Beyond the Code
or, how to win friends, influence people and make a living by writing open source software. It's not just about the code.
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Saturday 14 March 2009, 1:15 PM
Microsoft's open source side-step
Microsoft has announced the release of a plug-in for Eclipse which adds Silverlight development capabilities to the open source IDE. The plug in, Eclipse4SL, is itself available under the Eclipse Public License, an OSI-approved open source licence. While this is incompatible with the GPL, it's still a good licence, just with weaker copyleft provisions.
While I haven't tried Eclipse4SL itself, the feature list looks good, and makes Eclipse a viable platform for developing Silverlight code on. Despite being written in Java for a cross-platform IDE, it will only run on Windows, but you can't have everything -- and since the source code is freely available there's no reason someone else can't port it to other platforms.
Microsoft's motivation for wanting Silverlight development in Eclipse is clear: It wants its technology to be used as widely as possible, and giving developers who don't use Visual Studio tools to code for Silverlight should increase adoption, however marginally.
Look closer, though, and there's a clever piece of legal sleight-of-hand going on. While Microsoft funded the development of Eclipse4SL, it didn't do the work itself, nor has it released the code itself. Instead, it contracted French Eclipse specialists Soyatec to write the code. In the terms of the EPL, Microsoft is not a Contributor to the project. Microsoft has plenty of smart developers who could have done this coding. Sure, they may not know the Eclipse APIs as well as Soyatec's staff, but learning a new API is never that difficult, and once released as open source, the code can be improved by other contributors who may know the best way of coding for Eclipse.
Read the text of the EPL, and the reason becomes clear. Clause 2b states that "each Contributor hereby grants Recipient a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under Licensed Patents". Had Microsoft been the Contributor, it would have essentially agreed to licence whatever patents it claims covers Silverlight. Of course, Microsoft wants to do no such thing, hence this little manoeuvre. We have to assume Soyatec holds no patents over Silverlight.
All this shows is that while Microsoft pays lip service to open source software, interoperability and innovation, it still wants to have the ability to hit others with patent lawsuits. You could use this software, paid for by Microsoft, aimed at increasing use of a Microsoft technology, and still end up facing a patent infringement claim, despite not breaking the the terms of the licence the code was distributed to you under.
If Microsoft wants its open source efforts to be taken seriously, it has to comply with the spirit of open source, not just the letter of a particular licence.
While I haven't tried Eclipse4SL itself, the feature list looks good, and makes Eclipse a viable platform for developing Silverlight code on. Despite being written in Java for a cross-platform IDE, it will only run on Windows, but you can't have everything -- and since the source code is freely available there's no reason someone else can't port it to other platforms.
Microsoft's motivation for wanting Silverlight development in Eclipse is clear: It wants its technology to be used as widely as possible, and giving developers who don't use Visual Studio tools to code for Silverlight should increase adoption, however marginally.
Look closer, though, and there's a clever piece of legal sleight-of-hand going on. While Microsoft funded the development of Eclipse4SL, it didn't do the work itself, nor has it released the code itself. Instead, it contracted French Eclipse specialists Soyatec to write the code. In the terms of the EPL, Microsoft is not a Contributor to the project. Microsoft has plenty of smart developers who could have done this coding. Sure, they may not know the Eclipse APIs as well as Soyatec's staff, but learning a new API is never that difficult, and once released as open source, the code can be improved by other contributors who may know the best way of coding for Eclipse.
Read the text of the EPL, and the reason becomes clear. Clause 2b states that "each Contributor hereby grants Recipient a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under Licensed Patents". Had Microsoft been the Contributor, it would have essentially agreed to licence whatever patents it claims covers Silverlight. Of course, Microsoft wants to do no such thing, hence this little manoeuvre. We have to assume Soyatec holds no patents over Silverlight.
All this shows is that while Microsoft pays lip service to open source software, interoperability and innovation, it still wants to have the ability to hit others with patent lawsuits. You could use this software, paid for by Microsoft, aimed at increasing use of a Microsoft technology, and still end up facing a patent infringement claim, despite not breaking the the terms of the licence the code was distributed to you under.
If Microsoft wants its open source efforts to be taken seriously, it has to comply with the spirit of open source, not just the letter of a particular licence.
PreviousComments on this post
They obviously have been keeping their legal staff busy.
I suspect that those who would write code using an Eclipse IDE would more likely write for Linux and Moonlight instead if they have any interest at all in supporting Microsoft's web media standards.
