Re: OT: Reasons why few takers on MS 'Open Source'

["nate" <debian-user@aphroland.org>]

Kent West said:
> I understand that one of the the reasons that Microsoft's "Open Source"
> program has had few takers is because Microsoft's license is "viral" (to
> borrow MS's term for the GPL); once you see their code, there's a risk
> that any code you develop thereafter could be "tainted".
>
> Does anyone have any links to more info to this effect, or have any
> opinions? I've basically told someone the above, and now need to
> document it somewhat.

last I heard the MS Shared source was ONLY available to certain bigname
big spending customers, and it may not be free(e.g. you may have to
pay hefty fees(as in money), to see the source), and  you have little
freedom to do with the code as you wish(patch it/use it etc).

at least with Sun's solaris source program almost anyone can get the
source for solaris for low cost(media+S/H which when I ordered it for my
former company it was about $80). Anyone qualified for this program.

I can tell you my former company could of benefited HUGELY from access
to WinNT and Win2000 source code, one of the products they made was
a citrix-like clone which had deep ties to the kernel of the system,
a simple mis-step and the system would BSOD(which was a VERY common
thing which is why the product sold like crap for so long, the new
"version" is supposed to fix most of the problems but how often have
I heard that from other companies ....)

But the company either did not qualify(not big enough) or didn't spend
enough(very small company, the win32 development office was about 30
people, with revenue of approx $2mil/year at the high end). So unlike
citrix who has access to NT4 and Win2k(and probably XP and .NET server)
my company's developers had to struggle with MS's stuff. Even something
so "simple" as applying the Win2k Security fixup pack would change
the kernel enough to BSOD the machine which had the company's product
on it. Bad programming? I'm sure some of it had to do with that, but
most of it I believe was the constant moving, obscure target that is
the Win32 OSs(which isn't so hard to follow if your a big company and
can afford big agreements with MS).

so, in short, their source program  in general does nothing for the
little guy

nate