Microsoft Makes Second GPLv2 Release

angry tapir writes "Microsoft has made its second release under the General Public License in two days with software for Moodle, an 'open-source course management system that teachers use to create online learning Web sites for their classes[, which] has about 30 million users in 207 countries.' It comes on the heels of Redmond contributing drivers to the Linux community. No reports as yet on dropping temperatures in hell."

Comments

Not contribution; use

[CarpetShark]

This is an moodle plugin for microsoft's own groupware. Like their previous driver offering, it's not a wholehearted contribution to making an open source project better, but instead just a thing to make microsoft's own services work better when people need to use open source.

It's good to see a willingness to do even this much, but hardly a staggering change of heart. They've a long way to go yet.

Re:Not contribution; use

[Chyeld]

Microsoft is a victim of their reputation, a reputation honestly earned by their past actions. When everyone who ever gets in bed with you turns up dead or with a story of barely escaping alive the next day, sometimes it's appropriate for others to label you a black widow and liken you to a praying mantis.

No one claims that anyone in the group you listed are contributing to open source purely because they are altruistic and without any self interest. But that's the point, everyone on your list 'plays nice' with open source because they have an interest in seeing it succeed. Microsoft, however, has never acted as if open source was anything but a despicable wretch deserving a slow painful death. Their own self interest, therefore, leads people to suspect that perhaps the apples they are offering are poisoned.

It's also important to note that in both of the cases where they've done this, the contribution wasn't a general "here's some improvements" code, it was "here is some code which would allow you to work better with our proprietary services, so more people would be willing to use those." Anyone who thinks that Microsoft would continue to maintain such interoperability code should it prove a disadvantage to MS should avoid real estate brokers with deals concerning bridges.