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Ummm... not. But perhaps they are moving, ever so cautiously, in that general direction? InternetWeek reports (here and here) that Microsoft's new (as of last July) licensing/auditing terms, along with by now famous security concerns (for example...), are sending some smaller customers chasing after the Linux bandwagon. Around the same time, MS announced that companies, academics, developers, and gov't agencies will soon be able to license source code for its controversial (some say scary) Passport software.
Open source is still blasphemy in Redmond; they prefer this more toned down language: "The Microsoft Shared Source Initiative is a balanced approach that makes source code more broadly available while preserving the intellectual property rights that sustain a strong software business."
Posted by Maggie Law at October 14, 2002 12:16 AMShared Source is just another footnote in Microsoft's long and glorious campaign of FUD directed at open source. Any similarities between Shared Source and Open Source are purely cosmetic.
Shared Source violates numerous tenets of The Open Source Definition, which is to say nothing of The Free Software Definition. At a glance, Shared Source:
- Prohibits Free Redistribution
- Does not allow for modifications and derived works
- Discriminates against persons and groups
- Discriminates against specific fields of endeavor
The bottom line is that Microsoft does not share its toys with anyone. That said, Microsoft will gladly use source code taken from the community without contributing anything in return. Windows incorporated the BSD TCP/IP stack, which Bill Joy wrote while he was a PhD student here at Berkeley, since NT 4. Of course, this is completely legal under the terms of the BSD license.
And on a side note, I really wish the comment system wouldn't strip HTML tags out of the comments. *grumble grumble*
Posted by: occam on October 14, 2002 07:08 AM