Microsoft--an open source company?
ZDNet | at | by Mike
So it's a shame that Microsoft's Shared Source program has gotten so little serious ink. From the enterprise customer standpoint, Shared Source achieves almost all the important objectives of open source. The only real problem with it is that Microsoft doesn't use it widely enough.
Microsoft uses this kind of license, as opposed to the GNU GPL or BSD licenses, because they want to protect their intellectual property. It wants to be able to control the development of the product and it wants to be able to make money off the use of it. This seems perfect normal, downright American to me, but there are a lot of people out there who just don't believe in software intellectual property rights, and this is the attitude you have to have in order to object to Shared Source. The things you're not allowed to do are mostly the things that deny Microsoft the control over and ability to profit from its intellectual property. Ask yourself how many companies make profits selling GPL software and whether this is good for the industry.