What if... Windows went open source?

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 13 March 2008 22:33

Opinion and Analysis

Dhanapalan said there were too many "open source" licences. "Many of these are incompatible with each other, and a ludicrous volume of them are just MPL with 'Mozilla' replaced with $company. What keeps open source strong are the licences that either have clout in their own right or ones which can share code with those licences. The GPL is right at the centre of this, and we should be proud that the core of open source's superiority is Free Software.
"Microsoft could try and release code that meets the Free Software Definition but is intentionally incompatible with the GPL, as Sun did with OpenSolaris and CDDL. It still remains to be seen if OpenSolaris has any success, and I think GPL incompatibility is certainly a factor there (for example, they can't take drivers from Linux, so its hardware support remains poor).

"OpenOffice.org, on the other hand, is a prime example of a large proprietary project that has been released under a GPL-compatible licence (LGPL) and has gone on to be successful as a consequence. That success would not have happened if code could not be shared with other FOSS projects, integration could not be made (direct linking, etc.) and mindshare not won (FOSS advocates to write code, report bugs, evangelise, etc.)."

He pointed out that the biggest stumbling block was patents. "Sun have addressed this in the past with a strong patent covenant, and more recently they've been trying to do it properly by, for instance, relicensing OpenOffice.org as LGPLv3 (hence granting its users the inherent patent protections of that licence). Would a mere 'Covenant Not to Sue' suffice for Microsoft? In the case of Microsoft's recent releases of binary Office formats documentation, their covenant only covers non-commercial derivations. Similarly, their Singularity Research Development Kit was released a few weeks ago under a 'Non-Commercial Academic Use Only' licence.

"It is vital that companies have as full rights to use the code as non-commercial groups. Otherwise, the code would be deemed to be non-Free (Free Software doesn't permit such discrimination). The contributions made by commercial entities into the FOSS realm is immense and cannot be ignored. To deny them access would be a death sentence for your code. Microsoft would be stuck improving it on their own, and in that case what was the point in releasing it in the first place? Don't malware writers have enough of an advantage?

"Don't trust what a single company says on its own. Novell was for a short while the darling of the FOSS world... then they made a deal with Microsoft. I'm glad that many of us were sceptical of Mono back before the Novell-MS deal, because I sure as hell ain't touching it now. .NET might be an ECMA 'standard', but like OOXML it is a 'standard' controlled wholly by Microsoft. Will such a standard remain competitive and open? We've seen this in other standards debates, a good example being the development of WiFi. Companies jostled to get their own technologies into the official standard. The end result might indeed be open, but if it's your technology in there you already have the initiative over everyone else. If Windows is accepted as being open source, Microsoft will continue to dominate by virtue of controlling and having unparalleled expertise in the underlying platform.

"To raise the most basic (and in this case, flawed) argument, free software is fantastic for all users no matter what. Free (not just 'open') Windows means that Free Software has finally achieved global domination - a Free World, if you will. By this argument, we should simply rejoice in our liberation from proprietary software and restrictive formats/protocols."

Dhanapalan said this situation was unlikely to eventuate even if Microsoft released the Windows source code as open source (even under the GPL). "The software on top will remain proprietary (the GPL's 'viral' nature aside). We'll still have proprietary protocols and formats - and even digital restrictions management (DRM) - at the application level. In the grand scheme of things, the end consequence on FOSS of Windows source code being released might possibly be zilch."

The shortest response came from one of the free software world's most talented programmers. Theo de Raadt , head of the OpenBSD project, was short and to the point. "It would not affect what I, or our project people, do at all," he said.