Open Source is bad... except when Microsoft uses it

. . . keeping an eye on the penguin

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Apr. 19, 2006

Back in January 2005, Bill Gates took a back-handed slap at open-source saying, "There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises." Where he says "modern-day sort of communists," think "open-source advocates."

Fast forward to April 2006. Eric S. Raymond, the main man behind the idea of open-source, the author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, the seminal work on open-source, has just discovered that Microsoft is now selling a vector-graphics editor "Microsoft Expressions," which includes some of his open-sourced work.

Microsoft, the anti-open-source company, is using open-source software from one of open-source's leading lights. You've got to love it.

The code in question is GIFLIB. "GIFLIB is open-source software for hacking GIF images -- the direct ancestor of libungif, which is the name under which the codebase is more widely known these days," Raymond writes.

Microsoft didn't place the code in the product itself. That was done by the program's creator, Creature House. This company's code, technology, and development team was acquired by Microsoft in 2003.

Of course, Microsoft has been putting open-source code into its programs and operating systems for years. The classic example is its TCP/IP networking stack, which owes much of its goodness to the BSD TCP/IP code.

Still, as Raymond points out, "I'm OK with this, actually. I write my code for anyone to use, and 'anyone' includes evil megacorporate monopolists pretty much by definition."

Since the code is under the open-source MIT-license, Microsoft has every right to use it, so long as they keep Raymond's copyright announcement.

"Besides... now, when Microsoft claims open source is inferior or not innovative enough or dangerous to incorporate in your products or whatever the FUD is this week, I get to laugh and point. Hypocrites. Losers. You have refuted yourselves," concluded Raymond.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

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