Microsoft and Open Source Do Go Together
- By Peter Varhol
- 07/31/2007
At the
O'Reilly
Open Systems Convention last week, Microsoft's general manager of platform
strategy Bill Hilf announced that the company was going to
submit
its shared source licenses to the
Open
Source Initiative for inclusion in its list of open source licenses. Most
of the software covered by these licenses are used on software available from
CodePlex, Microsoft's
open source project hosting Web site.
The Open Source Initiative currently has listed approximately 58 licenses that
meet its definition for open source software. However, any license that restricts
source code to running only on the Windows operating system would not qualify
as an open source license as defined by this organization.
So don't look for Windows to be distributed under an open source license any
time soon.
Do you think Microsoft should try to participate in the open source community
through the shared source licenses? Let me know at [email protected].
The European Union Cites Intel for Illegal Competition
After a six-year investigation, the European Union has released a "statement
of objections" that claims Intel has abused
its dominant market position in the EU. According to the statement, Intel
has offered rebates to PC makers that agree to buy the majority of their processors
from Intel, made payments to some manufacturers if they agreed to delay or cancel
products using AMD processors, and sold processors below cost when bidding against
AMD.
This finding seems to support AMD's current lawsuit against Intel, currently
in its discovery phase. However, both the lawsuit and any EU conclusion are
still years off.
Do you have a preference in your processor vendor? Tell me why at [email protected].
Can the Community Build a Better Search Engine?
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said at the Open
Source Convention last week that he's getting ready to lay the groundwork
for a community-developed Web search service.
Wales' commercial company, Wikia, has acquired Grub, a Web crawler that will
enable this search service to index relevant Web sites. Through a combination
of automated indexing, algorithm-based search and retrieval, and human editing,
Wales believes that such a search engine can rival
today's major players -- Google and Yahoo. The code itself will be open
source.
Does the world need a community search engine? Send me your thoughts at [email protected].
About the Author
Peter Varhol is the executive editor,
reviews of Redmond magazine and has more than 20 years of experience as a software
developer, software product manager and technology writer. He has graduate degrees
in computer science and mathematics, and has taught both subjects at the university
level.