Thinking Clearly .

As far as I can tell, here’s the story:

Northrup Grumman refuses to allow open source developers to release a new version of Kowari Metastore, software that is licensed under the MPL 1.1.

Okay, that’s a bit terse and confusing. Here’s the back story:

The company that developed the Kowari Metastore, a leading open source RDF database system, ran into some fundraising problems—as startups sometimes will - and had to fold shop. But as part of its corporate strategy, the company, Tucana, had released an open source version of its proprietary product, which it called Kowari. These releases had occurred before the company folded, so in that sense, anyway, they were the legal actions of intellectual property holders. No problems. Kowari did less than the full, for$$ version, but it quickly won friends and supporters in the (rather anemic, if you ask me) world of RDF databases.

After the $$ dried up, Tucana’s investors (or whoever actually controlled the company) sold the remnants to Northrup Grumman, a big defense contractor in the US. NG now markets or sells (honestly, I’m not entirely sure what NG does with that software) Tucana Knowledge Suite under the marketing brand “information fusion”, which sounds to me like some kind of tip-of-the-hat to intelligence community IT people.

But, according to what seems to be settled legal opinion, the Kowari Metastore branch was still licensed under the MPL, which meant that development could continue on that branch, and that releases could be made as per the terms of the MPL, which is an open source license. The Kowari branch had always been a SourceForge project, and it’s remained such since the Tucana closure.

David Wood (with whom I work at UMD’s MindLab, for whatever that’s worth) was a principal in Tucana and has been working on Kowari development since NG acquired the assets of the company he helped found and run. Again, so far, so good—in truth, so far, so normal and typical.

Recently, however, the Kowari community (which is mostly ex-Tucana employees, but some others too) has been gearing up to make a new release—a process, I assume, David Wood would have been involved with pretty significantly. Apparently, however, Northrup Grumman has decided to block efforts to make a new release of Kowari. It’s not clear whether NG will attempt to block any attempts to make a release, but it has effectively blocked David Wood’s attempts. (And the blocking of Wood has caused at least one other Kowari developer to choose not to work on a new release of Kowari.)

I’ll reproduce here an email David Wood sent to Kowari list recently (with my emphasis added to the crucial bits):

It is with sincere regret that I hereby resign as an administrator and developer of the Kowari Metastore.

This action follows receipt of a letter from Northrop Grumman advising me that any attempt to release Kowari version 1.1 could cause “irreparable harm” to their company. I received the letter on Friday, 6 January 2006 and took no action on the project after that time.

Northrop Grumman’s position seems to be that they “purchased all rights associated with the Kowari software”, a position not reconcilable with their continued release of the software under the Mozilla Public License, version 1.1.

I was not able to fulfill my responsibilities as a Kowari administrator following receipt of the letter, and so I resigned…

I don’t have all the relevant facts here: (1) Who owns the copyright to Kowari? (2) How many open source releases have happened since NG acquired Tucana? (3) What happens if all the copyright holders of a branch of software can’t agree to make more releases? (Is the answer as simple as the release not including all the contributions of code that are owned by entities that don’t agree to the release? Won’t a release just happen later under the terms of the MPL irrespective of agreement? Of course that assumes a frictionless world where unlawful bullying doesn’t work. As it seems to be working here, alas.)

Hmm, I just realized that the answer to (1) is relatively easy to find (as is (2), but I’m lazy!)... There are lots of names in the CONTRIBUTORS file in the Kowari branch, including several entities I recognize as the corporate identities of former Tucana employees, as well as University of Maryland and some other universities.

Why do I care about all of this? Well, several reasons: More open source RDF databases are better than fewer ones, I suppose. I don’t like to see companies smush open source projects, even when that smushing is withing the rights of those companies. I really don’t like to see smushing when that smushing is not within a company’s rights. And, finally, I suppose I have something of an indirect financial stake hereabouts.

One of Clark+Parsia’s clients is a large, very technically-oriented agency of the US federal government, which happens not to be part of the Pentagon system. For that client we’ve been honestly pushing the virtues (and, more crucially, detailing the vices) of the Semantic Web, including RDF databases as especially agile. Now, we aren’t using Kowari or Tucana and didn’t really have any real plans to use it. (Not for any particular reason, we’re just using something else (Sesame).) But I’d like to know what the status of Kowari is going to be, open source or not, because there are clients for whom Kowari might be the right choice, and we won’t bet on a dog that Northrup Grumman seems determined to publicly beat to death.

Relying on Kowari is now not prudent, given our obligation to do our best for our clients; but it’s also bad for Semantic Web uptake in the US federal government, and that’s something Northrup Grumman should think very carefully about.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 9th, 2006 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Business, SemWeb. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.