Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Seeks Open Source Certification
eldavojohn writes "Microsoft is applying for OSI certification for its Shared Source Initiative. The move is described in a blog post by an MS OSS lab worker: 'Today, we reached another milestone with the decision to submit our open licenses to the OSI approval process, which, if the licenses are approved, should give the community additional confidence that the code we're sharing is truly Open Source. I believe that the same voices that have been calling for Microsoft products to better interoperate with open source products would voice their approval should the Open Source Initiative itself open up to more of the IT industry.' According to PC World, reaction from the community has been mostly positive."
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I apologize for submitting a dupe.
From that blog posting: I also run a training class that teaches people around the company how to engage in open source projects and make them successful. Now, after reading the higher ranked comments from the first article, I know many of you saw this as disingenuous, deceptive and/or highly manipulative tactics on order with a politician, the RIAA or Steve Ballmer.
But this blog is written by someone who's genuinely interested in Microsoft becoming part of OSS efforts. Will it happen? Probably not as a good many of you pointed out.
The real question is, when it doesn't happen, what was the real reason? This is tough, because Microsoft is a large company. I felt the pain of using their products when I had to stay at work until midnight on Wednesday trying to get AJAX (that worked fine in Firefox) working in IE. But this is only one of their many products. Is it fair for me to condemn their application for hundreds of other products for OSS certification based on a few tools I've used?
My answer to that is that "I don't think so."
What I'm trying to say is that the open source community is a community. Once you start to blame Microsoft for everything, turn a cold shoulder towards them whenever they even mildly reach out, you're essentially becoming them on the other side of the mirror. What's worse is that this attitude will ensure that there will never be a point in time in the future when Microsoft can reconcile with OSS. I think the fact that even one person inside the company is reaching out says that Microsoft as an entity is not 100% against opening a code base. They have great marketing and business tactics, they are hear to stay for as far as I can see. I think that the attitude should be open arms under the right conditions instead of a persistent never ending cold war or middle east-style conflict in software today.
Will I be jumped on as not being a hardliner open source advocate? Probably. Because I care far more about the success of everyone than I do the success of either side.
The people running the accreditation will no doubt be very stringent on the licenses passing OSS certification. I'm not a lawyer but I doubt any of the MS-GL/SL/RL licenses will pass. I hope it's not an outright rejection. I hope there's talking between the OSI and MS, I hope there's negotiations, I chances are given, I hope for compromise, I hope that some of the projects end up as OSS, I hope to use Microsoft's software, whether I pay for it or not, and to be able to see the source in the future.
Everyone needs to make money, I need to make money. This is a capitalistic society. I don't blame Microsoft for making money, I blame them for failing to see the folly of their position. I believe a different pricing scheme could net them billions more dollars & millions more users. I believe that slowly opening up the code on more and more of their products can only improve it. I believe that people will steal it one way or another if they want to so your job shouldn't be to catch them but to take away that motivation.
In the end, if you rail against Microsoft for doing this, you're only building the barrier higher. I wouldn't recommend an "you're either with us or against us" attitude, I personally do not feel that has gotten anyone anywhere before. The world is not black & white, software is no different.
My work here is dung.
"According to PC World, reaction from the community has been mostly positive."
PC World hadn't yet read this Slashdot thread.
the same voices that have been calling for Microsoft products to better interoperate with open source products would voice their approval should the Open Source Initiative itself open up to more of the IT industry.
What a pile of M$. The only barrier to products that interoperate better is them. Everyone else has bent over backwards for years, only to treated as a pawn in the quest for M$ dominance of everything. M$ is the only organization using such sleazy language. The goal is not some kind of imperfect interoperation, it's the use of real standards, the end of M$'s silly games and the beginning of real freedom. Without the four freedoms, everything M$ does is just another game.
If M$ sends the OSI software freedom, great. If they don't and the OSI certify it, the OSI will not have raised M$ in anyone's opinion, they will have disgraced themselves and further diluted the terms "free" and "open". We will all be able to judge for ourselves, but I don't expect anything useful from a company that's rabidly threatening everyone with patents.
At this point, M$ has very little of value to offer and the best thing they can do is cease hostilities and start to repair the damage they have done. It would take the community a decade to fix the mess Windoze and Intel BIOS are. It will take even longer to undo the DMCA, software patents and other evil stuff they have promoted. The market itself is doing a better job of fixing the problem by ignoring them.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If not, I don't see any reason for you to apologize. Even if you are, it's not like you're duping an article within a couple of days or less. Because I've bitched about dupes many times before. Many times. Which implies that I hold the editors to a high standard. If I can't be a standard candle for them when I submit stories, how can I expect them to hold these artificially high standards I force them to?
