SCIENCE

By Steve Fisher, Editor In Chief SAN DIEGO, CA -- The highly anticipated showdown between Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann and Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie, entitled “Shared Source vs. Open Source,'' took place yesterday at the O’Reilly Open Source convention. Mundie took the stage first followed by Tiemann and an open panel discussion. Mundie’s speech was professional, free from verbal jabs (with the exception of a photo of himself in the garb of Austin Powers’ Dr. Evil) and frankly quite slick. It was reminiscent of an address given by an eloquent politician rather than a software executive. It was the type of speech where you can see what they’re doing with their words but you’re forced to admire the clever way in which they’re doing it. Also, Mundie is a far better orator than Tiemann. Mundie repeatedly mentioned a software industry “ecosystem” consisting of all software providers, open source, commercial or otherwise, and users. “At the end of the day, the biggest concern that Microsoft has is the one about the long-term preservation of what we think of as the software ecosystem...” He continued seconds later with, “Microsoft, while certainly a company that has benefited from the commercial software environment recognizes that we only play a small role in this large software ecosystem.” It seems that the following are the central messages Mundie was trying to convey: A) Microsoft has no beef with the open source movement; B) In a way it seems to actually consider itself part of it; C) It appreciates the benefits of open source, and will try to do more with and for the community; D) Don’t ask it to apologize for the way it makes its money. In a nutshell, there’s room for all of us. Let’s create an environment of “informed choice.” Let’s just try and get along. Now, when Tiemann took the stage, not surprisingly wearing a red hat, things got interesting fairly quickly. He began with a statement about how it is better to “be” something, rather than to “seem” to be something. He then followed with, “When Microsoft bought Hotmail they not only became one of the largest free email service companies, they also ran one of the larger FreeBSD server deployments. When they tried to switch to Windows the inevitable happened…FreeBSD works…Windows crashes … FreeBSD works…Windows crashes…” Tiemann then went on to break down a theory that open source has taken root within Microsoft and will one day play a significant role in the destiny of that company. Of Microsoft’s shared source “thing” Tiemann said, “It is not so much a license I think as a treaty crafted by executives trying to buy time while they quiet the internal rebellion that is Microsoft’s own civil war. Now history has taught us the dangers of getting too involved in another’s civil war. And it is a very delicate issue and one we should debate, what is the appropriate way to make way for the coming revolution of open source within Microsoft?” Whether an open source revolution is brewing within Microsoft is of course yet to be seen. It could happen though I suppose. Stranger things have happened somewhere I'm sure. Tiemann finished up his speech with the following, “Craig, I think you were brave to come here and I think that you can report back that when Microsoft is ready to sign off on the GPL (general public license) and encourage its use to help us build a better, more transparent, more trustworthy architecture for computing, one that empowers individuals, promotes fair and equal competition, and enables freedom at higher levels, we will welcome you to this party as a first class citizen. And you can bet that on that day there will be plenty of both free beer and free software. When that happens we can be glad that we replaced the ‘winner takes all’ mentality with an ‘everybody wins’ model and that’s really what developers and customers want.”