Making The Case For Free Software | Maynard's SiCortex touches off open source debate
High performance computer maker, SiCortex Inc. of Maynard, had no more closed its doors in May when open source advocates went public with a drive to raise money for a bid on the rights to the defunct company’s software.
Behind the push was a California-based blogger named Christopher Bergstrom and a growing legion of open source fans that are pressuring the tech community to make more and more code free.
Bergstrom and the open-source advocates weren’t successful in raising the money in the SiCortex case, but they brought attention to a hot topic in the programming world that rarely sees the light of day in the mainstream media.
At issue is whether source code should die along with a defunct company, or whether it should live to spur innovation.
The Legacy Of DEC
Jon “Maddog” Hall, president of Linux International, a worldwide nonprofit that encourages the use of free, open source software, spent 16 years working at Maynard-based Digital Equipment Corp., which after becoming a technology pioneer, was eventually acquired by Compaq in 1998.
It was his experience at DEC that put Hall squarely on the side of open source advocates like those who fought for SiCortex’s source code.
“A huge amount of the intellectual property developed over the years (at DEC) never saw the light of day,” Hall said. “If they had been open source projects, then that work and intellectual property would not have disappeared and could have been used in different things.”
Making software source code available without charge to anyone who wants it may seem to be counterintuitive in a capitalistic economy, but open source enthusiasts say that a lot of great programming code evaporates if a company goes out of business or chooses not to move ahead with a product.
Some programmers fear that, in the case of SiCortex, whatever company does acquire the company’s hardware and software might just put the valuable source code on the shelf to gather dust.
“Again, that intellectual property is lost to all of humanity,” Hall said.
Sicortex was started in Maynard in 2002 by three former Digital Equipment Corp. employees: Its main products were low power, high performance computers with a Linux operating system, which were used by researchers of all kinds.
The company’s mission, according to its still operational web site, was to “build the world’s most energy-efficient computers.” According to press reports around the time of the company’s closure, SiCortex was unable to close on a new round of venture capital funding and simply ran out of money.
For open source advocates, the most valuable aspect of SiCortex’s property is the “PathScale compiler suite,” which according to a blog post from Bergstrom at www.codestream.com, is “one of the highest performance compilers in the industry.” A compiler is software that translates source code, the computer language written by people, into language a computer understands. Specifically, the PathScale compiler helped software programmers develop and deploy software applications.
The auction for SiCortex’s assets closed June 25. The company that ran the auction, Gerbsman Partners of California, has not disclosed publicly the results of the auction and refused to comment for this story.
The Linux Fund, based in Oregon, raised money with the help of Bergstrom to put in a bid on the SiCortex compiler software, according to David Mandel, the fund’s executive director. He declined to say how much the bid was for, but is under the impression that the fund’s bid was not successful.
“I never got any official notice that we didn’t win, but we heard through others that we weren’t successful,” Mandel said.
Others in the technology community have told Mandel that a major corporation was successful in its bid, and that there is still hope the compiler code may be made available to the open source community, he said.
Win Treese, who was director of advanced technology at SiCortex when it closed, said having the compiler code available as open source software for SiCortex system owners would “certainly be a plus.”
“Having to build that infrastructure without that open source code would have made the entire enterprise too costly,” Treese said. Treese now works for a consulting company called Serissa Research Inc.
Economics Of Free
The popularity of open source has been growing over the years.
The Standish Group, a technology research and consulting company based in Boston, estimates that IT departments throughout the United States collectively save about $60 billion a year by using free, open source software, said Jim Johnson, the company’s chairman.
Of course, the flip side of that means that commercial software companies are seeing $60 billion fewer dollars a year because open source is taking the place of commercial software.
“It did look at the displacement to normal software,” Johnson said about his company’s five-year report on open source software, which it released last year. “There is this notion that it’s hard for people to compete against free software, and it’s true, it is hard to compete against it.”
In addition to potentially lower costs for consumers, open source helps the economy in another way: it lets businesses save money by using source code.
But there are ways to make money with open source.
“It’s possible to have a sustainable business by maintaining the software, teaching people how to use the software and by customizing the software,” Hall said.
Hall used the example of the Danish nonprofit, the Blender Foundation, which makes a free, open source 3D content creation suite called Blender.
Of course it isn’t always a black or white issue of a free product or one that costs money. Many open source licenses dictate that if a commercial software company uses it in a product, that product in turn must have free distribution.
For Hall, it all boils down to one issue. “So much code has been lost and had to be reinvented,” he said. “We’re saying, don’t reinvent the wheel. Let’s take the source code that’s out there and reuse it.”
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