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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Microsoft has been criticized in the past for how it manages CodePlex, Microsoft's "open source project hosting site" (emphasis mine). This time, as The Register reports, Microsoft is hosting code that can only be run on the Windows platform.
This is not, of course, a violation of open source. Plenty of projects on Sourceforge will run on only Linux, or some other operating system.
No, the problem here is that Microsoft is restricting these projects to Windows by license, and not merely be technical capability.
In at least one instance, that of the Microsoft Extensibility Framework (MEF), Microsoft switched the license from its Windows-only Microsoft Limited Permissive License (Ms-LPL) to the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), an Open Source Initiative-certified license, under pressure from Miguel de Icaza and "community feedback." The reason given for putting the code under the MS-LPL in the first place is lame, however:
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Microsoft has evolved in its stance toward open source, but its current hiccup with the Sandcastle project calls into question just how well it understands the obligations open source imposes. Microsoft created its CodePlex site to host open-source software, and has been careful to abide by open-source rules, submitting its licenses to the Open Source Initiative for approval.
Yet as Sandcastle demonstrates, Microsoft still has a long ways to go before it demonstrates that it understands and is willing to stand behind the obligations of open source. The Sandcastle project went live on January 8. Several months later, it still isn't providing source code, a key tenet of the CodePlex hosting requirements.
This isn't a matter of holding Microsoft to a third-party standard. It's a matter of holding Microsoft to its own standards. Microsoft declares CodePlex to be an open-source project hosting site:
(Credit:
Microsoft)
The CodePlex terms of use require the following conditions for CodePlex-hosted projects:
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