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.