Too many times, I've said that if they just went to Google or Google news and typed "site:slashdot.org Microsoft OSI" they would find the dupe from a few days ago about a story with basically the same keywords. I mean, you could even build a link on the admin page for them to click and do that search.
I apologized because I submitted before taking my own advice, leading to what I considered a dupe.
I apologized for being a hypocrite. It's a basic idea of not contradicting yourself that was ingrained into me when I was a child & seems to be lost these days. You act like you would want someone else to act (the ultimate maxim) and it's clear to me that everyone hates a dupe so I apologize.
My work here is dung.
Sorry, but MS is very, very hard to trust. They'd be willing to let you look at Windows/.NET/whatever code alright. Only I would expect this would come with strings attached that'd ensure you'd be "contaminated" for the purpose of contributing to anything related. Say, they let you look at MS SQL, and then the moment you try to contribute to MySQL/Postgres they'd claim you're stealing their IP or something of the sort.
Personally, I wouldn't touch any source from MS with a 10 foot pole, unless BSD or GPL licensed. What do they need their own license for anyway? Like there aren't enough already.
Any of several ulterior motives on the part of M$ management is equally plausible. The most obvious is that they're going to hang some of their code out there until every contributor to Linux internals is tempted by curiosity to take a squint at it. After the next kernel roll, they swing the patent hammer, claiming that the new release can't possibly not be "contaminated" by its authors' having been exposed to their proprietary code.
The other possibility, if all the OSS folks assume the above and don't take the bait, is that Redmond cues the violins about how they made oh, so great an effort to meet the other side and act in "good faith" to promote interoperability, and use it as an excuse to continue going their own way.
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then they pretend to join you and stab you in the back at the first opportunity. Never trust Microsoft.
Gandhi (somewhat adapted)
Loose lips lose spit.
This is just a PR stunt so that Microsoft can reap the benefit of open sources good reputation. If they wore genuinly interested in working with the community all they had to do would be to release current specs for their various document formats and network protocols. I really hope the OSI take a long hard gander and turn every single stone before agreeing to anything. Microsofts history tells you to watch your back. Microsofts shared source license should not in any way be let in without complete abolishment of the windows platform clause. OSS licenses should not tell you what platform you can use the code on.
HTTP/1.1 400
the farmer found the snake freezing in the winter
the snake said 'please help me out, pick me up in your coat and i wont freeze to death'
the farmer said 'but you are a snake, you will kill me...'
the snake said 'no, i promise i wont. please help me'
so the farmer picks up the snake and puts him in his coat. after a while, the snake warms up.
his natural instincts take over. the snake bites him.
as the farmer lays dying, he says 'what on earth has happened. you rascal!'
the snake said 'you knew i was a snake when you picked me up!'
Seriously, we're way past the point that new licenses are tolerable. It seems like every major project demands its own license, even if the result is 99% similar to other common ones. Is there really a need for the Apache, CDDL, Mozilla, and Artistic licenses and their countless derivatives?
If you want other developers to use your code, no strings attached, pick BSD or maybe MIT. If you're more interested in end users but want the developers to still have a few avenues to lock the code down, there's GPLv2. If you're really into end users and care about patents, etc., then pick GPLv3. Repeat after me: no new licenses!
Really, I think OSI needs to pretty much reject all new submissions unless they are substantially different from the pre-existing major choices. Fragmenting codebases by writing Foo License and Bar License that are almost identical but incompatible in some subtle way can only appeal to Microsoft and other proprietary vendors. Just say no!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Are you referring to Richard Stallman?
FYI, GNU is an operating system, just like Solaris and BSD. The fact that one piece of it can be replaced with Linux to make it far more useful doesn't make it any less of an operating system
Join the Free Software Foundation
The writing has been on the wall for years. Microsoft has little to no interest in continuing to be a company that builds the core platforms in the long term. Over the next several decades, Microsoft will become a company very similar to Google in most ways, though they will still have the Gaming / Media Center business around (the underlying technologies will be mostly open source by then, though). This is a good thing for everyone, Microsoft included.
From reading the higher modded posts on the previous story, I was surprised that few people seem to have bothered to take a quick look at these licenses. Let's give that a try-
Both the Microsoft Limited Permissive License (Ms-LPL) and the Microsoft Limited Community License (Ms-LCL) contain a clause like this:
Platform Limitation- The licenses granted in sections 2(A) & 2(B) extend only to the software or derivative works that you create that run on a Microsoft Windows operating system productThe Open Source Definition has this:
5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
Either 5 or 6 look a like a clear contradiction to above clause. So IMHO, the 'limited' licenses shouldn't qualify for OSI approval. Then the Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL) has this:
the Licensor grants you a non-transferable, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free copyright license to reproduce the software for reference use(Emphasis mine). Basically a 'look but don't touch' license. Thanks to other commenters for pointing out Open Source vs. Free/Libre: this could qualify as Open Source, but definately does not qualify as Free/Libre software.
