Slashdot Mirror
'Shared Source' .NET Overview
Lisa writes: "As part of Microsoft's Shared Source initiative, the company announced Tuesday the public availability of more than 1 million lines
of Windows and Microsoft .NET source code--aimed primarily at universities. I guess Microsoft hopes to slow down academic support for the open-source Linux OS. Don't know why they expect this to work, but Brian Jepson has a nice overview of this shared source release."
I think that the real reason why Microsoft is releasing some of its source code as a part of the shared source initiative, is so that they can poison the mindspace of programmers. This would give them a very sharp thin end of a wedge to combat the true open source movement.
Consider a young programmer who has access to the Microsoft soure as a part of their education process, whether it be formal in a university or highschool or as a part of their own personal training. This programmer then wants to go and later (months or years) contribute to a GPL'd project, because their mindspace has been poisoned (enhanced?) by the Microsoft code they have seen their contribution could be claimed by Microsoft to have been influenced by Microsofts proprietary code and the Microsoft legal juggernaut would tie up the project in the courts for as long as their money lasts, since they have (according to their 2001 financial statements) 31.6 billion dollars US in Total cash and short-term investments that would be a very long time indeed!
If you want to do real open source, do not look at the poison.
Eben Moglen, general counsel to the FSF, gave the DotGNU project his opinion on the Shared Source license and tainting.
- Brian