Microsoft has long been known for its anti-open-source. Most famous is maybe Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer’s statement that “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”. But since November 2th 2006, with the controversial Microsoft-Novell agreement, Microsoft has been committing to open source development. At least, that’s what Microsoft says. Many people within the FOSS (Free Open Source Software) community are sceptical, though. And that isn’t particularly strange as Microsoft has been responsible for various actions which let you question their allegiance. The purpose of this article is to investigate Microsoft’s reputation as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

The Good
Lets start with some recent news. Several days ago Microsoft released an open source alternative to Google’s BigTable. For those of you who don’t know what BigTable is. BigTable is a filesystem for storing large amounts of data distributed over a cluster of multiple computers. It’s one of the backbones of Google App Engine, which works quite well in my opinion. Still, Microsoft’s open source alternative is much welcome as BigTable is a proprietary database system. While this already pretty interesting, the most interesting part still has to come. Apparently, the development team of Kumo, Microsoft’s new search technology, looks at open source solutions by default, not proprietary software. And that’s quite something for a company which prefers to keep its code closed.

Now, lets look at some slightly older news. In July 2008 Microsoft announced that it would be joining and sponsoring the Apache Software Foundation. And when they joined the Apache Software Foundation they also submitted LGPL-licensed patches for ADOdb. Simultaneously they also announced that they would participate in the RubySpec project. A week later the could be heard, though. While I understand that Microsoft has only joined the Apache Software Foundation for its beneficial licensing conditions, I think we should first review their contributions before we judge them.

The Bad
An interesting Microsoft product is CodePlex. CodePlex is Microsoft’s answer to SourceForge. Just like SourceForge, CodePlex is an open source project hosting website. To promote shared development it offers various tools to developers such as wiki pages, SCMs, etc. Unfortunately, it looks like CodePlex isn’t exactly clean. According to The Register Microsoft taints open source CodePlex well, by using licenses and conditions that go against the very principles of open source.

But lets move to something more recent. You might have heard that Microsoft recently released Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 with ODF-support out of the box. It looks, however, like Microsoft has only achieved technical compliance but zero interoperability. Rob Weir is the chair for the OASIS ODF TC. I think it’s admirable that a chair of a committee actually spends time to check if everything works as it should. Maybe his checks aren’t as foolproof as that of a dedicated team, but it gives a good indication. To me it looks like Rob thinks that interoperability isn’t limited to the implementation of a standard. And that’s great news for end-users. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t think so. Instead Microsoft calls Rob Weir biased and wants to remove him as chair for the OASIS ODF TC. I guess that Microsoft really wants to take over ODF, as it has tried before. It’s clear that only OOXML is on Microsoft’s mind. This list of the voting of the ODF 1.1 specification makes that also pretty clear: Microsoft didn’t vote, what a surprise. I rather have Rob Weir as chair, and the fact that he has ties with IBM makes me quite happy too. For those who don’t know, Big Blue is quite a big supporter of open source software.

The Ugly
You might remember this one. At the end of February Microsoft sued TomTom over Linux and various patent claims. After all of Microsoft’s claims that they’re committed to open source, they finally sued a company that used the world’s biggest open source project: Linux. They did that while they promised not to sue on FAT patents. About a month later TomTom and Microsoft settled, but to the FOSS community it was clear that Microsoft is not to be trusted. This also had some interesting consequences: The Open Invention Network announced that it would strike back at Microsoft with prior-art; A patch has been submitted to Linux to prevent creation of files with long filenames on FAT; People have begun to port software from Mono (based upon Microsoft technology) to other languages.

Finally, lets end with something from three days ago. Microsoft lobbyists are criticizing Amsterdam for moving to open source software. According to the article “Amsterdam wants to lead the way in the introduction of open source software”. Further in the article you can read that a Microsoft spokesperson has said “that the company is critical of governments that only want open source software”. That isn’t that strange if you consider the fact that unneeded software subscriptions can cost a municipality about €800.000,-.

All in all, Microsoft did things which were good for open source, but it’s still to early to tell whether Microsoft is really changing. Sometimes I get the idea that one part of Microsoft really wants to change, while another refuses to. I guess we should stay sceptical till Microsoft has figured how to deal with their split personality.