Binary Fortress Software

I just read an article on eWeek titled “Microsoft’s Open Source Trashware” that enraged me enough to blog about it - that’s a lot of rage. With a title like that you just know where their article is going: flamebait. They attempt to prove that Microsoft isn’t serious about open source software. I’m not arguing that Microsoft IS serious about it, I just think this article is a poorly written, poorly researched excuse to start a flamewar. Seriously, let’s look at some of their points:

1. They give a list of the top 25 most active project on CodePlex, then nit-pick details about the top 5. First of all, most of the top 25 aren’t even written by Microsoft, so how does this prove anything about Microsoft? If I wrote something crappy and posted it to CodePlex does that mean that Microsoft isn’t serious about open source because my crappy application is garbage? Right.

2. In talking about an application built with WPF and .NET 3.5: “In other words, it’s an “open-source” program built entirely from Vista-oriented proprietary languages and frameworks. Is a project really open-source when all its parts are proprietary? I don’t think so.”

Common guys. I can’t compile Apache for my Commodore 64, does that mean it’s not really open source either? The source code is OPEN, hence the name “open source”. I don’t care what operating system you can run or compile it on, that’s not the point. And does it matter if it uses proprietary components? Are you going to tell me that Firefox doesn’t use ANY Win32 APIs? None at all? Right.

3. They say: “Number four is BlogEngine.NET. Guess what? It’s a simple blog back-end written in .Net. Wow. Let me see, if I do a search on SourceForge, a real open-source site, on blog and engine, I find 5,633 results. Oh yeah, I see a big demand out there for another blogging platform.”

So, what you’re saying is that this project is lame because someone has already built a blogging engine? Ok, well why did anyone bother writing Firefox then? Internet Explorer, Opera and many, many other web browsers already existed. I guess by your logic Firefox is also lame and a complete waste of time. Right.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Microsoft is open source friendly by any stretch, but at least they’re getting started. Guess what, eWeek, Microsoft isn’t ever going to release the source code for Windows, Exchange Server or SQL Server, no matter how many of you morons write articles like this. Get over it. Microsoft is a publicly traded American company that wants to make lots and lots of money. That is job #1 for them, not sharing their source code with people who write highly biased, flamewar inducing articles just to try and make it onto Digg or Slashdot.

I have used many projects from CodePlex since it opened, and I have learned a lot from peeking at their source code. From the Flickr C# library to the Facebook C# Toolkit, I have learned many, many things and isn’t that what open source is REALLY all about? Sharing and learning?