A blogger and now Slashdot too (oh dear, now we’re doomed) are reporting that Microsoft is releasing the source code of their .NET libraries under a not-really opensource license.
Although only readable for people who accept a license agreement that forbids editing, copying, and rebuilding, I think it’s a step in the right direction. I hope the company will learn that making things truly opensource does not necessarily mean that there will be endless amounts of forks and support problems. I hope to see more like this. I’m among the opensource developers who’d love to see Microsoft join the love.
I’m certain that there are a lot of technically brilliant people working for Microsoft who’d like to see that happen too. At the end of the day, their (technical) goals are our (technical) goals. We just sometimes differ in opinion on how we want to get there. Typical for humans.
I know there are a lot of people who want to believe that the majority of opensource developers do what they do just because it’s fun to hate Microsoft. Regretfully for the people who want to believe that, that’s definitely not the case for the majority of us. The principles of opensource are older than Microsoft, so it’s also not the reason why it exists.