people? Surprisingly, yes. It’s certainly true that few people need direct access to source code;
only developers or code reviewers need the ability to access and change code. But not having access to how your computer is controlled is still a significant problem. Bob Young of Red Hat uses the analogy of having your car’s hood welded shut to explain why even non-technical users need access to the source code. Here is his explanation, in his own words:
investing in... The best analogy that illustrates this benefit is with the way we buy cars. Just ask the question, “Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?” and we all answer an emphatic “No.” So ask the follow-up question, “What do you know about modern internal-combustion engines?” and the answer for most of us is, “Not much.” We demand the ability to open the hood of our cars because it gives us, the consumer, control over the product we’ve bought and takes it away from the vendor. We can take the car back to the dealer; if he does a good job, doesn’t overcharge us and adds the features we need, we may keep taking it back to that dealer. But if he overcharges us, won’t fix the problem we are having or refuses to install that musical horn we always wanted -- well, there are 10,000 other car-repair companies that would be happy to have our business.
In the proprietary software business, the customer has no control over the technology he is building his business around. If his vendor overcharges him, refuses to fix the bug that causes his system to crash or chooses not to introduce the feature that the customer needs, the customer has no choice. This lack of control results in high cost, low reliability and lots of frustration.
To developers, source code is critical. Source code isn’t necessary to break the security of most systems, but to really fix problems or add new features it’s quite difficult without it. Microsoft’s Bill Gates has often claimed that most developers don’t need access to OS source code, but Graham Lea’s article “Bill Gates’ roots in the trashcans of history” exposes that Gates actually extracted OS source code himself from other companies by digging through their trash cans. Mr. Gates said, “I’d skip out on athletics and go down to this computer center. We were moving ahead very rapidly: Basic, FORTRAN, LISP, PDP-10 machine language, digging out the OS listings from the trash and studying those.” If source code access isn’t needed by developers, why did he need it? Obviously, there’s a significant advantage to developers if they can review the source code,
particularly of critical components such as an operating system. See also the discussion on the greater flexibility of OSS/FS.
16. Is OSS/FS really just an anti-Microsoft campaign? No. Certainly there are people who support OSS/FS who are also against Microsoft, but it’d be a mistake to view OSS/FS as simply anti- Microsoft.
Microsoft already depends on OSS/FS software in its own applications; Windows’ implementation of the basic Internet protocols (TCP/IP) was derived from OSS/FS code, and its Office suite
depends on the OSS/FS compression library “zlib.”. More recently, Microsoft admitted that critical infrastructure for its forthcoming Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition will be OSS/FS; as the eWeek article notes, it would have been difficult for them to compete otherwise. Microsoft could, at any time, release programs such as its OSes as OSS/FS, take an existing OSS/FS OS and release it, or provide applications for OSS/FS systems. There is no licensing agreement that
prevents this (though it certainly would be radically different than their current business processes, so no one expects this to happen any time soon). Indeed, OSS/FS leaders often note that they are not against Microsoft per se, just some of its current business practices, and many have repeatedly asked Microsoft to join them (e.g., see Free Software Leaders Stand Together).
In many cases OSS/FS is developed with and for Microsoft technology. On June 21, 2002,
SourceForge listed 831 projects that use Visual Basic (a Microsoft proprietary technology) and 241 using C# (a language that originated from Microsoft). A whopping 8867 projects are listed as
working in Windows. This strongly suggests that there are many OSS/FS developers who are not “anti-Microsoft.”
Microsoft has said that it’s primarily opposed to the GPL, but Microsoft sells a product with GPL’ed components. Microsoft’s Windows Services for Unix includes Interix, an environment which can run UNIX-based applications and scripts on the Window NT and Windows 2000 OSes. There’s nothing wrong with this; clearly, there are a lot of Unix applications, and since Microsoft wants to sell its OSes, Microsoft decided to sell a way to run Unix applications on its own
products. But many of the components of Interix are covered by the GPL, such as gcc and g++ (for compiling C and C++ programs). (Microsoft seems to keep moving information about this; here is a stable copy). The problem is not what Microsoft is doing; as far as I can tell, they’re following both the letter and the spirit of the law in this product. The problem is that Microsoft says no one should use the GPL, and that no one can make money using the GPL, while simultaneously making money using the GPL. Bradley Kuhn (of the FSF) bluntly said, “It’s hypocritical for them to
benefit from GPL software and criticize it at the same time.” Microsoft executives are certainly aware of this use of the GPL; Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie specifically
acknowledged this use of GPL software when he was questioned on it. Kelly McNeill noted this dichotomy between claims and actions in the June 22, 2001 story “Microsoft Exposed with GPL’d Software!” A more detailed description about this use of the GPL by Microsoft is given in The Standard on June 27, 2001. Perhaps in the future Microsoft will try to remove many of these GPL’ed components so that this embarrassing state of affairs won’t continue. But even if these components are removed in the future, this doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft has managed to sell products that include GPL-covered code without losing any of its own intellectual property rights.
In more recent years, Microsoft has begun to take a much more enlightened stand on OSS/FS. Bill Hilf has explained, “Do I really care if it’s open source or not if it sells our infrastructure?” (This is from the artcle “Cracking Open the Door to Open Source” by Carolyn A. April, Redmond
Magazine, March 2007, pp. 26-36; this quote is on page 28.) Indeed, Microsoft has been increasingly encouraging OSS/FS projects, even in some cases products that compete with Microsoft products. Why? Because use of those products encourages the sale of other Microsoft products. Hilf reports, with great candor, “Some people think that we’re doing these deals to appear more ‘friendly’, and that’s not it at all. It’s all about growing our business.” This includes projects like WiX, IronPython, and even the entire Microsoft-sponsored CodePlex website for developing OSS/FS programs.
That being said, there are certainly many people who are encouraging specific OSS/FS products (such as Linux) so that there will be a viable competition to Microsoft, or who are using the existence of a competitor to obtain the best deal from Microsoft for their organization. This is nothing unusual - customers want to have competition for their business, and they usually have it in most other areas of business. Certainly there is a thriving competing market for computer
hardware, which has resulted in many advantages for customers. The New York Times’ position is that “More than two dozen countries - including Germany and China - have begun to encourage governmental agencies to use such “open source” software ... Government units abroad and in the United States and individual computer users should look for ways to support Linux and Linux- based products. The competition it offers helps everyone.”