well to this point (total openness, online communication, quasi
anarchistic exchange of views in bulleting boards…) are the most appropriate
for the new situation Linux is at. For keep in mind that a lot of people
are carefully following the open source community these days, and any of
these childish disputes can certainly be taken out of context and easily
represented as \”anarchy\”, \”chaos\”, and overall inmaturity of a community
that will never be able to create an environment where businesses can
flourish. I mean, it\’s one thing to discuss technical issues in a heated
way as it happens quite often in the Linux kernel list, and it\’s a
completely different thing to air these internal infighting to the whole
world. Shouldn\’t the parties involved have met each other first and try
to work it out before making a fool of themselves and of the whole
community? As Lou Grinzo says in closing his article on this issue, I don\’t even
want to think what Bill Gates felt like while reading the news.

So, lesson #4: the fact that this is the open source world does not mean
that we should throw good old education and polite behavior over the board.
Before you start a fit and throw heavy words words in an email for the world
to see, please take the time to approach the other party and see if there
is a better way to solve the dispute. The fact that you shout louder doesn\’t
necessarily increases the rationality of your position.