Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft and Apache - What's the Angle?
A week ago, we discussed Microsoft's contribution to the Apache Foundation. Now, Bruce Perens has written an analysis "exploring the new relationship of Microsoft and the Apache project, how it works as an anti-Linux move on Microsoft's part, and what some of the Open Sourcers are going to do about having Microsoft as a rather untrustworthy partner." In particular, he notes:
"...Microsoft can still influence how things go from here on. If they have to live with open source, the Apache project is Microsoft's preferred direction. Apache doesn't use the dreaded GPL and its enforced sharing of source-code. Instead, the Apache license is practically a no-strings gift, with a weak provision against patent lawsuits as its most relevant term. Microsoft can take Apache software and embrace and enhance, providing their own versions of the project's software with engineered incompatibility and no available source, just as they forced incompatibility into the Web by installing IE with every Windows upgrade."
Apache.NET?
Does that Bruce Perens link really need to be a mailto: link? His Slashdot user page might be more appropriate: http://slashdot.org/~Bruce+Perens/
So a week later, and the best sinister motive they can come up with is Microsoft doing something they could've done without contributing to the project..
*breathe a sigh of relief*
and extinguish
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page 2: http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/print.php/12068_3762786_2
I'm currently trying to get C# to talk to Java through SOAP. In C#, I'm using WCF (A Microsoft Framework), and in Java I'm using CXF (An Apache Framework.) It's very difficult.
No, I will not work for your startup
Fan boy.
I'm not sure if you're referring to Bruce, Microsoft, Apache, or Slashdot.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I'm not sure why this would be said to be an anti-Linux move. I realize that this might be what people sense with regards to the contribution, but like the article said the "Apache license is practically a no-strings gift". With Microsoft's new talk of becoming pro open source, this might become like Apple's contributions to BSD. You don't here anything bad about Apple with their use of BSD, but at every chance possible commenters are willing to frame MS in a bit light.
I just wanted to point out that this type of news should be addressed as unbiased as possible, as Slashdot isn't exactly respected as a home of unbiased views or anything.
Trying to appear relevant?
I got news for you, but Microsoft is extremely relevant. Their relevance is what gives them the power to single-handedly break standards and have it supported by, not some, but the majority of web sites.
This might sound completely insane but did anyone consider that Microsoft might try and cut costs by using Apache for the backend in Windows Server 2010?
Apple has done it with Apple OS X Server. It would allow Microsoft to keep up to date with web standards without having to spend vast amounts to do it. All they would really need to do is develop propitiatory modules that they could hook in.
Microsoft really have very little vested interest in keeping IIS up-to-date. It isn't a big cash cow and I think most people would agree that it isn't a great web server (although does have some nice tie-ins with the OS).
While I am posting I really dislike the article attacking the Apache licence. The Apache and BSD licenses are the purest form of what OSS stands for. It is freedom in the true sense and not freedom in the American sense (e.g. Freedom at the barrel of a gun).
So, if MS forks Apache, will they still be able to call it Apache, or will they have to make up a new name for trademark reasons? If so, it'll just be another fork, won't it?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
So let me see if I have this right.
1: If they activelly avoid compatibility with open source, they're being evil.
2: If they just ignore it, they're being evil.
3: If they try to co-operate with any open source project, they're being evil.
What, to be blunt, the fuck is going on?
Ok, I'm not claiming closed source vendors are great or anything, but to my mind, this smacks of closed minded zealotry, and as we know, courtesy of the worlds religions, that generally doesn't work out well in the long term.
Is the open source movements plan to vilify any and all attempts of the 'establishment' to work with us? Is that the plan?
I freely acknowledge that Microsoft don't really have much in the way of compatible philosophy, but if all we do is bitch, all we'll get is negative publicity and bad feeling from people who, shock, horror, are actually entitled to think that open source isn't the source of all that is good in the world.
I'm an open source developer myself, but obviously not a 'proper' one, because all I care about is sharing my code.
What is it that Bruce is actually worried about happening here? All I see in that article is a lot of standard (for slashdotters) ideas mixed together, but no actual coherent argument end to end. Is the worry that if Microsoft joins OS, they'll cause ... what? Fragmentation? Destruction? Mayhem? What is the danger?
Tip: He was referring to Bruce.
