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Last night’s Microsoft press release about open source software (OSS) is not just about an IP agreement with faceless technology bureaucrats in Cambridge (Novell) or Seoul (Samsung). . Theoretically involved in the June 13, 2007 Microsoft announcement is Cathedral and Bazaar and World Domination author Eric S. Raymond (ESR), self proclaimed as one of the three most influential people in the OSS movement [(along with Richard Stallman (RMS) of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and gnu.org and Linus Torvalds (just plain Linus)].

Last September, ESR joined Freespire as sort of a committer, a member of what Freespire calls its Community Leadership Board. Freespire is the development feed into Linspire (which in turn is a Debian-based version of Linux), in the same way Fedora is the development feed into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu is the development feed into Canonical. Sorry for all these cross references but that’s the nature of the OSS movement.

Raymond may have done the Samba mambo and left Freespire over this the same way Jeremy Allison left Novell after its similar IP deal with Microsoft in November 2006 but I think not. He is still listed on the Freespire web site. And ESR has preached “open choice” and interoperability with Windows since the early drafts of World Domination in 2004, particularly concerned with the need to access codecs and other code that just plain doesn’t exist legally in the OSS world.

ESR is also revered as the OSS leader that widely distributed and publicized the Microsoft “Halloween memos,” documenting--in my opinion--standard competitive intelligence about Linux for internal use by Microsoft developers and executives. In OSS circles, the Halloween memos were seen as a Microsoft’s declaration of war against Linux. Therefore, in OSS circles, yesterday may come to be known as “Wednesday the 13th.”

The press release doesn’t even hint at this possibility but if the deal includes Linspire desktop Linux vouchers the way the Novell deal includes SUSE server Linux vouchers, it would cement Microsoft’s goal of giving its users (that is, almost everyone) true “open choice.” I discussed the concept of open choice relative to OSS here. Helping users put Linux on servers as the Novell deal does is one thing but helping them put it on desktops with or in place of Windows is the first concrete recognition of my theory that Microsoft is endgaming its lead product and textbook cash cow.

From a business perspective, this is the beginning of Microsoft’s counterattack on the soon-to-be finalized FSF General Public License version 3 (GPLv3). GPLv3 is now in “final call for comments” and this agreement provides a great way for Microsoft to explain the differences between open choice with OSS and rabid OSS as preached by the FSF. The way this option works has some interesting business and investor implications that I discuss over at research 2.0 (see link on upper right of this page).

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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Posted by: Terry Lechecul at June 15, 2007 01:04 AM | Permalink