Microsoft targets open software movement

Eric Auchard and Siobhan Kennedy

NEW YORK: Microsoft Corp. on Thursday took aim at the Linux operating system

and other rival software that share their basic instruction codes with the

public, saying such freely distributed "open source" software poses a

threat to commercial intellectual property rights.

Senior vice president, Craig Mundie of the world's largest software firm,

blasted the open source philosophy as impractical for businesses like Microsoft

in a major address at New York University, and pushed Microsoft's own more

limited ‘Shared Source’ partnering approach.

"Fundamentally, the thing that informs our choice is this belief in

protecting our intellectual property," Mundie said. "The really big

difference is there's not as much focus (in open source models)...that you have

to make a business out of this."

Open source, with roots in scientific and academic information-sharing, is a

software industry tradition through which source code - the underlying

instructions of a program - is made freely available for use or modification

product developers. Copyright is used to prevent others from charging for such

shared inventions.

The philosophy, which became a commercial phenomenon in the 1990s as a

popular way of building software to manage Web sites, is seen as a major

alternative to Microsoft's careful guarding of its source code Windows as a

trade secret.

In recent months, Microsoft executives have turned up the heat against the

open source philosophy. On Thursday, Mundie introduced the Shared Source as

Microsoft's rival strategy. Microsoft gives developers access to its crown

jewels, the Windows operating system source code, so they can develop new

products or fix glitches. But the company retains ownership of the software code

as its intellectual property.

Mundie's speech, heralded as a major position statement, blasted the open

source movement using more forceful language than the typically ambiguous,

jargon-filled phrasings of software industry executives.

He described the open software movement as "flimsy,"

"flawed," jeopardizing property rights and threatening to undermine

the software industry, a key economic growth engine. "We recognize that

Open Source Software (OSS) has some benefits such as the fostering of community,

improved feedback... and debugging," Mundie said. "But there are

significant drawbacks to OSS as well."

Open source software creates greater dangers of security risks, software

instability and incompatibility and could force valuable corporate intellectual

property into public hands, Mundie said.

A rival to Microsoft view



In recent years, open source development has captured the imagination of
millions of programmers across the globe as a new way of working outside the

orbit of Microsoft, which had previously dominated computer software design.

Spearheading the development of Linux, the best known of the open source

software systems, were companies such as Red Hat Inc., VA Linux and Caldera

Systems Inc. Since 1999, International Business Machines Corp., the world's

biggest computer company, has thrown considerable financial backing behind open

source software. Top computer and software makers such as Oracle Corp. have

joined in.

By contrast, Microsoft has considered open source as a challenge to its way

of doing business. The company identified it as a major threat to its business

during the federal trial where it was found guilty last year of antitrust

violations.

"It appears to me that Microsoft is putting a general cloud of suspicion

over open source software that is unfounded," said Bryan Sparks, chief

executive of Lineo, a maker of open source Linux software embedded in a range of

computer devices.

The Lindon, Utah-based firm is building open-source handheld computers,

network routers and cable television converter boxes for global electronics

customers including Sharp, Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Samsung. "There

are ways you can protect intellectual property with software drivers and

proprietary extensions to Linux. Open source developers have found ways to

create proprietary software mixed with open source software," Sparks said.

‘Open source threatens intellectual property’



Mundie targeted the General Public License, a basic contract under which most
open source software is distributed. He likened the GPL, which rejects

traditional copyright in favor of open sharing of any software design changes,

to failed dot-com business models of the past.

"(Supporters of the GPL) ask software developers to give away for free

the very thing they create that is of greatest value, in the hope that, somehow,

they'll make money selling something else," Mundie said. Open source

programmers typically rely on selling custom programming or consulting services

rather than selling software licenses, although open source advocates say that

new hybrid approaches that protect commercial development are emerging.

Mundie said Microsoft has made its source code available since 1991, first to

academic institutions then to close hardware partners and more recently, to

major corporate customers. More than 5 million programmers now have access to

Microsoft's underlying code, he said. Mundie said that Microsoft would be

expanding its Shared Source effort to additional countries and to independent

software companies in the coming months.

Brad Kuhn, vice president of the Free Software Foundation, the group behind

the General Public License, said Microsoft was trying to confuse the difference

between commercial software and proprietary software controlled by one company.

Kuhn said Microsoft pays lip service to the open source philosophy in order to

tap the energies of a wide network of programmers but uses those efforts to

create software that it alone owns and controls. "They're trying to trick

the issue and change it," Kuhn said.

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.