Sam Varghese
Thursday, 13 March 2008 22:33
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 5
Don Christie, president of the New Zealand Open Source Society and a director of
Catalyst, that country's biggest technology provider, had a different take.
"Microsoft claim they already have released their source code but the terms are so restrictive and encumbered that it is useless as far as the FOSS or any other community is concerned," he said.
"Really, they need to learn from Sun's experience. When Sun releases code under the GPL it is welcomed, used and has a major positive impact to Sun and the rest of the word. Think OpenOffice and a whole slew of middle-ware. When they tried to use a shonky licence for Solaris no-one wanted a bar of it. From what I have seen Sun are releasing just about everything under the GPL right now and that seems to be a very smart and consistent move.
"I do believe that in a few years time, once Microsoft have more confidence in alternative lines of business, that they will migrate to using the GPL as well and yes, that will be be a good thing," Christie said.
The views put forward by
Russell Coker , a renowned hacker who is best known for his sterling contribution to the National Security Agency's Security Enhanced Linux project, were coloured by what he has experienced with Solaris.
"Some time ago I was advised by a lawyer that I should not inspect any of the Open Solaris source code due to the possibility of it impacting my future free software development work," he said. While I have not tracked recent developments in Open Solaris or sought any further legal advice I have not looked at any Open Solaris source. So for me Open Solaris has no direct impact on my work, but the fact that it saved Solaris from becoming totally obsolete (IMHO) means that it does change things a little (for some projects I work on there are two viable user communities instead of one). I don't expect that an Open Windows OS would be any more open than Open Solaris is (or was - maybe they fixed things recently).
"There is significant potential for benefits to free software development in terms of interoperability if the Windows source was released. Some people who aren't afraid to get tainted could examine the code and document APIs and protocols so that others could write code to work with them. I am not sure how important this is to free software development (I don't deal with Windows machines often so it's not really important to me)."
