Microsoft's Internet Explorer continues to hemorrhage market share to Mozilla's open-source Firefox browser. But Microsoft is set to surpass Mozilla in one area: adoption of its open-source Microsoft Public License (MS-PL), according to research from Black Duck Software.
The MS-PL is now used by 1.02 percent of open-source projects. This is impressive given that it was only approved by the Open Source Initiative some two years ago. The Mozilla Public License (MPL), by contrast, has been around for many more years and is used by 1.25 percent of open-source projects, ranking ninth in terms of popularity. MS-PL is 10th but is gaining fast.
It's a matter of coloring inside the CodePlex lines.
The MPL offers some benefits over its long-serving peers like the GNU General Public License (50.17 percent market share), but often the benefits are outweighed by the sheer momentum of the GPL. Whatever its deficiencies, the GPL is a relatively well-understood license.
For those developers looking to go "off-piste" with a different license, and particularly for those with a Microsoft inclination--as is the case with Microsoft open-source code hosting repository CodePlex--it's far easier to opt to do so with the MS-PL versus the MPL, the Eclipse Public License, or another license.
As CodePlex continues to gain in popularity, I expect we'll see the MS-PL push past MPL and potentially even past the MIT License, which currently ranks seventh at 3.79 percent share. When that happens, it will be a sign that Microsoft has truly arrived as an open-source player.
Of course, I suspect that Microsoft would rather beat Mozilla in browser market share than in license market share. But you can't have everything, now can you?
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CNET's Stephen Shankland has already picked up on Google's decision to allow two popular open-source licenses back onto its Google Code open-source repository. Up until now, the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and Eclipse Public License (EPL) were both banned from the site.
The reasoning Shankland reports for Google belatedly approving the licenses, however, is a bit bizarre. In the case of the EPL, Google's Chris DiBona argues:
Eclipse is an important, lively, and healthy project with an enormous plug-in and developer community that uses an otherwise duplicative license. They aren't interested in using the BSD or other open-source licenses that are readily combinable with EPL code. We have decided that after nearly 2 years of operation, that it was time to add the EPL and serve these open-source developers.
Well, yes. But that was true before Google opted to ban them. DiBona is a smart, super open source-savvy guy. He didn't need anyone to tell him that the EPL is critical to Eclipse, and that Eclipse is highly important to open source. So why the lag?
As for the MPL, while DiBona doesn't state it outright, I suspect that Google's decision to re-up its commitment to Mozilla for three more years probably involved some strained discussions about Google's weird decision to dump the MPL, one of the industry's most popular open-source licenses.
Regardless, all is well that ends well. Google came to the right decision, however odd the logic.
First it was the Affero General Public License that Google banned from its Google Code site, an open-source code hosting site. Google contended that it didn't want to encourage license proliferation by accepting projects using licenses that don't have widespread use and acceptance.
This week, however, Google nixed a highly popular, important license license: Mozilla Public License.
Google's Chris DiBona played the proliferation card again against the MPL, but also admitted that how Google determines whether a license is suitably popular is "so arbitrary." Great. That makes me feel better. At least there's a clear criterion for deciding. Not.
While some projects have moved away from the MPL in recent years, it remains one open source's standard licenses. I've got to think this has more to do with MPL derivatives (It's no secret that DiBona disliked the "badgeware" licenses that derived from the MPL) and their potential impact on Google's ability to consume their code, just as with the Affero GPL, than with any respect for license proliferation.
If it were about proliferation, Google would settle on GPL/LGPL, BSD/Apache, and MPL. Between those, most licensing preferences would be covered. By leaving out the MPL, however, Google has mistakenly dumped the baby with the bath water.
Microsoft has hired Rob Conery, founder and lead on the SubSonic project, reports eWeek. SubSonic is a DAL (Data Access Layer) that helps a Web site build itself. Got that? Neither did I, but it sounds cool, if too technically complex for a layman like me.
This is all mildly interesting. After all, Conery has apparently been on contract with Microsoft for the past eight months and is an "MVP" (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, which is a bit like being a community lead in the open-source world--it means you know your Microsoft stuff).
What is very interesting is that Microsoft will likely be including SubSonic with its products, and that SubSonic will remain under MPL 1.1: ... Read more
I took a look at Mindquarry today, a new open source collaboration company funded by Hasso Plattner Ventures. The company is based in Germany. Mindquarry licenses its software under the MPL.
Mindquarry's core product is a collaboration server that allows teams to collaborate on documents, as well as via wikis and shared tasks. It's an interesting product now, but should get much better with the release of its email integration, due out this summer according to the company's roadmap. All in all, it feels like a simple alternative to Sharepoint or Basecamp, a comparison the company has made.
What's missing? Well, email integration for one. I think that's the holy grail of pretty much all collaboration/content management. It's no good trying to coax users off email - it's how people collaborate (along with IM), and everything else (Wikis, forums, etc.) is an afterthought compared to email. I also don't know how robust the company's document management functionality is (though I know a good source for that sort of thing :-). Overall, I think the company is going to need to ensure it has robust communication functionality built into its collaboration server, so that customers can collaborate in ways to which they're accustomed.
Still, I think this is a great 1.1 product for the collaboration space. I suspect we'll see a lot more of this in the months/years to come, as enterprises try to figure out how to manage all the information they're creating, and the process for creating it.
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