2007 Roundup: Open source comes of age

Battle of the acronyms pits world domination against global education

Matt Chapman, vnunet.com 24 Dec 2007

Two major open source projects finally came to fruition in 2007, bringing with them major headlines.

The One Laptop Per Child project finally rolled its first machines off the production line, and the latest version of the GNU General Public Licence arrived after 18 months of hard draft.

The OLPC had a rocky year, after orders placed with Nigeria in 2006 were cancelled at the last minute. The country ditched the OLPC XO laptops in favour of Intel's Classmate PCs.

OLPC was started in 2005 to create a laptop that cost only $100 to manufacture, although the cost has almost doubled since then.

The Linux-based machines started a trend among manufacturers and retailers. Asus created a competing notebook called the Eee PC, which sold for $350 in the US.

Wal-Mart offered a similar idea to US consumers by selling $200 Ubuntu Linux PCs which sold out in less than two weeks.

However, there was some respite for the OLPC as Peru signed a major deal to buy 260,000 XO laptops.

Meanwhile, the unveiling of the third version of the GPL managed to get Microsoft all worked up.

The Free Software Foundation questioned whether the certificates Microsoft sold to customers for Novell SuSE actually make it a Linux distributor.

As an open source code distributor Microsoft would have to abide by the GPLv3 and grant a loyalty-free patent licence to open source developers and users, effectively robbing it of the opportunity to ask for any money for its patent portfolio.

To try and escape this fate, Microsoft unilaterally changed the conditions for the Novell SuSE certificates that it sells to customers.

However, the first US lawsuit over the GPL could have provided valuable clarification on the legal status of open source software.

The Software Freedom Law Center filed a suit against Monsoon Multimedia on 20 September over alleged violations of the GPL.

Monsoon allegedly bundled the BusyBox open source application with some of its devices without providing the source code as required under the GPL.

The suit is the first legal case in the US concerning the GPL, and could further validate the licence as parties including SCO and Microsoft have previously asserted that the licence is illegal and therefore non-binding.

SCO, meanwhile, had its own problems, finally filing for bankruptcy protection in September.

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