...if something they do appears to not be evil, that's only because we're not looking at it the right way.
Microsoft has lots of money to hire key Apache developers, if they actually plan to use the code and want good service from its developers on a 24/7 basis. So, this $100,000 contribution and the partial patent grant aren't about interoperability.
Who says Microsoft wants to use this code? From the earlier article, it sounded like they wanted to improve the code that other people use, to make it easier to use on Windows. And this way they don't have difficulties with convincing people to become @microsoft.com, or with convincing people to trust and work with people @microsoft.com.
Last year, GPL went through a major revision, with the participation of dozens of attorneys from the world's largest companies, along with academics and individuals. That caught it up with the elaboration of copyright and patent law over the past quarter century. A second version, the AGPL, has evolved to deal with the business model of Google, software as a service instead of on the user's PC. That's fortunate, as GPL is going to be even more important now.
Because writing and using good, unique software is something that has to be "dealt with". Re-implementing parts that could be useful isn't enough, non-shared software is Evil and must never be allowed to be written.
Both kinds of developers may choose the GPL: the commercial ones because they want to keep their competitors from running away with the program without sharing their own work, and the individuals because they'd rather function as equal partners in enforced sharing than as unpaid employees who give all they create as a gift to the big company.
So if you make something available for everyone, you become the "unpaid employee" of anyone who improves it? Regardless of the fact that any further improvements you make will actually create more work for them to do (unless they send their changes back upstream)?
This also has philosophical issues, manufacturers of physical products don't get to forbid aftermarket modifications (and can't even void warranties just because of aftermarket work), why should this be considered a legitimate right for manufactures of knowledge (I know it's a legal right, but that doesn't make it reasonable)?
And most important, GPL is what developers will use if they welcome Microsoft's participation in their projects, but only on the same terms as everybody else.
Because BSD/MIT/X11 have wacky rules that apply differently to different kinds of contributors.
Microsoft can take Apache software and embrace and enhance, providing their own versions of the project's software with engineered incompatibility and no available source, just as they forced incompatibility into the Web by installing IE with every Windows upgrade.
Right on, that's cool. That's the purpose of the ASL. It is written such that commercial entities can extend it in unanticipated directions. That's what makes it different from GPL-like licenses, and it is totally OK. Some people (like myself) prefer to release under GPL-style licenses because we want to prevent commercial proprietary extension, and that's OK too.
Also, Bruce's commentary is fine. He's using an active case-in-point to demonstrate a behavior that some may view as a downside associated with using a liberal license, and which will help new joiners to the Open Source community to make their personal choice.
Or, in short, there's no need for yet another GPL versus BSD flamewar. We can all do what we like with our code, and that's good.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
They're trying to take the oxygen from Linux and you're breathing a sigh of relief. But suddenly you gasp. No oxygen! The room is spinning. It's getting dark...
Bruce Perens.
How are they going to fuck it up exactly? They can submit patches to the maintainers, but they probably won't have commit rights. Even if they did, the changes can be caught and removed in pre-release testing. Worst case they get backed out in the next release. Given a pattern of bad behavior, I'm sure their commit rights would be revoked.
They're making a donation, not buying carte blanche to do whatever they want to the main code base. If they want to fork it and fuck up their own version, well, so be it. Just don't call it "Apache".
Really, people need to back off these guys a bit. I don't mean stop being suspicious and guarded, but sometimes it seems like this reaches levels of the paranoid delusional.
They're trying to take the oxygen from Linux by becoming the dominant server for Open Source applications. But if you're an Open Source developer, helping them displace an Open Source platform isn't such a great idea, is it?
Bruce Perens.
Life is like a boxset of Movies, We have the good guys, and the bad guys, and the recurring villain, Microsoft.
signature is pants
I work for a fortune 100 company and we have a ton of middleware running on Apache Tomcat. Currently we have Tomcat running on old Sun Servers, HP Servers and newly procured Linux servers.
One surprising thing to me is the number of Windows 2003 Servers that we have running Apache Tomcat as well.
Maybe Microsoft realizes that there is some big business potential playing nicely with Apache?
It does have its limitations. It's more of a share and share alike license than a path to public domain software.
If I, as an open source author, want to give my code back to the community, with no strings attached, public domain is the only way to go. That way, anyone can use the code for any purpose they see fit. It is truly a gift.
