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IT giants embrace open source
Major IT companies, most notably IBM Corp., have increasingly embraced open source over the past several years. But this year saw an unprecedented interest by the IT clan of the Fortune 500.
Most notably, Microsoft Corp. signed a partnership deal with Novell Inc., in order to have Novell’s Linux platform work more easily with Microsoft Windows.
Although the deal soon fell into dispute over patent protection issues, the message was clear: Microsoft had to recognize the growing use of open-source software (or at least of Linux as a server platform).
This wasn’t the first capitulation by Microsoft. Last summer, the company started to help develop a software tool that would let Microsoft Office users open and save documents in the Extensible Markup Language-based Open Document Format, the format used by the open-source Open Office suite, a competitor to Microsoft Office.
Microsoft is not alone in courting open-source users. Oracle Corp. started reselling, as Oracle Unbreakable Linux, a rebranded Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
And Sun Microsystems Inc. has released the source code to its widely used Java programming language. “Commercial entities that embrace open source may find it leads to a greater market for other things,” said Bruce Sunstein, a lawyer who covers open-source issues for Bromberg and Sunstein LLP of Boston.
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