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Microsoft Launches OSS Site, Submits License For Approval
prostoalex writes "Microsoft has launched a site dedicated to collaboration between Microsoft and open source community. The site helps developers, IT administrators, and IT buyers find out what Microsoft's product offerings are, and read articles about open source such as 'Open Source Provider Sees Sales Doubling After Moving Solutions to the Windows Platform.'" Relatedly, CNet has the news that the company has submitted its shared-sources license to the OSI for approval.
PR. Free product testing.
Any other ulterior motives?
FOSS != OSS
See the Wikipedia article on Alternative terms for free software and RMS's Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source".
Worse still, with this so-called 'product' in particular. The article goes into long,loving prose describing the development of the learning kit, it's functional origins in a now-defunct product, how it provides great value to education users, promotes peace throughout the land, etc... and omits how useless it is without having already purchased a decidedly non-open and very expensive SharePoint product.
Where is the value here for the customer? This is an improvement,how? Great, customers get a development kit optimized for producing a certain type of SharePoint object set. Just another SDK...whoop-dee-bleeping-doo. How is this different from the legion of Microsoft SDKs and APIs produced over the last 25 years?
Same tired horse, different saddle. Not that I'm very surprised.
Ok, this is my second 'non-anti-MS' comment today, and my karma will almost certainly suffer for it, but here goes anyway.
The PDF linked to talks about Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0, which is actually zero cost and downloadable from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads - you seem to be making the assumption that its talking about Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007. Its not.
"A" puts something patented in MS "Open Source" code. MSPL says you have a license to use that patent.
You patent something else. "A" does something that you think violates that patent. You sue "A".
Congratulations! Your license to use "A"'s patent has been yanked.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I think a better list of things to consider is whether you have freedom to (1) use, (2) share, and (3) change the software. If you can do all those then it's free software, no matter which company it came from. There's no reason to hold Microsoft-written code to a different standard to other code. If it's free it's free.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
It's a reciprocity clause. Suppose A holds some patents, and they've contributed them to software S and licensed them for use there. Now, B comes along and sues everybody using software S (including A) claiming that it infringes some other patents held by B. If B uses S themselves, the clause is intended to insure that B loses their license to A's patents, opening them to being counter-sued by A for patent infringement. The idea is to force a situation where a patent-holder can't block everyone else from benefiting from a piece of software while continuing to benefit from it themselves.
NT did include a POSIX system but that bit-rotted from lack of use and was removed I believe.
The POSIX subsystem is no longer included in Windows distributions, but you can still get it as a free download as part of Services for UNIX (SFU). (You'll also see mention of it as the Interix Subsystem and the Subsystem for UNIX-Based Applications (SUA).)
It is continually being maintained, and MS actually seems to have put an increased (albeit still small) push of it fairly recently. There is a fair suite of programs available for it, including GCC, Bash, automake/conf, SSH, etc., and it was supplanted to (supposedly) be POSIX.2 compliant. (When it shipped with Windows, it only supported POSIX.1.)
The big problem with it is that programs running under SUA can't access Windows API calls. This isn't surprising given the architecture of Windows, but it does mean that, for instance, you can't really have a GUI. I'm also not sure how complete the POSIX support actually is.
Basically I suspect it's a combination of they didn't want to put it on the CD and hence slightly encourage end users to install it (the did this with Windows 98 and TweakUI and Raymond Chen said it turned out to be a disaster for their tech support lines) and the CDs of XP being too full for it.
Um, no. Bait and switch is advertising something then delivering another. MS did deliver it for the versions of Windows for which they advertised it for. And of course this ignores the fact that the OP was wrong about the bit rot bit, and in fact MS has *improved* the POSIX subsystem since they stopped shipping it with Windows, but I wouldn't expect the typical /. poster to actually know that, because it actually makes MS and Windows look a little less bad.