Call in the lawyers
Mundie emphasised throughout his talk that Microsoft is not interested in playing in the open-source business.
And he repeated several times in the course of his remarks his quip that "open source and open standards are orthogonal to one another." Mundie said that "open source has a tougher time getting to standards due to the fragmentation" inherent in the community--a claim challenged by one student in the question-and-answer session following his speech.
"We are not in the business of giving away our source," Mundie said. "We want to create value over time."
Mundie did not bring up Microsoft's checkered past in regards to open source. Over the past few years, various Microsoft executives have talked about possibly opening the Windows source, seemingly in an attempt to ride on the open-source movement's coattails. Microsoft also has toyed with the idea of porting its Office desktop suite and finding partners to port its .Net framework to Linux, sources have said. In addition, Microsoft a few years ago authored a series of memos, which came to be known as the Halloween documents, that outlined possible ways the company could derail the open-source train.
"There's a community of people that believes no software should be covered by intellectual property law," Mundie continued. "The GPL sweeps together people's IP (intellectual property) as the price you pay for contributing for the community."
While established for-profit companies, ranging from IBM to Oracle have backed open-source to varying degrees, Mundie said Microsoft was not interested in participating at all.
"If you want to develop under the GPL, you should have as many lawyers as IBM does," Mundie quipped. "We have a lot of lawyers, too, but decided the risks (of GPL) outweigh the benefits."
Mundie attempted to cast doubt on the sustainability of the open-source model for open-source participants, as well as for for-profit companies that are trying to build on top of the model.
"Today, any government putting work under GPL is walling it (the work) off from commercial business," Mundie told the audience. He said that many commercial ventures were leery of using anything covered by the GPL, fearing it could limit their attempts to commercialise related products in the future.
"At the end of the day, it's all about choice. And individuals, academics, business and government all must make policy decisions now," Mundie concluded.
