Microsoft's Open Source Motives Questioned

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April 08, 1999 (6:07 PM EDT)

By Malcolm Maclachlan,

Microsoft's hints that it may be willing to open its Windows 2000 source code, did not get a warm reception from open source advocates.

Speaking at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Los Angeles Wednesday, Steve Ballmer said Microsoft might open up the source code to its Windows 2000 operating system. Another Microsoft executive, Brian Valentine, vice president in charge of Windows operating systems, echoed this statement, saying the company is looking at opening the code to the NT kernel.

Microsoft is in the midst of trying to unify the development efforts of Windows 98 and NT into a single body of code that will almost entirely do away with the original DOS code.

But despite years of taunting Microsoft for its proprietary software, open source advocates are now questioning its open source hints.

This is a typical Microsoft strategy of testing the waters, said Michael Tiemann, co-founder of Cygnus, a 10 year-old open source software company. He called the potential move calculated to help Microsoft in its antitrust case with the government, and said reaction to any such release would be indifference at best.

"The open source community is not going to rally to bring their enemy back from the dead," he said.

A Windows source code release would also be worthless, Tiemann. One of the reasons the Linux development effort works, he said, is that the Linux kernel is only about a half million lines of code, designed from the very beginning to be modular and easy to understand. Windows, he said, would be upward of 30 millions lines of code, developed over years without any effort to make it easy for an outsider to understand.

Tiemann pointed to the Mozilla.org project as an example. One year ago, Netscape released the code to its Communicator 5 browser to the Mozilla.org open source project. Netscape did this, he said, with the best of intentions, as well a great deal of support from and consultation with the open source community.

But one year later, few developers outside of Netscape have made a serious effort to get through the 17 million lines of code. No major third-party products have been announced, and two of Mozilla's main developers left the project last week.

"The Mozilla example teaches us that just by releasing a piece of code as open source doesn't mean it will be successful," said Dave Sifry, chief technical officer at Linuxcare, a company that does Linux software support for clients such as Dell Computer.

Grassroots development efforts that start as open source do the best under the model, Sifry said. Open source is both a methodology and culture, he said, which go counter to the way things are done at Microsoft. But, as implausible as it may sound, it is conceivable that Microsoft could make a go of an open source effort.

"Don't underestimate the guys at Microsoft," Sifry said. "They've got a lot of smart people over there."