Microsoft Puts a Toe in Open Source Waters

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While I do not think that it represents a sudden change of heart by Microsoft that it has released its first program into the open source community, I do believe the company is testing the open source waters to see what the temperature is and what the ripple effects might be as it put the Windows Installer XML toolkit (known as WiX) on SourceForge.

As the world's dominant supplier of closed source code and a company that has expressed utter contempt for the whole concept of open source, you might be wondering why Microsoft even bothered to put the WiX toolkit out as open source. For one thing, a very large portion of open source and closed source applications are written for the Windows environment, and Microsoft's life, as well as that of the companies who create software for the Windows platform, would be greatly improved if there was a consistent standard for installing programs on Windows boxes. By making WiX open source and allowing the community of application developers to take the code and make it better to suit their needs, WiX could be improved at no cost to Microsoft and also make the company look a little less hostile to the whole open source revolution. Open source is not going away, and Microsoft knows this. There are widely divergent opinions about how open source will change, and how companies like Microsoft and IBM, the two biggest systems software companies in the world, will react to it.

Microsoft launched its Shared Source Initiative (SSI) for the Windows operating system in May 2001 as a way to try to show that it could offer the benefits of open source that Linux, Apache, Sendmail, and other programs offer without actually letting go of its intellectual property, copyrights, and control. At first, SSI was only available to the largest and most influential Microsoft customers. In February 2002, the program was broadened to allow 150 of the largest systems integrators in the world to get access to Windows source code so they could better understand its inner workings. In March, years after Microsoft expanded the SSI program to cover academic institutions and regular commercial companies, SSI has ballooned to over 1 million users. Windows CE.NET, Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows Server 2003 are available through SSI. Portions of the ASP.NET and Visual Studio.NET tools have also been delivered through SSI. The specifications of the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and C# language that are at the heart of Microsoft's .NET Web services initiative are available as open source spec through the European Computer Manufacturer's Association standards body, and the code behind Microsoft's own implementation of CLR and C# is also available through SSI.

Incidentally, the WiX toolkit was not distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) that is commonly used to distribute open source code. Microsoft opted to put WiX out on SourceForge through the Common Public License (CPL) that was created by IBM as it danced around the open and closed source issues for its own programs. With the GPL, anyone who makes changes or improvements to a program and or creates a derivative work based on a program has to release that program with its improvements and with its derivative works into the open source community, whereupon anyone can grab that code and change or improve it or create derivative works without paying any royalties. Under the CPL, if you make a change to a program, like WiX, you have to distribute those changes as open source. But any larger or derivative work that incorporates that program does not also have to be released into the open source community. Developers get to control what they release and what they do not. There are also legal protections in the CPL to make sure a vendor that distributes a program with CPL content only need to indemnify its own customers against liabilities (as closed source does by default). The CPL also allows a developer or company to distribute code in object code (rather than source code) format.

There are many different open source licensing options that span from SSI--where developers can only read and fix bugs in code, but only Microsoft can make changes--to the free-for-all of the GPL--where changes to code is "viral" in that all changes must be made available as open source code, period. If Microsoft has a positive experience with WiX, it might even create a more open license and let developers contribute to Windows itself, akin to the Java Community Process that Sun Microsystems has created to control the Java programming language and the J2EE and J2SE runtime environments. Stranger things have happened, such as archrivals Microsoft and Sun burying the hatchet as they did a few weeks ago.