few months, Softway's little-known tool for porting Unix applications to Windows would become more valuable than many in the industry would know, said Allison, who is now a senior engineer with open-source server vendor VA Linux Systems Inc. The developers of Interix had made a tool that could easily take Unix applications to a Windows platform and, in doing so, had made a number of contributions to the development of the GCC. Much of Softway's work on the compiler would become incorporated in later versions of the GCC.
"For about four or five months everything quieted down," said Khan, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin. "Microsoft was quite up front about the (open source) licensing issues.
"Back then the rhetoric wasn't as harsh as it has been in the last few months," he said.
During that period, Allison said he and other developers believed that Windows NT might become a platform for running applications that competed with Microsoft programs, thanks to tools such as Interix. "The hopes were it would be an open operating system that people could write subsystems for," he said.
Microsoft, however, quickly realized that it really didn't want to allow Windows NT to grow into a platform friendly to competing applications, Allison said, and Microsoft made a bid to acquire Softway and regain its source code. But the details surrounding the acquisition were never made clear, Khan said. "No one outside (Microsoft) really knew what happened," he said.
What is clear is that after less than a year on the market, Microsoft acquired Softway Systems and took control of its technology, rolling it into a division that distributed Unix tools for Windows. [See, "Microsoft Tool Furthers Unix-Windows Integration," May 17, 2000.] The acquisition would allow Microsoft to offer its own product to customers that were running Unix, and buy back Softway's license for Microsoft's source code.
By January 2000, Microsoft shipped its own version of the software under the name Microsoft Interix 2.2. It kept the technology unchanged and, under the guidelines of the GPL, has continued to provide related source code to customers with the software. The open source pieces of the program are available at its developers' Web site and for purchase on CD.
"We have been diligent in following the terms of the GPL for the Interix tools and will continue the same as long as we support the Interix product," Mundie said in a statement published on the Web. "This issue highlights what I was talking about regarding the choices of organizations. In this case, given the legacy code base of our customers, the desired functionality of the Interix product and the pre-existing licenses of software in an acquisition; it made sense for us to maintain the licensing structure in a limited fashion."
Microsoft's distribution of GPL-licenced software runs counter to recent noise from the Redmond, Washington software maker. Top Microsoft executives have come out against open source projects such as Linux that rely on the GPL, claiming that the license "fundamentally undermines" the commercial software model and poses a threat to intellectual property.
Mundie delivered a biting commentary on its downside during a presentation at New York University's school of business in May. [See, "Microsoft again takes aim at open-source," May 3.] He is scheduled to continue the debate in July at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in San Diego, California.
That criticism is unwarranted, critics say, since Microsoft under the GPL license, for example, needs to make available the source code for only the Interix compiler, and not the whole product.
"That's a great example of how open source software does not automatically infect their whole software base," said Eric Allman, founder of Sendmail Inc., which makes the widely used open source e-mail server software of the same name. "It's true that if they make a change to one of the source codes they are required to make that available; however, it no way infects any