But GPL'ed code is not a gift, it is a license. It seeks to enforce - through copyright law - the notion of free software. That is, you can't take my free program and add in proprietary changes, and add restrictions to the use of the code.
It's a good license. It does bring balance to the big picture.
But it doesn't address one of the fundamental problems of open source: it's difficult to make a living writing open source code. Sure, you can make a living supporting open source code, but it is very difficult for the average programmer to make a living on what open source pays (usually nothing).
Without the proprietary model, I would have to make a living doing something other than writing code. Which would mean, that because I would truly be an amateur programmer, my code would not be as good as it would otherwise. I'm able to make a meaningful contribution to open source code in part because I write code for a living.
The consequence of being employed to write code is that I can't contribute code which would interfere with my employer's business interests. So while I'm able to use my general programming skills to benefit open source, I cannot produce open-source software in my area of expertise. Which, to me, is a real problem. But the GPL doesn't solve the ethical dilemna of an employee undermining his employer's business model. A large portion of us rely on the revenues generated by the pay-per-license proprietary model; without it, our customers would have to pay inordinately large sums of money up front for software, and we couldn't introduce new and innovative features because the budget wouldn't support it.
I am a good programmer, and I do produce something of value when I write code. I have no problem with people sharing the code that I write, but we as a society need to understand that programmers need to be paid for their work. That is, if we are to have any reasonable expectation of software quality. Without the experience that comes from writing code professionally, the quality of software would be absolutely abysmal.
And open source does have the proprietary model to thank for its quality - typically, the code written for open source projects is written the way a programmer knows it should be written, rather than taking shortcuts because of scheduling and marketing issues.
I like open source, but I realize that I, and other programmers, need to be able to make a living writing code if we're going to contribute meaningful software to the world. Unfortunately, the GPL doesn't address this problem in an economically viable way. Even Stallman admits that in a free software world, programmers wouldn't make nothing, they'd simply make less. Problem is, I have a family to feed, and don't have the option of making any less money; if the whole world went open source, I'd have to go into management just to feed my family. I don't think it's very ethical to ask my children to starve so you can have your software free of charge.
The GPL is good, and needed, but there needs to be a balance. I can contribute to free software because my employer's proprietary model allows me to make a living writing code.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Vista's customer-hostile emphasis on digital rights management ... caused its downfall. IT managers won't stand for that ...
Thank you Bruce. I've been saying this since a year before Vista even shipped. Folks complain about a lot of different things in Vista (some of it fairly, I think) but I see most of those "features" as mere pains-in-the-ass that I could begrudgingly live with. What really gets me and why I won't be installing Vista on any servers or desktops at work is the DRM. To me it's reminiscent of the campaign slogan from a few years ago - "It's the DRM Stupid!"
As far as the Apache/MS thing is concerned I thought IIS was mostly used on parked domains, so it's like who cares what they do? But what if Microsoft extended this idea to the desktop O/S? Start with the distro of their liking and build their own UI on top of it. Isn't that what so many of us have been hoping for?
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Apache, in a way, is Microsoft's kind of software. It has lots of cruft, features that have been added over time and don't interact well. So it's hard to clone or replace. Lots of things plug into it using its API, so it has slave projects. That's the kind of lock-in Microsoft likes.
(Technically, all an Apache-type web server really needs to do is support serving of plain pages, and FCGI. With that, you can do anything, because there's an efficient way to pass off work to other programs. Interprocess communication is a good thing. But that's not the way Apache grew.)
In that case, what, exactly, would change with this scenario?
The contribution to the Apache Foundation would have the same PR effect, so that wouldn't have been affected at all.
The ability to embrace-and-extend would be slightly differentiated, but not all that much. Microsoft would integrate some new System Libraries into Windows Server, and any Microsoft-only extensions of Apache would be made dependent on them. The calls to the Windows System Libraries would be GPL, but the code in the libraries would remain closed, and adding their features to the GPL version of Apache would require a WINE- or Mono-like project.
And, um. What else is there? Well, Microsoft would logically be contradicting its GPL statements, but Interix/Services for Windows/SUA/whatever it is this week already did so.
