Microsoft Corp Senior Vice Pre-`sident Craig Mundie criticized the practice of freely distributing the underlying code of software and offered an expanded plan for sharing the company's programs with customers.
Making the biggest software company's programming code widely available would threaten its intellectual property and hurt business, Mundie said during a press conference at New York University.
PHOTO: AP
"We are not in the business of giving away source or software products," Mundie said. "We are a business and want to create value." Computer programs such as the Linux operating system, which competes with Microsoft's Windows, were developed in a so-called open-source environment, in which software code isn't owned by one company.
Instead, different companies can use the same code to develop their products.
It can be more difficult to reach software standards in an open-source setting because of "fragmentation" resulting in multiple versions of a program that don't work together, Mundie said.
Companies that develop products under the so-called General Public License, or GPL, rules in the open-source environment lose the intellectual rights to the products they create and all products compatible with that technology, he said.
Mundie likened the GPL plan to the business models of many failed Internet companies. Companies are expected to give away a product and hope to make money from providing support for it or selling other services, he said.
"The risks of developing under that license exceed any potential benefit," Mundie said. Companies wouldn't have the profits to "promote the growth of a sustainable business," he said.
Some proponents of open source or free distribution of software disagreed with parts of Mundie's assessment of the practice.
Bradley Kuhn, vice president of the Free Software Foundation, said that companies can and have made money by releasing software for free.
"Most of the money in software is made from providing service around the software," said Kuhn, who cited Cygnus Solutions Inc as an example.
Brian Behlendorf, founder of open-source company Collab.net Inc, said companies don't give up their copyright under the GPL protocol. Behlendorf is one of the developers of Apache open-source Web server.
Linux software maker Red Hat Inc's shares have fallen 14 percent since Feb. 14, when Microsoft Group Vice President Jim Allchin told Bloomberg News the company was trying to publicize the threat it believes is posed by open source software. Linux hardware and software maker VA Linux Systems Inc has fallen 56 percent since then.
VA Linux dropped US$0.67, or 16 percent, to US$3.52 and Red Hat lost US$0.46, or 7.4 percent, to US$5.73.
While Microsoft is choosing not to widely distribute its source code for free, Mundie discussed plans to provide code to more of its customers in 12 countries outside the US.
Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, will also make source code for its Windows operating system for handheld computers available in the second half of the year and will begin programs for independent software vendors, Mundie said.
Microsoft has been sharing its source code with select universities and customers for 10 years, he said.
"It's good that Microsoft is opening up more access to its code, it's the right thing to do," Behlendorf said.
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