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.

Comments

For some reason looking at their OSS site

[pecosdave]

gives me a weird feeling in my stomache. I'm not sure what it is, but I got a chill up and down my spine. I can't catagorize either feeling as good or bad, just strange. When it comes to that empire my first question is usually what's their real objective, with this one I'm not 100% sure and that scares me.

Does this mean we actually crossed over the line as legitimate to them, or is this bait for something else?

Explanation please

[pubjames]

Through that site I came across the "Microsoft Permissive License". The "conditions and limitations" of the license have this clause:

3(B) If you bring a patent claim against any contributor over patents that you claim are infringed by the software, your patent license from such contributor to the software ends automatically.

I don't understand this - can someone explain? If you bring a patent claim against a contributor then how does that contributor have a "patent license" that then ends?

Their long term strategy...

[skinfitz]

...is to patent Open Source.

That's right - all your codebase belong to them.

Step one in an anti-GPL 3 move?

[oneandoneis2]

I blogged on the subject recently:

MS has a number of proprietary things that the FOSS world would like to get inter-operable. The NTFS file system. The Office formats. Etc. etc. And the EU has been nagging at them to release interoperability information for ages.

Since MS seems to really dislike GPL v3, they could solve a lot of their problems with a simple move: Release all the code necessary to get interoperability under Linux working. Under GPL v2 only.

Take Samba. Samaba is going GPL v3-only. If MS released some significantly-big swathes of code under v2-only that resulted in much better Linux-Windows networking compatibility, a lot of people would use the MS-code with the last GPL-v2 release of Samba: Most end users are more concerned with how well software works than with which license it's released under.

That would leave the Samba team with two choices: Stick with GPL v3 and have a less-popular, less-functional fork of their own software. Or cave in and go back to GPL v2 so they can take advantage of the GPL'd code from MS.

And either way, MS would be able to show to concerned parties, such as the EU antitrust people, that they have finally released the code that the FOSS people have been demanding, under the single most popular FOSS license in current use.

Re:Step one in an anti-GPL 3 move?

[Darth]

except that the Samba team would then use the gplv2 code to be able to see both sides of the process and be able to more accurately document the protocol. Then they would reimplement the protocol in their own code under gplv3.

This would do nothing to stop the gplv3 from being adopted by Samba.

I dont think microsoft has any intention of using any version of the gpl. They are trying to get their shared source licenses approved as official open source licenses.

I think the point of this is that open source application development doesn't harm microsoft if they can have it done on their platform and on their terms. I think it's an acknowledgement that open source application adoption for some areas and for some users is inevitable and they are trying to minimize the impact that will have on their monopolies by making the choice to use those applications not necessitate changing platforms.

It is probably also an attempt to take open source developer mindshare away from the things they feel are the real threats in the open source community (the gpl in general; linux and the gnu tools in specific)

Re:Talent Poaching.

[CastrTroy]

After all the horror stories I've heard about corrupted databases and using network drives as the sole means of accessing the repository with Visual Source Safe, I'm not sure if I'd ever want to use a source control system from MS. SVN and CVS are simple, well tested, and can be accessed in a about 1000 different ways, from almost every IDE and operating system. I don't see any strong points to Microsofts offerings, but I hear lots of downsides, such as being crashes, corrupted databases, and very heavy on the network. I think I remember something about having to be connected to edit code in the repository, but that's too stupid, so I must have misread that.

MS Open source website? ooookkk

[opieum]

Well this is interesting. It is the equivalent of asking a Nazi about Jews and expecting objectivity. Also MS is having trouble having people developing on their platform. They are losing developers for Mac OS and Linux. People know a sinking ship when they see one. Plus the subtle jabs they take at developers claiming that it is their software causing security problems (which is partly but not totally true) why would anyone want to develop for MS when OSS provides full flexibility. People can see the code and not come up with hackish solutions or workarounds to problems they may encounter. http://www.cio.com/article/122152/Microsoft_Window s_Loses_Ground_With_Developers_Survey_Says With Vista being a mess of compatibility and DRM/WDM/"Security" laden crap, it makes it hard for any real innovation to happen in the application space. I used to work for MS. One of the biggest gripes I heard was that drivers were always made wrong. Applications were usually buggy which caused problems with the OS. While again that is PARTIALLY true, part of the problem was the fact that I later learned (after I left MS for the real world) that coding for Windows platforms is a PITA. The closed nature makes everything a hackish effort. Workarounds here, hooks there. Linux, BSD and other open source kernels out there have easy access to the lowest level if necessary of the kernels and OS in general. This makes it extremly easy to integrate with a minimum to intermiediate learning curve (if you are coming off Visual Studio specifically)

Re:Interesting site

[mrchaotica]

But what good does "Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0" do you when you need proprietary software (namely, Sharepoint itself) to actually do anything with it?

Re:Talent Poaching.

[CastrTroy]

That's why someone like Google should go to work indexing and caching their own copies of this stuff. Is there a service that lets you date files? I've always thought this was a good idea. Send a file over the internet to some organization, and they digitally sign it, and somehow include the date which it was signed. I'm not sure how easy it would be to implement something like this, or to prevent them from just signing something with some other date, but stuff like this would be useful for having verification with dates, of when something happened.