How Microsoft made open source selfish
By Dave Jeyes
Microsoft is loudly touting its first ever contribution of code to the open source community. Too bad the 20,000 lines of code boil down to three device drivers that will help Microsoft sell its own products.
The drivers allow system administrators to manage Linux servers using Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization product. This allows the administrator to carve one server into multiple virtual servers that can each run different software.
Virtualization is a hot topic among technologists as it allows for better use of the massive servers on the market today for specific, individual tasks. It’s also how a lot of hosting companies can profit by having multiple customers hosted on the same hardware.
Prior to this release, administrators could only manage Windows virtual servers using Hyper-V. This means that Hyper-V was immediately ruled out by companies with a mix of Windows and Linux servers, which is a fairly high percentage.
The device drivers will allow Hyper-V to manage Linux servers, which is no small task in terms of virtualization or large scale Web computing. That’s why the three measly device drivers take up 20,000 lines of code.
While it’s impressive to see Microsoft donating any code at all to the open source community, the company had little choice. If the drivers cost money or developers couldn’t see the source, it would not have been likely to be used by freedom-loving open source system administrators.
Open source software began as a community movement against overly-expensive and proprietary software. Along the way it has become a strategy for harnessing the contributions of the masses.
Sadly, Microsoft’s first release to the open source community is neither. The drivers are being used to promote proprietary software in Hyper-V and the community wasn’t involved in the process one bit.
This first move to open source a few of Microsoft’s device drivers comes 34 years after the company was first founded. Hopefully the community won’t have to wait another 34 years to see Microsoft contribute again.
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on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 10:44 am
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Stumble It!
July 22nd, 2009
Exactly what did you expect from them? It’s against their business model. I’d like to run OSX legally on my non-Mac laptop but it’s not happening and Apple owes a lot more to Open Source than Microsoft does.
I remember when they came out with the Novell client for WFW and that wasn’t because they wanted to help Novell. It was to keep Microsoft in the tool box.