Don’t judge industry collaboration by source code alone
Last week I joined a number of my peers at a Microsoft EMEA analyst event. During his presentation Ashim Pal, Microsoft’s Senior Director of Platform Strategy for EMEA, discussed what his employer had learned from Linux and open source software, particularly the community model for software development. Unsurprisingly he talked about Microsoft’s
Shared Source program as an example of how Microsoft collaborates with the broader community. Microsoft, of course, is not alone in using the contribution of code (and this is not the time to debate the relative merits of licensing terms) to demonstrate its community credentials. In January, IBM employed a similar tactic with its donation of
500 software patents to OSI (Open Source Initiaitive)-compliant open source software developers, as has Sun with
OpenSolaris. And there are plenty of other examples from commercial software vendors.
This got me thinking. Whilst contribution of code, be it open source or shared source, is certainly an important measure of community spirit, it seems to me that the very real threat posed by open source software is causing commercial vendors to miss a trick. Code and patents are one component, albeit a very important one, of a vendors’ intellectual property (IP). What about the architectural advice, frameworks and patterns, sample code etc. that they make freely available through
MSDN,
alphaWorks,
Oracle Technology Network,
SAP Developer Network …? Now obviously I am not naïve enough to believe that these ‘community’ initiatives are purely altruistic with no commercial agenda or that they aren’t targeted at a vendor-specific subset of the broader community but nonetheless I believe that such examples of “open IP” should also be factored into the community collaboration debate.
