Is Tom-Tom an open source company? Two separate blog posts—one on InfoWorld by respected tech journalist Bill Snyder and one by a self-proclaimed Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) zealot whose blog I’m not familiar with—popped up in my Google alerts on July 26 saying or implying that Tom-Tom is an open source company. In the Synder article, Bill was quoting Rivermuse’s Dave Rosenberg. In the blog post by Hans Bezemer, the post linked to a straight business-news story about Microsoft (MSFT) suing Tom-Tom. The news article appeared in the Seattle Post on February 25, 2009. Microsoft suing Tom-Tom was bad form in the eyes of FOSS zealots.
TomTom is a 20-year-old Dutch company that makes personal navigation devices. Its shares are traded on Euronext. To write this post I downloaded TomTom’s latest prospectus from its web site. To accomplish that I had to say I was a Brit, a crime apparently equivalent to formerly (maybe still true?) ripping the tag off a pillow that says “Do not remove this tag under penalty of law” in the United States. Despite the difficulty an American faces in downloading the prospectus, the document contains a stern warning about something or other to inhabitants of the State of New Hampshire (as in one of the 50 United States). I dunno?
The only references to software source code that I found in TomTom’s prospectus related to a discussion about copyright protection of source code (as opposed to “object” code, not open source code). I searched via a .pdf “find” and admit that even after apparently illegally obtaining the TomTom prospectus, I did not read it. In fact, TomTom appears very concerned with its intellectual property (IP) rights, particularly patent protection. TomTom’s position would appear to be a no-no among true-believer open source companies (if you believe there is such a thing) and FOSS zealots.
I also found no reference to Microsoft in the TomTom prospectus. On its website, Tom Tom has a lot of information about how its products run on or with Microsoft products. But I could find no reference to the fact that it is was sued by and settled with Microsoft over IP rights. Such a settlement would not be surprising given the widely noted concern in its prospectus about protecting its and others legal status vis a vis IP. On the other hand, if Dutch exchanges and/or the Government of the Netherlands have investor transparency rules similar to those in the US, I would guess the Microsoft/TomTom agreement was not a material event.
It is often the case that companies claim in their marketing material to be “open source,” when in fact their key software product technology is proprietary. Google Google (GOOG), for example. These companies are merely glomming on to the buzzword du jour although open source is now the buzzword du hier.
“Glomming on” does not appear to be the case with Tom Tom however. In the section of the prospectus on marketing/sales tactics, I found no reference to open source software. In fact, googling the term “open source” on the www.tomtom.com site provided only 23 hits. Most seemed to be in licensing documentation (see TomTom’s concern with IP noted above).
So what’s going on here? Why do “open source people” refer to or infer that TomTom as/is an open source company?
Perhaps not coincidentally, both the Snyder and Bezemer posts asked whether the world should be afraid of “…Microsofties bearing gifts.” Bezemer says you always should be. Snyder says not any more, saying “The only thing Linux folks have to fear is fear itself.”
If TomTom is an open source software company, then all companies—even Microsoft—are open source companies. Part of the issue is the conflation of Linux with open source and the conflation of the term open source with the term FOSS. Linux does not equal open source. Most open source software in terms of types and perhaps even in terms of instances probably runs on Windows, not Linux. And most open source software—at least in terms of instances if not in type—probably does not adhere to the GNU General Public License (GPL), the gold standard of the FOSS world.
By the way, why aren’t Native Americans up in arms about the clearly politically incorrect company name, TomTom?
-- Dennis Byron
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