It seems that Apache license allows you to modify and re-distribute without giving back the source. I bet the Apache foundation people gave a bit of thought about something like that happening before they chose the license and obviously they decided it wasn't that important.
Do people really think Microsoft will suddenly manage to destroy the Apache foundation because they said they wanted to contribute? I would suspect their sponsorship is going to strengthen Apache Foundation's capacity to penetrate more corporate entities. In some places the open source argument does mean anything to the decision makers but vendor support and an IBM/Microsoft backing certainly does.
Others like IBM have been doing just that and no one seemed to care. (http://www-306.ibm.com/software/webservers/httpservers/).
There are two versions of IBM HTTP Server, based in turn on 1.3 and 2.0 versions of open source Apache, but with small alterations to allow IBM to attach extra features. The code bases are maintained inside IBM, where IBM keeps them up to date by selectively picking up and applying bug fixes from the open source Apache CVS repository.
Go get your IBM httpd trial and see if you get any source with it. (I didn't check because I don't really care).
I'm also pretty sure that amongst all the project of the Apache Foundation, the Apache httpd server is probably not the most interesting for them.
So, you'll hire that teacher caught molesting their students because they say they want to help children? Microsoft has a long and sordid history of setealing intellectual property, claiming the success of open source projects they invest in and yet violating the published API's to lock out the software of the open source authors or public API publishers. This happened with Java, Kerberos, SPF, etc.
There is no reason to think they've changed policy.
that's a BSDaemon, thank you very much...
How long will it take before people realize that the GPL is holding Linux back? It's the greatest single strategic weakness of the beloved-by-socialist-wanna-be-programmers. The BSD style licensed projects get more momentum and make forward progress. Meanwhile, GPL-style projects fork and fork and fork and fork endlessly. How many Linux distros does it take to beat a clue into the head of a GPL zealot? The world may never know.
My Karma is gonna get a major dent from this, I know it. But there it is, folks. Apache isn't in danger from Microsoft because Apache is still free. Like totally free. Like not encumbered by any strings, free. Like get over yourself copyleft freaks, free.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Bruce Perens is the Chuck Norris of the geek world. He doesn't age. He recompiles time.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Yeah, actually. It works if you have a real community. Go read about what happened with the Firebird DB. It worked for Debian's SSL snafu, although it took longer than I'd like. It didn't work for Spring, because it was a single-company-dominated project.
Bruce Perens.
Distributions do not run the two desktop projects, they do collaborate on them.
Bruce Perens.
I dunno. Linux seems to do not that bad on the server market with a small number of distros dominating (and little fluctuation in which ones do). The embedded market loves Linux. True, it doesn't fare that well on the desktop market, but here we see a few distros dominating, as well.
Most users aren't even really affected by the forking going on. They use Ubuntu, Fedora or OpenSUSE and when they start really learning Linux they might wander off to Debian, CentOS or even Gentoo. Most minor distros don't get any media attention and are simply obscure. Distros like STD are very much welcome by the people who actually have to need for them but unknown to those who don't.
And I don't really think that someone who builds his own DSL derivative to make a Linux-based game console would improve the quality of Fedora or Ubuntu if he didn't have the choice of making his own distro. His motivation is completely different and he might not even get to participate.
Also, the GPL has nothing to do with distros whatsoever. After all, what about BSD? There's OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, TrustedBSD, DragonflyBSD, M0n0wall, PicoBSD, DesktopBSD, BSDeviant, FreeSBIE, pfSense... Either they relicensed 386BSD while I wasn't looking or the GPL isn't quite at fault.
The balkanization of distros comes from the fact that you can take the kernel and freely combine it with other software as you see fit. If you really want to stop that you'd have to use Windows-style integration where the Linux kernel automatically includes GNOME and Apache httpd so that people won't be able to build their own distributions without those. Or you simply don't release the source to the kernel and only offer it in one single package with the software you dictate. Which would be a bit counterproductive in an Open Source project.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
What if the developers actually do want to be paid for maintaining the software? Putting BSD terms means that nobody needs a commercial license, so you can't sell dual licensing, and that makes it harder for the developer to get paid. So what you get is some third party that didn't do the development work but gets the payment.
Bruce Perens.
If proprietary software was made extremely secure, how would anyone without the source be able to tell? Just trust someone?
Bruce Perens.