Why should users care about the difference between Microsoft
Shared Source and open source?
Microsoft's latest moves concerning its Shared Source philosophy
may be confusing unless you recognise that this is part of a larger
agenda. Consider the following facts. Microsoft has:
- Acknowledged that source code and source code licensing is just
one component of an umbrella framework that is the commercial
software model.
- Submitted the specifications for the Microsoft.NET Framework to
the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) standards
body.
- Expanded the level of Windows CE source access to silicon
vendor partners via the Windows Embedded Strategic Silicon Alliance
programme and to system integrator partners via the Innovation
Alliance programme.
- Broadened Windows CE source code licensing access through
Platform Builder 3.0 and will offer academic (non-commercial) site
licences for Windows CE source code.
- Suggested that Shared Source is a corner of open
source.
Microsoft's agenda is to make its Shared Source philosophy as
appealing as possible, without leading users to repudiate its
control of source code. At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention
recently, Craig Mundie, the senior vice-president of Microsoft,
said that Microsoft wanted to learn from free software.
This is significant because it means Microsoft is making an effort
to counter the negative backlash from executives who have called
Linux a cancer (Steve Ballmer), anti-American (Jim Allchin) and
referred to the General Public Licence (GPL) as Pac Man-like (Bill
Gates).
It also means that the Microsoft management is pragmatic and
understands that it needs to stop the negative rhetoric if it is to
have success in gaining support from the open source community for
its Shared Source philosophy.
What is different, and essentially adds a dimension to the
rhetoric, is the suggestion by David Stutz of Microsoft that Shared
Source is a corner of open source. If Microsoft is successful it
could lead to Shared Source being embraced as part of the open
source continuum, narrowing the divide between the two
methodologies in the process.
The most important distinction to consider is that while Microsoft
source code may be made available to programmers, the company
maintains intellectual property rights to the source code. This is
a reason why open source as a methodology and a technology
threatens the control that Microsoft has as a single vendor over
its customers.
It is ironic that despite claims from Microsoft that it wants to
learn from the open source community, it appears that it has
learned most from Sun Microsystems, since its Shared Source
philosophy is far more similar to Sun's Community Source Licence
(SCSL) than to software under a BSD, MIT X or GPL-style
licence.
Primarily, the growth of Linux and the slow adoption of Windows
2000 led to the articulation of Microsoft's shared source
philosophy. In fact, for years prior to the introduction of Shared
Source, Microsoft has made sample source code freely available to
developers through resources such as software development kits
(SDKs), device driver kits (DDKs) and Microsoft Developer Network
(MSDN).
The company has also licensed Microsoft Windows source code to more
than 100 academic institutions in 23 countries, and licensed
Windows 2000 code to more than 1,000 enterprises customers in the
US with plans to extend this to 12 additional countries.
Although a competitive landscape between Windows and Linux exists,
in order for Microsoft to gain support from the open source
community it must lessen the perception of Microsoft as predator.
To further this point, Mundie claims, "We [Microsoft] only play a
small role in this large software ecosystem." Yet this is unlikely
to dispel the perception that open source versus Shared Source is
proportional to a battle between David and Goliath.
For users who want to look at the source code but are concerned
whether they own their own contributions or enhancements to the
code or are locked into one commercial vendor, Shared Source may be
worthy of consideration.
However, for a number of Microsoft customers, a Shared Source
licence that couples the notion of a single source provider with
open source access for non-commercial purposes may have limited
appeal.
The challenge for Microsoft is that Shared Source is a proprietary
framework, and unless the company expands and embraces the
possibility of unrestricted access to source code for commercial
purposes it will never lead to the sense of community, dynamism and
serendipitous events that open source technologies, such as Apache,
Samba, Perl and Linux, encourage.
