Open Microsoft

Recently, I wrote about how Microsoft has become a company more customer-focused, how it is now part of the review process to demonstrate concrete actions of customer service.

Over the past few months, it seems to me that the company has become more open.

With .NET, Microsoft provided essentially the sources to the libraries with the Rotor source code, complete with ports to BSD and Macintosh. Over the past year, Microsoft provided access to source code to various governments and corporations. Just this past week, they are opening sourcecode to MVPs. Microsoft opened up the Visual Studio Integration Program, which used to cost $10,000 to all developers. They have also recently started an Empowerment program for new software developers, that provides approximately another $10 K worth of Microsoft software, kits and betas, for just $750.

If you have read this post from Scobelizer, Microsoft is attempting to get developers, press people, customers and so on to get an early peek at Longhorn, two to three years out, at PDC. This PDC is different, because it doesn't actually impose an NDA. Essentially, Microsoft is trying to get and incorporate customer feedback in designing Longhorn so that "Longhorn doesn't suck." Previously, customer feedback was available only when it was too late; now, customers can actually affect the development of the OS at the midpoint of its development.

Comments

[Chris Hanson]

Except nobody should actually look at Microsoft's Shared (not Open) Source.

Why? Because Microsoft believes in the idea of "contamination." That is, if you see the source code to something, and later implement something else that's similar, Microsoft believes the second implementation is a derivative work of the first. (Or at least could be considered by a court to be.)

Don't believe me? This was discussed by one of Microsoft's own Exchange server developers on the public IETF IMAP mailing list a year or two back. Microsoft has a strict policy against any employees working on or even looking at source code covered by the GNU General Public License for precisely this reason.

And yet, Microsoft is trying to distribute core source code, including operating system source code and source code for their bet-the-company runtime, far and wide. And people deride the GPL for being "viral."

[Benjamin J. J. Voigt]

Well, these things have been considered by quite a few people, specialy Mono coders are urged not to look at Rotor (thats why I did not look at it, for not closing any doors here). But I believe the general idea of Microsoft deliberately distributing code to make others suffer is largely inspired by the "fear of the big guy"(tm). If Microsoft were to behave this way, it won't happen unnoticed, and Microsoft would suffer much harder then any target of such a suite, it just won't be cost effective, and thats why I believe the above scenario is not very real. Some property rights agains a huge PR mess? You must be kidding.

[Mike Dimmick]

There is (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on which side you stand) a precedent in software copyright law regarding the principle of 'non-literal copying'. One company, with access to the source code of another, ported that code to a different language. The originator sued for copyright infringement, and won.

This is why Phoenix, when copying IBM's BIOS, had two sets of people working on it. The first had access to IBM's manuals which at that point included the source code; this group wrote specifications for each documented BIOS function. The second group took these specifications and produced Phoenix's BIOS code. Because Phoenix could prove that this was how it was done, IBM could not sue and the PC clone market was born.

I hadn't realised that Microsoft has an Enterprise Shared Source Licensing program for Windows 2000, XP, 2003 source code. You can, as a company, license the source code in order to read it and ensure compatibility with your applications. However, I suspect there are strong non-disclosure and non-use clauses in the license.