Microsoft keeps its open source enemies close

Matthew Broersma ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 30 Jun 2005 17:00 BST

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In early June, Michael Tiemann — who doubles as the president of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and vice-president of open source affairs at Red Hat, acknowledged he too had been approached by Microsoft. Tiemann said the company wanted to start a "productive" conversation with Tiemann in his role as OSI president, and Tiemann agreed, though he hadn't yet met with Microsoft.

In another interesting move, in late May Microsoft hired Daniel Robbins, the founder and former chief architect of Gentoo Linux, one of the most popular and highly-regarded Linux distributions. Robbins revealed the move publicly in mid-June in a note to the Gentoo community, commenting he would be "helping Microsoft to understand open source and community-based projects". Robbins took on a programme manager role with Microsoft's Platform Strategy organisation, which includes a Linux and open source software technology group.

Microsoft has made a number of experiments in co-opting aspects of the open-source model, including the Shared Source initiative, which now has 20-odd programs and 1.5 million developers involved, according to Shared Source director Jason Matusow.

The company engages in a lot more shared or open source projects that aren't highlighted under the Shared Source programme, and Microsoft developers have recently begun calling attention to this fact. Josh Ledgard, a programme manager with the Visual Studio community team, recently called attention to shared or open source projects including the VBCommenter PowerToy, several Visual Studio.Net Academic Tools and Windows forms controls such as ColorPicker.Net.

The recent moves toward open source amount to an acknowledgement of the development model's right to exist, which is a step forward of a sort. "It's part of a realisation that Microsoft has come to, not least because it has a substantial body of internal advocates, that open source is neither a fad, nor likely to fade away in the foreseeable future," says Stephen O'Grady, a software analyst for RedMonk. "Given that, and a climate especially abroad that is pushing for openness, transparency, etc., it seems imperative that Microsoft at least forge working relationships with the organisations in question."

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