Microsoft and open source: friend or foe?
Microsoft says it’s committed to open source, but critics remain sceptical about its motivation.
Microsoft’s move from open-source software pariah to key player in the arena has been dramatic. The $7.5 billion purchase of developer platform GitHub is the latest example of the company planting its flag in open-source territory.
The acquisition, however, ruffled hackles among developers, who mistrust Microsoft’s intrusion on open-source projects such as Linux, which Microsoft’s last CEO, Steve Ballmer, labelled a “cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”.
Such a hard line against open source has left developers wondering: can Microsoft really have changed so quickly?
In a developer community survey of almost 700 members, 53% had bad feelings about the acquisition, whereas 24% had good feelings and 23% were unsure. “The developer community is still cynical about this sudden change to being open-source friendly,” said Bambordé Baldé, co-founder of developer forum Hackernoon, which conducted the survey.
There is also a suspicion that the very public embrace of open source is little more than PR spin. “Microsoft had to do this,” said Baldé. “It’s not about being open, it’s because the development ecosystem is so big and broad that, if Microsoft stayed like it was, it would be completely irrelevant to the developer community.
“Microsoft was forced to embrace the OSS community, no matter what nice lines they come up with.”
Culture shift?
It’s a theory that holds water with former Microsoft staffers who were there at the beginning of the change, which started around the time that Satya Nadella took the reins at Microsoft in 2014.
“Part of it is just recognising that a shift has happened with developers – more and more were comfortable with open source,” said Jonathan Turner, now with Mozilla, but project manager on the TypeScript Java project that was one of Microsoft’s first forays into collaborative coding.
“As a company that wants to connect with developers to help build out an ecosystem around its products, Microsoft moved to connect with them where they were. This increasingly meant doing more on GitHub.” There’s also a strong feeling that the changing attitudes and the purchase of GitHub is geared towards pushing projects onto its Azure web platform. Microsoft, for its part, has admitted it made mistakes in the past, but stresses it has changed. “Microsoft is all-in on open source,” said CEO Nadella in a blog post defending the company’s credentials. “Today we are active in the open-source ecosystem, we contribute to open-source projects, and some of our most vibrant developer tools and frameworks are open source – judge us on now.” Still, there are fears over what Microsoft may do with GitHub – over the ownership of code, or that Microsoft would have access to private code. But even the Linux Foundation – a former archenemy of Microsoft, but which now counts the firm as a member – debunked this concern. “Two of the fastest growing projects in the Linux Foundation family, Kubernetes and Node.js, are developed on GitHub,” the Foundation said in a blog post. “However, (and I triple checked this with our lawyers), Microsoft does not own Kubernetes or Node.js as a result of this transaction. Project copyright owners retain their ownership of their code.”
Some have expressed concerns that Microsoft could be privy to too much detail about rival companies’ projects
Yet, for developers who have faced Microsoft lawsuits and licensing issues in the past, the level of scepticism remains high. “I am suspicious that Microsoft has changed its attitude towards open source – it has been aggressively enforcing its patents towards Android and Linux,” said Benjamin Henrion, president of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII).
“Unless Microsoft apologises and refunds all the Android manufacturers with the royalties it has collected from them, I don’t see any reason to trust them. Microsoft has several patents around things implemented in Linux or Android, but the list was never made public.”
Henrion pointed to the way Microsoft was perceived to derail the OOXML ISO standardisation process as an example of how the company would fight to protect its own products at the expense of others.
Access to rivals’ code
As the gatekeeper of GitHub, some have also expressed concerns that the company could be privy to too much detail about rival companies’ projects, or at least have too much sway in open-source projects. According to one source, the feeling among people close to Microsoft’s acquisitions was that there was at least some strategic value in buying a place at open source’s top table.
“Microsoft is well aware that some of the value of what they’re buying is having these companies close with their unique identities,” he said.
Microsoft is unlikely to gain direct access to code, but there are fears that its increased involvement would see Microsoft in a position to steer the direction of open-source software (OSS) in ways that suit its own goals, effectively a Trojan horse. “In politics this concept or strategy is known as entryism – the premise that you gain controls/leverages over that which threatens you,” said Roy Schestowitz, software engineer and longtime critic of Microsoft’s business practices.
“You direct the opposition’s decisions. For example, you could say it already does this inside the Linux Foundation, where Microsoft already has representation on the board.”
On top of that, critics believe that Microsoft’s GitHub could change the ebb and flow of development, especially if it ties in new tools and versions with its own timeline. “My fear, and that of others, is that the roadmap becomes so entrenched with Microsoft technologies that it starts to be useless for other ecosystems that are out there,” said Baldé.
Contributing to the community
The statistics support Microsoft’s claims to be more than an active participant. Open-source development firm Tidelift combined its own datasets with GitHub data to investigate Microsoft’s contribution in recent years, exploring the “commit” history across 2.8 million projects hosted on GitHub.
Its figures show input from almost 5,000 unique Microsoft contributors. Only Google had more people working on OSS, with 8,000, while Facebook had 2,504 unique committers and Red Hat had 4,380.
“We see evidence that Microsoft has been walking the walk as a good open-source citizen over the past few years,” Donald Fischer, CEO of Tidelift, said. “Some of this work has been on projects that directly benefit Microsoft, but it is hard to ignore that Microsoft has commits to over 8,000 other projects in a wide variety of areas.”
Of course, Microsoft isn’t letting its developers work on whatever they want and, according to Tidelift’s research, the majority of contributions from Microsoft are on its own projects – such as 25,000 commits to VS Code, 24,000 to .NET compiler Roslyn, and more than 18,000 to TypeScript. But Microsoft also contributed to more than 8,000 non-Microsoft projects, even if some of those still benefited the company. “We found some of these contributions enable a Microsoft integration, for example it pushed a series of commits to help integrate software with Windows and later PowerShell,” said Fischer.
The list of its own projects that Microsoft has open sourced backs up the statistics: PowerShell, Visual Studio Code, and the JavaScript engine within Microsoft’s Edge.
Microsoft’s increasingly pragmatic attitude to open source is perhaps best summed up by the Shared Innovation Initiative it launched in April to build software in partnerships. “The old Microsoft – the Windows-centric one – would have been interested in reasonably strong protection of its intellectual property in APIs,” says Florian Mueller of the FOSS Patents blog.
“The new Microsoft is apparently more interested in access to other companies’ APIs. It’s still far from advocating the abolition of software patents, but it appears to be trying hard to be part of the sharing economy in some other ways.”