Microsoft--an open source company?

Why is open source important?

Some of the simplest and most common arguments--for example, that anyone can fix bugs themselves--are literally true but unimportant in a practical sense. How many of you out there, especially in enterprise IT, have ever done such a thing? Likewise for the ability to create a derivative work: It's nice to know you have such ability, but few of us will ever do it.

But to businesses the transparency of open-source products is important. It is a characteristic that builds confidence in the product for many reasons. First, you know there are no secrets. Second, you can more fully investigate bugs in your own applications and interactions between third-party apps and the OS. Access to the operating system source code can help with performance tuning, internal support, security audits--and I could go on and on. It's just good to have source code, even if you can't fix your own bugs in the product.

And in the world of commercial software, it's the software company's job to fix bugs. It's one of the things you're paying them for.

So it's a shame that Microsoft's Shared Source program has gotten so little serious ink. From the enterprise customer standpoint, Shared Source achieves almost all the important objectives of open source. The only real problem with it is that Microsoft doesn't use it widely enough.

Microsoft uses this kind of license, as opposed to the GNU GPL or BSD licenses, because they want to protect their intellectual property. It wants to be able to control the development of the product and it wants to be able to make money off the use of it. This seems perfect normal, downright American to me, but there are a lot of people out there who just don't believe in software intellectual property rights, and this is the attitude you have to have in order to object to Shared Source. The things you're not allowed to do are mostly the things that deny Microsoft the control over and ability to profit from its intellectual property. Ask yourself how many companies make profits selling GPL software and whether this is good for the industry.

The most famous Shared Source product is Windows CE, partly because you don't have to sign a non-disclosure agreement for it. But Microsoft has numerous Shared Source licenses, for enterprise customers, OEMs, system integrators, and a lot more. C#, Jscript, and the CLI (the .Net Common Language Infrastructure) are also available as Shared Source. Microsoft has also announced that they will open their Passport authentication service to Shared Source.

All of these products are underdogs in their markets, or at least their hold on their markets is tenuous and most face established competition. Perhaps Microsoft views Shared Source as a bootstrap marketing tool. But other Shared Source licenses go much further. Enterprise customers and others can get access for limited purposes to the source code for Windows, including all the latest betas of Windows .Net Server, service packs, and hotfixes. There are eligibility requirements and you have to sign what must be a hell of a non-disclosure agreement, but if you're a large enterprise customer (or an OEM or a system integrator or a large government operation) you can get to the source for Windows if you want it.

It's rather surprising that so many outside parties have access to Windows source code, even if under non-disclosure. So why doesn't Microsoft make Office source code available under Shared Source? How about SQL Server, Exchange, and other strategic programs?

And while I can understand Microsoft's nervousness about baring the family jewels to the world, I also think that in the long term the non-disclosure agreements are not meaningful. Yes, this is easy for me to say. If the Shared Source license doesn't let someone, for example, ship "Windoze 1999," whoever does it should face civil litigation. But more to the point, very little in software is much of a secret to the talented and determined. With the regular binary distribution maybe you can't see the C++ source code but you can use a debugger and figure out most of what's going on.

Richard Stallman and the GNU gang would disagree, but I think that the most important objectives of open source and those of intellectual property protection don't conflict. I hesitate to relate the beliefs of others, especially those with whom I disagree, but I believe Stallman would speak of Shared Source not being "free" in the sense that users can't do whatever they want with it, which would include making modifications. Of course this is true, but it's also unimportant. And if you don't like the Windows license, like I always say, just take your business elsewhere.

What do you think--is Microsoft's Shared Source really an open source program? Talkback below or e-mail us to share your thoughts.