Yesterday, we discussed Microsoft’s growing control of the Linux and Open Source world. Purchasing influence and power over large portions of the FOSS world (which, until very recently, Microsoft regarded as Enemy #1).
I posited that these actions by Microsoft bear a striking resemblance to both the “Embrace” and “Extend” portions of the famous “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy that Microsoft has used, in the past, to defeat other competition.
Well, it appears that the “Extinguish” phase has begun.
On June 16th, Microsoft updated the policy for the Microsoft store to include the following restriction for all software sold:
“to prohibit charging fees in the Store for open-source or other software that is generally available for free”
Yes. You read that right.
Microsoft is going to begin prohibiting charging for any and all open source software… effectively killing a critical method for funding Free and Open Source Software projects. (We weren’t the only one to notice this. Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy wrote an excellent article discussing why this is a bad thing.)
One of the Krita developers had this to say:
“As one of the ~8 paid, full-time Krita developers, I can tell you all for a fact that, for better or worse, a big chunk of our development funding comes from stores like Steam and the Windows Store, without which we have very little chance of keeping up the current scale and pace of development.”
Let’s see. Here’s the order of events…
Step 0) Talk about how evil Linux and Open Source are for years and years. Declare it to be a major threat to everyone. When that fails to destroy Linux and Open Source… proceed to Step 1…
Step 1) Get involved in Open Source and build a business around it. [Embrace]
Step 2) Make Open Source dependent on Microsoft (both for infrastructure and funding). [Extend]
Step 3) Choke off other forms of funding for Open Source. [Extinguish] ←(We are here)
But, don’t worry, Microsoft totally loves Linux. *wink wink*
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This is probably going to be a controversial take and it might seem like I'm shilling for Microsoft, but perhaps their move here is not malevolent. I suspect they are doing this to crack down on the numerous "Free VLC Player" type clones (and the like--not picking on VLC at all) in the store that are open source software bundled with spyware or other unwanted software. In other words, projects taking or redirecting possible funding from the original projects they claim to be.
Is anyone really surprise Microsoft made this move? We already have large corporations making millions to billions on open source tools/platforms and give hardly anything back if any to those communities. There is tons of stuff "running" on opensource, but because they are hosted, I've yet to see a link to the source code with their changes (which in theory should be available to me).