As was recently reported by Martin Owens, at this years Software Freedom Day Richard Stallman took his behaviour to a whole new revolting level by calling Miguel de Icaza a traitor. This wasn’t related to anything except Miguels recent decision to sit on the Codeplex foundation board, a foundation whose stated mission it is to further Open Source in business. It is no secret that Microsoft is the seed of this our newest member in the family of Open Source promotors, even earmarking a million dollars to that aim and dedicating time and personnel to let the foundation reach its lofty aim. In fact in recent years Microsoft has gotten quite involved with Open Source by releasing code of their own, getting licenses approved from the OSI and donating substantial amounts of money to existing projects. In a highly published move they even recently submitted 20.000 lines of code to the Linux kernel. They are no longer the bully of the 90’s, they are changing but their transformation is not complete, and it certainly will not be the instantaneous conversion some people expect of them.
Now Miguel is no stranger to abuse, in a personally shameful moment right after the famed Novell-Microsoft collaboration agreement, fueled by Bruce Perens’, fallacious, claim that the deal was in violation of the GPLv2 even I send the Novell Open Audio podcast an angry mail asking them to dedicate time debating this on the show. Miguel kindly wrote me a lengthy personal mail calming my fears and he never used a harsh word despite what I now realize were words far outside of rational discourse. I have since that moment had a tremendous amount of respect for Miguel as a person, he is probably the person in the community who faces the most opposition and abuse despite the amount of work he has done historically and continue to do to improve the free desktop. You might disagree with his methods of improvement but I have never seen Miguel use a tone of aggression in rebutting his opponents.
If I live to be a thousand years I will never master that level of calmness while under fire, I realise that with some degree of sadness. Had Richard viciously attacked me the way he did Miguel I am sure at tirade would have ensued, I know it to be my style. Miguels reply is nothing short of admirable. It is a constructive polite call for civility in the views on how to improve our community.
I am glad our community has someone like Miguel, I am glad he does the work he does and I believe that it fills a vital piece of the puzzle to get Open Source everywhere and turn former opponents into new friends. Utopia won’t be built in a day but Miguel certain laid his fair share of rocks to let it happen.
Davy Brion said,
September 24, 2009 at 20:30
about the whole microsoft and open source thing… most of the .NET projects that they released under an open source license aren’t really typical open source projects. They don’t accept patches, their source control repository is not open to the public (they just publish periodic ‘code drops’), they have an internal issue tracker which isn’t synced automatically with the public one, etc…
they still have a loooong ways to go, but i do agree that it is slowly getting better.
davidnielsen said,
September 24, 2009 at 22:22
Code drops is sadly a common way for companies to interact with Open Source even in the late phases of understanding it. Google e.g. still does this for a number of projects despite clearly understanding how we prefer to work.
I don’t think it’s really a sign that they don’t like the way we work or that we should necessarily expect that in time they will “get better”. I think it’s more a problem of companies that that grown up sorta speak with a different culture. It is not going to be overnight, it’s not going to be next month and sadly it might not be in a decade for all projects. I think though that as Microsoft grows their understanding of Open Source they will start new project in the open manner, with a public git repo, bugtracking, mailing lists and all the junk we so dearly love.
That seems to me at least to be a realistic hope for how they and others will transition to more openness, and definitely full openness is not for every company I doubt it will be for Microsoft but hopefully they will continue down the path they are on now with increased vigor, high spirits and the support for the community.
Michel said,
September 24, 2009 at 23:21
Apple too, early on, with WebKit, and even nowadays with the Darwin core of OS X.
But accusing companies of betraying open source, rather than accepting that changing long-established processes take time, is almost always counter-productive, by poisoning the well of relationship.
I signed up with CodePlex to see how it works, and so far the only downside I find is that the only supported VCS is Subversion (what, no Git or Hg?). Quite nice to see an open-source solution chosen, nevertheless. There are some concerns raised about how Microsoft is still the dominant player behind CodePlex, but still, that’s the same of even Fedora at the beginning (Red Hat dominated the board).
By the way, David, I added you to blogroll.