Microsoft on open source

Microsoft and open source don't often meet but this looks to be changing.

Microsoft and "open source" are not words that appear in the same sentence very often. Recently, however, the software giant that made its fortune selling proprietary software is going out of its way to be more accommodating of free and open source software.

Over the past 18 months Microsoft has not only promised to work with open source players but has also released a couple of pieces of its software under open source-friendly licences. All of which is a far cry from the comment made by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer back in 2001 that "Linux is a cancer".

Interoperability

Some of the first significant steps Microsoft took towards a new openness was in March and April of 2008 when the company announced a series of interoperability plans. In March of that year Microsoft announced its document interoperability initiative which was generally welcomed but also viewed by many with scepticism.

The scepticism stemmed from the fact that the initiative was announced just days after the conclusion of a bruising battle between Microsoft and the open source community over document formats. The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) had just voted in favour of Microsoft's OOXML document format being adopted as an international standard, despite widespread global opposition to the move.

To many the document interoperability initiative looked like a conciliatory move from a company which had lost favour with the open source community.

A month later the company took the move to interoperability further by announcing a broader interoperability initiative. The initiative, Microsoft said, was aimed at "ensuring open connections", "promoting data portability", "enhancing support for industry standards", and "fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities". Again the announcement was welcomed in a sceptical way by the open source community.

Licensing

Over the next year Microsoft continued to talk about interoperability, open standards and its willingness to work together with the open source community. In July 2008 the company announced it was willing to put some money behind open source software by agreeing to become a platinum sponsor of the Apache Foundation - the foundation behind the most popular, open source web server. The annual $100 000 sponsorship is paltry in terms of Microsoft's worth but it was a step few could find fault with.

It was a year later, in July 2009, that Microsoft finally decided to release software under an open source-friendly licence. To date its software has mostly been released under strict proprietary terms or under the Microsoft Public Licence which is approved by the Open Source Initiative but not widely used in the open source community. In July Microsoft made two quick releases - 20 000 lines of Hyper-V code for the Linux kernel and a Moodle plugin - both under the GNU GPL2 licence, the licence most often used by the open source community.

The move was significant not just for the software released but rather for the fact that Microsoft has consistently avoided embracing the popular open source licence over the years. By establishing its own open source licence rather than adopting the popular GPL licence, Microsoft had avoided legitimising the GPL as a licensing scheme. Now, however, Microsoft had made an important move that gave additional weight to open source licensing.

Advocacy

Seemingly emboldened by its Apache Foundation funding and its GPL2 releases, Microsoft last month announced the formation of the CodePlex Foundation, a not-for-profit open source foundation that the company is funding.

The objective of the foundation is to "enable the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities". The move was quickly greeted by criticism and scepticism, most notably from Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation and other hardline free software advocates.

The CodePlex Foundation does, however, include a number of key open source developers including Shaun Bruce Walker from the DotNetNuke project and Miguel De Icaza of Novell and the founder of a number of key open source projects. Much of the criticism of the Foundation came from those that felt that Microsoft was re-inventing the wheel by establishing its own foundation rather than becoming involved in existing bodies with similar goals.

Microsoft says, however, that unlike many other foundations the CodePlex Foundation is focused on solving open source-related business problems rather than technical problems. Despite the criticism, Microsoft says it will invest $1 million in the CodePLex Foundation, not an insignificant amount. Whether the foundation will succeed in developing open source further or simply create a parallel universe of semi-free software only time will tell.

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