Full text of JDJ'S exclusive interview with Lutris's foremost critic, George C. Hawkins. "Their behavior is a complete slap in the face to all those in the user community" says Hawkins.

George C. Hawkins is a contract software engineer, based in Ireland, who's been working with Java since 1997 and currently works for IBM on their MQSeries Integrator multi-platform messaging product.

(October 24, 2001) - JDJ: You state on your Web site devoted to what you term Lutris's "betrayal" of the OS community, that "companies like Lutris who take advantage of the open source community must be named and shamed and shouldn't be allowed to damage people's confidence in and support for open source development." Has the site had the desired effect?

HAWKINS: It hasn't caused Lutris to change its mind but then I didn't expect them to. In terms of raising awareness of what's happened it has certainly achieved the desired effect. I've had a lot of feedback - all of it positive, commending the site and expressing varying degrees of disapproval for Lutris's actions.

A number of people wrote saying perhaps I and the other people who developed against InstantDB were naive to take a commercial company on trust when it came to their claim that while InstantDB wasn't open source just at the moment it would be *soon*. I would have to agree with them now - but I'm sad that it's so. Cearly many people in Lutris believed the promise to deliver an open source release of InstantDB would be kept, and so were genuine in their reassurances when people popped up occasionally to ask why this was taking so long. The initial press release in April 2000 following Lutris's acquisition had given summer 2000 as the date for this OS release.

JDJ: Before it was acquired by Lutris, InstantDB was payware if used commercially: isn't there always an inherent risk that even where a payware and a freeware model co-exist, the proprietary owners of the ware will abandon the latter and stick with the former? In other words, can it really have surprised you that having *bought* something, in this case intellectual property, from ICS, Lutris would wish to recoup what it spent through on-selling it on a commercial basis?

HAWKINS: Yes it did surprise me (and many other people). If you'd done a search for InstantDB on Google in June you'd have found a huge number of matches where it'd been used in other open source projects. The old InstantDB site made such a fuss about InstantDB and open source and so many Lutris employees continually referred to it if it were already open source that it was hard to believe that things could ever turn out otherwise.

The original creator of InstantDB, Peter Hearty, and others were reassuring the impatient user base right up until the day that the instantdb.enhydra.org disappeared. It wasn't as if there were any signs proceeding this disappearance that Lutris were gradually going cold on the idea of open source - quite the contrary.

JDJ: You have said that OS was around long before anyone had heard of the "new economy" and will survive one or two glitches like this. But what makes you certain that recent Lutris decisions don't mark the beginning of the end for open source initiatives overall in the commercialized, globalized 21st century?

HAWKINS: I think open source is looking stronger than ever. There are amazing projects being developed out there, some benefiting from substantial industry support such as openoffice.org backed by SUN and the many Linux projects (and companies such as SUSE) backed by IBM and many being developed by individuals with no industry backing.

I think the lessons I'll be drawing from this are a. if you don't have the source then it's not open source. This may appear blatantly obvious but myself and many others were taken in by Lutris's promises; and b. if the license isn't GPL, BSD or one of the well known open sources discussed at http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index.html then caveat emptor. If you're not a lawyer don't assume that because the license has open in its name that you won't get burned in the future. I'll be far more cautious of company's own brand open source licenses.

JDJ: With hindsight, do you still think "betrayal" is an accurate characterization of the Lutris behavior, given that it is more or less ordinary business behavior to conduct business for profit. Isn't there some truth to the Lutris CEO's counterclaim that businesses--just like people--can, do, and even must sometimes change their minds?

HAWKINS: Yes, I do think betrayal is an accurate characterization of the Lutris behavior. The claims of Lutris CEO Yancy Lind and others are completely self-serving. Open source wasn't just a minor element in the development and acceptance of Lutris's products - it was core, it was repeated mantra-like, it was all over their sites, they gave presentations of their products at major open source events.

Their behavior is a complete slap in the face to all those in the user community who bought all this. In many companies there's a big barrier to be overcome in convincing management that open source products are a real alternative to commercial products in many situations. I wouldn't like to be someone who'd overcome this resistance to introduce one of the products under the Enhydra badge and now has to explain that actually it's not open source any more and that the pitch they'd made about how open source meant XYZ good things was now nonsense.

Open source provides a way, if managed properly, for small companies to compensate for the fear that they won't be around for ever. If the product is popular, and control of the source open and well managed (e.g. third party CVS management such as that provided by SourceForge), then you can say "Well whatever happens to us the source will be around and supported forever - if we go belly-up you won't be left with just a mysterious binary that'll never be updated - the product exists independently, as it were, of us."

People bought into the Enhydra product range for a variety of reasons, most to do with aspects of it being open source - now those same reasons have gone up in smoke.

What do you think? Your feedback is welcome (see form below).

JDJ References

Sun Community Source License

"How Lutris betrayed the Open Source Community"

Lutris Enhydra Journal