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Why Microsoft Shouldn't Spurn Open-Source Code

------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Sat, 05 May 2001 15:06:27 -0700 To: alert@oreilly.com From: Mark Brokering <mark@oreilly.com> Subject: Why Microsoft Shouldn't Spurn Open-Source Code

INTERNET WORLD NEWS Monday, May 7, 2001 Vol. 3, Issue 87 http://www.internetworld.com

Postscript: Why Microsoft Shouldn't Spurn Open-Source Code

By Jonathan Hill

Craig Mundie, a senior vice president at Microsoft ( http://www.microsoft.com ), set off a firestorm earlier this week with a speech given at the New York University school of business. The text of his talk, available online at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/05-03sharedsource.asp, contains a passionate defense of intellectual property rights as they relate to commercial software and goes on to take some potshots at the Open Source Software (OSS) model, reserving special ire for software that depends on the GNU General Public License, or GPL.

Predictably, open-source adherents jumped all over Mundie, and just as predictably, the buzz in the press and in technology chat rooms seemed largely to consist of objections to things that Mundie didn't say. Strange, because there are a lot of real issues here.

Let's start with some Microsoft context. Microsoft is busy reinventing its target audience. Mundie refers to the company's .Net Web services initiative as a change in strategy, a move away from device-centric applications to user-centric services. This requires overhauling the company's business model. Microsoft has, for some years now, concentrated its application development efforts on tight integration with the operating system -- and no, we will not veer off into Justice Department territory here. We're talking about MS Office applications that are designed to take advantage of Windows services like the Taskbar and 3-D and multimedia applications that can assume the existence of a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer).

To be sure, most of the back end of .Net, the various enterprise servers, for example, is designed to work in the same way, taking advantage of things like Windows 2000 security services. In Internet World magazine's extensive coverage of .Net in March, we pointed out that this tie may well slow the adoption of the .Net servers, certainly within current non-Microsoft shops.

But the Web services part of .Net need to be designed around the idea that support services may or may not be available. Web services applets need to be explicitly hardware independent, hence the push to adopt SOAP/XML. Whether Microsoft can create compelling hardware-independent software is a subject of some debate, but at a minimum, .Net services must -- simply must -- work within an undefined hardware and software environment. This is a market that has already been the subject of countless man-hours of application development, and, to a large extent, that development has been accomplished using open-source tools.

The bulk of Mundie's talk was devoted to an alternative development model, newly defined "Shared Source," which extends Microsoft's current model of strong support for the Microsoft-based developer community and provides a broader range of support services. As Mundie pointed out, to a limited extent Microsoft has been doing this for years: Big hardware manufacturers routinely get to look at OS source code, for example. More important, big hardware vendors and ISVs can be trusted to scrupulously honor Microsoft's intellectual property rights and their contractual obligations.

And here's where things get a bit tricky. In the abstract, it's easy to understand why the software giant is so concerned about intellectual property. Microsoft wants to become "the" provider of building blocks for complex applications. To compete, its blocks need to provide an advantage over other blocks. Microsoft is not about to become a giant consulting company putting together complex applications to drive cozy partner relationships. To get a return on its investment, Microsoft needs to get paid directly for its tools-creation efforts. Current software property rights law is on its side, but it remains to be seen how well current law can be implemented within the amorphous, anonymous Web.

The problem is that .Net applications may be based on a wide variety of programming languages, tools, and libraries. Thus, GPL's mandate that "any software that incorporates source code already licensed under the GPL will itself become subject to the GPL" means that if someone creates a .Net application that contains GPL open-source code, all of the rest of the application becomes open source, and you can say goodbye to competitive advantage and all those MS dollars thrown into creating .Net building blocks.

Mundie errs, however, when he tries to tie the use of GPL to the "dot-com business models that proved least successful" last year. His audience -- an audience that Microsoft desperately needs to court -- knows better. From IBM to one-person shops, developers are making money by developing complex applications using open-source tools. They're not trying to make "sole source tool provider" into a business plan, and they're not trying to walk a tightrope, but they are almost universally tired of being treated like fools. Considering the extent to which all of these parties rise and fall together on the strength of the new business-focused Internet, some give-and-take, and a reappraisal of the workings of intellectual property rights law, would seem to be in order.

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