Microsoft Loves Open-Source… No Really
I just had a chat with BMC Software’s William Hurley (aka whurley, a long time open-source advocate) about the latest moves by Microsoft, Adobe and Sun into open-source development. In the last two weeks, we’ve seen all three companies release code for their developers kits under open-source licenses: Adobe’s Flex SDK under the GPL MPL, Microsoft’s Ajax toolkit and dynamic runtimes for .NET under the Ms-PL (a shared-source license) and Sun’s new JavaFX Script, which the company plans to release under the GPL later this year.
A lot of people are surprised that Microsoft is on that list. Whurley wasn’t. He pointed me to a blog post he wrote just before last week’s Mix07 conference called Seven Reasons Microsoft Loves Open-Source.
Two snips that jumped out at me:
They include open source code in their products.
Have you forgotten the first TCP/IP implementation in Windows? It was based on open source code that Windows XP still contains remnants of.
…They aren’t threatened by open source.
Open source is not the threat; Linux is. Don’t confuse the two. Open source is growing rapidly, but Linux has several distinguishing features that make it the real challenger.
Just for fun, I ran a Google Fight to see which basic emotional reaction Microsoft really has towards open-source software. The results appear at the top of this post — issue resolved!
Update: Thanks to S. Howard for pointing out the error in Adobe’s choice of license.
