Recently, Micro$oft has launched a new open source collaborative platform called CodePlex. From its announcement:
Microsoft’s strategy with open source has evolved over the past several years as we strive to make Windows the platform of choice for customers. My team has participated in that process first hand, we’ve worked hard with the PHP community to ensure PHP runs great on Windows, integrated PHP installation into the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, and engaged some of the most popular PHP applications like WordPress, Drupal, and SugarCRM to ensure customers have a great experience running these applications on Windows and IIS. We’ve also worked closely with the jQuery project to make it a natural part of building applications with ASP.NET.
If really their strategy is to allow their customers to continue using their platform, another hidden issue about the CodePlex Foundation are the terms under the code is shared — just take a look on the allowed licenses — and their contributor agreement, where Josh Berkus spotted the problem with it in his article titled "Codeplex: Stay Away". A point on the agreement mentions:
You grant Foundation a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable license in the Submission to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, and distribute the Submission and such derivative works, and to sublicense those rights to third parties.
Which is interpreted by Josh Berkus as:
You grant Codeplex the right to give, for free, forever, under any license they please, your work to Microsoft and its partner corporations.
Damn!, I think that I must not put ever my source code on CodePlex!. I’m not a lawyer expert, but seems that Josh have the true in his interpretation. The full agreement is placed here. Also, in the announcement comment responses, they ensure that there is no relationship between CodePlex Foundation and CodePlex.com:
There is no other formal relationship between the CodePlex Foundation and CodePlex.com run by Microsoft. I anticipate the foundation will accept projects hosted on CodePlex.com or any other project hosting site. For more information on common questions like this one, see the FAQ posted on codeplex.org/faq-mission.aspx.
In the FAQ they are refering to their mission, and the FAQ have a question on it: "Why is Microsoft involved in the creation of an open source foundation?", they mention the fact that Micro$oft is supporting the Apache Foundation and similar recently made moves from Micro$oft. But what is behind?, a recent move was the release of FOSS drivers for the linux kernel with up to 20000 lines of code — me as a single developer have contributed with a similar amount of lines of code — but, have they really release the code to contribute to the community?. Seem that the answer is not. In a recent article titled "Microsoft opened Linux-driver code after ‘violating’ GPL", we can find Micro$oft releasing the just after some discussions, and the real intentions behind that are not yet clear.
We don’t know why Microsoft positioned the news as something it was not. Maybe it was because of the strategic and political importance of Hyper-V to the company, the unmissable kudos of embracing GPL and helping Linux on Windows, and how such an act could finally silence doubters.
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