Microsoft's sour view of sharing code

By ADAM GIFFORD

The licensing system under which the Linux operating system is distributed is a threat to the "software ecosystem" built up by commercial companies like Microsoft.

That is the way Jason Matusow, Microsoft's shared source initiative product manager, regards the open source movement and the Gnu General Public Licence (GPL).

Gnu is a Unix-like collection of programming tools and utilities - including a compiler, the essential tool for turning source code into a running program.

It comes with source code that can be copied, modified, and redistributed.

The Linux operating system consists of Gnu components and the kernel developed by Linus Torvalds.

The GPL, devised by Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman, requires source code to be freely distributed with the software.

Programmers can charge for the costs of distribution and warranties. It also requires any program derived from GPL code to carry the GPL.

The success of the open source model of collaborative, dispersed software development can be seen in products such as the Linux operating system and the Apache web server.

That success has brought pressure on Microsoft to be more open about what is in its code.

This year the company announced its shared source or the "Enterprise Source Licensing Programme", which Mr Matusow, who visited New Zealand last month, said was "Microsoft's approach to getting source code to customers and partners while not sacrificing control of the IP (Intellectual Property) behind its products".

Microsoft will now allow the IT departments of its 1600 biggest customers to see source code, which should help them develop custom applications and optimise applications for their environments.

If they spot any bugs, they can inform Microsoft and get them fixed. Mr Matusow said open source had its place in government and academic research, which could result in technologies which added to the "intellectual commons".

But he said the wider view of the cycle of innovation showed that technologies were not products and the movement from technology to product was difficult.

"Commercial entities can take the innovating steps, the heavy lifting as well as the economic risk of bringing a product to market.

"They support it, develop it, produce it."

In Mr Matusow's view protection of IP rights means the companies that do all this work are then given the opportunity to profit from that effort and investment.

But open source advocate Eric Raymond disagrees, saying the movement from technology to product is, in fact, extremely easy because software is so malleable.

"Microsoft wants you to believe that 'productising' software adds a kind of value that only the wizards of Redmond understand, and which is so important that it justifies their monopoly.

"But if that were really true, we wouldn't have high-quality Linux distributions being integrated by pairs of 15-year-olds in garages," Mr Raymond said.

He said commercial entities were generally incapable of real software innovation, "for the simple reason that they have backward-compatibility and user-expectation issues and a market share to protect".

"This makes them innately conservative."

Mr Matusow said Microsoft was not attacking open source but had concerns about the GPL because it "steps in and fundamentally places a wedge between the players in the software ecosystem".

He uses TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) as an example. It began as a top secret development project in US military.

"If TCP/IP had been released initially by the Government under the GPL, no commercial entity could have taken that technology and placed it into a commercial product without threatening the IP of the entire product."

Mr Raymond said the "larger context" was that Microsoft copied the Berkeley Unix TCP/IP stack and put it in Windows.

"Keep your eye on the pea, not the shell; what Microsoft wants open source to be is a safely neutered free R and D arm for its monopoly," he said.

"Microsoft believes that in order for commercial software to be viable, companies like Microsoft must be free to disregard the licensing entity's choice of GPL and appropriate any open-source technology it likes."

Mr Matusow said that if GPL-licensed code were included in a larger aggregate work, "then the entire larger product is covered by the GPL".

Mr Raymond said that that misinterpreted the GPL, as only those parts of the software statically or dynamically linked with GPL code must come under the licence.

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