Source of Anxiety

Baldwin Louie — Mon, 28 May 2001 18:00:00 -0400

The open-source community is outraged. Microsoft is trying to co-opt the good karma associated with making the source code to computer programs available for all to peruse and modify - without actually revealing any source code. The usual open-source talking heads are attacking Microsoft's "embrace and extend" approach, claiming that the Redmond giant wants to do to Red Hat and VA Linux what it did to Netscape, Stacker and others.

For once, though, the critics have little to fear. The feel-good incentives that lure programmers to the open-source world are missing in Microsoft's "shared source" alternative, making it unlikely that any community of programmers will embrace it. Indeed, all Microsoft is trying to do with "shared source" is make it appear that its corporate self-interest is, as Microsoft VP Craig Mundie put it, a "philosophy." This isn't a particularly elegant public relations initiative, but it's no surprise. If you were Microsoft and enjoyed a monopoly-level market share in operating systems and office suites, you, too, might want to divert people from a fundamental shift in the way software is distributed, a system in which all the money now goes to you.

So why all the outrage about a silly public relations initiative that probably won't work? I suspect the anger has more to do with the frustrating business environment than with Microsoft's latest campaign. Open-source companies are not immune to the current slowdown. Linux developer Eazel is shutting down, and ArsDigita is reported to be shifting from a free-software model (the company made money on services) to a paid one. It's easy to carry a torch for open source when your company enjoys a stratospheric capitalization; it's less fun when the torch has burned down and singed your fingers.

Since the open-source community went aboveground, there's been a battle between those wanting to change the world (at least the world of software) and those who see open source as a business opportunity. For the former, politics holds sway; the others see only business problems and solutions. It's disingenuous for either side of the open-source crowd to wish Microsoft would leave it alone, since so much of the good will open-sourceniks enjoy emerged from the movement's incessant cathedral-versus-bazaar comparisons between its way of doing things and that of the "Evil Empire." If Microsoft had real commercial competition in operating systems or office applications, open source would be a marginal theory, not a movement that has been adopted by the likes of IBM.

Consortia like XML-RPC, which lets multiple operating systems communicate clearly, hint at promising ways that closed and open systems can interact. As advocates of the open language Perl like to say, there's more than one way of doing things. One of those ways is for open-source businesses to accept the reality of Microsoft's dominance in some markets and provide interesting solutions in areas Microsoft hasn't yet considered. Empires tend to fall apart at their edges, not their centers. Less complaining, more coding. A company can't "embrace and extend" your product if it can't keep up with you.

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Source of Anxiety