Of all the nerd fights that take place on the internet, Microsoft versus the open source community is the battle that has caused more trollish comments and lengthy prose to be posted than anything even remotely similar. Forget Android versus iOS, Microsoft versus Linux is where blood boils. Understandably so when you look at how Microsoft makes money, by writing and selling software, whereas the “freetards”, as Fake Steve Jobs likes to call them, want to sell you professional services and management while keeping the apps themselves free for everyone to tinker with. This hasn’t stopped Microsoft from tipping their toe into the sea of quality free software out there, but they’re not going to change business models anytime soon. The same mindset is now being used to push free open source software out of the Windows Phone Marketplace, but not in the way most imagined. Rather than write a headline about how all open source software (OSS) is banned, the real story is a bit more complicated than that.
The GPL (General Public License) which most OSS applications use has seen various iterations with time. The latest version, GPLv3, has a clause that states DRM type software can not be used in conjunction with OSS, under any terms. How do you think Microsoft keeps track of the software that gets sold on their handsets and tries to prevent piracy? DRM of course. That’s the sole reason you’ll never see GPLv3 software on your Windows Phone. Other licenses are fair game. Microsoft even lists which ones they prefer you use: BSD, MIT, Apache Software License 2.0, and their very own Microsoft Reciprocal license.
Will this anger several people? Yes, but that’s the price you pay when you create a closed ecosystem. We saw the same thing happen with VLC for iOS. Someone ported freely available source code to work on the iPhone and iPad and Apple originally gave them the thumbs up, only to ban the apps a few weeks later.
[Via: Ars.Technica]