Keeping the platform open
Written by mufasa
In the past, software platforms have often been used to lock developers in. This led to a drive for open standards so that no one company could control the platform and to give all the implementers input into the standard. However, the standards process is largely a relic of hardware standards and doesn’t really work for application software. Standards are best suited to network protocols that are programmed into routers, routers for which the software then stays the same without being updated for years. The modern PC is updated very often, at least 2-3 times a year, so the standards process is a straight-jacket on desktop software. It takes years for the standards bodies to reach consensus on a standard, which once ratified shows the dents of design by committee and then cannot be modified easily. The inadequacy of HTML/HTTP shows the results of this process. I will now suggest a way to keep platforms open, open to developers and competition, without the standardization that chokes off innovation. I believe these concepts should be used for a new thin client but they can be applied to almost any new software platform, such as rich clients, widget toolkits, or other software libraries.
First, let’s look at each of the ways that companies can potentially lock up a thin client platform: APIs, copyright, and patents.
- APIs – Although it appears that there is no protection for APIs, software copyrights are murky legal territory so it’s always better to be safe. The people behind an open thin client platform should not assert any intellectual property rights over the public APIs. Also, any API that is disclosed to one licensee should be disclosed to all licensees so that some developers don’t have access to exclusive APIs. These protections will allow a competitor to reimplement any APIs, just as the Wine guys have reimplemented the win32 APIs (though they better watch out as Microsoft might use this API issue to come after them some day). Of course, just because a competitor is free to reimplement the APIs doesn’t mean that is all there is to it. Open standards have a full specification that lays out much of the design. However, I see no reason to require an open platform to have an open specification, this decision should be left up to the creators. Outside developers can often figure out how the original implementation works and reimplement it, provided the original license does not prohibit doing so. Often this is the best way to reimplement software, as almost no specification is so precise that it lays out every detail of the implementation accurately. If there is an external API, a developer should be able to figure out how it works from the software, so there should be no licensing prohibition against using the original implementation to gather knowledge necessary for reimplementation. A thin client will have a compact set of documented public APIs so it should be easy to reimplement.
- Copyright – This is the main way in which software is currently protected and copyright is necessary to both closed and most open source software and business models. While open APIs allow developers to build on top of a software platform with the assurance that they’re not locked in, they do not allow the developer to modify the thin client binary itself. I see no reason to add any requirements about this however, as it should be up to the people who develop the platform as to how much control of the software binary itself that they want to give to third-party developers. Some will allow plugins and other modifications, others won’t. This is often a security issue and there are a range of possibilities: it should not be necessary to restrict the developer of the platform in this regard. I suspect that most software in the future will be a mixture of open and closed source- rather than exclusively one or the other as most of it is now- so I don’t think exclusive, monolithic control of a software platform through copyright will be much of an issue in the future.
- Patents – Let me start off by saying that most software patents are a joke and are only possible because the current patent system is a complete debacle. However, as people use software patents anyway and a few have some justification, I’d like to account for them. What’s important for a software patent is that all patents on an open platform must be disclosed. Also, no disclosed patent can restrict someone from reimplementing a feature of the platform because it is the only way to implement it. So for example, if someone were to patent quicksort, you could always use bubble sort so that’d be okay. However, if someone were to patent something ridiculous like Akamai’s distributed hosting patent, there would be no way to implement something similar so it wouldn’t be kosher.
Taken together, these restrictions can make up an Open Platform Promise, or OPP, consisting of the following:
- No intellectual property rights will be asserted on any publicly disclosed APIs.
- Any APIs that are disclosed to one developer will be disclosed to all developers.
- No restrictions will be made on usage of the software to help reimplementation.
- All patents will be disclosed.
- No patent can preclude reimplementation of a feature of the platform.
Some may wonder why all this discussion of intellectual property is even necessary. My argument is that software platforms can be extremely widely deployed- a thin client platform in particular- so it is important to consider issues of lock-in and monopoly. Most current software platforms are either at one extreme of closed-source, patented software, exemplified by Microsoft and their win32 APIs, or the other extreme of open standards often implemented by open-source toolkits, exemplified by HTTP/HTML. The goal of the preceding is to fashion a melding of the two extremes that works better than either one does individually. I do not address the issue of open- or closed-source as I believe that most software will end up being a mix of the two. Instead, I address the other API and IP issues that go with keeping a platform open. The goal of the OPP is to allow developers of a platform to create something they can own and improve upon while allowing third-party developers the freedom to choose their platform and its implementation.
Questions:
- I’m no intellectual property lawyer so I’m going to need more info from those who’ve dealt with this stuff in more detail. What other provisions do software companies use to lock developers into a software platform?