Microsoft

A few days ago, Microsoft announced that it has released PowerShell under the MIT license for Linux (and Mac OS X). Perhaps surprisingly, this has brought a number of folks out of the woodwork to gripe about Microsoft… releasing something as open source. Microsoft isn’t perfect, not by a long shot, but this is not Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft. This isn’t Bill Gates’ Microsoft. The days when Microsoft and the open source community are mortal enemies are behind us. (At least for now, anyway. Companies don’t always move in a straight line.) The company still has plenty of flaws (its position on software patents, its Windows 10 update policies, for example), but the knee-jerk “anything Microsoft does is terrible!” attitude needs to go. ...

Okay, so I read on Slashdot (is a link really necessary?) that Microsoft has put up a program called FlexWiki under an Open Source license… a real OSI-approved license, not just some evil license that they’re calling Open Source. Well, you don’t see that every day, so I head over to the site to check it out. Now, if you’re not familiar with Wikis the concept is that (by default) anyone can edit them. Helps for all kinds of projects to allow open editing, and most Wiki software has version control built in so the community can roll back or remove changes that are detrimental. ...

Is mainstream acceptance for Open Source a " nuclear winter" for the software industry? I certainly hope so. Some argue that Open Source and Free Software are best left as a niche market, and that widespread acceptance of software without license fees will harm the economy. Certainly, widespread adoption of Linux, OpenOffice and other freely available software would be harmful to the bottom line of certain companies, but would it be harmful to the economy overall? ...