Krishwords

Some of the tech bloggers are claiming that Microsoft has open sourced .NET libraries. There is a discussion in Techmeme too. In fact, Microsoft blogger used the correct term but the tech blogosphere has got it wrong. I am pretty sure this post will be damned as one of an extreme ideological position. But there is a huge difference between open source and releasing the source code. Open source means more than just releasing the code. It means the associated freedom to use the code in the way user wants. Open source licenses are meant to offer this freedom to the users. Microsoft Reference License, under which .NET libraries are released, doesn’t offer this. It is my humble request to the tech bloggers not to use the term open source when they are referring to Microsoft Reference License. Please do not dilute the importance of the term “open source” by decoupling the associated freedom from it. In fact, this is exactly the strategy of Microsoft. They want to paint a picture as if they are embracing open source whereas they are not actually doing it. Let us be more careful if we have to cultivate the concept of freedom in Microsoft.

PS: Thank you in advance for future cooperation. Scoble and Marshall are great people whom I admire and hence a friendly suggestion. Let us not confuse them with some other tech bloggers and media personal who intentionally misuse this term.

Update: Scoble has changed the title of the post. Kudos to Scoble for listening to his readers. Remember this post on Scoble. It still holds true :-).