Quick check – ok, the sun is in fact not as black as sackcloth. But today, something earth-shattering happened – Microsoft has contributed code to Linux.
I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that I’d never live to see the day this happened. It’s 20,000 lines of driver code to make Linux run better under Hyper-V, which is of course in their interest (since you have to buy a copy of Windows Server 2008 as the host) , but that’s par for the course for open source contribution (you scratch your own itch!), and it’s a massive watershed regardless. From what I hear there’s still a lot of concern at Microsoft about how to manage contributions across the company boundary (in both directions), so I’m not sure what extra procedures they would have put in place for the developers involved in this process to keep the corporate legal army satisfied – perhaps pre- and post-project selective mind-wipes 
– but the fact that they managed to make it happen is a big deal.
Microsoft has wielded by far the most acrid rhetoric about open source in the past – we all hear that it’s changing, and I know particularly of specific people at Microsoft (mostly developers) who take a much more open view, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that while the top brass who set the ‘old’ policies remain in situ, substantive change will be difficult. But this move is one of many lately that make me think that just maybe, people higher up the chain are starting to get it. Or at least, they’re starting to defer to people who know better.
I’d argue that very few people in the open source community are inherently anti-Microsoft, they’re just a little more free-thinking when it comes to technology choices, a little more honest with their opinions, and have come to view MS as ‘the enemy’ primarily because of the old rhethoric the company used to use on a regular basis to attack them (and some parts of the company still don’t seem to be getting the ‘openness’ memo – as TomTom found to their detriment). Microsoft, or rather, Mr Gates and Mr Ballmer specifically, effectively made themselves the enemy of the open source community with their often ill-conceived tirades, and that’s something that will take a long time to heal. But, as we all know, actions speak louder than words – and if the company continues to make these kinds of conciliatory moves, they will start to win people in the open source community back, at least those people that judge on facts rather than old predjudices.
Trust takes a long time to be earned, particularly from where MS started from, so it’ll be a long road – but if this is how things are going to develop in future, then bon voyage, MS.
July 20th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
Christ on a bike.
July 21st, 2009 at 9:53 am
Microsoft is a big place – it almost seems like a collection of many smaller that sometimes compete with each other. Grass roots movements take time… but I do hope that the trend to be open when it is clearly in the best interests of everyone continues.
July 21st, 2009 at 2:47 pm
An enemy of Open Source community ?
Unlike various freaks (RMS comes to mind) I don’t think of this as an organized movement with a goal…
I mean ,sure you can end up being ridiculed by various fringe social warrior type groups (i.e GNU activists) – if anything I would consider that to be a badge of honor …. but can you make yourself an enemy of C++ community, or Java community ?
July 21st, 2009 at 3:06 pm
@warmi: no, I don’t think of open source as a ‘movement’ either, just as a good way to get things done in many cases (many, not all). And yet MS’s attitude to open source in the past has gone down very badly with me, and I’m sure with a lot of other individuals too. When I say they had made themselves an enemy of the ‘open source community’, I mean they’ve disenchanted a lot of individuals who just think open source is a good idea just for it’s own sake, rather than as a political standpoint or exclusive arrangement. By threatening major projects such as Linux and Samba, I’d say they did make an enemy of the ‘community’, and not just the extremists like Stallman (who I don’t think the majority of open soruce developers agree with anyway). In many cases, their attacks tried to tar all of us with the same brush (that we’re all anti-capitalist / communist and other such nonsense), and that alienated the moderates like me too, the people who think proprietary and open source don’t have to be mutually exclusive stances.
I’m glad all that is getting retracted, finally. Although I’m sure people will be cautious for a while.
July 21st, 2009 at 3:19 pm
If u look deeply they are still helping themselves, but in the process they are accepting Open Source principles and helping others as well. Hopefully this continues.
Linux Would have been no. 1 not no.3 Os if it had focussed on the end user, instead of only server and developers and command line. And tried to give standard unified experience acroos various distributions.
July 21st, 2009 at 3:40 pm
“If u look deeply they are still helping themselves, but in the process they are accepting Open Source principles and helping others as well. Hopefully this continues.”