I don't see any obvious problems with the other licenses though. And 1 thing I do like: they're nice and short, so that you can actually read them, and (try to) understand what they say. As opposed to reading through the pile of legal mumbo-jumbo in common EULA's.
One final point I'd like to make: one shouldn't take a license and complain about whether it does or doesn't suit your purpose. Instead, start with what you want to do with your code, and use a license that best suits that purpose. For some funny, new app the GPLv2/3 may be good, but for an implementation of a low-level networking protocol, that you want to become the defacto standard, a BSD-style license may be more appropriate (so that it can be used by anybody, even hidden deep inside black boxes, but using your protocol). You might be worried about the exact purpose of these MS licenses, but they may also be a vehicle to have your code included in MS products (and help improve standards compliance/interoperability). Not to mention that it's zero problem to contribute things like small bugfixes to projects licensed under these.
So I agree very much with parent poster. Why complain about MS when you think they're throwing you a bone, and you don't trust it? Simply throw them a bone back sometimes, and see what happens.
I believe that the same voices that have been calling for Microsoft products to better interoperate with open source products would voice their approval should the Open Source Initiative itself open up to more of the IT industry.
I think they'd voice their approval much quicker should Microsoft make a concerted effort to actually interoperate better with other products, open source or not. It's interoperation that is really the key... for example: back in the early '80s the yet-to-be-named open source community embraced UNIX not because it was open source - in fact at the time it wasn't - but because it was designed to be easy to interoperate with at every level.
It's not good enough to provide open source components that only actually work on top of your API, or to provide libraries that allow people to talk to your protocols through the cut-out of your system software, you need to open the black box and commit to supporting documented and non-proprietary wire protocols and file formats.
Otherwise what you've got is better described as an "open pit-trap".
More like living under a rock, kept in the dark, fed shit, and basically a mushroom in intellect.
/.) claiming all sorts of missing features and crappy programming when in reality all the open source guys did was defend by correcting what was obviously wrong.
FOSS just wants their freedom. They don't want to have to be shit upon by a criminally convicted monopolistic company that has a reputation of stealing other's intellectual property.
FOSS has not slammed anyone except to say that it makes no sense to pay money to a criminal monopolist is to continually bury your head in the sand. If you continue to use a product that locks you into continued purchases then it isn't FOSS that is shitting on others. It is Microsoft shitting on you. To continue to pay for something that locks you in is silly. To use a product that costs you money when there's a free nice alternative, well that's crazy. On top of that it was the Office zealots that dumped on Open Office (in prior threads on
How on earth can you not see what they have done and how harmful that has been to the whole industry? The opportunities for strong competition in the OS market are essentially non-existent due to Microsoft's criminal behavior.
The FOSS movement has done absolutely nothing wrong. They've stolen from no one. They've hindered no one. All they want is to keep a criminal monopolist out of their home. I'm sure you would feel the same way about allowing a criminal into your home.
On top of that you fail completely to understand that Microsoft is spying on you. They have 47 programs in Vista that collect information about you and return that information to their servers for analysis. They also have programs that essentially search and can seize your computer (refuse to work if they believe it is pirated, even if it isn't). They do this without most people's knowledge. They spy on you after having stolen from you for so many years. And you let them continue while essentially attacking the benevolent group of people who just want to have a fair free competitive market. Something that Microsoft has denied so many for so long.
On top of that you also fail to understand some of the largest companies in the world support FOSS and Open Source. What the FOSS industry doesn't want is Microsoft tainting the waters. Microsoft is already extorting cross licensing from other companies upon threat about IP violations that have never been proven nor the IP ever been identified. How would you like it if I stood in your neighborhood and told your neighbors that you were stealing and that I had proof of X number of thefts. You, and they, would demand that I tell them what you stole (what crimes you committed). They wouldn't put up with it.
Microsoft is like the big oil company that threatens all car owners that drive because they buy gasoline from one of their competitors. They say that the gasoline is refined using IP that they own. On top of that they are threatening any large company even more so if they don't agree to not just pay them money but give up their own intellectual property. It doesn't seem to matter that no proof is offered nor evidence of any sort yet they still claim that all car drivers will have to pay a price to them.
Don't you think it is silly that they threaten their competitors customers because they aren't using their gasoline? They can't compete on their own merits?
And your attitude is appalling. You have no idea, you have no knowledge, you have no eduction in this matter and you have never taken the time to actually understand what is happening. Then you come here and abuse everyone else who differs in opinion to you. Its rather sad if you ask me.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.