Domain Registration Related News
Microsoft goes Opensource
April 2004
Will Monday, 5 April 2004, be celebrated as the
day Microsoft began turning into an open source
company?
At first sight, the Windows Installer XML (WiX)
toolset released then is just the latest piece of
software distributed under Microsoft's Shared
Source Initiative. This is the company's
increasingly complex attempt to steal some of open
source's thunder by offering classes of users
degrees of access to the underlying code - mostly
to look at, but in certain circumstances to touch,
too.
Microsoft's nervousness about letting others see
its source can be judged by the plethora of
different licensing schemes now available. It is
also reflected in the low- key description of the
"WiX Shared Source Licensing Program". It is only
when you follow the link to the SourceForge page
where the project is hosted that you discover that
WiX is being released under a licence that is
fully approved by the Open Source Initiative. In
other words, WiX is Microsoft's first open source
code.
The background to this historic moment is sketched
by the software's principal author, Rob Mensching.
That he does so in a blog is hardly surprising
these days; that he is one of more than 150 fellow
Microsoft employees who not only create blogs but
are allowed to share them with the world is rather
more amazing.
Another of those blogs gives an insight into why
Microsoft is opening up. It relates the company's
new-found interest in blogging to concerns about
"software quality" and the "customer connection."
These are precisely the areas where free software
excels, thanks to the tight links between coders
and users that lie at the heart of the open source
development model - and that people at Microsoft
are trying to replicate through its official
Shared Source Initiative as well as more informal
approaches like blogs and Wikis, the latter mostly
part of the interesting Channel 9 project.
|