Well, that’s what Open Source is all about anyway
The whole point is that more often than not, having the source code out there will end up helping you as well.
July 21st, 2009 at 4:13 pm
““If u look deeply they are still helping themselves, but in the process they are accepting Open Source principles and helping others as well. Hopefully this continues.”
Well, that’s what Open Source is all about anyway ”
Bingo. All open source contributions come out of self-interest at the end of the day, the idea is that when put together, you end up with more than you would have had otherwise.
I think the trouble was that the psyche at the top of MS has been that to win, you have to destroy everyone else. It’s a very 80′s way of thinking, and totally at odds with what open source is about (and how most developers think, I believe), it’s not socialism, just co-operation.
July 22nd, 2009 at 10:18 am
Some have found out that MS was legally BOUND to release their source code, so I’m still not convinced of their good faith…
Still, they did the “right thing” instead of trying to keep a lid on it, for which they can be congratulated…
http://linux-network-plumber.blogspot.com/2009/07/congratulations-microsoft.html
July 22nd, 2009 at 3:55 pm
OpenSource != socialism || Communalism
OpenSource != KillMSBuisness
How much conceptual clarity is needed to understand that?
July 22nd, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Checkout this story on ZDnet “Pigs are flying low: Why Microsoft open-sourced its Linux drivers” http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=3433
MS was in legal violation of GPL and the release of the code was prompted by prominent members of the community pointing this out. I wound’t expect to see further Linux contributions from MS anytime soon.
July 23rd, 2009 at 9:44 am
That’s interesting, thanks. However, I don’t think makes a lot of difference fundamentally – lots of companies have been in technical violation of open source licenses and have had to straighten up their act; it’s especially common in companies that didn’t previously understand open source very well, and MS has willfully misunderstood it from day 1 so they had more to learn than most. The fact that they did change their behaviour to comply based on just suggestions from the community is positive in itself, rather than taking alternative routes, like challenging the suggestions (they’re not short of lawyers), doing nothing until real legal action was taken, or abandoning the development entirely. They did what all good open source participants should do – realise their mistake and correct it without fuss.
I think it’s still an overall positive. I don’t expect MS to contribute any more to Linux unless it’s in their interests, but as I say, that’s par for the course for most people anyway. The fact that in this matter they’ve become like most other companies learning to play nice with open source is a massive step up from their historical position.
July 23rd, 2009 at 10:03 am
An on that subject, I like Matt Asay’s recent comments on this subject.
We do need to be careful about being *too* suspicous, even with people who have tried to wound us in the past, because, as Matt alludes, we risk missing the ‘perestroika’ opportunity (I love this analogy).
July 23rd, 2009 at 4:03 pm
perestroika analogy is really perfect:)
July 24th, 2009 at 11:08 am
I think some people (not particularly anyone on this blog) are forgetting Microsoft is a company made up of people. In my opinion the company’s attitudes have changed a lot over the years. It was a surprise when they made stuff available under their own open source licenses and now they’re contributing under a GPL license I think it’s a pretty clear indication that the people working at Microsoft value open source and want to make Microsoft more involved in the area.
I’ve read a lot of different view points of this subject from around the net and there really are too many whiners trying to find out why Microsoft did it. I wish they’d get a clue and realise the all the matters is the patches, not where they come from. You could quote endlessly past misdeeds by Microsoft however they’re not from the same people they are making the open source patches. Trying to get this through to some people is just an impossible task.
July 24th, 2009 at 11:24 am
I agree. Personally I think the main remaining concern over whether MS has really changed is that Ballmer is still in charge; his reputation as a fountain of anti-open source rhetoric precedes him, and I think most people suspect he would love to do a u-turn on these recent policies if he could make it make business sense. MS may be ‘new’, but the top guy is still very much of the old skool, so it’s hard to know if it will last. I hope so.
November 16th, 2009 at 11:53 am
[...] under the GPL, something I’m sure many people thought would never happen. Firstly there was contributing code to Linux for Hyper-V, and most recently they (unintentionally) used some GPL code in a USB/DVD boot tool for Windows 7, [...]