eweek.com — In a move that shows just how far Microsoft Corp. has come, and how pervasive open-source software is in certain areas, the software powerhouse is, for the first time, including open-source technology in one of its shipping products.
Sep 15, 2005 View in Crawl 4
lartSep 15, 2005
amm what about the BSD tcp/ip stack along with a few other programs where m$ used BSD(licensed) code?
monolithSep 15, 2005
Ah from spyglass.<a class="user" href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/community/columns/historyofie.mspx">http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/community/columns/historyofie.mspx</a><a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer</a>Everything seems just a google away.
davidkSep 16, 2005
"Whats the big deal? It's called OPEN SOURCE! If they want to use it they can. That's what it's there for. Deal with it.""Open Source" is not a license, if they want to use the code they must obey the license, most likely the GPL.That means they morally ow something back, even if they haven't altered the code, as they are making money off of it... how about some respect for the communist "open source" community?
archie_jmSep 16, 2005
"Microsoft is working with Argonne National Laboratory,..., and has taken its MPICH2 reference implementation, which most ISVs have tested their code against, and OPTIMIZED it for PERFORMANCE and SECURITY.HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAH
angelwsprSep 16, 2005
Wow! I need to rip off open source and start selling it as my own company's software...
frontbrainSep 16, 2005
To my knowledge you can't use GPL code in a closed source product if you are going to distribute it, because anything containing GPL code must give everyone you distribute it to the same rights you have. GPL is viral licensing.To my knowledge, LGPL and BSD licensed code can be used in a closed source product, possibly as long as a few conditions are met, but you don't need to release all the source to the product.
badgerouSep 16, 2005
Woah! Argonne is NOT ripping off proprietary software (are you really a doofus?)-- it's very much written in house (although clustering is not a new idea, I know). As far as MS optimizing MPICH2 for performance and security it wouldn't be that hard. MPICH was written for portability, and currently has almost no security in mind. The portability means that it gets good performance on "everything" but great performance on nothing. And since it was created mostly to run on clusters (which are most probably almost closed to the outside) security wasn't taken into account.Take it from a former intern working at Argonne on MPI 2 code and testing :-)
groovepapaSep 16, 2005
I think this is actually a positive step for Microsoft. they're not "ripping off open-source" any more than any other company that bundles open source products into their commercials products - SAP + MySQL, Cisco (and countless other hardware manufacturers) + Linux.'It would have been extremely costly and complex for Microsoft to develop an alternative to the MPI technology, which "is a complex piece of software that would take years to develop," Faenov said.'here you have Microsoft's Director for High Performance Computing recognizing the power of the open-source model - why spend time and money to build what's already built?what remains to be seen is if Microsoft's "optimizations for security and performance" end up forking their implementation into a proprietary specification, whether intentionally (to make customer lock-in) or unintentionally. either case would be at least detriment, because from that point forward, work done on the MPICH spec might no apply to Microsoft, and they would have to start paying the R&D on their own, now competing, spec. but that's a decision Faenov will have to keep making.right now I think he's making a smart one.
digger2000Sep 17, 2005
interesting open source code search engine <a class="user" href="http://www.codase.com">http://www.codase.com</a>