Over the years, Microsoft statements toward open-source software have ranged from derision and threats to mollification and even cautious praise.
Microsoft's Thursday announcement of a significantly more accommodating approach to open-source programmers is just the latest refinement of the company's ambivalence. At the same time that Microsoft's new arrangement opens up previously secret specifications and protocols for use in open-source software, it also insists that companies planning on distributing or using that software need a patent license.
So to put the news into historical context, here's a chronology of some of Microsoft's statements and practices regarding open-source software over the years:
• On October 31, 1998, the first so-called "Halloween memo" from Microsoft suggested that some in the company saw open-source software as a major threat. "The intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in open-source software has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a long-term developer mindshare threat," the memo said, suggesting that one way to thwart open-source software would be to extend communication protocols with Microsoft-only changes.
• In May 2001, Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie derided the business model of open-source software companies that aim to sell support rather than software licenses, likening the practice to that of failed dot-com companies. "A common trait of many of the companies that failed is that they gave away for free or at a loss the very thing they produced that was of greatest value--in the hope that somehow they'd make money selling something else," Mundie said.
• In June 2001, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates described the widely used General Public License as "Pac-Man-like," referring to the GPL's requirement that software tightly integrated with GPL components must by the license also be governed by the GPL.
• In a June 2001 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said, "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches...The way the license is written (the Linux kernel uses the GPL), if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source."
• A newer "Halloween" internal memo, based on research in 2001, warned that Microsoft's attacks on open-source software and licensing "are not effective" and are backfiring.
• In an October 2002 interview, Ballmer touted Microsoft's shared-source program, which initially emulated some open-source attributes without giving programmers full freedoms. "We're learning...from the Linux world...If you take a look at the Linux world...There are many more communities in the Windows world than in the Linux world. I don't think we have mobilized that community as effectively as the Linux community has."
• In June 2003, Pete Houston, Microsoft's senior director server strategy, said Microsoft had moved beyond its philosophical attacks and had begun trying to show customers the "business value" of Microsoft products. "I don't see the Linux community development model building the integrated offerings we have today," he said.
• A Microsoft executive, Richard Emerson, helped to arrange an October 2003 investment of $50 million in The SCO Group shortly after it began a high-profile but largely unsuccessful attack that argued Linux violated the company's Unix intellectual property, according to the head of BayStar Capital, which made the investment.
• In January 2004, Microsoft launched a "Get the Facts" ad campaign to try to show the cost advantages of Windows and other Microsoft products compared with open-source rivals.
• Midway through the decade, Microsoft softened its attacks and even began launching its own open-source projects.
• In June 2005, Ballmer said Microsoft isn't trying to compete with the philosophy behind Linux, only with it as a software product. "We come to work every day and we compete with products, we don't compete with movements," he said.
• In June 2006, Microsoft launched a site called CodePlex to host shared-source projects.
• In May 2007, Ballmer and Brad Smith, Microsoft's top lawyer, said Linux and other opens-source projects collectively violate 235 Microsoft patents. "We live in a world where we honor, and support the honoring of, intellectual property," Ballmer said in an interview with Fortune. Microsoft's open-source competitors must "play by the same rules as the rest of the business."
• In September 2007, Clint Patterson, public relations director for Microsoft's Unified Communications Group, said: "The open-source development model has yet to demonstrate the ability to support profitable software businesses that can drive the coordinated research and testing necessary to sustain innovation."
• In October 2007, after Red Hat Linux had declined to enter into a patent licensing-deal the way rival Novell had, Microsoft's Ballmer told an audience that customers using Red Hat Linux need to pay Microsoft for its intellectual property. "People (who) use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to eventually to compensate us."
• In October 2007, the Open Source Initiative grants official open-source status to two Microsoft licenses, meaning that projects governed by those licenses may be called open-source software.
• Finally, here's how Ballmer described Thursday's move: "Our goal is to promote greater interoperability, opportunity, and choice for customers and developers throughout the industry by making our products more open and by sharing even more information about our technologies."
Microsoft made major concessions Thursday that should make it easier for open-source software to dovetail with or even replace Microsoft products, but a major caveat means the company's legal threats remain alive and well.
Microsoft announced a number of moves that could significantly improve its relationship with the open-source world. Among other things, the company said it will share communication protocols that govern how Microsoft software products communicate; pledged not to sue open-source programmers for developing software that uses those interfaces; and launched an Open Source Interoperability Initiative to improve how well open-source software works with its own.
Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie (left) and CEO Steve Ballmer.
(Credit: Microsoft)Although programmers now are apparently free to reproduce the software, Microsoft's generosity ends when the software crosses the threshold from project to commercial product.
"Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open-source developers for development or noncommercial distribution of implementations of these protocols," the company said. "Companies that engage in commercial distribution of these protocol implementations will be able to obtain a patent license from Microsoft, as will enterprises that obtain these implementations from a distributor that does not have such a patent license."
In other words, Microsoft hasn't backed down from its insistence that its intellectual property isn't free for the taking, an assertion made most clearly in 2007 when Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said Linux and other open-source projects violate 235 Microsoft patents.
"The promise not to sue is only for 'noncommercial' open source, which is a bit meaningless," said Jeremy Allison, a founder of the open-source Samba project that lets Linux servers substitute for Windows file and print servers by emulating the required Microsoft communication protocols.
The Thursday move suggests two forms of patent agreements. First is one in the mold of the controversial Microsoft partnership with Novell from 2006 and various other smaller Linux companies afterward. The second is an agreement directly with customers that use open-source software such as Red Hat's Linux, as Ballmer suggested last October when he said, "People (who) use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to eventually to compensate us."
It's not likely Microsoft opened up its specifications and made its pledges Thursday out of the goodness of its heart. As the open-source movement and its free-software predecessor have matured over more than two decades, Microsoft has found it necessary to make accommodations.
First, the open-source programming philosophy outdid Microsoft in an area where it previously had been a leader, fostering communities of developers. Second, there have been years of antitrust litigation, first by the United States and more recently from the European Union, that called on Microsoft to share. The third, and perhaps strongest reason, is that open-source software has become a powerful force in the software industry and customer sites--and even at Yahoo, the Internet company Microsoft is trying to acquire for $44.6 billion in part because of its engineering expertise.
The Samba case illustrates the pressures on Microsoft. In December, Samba announced a complicated third-party arrangement that in effect gives it access to Microsoft's communication protocols, a move that came shortly after the European Union required Microsoft to share interoperability information with open-source projects.
Sharing protocols, while it makes it easier for others to interoperate or clone Microsoft products, also could serve to entrench Microsoft's products by making its in-house protocols into de facto industry standards.
Take OOXML, the office document format Microsoft is trying to standardize as an alternative to the ODF that was spawned from the OpenOffice.org software, an open-source rival to Microsoft Office. "The approval of OOXML, for instance, is seen as crucial by Microsoft as a means of maintaining its Office market share," The 451 Group, an analyst firm, said in a statement Thursday.
And as ZDnet blogger Mary Jo Foley noted, the ISO standards group is meeting in Geneva next week to vote on whether OOXML should be awarded official standard status.
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