Microsoft Makes Second GPLv2 Release 218
angry tapir writes "Microsoft has made its second release under the General Public License in two days with software for Moodle, an 'open-source course management system that teachers use to create online learning Web sites for their classes[, which] has about 30 million users in 207 countries.' It comes on the heels of Redmond contributing drivers to the Linux community. No reports as yet on dropping temperatures in hell."
uh, the driver release is an ANTI-Linux move (Score:5, Interesting)
Not everyone was fooled. Apenwarr [alumnit.ca] wrote about it, for one.
This is still Microsoft, folks. It's always a trap.
Re:uh, the driver release is an ANTI-Linux move (Score:2, Interesting)
I also believe that tit-for-that is one of the most winning strategy in the prisonner's dilemma game. They'll have to do a lot more effort before I consider them worthy of trust.
Re:Not contribution; use (Score:4, Interesting)
Like their previous driver offering, it's not a wholehearted contribution to making an open source project better, but instead just a thing to make microsoft's own services work better when people need to use open source.
Microsoft is a corporation, after all, and I would be very surprised to see them expending resources working on open source projects that they do not actually use. This could be a gateway, a toe in the water, to starting open source projects, which then of course they would contribute to. But unlike IBM, (former) Sun, etc, Microsoft has no ties to existing open source software, so not contributing to the same isn't too surprising.
It's good to see a willingness to do even this much, but hardly a staggering change of heart. They've a long way to go yet.
I suppose you could say that. I think the point here is not that Microsoft is releasing something under an open source license, but that Microsoft sees open source as a viable approach to softare development and a real business force. Typically we expect the company to brush off open source as "anti-American" and offer pricey, Windows-only alternatives to whatever the demand might be. But now they are admitting, in a business sense, that the open source market exists and is worth working with. Sure, they're doing this to increase interoperability with their existing, closed-source projects... but that's more than just a token move.
Re:uh, the driver release is an ANTI-Linux move (Score:1, Interesting)
A large part of his argument seems to be resting on the fact that 'almost everyone' in the western world 'owns' a copy of windows they can 'just virtualise' on whatever platform they desire.
Thus making linux + virtualised XP a valid choice.
This is far from accurate as I'd wager that 90% or more of people who 'own' XP actually have an OEM lisence, which does not give you a legal right to install it on other hardware or virtualised hardware.
Even if such people wanted to break the law and install their OEM copy of XP on a VM, most of them couldn't as they don't tend to get a real install disk. (more likely an automated setup locked to their specific hardware or worse an image)
Re:Maybe Part of A Larger Strategy ("The Cloud") (Score:3, Interesting)
However an open-source client to their software means they cannot hide how to interoperate, and they cannot prevent other software from using this code. I suspect it does not cover a lot of the interoperation, but the code is probably also a big help for reverse engineering.
Microsoft could compete without shenanigans if they would document how to interoperate and license that information for everybody to use. Releasing this information as open source licensed code is a good way to do it, as the documentation in the code is likely much more accurate than any manual, and it probably is easier to make that code than to try to write the documentation.
If Linux could run DirectX programs legally and with the api fully documented, it would still have a hard time if it ran them 10 times slower, due to some clever piece of internal code that some engineer at Microsoft invented, for instance much faster antialiasing. This is fair competition. I think some engineers at Microsoft are interested in this as well, I would be, it is insulting that any actual talent is invisible because it is totally impossible for anybody to make a competing implementation.
Releasing anything under the GPL is a huge change for Microsoft. If you believed what they said a few years ago, they would have to publish every piece of source code they have right now, because the GPL is "viral".
Re:Bravo (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, now that the FSF is using GPLv3, Microsoft can use GPLv2 and at the same time still claim the license used by FSF is evil :-)