Wow, Microsoft going Open Source!

[softwareguy74]

What do you all think about this? I think it's a great thing and potentially deals a death blow to the established Open Source camp...

http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatc...cgd=2008-02-21

[Hack]

The most important part is this

Additionally, Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementation of these protocols. Developers can use the documentation for free to develop products.

[Kasracer]

Wow, Microsoft going Open Source!

Providing documentation and protocol information != open source.

What do you all think about this? I think it's a great thing and potentially deals a death blow to the established Open Source camp...

death blow? huh? sounds to me like it'll help enable open-source developers to create more competing pieces of software. I'd love to know how this affects open-source in any negative way...

[softwareguy74]

Well I guess what I meant is developers that are currently "anti-Microsoft" because they swear by open source platforms like Linux and the like, will flock to Microsoft's platform instead. But maybe I'm way off.

[Kasracer]

Well I guess what I meant is developers that are currently "anti-Microsoft" because they swear by open source platforms like Linux and the like, will flock to Microsoft's platform instead. But maybe I'm way off.

I think you're way off because this will affect file formats, APIs for existing Microsoft products and protocols used by Microsoft. Open-source advocates have been interested in the file formats and protocols more than anything. Only existing Windows developers, IMO, would be interested in Microsoft APIs. No need to move to any new / different platforms for either side of the issue (closed-source / open-source).

[techgnome]

It's not true open source.... it's open access.... big difference.... open source means I'll have access to the source, and I can modify it.... and redistribute it... that's not the case here.... what MS is doing is saying, hey, look, here's the complete documentation on all of the system apis that you can use & access.... but you can't change them.... they aren't making the source available.... jsut all of their hooks..

=tg