Two months ago I talked about Microsoft's attitude to open source software. Things didn't stop there. In the intervening time, Microsoft has come in contact with BSD a couple of times.
$ strings /C:/FTP.EXE | grep Calif @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
BSD users will immediately recognize this as being part of the BSD license. Unfortunately, there's nothing of this nature in the kernel sources, and Microsoft was not handing out the source code, so the conclusion was based on an analysis of the behaviour of the stack. Lee found that yes, indeed, Microsoft uses BSD in its IP stack, and published an article in the Wall Street Journal. The article was copyrighted by Wall Street Journal, of course, and it's no longer available on their web site, but it is available online at Is Microsoft secretly using open source?. The article also discovered that Microsoft is indeed still using FreeBSD at Hotmail, despite their claims that they had eliminated all traces.
The contents of the article are not the most important thing: later doubts arose as to what parts of Microsoft's IP stack really contain BSD code, since they also purchased a stack from Spider Software. Spider claims that theirs stack is a complete rewrite of TCP/IP. The real issue is that lots of people heard of FreeBSD for the first time as the result of this article. It's not really clear whether the fact that Microsoft might be using the code is an endorsement of the quality or not.
On Wednesday, Microsoft announced plans to release what amounts to a shared-source version of its .NET infrastructure for Windows and FreeBSD.
Later in the article, John Stutz of Microsoft is quoted as saying:
The licensing terms are designed so that people who want to do non-commercial ports to Linux [can do so]. That's well within the intended purpose of the license. We don't feel comfortable with Linux because of the GPL nature of the kernel ...FreeBSD has traditionally been an operating system that encouraged unencumbered experimentation. ... And that's what we're using it for. We're using it to prove the point that you can actually implement the CLI on Unix. It's been around a long time, people use it commercially. Microsoft uses it commercially, actually. And the academic community is quite familiar with it as well.
Still later in this article, John Osborne asked: ``So you're favoring FreeBSD over Linux because of the licensing?'', and Stutz replied ``We have chosen FreeBSD because of licensing issues, yes.''
CRN also published another article on this subject, entitled Microsoft's FreeBSD Move Aimed At Next Generation Of Developers
Sounds good, doesn't it? Well, maybe, at first sight. If you look more closely, a number of things don't seem to fit:
The FreeBSD community saw through these tactics. Bzdik BSD wrote:
He essentially says that they have the right to take the other people's work and screw the rest of the world over and over again. e.g. when they talk about Kerberos 'hooks'.
The real advantage of this report was the publicity that it brought for FreeBSD. As Pedro Giffuni said:
What is nice here is that in an unprecedented Press Release, Microsoft is encouraging people to use FreeBSD. The could have released binaries for Linux, after all most of this is userland code, but they chose us, apparently with a very user friendly license,.
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber wrote:
This is a rather transparent attempt at "divide et impera!" over the Open Source community.
John Baldwin wrote:
I'm not sure it's really cool. M$ is just using us to snub the GPL crowd. Presumably if they actually manage to use BSD to squash the GPl, they will just turn around and attack BSD next.In any discussion, of course, people voice different opinions. In this discussion, it was interesting to note the lack of more positive reactions to this announcement; presumably Microsoft found the reaction disappointing.
The Linux community saw pretty much the same thing. To quote the CRN article,
Linus Torvalds, the inventor and guradian of the Linux kernel, claims Microsoft's FreeBSD announcement is aimed at causing friction in the open source movement and the C# effort doesn't go far enough."I'd guess that somebody at MS said, "Why can't we go back to the good old days when there were tens of different UNIXes, all in-fighting?'" Torvalds told CRN in an e-mail. "I think they are a bit chicken, though. If they had any [courage], they'd have put something like IE or Office on FreeBSD. C# just isn't sharp enough."
Those ties are becoming stronger. Two members of the FreeBSD core team, Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith, have joined Apple. We can expect to see significant cooperation with Apple in the future.
As always, significant changes worry some people, who saw Jordan in particular as becoming lost to the project. There's no reason for that, of course. Jordan has had a day job before. In any case, he addressed these concerns in his announcement:
Let me assure you all that Apple does fully understand the importance of FreeBSD and they don't want me or anyone else to stop working on it. FreeBSD doesn't compete with Apple's product offerings in any way and provides an excellent source of technology for them. Darwin is substantially based on FreeBSD 3.2 and Apple certainly doesn't want the technology transfer to end there or to be strictly one-way. Part of my mandate will in fact be helping Apple to be an even better Open Source citizen, increasing collaboration and strengthening relationships with FreeBSD and other Open Source projects.
Certainly the concerns that Jordan won't be able to devote as much time to the project as before seem unfounded. After all, he had a day job before, and the project-related work was always in addition. It's still too early to know how well the cooperation between Apple and FreeBSD will work out, but we're expecting great things.