Microsoft's quest for shared-source approval

Microsoft has submitted two of its "shared source" licences for approval by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The significance of this can be read in different ways. Some see it as a victory for open source, a capitulation on the part of Microsoft, and an admission that open source will be the way of the future. Others see it as a divisive move, designed to emphasise existing splits within the free and open source community. In reality, it is probably a bit of both.

Either way, Microsoft's submission of licences to the OSI illuminates some problems, not all of which are of Microsoft's making. Microsoft has always had a problem with free and open source software. The seeds of this animosity can be traced as far back as the famous Open Letter to Hobbyists written by Bill Gates, "General Partner, Micro-Soft", on February 3, 1976, in which Gates declared: "As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?"

"Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?" he asked. "What hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?" This is a question that has been answered many times by free software developers during the intervening thirty years.

The merry band

However, by adopting the EULA and software in a box Microsoft grew from being a mere "break-even operation", as Gates claimed it was, to becoming the richest corporation in the world. Free and open source software didn't become a serious problem to Microsoft until the late nineties when Linux and Apache began to make serious inroads into the web server market. A leaked report, written in 1998 by a Microsoft engineer, Vinod Valloppillil, praised "the ability of the [free software] process to collect and harness the collective IQ of thousands of individuals across the internet," and suggested that the resulting software was of such a high quality as to constitute a "direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft." Nonetheless, a year later, Ed Muth, a Microsoft group marketing manager, felt able to compare free software developers to Robin Hood and his merry men, declaring that "complex future projects to add such functions as automatic translation of email require big teams and big capital. These are things that Robin Hood and his merry band in Sherwood Forest aren't well attuned to do."

In July 2000, Steve Ballmer declared: "Linux is a tough competitor. There's no company called Linux, there's barely a Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it. That is, it's free."

A PacMan and a cancer

By 2001, it had become obvious that free software developers were well attuned to the creation of large projects, and had found working business models to distribute the software. Free is hard to compete with, especially when the methodology tends to result in better quality software. During this time, Microsoft was on the attack, worried in particular by the impact that free software was having on government computing projects, with their emphasis on cost and accountability. Within a matter of months Microsoft executives Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates, Craig Mundie and Jim Allchin all made statements about the dangers of free software.