"Jim was not misquoted," a company official said, referring to an interview in which Allchin was said to have warned that "open source is an intellectual-property destroyer."
The report inflamed open-source proponents when it quoted Allchin as saying, "I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don't think we've done enough education of policy makers to understand the threat."
Microsoft representatives told eWEEK Tuesday that Allchin was primarily concerned about the impact of the GNU General Public License, the widely used statement of open-source terms and conditions introduced 10 years ago by the Free Software Foundation.
The offending paragraph
Allchin's concerns, eWEEK was told, stem from GPL paragraph (2B), which states, "You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License."
In other words, Microsoft representatives warned, "anyone who adds or innovates under the GPL agrees to make the resulting code, in its entirety, available for all to use ... [which] might constrain innovating stemming from taxpayer-funded software development."
Allchin, according to the company, does not have the same concerns about all open-source approaches in general. "There are other kinds of open-source licenses that encourage third-party development but without the same constraints, including the BSD license," Microsoft representatives said.
Microsoft's position on GPL contrasts with that of rival Sun Microsystems, which took aim at Microsoft's lucrative hold on enterprise desktop software by releasing the source code of its StarOffice Suite under GPL last July.
Allchin's comments riled many in the open-source community, leading to jokes that open-source developers were "un-American."
"People are leery of Microsoft in particular," said James Martin, technical coordinator for a grant program administered by the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, who noted that Microsoft competes directly against open-source software like the Apache Web server and Linux. "I'd chalk that up to marketing. I don't think that statement has any validity."
And open-source development is anything but a threat to innovation, Martin added. "Open source has proven itself already to be a place where a lot of innovation happens," he said.
