codewiz51

Can We Take Microsoft at Its Open Source Word?

As an aging software developer, I float between OSS and Microsoft development environments on a daily basis. For those espousing that this article advocates socialism, I am amazed and heartily disagree.

Microsoft, at least from a technical perspective, has historically borrowed from the Open Source community and not contributed much content back until very recently. When MS had to implement TCP/IP protocols, way back in Windows 3.1, they allegedly took the stack (software code) from an operating system called BSD 4.4. (Here's my source www.heise.de/newsticke... in German and to be fair, here's an article claiming to counter: www.kuro5hin.org/?op=d...;sid=2001/6/19/05641/7... although they sidestepped by saying the did get the code under a BSD license.) The BSD license allows this behavior.

What they do not want is to work with the GPL license, which forces them to turn over any improvements they make in the code back to the community.

Yahoo is probably the largest user of FreeBSD operating systems and Apache web servers in the world. Both FreeBSD and Apache use the BSD style license model. Microsoft knows this, and they understand the licensing implications of the BSD style license. Whatever MS obtains from Yahoo, it may be "open source", but it does not have to be released back into the community that originally developed the software. I'd also like to point out that Apple did something very similar with their operating system call OS X. They actually adopted FreeBSD in it's entirety for the base OS. See www.trollaxor.com/2004... for one side of that story.

So in conclusion? Only time will tell if they mean what they say. I am not prepared to trust them until I see results.