February 22, 2008

Microsoft going Open Source? Nah...

All over the news today is the word that Microsoft is turning from evil to good, hell is freezing and they're really adopt Open Source and trying to contribute to its world.

Let me give you some ice:
  • The whole stuff is incompatible with GPLv2 and GPLv3.
  • All this is full of patents and patent promises. For instance, while there's a promise to not sue voluntary non-paid developers, using the code covered by patents for commercial purposes is only permited “for the right fee”.
This news is bringing more harm than good to the open source and the free software world. Which is not that a big deal of news, considering it comes from Microsoft...

3 comments:

  1. Finally someone that sees trough the bullshit!

    I mean, it's a good thing (IMHO) for Microsoft to release APIs, docs and all, but call it Open Source ?

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  2. Not everyone likes the GPL interpretation of "Open Software". IMHO, BSD is Open Source. GPL is Borg Source . =P And, since it's Microsoft, I'm happy for just having the right to look at their code. Really.

    Please, no flame wars. All licenses exist to serve different purposes. I just don't love BorgSource. ;P

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  3. @Köch: You might want to read this to see that this "Open Source" thingie is in fact a lot more "shared source" than open. It is almost a "look, but don't touch" warning, and might end being an iniciative simillar to the one of .NET to mess up with Mono, where "looking at the source code" is making you - for instance - not to be able to code for Mono.

    You might not like GPL, or even the concept of "Free Software" and prefer the open source model. The problem is: how open is this open source model? Only the fact that it is crippled with software patents creeps me out...

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